Free Playfair's Axiom by James Axler

type!”
    “Hold on,” Ryan said, standing up. “Back up a couple steps. You lost me.”
    “The princess!” Lonny snapped. “You don’t care about her. What they’ll do to her. Your kind don’t care!”
    He snorted a deep breath through his lump of nose, drawing his head back on his thick neck. Opening the lid of the food dish he hawked and spit a big glistening green glob into the stew. Replacing the lid, he rocked the dish from side to side, to stir the mix up right. Then he bent down and shoved the dish through the hatch.
    “There you go, coldhearts,” he said. He turned and marched off.
    “What that about?” Jak asked.
    Ryan shook his head. “Slagger’s a few rounds short of a full mag.”
    He picked up a chipped bowl and a wood spoon fromwhere Krysty had laid them out on the floor, went to the dish. Opening the cover, he spooned himself a bowl of stew.
    Mildred gagged. “You aren’t seriously going to eat that?”
    Ryan sat down cross-legged on the floor with his back to the wall, facing the door.
    “Had worse,” he said, and dug in.

Chapter Eight
    From the heaviness of the fist banging on the steel outer door Ryan knew who he’d see when he opened his eye.
    “Garrison,” he said, sitting up. His body felt as if mules had been playing kickball with it.
    Around him the others roused themselves from sleep. Outside the shadows were lengthening toward afternoon. The light had gone mellow, softening the edges of things.
    “Baron wants to see you,” Garrison said.
     
    B ARON S AVIJ WASN`T what any of them expected.
    His room made up pretty much a big chunk of the upper story of the baronial palace. The chamber was decorated lavishly. And also in what, even by Deathlands standard, was pretty dubious taste.
    The chamber was festooned with swatches and banners of purple and gold silk. Giant velvet paintings, of bare-breasted women, Elvis the 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 abundanceof 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