“Where’s the baron?”
“Dead.”
“Where are those two? They escape? Did you say they were the ones who hit me, Ryan?”
“Yeah. I chilled them both. But I’ll tell you about it later, when you feel better.”
“Don’t feel too bad, considering what happened to me.” He paused for a long moment, his face puzzled. “Can you just tell me again, Ryan, what happened to me?”
“ALL YOU HAVE TO DO, my dear, is not to do any worrying. Have no fear, Mystical Meg is here.” The wise woman was stout and jolly and had a large wicker basket filled with the herbs and unguents of her art.
“Don’t worry,” J.B. said confusedly. “My own words to myself, ten thousand times a day.”
“What are you going to do?” Ryan asked, watching as the woman took out a large jar that seemed to be stuffed with ragged leaves of some sort.
“Bleed him,” she replied. “Got some of the finest leeches this side of the Pecos.”
“No,” Ryan and J.B. said in unison.
“Stuff and nonsense. You go away, with your ugly great patch scaring the daylights out of poor little Johnny Dix here. And I’ll apply a few of these big torn leeches of mine about his body. Soon have him up and about, won’t we? Then, if it’s needful, I can always cup him.”
“No, you fucking well won’t,” the Armorer grated with a rare venture into profanity.
“No leeches,” Ryan warned. “Mebbe some broth or a poultice. But no leeches.”
The jolly face creased with disappointment, the corners of her mouth turning down. “Now, you don’t catch me coming along and trying to tell you how to go about your own killing trade, do you? You do not.”
Ryan had been looking out of the bedroom window. Now he spun on his heel and walked around the bottom of the Armorer’s bed, stepping in close to her. He leaned down so that his face was on a level with hers.
She recoiled at his cold anger, nearly dropping her jar of leeches. “Oh, don’t hit me, Master!”
“I won’t.”
“Send her away, Ryan,” J.B. said, shaking his head, then wincing at the distress that it caused him. “Only a knock on the skull. Soon be better.”
“I can help,” the wise woman protested. “But it has to be my way.”
“Or?”
“Or not at all,” she said smugly.
“Agreed,” Ryan replied. “So it’s not at all.”
J.B.’S RECOVERY from the murderous blow to his head took longer than either he or Ryan had guessed. The concussion lingered for three more days, with blurring of vision and voracious, sickly pains across the side of his skull that made him throw up a dozen times.
It was an additional two days before they both felt that the Armorer was fit enough to face the rigors of long hours on the road inside the LAV-25.
During that time, the mourning ville seemed to be frozen in a vacuum around them, like a fly trapped helplessly in a block of cooling amber.
The death of a baron can often result in a period of limbo before his successor appeared.
But there was no clear claimant in the ville.
The parricides were dead, tipped together into an unmarked grave in the depths of the forest of pines to the east of the ville. No tears were shed for them.
The funeral of Baron Hamish Tenbos was a splendid affair. A cortege wound through the ville, following the oak coffin on the back of a flatbed truck. Men, women and children, many of them weeping, all in their best dark clothing, trudged through the sleet that fell that afternoon. Most of them cast curious sideways stares at the tall, one-eyed outlander who strode among the sec men.
It had been a deputation of the senior sec men who had come to visit Ryan and J.B. in their bedroom, the evening before the interment of their last master. Five of them stood uncomfortably around the walls, blasters bolstered, none of them wanting to be the one who started to speak to the dangerous outlanders.
In the end it was the oldest of them, his long gray hair streaked with white, who put the suggestion.