Playfair's Axiom by James Axler Page B

red. Everyone else laughed.
    The banquet hall was on the palace’s bottom floor. The kitchen was in the back. Heat washed into the room whenever the double doors swung open to admit servers carrying laden trays and full bowls. Although the twenty or so diners gathered around the big table—made by pulling several smaller tables together—raised the heat level plenty by themselves.
    Amazingly, it didn’t stink. Not by Deathlands standards of stench. Cleanliness seemed the order of the day in the ville. It kept down disease, something every ville feared, especially since sickness spread like floodwater rising through concentrated populations.
    Nor did Ryan and his friends contribute to the stinklevel. They and their clothes had been freshly washed. They had bathed in metal tubs and water had been brought to them by order of Brother Joseph. Their clothes had been laundered by other ville helpers. Though the clothes were still damp, that actually helped cool Ryan a bit. It wasn’t as if they weren’t going to sweat their duds sopping by the time dinner was through anyway.
    “I’m really interested in what you’re doing here, Mr. Bulstrop,” Krysty said to the long-haired garden guy.
    The man smiled so big it seemed the top of his head would just open up backward like a hinged beer-stein lid. “Thank you so much, Ms. Wroth.”
    “Ms. Wroth,” Ryan repeated aloud. “They got some bastard manners in this ville. Ow! Why did you kick me?”
    “Because I’m not close enough to,” Mildred said grimly.
    “But I was impressed!”
    “Ryan—”
    The tone in Krysty’s voice shut him right down. Since he’d finally gotten grown-up and hard-bit enough to stand up to Trader, who’d ridden him unmercifully during his early apprenticeship, Ryan would step down for no man.
    Then again, only a blindie would mistake Krysty Wroth for a man.
    “My friends!” Bro Joe’s voice pealed like a bell from the head of the table. Booker sat at his side, stuffing a piece of bread into his face with crumbs cascading to the scarred wood table below him. Ryan noticed he’d managed to turn the bread gray just from briefly handling it. Ryan was glad that whatever breeze the open windows and doors gave didn’t blow down from that end of the table. It would’ve taken the edge off even his appetite.
    “As you know,” the preacher continued when the burble of conversation stopped, “we are privileged to have guests with us tonight—intrepid wanderers of the wasteland!”
    That brought out some discreet applause. Ryan wasn’t sure how the guest list had been assembled. Most of the attendees were getting on in years, forties at least, looked well enough fed and well-scrubbed. He didn’t reckon they’d been picked for opposition to Bro Joe; he noted Strode was absent. Tully sat at the far end of the table from the preacher and looked fairly uncomfortable. Didn’t harm his appetite any Ryan could see.
    Garrison was there, sitting up on the preacher’s right across from Booker. Ryan admired the strength of his stomach. Unless, like some folks, he’d been born without any sense of smell.
    Ryan caught Krysty’s eye as she smiled around at everybody, playing the ideal dinner guest in a way that wouldn’t have been out of place at a baronial party in Front Royal. Her expression hardened briefly as she caught Ryan’s attention.
    Guests, he knew she was thinking, as he was. Six sec men with hands behind their backs and sidearms and truncheons hanging from their belts stood at ease around the dining room. Brother Joseph might call the companions guests, but there were still blasters ready to come out if they started actually acting like them. They were prisoners, no matter how well they were being treated.
    Fattened? Ryan didn’t like the taste of that line of thought.
    “In their honor, and in honor of our wonderful ville and the service rendered it by a succession of heroic Barons Savij, I propose that we bring out Saga to give us the