Chapter Eighteen

« ^ »

THERE IS A POINT where the old states of Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia all come together at notorious Harper’s Ferry. The wag coughed and spluttered its way into Ryan Cawdor’s home state, now a scant sixty miles from the ville of Front Royal. The closer they drove to his birthplace, the quieter the one-eyed man became. He sat alone on his bunk when he wasn’t spelling Jak in the driver’s seat.

It was becoming increasingly obvious that the sec wag wasn’t going to make it the whole distance to their destination. The farther they traveled, the rougher the engine sounded, devouring more and more gas.

They stopped for the night, about thirty miles from Front Royal, and Jak dipped a long stick into the tank, holding it angled to the orange beams of the setting sun to try to see the gas level.

“How much?” Ryan asked.

“Not ‘nough,” the boy replied.

“In the cans?” J.B. asked.

“Drier than an old woman’s tits. Guess ‘bout ten miles. Mebbe fifteen.”

They all looked at Ryan. “You recognize where we are?” Krysty asked. “Ring any chimes from boyhood?”

He shook his head. “Never hunted much north. This trail don’t seem much used. Main tracks were south and west of here. Old 1-81 was the wide one. Pa had trouble with guerrillas coming from the mountains to the west. Shen raiders. They used that interstate with fast wags. Light armor. Stole horses and cattle and women. Surely missed the stallions and the seed bulls.”

“But you believe we may be somewhat in the immediate vicinity of your ancestral home?” Doc asked, scratching his chin, his mind immediately wandering off the subject. “Why, ‘pon my soul, I declare that I have a dire need of a shave, my friends. Forgive me while I go to attend to my ablutions.” The old man vanished toward a slow-moving stream behind the wag.

Ryan shrugged. “I guess we got to be close. Can’t say… Fireblast! I don’t think I’m doing right bringing you along on this.”

Krysty clucked her tongue and moved closer to him, but he shook his head.

“No, lover. I mean all of you. If’n Harvey once finds out I’m within a hundred miles, he’ll put the dogs out after me. After us. And he must be able to call on…mebbe a hundred sec men or more. As well as having every bastard village and hamlet for twenty miles around under his heel.”

“Wouldn’t be here if’n I didn’t want to be,” J.B. replied.

“And me,” Lori insisted defiantly. “We’ll killed your brother together. Shan’t I?”

The others laughed at the girl’s serious face, Ryan finally joining in.

“Okay, friends,” he said. “But when my brother has us roasting over a slow fire, don’t any of you put the blame on me!”

 

JAK CAUGHT SOME TROUT and roasted them over a slow fire of hickory wood, the scent making everyone’s mouth water. The fish were delicious, the tender flesh all but falling off the slender bones.

“What’s time, J.B.?” Jak asked, laying back on a shelf of thick moss, legs crossed, his stark white hair spread out behind him like a bride’s veil.

“Twenty-five of eight,” the Armorer replied, checking his wrist chron.

“We should be moving on,” Ryan said, belching appreciatively. “Those fish were double-ace. Hardly ever get fresh eating. Did you have self-heats and spun soya in your day, Doc?”

“What, may I ask, do you consider to be ‘my day,’ Ryan?”

“Before the long winter, course.”

“During my time in the 1990s, I found the quality of cuisine execrable.”

“That mean it was good, Doc?” Ryan asked.

“It means it was shit, Ryan.” The old man grinned. “Tinned and frozen and packaged and freeze-dried and irradiated and processed. Little better than these appalling self-heats. But remember that my time was also back in the late 1800s, before I was so cruelly trawled forward as part of Cerberus.”

“What was food like then? In real old times,” Jak asked.

“Ah,” Doc sighed. “Like those trout. All food was fresh. Well… most food was fresh. Chicken and mutton and beef and turkey. Salmon and trout and bass. Vegetables from your own garden, with no having to take a rad count first. Cream so thick I swear you could cut it with a knife. But what is the merit in such talk? Let us enjoy the occasional marvelous food like these tender fish.”

“Had good food as a kid, back at the ville,” Ryan said. “Cooks made me a special sort of a pie with apples and oranges in it. Called it ‘Master Ryan’s Surprise,’ they did.”

“By the three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed, leaping to his feet in dismay.

“What the…?” Ryan said.

“Your name!”

“What?”

“Your name,” Doc repeated. “Your name is Ryan Cawdor. We all call you by that name, do we not? Indeed we do.”

Ryan didn’t understand. But he was used to the occasional way Doc’s synapses disconnected and produced only babbling. Krysty also stood up, eyes lighting up as she realized what Doc was trying to say.

“Ryan!” she exclaimed.

“You all lost your jack, lover? What’s all this about…?”

“About your name, you double-stupe,” she said, voice raised. “Tomorrow we’ll be within range of the ville.”

“And?”

“And if anyone hears the name of Ryan Cawdor, then they’ll…”

“Go running to Harvey,” Ryan finished, slapping his own forehead with exasperation. “Sorry, friends. Better go and throw myself in that pool to try and get my damned brain working. Yeah, of course. Got to change my name.”

“Upon my soul, but I admire a man who likes to speak his mind. Indeed I do,” Doc said, grinning. “That’s my impersonation of… of someone or other from some old vid.”

“I don’t know what to call myself,” Ryan said.

“John Doe,” Krysty suggested. “Used to be the name for chills they couldn’t put a name to.”

“Thanks, lover,” Ryan said dryly.

“Floyd Thursby,” Doc offered.

The suggestion was greeted with total silence by everyone. Ryan tried the name on his tongue, finding it felt familiar. “Not bad.”

“Like it.” Lori smiled. “Floyd Thursby. I can remember that.”

Krysty leaned over and kissed Ryan on the lips. “Hey, Floyd, you kiss just like a guy I used to know.”

“You enjoy it?” Ryan grinned and pulled her to him, kissing her long and hard.

“Even better when you help,” she replied, face flushed, sentient hair coiling and uncoiling on her shoulders.

“Floyd Thursby.” J.B. tried the name. “Why not? Where did you pick that one from, Doc?”

The old-timer looked puzzled. “I think… No, it’s vanished. Perhaps we shall never know who the real Mr. Floyd Thursby was. It will remain a mystery shrouded in an enigma.”

 

THEY FINALLY RAN OUT OF GAS a little before noon. Fortunately the rebuilt wag had been giving them plenty of warning, the engine stalling and backfiring repeatedly. Jak, who was at the wheel, had ample time to pick a secluded spot off the deserted blacktop. He eventually parked the truck in a grove of trees, completely out of sight of any casual passersby. They hadn’t seen a soul since crossing the Susquehanna, so it looked like a good place to safely store some of their clothes and blasters.

“We go and we look. Find a way—if there is a way—to take out Harvey and his woman. And his bastard son. We need more power, we come back here and collect the rest of the blasters.”

The Armorer sighed at Ryan’s words. “Surely like to have the Uzi in my hand, going into a hostile ville like this.”

“Sec men’d chill us ‘fore we got ten paces over the moat.”

“Sure, Ryan, sure.”

Their secluded grove was a place of quietness and muted grays and greens. A small, furry animal scuttled amid the rustling leaves, darting out of sight behind the wheels of the wag.

“Nice forest,” Krysty said. “Any mutie critters around here?”

“Some humans,” Ryan replied. “There’s still some black bear in the hills, and mebbe some cougar. Pa used to breed wild boars. Big mothers, six feet at the shoulder, with curved tusks that’d rip your belly open ‘fore you even saw ‘em coming.”

“Nice, lover. I’ll stay close to you. This all the woods from the Front Royal ville?”

“Used to be. When I was a kid it seemed like we owned half the Shens. Now… I don’t know. Just know that we gotta step careful.”

“When do we move?” Doc asked. “There’s ample daylight left for us to continue with our odyssey, is there not?”

Ryan put his hands to his chin, as if he were praying, trying to decide what’d be best. It was nearly twenty years since he’d been in Virginia. There could have been lots of changes—probably had been. In fact, in the year since there’d been any reliable, fresh news, much might have altered at the ville. Harvey could be dead. So could his wife and son. There could have been a rebellion. It was widely known that precious few barons ever died peacefully in their own beds.

“Wait for dusk,” he finally decided.

Most of them slept through that long afternoon.

They all dreamed, locked in their own private memories and thoughts.

 

Jak was riding a great alligator, fully sixty feet long, with mutie jaws and teeth. Somehow it skimmed above the surface of a vast swamp, covered with rich, waxy flowers in unearthly shades of purple and green.

 

Lori was wandering naked along swept corridors of gray stone, turning corners, walking and turning more corners. Always the corridors stretched ahead of her, limitless and featureless. Yet she knew that she must keep walking. She was cold, but if she could only find it, there was warmth somewhere for her. Her feet were sore and bleeding and she cried. In her dream, the girl cried.

 

J.B., his glasses neatly folded and tucked into the protective top pocket of his coat, was immersed in a common and repetitive dream. His lips parted in a faint smile of enjoyment.

He had fieldstripped a Stechin machine pistol and laid the parts out, all clean and oiled, on a cloth of white velvet. He ran his eye over them, naming each part.

“Barrel, recoil spring, slide, barrel bracket, extractor, tip of firing pin…” and all the way through the field manual.

The Armorer sighed with pleasure.

 

Krysty was dreaming of her childhood, back in the ville of Harmony. She was running through a field of poppies, red as spilled blood, feet bare, a ribbon holding back her vermilion hair. The sun was as bright as a newly minted copper coin. Around her she could hear the laughter of children, pealing sweet and hard like small bells of platinum.

The laughter was getting closer and closer to Krysty.

The sun disappeared behind clouds.

The poppies withered and died.

But the laughter came closer and closer.

When Krysty jerked awake, she was sweating and trembling.

 

Doc Tanner slept shallow and often, like many old people. His dreams were of the long-gone past, lost and beyond recall.

He was in a book-lined room, which was lit with the soft glow of a brass oil lamp, the background resonant with the regular, measured heartbeat of a walnut grandfather clock.

Doctor Theophilus Algernon Tanner was reading, occasionally pausing to make a note with his quill pen, dipping it into the ornate ormolu inkwell.

Through the open doorway, he could see his wife, Emily, suckling little Jolyon, while baby Rachel, swathed in layers of lace petticoats, played with a plump puppy by the fire. It was a scene of intense domestic happiness, and the old man mumbled to himself, smiling on his bed of dry leaves and soft moss, two centuries away from his dream.

 

Ryan dreamed of a dagger.

 

When they awoke, they readied themselves for the journey to Front Royal, leaving their long winter coats in the wag. J.B. reluctantly laid his mini-Uzi on a shelf, and Ryan pushed his precious G-12 and its ammunition under one of the bunks.

It was dusk, a fresh spring kind of an evening with a flock of pigeons wheeling above the tops of the trees. The air tasted green, and already the beginnings of dew lay slick on the folded tops of the boulders.

“That way,” Ryan said confidently, pointing to the south.

“Wait,” Krysty ordered.

“I hear dogs,” Jak said, brushing his hair back from the side of his head.

“Yes,” Krysty agreed. “Pack of dogs, coming this way. Fast. Listen. You’ll all hear them soon. They’re hunting.”

Lori heard them next, then Ryan and the other two—a high keening that rose and fell as the animals ran into hollows or over hills in their hunt. Ryan felt the hair on his nape rise at the sound. It was a familiar noise from his childhood. He had heard it when he’d ridden to the hounds after boar, galloping behind his father, stirrup to stirrup with his oldest brother, Morgan.

“What do we do?” the Armorer asked. “I’ll get the Uzi out the wag.”

“Wait,” Ryan urged. “If it’s a full pack, then blasters won’t be much use. There’ll be forty or fifty curs, trained to go for throat or groin. The only chance is to get in the wag and shut the door.”

“Then whoever’s running the dogs’ll take us like rats in a trap,” Krysty argued.

“Better than being ripped apart.”

“Guess so, lover,” she said.

But the pack veered away, heading east. While the six friends stood huddled together, they heard the hunting animals finally catch up with their prey and make their kill.

The screaming went on and on for what seemed like long minutes but probably only lasted for thirty seconds or so. It was a shriek of purest agony. And it was undeniably human.

 

Chapter Nineteen

« ^ »

THE MEMORIES ARE flooding back and filling my brain with the past,” Ryan said vehemently.

They’d been walking through the evening and into the night, traveling on a twisting network of narrow footpaths. They heard the sound of the pack of hounds, called back by a blaring horn, gradually fading away to the south, toward the ville.

Jak led the way with his good night sight, and at one point spotted the far-off glow of cooking fires. Ryan recalled that there were many small hamlets or settlements scattered around the area.

“They all owed work and land to the ville,” he said. “The baron had almost total power over them.”

“Almost?” Doc questioned.

Ryan grinned, his teeth white in the moonlight. “Yeah, Doc. Almost. Ville couldn’t stop you chilling yourself.” He paused. “But your family’d suffer if you took that road out.”

One thing had changed in the years since Ryan had fled the region, half-blind and nine parts crazed. There had been a steady infiltration of mutie raiders from the west, and all the small communities now had armed patrols out every night, all local men who knew every twist and turn of the dense forests.

Jak and Krysty heard them coming almost simultaneously. But it was too late.

Short of a full-fledged firefight, Ryan and his group had no way of escape.

The villagers must have heard them coming, or seen them through the trees. There were six men, all armed with a variety of handblasters, ranging from an old English Enfield to a target .22 Colt with sawed-off sights. All of them handled the pistols as if they knew how to use them. They had come in on opposite sides, calling out a warning from cover.

“One step and you’re all chilled!”

Jak was the only one who went through with a draw, hefting the gleaming Magnum from his belt and waving it threateningly at the trees surrounding them. Ryan snapped out an order for him to holster the gun.

“Don’t, Jak. Not now.”

“Do like the one-eye says,” came the voice, soft and calm.

“Okay, Ry…Floyd!” The albino nearly blew the pseudonym, just remembering it in time.

“Like to see all the blasters by your feet, real slow ‘n’ easy.”

Ryan glanced around. He spotted the six men easily enough, but saw that they were well protected by the trunks of the sycamores. He felt angry with himself for allowing the double-poors to come and take them as easy as that. The only consolation was that they hadn’t opened fire on them.

There was also the odd feeling that he didn’t need to take any precautions. He was Ryan Cawdor, son of the old baron and brother to Harvey Cawdor, ruler of Front Royal ville and the thousands of acres around it. Why should he not feel safe? And that same feeling had somehow communicated itself to Jak and to the rest of the group.

“Put the guns down,” he ordered. He raised his voice to address the leader of the patrol. “We’re traders. Our wag ran dry three days back. Been wandering around these forests ever since. Where are we, friend? We were heading for the ville of Front Royal to trade in fish and fruit.”

“Baron Cawdor’s ville has no need of fruit or fish, friends. So you’ve wasted your journey.”

“Are we near the ville?” Krysty asked.

“You mutie? You and the snow-hair kid? Baron don’t welcome muties, lady.”

“We aren’t muties. None of us.”

“Step back from the blasters. Now take some care. One at a time you step forward and we’ll search you. Make sure there’s nobody holding on to a hideaway. That’d be a mistake.”

Ryan was impressed with the man’s control. It was impossible to make him out clearly, but he sounded only in his late teens or early twenties. He had handled the ambush with an almost ridiculous ease, plucking them all into his net like ripe fruit.

“What’s your name and where are we?” Ryan called.

“Hamlet of Shersville, friend. Name’s Nathan Freeman. Sec head of our small ville. That’s ‘nough talk. Old man first.”

The search was thorough, and sec men found the knives that Ryan, J.B. and Jak carried, but missed the sword-stick that belonged to Doc Tanner.

“Seems okay,” Freeman said, still keeping cautiously out of sight. “You can pick up the blasters and come with us. Stay in Shersville a day or two. Then be on your way.”

A skinny hunched man called from the other side of the clearing. “Gotta let baron know. Strangers, Nate. Gotta tell him.”

“Baron wants to know any danger, Tom. These six won’t topple Front Royal. I believe what they say. Let ‘em be.”

“Cause trouble, Nate. Trouble for you is trouble for Shersville. Trouble for one is trouble for all.”

“Damn that fear, Tom!” the leader shouted, suddenly vehement. “The shadow is fucking long. All knows that. But it’s not forever. One day there’ll be change.”

“You speak treason, Nathan,” came another voice, older and calmer. “There’s many loves you but there’s those in Shersville’d see you fall and the chance of wolfs-head jack from th’Baron.”

“Shersville don’t need such as them. One day we can stand and fall as we are. Not ‘cause of fear of the baron and that sluttish…”

“Nate!” Tom shouted. “Watch your tongue, you stupe. Or we’ll all dance on cold air for it.”

Ryan found the conversation utterly fascinating. There was obviously some deep-rooted and bitter feelings against his brother and Lady Rachel. But there was also intense fear of the chilling power of the ville. The barons Cawdor of Front Royal had always had long arms.

“Said we should report strangers, Nate.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah! I hear you. I say let ‘em have their blasters and come with us. Day Shersville can’t offer shelter and food to lost strangers is the day Shersville loses all it ever had.”

“We are obliged to you, young man,” Doc Tanner said as courteous as ever. His hand moved to his sparse silver locks to sweep the stovepipe hat off in an elegant bow, but he let it fall again to his side as he remembered that the ancient hat was now part of the flotsam and jetsam off the New Jersey shore.

“Yeah, we’re grateful, Master Freeman,” Ryan said. “From what we heard, it sounds like there could be trouble from this baron if you give us shelter. Wouldn’t want that.”

“Tom speaks over the top. Baron demands we watch the borders for muties and hire-killers. You aren’t the first. As for the second… Like I said, six won’t take Front Royal. So what’s to tell the good Baron Cawdor?”

Nathan Freeman turned and led the way through the bright silvered night, following the trail as it gradually became broader, blending with other tracks until they were on a well-preserved blacktop.

The rest of the villagers straggled along in the rear, talking quietly and urgently together.

“You worried them,” Ryan said.

Freeman shook his head. “My mother used to say something about dying on your feet mebbe being better than living on your belly. The ville’s been too powerful for too long since Baron Harvey stole it.”

“Stole?” J.B. asked.

“Long story. I wasn’t even born when it began. We’ll get to Shersville and get some food down you. Then I’ll tell you.”

Ryan had noticed that the man had been staring curiously at his eye patch. When the question finally came, he was ready for it.

“Best I know your names,” Freeman said, “so’s I can say I made proper inquiries. And I wonder ‘bout that wound to your face.”

“I’m Floyd Thursby. This is J.B. Dix, Krysty Wroth, Lori Quint, Doc Tanner and Jak Lauren. This?” He lifted a hand to touch the leather patch over his left eye. “Don’t much like talking about it. Double-stupe way to lose half your sight.”

“How?”

“Rabbit.”

“How’s that?”

“I was in my twentieth summer, out west, where I was born. Been trapping with my uncle. Both my parents died when I was three. There was a big buck caught in a snare around its foreleg. The wire had bitten deep to the bone and the creature seemed like it was nearly chilled.”

Everyone had stopped, gathering around to hear the conclusion of the story. Ryan wasn’t a natural-born liar, and he struggled to keep the tale as short and as simple as possible.

“Stooped over it, skinning knife in my right hand. Been a bad chem storm and it was dark, under some trees. Bent low. Fucker wasn’t near dead, and it kicked out at me. Hooked this eye out from its socket neat as a stone from a plum. Gouged this down me at the same time.” He touched the jagged cicatrix that seamed his cheek from eye to mouth on the right side of his lean face.

“Coney blinded you!” The villager called Tom laughed. “If that don’t take the biscuit! A coney spoiled the stranger’s looks.”

Ryan turned slowly and stared at the man, the moon catching his good eye, giving it a glint of ferocious anger. It checked the laughter so quickly that Tom nearly choked on his tongue.

“No harm meant, Master Thursby,” he stammered out, taking a stumbling half step back, stepping on the toes of the man behind him.

“No harm done, friend.” Ryan smiled.

 

“THERE’S STRANGE FRUIT, lover,” Krysty whispered as they came within sight of the hamlet of Shersville, a quarter hour later.

Ryan looked where she pointed. Ahead of them, fringing the road, were five corpses. Three had been hanged and two had been crucified on crude crosses.

“Baron Harvey’s orchard,” one of the older men with them cackled.

“Pour encourager les autres,” Doc Tanner muttered.

“How’s that, Doc?” Jak asked.

“It means, my dear boy, that the baron believes in visible lessons to those who might consider crossing him.”

Ryan stopped in front of the first of the bodies. It was a woman, naked, aged around fifty by the look of the dried, wrinkled flesh. There wasn’t enough left of the face to be more certain. Strands of ragged, graying hair still clung to the gnarled bone of the skull. The lower jaw had become detached and fallen to the earth. The eyes were long gone, pecked out by the crows that they’d seen near where they had parked the wag. The hempen rope around the scrawny throat was stained black with ancient blood.

The next dangling corpse was a man. But it was only by the torn ribbons of breeches and jerkin that you could guess it. The body had obviously hung there longer than the old woman; the flesh had turned to crisp leather, tanned and gleaming in the bright moonlight. The hands were bound behind the back, and the ankles were also tied together. One foot was missing.

The third body was smaller, younger and fresher. The eyes were missing, as well as the lips and part of the soft flesh of the cheeks. It was a teenage boy, flaxen-headed and slightly built. Both hands were gone, obviously cut off before the lynching. Smears of thick tar around the stumps showed where a crude effort had been made to stop the lad from bleeding to death before he could be strung up.

“Found a boar with broken legs out in the wild Shens, south of here,” Nathan Freeman said, voice as cold as death. “Beast was done and he slit its throat and took a haunch for food for his family. Live on the edge of Shersville. Someone leaked word to the baron and…” The sentence drifted away into the silence of the night.

Both of the crucified corpses were men.

“See this on every road around Front Royal,” Tom mumbled almost apologetically, as though he needed to give the six strangers some sort of an explanation for the horrors.

“Been up for weeks, them two,” added the oldest of the villagers. “Both gotten catched hoarding food meant for Lady Rachel’s horses.”

“That’s a high price,” J.B. said, staring up at the tortured corpses.

“Bad way’t‘go,” Nathan commented. “The hunk of wood for your feet makes it longer. Ropes around the wrists and ankles. Baron wanted nails used, but Lady Rachel said nails made it quicker. Through the tendons and bones at wrist and ankle. Ropes is more cruel, she said. So it was ropes.”

“What chills you?” Jak asked, displaying a ghoulish interest in the mechanics of how a crucifixion actually worked.

Nathan pointed. “See the way the head falls forward on the chest? Whole body leans out. Closes up the chest so you can’t breathe. You pull yourself up straight. Then the strain’s too much so you slump. Goes on until you choke.”

“Bastard hard,” Ryan said.

“Indeed, Master Thursby,” the tall young man agreed. “But the baron and his… his lady have less kind ways.”

“Worse than that!” Krysty exclaimed, shaking her head in disgust.

“A man who spit at Lady Rachel Cawdor, for what she’d done to his family, was taken and stripped and his wrists bound tight with whipcord. Then he was placed on a large wooden spike that tapered, becoming wider and wider.”

Jak looked puzzled. “Placed? How d’you mean? How?”

“Point up his ass, Whitey,” Tom explained. “He gripped with his feet. But he got tired, didn’t he, mates? Slipped down a bit. Then there was all the blood and stuff on the spike. He went down farther. And in the end it came clean out through—”

“Enough!” Doc Tanner shouted. “By the three Kennedys! This is monstrous.” He turned to Ryan, whose heart sank at the suspicion that the old man, in his rage, was about to call him by his real name. And possibly destroy them all.

“Don’t glare at Floyd, Doc!” Lori shrieked, hanging onto his arm and nearly pulling him clear off-balance.

“Who? Don’t what, child? Who is…” The light of reason seeped back into the eyes. “I swear I was near the brink of… But let it pass. Master Thursby, I fear that I cannot, nay, will not, spend a night in the shadow of these poor curs.”

“Where can you go, Doc?” Ryan asked.

“Back to wag. I knew the trails,” Lori said. “I could have found it easy.”

“You said it was days off,” Tom interrupted, suspicious. “Didn’t yer?”

“There’s a cache of food,” Krysty said quickly. “Mebbe it’d be safer for them, Floyd.”

“If’n that’s what you want, Doc.”

“I can lead you back,” Nathan Freeman offered. “Know these woods from a child. On the morrow I can trail and make sure all’s well.”

“No need, thanks,” J.B. said. “We know where the wag is.”

“Sure,” Ryan added, taking the old man by the arm and leading him out of earshot of the others, Lori following closely.

“We’ll be fine, Ryan,” the old man whispered. “Be good cover if’n there should be trouble. Don’t trust them.”

“The young man, Nathan, seems a straight. But I know what you mean. So much fear of the ville. We’ll stay there for the night and then leave early morning. Stay at the wag and we’ll pick you both up before noon. Is that okay?”

Doc gripped him by the hand. “Ryan…I mean, Floyd. I don’t have the power of a doomie to see the future. But I fear that this promises ill. Will you abandon the venture, come back to the gateway and let us go elsewhere?”

Ryan sighed. “No, Doc. Thanks for the warning. But I’ve come too far, too far to turn back now. Take care. And you, Lori. See you tomorrow.”

The slim young girl led the way back along the trail, Doc Tanner walking more slowly, stumbling a little, after her. In a very short time they’d both disappeared into the darkness, leaving Ryan to wonder whether he should have let them go.

Or whether they should all have gone with them to the wag.

 

YOU COULD ALMOST TASTE the fear when Nathan Freeman led the strangers into the hamlet. Many of the inhabitants were asleep, but most of those were quickly awakened by the noise that greeted Ryan and the other three.

Nathan brushed aside any discussion about whether the baron should be told, and Ryan did what he could to reassure everyone that they would be leaving early in the morning. They were taken to a barn, clean and dry, with ample fresh straw for all four of them to sleep in comfort.

A woman carried in a tray that held cups of warm goat’s milk and four wooden bowls containing thick vegetable soup. Her hands trembled as she served them.

They all fell asleep quickly. Ryan awoke only once, around two, when he thought he heard the sound of a horse’s hooves, muffled. Though he lay and listened, the sound wasn’t repeated, and he was soon asleep once more.

 

Chapter Twenty

« ^ »

THEY ROSE EARLY in Shersville, and had breakfast by eight o’clock. Ryan had risen earlier, only a few minutes after a pale dawn. He’d pulled on his high combat boots and tucked his pistol and panga in their sheaths. As he walked out of the barn, he nearly bumped into the tall well-built figure of Nathan Freeman, who stood patiently in the deep shadow of the wooden building.

“Good morrow, Master… Thursby.” The hesitation before the name was so slight that most men wouldn’t have noticed it at all.

Ryan noticed.

“Morning, friend,” he said.

“The others awake?”

“No.”

“I’d like a chance of a talk, Floyd.”

Ryan looked at the young man, noting the peculiar dark shade of his eyes, so dark it was almost black.

“Now?” the older man asked.

“Too many would wonder. After we’ve eaten. There’s bread and there’s eggs…and everyone is about their own business. Then we could walk to the river and talk together. Yes?”

Ryan nodded. “Okay, Nathan.” He wondered whether he should ask him about the horse he’d heard leaving the village during the night, but decided it wasn’t worth it.

 

THE BREAD WAS NEWLY BAKED, crusty and delicious, its top covered with small, crisp seeds that burst with flavor. The eggs were scrambled with butter and a mix of herbs. Even Jak Lauren, who was not normally a sturdy trencherman so early in the morning, devoured three helpings, wiping grease from his chin and looking longingly at the platter that crackled and spit over the open fire with more eggs.

“Fucking good,” he said, belching, earning a reproof from the middle-aged woman who’d been serving the breakfast. She rapped him over the back of the head with the heavy wooden ladle.

“A loose tongue is an affront to an honest woman,” she said.

“Where’s this fucking honest woman?” he retorted, grinning impishly at her, delighted to see the hectic spots of angry color that sprang to her rounded cheeks.

“By the Blessed Ryan, I’ll…!” she began, then put her hand over her mouth and turned away from them, gathering her long skirts and darting into one of the huts.

The four friends sat in silence, looking at one another. It was Jak who broke the stillness.

“Hear that, Mr. Thursby? Hear what old crone said?”

Ryan nodded slowly. Somehow, it didn’t surprise him. He knew from plenty of other primitive double-poor Deathlands communities that odd religions were the norm. If Harvey Cawdor was the obscene tyrant he seemed, it made a kind of bizarre sense that some of the older locals might still cherish the name of the vanished son. It was something he needed to think about. And maybe talk to Nathan Freeman about. He stood and went to join him.

They sat side by side, on the bank of the narrow, twisting river. Nathan had said that it didn’t have a name. It was just “the river.” That was all it had ever been. As there was only the one, it didn’t need to be called anything.

The water gurgled over round moss-green stones, forming small pools where delicate silverfish weaved and darted. Ryan watched them, leaning back against the sun-warmed bole of a toppled beech tree.

“Good feeling, Nate,” he said.

“Not many of those within a country mile of Front Royal and the Cawdors. Father, mother and devil brat.”

“Tell me a bit ‘bout the ville and the Cawdors. I don’t know this region well.”

“Don’t you, Master Thursby?” Freeman asked with an odd insistency. “Sure ‘bout that, are you?”

“Course. You lived here all your life?”

“Yeah. Father was a local man. My mother came to Shersville when I was around three years old. Never rightly found where we’d been till then. Traveling some was all she’d tell me. Died when I was still a boy. Neighbors raised me.”

“The Cawdors?”

“Run the ville since the long winter, so the oldsters say. Old baron died around twenty years back. Whispers tell of his being choked by Lady Rachel. But…” He allowed the sentence to drift off into silence. “There were three brothers. One good, one bad and one… one that just up and vanished, Master Thursby. He was… I’ll come to him last. There was Morgan, who was everything good. Murdered by Harvey, who now runs the ville, who’s every evil you could set your mind to. A gross and perverted bastard who shadows the earth he waddles over. Married to slut Rachel. One son, Jabez Pendragon Cawdor. Has every stinking, rotten part of both his parents in him. I can’t… There aren’t words for someone like him.”

“The other brother?”

“Ryan Cawdor. Fifteen when he disappeared. Word was of an attempt on his life. That left him… Swift and vengeful boy, they say. Some think him rotting in the moat, like many another. But a lot of honest folks still think that one day he’ll come riding in from the west on a stallion of pure white. He’ll slaughter the Cawdors, take back the ville and the sunshine days will come again to all in the Shens. What d’you think of that, Master…Thursby?”

This time the hesitation was plain.

“What do you think about this missing brother, Master…Freeman?” Ryan dragged the pause out even longer.

“I think that I believe some things and not others. You know?”

“What?”

“I believe he escaped. I believe he lives. I don’t believe in the dreck about a white stallion or a blaster that fires golden ammo. No!”

“I heard a tale, Master Freeman.”

“Tell me.” The young man picked up a handful of dried cones from a nearby pine tree and flicked them underhanded into the water, staring after them as they bobbed and leaped through the shallows and falls of the narrow river. He kept his face turned away from Ryan.

“Morgan Cawdor, they say, had a woman, and the woman bore a child after the death of her husband. Murdered, we agree, by Harvey. A son, I heard. The mother was mutie.”

“She was…” the young man began, pale face flushing, dark eyes glaring. He threw the rest of the cones into the water with a barely controlled viciousness.

“She was what? I heard she was a woman with the power of seeing. If there had been a son, could he have inherited that?” He waited a moment, then answered his own question. “Perhaps.”

“They say that Ryan Cawdor was desperate wounded when he fled the ville.”

“Do they?”

“They say that a blade from Harvey’s fist took out an eye, neat as a stone from a ripe plum—so they say—and opened a cut that ran from eye to mouth along the right side of the boy’s cheek.”

Then he turned and looked straight into Ryan’s good eye, a fierce intensity in his glittering black eyes.

Neither man spoke for several heart-stopping seconds.

The moment broke into shards of crystal time as a voice wafted to them from the trail that led to the village.

“Nate? You there?”

“Yeah.”

“Seen Tom?”

“No. Saw him late last night. Not this morning. Why d’you…?”

“Missing. Horse gone an’ all.”

Ryan felt the short hairs rising on the back of his neck—the familiar warning of imminent danger. Sitting close to the young man, he was aware of Nathan’s whole body tensing and stiffening. His mouth hung open, and the breath hissed through the man’s teeth.

“We’ve—”

“I heard it,” Ryan interrupted.

“The horse? The bastard’s gone to the ville.”

There was a cold horror in Nathan’s voice and blank, shocked face.

“Couple of hours after midnight. Listened. Didn’t hear anything more.”

Freeman stood up, uncoiling with an easy grace. “You heard it! By all the gods, Ryan! Didn’t you feel it? Didn’t you see it!”

Ryan also stood, hardly noticing in the sudden, dreadful tension that Nathan had admitted he was indeed part mutie. And he had called him “Ryan.” He knew him.

And, in turn, Ryan realized his own guess was correct. He knew who Nathan Freeman was!

“Morgan’s son,” he said softly. “You’re the son of my brother. Your mother was Guenema. I’m your uncle, lad.”

“Hell,” Nate said. “I guess I knew that all along, Uncle Ryan.” His expression changed. “But now’s not the time. Gotta move, and fast.”

“We been betrayed?”

“Tom. Wants to be sec chief of Shersville. Guess he’ll get his way now.” The words tumbled over one another in the young man’s haste to explain.

“When will they come, Nate?”

The water was covering their conversation from the villager standing a few paces behind them.

“They’re here.”

“What? Fireblast! We have—”

Nathan Freeman laid a hand on his arm. “Too late. Now I’m concentrating I can hear ‘em. Load of sec men, on all sides. They’ll take you, even in a firefight. Listen, I can make it through the woods. Get to the old man and the straw-head girl. To your wag. Other blasters there?”

“Yeah. Couple.”

“I know paths and ways. I’ll do what I can, Ryan. Don’t fight. Harvey and Rachel aren’t muties. Won’t expect you. Won’t think it’s you, mebbe. Play Floyd Thursby. Stick to your story. Could get away. Watch Rachel. More, watch Jabez. Warn others. Me and the other two’ll do what we can, when we can.”

Ryan’s fighting brain was racing. He still hadn’t heard any sound of a sec patrol closing in on them, but he’d seen enough of mutie skills in his life to know that his nephew was probably telling the truth. There’d been a blind listener up in the high plains who could hear a kerchief of satin fall on soft earth at two hundred yards.

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Don’t charge in after us. If’n we can fool ‘em, we could get away free. Foolish to lose lives for nothing. Wait and listen, Nate. That’s the best.”

Then Ryan heard them—horse-mounted sec men, clattering along the main blacktop through Shersville. He knew they’d be good mounts. Front Royal had always been famed for the quality of its horses. Right back to the time before the long winter.

“Gotta go,” Nathan whispered. “Just meet the man I dreamed of for twenty fucking years. And we gotta part.”

“Watch your back, Nate,” Ryan said, quickly shaking hands with his nephew. The grip was brief but firm.

The young man leaped at the river, balancing for a moment on a large flat stone near the center, then hopped to another, smaller stone. With a splash, he reached the opposite bank. Pausing for a second and waving a hand to Ryan, he then disappeared into the dense screen of bushes.

Ryan turned away to make his way back to Shersville, where the sec men were already in control.

 

FOR A MOMENT Ryan’s head whirled, and he felt himself transported back to his fifteenth year, battling for his life in a blood-slippery passageway in the stone heart of the ville. The uniforms of the sec men were unaltered: maroon jerkins, with breeches tucked into high boots. They wore helmets that hugged the skull, and some wore goggles. They were armed with the same M-16 assault rifles that Ryan also remembered well enough from his childhood—trusty weapons that had served the barony well over the years since the endless chilling.

Krysty, Jak and J.B. stood in a group outside the barn, surrounded by at least thirty of the guards. The old man, Tom, preened himself nearby. He was grinning broadly, chest out like a little pigeon, bursting with pride at his own achievement.

The leader of the sec guards was a sergeant, tall and with shoulders nearly as broad as the doors on the barn. He saw Ryan coming toward him and grinned.

“Hurry up, One Eye. That’s four plucked and two to go.”

“Where’s Nathan Freeman?” Tom yelped.

“Who? ”Ryan said.

“You know, you bastard!” screeched the venomous little villager. “Make him tell,” he whined to the sergeant.

The sec man spit in the mud, not bothering to hide his contempt. “Baron says you get to be sec chief of this dung heap until someone better comes along. So zip up that mouth of yours or I’ll shut it. I decide what happens.”

“And what’s that, Sergeant?” Ryan asked. “We’re travelers who only arrived in the Shens a day ago. We hoped to move on.”

“Came in a wag?”

“Yes.”

“Where? Where’s the wag?”

“Ran dry way back north. Dumped it. No chance of gas around here?”

The big sec officer laughed. “Not for the likes of you scum. Baron controls all gas for fifty miles around.”

“Why are you here with this army?” J.B. asked.

“Old runt said you was armed and dangerous. Said there was two more of you. Old man and pretty little girl. True?”

Krysty stepped forward and smiled at the sergeant. “Do we look dangerous? Our two friends have gone to try to make their way back to the wag. But we fear they might be lost in the forest.”

“Don’t waste all that fucking charm, sister,” the sec man said, the smile vanishing. “Got my cock and balls blown off by an old anti-pers mine ten years back. Don’t fuck a lot now. We’ll get moving.” He shouted an order to the patrol, standing stone-faced in a maroon circle. They snapped to attention and began to shepherd Ryan and his companions toward the road, where they saw a couple of horse-drawn wagons with barred sides and roof, obviously built to accommodate prisoners.

As he passed Tom, Ryan whispered to the old man. “One night you’ll feel cold steel in your groin.”

The villager turned as white as a sheet and tottered, hand going to his heart.

Ryan smiled at him as they were led into the wagons. The three men were put in the first cart, Krysty in the second one.

 

THE SKY THREATENED RAIN. The air felt cool and damp and the breath of the horses hung about them like fog. They could see mist filling the hollows on the other side of the wide valley, leaving only the tips of the trees emerging from the pale blue haze.

The sergeant was at the head of the convoy, followed by a dozen mounted sec men. Then came the cart with the men, and a dozen more troopers, followed by the wagon with Krysty, and another dozen horsemen at the rear.

Oddly there had been no attempt made to disarm them. Ryan had seen the eyes of the sergeant home in on the butt of the SIG-Sauer, but it remained in its holster. He guessed they would lose their arms when they reached the ville.

For Ryan it was a journey deeper into his own past.

Every rattling turn of the wheels brought him closer to the ville. Every now and again he’d recognize some bridge or building or turn of the road. Once a massive wild boar thundered across the trail, making half the horses rear and whinny, throwing a couple of the sec men. Its eyes were vicious rubies, and Ryan saw fresh blood on its curved tusks.

They also passed more signs of the tyranny of Baron Cawdor and his family. Eight corpses. One in chains at a crossroads gibbet, not a shred of flesh remaining on the dry bones. Three on makeshift gallows, one a woman. Three crucified, two of them children, whose frail little bodies looked no more than six years of age. And the charred remnants of a corpse, smoldering in glowing metal links at the center of a heap of ashes.

It took close to two hours for them to finally reach the massive ville of Front Royal. And when they did, Krysty stared out in disbelief. The ville was just about the biggest building she’d ever seen in her entire life. It was like pictures of medieval castles in the old books she’d read as a child in Harmony. The brick was weathered to a glorious golden hue that shone, even on such a dull morning. The windows were mainly narrow slits, as in most armored wags. But high up on one wall was an arched window that looked as if it were made of colored glass. There was a wide river around the outside with only a single bridge that crossed it, which could be raised or lowered on chains from inside the ville. Through the archway, under a spiked gateway, Krysty could make out a central courtyard, where armed men patrolled. For at least two hundred yards on all sides of the squat building, the trees and bushes had been hacked down to prevent them being used as cover by any would-be attackers.

She realized then why the Cawdors had been able to control so much of the Shens for so many years. With a hundred armed sec men and a ville of this strength, it was impossible to conceive of the baron ever being humbled.

Krysty began to feel very frightened.

As soon as the wagons had rattled over the cobblestones of the bridge across the sedge-crusted moat, they reined in to a halt. The four friends were hustled with an overfirm politeness through a studded doorway, along a narrow corridor, past other guards and into a large chamber.

“One at a time into there,” the big sergeant said, pointing at another door. “Everything off. There’s a bolt on the inside, in case you worry about your privacy or whatever. There’s clothes and boots on racks on the walls. All sizes. Leave everything there. It’ll be boxed up and kept for if… for when you get out of the ville.”

“Blasters?” J.B. asked.

“Watch my lips, short-ass. Everything. Know what that means? It means ev-er-y-thing. Far side there’s another door. Go through it and wait. Don’t try to fuck off anywhere else. You’ll be watched. And don’t forget to unbolt this door before you go on through. You read me?” He glowered at J.B.

“Sure you don’t want us to unhook our balls in there, so we can all be the same?” the Armorer replied, never one to be faced down, even when he was at least a foot and a half shorter than the sergeant.

The sec man stared, stone-eyed for a moment, then nodded and laughed. “Mebbe that old coot back in Shersville had something, little man. Mebbe you’re more than… Mebbe we’ll talk after the baron and the lady’ve spoken to you. I hope so. That jest of yours could turn sour.” He looked at the others. “Now who goes first?”

“Me,” Ryan said.

He pushed the door shut behind him, not bothering to slide the heavy iron bolt. If the sec men wanted to get in at him, a single bolt wasn’t going to hold them off, and the far door had no lock, anyway. But to make up for that the farther doorway was encircled by what he recognized as a sophisticated metal detector in top condition. The only better one he’d ever seen had been in a double-class gaudy house down in Norleans, years ago.

The sets of clothes that lined the wall, which looked like sucked-out corpses, were in the familiar dark color that was worn by most of the interior servants of Front Royal ville. They had a strip of black on the lapels, with a neat red star that showed they were guests.

His mind raced with what was happening. The last time he’d seen his brother, Harvey, it had been through a welter of streaming blood. The air had been filled with murder. Now, after so many years, he was about to meet up with Harvey Cawdor once more.

If he recognized Ryan as his missing brother, then death would follow as surely as night followed day. But would he?

That was the question that occupied Ryan as he pulled off his steel toe-capped boots and replaced them with the soft leather ankle boots. He placed all of his clothes in a large canvas bag, putting his weapons on top of it—the long panga and the slim-bladed flensing knife, with the 9 mm SIG-Sauer on the very top.

He tried to recall what this part of the ville had been used for when he’d been there, but time had blurred the edges of his memory. Some kind of storeroom, he thought.

“Rutabagas,” he exclaimed out loud, remembering now that there had been a great dump of yellow turnips in the room. They’d been piled high in the corner where the boots were stacked near the farther door. He’d used it when playing hide-and-seek with Morgan when he’d been about nine years old. He’d carved his name with a battered horn-hafted knife on the side of the door. Ryan went and peered to examine the frame, but it had been rebuilt and painted several times and there was no sign of his initials.

Dressed and ready, he now had to go and face the next room in the ville, and hazard the chance of being recognized by his brother. Ryan took a deep breath and pushed the door open. The chamber beyond was dimly lit, and he blinked into the darkness.

A voice bubbled out from above and behind him. “Welcome to Front Royal, brother.”

 

Chapter Twenty-One

« ^ »

BROTHER!

He knew. Harvey Cawdor knew, had known all along! Someone had recognized Ryan, had spotted the blind eye and the torn face and put two and two together. It had all been a setup to take him off-balance, to get his weapons away without a fuss. The gentle approach.

Ryan winced, waiting for the crushing impact of a .45-caliber bullet between his shoulder blades. Or would it be slower?

“For any man that comes to our home is surely our brother, is he not? Or our sister. If he is a woman she is… then she is not our brother but our sister. Then our sister and our brother are all men and women who visit us.” The muddled sentences dribbled away into a gurgling, chortling laugh, which sounded like thick gruel boiling on an open fire.

Ryan turned around slowly, fighting for control as he realized he was not down and doomed. Not yet.

His eye was quickly becoming accustomed to the smoky half-light, which was generated by flaming torches placed in wall sconces around the room. There was a balcony that ran clear around the second-floor level. This had been a small dining room when Ryan had been a child, and there had been music—mandolin, dulcimer and banjo—played from the balcony.

Now Harvey Cawdor, baron of the ville, stood there with his woman at his side.

“We welcome you, Master Thursby, to Front Royal. You will understand that we must take precautions—” he stretched the word out to an absurd length, as if he savored every elongated syllable “—precautions… against them that trespass against me. You saw our crop of flowering trees as you came here, Master Thursby?”

“Yes, Baron.” Ryan made a half bow to the shadowy figure.

“Good, good, good. You see, dearest, that here is a man of culture and understanding who will be welcome. Not some ragged and double-poor fucking bastard who would covet everything I own!”

Ryan took a deep breath. The change from the effusive and elegant welcome to the foul words—delivered in a rising and hysterical scream—was totally unexpected, bringing to Ryan the realization that his older brother might well be full-crazy.

“Where are the other visitors, brother? Brother Thursby?”

At that moment the door opened again, and Krysty Wroth came in, wearing a dark blue blouse and knee-length skirt of the same Front Royal livery. Her ankle boots were of plain untanned leather with a low, stacked heel. She’d used a piece of thin cord to tie back her cascade of hair. Even in the poor light of the vaulted room it still blazed like a coronet of living fire.

“Brother, wel… come… sister. Sister welcome. Is she…?”

Ryan heard a woman’s voice for the first time, pitched low, but with the crack of a command to it. The bulky figure of the man shifted sideways a few steps, until it stood directly beneath one of the torches.

Then, at long last, Ryan was able to properly see his brother. He had the same clumsy, shuffling, crablike walk with the right leg trailing and the right shoulder lifted in an unsightly hump. His face was partly in shadow, but Ryan could detect that there was some malformation of the mouth and nose. After so many years it gave him a thrill of vicious pleasure to see that his parting punch into his brother’s hooked nose had been so brutally successful.

But above all of this was the astonishing way that Harvey Cawdor had grown grotesquely fat.

Not plump. Not just obese. But grossly, obscenely fat. He wore a flowing gown, like a cerise bed sheet, but it couldn’t conceal his size. A quick guess put him around the 350-pound mark. His clothes were covered in delicate filigree embroidery, in woven patterns of silver and gold. His chubby hands were smothered in rings, one with what looked like a human eye set in a stone of amber.

Lady Rachel moved, with an infinite grace that caught Ryan’s attention, to stand near the lord of the ville. Her face turned away from the light to peer down into the gloomy cavern of the hall at the man and the woman. She was taller than Harvey Cawdor, slim and elegant, wearing a gown that looked like black velvet, soft as sin. Her hair was cropped to her narrow shoulders, dark and lustrous. Her cheeks were very pale, and her eyes had vanished like gemstones of midnight jet in the hollows of their sockets. She wore no facial makeup, and her fingers were long and strong without any jewelry.

“Is the woman mutie?” she asked in a soft, caressing, melodious voice.

“No, she’s not, Lady Rachel,” Krysty replied in a loud, ringing voice, startling Ryan as he felt it wash over him like a breath of fresh air. Only then did he realize that the room carried the scent of some floral incense. One of his father’s serving women had used something like it. The odor was clinging and sickly sweet, like the rotting meat that attracts the most beautiful of butterflies.

“Where are the others of your party, Master Thursby?” the lady asked. “There are two more men and then two more that have fled our hospitality into the unfriendly Shens.”

“True, my lady. Doctor Theophilus Tanner and his…and Lori Quint. I am Floyd Thursby, as you know, and this is Krysty Wroth, from the ville of Harmony.” He turned as the door opened once more. “This is Jak Lauren from the far south of the Deathlands.”

The woman on the balcony gasped aloud. “Azrael! His hair, husband!”

“Mutie. A mutie, here in the heart of my ville. Take him, guards! Slit his throat and in the boar pit for my precious pets.”

“He is not a mutie, great lord,” Krysty said. “His hair is natural. Where he comes from it’s as common as red or black hair.”

Harvey Cawdor laughed, shaking like a massive cherry jelly. “ ‘Great lord!’ Rachel, did you hear? The red-hair is… I like her, like her, like her.” His voice edged up the scale toward a falsetto shriek that made the torches dance and flare into bright flames.

At that moment, as quick and neat as ever, J.B. came into the room, glanced up at where the lord and lady of the manor stood and folded himself into a bow so deep it held the taint of parody. Fortunately neither of the Cawdors seemed aware of that. Ryan introduced him.

“John Barrymore Dix, from Cripple Creek in the Rockies. A man with a great skill with all blasters and weapons.”

“Could use him, Rachel,” a slobbering Harvey said. “Lotsa blasters going home, sweet home on the range. Need a good man to put them together again, again.”

“Now that we’ve seen you, you can eat with us,” Lady Rachel Cawdor called down. “And you can all tell us more about yourselves. Then we can decide whether you… what happens to you.”

There was a third person behind the ornate pillars of the balcony, indistinct and shadowy, with a pale round blur of a face. The clothes were as dark as Rachel Cawdor’s, with what looked like a chain of gold around the neck. It held a single large amethyst, cut so that its facets reflected bolts of violet light across the room.

As quickly as he appeared, the person vanished, moving with a gentle ease, not making a sound. Ryan looked again at the space where he’d been, doubting his own sight. But he noticed that Krysty had also seen him.

She mouthed the single word “Jabez” to Ryan.

Suddenly the audience with the rulers of Front Royal was over.

Rachel had begun to show signs of a strange unease. Her hands fluttered around her mouth, like startled birds, and she rubbed at her lips, chafing the skin of her cheeks. When she spoke, her voice had dropped, becoming rapid and urgent. She told Ryan and the others that they should wait for the sec men, who were posted at each corner of the large hall, to take them to their quarters for the night.

“We eat at six in the evening. Don’t leave your rooms, or you’ll be killed on the spot.”

It was said with a chilling finality. Ryan watched them go, his brother shuffling haltingly like a mountain of blubber after his wife. One thing was sure: Lady Rachel Cawdor wasn’t someone to screw around with.

 

Chapter Twenty-Two

« ^ »

LOCKED AWAY in the heart of the castlelike ville of Front Royal, Ryan and his friends found that the day passed with infinite slowness.

They had been taken away by the sec patrols, along winding passages, up and down narrow stone staircases, to what Ryan thought must be the third or fourth floor of the fortress. Each of them was pushed firmly into separate rooms, the doors slamming shut behind them, keys grating in locks.

To his amazement Ryan found that he was in a chamber that had once been his nursery. The pictures on the walls of stags and boars being torn apart by ferocious hounds were gone, and the draperies were now of plain blue material. The window, which was barred, looked out over the scum-covered moat across the strip of cleared land to the rolling waves of the forest ocean.

Shelves—mainly empty—lined the wall that had once held Ryan’s toys and the handed-down model blasters and soldiers of his two older brothers. Morgan’s toys had been well used but serviceable. Harvey’s had been generally in mint condition, but with sly damage: a leg severed from a soldier, or a wing cut through on a USAF F-4C Phantom.

There had been something about the shelves, something that Morgan had once shown him. There was some way to get behind it into the room next along the corridor, which had once been used by an earlier baron for his illicit affairs with serving maids. There had been a simple catch, Ryan remembered, but it had been too high and too stiff for him to reach easily.

There was a sliding panel in the center of the heavy oak door, and as Ryan glanced at it, the square moved back silently. An eye appeared briefly, staring in at him. Then the eye was gone, and Ryan thought he glimpsed the violet flash of an amethyst before the panel closed.

If there was a hidden doorway between his room and the next one, it was dangerous to try to find it with someone manning the spyhole. Ryan went back to the window, looking out toward the west over the blue haze of the distant mountains.

He knew Jak Lauren was in the first room along the corridor, and he thought Krysty had been put in the chamber on his right, the chamber that he remembered had the connecting door. It was a possibility worth hanging on to.

Several times during the afternoon he saw or heard someone watching him.

There was a rainstorm at four o’clock. He could hear a bell chiming the hour from the central tower of the ville, a sound that once again plunged his mind back twenty years to his childhood. He remembered standing in this very room, staring out through the window—before it was barred—watching a bald eagle, with a monstrous wing-span of more than twenty feet, pluck a young foal from the meadow and carry it off, whinnying. The mare had run below in hopeless, desperate circles.

His thoughts went to Doc and Lori, out there in the sheeting rain that came slanting in gray clouds from the west. The trails were so complex that he feared they would have become lost, though the girl sometimes displayed an uncanny sense of direction. And there was also the hope that Nathan Freeman would have been able to find them and lead them to the wag. But what could they do against the massively invulnerable pile of stones that was the ville of Front Royal?

“Not much,” he muttered to himself.

 

JUST BEFORE FIVE a tray was brought in by a young man with hard eyes and the kind of formal clothes that a sec man wears when he wants you to know he’s a sec man. There was a cup of milk on the tray and some biscuits.

“Baron and Lady Rachel eat at six,” he said. “You’ll be ready.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ryan replied.

“No. You’re not,” the sec man said. He backed away to the door, shut it firmly and turned the key in the lock.

Through the brief gap, Ryan noticed a pair of crimson-uniformed sec guards with their M-16 carbines carried at port arms. Despite his gross personal appearance, Baron Harvey ran a tight ville.

Or Lady Rachel did.

There was another flurry of a storm around five-thirty, with surging clouds of dark green and purple skating across the pale blue sky. Lightning crackled through the dark chem clouds, throwing violent shadows across the room where Ryan waited patiently.

The door opened at five to six.

Krysty smiled at him from the corridor. “Don’t know ‘bout you, lover, but I could eat me a mutie buffalo, horns an’ all.”

“Pretty mouth, lady. Shut it or lose it,” said the sergeant who’d brought them in from Shersville. His eyes met Ryan’s stare, and he came close to a smile. “You ‘nother wants to try me, One Eye?”

“I’d kill you,” Ryan replied, voice quiet and neutral.

“You reckon?”

“I know. You’re big and strong, but you’re also soft. You gotten used to breaking the arms of women and kids.”

“If the baron says what he usually says, we’ll have a chance to see if you’re right, One Eye.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Threats are cheap.” The sergeant grinned, but Ryan could hear that the edge had gone from his voice. The arrogant confidence had been eroded a little by Ryan’s calm manner.

“Not a threat. It’s a promise. One day you’ll learn the difference.”

J.B. and Jak joined them in the passage, each with a trio of guards at the shoulder. J.B. made the fortress clothes look like a neat military uniform. The albino boy had already ripped the sleeves out of his jerkin and wore the breeches low on the hip to give himself greater freedom of movement.

“This way,” said the sec officer, heels ringing on the stone flags.

They ate in what had always been the old banqueting hall of the ville. Ryan’s father had told him that the region around Front Royal had mainly been hit by missiles that killed but didn’t destroy. Ryan later came to understand that the missiles had been neutron bombs. It explained why the ville itself was in such remarkable condition for a prewinter building.

The table was the same. Hewn from two pieces of an enormous oak tree, it had been sliced through and joined to give room to seat at least twenty a side. The four “guests” sat together, Ryan and Jak opposite Krysty and the Armorer, at the far end of the table, farthest away from the log fire that crackled and spit brightly and noisily. Sec men, as silent as statues, stood at regular intervals around the perimeter of the hall, and more watched from the gallery on the second floor. The light came from a dozen multibranched candelabra on the table and burning torches spaced along the four walls of the room.

“No elec?” Krysty asked. “Must have.”

“Yeah. Most is wind- or water-generated. Storage batteries in the cellars. Always been a tradition here at the ville to use candles and lamps and torches like those.”

“Stand for Lord Harvey Cawdor, Baron of Front Royal and his wife, the Lady Rachel!” a voice bellowed from near the fireplace. The four friends stood up, chairs scraping on the rush-covered stone floor.

In the brighter light of the great hall, Harvey Cawdor was even more grotesque than at first sight. Ryan upped his guesstimate of his brother’s weight to four hundred pounds, contained in a billowing coat with horn buttons. It was a dark maroon color and seemed to have used up enough material to make a fair-size tent. The clothes were designed to try to minimize his deformities, but nothing could conceal the crooked back or the dragging leg.

The wide belt of polished snakeskin held two small holsters with the gleaming butts of twin Colt pistols peeking from them.

Harvey took a reinforced carving chair at the head of the long table, waving a hand to his wife to sit on his right side.

Rachel Cawdor was in her middle thirties, and it looked as though she worked hard to keep her appearance down in the twenties. The reward was that in the half-light of the big chamber, she could pass for twenty-nine. Maybe.

Her black hair supported a narrow silver coronet that sparkled with diamonds. The piece was a Cawdor heirloom, and Ryan felt a flush of surprising anger at seeing the murderous slut flaunting it. Her dress was a blue velvet so deep that it could be taken for black. A silver brooch shaped like a long-necked flamingo, its tail a mass of different colored precious stones, decorated the low front. She nodded to Ryan and his friends, totally ignoring her husband. On her arm was a small purse of scuffed black leather, at odds with the rest of her immaculate appearance.

The chair to the left of the baron remained empty.

“Is…?” Harvey said, getting an almost imperceptible shake of the head from his wife. “Ah, no matter, matter is energy is mass and matter. Doesn’t matter to me. No damn matter.”

Once they had both seated themselves, Ryan and his three friends also sat down. The table was so long that they were twenty yards away from Rachel and the baron.

Harvey Cawdor clapped his hands and servants, dressed in the livery of the ville, appeared bearing platters and tureens and great serving dishes. Ryan had somehow expected it would be the same blue dinner service with the willow pattern design that he’d eaten from during his childhood. As the meal began, he realized why that no longer existed. The Baron Cawdor was an intemperate and violently clumsy eater.

There was no question of soup followed by fish, followed by game, followed by salad, followed by a main course of meat with desserts and then cheese and fruit. Everything came at once. The servants lined up at the far end of the table while their lord and master ladled out slopping portions of anything that caught his eye. He piled it all into a bowl in front of him that must have been able to hold five gallons of liquid or thirty pounds of solid food.

At that distance it was difficult for them to see what precisely went into the bowl, but the servants eventually made their way to the guests’ end of the table. Lady Rachel only indicated a small portion of steamed fish for herself, with a spoonful of sugar peas. She took only water to drink.

Ryan had rarely seen a more spectacular array of food. There was steak and great hunks of horsemeat, marinated in white port wine, lamb cutlets with a red fruit sauce; pork, overfat, smothered in honey and wild ginger; flounders, served with roasted almonds; bowls of shrimps, wallowing in a pepper sauce and crabs, still in their shells; meat that Krysty identified as turkey, pallid and waxen, dripping with melted goat’s cheese and crushed peppercorns; tomatoes and onions in sour cream, sprinkled with mushrooms and little green berries; a thick gray-brown soup that had, unnervingly, dozens of hard-boiled eggs bobbing greasily around in it; potatoes and rutabagas and beans, minced and fried in gravy.

There were also bowls of fruit, cooked and raw, mostly in sweet and sickly sauces that drenched them. There was water to drink, or a thick lilac-colored liqueur that had an unusual taste.

“Like something a gaudy whore would bathe in,” J.B. muttered, struggling to conceal his disgust at the scented flavor, opting for the water instead. He followed Rachel Cawdor’s example and took only a portion of boiled fish and a side helping of vegetables.

Ryan chose a steak, finding it grievously underdone, blood seeping from the meat before he even laid a knife into it. He ladled some fried beans on the side and discovered they’d been soaked with grated red chilies that almost took the skin off his tongue.

Krysty contented herself with a chipped goblet of springwater and some of the potatoes, which had been fried in butter. She also took a couple of slices of the whole wheat bread from the wooden board, which was carried by an elderly man with trembling hands who kept his head bowed and didn’t look at any of the guests. He repeatedly muttered, “Thank you, my lord, thank you, my lady, thank you…” regardless of the sex of the person he was serving at the time.

With a shudder, Krysty noticed that the old servant’s hands had been branded several times, and his fingers and knuckles showed the unmistakable signs of having been brutally broken more than once.

“Food good, Brother Thursby?” Harvey Cawdor bellowed from the murky distance at the head of the table. His face and beardless chins were beslobbered with runnels of grease, carrying particles of several different courses of the meal. His piggy little eyes had almost vanished behind rolls of fat.

“Yeah, Baron Cawdor.”

“Dreck,” whispered Jak Lauren. “Eaten better from a double-poor swampie’s chuck-out pile.”

“What did the whitehead say?” Rachel Cawdor asked, blazing eyes focused on Ryan.

“Good food, my lady,” he replied.

“I have lost the taste for food, Master Thursby. I no longer get any pleasure from the act of eating.”

Her voice was low and uneven, and her hands folded over each other, fingers writhing like ten white snakes.

As they watched, ignoring the grunting and wallowing of Harvey Cawdor, the woman fumbled in her black purse and took out a circular mirror with an ornately sculpted edge where tiny dragons fought amid a tangled forest. It was another of the Cawdor heirlooms. She also removed a small sliver of polished steel and a tiny brown vial, which was tightly corked.

“Jolt,” Jak mouthed to Ryan, but the one-eyed man had already recognized what was happening. The woman was probably addicted to the hallucinogenic mix of coke and mescaline. Not everyone who took jolt became quickly addicted. But once you were well hooked, then you were on a steep and icy slope that carried you down faster and faster. All the way to the bottom. If Lady Rachel Cawdor needed to snort some lines of jolt in the middle of a public meal, then the bottom of the slope couldn’t be that far away for her.

While Harvey Cawdor snuffled and grunted his way through his trough of food, his wife methodically began her preparations for doing the drug. Ryan and the others continued to eat quietly, occasionally beckoning to one of the silent servants for more bread or vegetables.

Rachel eased the cork from the narrow neck of the small tinted bottle, tipping a half gram or so of the sparkling white powder onto the scored surface of the mirror. She concentrated on the task, oblivious to the glances of her guests. Gripping the thin section of surgical steel and using it to chop and grind the jolt into smaller grains, she eventually arranged the drug into a half-dozen, neat, ordered lines across the glass.

“Anyone want a sniff?” she asked, two spots of bright color highlighting her spare cheekbones. When everyone had shaken their heads, she rummaged once more in her purse, triumphantly pulling out a narrow tube of carved ivory.

She carefully inserted one end into her right nostril and closed the other with a thin forefinger. Lowering her head over the mirror, she sniffed up one of the lines of jolt, moved quickly to the next line and then the next. Eventually all six lines of the iridescent powder had been snorted.

Her body shook in the characteristic tremors that gave the drug its common nickname. Rachel’s breath came in sharp gasps, and her eyes rolled back in their sockets. Her husband totally ignored her convulsions, busy as he was with rending strips of meat off the carcass of an unidentifiable fowl.

“Oh, yes, yes,” she whispered, her breathing slowing down again. She licked the mirror clean with a long, feline tongue, then tucked all the jolt paraphernalia back into her purse. Looking up, she became aware that the eyes of the four strangers were on her.

“Good, my lady?” Ryan asked politely.

“Better than good, Master Thursby,” she replied, licking her lips very slowly as she looked at him. “It is better than anything. Better than the most wonderful fucking you could imagine. Better than pain. Better even than death.”

“And we know how much you enjoy death, don’t we, dearest mother?”

None of them had heard the newcomer arrive in the hall. Ryan noticed immediately how the servants backed away, eyes cast down. The old man with the bread salver came within an inch of dropping it, face angled to the stone floor.

The light from the numerous beeswax candles danced off the polished orb of amethyst at the end of the gold chain around the young man’s slender throat. He was dressed in a coat and trousers of black velvet, and black boots. In his belt was a small high-velocity dart gun that fired a cluster of razored metal projectiles only a half inch long, their shafts barbed to make withdrawal difficult and damaging.

“Jabez,” the woman said delightedly. “You have come to join us?”

“Of course. We have guests so rarely and they stay for such a short time.”

Ryan looked curiously at his nephew. Harvey’s son was in his late teens, of average height and build, with a face that seemed oddly unbalanced. The right side was higher and more angular, the corner of the eye twisted and pulled down as though the young man was continuously blinking. Jabez’s complexion had a deathly pallor, as if the light of the sun were never permitted anywhere near him. His hairline was receding, hair cut short and of a nondescript brown color.

“Come kiss me, son of my loins,” Rachel Cawdor said, reaching out for her only child.

While the others looked on, Jabez strode the length of the table, stooped and kissed his mother on the cheek. A dutiful, filial kiss. As he straightened he caught Ryan’s eye on him and smiled—which sent a chill down Ryan’s spine.

“More, Mother dearest,” the boy said, leaning and gently lifting Rachel’s face to his. He lowered his mouth onto hers, pressing it over her parted lips. As he leaned across her, he allowed his left hand to drift over the front of her dress until it cupped Rachel’s right breast. Lady Rachel Cawdor made a helpless gesture of resistance, then gave herself up to him.

When he finally released her, Jabez’s mother was flushed and panting, smiling up at her son and holding his hand in hers. Even from where he sat, Ryan could see the unmistakable bulge of an erection pressing at the front of the lordling’s breeches.

“You have traveled far, Master Thursby, I hear,” Jabez Cawdor said, turning away from his mother and totally ignoring his gormandizing father. Baron Harvey Cawdor ate on, never lifting his eyes from his bowl.

“Gaia!” Krysty exclaimed, pushing her plate away in disgust at the blatant behavior.

“Eat it,” Ryan said in a low, urgent voice. “Don’t let him know it matters.” Raising his voice he said, “We have traveled many miles for many years, my Lord Jabez.”

“And you have lost an eye. How careless.”

“It is common enough in Deathlands,” Ryan replied. “And an arm or a leg or even a mind.”

As though he were bored, Jabez sat and beckoned over his shoulder to the servants to bring him food, taking only chunks of pork. His father also called out, in a voice muffled by the dribbling mush he was eating, for more meat. When he finished a plate he would knock it from the hands of the particular servant with a grunt of rage that rose high and thin like the scream of a gelded animal.

Down at the other end of the table there was no conversation between Jak, J.B., Krysty and Ryan, each locked in his or her own thoughts.

Ryan’s mind was whirling at the visible madness that ran the ville. Harvey was a double-crazy who would eat himself into the grave within the next few months. His wife was psychotically withdrawn and obviously dependent on jolt. From the junkies Ryan had seen, the woman would also be dead within the year. And that would leave her incestuous son, Jabez.

The security at Front Royal was tight, primed with fear, and it would be hard to find a way of slaughtering his brother and family. Their insanity was both a plus and a minus. It needed careful consideration.

“A rabbit, Master Thursby?”

“You’re well informed.”

Jabez persisted. “Thieves are blinded in parts of the Deathlands, Thursby.”

“Yeah.”

The voice was soft, insistent. “Are you a thief, Thursby? You and the killer and the two muties? Killers, are you? Are they killers, Mother? Should I take them where it’s quiet and ask them?”

Rachel didn’t answer, but Harvey looked up, glancing, eyes bright amid the smeared food, and shouted to his son, “I’m eating, you filthy little bastard! Fuck off! Go on, get away from our table before I—” The anger faded as quickly as it had risen.

“What’ll you do, Father?” Jabez asked. “Thursby the killer and his friends are listening.”

“They can leave after breaking their fasts tomorrow morning. I’m bored with ‘em. Hear me, Thursby? You can go tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Baron Cawdor.” Ryan’s mind darted. That meant they must do what they could during the night. There was that secret door between his room and Krysty’s…

“More of those eggs,” Ryan’s brother bellowed, struggling to look over his hunched shoulder for that particular delicacy.

Rachel was sitting back in her chair, waving a hand dreamily to and fro, humming to herself. Like her husband and her son, the woman marched to the beat of a different drummer.

“Your hair is beautiful,” Jabez said, pushing his own seat back so hard that it crashed over onto the floor. Ryan felt a pang of concern.

The young man moved with a lethal elegance, allowing his hand to drift over the carved chairs, gesturing for the old man with the breadboard to step out of his way. When he reached Krysty, he stopped, his eyes flicking between Ryan and his mother. There was something about Ryan that bothered him; that was clear. As long as he didn’t start to make some connection…

His hand darted out like a striking adder and tugged at the cord that kept Krysty’s flowing scarlet hair bound up. It tumbled about her shoulders in such a cascade of light and color that even the baron was distracted from his eating for a moment.

“So pretty, pretty, pretty,” Jabez whispered. “Tonight I’ll come and visit, but not a word to Mother.” He giggled like a little child sharing a secret. “She gets so jealous.”

Jak laid his fork down on the china plate, his knuckles whitening on the hilt of the table knife. J.B. caught his eye and made a subtle, cautionary movement with his hand.

Ryan watched Krysty’s face, seeing the green eyes narrow, then close. The girl was fighting for inner control against the hand that rested on her shoulder, then began to caress her nape. Jabez was staring beyond Krysty’s head, smiling gently at his mother, who now sat up straight and looked at him, emotionless, slate-eyed.

“Your hair is the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen. So soft and… Aaaaarrrggghhh!”

For a splinter of a second Ryan thought Krysty had succumbed to the temptation to use the awesome power of her Earth Mother against Jabez. Then he realized that the young man had been startled and terrified by Krysty’s sentient hair, which had coiled and tangled around his fingers. The scream made everyone in the room look up, including the doddering old man who carried the bread.

His eyes fastened for the first time on Ryan, and his mouth sagged open in shock.

The hand shot out and pointed. “By Jesu and the martyrs! Our prayers are answered. Lord Ryan himself has come back!”

 

Chapter Twenty-Three

« ^ »

JAK LAUREN HAD GONE for a sec man with a table knife, cutting the man’s forearm to the bone before he was clubbed to the rush-covered floor.

Ryan, J.B. and Krysty didn’t resist.

Trader used to say that there was a time to fight. But more important was the time you decided not to fight.

The only casualty had been the old servant who’d blown the whistle on Ryan Cawdor.

Following the cry that identified the one-eyed man as the missing son of the ville, there was a moment of utter silence. Everyone reacted in different ways to the shock.

If Ryan had been counting the beats of his own heart, he would have reached twenty before anything happened in the banquet hall.

Harvey Cawdor lifted his porcine face from his dish very slowly, staring at Ryan with an expression of growing horror.

Lady Rachel unfolded her hands and carefully laid each one—as if it were a rare piece of porcelain—on the linen cloth in front of her. Her face didn’t alter as she absorbed the news.

Jabez Pendragon Cawdor took a dozen slow steps backward in the direction of the fireplace. His eye blinked rapidly, and his hand began to creep toward the dart gun in his belt.

“Ryan? My brother?” Harvey muttered, shaking his head stupidly, bits of food spraying all around him. “How can…?”

“Dead,” Jabez said quietly. “You’re dead.” Then loudly, “Dead for twenty years! Bones and blood, but you shall stay dead, Uncle!”

He drew the blaster and aimed it at the center of Ryan’s chest, finger white on the slim trigger, lips peeled back off his yellowed teeth in an expression of tigerish delight.

Ryan had known this moment would come one day. If you lived your life by the blaster, it was certain that eventually you’d die by it. You’d hear a cold voice out of the darkness telling you not to turn around, or meet it face-to-face. In the end, they were both much the same.

He heard Krysty, sounding a far way off, calling his name, but he sat there and looked into the eyes of his nephew, waiting for the shock of death.

Which wasn’t to be that day.

The old man moved first, lightning fast for his age. Mouth working, he stood there, stunned with everyone else. “Lord Cawdor, forgive me!” he shrieked, like the eldritch howl of a midnight banshee.

He threw himself at Jabez Cawdor, clawing at the young man’s face. Ryan heard the distinctive hiss of the dart gun, and the servant’s body jerked backward like a gaffed salmon. With arms flung out, he toppled over, blood frothing from his open mouth, darkening the front of his uniform.

He lay there, legs twitching, dulled eyes staring blankly at the vaulted ceiling of the hall as if he’d never noticed it before. His lips moved as he tried to speak, and he struggled to turn his head toward Ryan. He said something that might have been “Sorry,” and then he died.

Jabez spit at him and wrestled with the stubborn mechanism for recocking the blaster. The sec men started to move in, and Jak leaped to his feet, brandishing the knife.

The stones would have been awash with blood if Lady Rachel had not acted. She raised her hand and snapped out a command that checked her son’s murderous rage and stopped the sec men from opening up with their carbines.

“Alive,” she shouted. “Take them all alive! Chain Ryan and lock up the others. Triple guard.”

So it happened. Jak was carried away unconscious, bleeding from a gash on his temple. The others walked—escorted by sec men—back to their chambers.

On the way, Ryan looked around and saw that the tall sergeant was still in charge of them.

“One question,” he said.

“What?”

“The old man who died.”

“Yeah. What of him?”

“Who was he? Didn’t recognize him.”

“He knew you, didn’t he, Lord Ryan Cawdor? You didn’t even try to deny it. You sat there like a kid messed his pants.”

Ryan shook his head. “Didn’t intend to come and dine with Harvey. Wasn’t the plan.”

“What was?” The sec officer held up his gauntleted fist to halt the escort. “Come on, Lord Ryan. You’ll tell me sooner anyway.”

“I’ll tell you anyway. Why not?”

“Murder the family and then rule yourself as the baron of Front Royal?”

“Yes to the first and mebbe to the second. You still didn’t tell me his name.”

The sergeant moved closer, grinning. “You’ll like this, Lord Ryan. Remember little Kenny Morse?”

“Course. If n it hadn’t been for Kenny, I’d have died at fifteen. He saved me from my brother.”

“And you know what—”

“He was murdered,” Ryan interrupted. “I heard that recently.”

“That was his brother, Will, just betrayed you in there. Funny, isn’t it?”

“No.”

 

SOME MILES AWAY, deep in the forest of the Shens, Nathan Freeman was leading Doc Tanner and Lori Quint along winding paths. Picking his way carefully, he stopped frequently to listen for any sound of man or beast. They were heading toward the rambling fortress of Front Royal.

 

THE CHAIN AROUND RYAN’S THROAT bit into his skin and was drawn so tight that breathing was difficult. It held his head still, strained up and back. The steel of the handcuffs was pitted with age, but the action was greased and clicked home, and squeezed so hard that the ends of his fingers were swollen and sore. But he’d felt worse.

At least the sergeant hadn’t taken the opportunity to give him a beating, merely checking that the cuffs and the throttle chain were secure. He fixed the end of the links to a heavy iron ring that was built into the stone of the wall.

“Now you wait, my lord.”

“I wasn’t going to move, anyway. Could you put out the lamps? They’ll disturb my sleep.”

The man laughed at that, tweaking him by the cheek with the thick leather glove. “If you weren’t who you are… and if you weren’t going where you’re going… I swear I could almost like you.”

“When will my brother come?”

The sec man sniffed as he straightened up. “Baron’s not well, seeing you come up like a skeleton out of the tomb. Had himself some drink, did the baron. On the morrow he has to ride out to Fishers’ Hill. There’s a hunt fixed. Boars. Baron wouldn’t miss that. And it’ll give you a day to sweat on it.”

“Tomorrow night, then?”

“Figures. There, I’ve dimmed all the lamps but one. Need that to watch you through the judas hole in the door. Sleep well, Lord Cawdor.” Somehow, that time, there didn’t seem the same element of sarcasm when he called him by the title.

The door closed with a solid thunk, and Ryan heard the key turn in the lock. A double bolt slammed home. The sec man had told him that the other three were also locked in their rooms, but none of them was to be tied. And Jak had recovered consciousness from the blow to his head.

They would all take their turn being interrogated by Baron Harvey Cawdor.

There was a warm glow from the lamp that stood on an old, polished round table near the barred window. The draperies had been closed, leaving only a chink near the top. It was full dark outside.

From where he lay on the floor of the chamber, Ryan could hear the noises of the ville as life went on. He guessed that the news of his return would already have raced through the big building until the meanest scullery boy would know that Ryan Cawdor was back at Front Royal.

“Oiled and ready to tear some ass,” Ryan said out loud, managing a wry grin. He was resigned to that fact of his imminent death. It was simply a question of how and when. J.B., Jak and Krysty would also perish. That was also destined. There was a slim chance that Doc and the girl might get away. Ryan hoped so. He liked Lori, but he was coming to love the eccentric old man.

The only hope left now to Ryan was that they might get careless at the end and give him a chance to at least settle the old debt by killing his brother. He could do it easily enough with his bare hands, given just a couple of seconds and a scant yard of space.

Somewhere he could catch the distant sound of a piano playing, and he wondered who was at the keyboard. An aunt of his had come to the ville when Ryan had been eight years old, an immensely tall, skinny woman whose name escaped him. It was some sort of flower, he thought. She’d loved dancing and had teased the solemn young boy by snatching him as they’d passed in one of the long corridors. Pressing him to her flat, bony chest, she’d called out, “Heel and toe, heel and toe, one-two-three, one-two-three. Lovely, Ryan, lovely.”

As the wasting sickness that had killed her had begun to set its teeth in her body, she’d grown more melancholy. Once she’d been playing an old tape of music, a dance tune called a tango. She’d looked up at him from the thin birdlike face, with eyes bright and fevered, the bones scraping at the inside of her skin.

“They say the tango is a merry rhythm, Ryan. It is not. It is infinitely mournful.”

She’d died a week later and been buried in the family plot with the rest of the line of Cawdors, back to the long winter.

Ryan didn’t recognize the tune the piano was playing. After a while it ceased, and he slipped into an uneasy sleep.

The rattle of the spyhole woke him, and he peered across the room. The lamp was burning low, near to guttering out, and the chamber smelled of oil. There was a momentary flash of brighter light as the door opened a narrow crack and then closed again. Someone slipped through the gap, and for a split second Ryan allowed himself a glimmer of hope, knowing the foolishness of such a thought.

He heard a voice, speaking with a frighteningly cold intensity. “On your life, trooper. I’ll spill your heart blood myself. Not until I knock to be let out. Understand?”

One of the sec men murmured his assent as the door closed.

There was plenty of light for Ryan to immediately recognize Lady Rachel Cawdor, wearing the same dark clothes and carrying the same worn leather purse. Without a word she knelt at his side, drawing a slim-bladed stiletto from her belt. The point rested for a moment on the material of his pants, just above his groin. She began to push, the steel slicing through the material, touching cold on the flesh of his stomach.

“Now,” she said.

 

Chapter Twenty-Four

« ^ »

THE KNIFE WAS VERY OLD. Ryan had never seen it before, but he knew that the ville had once housed a remarkable collection of early weapons of all sorts. The hilt was silver, heavily embossed with floral decoration, and the blade was steel.

He tried to relax against the sharp pricking of the knife as she moved it lower and lower. Despite himself, Ryan winced and tried to ease himself down, avoiding the steel as it brushed the top of his penis.

Lady Rachel Cawdor laughed delightedly, a soft, gentle sound in the stillness of the room.

“So brave, brother-in-law, yet so like all men. Filled with stupid pride until your pathetic little pricks are threatened.”

“Harvey wouldn’t like me spoiled.”

She patted him on the cheek, running a sharp nail along the jagged scar that furrowed his face. “He did that. And the eye. He talks of it. When he sleeps, racked by horrors, he talks of you. He knew you’d come back one day. Knew it. You’re his walking nightmare, Ryan Cawdor.”

He didn’t speak. The knife was still poised, like a honed nemesis, ready to descend and hack at his manhood. She was very beautiful. Ryan corrected that thought. She had once been very beautiful. Now she was raddled by the jolt.

“You can’t move. I could do anything to you, dear brother-in-law. Anything. I could rape you. Use that cock of yours, then cut it off. I could kiss you. Make you kiss me. Make you use your tongue on my body. Would you like that, brother-in-law?”

She was leaning across him, her breath running faster. The front of her dress gaped open, and he could see her breasts, the nipples erect with desire.

“What would you like, Ryan?”

“I’d like you to die, and take your husband and that sick little bastard of a son with you.”

He waited for the thrust of the knife, but nothing happened. Ryan had closed his eye, and he opened it when he heard her laugh. She had sat back on her heels, the velvet dress hitched up between her knees, showing a smooth expanse of pale thigh.

“You talk big for a helpless one-eyed man, Ryan Cawdor.”

“Why’ve you come?”

Rachel’s dark eyes were almost invisible in the half-light. “I wanted to see you. Wanted to see you before that sottish husband of mine had you thrown to his boars or his dogs or whatever unoriginal way of chilling he picks.”

Ryan didn’t reply. There was nothing to say. He’d read pulps where the captured hero talks to the mistress of the villain and uses his charms to persuade her to release him. Life wasn’t at all like that. Steel cuffs held him helpless, and the chain around his throat made it impossible for him to move. Tomorrow they’d come and take him to Harvey, and then he’d be dead. The best to look for was a quick passing, which was why he’d tried to provoke the woman into wasting him with her knife. That had failed, and there wasn’t anything else left.

“Don’t want to talk?” She was becoming more nervous, hands moving, head turning from side to side. He recognized the symptoms from the dinner table. The woman needed more jolt.

“Need a snort,” she said, voice as taut as a bowstring. “Need something to rest my mirror on. You’ll do, brother-in-law.”

She took the knife again and slit his clothes, opening the jerkin and pulling it back across his flat, muscular stomach. Then she cut through the crotch of his trousers. Placing the knife on the floor, she tugged his trousers over his thighs. She touched him, very gently.

“Oh, my dear relative, I’ve cut you. A tiny ruby that glistens here. Should I kiss it better for you, Ryan?”

Despite the effects of the jolt on her appearance, Rachel Cawdor was still an attractive, skilled woman. Ryan tried to pull away from her, fighting for control.

She laughed. “Very good, Ryan. But I shall win. Like all men…” she began, then bent once more to her task.

When she lifted her head again, the woman was grinning. “There, brother-in-law, that wasn’t so awful, was it?”

Ryan didn’t reply, feeling soiled by the contact, certain only that he would kill Rachel Cawdor if he was given half a chance.

“Bad loser,” she said. “While you’re here like this I might give myself some…” She stopped, and her body suddenly twisted with a violent shudder. “Oh, the cramps are… First things first.”

Rachel took out the little brown bottle and uncorked it. Holding the mirror in her hand, she looked round the room for somewhere to set it, eventually placing the chill metal on Ryan’s stomach. She cut the powder into finer grains, then formed it into several narrow lines.

“Forget the fucking, after all,” she breathed, breasts rising and falling. “This is…”

The ivory tube in one nostril, the other pinched tight, she again lowered her face toward his body. She sniffed up the lines of jolt, her body trembling with the powerful sensation of the drug. Only when the mirror was clear did she sit up again, face wreathed in a broad smile.

“Now, what shall we do, Ryan?”

“Get out,” he said.

“Worried the mutie redhead’ll find out you enjoyed me doing you? I might go tell her right now.”

“That jolt’ll kill you soon,” he said.

“I can stop when I like.”

“Like everyone else can. I seen the stiffs from coast to coast. Heart gives up the effort. You’re dead, bitch.”

“Harvey won’t live long. His heart’s near finished, brother-in-law. Then I rule the ville.”

“What about your son?”

“Jabez? The darling does everything I tell him to do.”

“Like fuck you?”

At last he got through her guard. She slapped him hard across the face so that his head banged back against the wall. She snatched up the knife and stared at him, eyes open wide in an insensate rage.

“You don’t…don’t…” she stammered, spraying him with her spittle. “I’ll…Jabez loves his mother. That’s all.”

Rachel put the dagger down once more, leaning close to Ryan so that he could almost taste the scent of her sour-sweet breath. With a swift movement she sat astride him, her weight on his groin. Her left hand tangled in his hair, pulling so hard that it brought tears to his eye.

“Keep very still,” she hissed at him, her white face inches from his.

Her right hand stretched and touched the leather patch over his blinded left eye, easing it upward.

“No!” he cried involuntarily.

“Ah, so the brave hero has his weakness. I only want to see what good work my dear husband did on his little brother. There…”

Ryan closed his right eye. He knew what Lady Rachel was seeing. He’d seen it often enough in pools of water or in polished metal or in mirrors. The empty, raw socket, the skin puckered, red and scarred. Often the scooped cavity would weep a little. A clear liquid, as though it wept for the missing eye.

He winced again as she laid her thumb on the skin at the very corner of the eye. “What does it feel like, Ryan?” she whispered.

He screamed. For the first time in countless years, Ryan Cawdor screamed in helpless, mindless terror, feeling the jagged nail probe into the deeps of the empty eye socket, pushing hard against the agonizingly delicate skin. The pain went on and on as she turned her finger around, still keeping her iron grip on his hair. Through the mist of raw red pain, he could hear her laughing at him.

Ryan jerked so hard at the handcuffs that blood sprang from the ends of his fingers.

A millennium of suffering crawled by until at last she took the finger away. He could feel a warm liquid coursing down his cheek, but he didn’t know if it was tears or blood. It touched the corner of his lips and it tasted salty.

Her weight moved off him, and he blinked open his good eye. Rachel stooped and adjusted the patch back over the blank socket.

“So much blood, brother-in-law. Such a deep scar, isn’t it?”

Ryan didn’t trust himself to speak, knowing that his voice would shake with his pain and anger.

“I think I shall go and kiss my son a fond good-night. After all, I doubt you could please me with this—” she touched him contemptuously with the toe of her dark blue shoe “—this worm.” She giggled, the jolt coursing through her body, making her hyperactive for a brief few minutes. “Know what I do if I see a worm in my path, brother-in-law? I crush it beneath my heel. Perhaps… No, it would be a waste. If it was Harvey’s pathetic worm, then…”

“Why stay with him?”

“He is the baron, Ryan. You know what that means. After I throttled your father, Harvey stopped sleeping in the same bed as me, fearing for his wretched life. And he is right. Now he will soon die. There have been two attacks already, and the doctor says he cannot live through another.”

“In twenty years you could have…”

The woman shook her head, bending to collect her dagger and thrust it back into the sheath at her belt. “Not until Jabez was old enough. This ville runs on fear, Ryan. And now you’ve come back. All my life here you’ve been a shadow on every wall. A listener behind every door, the poison in every dish, the fear in every dream.”

“Now I’m here.”

“The older servants prayed to you. We flogged and branded them and still they believed that one day you’d come back and save them all from… Harvey and from me. They call me the Lady of Pain, you know, Ryan. Me! This time tomorrow Harvey will return from the hunt. You and your friends will die in a fine public ceremony. Soon Harvey will die, and Jabez and I will run the Shens. And there will be no more shadows!”

Her voice soared like an eagle as she ranted at the bound man at her feet. She kicked out at him in a vicious temper, her feet cracking into his ribs, leaving deep purple bruises.

As quickly as it had come, the anger left her, the wild swinging of moods that was typical of a jolt junkie. She stood panting, her face growing blank. “There, brother-in-law, you made me… Relatives shouldn’t anger each other.”

“Goodbye, sister-in-law,” he managed.

“I came to see you,” she said, pausing near the door, “to see if you might be of use. You could have killed Harvey. That would have been pleasant, wouldn’t it? All the double-poor stupes that live on our lands would have flocked to worship at the shrine. Ryan, the miracle baron of Front Royal. You could have had me as well, brother-in-law.”

“Why not?” he asked. Behind her the last of the lamps was guttering out, making her shadow dance, shift and vanish.

Rachel smiled. “No, Ryan. Not now. You should have been the baron. You and I could… once… Not now. I know men, Ryan. I know you. You might agree, to save your skin, then break my neck without a single backward glance. No. You aren’t weak enough.”

She pulled at the door handle, pausing a moment in the brightly lit opening to glance back at him. Then the door slammed shut, and Ryan was left alone in silence and in darkness.

The blood congealed on the tips of his fingers, around the nails and on the grazes around his throat from the tearing of the rough iron chain.

As the night wore on, Ryan managed to slip into an uncomfortable slumber, waking often from the pain of his position. He wondered how the others were bearing up, thinking specially of Krysty Wroth.

Ryan also wondered about Lori and Doc Tanner.

 

Chapter Twenty-Five

« ^ »

BY THE THREE KENNEDYS!” Doctor Theophilus Tanner exclaimed, tripping over the gnarled root of an ancient live oak. It had rained, briefly but fiercely, and the ground had become soggy and treacherous. The low clouds veiled the moon, making it difficult to see more than ten feet ahead.

“You okay, Doc?” Lori asked, helping him to his feet and wiping ineffectually at the smears of mud on his black coat.

“Yeah. Just this path doesn’t run straight for more than twenty yards at a time.”

Nate Freeman looked back over his shoulder, face a pale blur ahead of them. “Want to get nearer than this to the ville ‘fore sunup. We’re close to Shersville here, and they might have patrols out, watching for me to head home.”

The clouds parted, and the moon broke through, bathing the region in a bright silver glow. Doc looked around him, admiring the beauty of the forest, the rain glistening off the boles of the endless ranks of trees.

“How far?” he asked the young man.

“Sunup or the ville?”

“The dawn’s early light.”

“Two hours.”

“The ville?”

“Three. If we don’t all keep falling over our feet like clumsy old stupes.”

“You’ll watch your mouth or…” Lori threatened crossly. But Doc patted her arm.

“No, my dear heart. Nathan is right. I must take more care.”

“Should have fetched the fast blasters.” The girl sighed.

“Safer in the wag,” Freeman argued. “You go through your plan to try and get in the ville then that mini-Uzi and the gray rifle’d have you in the moat ‘fore you could say, ‘Blessed Ryan spare us.’ Know what I mean?”

Doc was thinking about the plan as they walked briskly through the Shens. Part of it had been his, but he kept forgetting bits of it. He was to be a traveling quack who was calling at the ville to treat any minor ailments and to draw teeth. But he’d lost his bag of tools. He could remember all of that. But Nathan hadn’t liked the idea.

He’d wanted to wait and see, to try to sneak some news from those in Shersville who were still loyal to him. But even the young man had admitted that there had to be a real risk that Ryan’s cover had been blown inside the ville. Doc had asked how long he thought Ryan would live once Harvey knew who he was.

Nathan had replied by simply snapping his fingers once.

So, that was why Doc and Lori were going in. For news. And if that turned out bad, for a try at a rescue.

“How?” Doc mumbled to himself. And after a little while he realized he didn’t have an answer to that question.

The swordstick helped the old man over some of the rougher parts of the trail, and Lori was always at his elbow with encouragement.

“Path here goes through a swamp, so step careful. Mud’s near bottomless on both sides. And we’re closest we come to my home village. Fast and careful and quiet’s the way.”

Ironically it was Nathan Freeman who nearly brought disaster upon them all. He had looked back to make sure that his two companions had safely negotiated a tumbled willow tree that was rotting across the path, when his own foot slipped and he crashed to the ground. In falling he clutched at a low branch of a stunted elm tree, which broke in his grasp with a loud report that sounded like a Magnum going off.

“That you, Beau?” called a voice. It was a thin, whining sort of a voice, like a querulous old man asking when his supper would be ready.

Nathan drew his blaster from his belt, a double-action Smith & Wesson Model 39 handgun. Dropping into a crouch, he waved to Doc and Lori to take cover behind him.

“Beau? You fallen in the fucking water ‘gain? I’m not pulling yer out if n…”

“Hi, there, Tom,” Nathan said, straightening up, holding the pistol on the hunched little figure that had appeared out of the rags of mist that hung over the muddy water. “Thought I knew your voice, my trusted old friend.”

Doc and Lori also stood up, seeing that the other villager was paralyzed with fear. The old man was literally shaking in his boots at the sudden appearance of the man he’d betrayed.

“Ramjet! Nathan, is…? I didn’t know you was going’t‘come back. Me an’ Beau…”

“Here,” Nathan said quietly, beckoning to Tom. “Come here.”

The little villager stumbled toward Freeman, wringing his hands like an abject penitent. “Didn’t mean trouble, Nate, you know that. Hell, we bin friends longer than most. I taught you to shoot an’ told…”

“Shut up, Tom,” Freeman said. “Kneel down here, in front of me.”

“I’ll get my breeches fouled in the dirt, Nate. You know what Becky’s like if’n I get muddied up. I’ll just stand.”

“Kneel. That’s good. Now get your mouth open real wide, Tom.”

“What for? I don’t… Urrgh…”

Doc looked away, knowing what was going to happen. Lori also guessed, and she clapped her hands together delightedly, eyes sparkling in the moonlight. “Yeah,” she said. “Do it, Nate.”

The little villager knelt in the slime, hands together, looking up at Nathan Freeman. The muzzle of the heavy automatic pistol was jammed in his mouth between his broken and stained teeth. His eyes were as wide as saucers, and he was moaning to himself.

“Close your lips, Tom. Suck on it, real good, like it was mother’s milk. Good. So long, Tom.”

The gun bucked, the sharp edge of the foresight cutting open the man’s mouth. The explosion was muffled, sounding no louder than a man slapping a mosquito off his wrist. Out of the corner of his eye, Doc saw a hunk of bone burst out of the back of the scrawny villager’s skull, landing with a plopping noise in the water on either side of the trail. A fine spray glittered in the moonlight for a second, like a ballooning fountain of fireflies, mushrooming from the hole in the head. The dappled mess of blood and brain tissue pattered in the dirt. The body jerked violently backward, legs kicking in the air, the mouth hanging open.

“Help me roll him into the swamp, Doc,” Nathan said, holstering his smoking piece.

Tom’s clothes held pockets of air, and at first it didn’t sink, floating like a sodden log in the scum-covered water. Nathan glanced around. He found a broken branch from one of the willows and used it to push at the corpse, hold it under. He watched the bubbles, some bursting with crimson centers. When they stopped, he let go of the branch and threw it away. The body stayed beneath the surface.

Without a word, Freeman turned away and led Doc and Lori onward.

When they reached the screen of trees that fringed the open space in front of the fortress of Front Royal, it was a little after sunrise. The dawn was brilliant, the flaming disk of the sun lurching over the eastern horizon, coloring everything with its crimson light. The ville looked as though the stones glowed with a dreadful inner heat, and the water of the wide moat lay like congealing blood.

The drawbridge had just been lowered, and villagers were beginning to enter, hurrying past the dozen guards that lined the main gateway. Nathan looked worried.

“Normally only a couple of sec men there. Smells of trouble.”

“Then I venture to suggest that we might consider our entrance as a matter of some immediacy. Time is of the essence, my dear young man, would you not say?”

“Yeah. I’ll wait up here. You get out with news, take the trail runs due west. But don’t go as far as Shersville. I’ll pick you up. Don’t look for me. I’ll find you.”

They heard the brazen howl of a trumpet from within the gates and the baying of a pack of hunting dogs, a sound that Doc and Lori recalled only too well from their arrival in the Shens. The girl shuddered at the noise and clutched at Doc’s hand for comfort.

“Baron might be going hunting,” Nathan said. “Nothing stops for that. Nothing. After the wild boars he breeds in the cellars of the ville. Best keep under cover until he’s gone by.”

Doc Tanner parted the branches of leaves and peered out at the fortress, grim and invincible, surrounded by the bloody aura of the rising sun.

“I doubt either of you are familiar with the poetic works of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe? No, I thought not. Poor man. Tragic life. My grandfather on my father’s side knew him slightly. This scene recalls one of his verses, concerning a haunted palace.”

“I like you reading poems, Doc,” Lori whispered, glancing proudly at Nathan. “Doc knows millions of poems, doesn’t you, Doc?”

“Perhaps hundreds rather than millions, my dear chickadee,” Doc replied.

“Tell me the poem you said. About a haunting palace.”

“It starts about a fine castle, like the ville here, that was once a place of great riches, splendor, pomp and circumstance. Then it fell upon bad times.”

“Go on,” she whispered. Nathan Freeman half listened, watching the road into Front Royal for the best moment to move.

“But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch’s high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)

“Then it goes on about how the wonders of the olden times are sunk forever and locked into the grave, as they are here. The crimson of the rising sun is so strong in recalling this verse.”

“Something’s happening, Doc. Look. Horsemen and the pack of dogs. Stay still and keep your voice low.”

First came a squadron of mounted sec men, their uniforms tinged with dazzling scarlet by the dawn. Then came a huge mutie stallion—the biggest horse Lori and Doc had ever seen, not that the girl had actually ever seen a live horse in her entire life. Mounted on it, wrapped in a silver cloak that the sun streaked with bloody splashes, was an immensely fat man. He wore a feathered cap that nodded and danced.

“Lord Harvey Cawdor, baron of Front Royal,” Nathan whispered, unable to hide his hatred.

Then came a pack of twenty or so dogs, slavering black hounds with narrow muzzles and long legs. They were controlled with whips by a half-dozen mounted grooms. At the rear came another squadron of sec guards.

They cantered by, only a hundred paces from the hiding place of the three companions, who watched them pass.

The sec men were laughing at some shared jest. From the tone of the laughter, it was a cruel joke. Doc Tanner continued his remembered poem by Poe.

“Somehow it is even more suitable now that we have seen that procession of death,” he said.

“Tell it, Doc,” the girl urged.

“And travelers now within that valley, Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a rapid ghastly river, Through the pale door;

A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh—but smile no more.

“Watching the front of that dreadful pile, lit by the vermilion rays of the rising sun, seems as ominous and frightening as the haunted palace of that verse.” Doc’s rich melodious voice had carried the poem well, sending a shiver down the back of both listeners.

Nathan suggested that it was as good a time as any to try their luck. With the baron out of the way for the day, heading toward Fishers’ Hill, it was unlikely he’d be back before sunset.

They made their farewells quickly, then the old man and the pretty girl strode confidently out of the cover of the forest, joining other commoners on the road into the ville.

“You outlanders? Beyond Shens?” a stout young woman asked, dragging a trio of snot-nosed brats behind her as she wheeled a barrow along the rutted trail. The rickety cart was loaded with a mixture of mud and potatoes, heavy on the mud. Her accent was so barbarous and rude that it took all of Doc’s frail concentration to understand what on earth she was saying to him.

“I regret that we are not fortunate enough to enjoy the benefits of a domicile in these attractive parts.”

“What? You talk like a double-stupe mutie!” She spit to show her disgust as they joined the lineup at the drawbridge.

“He’s not for here,” Lori said, doing her best to ease the sudden tension.

“Yeah. Bin here ‘fore?”

“No, never,” Doc replied. “You know the ville well?”

“Should do. Bleeding scullery maid here for eight bastard years. Cleaning shit an’ sodding grease off whoring plates. Then I landed these little pissers and me man went off south. Now I sell what I can.”

The sec men were passing everyone through at a fair speed, seeming to recognize them as regulars. But Doc noticed that one of them was already eyeing Lori and himself, muttering to the guard next to him.

“Sees are busy today. Someone must have farted in front of her ladyship.”

“No-o-o-o,” jeered an elderly man at their side, who carried a string of diminutive onions on a long pole across his shoulders.

“How come you know so much, Eddy Pungo? Riddle me that.”

“Hasn’t heard? Course not. You’s not gotten daughter in ville. Your man left you, dinne?”

“A stone an’ a stick can make me sick, but words don’t ever harm me, Eddy Pungo. You got news, then tell us.”

The old man looked both ways, then leaned toward her, casting an anxious eye first at Doc Tanner and Lori, seeming to recognize them as being harmless. “Ryan. Ryan Cawdor.”

The woman laughed, a short, coughing kind of a laugh that made her disbelief obvious.

“True,” the old man insisted. “Girl says so. Seen the secs taking him and some friends. Tried to raid the ville.”

“Lord Ryan come back? One eye an’ all?”

“Ssh. One eye an’ all. It’s him all right, like the old stories say.”

“What has happened to him?” Doc asked, hoping that the fluttering in his chest was only an attack of nerves.

“To Lord Ryan, stranger? I hear he was ‘trayed. A servant, brother to Kenny Morse, gave him up from shock. Now he’s bound and waits death when the baron comes back from his hunting.”

“Oh, dear!” The woman with the barrow sighed. “Fucker, innit? Wait twenty years or more for the lord to come and release us. Then next day stupe bastard gets chilled by Baron Harvey and us no better for it.”

“No worse, no worse. Gotta look it that way. That’s why gate’s crawling with secs, as thick as lice on a horse blanket.”

Soon enough it was Doc and Lori’s turn to face the guards on the cobble-lined approach to the main entrance to the ville. Up close Doc realized what a difficult operation it would be to try to take the fortress.

“Could use a Peacemaker or a Minuteman missile here,” he said.

“What’s that, stranger?” a sec man barked. Doc hadn’t even realized he’d spoken out loud, and he became confused.

“Don’t wish to cause any fuss or alarm. Sorry if I spoke out of turn, only the volume of a given mass of gas is inversely proportional to… to something or other.”

Two more of the sec men turned their way. “What’s he saying?” asked one, a brutish looking bully with a number of unhealed sores across his upper lip. “Heard him say something about wanting gas.”

“No, that wasn’t quite…” Doc Tanner paused, fighting hard to gain control of his wandering wits, knowing that for the first time in many, many years, the lives of others rested with him.

Lori was holding his arm so tightly that it was hurting him, but it suddenly seemed to be his sole contact with reality and sanity. With an effort the old man pulled himself together.

“I am Doctor Tanner and this is my—”

“I’m his assistant,” Lori put in quickly, remembering from the planning session in the abandoned wag that this was to be her role in their attempted deception.

“Yes, my assistant. I wish to gain entry to this eminent ville.” The splendidly rounded vowels rolled out from between the immaculate set of teeth.

“Why?”

“I am a traveling medicine man.”

“What d’you do?” the sec man asked. Now there were six of them around the strangers, mostly there to leer at the blond vision that was Lori Quint.

Then Doc recalled something of the spiel he’d contrived as they’d walked through the forest. “Hallelujah, my brothers. I’m here to help to heal the sick and make the lame walk. To aid the blind in obtaining the miraculous gift of sight and the deaf to be able to worship at the shrine of the muse of orchestral sound. If your piles itch or your skin flakes or your glands swell or your kidneys leak or your lungs wheeze or your teeth ache, then let Doc Tanner be your hope and your blessed salvation.”

He ended on a silence that seemed respectful. The old man thought that he might have missed his true vocation.

“I have missed my true vocation,” he said, not intending to speak out loud. Fortunately his tumbling speech had fascinated all of the guards, and nobody listened to his comment.

“You say you draw teeth, old man?” asked a skinny man with a stubbly beard sprouting amid a lake of warts.

“I do, indeed. But sadly all my tools were taken when we were attacked by muties some days ago. They took all our possessions.”

“We got tools in the guardhouse. Come in. Our sergeant’s been moaning for days and nights about a tooth that ails him.”

Doc was brought sharply back to earth. “Draw a tooth for your sergeant? I don’t… I mean to say that it’s not—”

“Not what, old man?”

Doc swallowed hard, wondering why his mouth had become bone-dry. The crowd pressed around him, and he heard Lori squeak as someone goosed her. He struggled to hang on to his unique role as the savior of the group. Everyone was depending on him.

“If the tools are suitable?”

There was a disturbance in the throng, with men and women staggering sideways. A tall man appeared in an immaculate uniform, gesturing for the drawbridge to be kept clear.

“With the renegade caught, we have to watch for any spies or enemies,” the sergeant barked at the sec men. “And who the sweet crucifix is this?”

“Traveling quack-salver,” the corporal replied. “Says he can treat bad teeth.”

“Then get him in and he can treat mine. Pain’s burning my brain. Is the gaudy with him?”

“My assistant, Captain,” Doc Tanner said. “Did I hear you mention some renegade?”

“Only the missing Ryan Cawdor, come sneaking back like a diseased rat after barley. But he’s locked safe. And by dawn tomorrow he’ll likely be another fruit a’dangling in the baron’s prize orchard yonder.”

 

WHEN THE PLIERS SLIPPED on the sergeant’s rotten tooth and Doc heard the ominous crunch of broken bone, he knew that he and Lori were in deep trouble.

 

Chapter Twenty-Six

« ^ »

KRYSTY HAD WATCHED the departure of Baron Harvey Cawdor and his entourage for their day’s sport in the Shens. By peering through the window of her room she could just see the road that wound out across the drawbridge, vanishing into the trees on the far side of the moat.

With nothing else to do, she had sat on an old-fashioned stickback chair by the open casement, watching the men and women from the surrounding villages file in to sell their produce.

And she saw the silver-haired old man in the cracked knee boots and stained frock coat, who was accompanied by the tall blond girl with the wide smile. For a moment Krysty stood and leaned on the sill, hoping to try to catch the eye of Doc and Lori. Then she withdrew into the room as she realized that they were playing a dangerous game, hoping to infiltrate the ville in some secret guise.

A few minutes later she could hear yelling and cursing, floating up from the guardhouse just inside the main gateway. She hoped it wasn’t anything to do with Doc and Lori.

She’d heard something of what had gone on in the chamber next door to hers during the darkness of the night. Krysty’s part-mutie birthright had given her certain peculiar skills, including enhanced sight and hearing. The visit of the Lady Rachel Cawdor to Ryan had been largely audible to Krysty, though some parts of it had been left to her imagination, not that much imagination had been required!

Once it was daylight, the tall redheaded girl had devoted her energies to examining her prison in the most careful detail.

She’d spotted the interconnecting door immediately. But it was sealed with an old iron bar, secured with a huge brass padlock. She rocked it with her hands, but the bar was rooted in the stone wall and hardly moved at all. The window opened on the moat, but it was a drop of forty feet. Though it didn’t have any heavy security bars, the window frame was split into eight by metal rods. With a great effort it would have been possible for a small, skinny person to wriggle through. But for someone of Krysty’s height and build, it was unthinkable to escape that way.

The main door into the room was locked and bolted from the outside. There was no judas hole for the sec men in the corridor to spy on her, but she could hear from the sound of boots and quiet conversation that there were at least a dozen guards in the passage.

The room was eighteen feet by fourteen, with no other exits or entrances. There was a fireplace, but the chimney was blocked off with stone and concrete. She even checked the stone flags on the floor, rolling back the coarse woolen drugget. The furnishings were sparse, and seemed very old.

A carved wooden chest at the foot of the double bed opened at her touch, revealing a pile of cloth. The smell was unpleasant, like damp earth. Krysty pulled the top bolt of cotton out of the trunk and unfolded it. The cloth was spotted with speckles of green mold, which carried the rich, moist odor. She wrinkled her nose as realization came to her. It was a cerecloth that had been used as a shroud or winding sheet for a corpse. Though, by the look of it, the cerement had done that duty on several occasions.

The chest also held a number of iron and pewter vases, which were cold and dusty with age. A wardrobe at the head of the bed on the left was completely empty, except for the stub of a pencil and an empty can of fly killer. A faint message had been scrawled on the inside of the door: Cathy Supports Lynx.

Krysty wondered who Cathy had been and how long ago she had supported Lynx, whatever that was.

A mahogany cupboard in one corner, with a deeply ornate acanthus design, held a lidded chamber bucket, which Krysty had used and emptied into the filthy water of the moat.

There was a tapestry on the long wall behind the head of the bed. Faded green and blue, it showed a sailing ship, partly dismasted, running for shelter before a terrifying storm. Massive white breakers curled under the schooner’s quarterdeck, and sharp-fanged rocks waited at the base of towering cliffs. It was a mournful and desolate picture that fitted Krysty’s mood of bleak pessimism.

Since leaving Harmony, Krysty Wroth had been bowled along, bouncing from adventure to adventure, constantly flirting with death, but never finding herself locked in its embrace. Now it was changed. They were prisoners of a ruthless and crazed baron, locked away, weaponless, in the center of a fortified ville that swarmed with sec men. Only Doc Tanner and Lori Quint had offered any prospect of help, and she’d just seen them both stroll into the gaping jaws of the grinning tiger.

Krysty felt very much alone.

They brought food around noon, a hand-turned wooden bowl of vegetable soup, with some scummy slices of potato floating in it, and a hunk of coarse bread. They didn’t give her even a spoon to eat with, nor did any of the three armed men speak a single word to her.

There were no books in the room. No tapes. No pix, no sounds. Using some of the skills taught her by her mother, Krysty eventually lay on the creaking bed and willed herself into a semitrance, slipping easily into sleep by relaxing herself from her toes upward.

The day crept by.

 

it was near dusk when she heard the distant baying of the pack of hounds drawing steadily nearer. The fading light made it difficult to make out details, but she thought that Baron Harvey was slumped in the high saddle of his horse, his pretty cloak caked with gray mud. The whole party was subdued, with none of the chatter and singing that you would normally expect with the return from a successful day’s hunting.

There was the bloodied corpse of a large pig of some kind, its curling tusks gleaming yellow in the dusk. Its throat had been slit, and there was what looked like a scattergun wound in its flank. It had been flung into the back of a cart, which rattled over the cobbles into the keep of the ville.

The guards brought another meal, identical to the first except that there were some shreds of stringy pork lurking in the slimy depths of the bowl.

Through the open door, Krysty could see the sergeant who’d brought them in from Shersville. She noticed a crust of dried blood on his lower lip, and the side of his jaw seemed swollen. Even as she looked at him, he lifted his hand and touched his face, wincing as though it were damnably tender.

“A good hunt for the baron?” she called out.

“He fell at a thorn break. Came home tired and in the foulest of tempers. And I feel much the same, so just shut your mouth and keep it that way.”

“Won’t he see us tonight?”

The sec officer sighed. “I told you to… No, he won’t. He’s gone to his bed. But don’t worry, Red. One more night’t‘live. Be thankful. This time on the morrow you’ll either be chilled, or you’ll wish that you were.”

And the door slammed.

 

KRYSTY WAS AWAKENED by a faint grating sound that seemed to originate behind the head of her bed. She sat up, trying to work out what the time was and what had caused the noise. The sound was repeated. It had a peculiar, hollow resonance to it that echoed through the room.

The girl swung her long legs off the bed and stood facing the ancient tapestry, which stirred as if a breath of wind had tugged at it. Though the window was flung open, there wasn’t a breath of air in the room. The night was sultry and humid; Krysty could hear thunder rumbling off to the north.

The tapestry moved again, and the glow from the single oil lamp in the room cast dancing shadows across the faded material. The grating stopped, but Krysty could hear the squeak of an ungreased hinge. There was another entrance into the room, hidden by the huge wall covering.

Whoever was coming into the room was moving with a marvelously light foot. Krysty made a guess, calling in a low voice.

“Come in, Jabez. Why not use the proper door to the room? Frightened you might be seen visiting a mutie in the middle of the night?”

A hand appeared at the edge of the fabric, gripping it tightly. At her words, the hand vanished for a moment, then the tapestry was pushed aside and the young Lord Jabez Pendragon Cawdor stepped softly into Krysty’s prison room.

He wore a jacket of plum-colored velvet, slashed with white ermine. His chest was bare beneath it and, Krysty noticed, utterly without hair. His trousers, made of raven-black satin, were loose and baggy about the knees, like something out of a child’s book of Sinbad the sailor. He wore fur slippers on his feet. His dart gun was in his belt, his right hand hovering near the butt.

“Only a mutie could have known it was me,” he said quietly, looking around the chamber suspiciously. When he was satisfied he and Krysty were alone, he perched on the edge of her bed, one foot dangling.

“Who else could it be? Your father? To move so quiet? Your mother? I think not. Her liking for jolt would keep her to her room at night, unless she had some vital errand.” Krysty stared at Jabez as she spoke, looking for a clue that he knew about Rachel’s nocturnal visit to Ryan.

But the pallid face betrayed nothing. The distorted eye blinked furiously. His left hand toyed with the beautiful amethyst set in gold at the end of the long chain about his throat.

“Blood and bones! You are one of… If you were not marked for death I could…”

Krysty felt her pulse rate rising. There was something truly sinister about the young man who sat so relaxed on her bed. There weren’t many reasons why he might come to see her at this hour. And none of them were good.

“What is it?”

“I came to see you. To see if my brief and interrupted memory of you was correct.” He paused, but she didn’t reply. “And it is,” he concluded lamely.

“You’ve seen me. Now you can go.”

“Ah, no. That’s stupid of you. Stupid to anger me.”

“You know I’ll be dead by tomorrow, lordling,” she mocked. “You think any threat can frighten me? Go and sleep with your mother, like a good little boy. Go on.”

Jabez drew the dart gun and leveled it at her. “It can be tomorrow. It can be now, you flap-mouth slut! It can be easy or I can make it hard.”

Krysty continued to deliberately provoke him, feeling her own tension mounting, knowing she was flirting with an instant chilling.

And not caring.

“Hard, Jabez? I can’t believe you can make anything hard, least of all your pathetic cock.”

“Bitch!” he screamed, taking a half step toward her and squeezing the trigger of the blaster. But his feet slipped on the edge of the large carpet and threw his aim. The cluster of darts hissed venomously across the room, burying themselves in the door of the wardrobe, missing Krysty by a hand’s breadth.

She backed away from him, whispering to herself, watching Jabez Cawdor through slitted eyes. “Earth Mother, help me. Aid me now, Gaia! Help me and give the strength and the power.”

“Prayers won’t help you, slut! I’m going to open your belly and rip out your tripes. But first I’m going to show you how a Cawdor can fuck. Sit on the bed and keep your hands still. No, take off your clothes. Fast! Before I waste you, here and now.”

Moving as slowly as she could, Krysty concentrated on slipping into the trance of power, the way her mother, Sonja, had taught her. The dark blue top came off, revealing her splendid breasts. Still chanting the invocation to the Earth Mother, the girl started to unzip her pants, slipping off the low boots and kicking them into a corner of the room.

“Faster!” The slit barrel of the dart blaster gaped at her as Jabez waved it angrily.

“Give me all the power. Let me strive for life,” she was whispering, eyes closed now, feeling the familiar surge. An almost indescribable sensation flowered in her loins, spreading like a slow fire through her belly and thighs into her chest and arms and down to her ankles. It finally filled her head with a scything hiss, as though her brain were floating. She felt unbelievably light and potent.

Jabez Pendragon Cawdor, baron designate of the ville of Front Royal, saw none of that. He saw a sexually attractive young woman with a wonderful body, who had stripped naked at his bidding and sat patiently on the big bed, waiting for him to take his pleasure.

He licked his lips as he stared fixedly at the junction of Krysty’s thighs, at the curling nest of blazing pubic hair that tangled and concealed and aroused.

“Lie down,” he said, voice trembling.

“Don’t,” she said, now calm, her breathing steady and relaxed. It would be better if Jabez left the room without touching her. But if it happened, then she was ready for it.

“Beg for mercy, whore. It adds to my pleasure. Beg.” Clumsily, holding the dart gun in his right hand, the young man shrugged off the rich velvet jacket, kicking the slippers to one side. “I don’t hear you begging, you useless mutie slag.”

“Come then,” Krysty whispered, holding her arms out to Jabez.

“Blood and bones! You’ll weep for death this very night.” He unlaced the satin pants and tossed them to the floor, grinning as her eyes fell on his near-erection. The blaster was steady in his hand as he knelt on the bed and leaned over her.

Krysty was ready.

 

Chapter Twenty-Seven

« ^ »

WITH A SHORT, STABBING BLOW from the heel of her hand, Krysty Wroth crushed Jabez’s larynx, rendering his vocal cords useless. It was a savage and crippling attack that flung him onto the floor, his mouth flopping open in a silent, anguished scream. His eyes opened wide, the drooping lid flicking up like a window blind suddenly released.

Krysty’s most awesome mutie trait was her ability, under certain circumstances, to call on a reserve of incredible muscular power for a short time. The cost was dreadful, and always left her exhausted and drained for hours after. Therefore it was an ability she hardly ever used. But she knew the baron’s son intended to rape her in the most violent and humiliating way, and then kill her. She didn’t have to be a doomie to see that.

Her right hand jabbed at the arm that held the dart gun, snapping both radius and ulna above the wrist. One splintered end of bone protruded through the skin, surrounded by flags of torn and bloody flesh. The fingers opened in a spasm of shock and pain, dropping the dart gun to the stones, where it landed with a hollow, metallic clang.

Krysty was barely in control of her own body. The devastating power of the Earth Mother was released in such a rush that it almost blanked her mind: all that registered was that she had to kill this man in the most absolute and total manner.

Jabez struggled to his feet, chest heaving as he battled for breath. His eyes stared blankly at the staggeringly beautiful woman who stood across the bed from him.

He shook his head in disbelief at her speed and brutal strength. Jabez had always relished giving a good beating to a serving maid, smiling at her screams as his whip cut patterned welts over the soft skin. They were so weak, women.

Krysty punched out at his other arm, snapping it like a dry twig at the elbow joint.

Now a red killing mist swamped her mind, closing off any reason or sense.

Or mercy.

Short jabs with fists clenched broke five ribs on the left side of Jabez’s chest and four on the right. None of the savage punches traveled more than six inches. The man staggered back against the wall and tried to scream for help, only managing to make a sound like a newborn lamb bleating weakly for its mother.

Krysty grabbed his dangling left hand and crushed it between her palms.

At this point, Jabez Pendragon Cawdor fainted, slumping in her arms, his blood smearing the stone floor. He lay on his back, legs outstretched. Krysty looked down at him, eyes blank and cold, breathing faster.

As though in a trance, she measured her aim, leaped high and came down with both heels on either side of the left knee, springing the joint so that the patella popped out like a metal bearing between finger and thumb.

Jabez stirred at the appalling pain of the injury, but before he was jerked back into consciousness, Krysty repeated the attack on his other knee, destroying the joint.

Had he lived, Jabez would have been a helpless cripple, unable even to crawl.

Had he lived.

Krysty stood, panting. Her eyes were half-closed, and she was swaying on her bare, blood-smeared feet. She glanced down at the naked, broken, unconscious man lying crookedly on the gray stones of the bedroom floor.

If any of Krysty’s friends had seen her at that moment, they would have backed away from her, horrified that she’d been seized by a killing frenzy. She touched Jabez with a toe, and he jerked away from her. She laughed quietly, an ugly, tinkling little noise, like a cracked silver bell.

Jabez’s eyes flickered open, and she heard a choked groan of purest pain. She could see the pulse that fluttered unevenly in his throat, just beneath the ear.

As she stared at him, the mutie power of her mind stripped him to the soul. She saw the stunted, evil core of Jabez’s being, when pleasure came only through the pain and suffering of others. She saw the festering slime that a religious person might have called the soul. And was appalled.

Jabez Cawdor stirred, head rolling to one side. A thin trickle of bile, tinted with blood, drooled from his open mouth.

Krysty lashed out with her heel, hitting the heir to the ville of Front Royal at the base of the nose. Cartilage burst, and the septum shattered into a dozen splinters of jagged bone. Gouts of blood spewed in the air and all over Jabez’s naked chest. The power of the kick jammed the shards of bone high into the soft spaces of the skull, driving them into the brain.

 

RYAN HEARD NOTHING of Krysty’s fury from where he lay in his own room, watching the light fade away. He’d heard the clattering of hooves on the cobbles in the morning and the excited yapping of the hounds. A bowl of gruel and some crusts of dry bread had been his only meal, given to him so cautiously that he’d lapped at it like an animal. He knew nothing of the disastrous and farcical entry of Doc Tanner and Lori Quint into the ville.

And he knew nothing at all of the visit of Jabez Pendragon Cawdor to Krysty Wroth. Not a hint of the young man’s hideously violent chilling.

The sec men hadn’t bothered to leave Ryan any lamps lit in his prison room. Despite the discomfort of his binding and the imminence of his departure from life, Ryan still managed some sleep, dozing until the links of the chain around his neck jerked him awake.

But something else had disturbed him. He lay still, eye open, straining to listen. It had been a creaking noise, like a piece of wood being slowly split in two. There was silence, and then another, sharper sound. In the blackness, Ryan could make out a narrow strip of golden light shining in the middle of the shelves.

Where he knew the secret door was hidden!

A figure moved against the thin rectangle of pale yellow, then the door closed and the chamber was in total blackness. Ryan tried to wriggle into a position where he might at least try a kick at whoever had entered the chamber.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Come on, you bastard! Come on.”

His hearing was better than most, and he strained to listen to the pounding stillness. Bare feet moved with an infinite caution on the cold, dusty stones of the room. And the ragged breathing sounded like that of a man at the farthest edge of exhaustion, only a knife blade from collapse. The steps hesitated again, and then stopped about five paces from him.

“Ryan.”

The touch of a moth’s feathery wing brushed at his hearing—Krysty’s voice, seeming to come from a great distance, from somewhere in the deeps of the ville.

“Lover?” he said. “What is it?”

“The power of…of the Earth Mother came…to…to me. Was as though Gaia herself took possession of…”

The words faded away.

“What is it? What happened? Fireblast! If only I was free I could… Krysty, tell me what’s happened. Tell me.”

She came closer, and he finally felt her hand on his arm. “Ryan. Oh, but… I’ve killed Jabez Cawdor.”

Since he already anticipated death within the next few hours, Ryan wasn’t too shaken by her words. The murder of his brother’s only child didn’t make a whole lot of difference. The Trader used to say that a man could only get himself chilled once.

“How? No, make that why?”

“Came in to rape me. He was the most evil… evil bastard I ever met, Ryan. So I took him. Wasted him.”

“Had it coming, lover,” he said.

Then she broke down, lying across him, hanging on as if she were drowning, her tears wetting through his clothes. The girl’s whole body was shaken by sobbing, the sound muffled as she pressed her face to his chest. Despite being bound and helpless, Ryan tried to comfort his woman, muttering softly and kissing the side of her neck. He could feel that her long, sentient hair was coiled tightly at the back of her head in a defensive bundle.

“Tell me ‘bout it.”

Krysty fought for self-control, sitting back on her heels, trying to steady her breathing. “Chilled him. But… that isn’t all. The power was worse than I ever knew.”

“How d’you mean? Worse?”

Her voice was so quiet that Ryan could barely hear it, but he eventually made out what she was saying. And the flesh crawled on his nape at the horror of it. She hadn’t just killed the young man. She’d slipped into a blind frenzy and ripped his body apart.

Ryan tried to speak and found that his voice had gone, choked in a fearful dryness. He’d seen Krysty use her power before, and witnessed the awesome strength at such times. But to rend a corpse limb from limb… He swallowed hard and found words again.

“Don’t ever get angry with me, lover,” he whispered.

He felt her relax a little, the hair loosening at her neck. She even managed a muffled giggle at his weak joke. “Try not to, Ryan. If we live that long. What can we do?”

“Nobody outside in the passage heard?”

“No. I’m good at it, lover.”

“I know. Are there bars on your window?”

“Some. You can lean out, but I doubt you could escape that way.”

“They fear magic in the Shens. Always talk of shamans and wizards. I know that Harvey was always terrified of such things. You could sink the… the body in the moat and say you fell into a deep sleep and babble about demons and spirits possessing Jabez. The door’s locked?”

“Yes. On the inside. And there’s some old shrouds and some chunks of iron in a chest. I could weight the bits.”

“Do it. At least it might take the blame away from you. Who knows, lover? Can you do it? You’re not too weak?”

“I can try. By Gaia! What I want most is to sleep for a month. With you, Ryan.”

“Don’t forget. He came in and was babbling some sort of shit that sounded bad. You blacked out, and when you came around Jabez was gone. Just a lot of blood on the floor.”

“I’ll try, lover. Will Harvey and his bitch-wife fall for it?”

Ryan smiled in the darkness. “If they don’t, things can’t be worse for us. And if they do… Who knows, Krysty? Who knows?”