The Cajun's name was Henri de la Tour. As he leaned against the bole of the tree, he contemplated the hours to come. Once the rituals were finished, they would collect the outsiders and take them for the new ceremonies. But if the baron was interested in them, then they must not be unduly harmed.
Yet the girl with hair as red as glowing coals in a fire...
His head was sunk on his breast, and he lifted it, jerking a hand up in irritation at the feathery touch of an insect near his ear. The movement exposed the side of his neck above the collar of the shirt, uncovered by the long beard.
"Merde," he hissed. Even to someone who'd spent all of his life in the swamps, the insects could be torture. There had been a woman in Moudongue, named Jenny, whose skin had carried a subtle odor that was irresistible to the hordes of biting insects around the bayous. Poor Jenny. She'd tried getting help from the local voodoo priests. Even gone to Mother Midnight and begged aid against the swarming skein of fluttering flies that always hung around her long hair and face. In the end, Henri recollected, Jenny had been driven insane. Clearly mad, she had run screaming into the splashing shallows of the nearest slime hole, tearing great bloody gouges in her face. No one who had watched the frenzy of her thrashing in the gray-brown ooze tried to help her. It hadn't taken long for the sinister caymans, attracted by the disturbance, to slither from the banks.
Again there was an insect brushing at his hair, making him twitch with irritation.
He moved his head to precisely the right position.
De la Tour cursed fluently, slapping his hand to the point just below the right ear where the bastard moustiquehad stung him. Sharp and painful, where the big carotid artery carried the blood from the aorta to the brain.
In the darkness of the forest, the Cajun heard rain pattering on the leaf-mold around his worn boots. That was strange as it wasn't raining. Somehow it was hard to concentrate on why that should be so peculiar.
It was definitely raining. Henri could feel rain soaking through the collar of his shirt on one side, running over his skin. Warm.
"Chaud?" he muttered, puzzled by the heat, of the rain.
He felt his lips move, heard the faint whisper of his own voice. But all of it was happening a long, long way off. Happening to someone else.
With a labored slowness he reached up to touch the place where the insect had stung him, feeling for the lump of the bite. It wasn't a lump at all. It was a tiny mouth, set in his throat. Pouting lips that intermittently spat blood into the night air.
The Cajun's left hand, opened, and the musket dropped away to be caught by Ryan Cawdor before it could reach the ground.
Then the Cajun understood.
Through the murky slowness of his fading mind, he knew what was happening. He wanted to shout a warning to the others, busy at their ritual, but a hand, strong as a steel clamp, shut over his mouth, helping him as he felt his legs start to falter.
Ryan steadied the dying man, laying down the blaster with one hand, lowering the blood-splattered body to the earth. He actually sensed the moment that life departed.
The last cogent thought of Henri de la Tour was that he had, shamefully, lost control of his bowels.
"Pays the debt, Henn," said Ryan quietly, wiping his hands on the stubby grass that grew around the base of the trees.
In some double-poor communities, out in the deserts, Ryan had seen ceremonies, sacrifices, hoping to bring some sort of fertility or rain or freedom from plague.
They'd all been poor, shoddy events.
This was different.
The air tasted of fear. Followed by Krysty Wroth, the one-eyed man picked his way with exaggerated caution, closing in on the fringe of stunted bushes that hid them from the fire and the people around it.
There were eighteen: fourteen men and four women. All were naked to the waist, and sweat glistened on their bare flesh. What fueled the fire was rough-hewn logs, piled loosely in front of a broken block of concrete around eight feet long and four feet thick.
Spread-eagled on the makeshift altar was a huge boar, its skin pink in the light. A hemp cord was bound tightly around its long muzzle, muffling its shrill cries. It lay on its side, its legs and neck stilled with wire. Leaning against the stone rectangle was a long-hafted logger's axe, its edge glittering orange.
"They going to kill it?"
Ryan nodded. "Yeah. Got to be. I heard of some crazies out west kill like this. Trader said he once seen them slitting the throat of a girl child."
"What did he do?"
"Asked 'em first. They said it wasn't a girl. They said it was a goat. A goat without horns. I never forgot that."
"But what did?.." she began.
"Iced them all."
"How about them?" she asked, pointing through the trees at the group of dancing Cajuns as they circled and shuffled through the trampled mud to the slow beating of the drum.
Ryan patted the butt of the gray Heckler & Koch G-12. "Could freeze the lot of them." He paused. "Mebbe. And mebbe that's not enough."
"There's others back at the ville."
"Sure. Could be other villes close by. No, best get our heels clean of here. Join the rest where we said now we know what's going down."
"You figure we could've been next, Ryan?"
He shook his head. "Mebbe, Krysty. Let's go."
They turned their backs on the fire and the bizarre ceremony in the deeps of Atchafalaya and carefully began to walk toward Moudongue.
They'd gone about a hundred paces when they heard the drumming reach a swift crescendo, then stop. The stillness was eerie. A man, his voice high and cracked, sang out some words in a foreign language. It sounded like "Je suis rouge,Фwhatever that meant.
The words were echoed by the rest of... Ryan almost thought of them as a congregation, like some of the church-belt crazies in Deathlands. There was a moment of awful teetering silence, as if the world around licked its lips in lascivious anticipation.
The faintest whistle of a steel blade sliced the air.
There was a solid, wet thunk.
Both of them heard the stifled squeal of mortal shock from the tethered pig. But they kept their faces turned and continued toward the ville and their friends.
After the exchange of whistled signals, Ryan and Krysty rejoined the others. Doc and Lori were sitting quietly together along the faint trail that they hoped led toward West Lowellton. Finnegan and J.B. stood watching the immensely tall Cajun woman. She leaned against a live oak, with little trace of animation on her heavy, brutish features. She was wearing only a coarse brown blanket across her brawny shoulders.
"They're butchering a pig back, there at the fire," said Ryan.
"A pig?"
"Yeah. Better'n a goat with no horns." Only the Armorer would have understood the allusion; Ryan wrinkled his mouth in distaste.
"We going?"
"Yeah, J.B., I guess so. Why d'you bring the woman with you?"
"He wanted to fucking ice her while we was still fucking fucking," spat Finnegan angrily.
"You said..." J.B. started to protest, looking across the small clearing at Ryan.
УSo why's she here?"
"She knows all 'bout this fucking Baron Tourment," said Finn.
The woman showed little interest in their discussion, busying herself with digging something from her cavernous nostrils, examining it closely, then popping it into her mouth and chewing with stolid relish.
"Mebbe she can show us a way out of here," suggested J.B.
The paths were tortuous in the darkness; Ryan realized that once the Cajuns discovered them gone, they'd be able to move faster and farther. Perhaps the woman couldhelp. "Tell her to show us the fastest way to West Lowellton," Ryan ordered Finnegan. "We going to keep her?"
"Far as it takes."