“Water thief,” Hawk said gruffly, shaking the reins to keep his horse abreast of the wag. The animal didn’t like to be near the noisy wag with its exhaust fumes and kept shying away. “Remember that sight, or else it could be you. Always need more sacrifices for the Scorpion God.”
“No blood, no water,” a sec man said in a solemn manner, bobbing his head slightly in a small bow. The rest of the sec men repeated the phrase along with every person in the crowd.
Turning his head that way, Ryan meet the gaze of the sec man who had spoken and was surprised to see the guard who had first met them outside the ville. The two exchanged hostile glares for a moment, then the guard rode onward.
“We’re going to have trouble with him,” Ryan stated under his breath.
“Heads up,” Dean said softly, glancing to the side.
Following the direction, Ryan saw a redbrick building rising above the tan adobe structures. Some sort of a keep, a fort within the walled ville. The windows had thick wood shutters and iron bars, blaster slots were everywhere, and a blue flag bearing the golden outline of a scorpion fluttered from a bare metal pole on the roof.
Standing at a corner of the roof with the afternoon sun at his back, was a man, hands clasped behind him, a double rig carrying a blaster under each arm, a thin trail of smoke rising from the slim cigar in his unseen mouth. Yet Ryan had no doubt that was the baron. As if sensing the attention, the baron turned to look down at the vehicle passing the keep, then he turned to walk inside the fortress, a phalanx of bodyguards staying close with weapons in hand.
“That where we’re going?” Ryan asked, keeping his voice neutral. “To see the baron?”
“No need,” Hawk replied, gesturing with a finger. “You’ll be staying a few blocks over that way, at the motel.”
“Motel?” Mildred repeated in surprise. That was a word she hadn’t heard in a long while.
Hawk slowed his horse to speak to the woman in the rear of the vehicle. His frank disapproval broke her reverie and sent a shiver down her spine that the woman tried to hide. Then Mildred noticed him looking at her satchel, which bore a red cross. Oh, he had something against healers. That explained it. It wasn’t the color of her skin, or her sex, but that she was a healer, a scientist. Odd, but some people still harbored that hatred.
“Motel is what we call the inn where outlanders stay there until it’s time to go,” Hawk said in disdain. “That is, until they cause trouble and go to the temple.”
“No blood, no water,” Ryan said without inflection, watching the dashboard gauges start to climb once more.
For a moment, Hawk glared at the man, unsure of how to react to that, then he kicked the flanks of his mount and rode on ahead of the others.
“A genuine, old fashioned, water monopoly,” Doc murmured. “Fascinating. Control the people by controlling the water.”
Mildred added, “Rather similar to how the Aztecs maintained population control by pretending to need human hearts to make the sun rise.”
“Quite so, dear lady.”
Holding on to a rib of the awning, Dean glanced back toward the red brick building. The crowd was carrying away a body, blood dripping off the form to show he was still alive, although just barely.
“Or do you think they got some kind big mutie in there?” the boy asked nervously. “Could be it drinks blood and pisses water, or something like that.”
“Some cave bats drink blood and piss ammonia,” J.B. said, removing his fedora to wipe the sweatband with a handkerchief. Then he tucked it back on. “And we can cook that into a kind of explos, so who knows?”
“Changing blood into explosives,” Doc boomed, shaking his head sadly. “Never have I heard a better paradigm for existing in this wretched land.”
Following the mounted guards past a slaughter house and a reeking row of public shitters, Ryan steered the vehicle away from the protected section of the ville and into a wide open area exposed to the raw sun. It was like entering an oven. There was nobody on the streets, not even a dog or lizard, the adobe buildings spaced far apart so that it was possible to see the high wall surrounding the ville a hundred feet away.