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 bloody 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 anticipation 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 carcass; 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.
Nobody 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 brass buttons. 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 bastard."
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 snigger of laughter from someone near the piano, quickly muffled 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 passed on, but still strong enough to fuel his instinctive dislike of the hoggish woman.