He was a little taller than average height, with a smaller beard than was usual about the ville. Several scars lined his weather-beaten face, one of them pulling down the corner of his left eye. The middle finger was missing from his left hand. He wore the jumper and breeches that most of the sailors favored. There was a dirk in his belt with a hilt that looked as if it had been carved from a piece of bone or ivory.

"Then you can tell me why everyone s.h.i.ts themselves at the mention of your ship and your captain."

"Best keep thy prow out of waters that don't concern thee."

Ryan spit on the floor, shrugging off Krysty's warning hand, knowing with a surge of strange excitement that he wasn't going to be cautious. Not this time. This time he was going to see the quarrel through. Even if it meant pushing it all the way himself.

"You scared to tell?"

The man stood at that, pushing away the table, hands resting on his hips in a gesture that was provocative and also kept his right hand near the knife hilt.

"Scared, outlander? Jonas Clegg fears neither man nor beast. There isn't the man born of woman or the whale broaching from the deepest waters that scares Jonas Clegg."

"I say you're a liar. I say you're a liar, Clegg, and a white-gutted coward!"

The mate smiled at that, gesturing to the three men with him to step away. The rest of the customers of the Rising Flukes also got up from their tables, backing off to ring the walls. Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders and retreated behind the bar.

"Come on, lover," Krysty urged quietly.

Ryan glanced at her and she took a sudden, indrawn breath. She knew Ryan was a killer. That was his trade. But rarely had she seen his face glowing with the thrill of an imminent fight.

"Got to be, lover," he replied softly. "Had enough of this place. Polite on the surface and something stinking rotten underneath. Time to get that out here in the open."

"Careful, Ryan."

He kissed her lightly on the cheek. "Always am, lover."

"Finished saying thy goodbye to thy poxed wh.o.r.e, outlander?" Clegg sneered.

"Sure you don't want to run and get your poxy Captain Quadde and hide behind

his skirts?"

"Hide behind... ?" Clegg began, looking puzzled for a moment. "Then thou knowest not that much about the Salvation!""Get to the steel!" someone yelled, and the sailor grinned wolfishly."Aye, let us to the steel. Dost thou have a knife, outlander?"Ryan drew the panga with its eighteen-inch cutting edge from its sheath, the sight of the weapon bringing a burst of whispering from around the taproom of the inn.

"Bring the blood-red roses to thy cheeks, Jonas," one of his shipmates cackled.

Clegg drew his own knife, showing it had a double-edged blade around eleven

inches long. "My sticker'll draw the teeth of thy butchering cleaver, my chilled

outlander," he called."f.u.c.k the talk. Fight," Ryan gritted, his whole body twitching with the adrenaline rush. He was filled with the burning desire to annihilate the man in front of him. He didn't really know why, but that didn't matter much in the Deathlands, either. There was something inherently evil about the whaling ship Salvation, and he was about to remove a little of it from the earth.

The extra length and weight of his panga was outweighed by the difficulty of using it effectively against a lighter blade in the hands of a skilled man.

The sailor was a tough fighting man, veteran of dozens of tavern brawls and dockside melees. Over the years he'd killed at least a dozen men in eye-to-eye combat.

Ryan, approaching the near side of middle age, was a whetted, flawless chilling machine, with no idea of how many men and women he'd sent into the endless dark.

Sensing that the one-eyed outlander held himself like an experienced knife fighter, Clegg kept off, moving around in a slow shuffle, feet sc.r.a.ping on the worn boards. The point of his knife was up, threatening Ryan with a cut at groin or belly.

The panga wasn't ideal for this sort of cut-and-thrust, dancing standoff. It came into its own when tables were falling and chairs thrown and a dozen men tangled in a b.l.o.o.d.y shambles of hacking steel.

"Take him, Jonas!" a voice yelled from the blurred ring of faces around the room. Ryan's concentration was totally fixed on the man in front of him, watching the eyes for the flickering change of expression that would mean an attack.

If he let the seaman get in too close, then he was done for. The dagger would be so much more maneuverable that it would be in and out between his ribs before he could counter with the cleaver.

"Sec men come by around this time!" Rodriguez called from behind the bar.

Ryan hardly heard him.

Everything around him was fading into the crimson mist that fogged his mind. In all the world there was only Jonas Clegg and himself. And the two steel blades.

Nothing more.

Sparks danced in the smoky air as the knife and the panga clashed, Clegg thrusting and Ryan managing to parry.

The sailor was grinning with the tension, lips pulled back wolfishly off his teeth. His breath panted harshly as he moved around. The man was good. Better than Ryan had guessed.

Clegg nearly knocked over a table as he pivoted away from his opponent. Pewter tankards rattled and he reached for one with his free hand, throwing it at Ryan in a shower of ale, hoping to take him off balance. The seaman came in after it, ducking in antic.i.p.ation of Ryan cutting at his head.

Ryan second-guessed him.

Knocking away the spinning mug he immediately swung the long blade back, ready for a deadly, hissing cut. He aimed low, knowing that Clegg would try to dive in at him, aiming for his stomach.

There was the unforgettable jarring thunk that ran clear up Ryan's arm from wrist to shoulder.

A blind man would have heard a strange sequence of sounds in the barroom of the Rising Flukes Inn that night-the faint hiss of honed metal through the air; a clunk, like a butcher separating a row of chops from a carca.s.s; a gasp of pain or shock or surprise; the tinkling of steel falling to the wooden floor. And something else falling. Heavier. Sounding like one of the meat chops. From all around came the gasp of released tension from the horde of spectators.

And then there was the odd pattering, like heavy rain, or a leaking faucet, pattering on the sawdust that covered the wooden floor.

The blood jetted from the severed stump of the right arm, spraying high in the air as the crippled man waved it helplessly, backing away from the inexorable figure of doom.

Words of the Trader came to Ryan's mind as he advanced grimly after Clegg, careful to avoid the slippery puddles of blood. "Get a man going... Chill him quick an' best you can."

It was the best of advice. Ryan could still recall a young man from War Wag Two-must have been four years ago-whose name had been Rocco Papini. He'd put down a mutie girl with two rounds from his little Czech-made blaster. Instead of putting a third bullet into the young woman's head, he'd drawn his knife and knelt down to cut her throat, thinking she was helpless. The fight had revealed one perfectly formed breast through a tear in the mutie's jerkin, and Rocco had turned, grinning to draw his friends' attention to it.

She'd opened him from groin to throat with a straight-edge razor, spilling his guts all over herself.

It had been Ryan, with his 9 mm SIG-Sauer, who had blown the mutie girl's skull apart, which hadn't been much consolation to the dying Rocco Papini.

Clegg tried to parry the next blow from the panga, expecting it to come at his face or throat.

Ryan feinted high, and then struck low, taking care not to put all his strength into the cut. The one fault of the cleaver was that its heavy blade sometimes hacked so deeply that it got lodged in bone and wouldn't come free.

This time it hit the staggering sailor near the top of the thigh. A reflex made Clegg half turn, saving his genitals from being sliced through. But the panga hit him across the leg, cutting muscle and snapping the femur. He cried out, thin and feeble, like a rabbit in front of a rattler. The man staggered, but didn't fall down.

Automatically his arms dropped and Ryan was able to take a half step in and open up the front of Clegg's neck with a steady cut that drew the edge of the panga across the taut skin. More blood gushed and the seaman fell at last, kicking and jerking, breath bubbling pink from the severed windpipe.

"Neat," J.B. said.

n.o.body else spoke as the body finally ceased moving and became, undeniably, a corpse.

At that moment the front door of the tavern swung open, banging on its hinges, allowing in a shudderingly cold wind, carrying tendrils of fog upon its shoulders. Ryan was kneeling by the body of Jonas Clegg, wiping the blood-slick blade of the panga on its coat. He knew the others would be watching his back, so he didn't bother to turn around.

He heard the noise of heavy boots and the tapping of the ferrule of a walking stick. His mind went to the figure that he and Krysty had spotted through the creeping fog the night before.

The voice was harsh, the words grating one against the other like the broken edges of river ice as it broke up in the spring.

"Is he chilled?"

Ryan answered without looking behind him. "Try waking him if you think he's just sleeping."

"Who's done for Jonas? The one-eyed outlander? I don't hear thee, landlord! Speak up, Rodriguez, or I'll have thee flayed."

"It was... Captain Quadde... it was..." the landlord stammered.

The panga wiped free of blood, Ryan sheathed it at his belt and straightened. And turned to face the ugliest woman he'd ever seen in his life.

Chapter Fifteen.

CAPTAIN PYRA QUADDE was forty-seven years old. She was five feet ten inches tall and weighed in at a muscular one-seventy. Her hair was a wonderful

deep auburn, spoiled by being filthy and greasy. She wore knee-length boots in stained black leather, cracked and dulled with salt. Her black skirt reached below her knees, and she was swaddled in several layers of thick sweaters. Over all was a dark blue pea coat with tarnished bra.s.s b.u.t.tons. A belaying pin, its end gleaming from use, was stuck in the broad leather belt. Her right hand gripped a stout walking stick, its end gray iron and the handle a smooth piece of ivory.

From behind, Ryan guessed that she could have been mistaken for a middleweight male wrestler, run to fat.

From the front she was nothing but an astoundingly ugly woman.

Her complexion was sallow, the skin oddly tight in places, slack in others. The furrows and wrinkles were seamed with dirt. Spots and boils decorated her cheeks and chin. A bristling mustache clung as tenaciously to her upper lip as a beggar to his last ten cents. The eyes were sunken in rolls of fat, like raisins in dough, and they glittered like chips of jet, fixing themselves to Ryan's face. When she smiled, Captain Quadde revealed a most peculiar set of false teeth. Ryan realized with a shudder of revulsion that they had been carved from some kind of animal bone.

"Thou butchered goodman Jonas? Thou, with a single starboard glim to peek through? Is that true, Rodriguez? The truth, thou sniveling b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

The landlord couldn't meet her eyes. Glancing toward Ryan Cawdor, he decided he couldn't face him, either.

"Yeah," he muttered into the stillness.

"What?" She spoke softly, the way a cougar will snarl deep in its throat.

"Good evening, Captain Quadde," Ryan said. "I chilled your man."

"Thy name?"

"Ryan Cawdor."

"Why didst thou slaughter poor mild Jonas? He would not have harmed a sleeping babe." There was a sn.i.g.g.e.r of laughter from someone near the piano, quickly m.u.f.fled as the woman turned and stared in that direction.

"I didn't like the way he looked and spoke." The surging anger that had pushed him into the fight with the seaman still moved within Ryan. Gentler, like the waves on a beach after the eye of the storm had pa.s.sed on, but still strong enough to fuel his instinctive dislike of the hoggish woman.

She moved closer, and he noticed that she limped on her right leg. His eye was caught by Krysty, who was looking at Captain Quackle with an expression of almost religious horror. Her lips were moving, and Ryan guessed she was whispering an invocation to Gaia, the Earth Mother. Her long crimson hair, sentient to the moods of its mistress, was coiled tightly and protectively about her skull.

"Didst thou not like the way Jonas spoke and looked?" the woman said musingly. "For that he was slain. Lies here leaking out his red, red roses."

Ryan allowed his right hand to drop to the b.u.t.t of his blaster. "Don't come any closer," he warned her.

Pyra Quadde halted, a scant six feet from him. Very slowly she lifted the cane in her hand, until, as cold as death, the ferrule touched Ryan's throat. He made no move to stop it, knowing that she couldn't manage enough leverage from where she stood to harm him.

"Thou dost threaten me, outlander?" she growled. "Thou hast no love for living. Knowest thou not that no man in Claggartville would dare to life a hand 'gainst me?"

"Then Claggartville doesn't contain many men, does it?"

The walking cane was lowered slowly, until it tapped on the boards. The woman moved back a step, seeing that the spreading pool of blood from Clegg's corpse was oozing stickily closer to the toes of her boots.

"I'd give a ram keg filled with jack to have thee 'board the Salvation when we sail the day after the morrow. To go hunt the great whales across the gray ocean."

Her eyes roamed around the silent tavern as she spoke, and Ryan felt a faint p.r.i.c.kling of something that was almost fear between the blades of his shoulders. The way this stocky woman seemed to hold the entire ville in thrall was frightening. He'd seen enough barons running frontier pest-villes who had less presence than Captain Pyra Quadde.

"What dost thou want done with... ?" the landlord stammered, pointing at the corpse and not knowing quite what to call it.

"Garbage! Heave it off the dock and let the eels take it."

"Aye, Captain."

The woman fixed Ryan again with her stare. "Thou hast had a day, outlander. Times pa.s.s. List, and thou canst hear it sliding by. Three days without work and thou must leave or work'll be found. Think on that, Ryan Cawdor."

"Get out into the fog and blackness where you belong, or stay and get yourself chilled like that piece of dead meat there."

"Big words, outlander." She spun around and stepped to the door, the stick tapping smartly. She paused for a moment, hand on the latch, and Ryan half drew the pistol, expecting her to turn holding a hideaway blaster.

But she opened the heavy door, her dark shape silhouetted a moment against the white fog beyond. Then she was gone, with only the rapping of her stick fading away down the alley.