King, African warriors and, in close-up, a snarling tiger’s face, hung from every wall. Candles and lanterns burned everywhere, hanging by chains from golden lamp-stands, on gold-painted stands by the walls, from a candelabrum overhead. Dominating all was a vast bed canopied in purple and gold and green satin, and hanging behind it, a giant tapestry—evidently also predark, since the figures were too precise and the colors too bright even after decades for handwork—of a black man with a ferocious Afro. He wore an abundance of gold jewelry and strode defiantly with an electric guitar in one hand and a panga not unlike Ryan’s in the other, at the head of a retinue that consisted primarily of scowling, hypermuscular thugs with shaved heads, and beautiful women.
The curtains of the big bed were parted to reveal the baron, lying with his head propped on a green satin pillow.
He had been a big man. That was obvious from his frame beneath the purple satin coverlet. From the way his sallow, mottled cheeks had fallen in it was clear he’d suffered catastrophic weight loss. He turned his hairless head right to face the newcomers and blinked gum-encrusted eyes at them.
The room stank of incense and stale piss and shit. It even made Ryan’s titanium-steel stomach restless.
A young woman in a green smock dabbed at the baron’s eyes with a cloth soaked in some sort of a solution. He waved her away feebly.
“Let me see these people,” he said in a slow, cracked voice.
Garrison and Strode had escorted the companions to see the baron of Soulardville. He blinked at them slowly. Though his complexion was mottled with greenish and yellowish bruiselike marks, Ryan guessed he had been a medium dark-skinned black man. His eyes were a dark blue, which would probably have been startlingly intense had they not been clouded and dimmed by his condition.
“You look…strong,” Baron Savij said. “Reckon…you’ll do.”
Ryan just stared. Krysty said hastily, “Do for what, Baron?”
“I want my baby back,” he said. A tear rolled down his right cheek to make a dark stain on the pillow. He stretched a clawed, discolored hand toward them. “Bring her to me. Please.”
His eyelids fell shut, his arm dropped like a dead bird. His hand dangled off the edge of the bed, palm up. The female attendant hastened to ease it back onto the coverlet beside him.
“He dead?” Jak asked. The words were horribly loud in the sudden deep silence.
Krysty shushed him fiercely. “What I say?” he protested. Doc took him gently by the arm and led him aside.
“You’d better go now,” Strode said. She looked no more than usually concerned for the health of her prize patient.
“Is he?” Ryan asked as she led them toward the stairs.
“Is he what?” the healer asked a bit impatiently.
“Dead.”
“No. Just exhausted.” She seemed minded to say more. Instead she flicked her eyes toward the sec boss, who stood gazing down at his baron with a thoughtful frown rumpling his face.
They started down heavy stairs of dark-stained wood. “Rad sickness?” Mildred asked quietly. The ville healer had assured her J.B. was resting well and she and the others would get to see him once the bosses were finished with them. Mildred seemed to have accepted the healer’s competence. She still was obviously none too pleased with their situation. But then, who was?
Lips pressed together, Strode nodded briskly. “Apparently he broke open a hidden rad pit while leading an expedition into ruins to the northwest of here. He took a substantial dose. Probably ingested some.”
“Lethal dose?” Mildred asked.
“Only time will tell. At this point some random disease could swoop in and carry him off opportunistically. Pneumonia’s a real threat. Even with scavenged antibiotics, there’s a limited amount we can do.”
“Rad death,” Jak said softly, and shivered. Not much scared Jak. But death by radiation exposure would frighten the balls off a brass statue.
“Hard way to go,” Ryan said.
“Know any good ones?” Garrison asked.
Ryan shrugged. “Easier ones and quicker ones, sure.”
“Wait,” Mildred said, stopping dead halfway down the steps. “I know the man in that tapestry. That’s Savij!”
“The first Baron Savij, yes,” Strode said. “He founded Soulardville in the days just after the bombs quit falling. He and his posse showed up one day armed to the teeth and took over.”
“I knew him,” Mildred said. “Knew of him, anyway. He was a famous gangster rapper. Unlike a lot of them he was the real deal. Authentic street thug, been shot half a dozen times, suspected in a dozen murders but somehow never convicted. Supposedly kept his posse supplied with cocaine, hookers, illegal automatic weapons, explosives and rocket launchers.”
“Sounds like our founder,” Strode said.
Frowning, Mildred shook her head. “I remember reading once that Soulard was a totally white-bread little suburb. How would a bad-ass black man like Savij take over a place like that?”
Garrison chuckled like gravel shaken in a gallon can. “Who was gonna stop him?”
They came out onto the ground floor. A young woman was lighting kerosene lanterns against evening’s impending arrival.
Two men stood on a dark brick floor near the landing. One was tall, erect in bearing, lean with just a hint of pot belly pushing out the front of a T-shirt tie-dyed in a red and orange and yellow sunburst, over which he wore an open sky-blue shirt. Sun-faded jeans and sandals completed the ensemble. He wore a three-lobed golden pendant, each lobe of which was engraved with a spiral.
Late-sun glow from the street gilded a round cheek and a head of neat dreadlocks just long enough to tie into a queue at the back of his neck. He was a middle-aged, relatively light-skinned black man with laughing eyes and a trim salt-and-pepper beard.
The shorter man was a little skinny white guy dressed in a red, green, black and gold T-shirt bearing an image of the original Savij. It had to be relatively recent scavenge by simple virtue of the fact it was intact. It was, however, filthy; Ryan, accustomed to the smells of himself and his friends after days of wandering in wilderness and ruin, felt a bit of a twinge at the sheer intensity of his body funk. He had a ratlike face, much of which was concealed, probably for the better, by big dark glasses. His hair hung over the shoulders of his shirt in tangled dreadlocks, so greasy they not only made it impossible to tell what color they might originally have been, but also actually left obvious stains when they brushed the already grimy fabric.
“I’m Brother Joseph,” the tall man said in a rich baritone voice that flowed like honey. “This is my associate, Booker.
“I am the spiritual guide of this community of seekers,” Joseph said. “I’m pleased to meet you all at last. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“What would that be, Brother?” Krysty asked, putting some sugar in her voice. Men tended not to get suspicious when a question came out in that kind of tone from that kind of face and body. Krysty had a great
