“Costs us nothing to be nice to them,” she urged. “And it might help us in the long run.”
Doc had grumbled and grumped. “Upon my soul, Dr. Wyeth, but you are too much sweetness and light, and I am cantankerous and evil livered.”
“Yes, but we all love you, Doc,” she replied, squeezing his hand.
BREAKFAST WAS uncomfortable and stilted. Wolfram was the very model of easygoing good nature and surface charm. But it rang as false as a cougar’s smile. The Magus was nothing but wormwood and gall.
Once they were seated, the fat man gestured for the meal to be brought in.
Sec men carried in dented silver chafing dishes, with polished covers, laying them at intervals around the long refectory table. Krysty watched with some interest, noticing that there seemed to be no women in the fortress at all, not even the sluts that might have been expected.
The food was basic, approaching adequate, leaning heavily on what the surrounding forest and river supplied some long-boned fish with the heads left on, silver eyes boggling at the ceiling, jaws brimming with a triple row of serrated teeth; a leathery omelet, liquid at the center, larded with pieces of bacon and fat strips of pork. The best dish was some wafer-thin flakes of beef soaked in oil and served with chopped onions, sun-dried tomatoes and some olive bread.
“We had some scouts out in the wood last night,” Wolfram said, once he’d helped himself, piling his blue-and-white plate high with food, scooping out several ladles of greasy fried potatoes and adding a half pint of ketchup.
“And what did they see?” Krysty asked.
“More what they heard,” muttered the Magus, who was pulling a fish apart with his steel-tipped fingers.
“What?” Mildred asked, sipping at a mug of coffee sub.
Wolfram leaned back, making his deep-armed chair creak. “Couple of my best scouts were out, on my orders. Told them, dear fellows, to keep out of trouble. To watch and listen. Not become involved. That’s what they did.”
“Probably the shitters only went a hundred paces into the trees, then waited a few hours and came back out again,” the Magus said.
“I think not. I trust them somewhat. Said they heard a gang of stickies moving south toward the ville that has the strange museum place. Tedious stuff. But I digress. My men say that they heard a scream.”
“Just one scream?” Jak asked.
“Indeed, my white-haired youth, just the one. Nothing to build a reputation on, is it? A scream. It could have been a wild hog. Or a slaughtered stickie. Or even a one-eyed murderer who once rode with the arch slayer, the Trader, finally making his way aboard the final locomotive, westbound.”
Krysty stopped eating, not sure whether the grossly fat man was playing a cruel joke on them all. Did he know more than he was saying? Was Ryan lying cold and dead somewhere out among the endless miles of pine trees?
“You look head-fucked,” the Magus said, staring accusingly at her.
Krysty managed a bright smile at his cruel face. “No. I’m really fine. Could be you who gets head-fucked when Ryan and J.B. get here.”
The Magus stared at her, and she felt a chill run down her spine, her sentient hair curling defensively around her nape. He lifted his hand and tapped his right eye with the steel nail, generating a metallic clicking sound. “I see what I see. I see what’s going to happen. When debts are paid and accounts settled. You have the power of seeing, don’t you?”
“Some.”
“So, what does the future hold for you and for me? For all of us?”
Krysty rarely responded to that kind of challenge, having learned from her mother that the special talent of seeing that she possessed was Gaia-given and shouldn’t be devalued, cheapened and peddled as though it had fallen off the back of a truck. But the snide probing of the Magus had gotten to her. She closed her eyes and sat back in her chair.
“You should not succumb to the fiend,” whispered Doc, on her left.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Got everything in hand. It’s all right.”