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.

She moved closer, and he noticed that she limped on her right leg. His eye was caught by Krysty, who was looking at Captain Quadde 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 butt of his blaster. "Don't come any closer," he warned her.

Pyra Quadde halted, a scant six feet from him. Veryslowly 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 Salvationwhen 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 prickling 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 pass. 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.

"Up to the room," Ryan ordered, collecting the others with his eye. It wasn't the time to linger in the cramped bar, among so many threatening strangers.

Donfil was last into their room, shutting the door gently and leaning his shoulder against it. "Lot of sour badness in that woman," he said.

Krysty nodded. "Right. I could hardly breathe with her in the same room, Ryan. Why did you have to push the fight with?.."

"Because I had to. I did it, he's chilled and we move on."

"If I may venture a small suggestion," Doc said. "I think we would do well to consider the possibility of moving on from... from... from whatever this dreary place is called. Ah, Claggartville. It came back to me."

"I hate this place!" Lori said vehemently. "It's fulled of badness. We shall... should get out and back to the gateway and go someplace else. "

Ryan looked at Jak and J.B., the only two in the group who hadn't spoken. "How about it?"

"Don't see any point staying," Jak mumbled, head down. "No work. No jack. I say go."

The Armorer still stayed silent. He walked across to the low window and peered out, wiping at the condensation with his sleeve.

"J.B.?"

"Trader used to say something about the man who doesn't get into a firefight but runs away, lives to run away on another day."

Ryan had heard it before, but the old joke still amused him. "Sure, but what do we do? I agree with Jak, in a way. Can't see much to keep us in this ville. Woman like that Pyra Quadde looks like she could pull a lot of strings in Claggartville. If someone mebbe plans to coldcock me, I'd rather not stick around for them."

"So we go?" Krysty said, the relief heavy in her voice.

"When should we plan our departure?" Doc asked, sitting on one of the beds, cracking the knuckles of his right hand with a sound like distant musket fire.