Palaces of Light

by James Axler

  It might not be much, but it was K’s own. He had built it from nothing, and intended to keep it that way. To do so he had flexed considerable muscle. So it was that Morgan’s defiance shook him on more than one level. It wasn’t just the refusal, so out of character. It was also the fact that it reinforced that which he had been unwilling to face: his own uselessness in the face of this enemy. Rather than go after them himself, he had been more than happy—no, relieved was a better word if he was honest—to let the one-eyed man and his band of mercies go after the children. Even though his own daughter—the one thing he prized more than his own existence—was among the ones taken.

  The one thing that K had never been—the only thing that his detractors couldn’t hold against him—was a coward. Yet that was how he felt. He could try to explain it to himself in many ways: he couldn’t leave his people at this time; he couldn’t risk his best men and leave the ville undefended; he was sending the one-eyed man and his mercies as a scouting party for the real raid. No matter how he dressed it up, that sickness in the pit of his stomach remained. It was a sickness that was in part his own loathing of not going after the bastards in person and in part a dread admission of his own fear.

  He waved away the servant who came to him as he went through the tarnished and barely disguised squalor of the old house that was his base. It was the largest and best preserved. That wasn’t saying much when you looked at the rest of the buildings around, though. The ville was built around the remains of a small settlement that had serviced some nearby attraction for visitors on the days before skydark. That much was clear from the remains of an old display that took up part of the wing at the rear of his palace. That part remained unused, although at times he had gone in there and by lamplight had mused at the landscape described by the faded pictures and broken models that littered the unused rooms. Had the land around really looked like that? Shit, it had been so green. Just his bastard luck to come along when it was a dust desert.

  The servant hurried away. Baron K wasn’t a man to be disturbed when he was in a sour mood, even if it was a matter of great importance. In truth, nothing seemed that important to any of them since the incident involving the children.

  K settled down to brood. Maybe he would find some answers as to why he had done nothing. Worse, as to why he hadn’t even seen it coming at him like a bastard great bullet aimed between the eyes.

  He started to think back to how it had begun… .

  * * *

  “SIX OF THE BASTARDS, all weird as fuck, coming from out of the chill zone.”

  K stopped chewing on the stringy leg of mule that was marinated in grease and a few herbs. Food was never great in the ville, but at least his cook made an effort. She was better than most, and he could put up with her cooking as long as she gave him a blow job after the meal. There had to be something going for her. He could be an indulgent baron. And it had been the thought of this that had been occupying his mind while Higgins spoke. He hadn’t, if he was honest, been giving the sec man his full attention.

  The last sentence had caught his attention, though, and made him look up from the plate. He laid the shank down in its thin sauce and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. Not that he gave a crap about manners, but it gave him a couple of moments to marshal his thoughts.

  “The chill zone,” he repeated in a flat tone. “But no one lives there.”

  Higgins shrugged. He was a big man, about six-four and 280 pounds, most of it muscle and a lot of it in his head. But he was loyal and—most important of all in the circumstances—he was just too damn stupe to lie. If that was what he’d seen, then that was what he’d seen, no matter how strange or even impossible it might seem.

  K got up from the table and walked around to where the sec man stood. As he passed him, he clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, Higgy, this I’ve gotta see.”

  Higgins grunted and nodded as he fell in behind his baron. He’d been a little nervous about reporting to K. When the eastern sector patrol had come back in on their mounts just before sunset and reported the distant group coming across the flatlands on foot, he hadn’t been inclined to believe it, either.

  Higgins had fallen in with K somewhere out midwest, when the two men had been mercies for hire. Higgins was a follower, not a leader, and had recognized the leader in K. All leaders need good, reliable muscle as backup, and so Higgins had made the decision to be K’s right hand. It saved him having to think, which was something he wasn’t good at. But by the same token, he wasn’t a complete stupe. He wouldn’t have stayed alive so long if he was. One of the first things that he had learned when he followed K to this pesthole and taken it over was that the lands to the east were beyond all life. No birds flew over them. No animals that you’d want to sink your teeth into, or meet on a dark night, lived on them. And no people. Sure, he’d heard the stories of those who had wandered out there and come back…different. But as he’d never actually met one of those people, or even anyone who could actually have claimed to have met one rather than just heard about it, he didn’t believe it for a second. Just as he never gave more than that second’s thought to what was out there. What the land looked like—shit, it could be flat, dead and dusty between here and the sea for all he cared, as long as he didn’t have to go on it.

  So when he figured that he should check it out before reporting to K, he felt fear in the pit of his stomach. It took a lot to shake it off.

  He took his horse out slowly, and beat the bastard raw to get back quick. There were six men, of differing shapes and sizes, and they were coming toward the ville on foot.

  As he followed the baron out on horseback once more, he felt the unease of a person who really didn’t want to be doing what he was right then. But he had to lead K to them, make him see for himself.

  They rode heavily across the dry and dusty earth for twenty minutes, raising clouds into the skies above them. There was no need for subterfuge, as it was plain that if they could see the oncoming party, then that party would have no trouble seeing them.

  Visual contact was made after twenty minutes. That made them about seven miles out of the ville. Even in the fading light of evening, there was still enough visibility for the distant party to be a good five or more miles away. That would give K enough time to work out what to do.

  He pulled his horse up, signaling to Higgins to do the same.

  “What do you figure?” he asked. “It’ll take them a good few hours to reach us. Gives us time.”

  “Plenty,” the sec man agreed. “They ain’t much farther on than when I last saw them. Whoever they are, they ain’t rushing.”

  K looked ruminatively up at the twilight skies. The sun was now sinking, but even so it still burned in a sky that was devoid of all but the briefest of cloud cover. It had to have been bastard hot on that sunbaked earth. And they would have been marching all day. There was nothing before the horizon that could have given them cover, or from where they could have come.

  The baron scanned the oncoming party: two of them were tall, one skinny and one a whole lot fatter—a lot like Higgy, he thought with a wry grin—and the skinny one looked like he was carrying something on his back that towered over his head, making him seem even more angular and accentuated. The other four were all around medium height, and three of them were stocky and not remarkable in any way. At least, not at this distance.

  But that left one. And he was one weird-looking bastard, the baron thought, even as little more than a dot on the horizon. He was immensely fat, and seemed to walk with a rolling gait that made him look as though he was about to topple over with every step. It was only the momentum of perpetually falling that kept him moving forward. In fact, the only thing that seemed to keep him on his feet was the walking stick that seemed to extend from his hand like some kind of weird antenna, its point raising puffs of dust as it hit the ground. He walked sl
ightly apart from the others, and K couldn’t be sure if that was because he was the leader, or because the others didn’t want anything to do with him.

  He’d find out soon enough, but his instinct was already telling him which supposition was the answer.

  “What are we gonna do, boss?” Higgins asked. He didn’t really want to prompt K, or to push him. He knew what he was like, and a more irritable bastard you couldn’t work under when that happened. Even so, the creeping fear in his gut was pushing him. He didn’t want to stay here, and he’d be a whole lot happier when they got back to the ville, and safety in numbers.

  K didn’t answer for a moment. His instincts were telling him to go back, get a bunch of men and come back shooting. There was a pall of menace that hung over the distant group. And yet, even as his instincts yelled at him, another voice within him was telling him that they were just a bunch of people, too few in number to be a menace to his well-organized ville.

  K pulled his horse around. “Let’s get back and run up a little welcoming committee. Put the men on triple red around the perimeters, get the people ready, and we’ll come back to meet them with six men at our backs. Armed.”

  Higgins grinned mirthlessly through cracked and stained teeth. That was exactly what he wanted to hear. He pulled his horse around and took off in the wake of the baron.

  They reached the ville to find that word of the men coming from the chill zone had spread like a disease among the people. Despite being told by Higgins to keep it to themselves until he had returned with the baron, the sec party that had made the discovery had found it hard to keep it to themselves, and the itching sense of excitement and unease that they felt at their discovery had soon spread among the ville folk. Most of the people in the ville had lived in the region their entire lives, as had their ancestors. More than K and Higgins, they knew that the chill zone was an area where life was almost extinct. What sort of men could come from there, or even just walk across its unknown length and stay in one piece?

  It was a mark of the power wielded by K that he was able to silence the throng that had gathered around his palace. Briefly, he told them what he had seen, and just what he intended to do about it, ordering his sec teams into action around the ville while picking out half a dozen men to accompany Higgins and himself. He sent the team to get weapons from the armory he kept to one side of the palace, and directed the rest of the populace to form defenses. Even as he was doing this, a part of his mind was nagging at him. Wasn’t this an overreaction to what was, when all was said and done, just half a dozen men on foot? Men who would doubtless also be exhausted after what had to have been a marathon trek. Yet there was something about the way in which his people responded that suggested they felt this apprehension, too.

  He turned to Higgins as the crowd dispersed. The big man was sweating, despite the fact that the night air was now beginning to cool.

  “Can you feel it?” he asked simply. And when the big man nodded briefly, he continued. “It doesn’t make sense, but I don’t want to take chances when it makes me feel like this. Lock and load, big guy.”

  Higgins nodded again, but this time with a weak grin. It had been a kind of catch phrase and private joke between them since they had first met, and its familiarity made them both feel better.

  By this time, the crowd had dispersed, the sec teams had assumed their positions around the ville, and the six men had returned from the armory. Collecting their mounts along the way, they were now ready to go.

  K turned to them. “Keep it frosty. There’s more of us, and they’re on foot, but don’t take anything on trust.”

  The mounted sec men exchanged glances that mixed both surprise and shock. This wasn’t what they expected from a baron best described, in the interests of their own safety, as driven and confident.

  “I know,” K said simply. “But this is the chill zone. I might not come from here, but I listen to my people.” He stared at them. They returned the look with a ripple of understanding.

  “Okay, then,” he said, nodding, “let’s get out and meet them.”

  They set out into the evening, the cooling air flowing around them as their horses kept up a steady canter. It was only a short while before the approaching party came into eye contact. Even as shambling shadows in the distance, they seemed strangely sinister, and it was with a sense of apprehension that the sec party grew closer.

  K was a little puzzled by their behavior. With a mounted sec party headed toward them, which they had to have realized would be armed, you would have expected them to at least slacken off the pace a little, or to show some kind of sign of acknowledgment. Instead, they kept coming at the same steady pace, as though not seeing the sec party moving toward them. Or not caring, which, the baron reflected, would be a scarier prospect.

  “Lock and load, but keep it casual unless they show the slightest sign,” he called over his shoulder to the party at his rear. He liked to lead from the front, and in the same way he knew that he had no real need to issue the instruction. It was perfunctory. His men knew him, and they knew what they had to do.

  K dragged his own Remington from the holster on the horse’s saddle and slipped the safety, holding it barrel-up against his shoulder. It looked casual, but he was skilled and practiced. The longblaster could be leveled and the first round buried in a bastard’s heart before he had a chance to take a breath.

  Now that they were near, he could see that the immensely fat man with the cane had a brown derby on his head, almost white with dust. He also wore round glasses that blanked out his eyes as the baron rode close enough to be able to establish eye contact. The group at his rear was a motley collection. The stocky men were adorned with web belts of which they carried a variety of battered musical instruments, all of which had seen better days and clanged gently together in rhythm with their footsteps. They also had puppets of wood and cloth hanging from the webbing that crisscrossed their bodies. Carved of wood or made of cloth and stuffed, the eyes of the puppets stared sightlessly and chilled in a way that made K shudder.

  Gathered just to the rear of these were the two tall men. The skinny guy had bug eyes that might have been due to the effort that he had to expend to carry the wooden booth that was on his back, or may just have been the result of madness from being in the wilderness too long. K wasn’t sure, and he didn’t care. He could just see that the faded paintwork on those portions of the booth visible was covered in strange stains that he couldn’t—and wasn’t sure that he wanted to—identify.

  That just left the big guy that looked like Higgy—well, maybe not so much up close. Tight curls in his hair and beard gave him a deceptively angelic look, which belied his bulk. Just visible was the heavy pack that he carried on his back, but it was his clothing that was most remarkable—leggings, and a vest of patched and multicolored diamond shapes, hung with bells that jangled only dully, so clogged were they with the dust that also faded his clothes. His brown boots had bizarrely turned-over cuffs that only made him seem stranger. There were also the objects that hung from his belt, strange, shrunken objects that looked like dried fruit, and yet… K didn’t want to consider the thought that suddenly struck him.

  Indicating with a tilt of the Remington that his people should pull up behind him, the baron brought his mount to a standstill about a hundred yards from the oncoming party. It was uncanny the way they had just kept coming despite the approach of what was obviously a superior force. It was either a completely stupe action, or perhaps an act of supreme confidence. K couldn’t be sure.

  The mounted sec party came to a halt, dust settling around them in the darkening twilight. The walkers kept coming, until they were only a short distance away. Then, when they were close enough for all of them to make eye contact, the immensely fat man held up his stick so that it was raised above his head. At this sign, they came to a silent halt.

  It was a
strange and uncanny atmosphere as the two sides faced each other. K was unwilling to be the first to break this silence. Yet the wait was straining his nerves to breaking point. It seemed as if the fat man knew that. With an almost infinite slowness he removed his glasses and produced a handkerchief, with which he carefully polished the dusty lenses before inspecting them, nodding to himself, and placing them back on his nose with one hand while he pushed the handkerchief into the back pocket of his pants with the other. He looked up at the baron, head on one side, before sniffing and finally speaking.

  “So…”

  He let the word hang in the air for several seconds, as if daring the baron to break in. But K kept his counsel. A crooked grin split the fat man’s face. When he spoke again there was something in his voice—not an undertone, nor any hint of sibilance, but somehow it seemed to seep into K’s mind, wrapping it up so that the trepidation that he was feeling was pushed to the very boundaries of his consciousness.

  “So,” he began again, “we have traveled far to drink your wine, and to provide for your edification an entertainment that will astound you and be fair exchange for your hospitality. What do you say?”

  The baron, determined to remember the apprehension that counseled valuable caution, summoned up his will and as much phlegm as he could from a throat suddenly dry. He hawked a glob onto the dry ground, landing it at the fat man’s feet.

  “I say you’ve got a real strange way of talking. And of traveling. I dunno about any entertainment, and I don’t even know what edifucktion is, but I’d sure like to know where the hell you’ve come from.”

  The fat man’s grin grew wider at the baron’s choice of words.

  “You have no idea what you’re saying. How close, indeed, you might be to a noble truth. But that is not for you to worry about. Our plight is our own. We merely carry it with us from ville to ville as we make our way across this rad-blasted land. Our sole aim is to make enough jack to keep alive so that we might carry on to the next ville.”