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Brick, structural steel, thick interlocking slate on the roof and canopy rigging to keep off the worst of the summer sun, heavy beaming and concrete-wrapped terraces of decorative prairie earth built up to the roof-this Baron had chosen his headquarters well. Nothing short of a heavy artillery barrage would put much of a dent in that monstrosity. Valentine wondered how many could be gathered under that titanic roof.
Of course the Gray Ones had added their own touches the original architects never intended. The decorative garden beneath the steeple sprouted monoliths of bones, skulls, and captured weapons. Victory columns, Valentine guessed. Female Grogs scrubbed their broods in ample pooling space of the fountain's spray. An aged attendant skimmed dirt out of the sluices and others waded to the fresh flow at the top to fill jugs and jars.
The Gray Ones had also added their own fetishes. They didn't go for brass idols, but rather markers like over-thick spears or harpoons with knot work and mixtures of leather and wood dangling from spars that reminded Valentine of pictures he'd seen of medieval samurai warriors with banners attached to their armored backs. There were bones, teeth, dried fingers, and even a preserved penis or two among the tokens of triumph.
Valentine had never seen the like in the Kurian Zone proper, where discretion about bodies both kept things hygienic and the populace settled. The men who handled bodies were typically selected and supervised by the Church, with a doctor or nurse on hand to add an air of medical authenticity. Only in the worst New Orleans slums were bodies left for discovery by rats, or those eager to plunder a corpse for its socks and hair. The Gray Baron was essentially saying death is our business, with a display like that on the doorstep of his headquarters.
There was an old pre-22 chain hotel that looked like it served as quarters for NCOs, judging from the men coming and going and lounging in the pleasant spring sunshine, eating or playing games or reading or cleaning guns. Small armies of servant Grogs worked in shacks nearby, polishing and resoling boots, laundering and patching uniforms, even shaving and cutting hair for the men. The Gray Baron's men had it good.
Valentine got a glimpse of the alleyways of the Gray One quarters. He'd never seen Gray One urbanization before, and he wished he was at liberty to take a better look. From a distance, their ghetto reminded him of a creative child's stack of blocks. Prefabricated housing trailers were grafted on, dug in, suspended over, and bridging older human single-family homes into what looked like a haphazard pile, but probably had something to do with chiefs and sub-chiefs and their clans. The ghetto clattered and buzzed and smoked. There was electricity in most housing, but for water it looked like the residents had to use troughs and pumps set out in the yards of the older human houses.
Back in the hills behind the headquarters megachurch, Valentine saw a few more elegant houses, presumably the Baron and his main lieutenants lived there, several barns of various types, and an expansive training area on the distant hills. He saw groups of Gray Ones, antlike in the distance, moving upslope and down, crossing various sorts of obstacles, breaking up and re-forming like waves striking rocks, and some hand-to-hand tussles.
Of the Golden Ones he saw nothing; though up by the dust and clatter in town he did see the giraffe necks of cranes and a vaguely pyramidal structure rising next to them.
Before he could get a better look at the distant, dust-shrouded construction, Valentine was brought before a little cinder-block building with a sod roof. GUARD AUXILIARY MONGO STATION ARRIVALS read the stencils on the door lintel. It had a hand-painted sign out front as well: ABANDON ALL HONOR, YE WHO ENTER HERE-AND RETIRE RICH. Even the doormat had a legend, Valentine noticed, but the letters were mostly obscured by mud.
OAR
In the "Arrivals" blockhouse, they negotiated Valentine's sale in the time it might take Valentine to turn in a bag of laundry and his best uniform at a Southern Command Laundromat.
Valentine submitted to the usual once-over. They looked into his eyes, ears, checked his teeth, combed through his hair looking for vermin, looked at his nails and tongue and toes.
They didn't like his limp and made him walk, run, and hop along the spring mud flanking the blockhouse.
After a good deal more argument they settled on a price, it seemed. Ahn-Kha walked over to Valentine.
"I claimed you fought me like an evil spirit and you'd no doubt won your scars in battle," he murmured, removing the lead. "They claim you're fit only for use as a draft block in a doorjamb, but I suspect they are pleased to have you."
Ahn-Kha insisted that their price for such a healthy specimen wasn't satisfactory, and the manager there finally accepted a deal where they would see how the captive worked, and if he lived up to Ahn-Kha's promises, they'd meet his price.
Ahn-Kha leaned on the counter so heavily Valentine could hear nails working free. "He's to be well treated, until my price is met."
They sprayed off the mud with a power hose they kept at the gate to the motor vehicle revetment. Valentine rather enjoyed all the mud being blasted off, though his skin felt like it had been sandpapered after. The towel they gave him to dry off was rough and stiff and had not met soap since the previous March, but it was as clean as well water could make it.
Sergeant Stock hung around, watching, which seemed a waste of time for a man due for liberty.
He threw the towel over his head and shoulders, assuming that his nakedness would draw attention rather than his face. If there were still wanted posters out for him, they were for a much more youthful face and long black hair.
A corporal with another odd variant of a short whip-it looked like a stingray tail Valentine had seen in the Gulf-led him to a white-painted prefab with a Quonset-hut-style roof. Valentine noticed a red cross painted on the roof-as if Southern Command or the Grogs had an air force that might bomb the Baron's headquarters-and took him inside. Valentine's nose smelled rubbing alcohol and Kurian Zone disinfectant of the sort that came in fifty-gallon drums sweetly reeking of artificial lemon.
He was glad the place sparkled and smelled. At least he wouldn't be probed with a blood-encrusted finger.
"Wait here," the corporal ordered, shoving him into a folding metal chair.
Stock, who was still watching, spoke up. "Easy there, Corp. This Scrubman's been a broke horse the whole march in." Turning to Valentine, he said, "Relax. Didn't you read the doormat? No fear. Goons over with here. No Reapers. Savvy?"
With that, he walked out of the building.
Was that a code, Valentine thought? Relax, I recognize you, your secret is safe? Or is he just kindly to human captives. The Molly Carlson he'd known wouldn't have married a brute, not after what she'd been through; if anything, she'd only be courted by the most gentle of men. Probably just his nature.
More waiting. Valentine grew ever hungrier, and his stomach growled. The corporal's knuckles whitened on the whip handle, but he otherwise didn't move.
At last, a cough preceded a medical man, with an orderly trailing behind carrying a tray full of instruments and some jars.
The doctor, a gray-hair who looked terribly frail for a forward military camp, examined Valentine. The medical man knew his business. He looked into his eyes, ears, and throat, listened to his heart and breathing through a stethoscope, tut-tutted over the old steam burns on his back, palpitated his scrotum and had Valentine cough, and ran some sort of irritatingly dry swab up his rectum.
He paused over the old gunshot wound in his leg. He cocked his head first to one angle, then another as he looked at it. He reminded Valentine of a pigeon he'd once watched in New Orleans, deciding if a dropped coin was edible.
