Chapter Twenty-Eight

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HARVEY CAWDOR LOOKED like a man in the last stages of some dreadful ague. His whole body quivered and shook, his chins flapping from side to side like enormous dewlaps. His face was as pale as parchment, and a thread of spittle trailed from one corner of his thick lips. Sweat glistened on his pallid forehead and trickled over the pudgy acres of his cheeks.

“Just blood?” he asked brokenly. It was the twentieth time he’d repeated the question since Ryan and his three friends had been dragged from their rooms just after dawn, and hustled into the main hall of the mansion. Harvey sat in his wide-armed oak chair, wearing a loose cloak of aquamarine, lined with sleek black fur. His straggly hair was uncombed, and his fingers were ring-less.

Rachel sat next to him, face blank, hollowed eyes locked onto Ryan’s single good eye. Her fingers played with the silver catch on her scuffed leather purse. She wore a black robe with a tiny gold star-cluster brooch on her breast. Rachel had said nothing since the news of the bizarre disappearance of her only child.

“Only blood? How can that be? How can a grown man vanish and leave just a lake of dried blood?”

“He raised demons, Baron Cawdor,” Krysty answered quietly. She’d recovered something of her normal strength, but she was still pale and shifted nervously from foot to foot as though she feared she might fall.

“You told us that,” Rachel spit, finally stirring from her lethargy.

“The door was locked from within. The window barred so that no human could leave. No body floats in the moat. I cannot…can’t…she’s a witch, that flame-haired gaudy whore! Killed my little boy. Butchered him and made his body disappear like fucking smoke. Ah…”

Harvey looked at the sergeant of the sec men, who stood at the side of Ryan Cawdor. “The chimney in the room. Was it searched?”

“There was no chimney in that room, Lord,” replied the guard.

Baron Cawdor fell silent. Ryan looked around him, his memory conjuring up long-dead faces and times, mostly not worth remembering: banquets with a whole pig being roasted on a spit by a red-faced lad; jugs of beer being hefted by muscular women from the kitchens of the ville; the unforgettable taste of overripe venison with sweet potatoes and crimson berries; music floating down from the gallery that ran around three sides of the vaulted room.

In the stillness he could hear the faint sound of the baron’s hunting dogs, howling beneath the central keep of the house. And the keening noise of the ferocious boars that his brother bred for his own sport.

Jak Lauren was on the end of the row, his white hair tangled and greasy, his red eyes darting around the room. He caught Ryan’s glance and flashed him a lightning grin.

J.B. Dix stood next to him, arms folded across his chest, pale face turned incuriously toward the baron and his woman. Despite the passive appearance, Ryan knew from long experience that the brain of the Armorer would be racing, calculating angles and odds, looking for a chance. Half a chance.

Anything.

Ryan had been doing the same. Ever since his true identity had been revealed, he’d known that death stood a heartbeat away from them all. A bloated assassin like Harvey would not blink at spilling more blood. And in all the world there was nobody he wanted chilled more than Ryan.

But now the four friends were helpless, unarmed, and overwhelmingly outnumbered by the army of sec men that patrolled Front Royal. The butchering of Jabez had been a tiny entry on the credit side of their account, but their own debiting came ever closer.

The sergeant coughed, catching the piggy little eyes of his lord.

“What is it, man? Speak up!”

“The old man and the girl?”

Harvey Cawdor stared blankly at the sec officer. “What?”

“The old man and the young girl, my lord. She has yellow hair and he—”

“I know who you mean, you fucking double-stupe! What of them?”

The man shuffled his feet and looked down, his hand going to his bruised and swollen jaw. The expression on his face said clearly that he wished they’d never started a conversation.

“He broke one of my teeth. Pretended he was a real doc. We got him and the girl in the guard cells.”

“What has this to do with the wizardry and deviltry that took my son from me? Are you saying they’re witches, as well? Shall we burn them?”

“No, I don’t… I mean, my lord… What shall we do with ‘em?”

“Flog them and turn them out of the ville!” Ryan’s brother picked irritably at the chipped blue varnish that decorated his chewed nails.

“They could be traitors and friends to these four,” said Rachel Cawdor, leaning forward in her seat, eyes staring above and beyond Ryan’s head.

“I don’t think so, my lady,” the sec man said. “The oldster’s barely three bullets in a blaster and the girl’s a near-dummy. I say flog ‘em out of the ville.”

Harvey shifted his enormous bulk and belched, glowering at his sec officer. “You say that, do you, Sergeant? I’ve a mind to flog you. Cut your ears off. Slice the lids from your eyes. Peel off those fucking lips. What then? I’ve heard the girl is pretty, Sergeant. What d’you say to that, man?”

The sec man swallowed convulsively. “Yes, she is. I’m sorry, Lord, that—”

“Shut up,” Harvey muttered, his violent anger passing as fast as it had risen.

Ryan glanced at the line of grim-faced guards, each of whom carried his M-16 at port arms. The windows were flung open, letting in the clean morning air. He could hear a young child crying to his mother for attention. There was the crack of a slap and a scream from the toddler. Another slap rang out, and then silence once more. A young brindled puppy wandered in, looking around for a familiar face. It ambled over to Jak and rubbed itself against his legs. The boy stooped to pet the animal, chucking it under the chin. It was an oddly normal scene, hardly one where four people were about to be sentenced to their deaths.

“I think it was some black magic that took my son,” Harvey Cawdor said, levering himself to his feet. “We’ve heard how he came to question a prisoner. And she… or someone…raised a devil, who lifted my dear Jabez to the realms eternal.”

Ryan’s hands were still cuffed behind him. Krysty, sensing that the word of doom was coming, took a half step forward to be beside him and rested her hand on his arm. Jak ignored the baron, continuing to stroke the puppy that now rolled on its back to have its stomach tickled.

J.B. stood at ease, the dawn’s light glinting off his spectacles, his fedora pushed back off his forehead.

“My order is… Sergeant!”

“My lord?”

“Chill that fucking dog!”

“Now, my lord?”

“Now, man!”

The sec officer gestured angrily to one of his men on the far side of the hall. The guard was tall and skinny, the blaster looking as if it weighed him down. Ryan could almost smell the sec man’s fear at being picked on in front of the baron.

“Move away, Jak,” he said quietly. For a moment he wondered if the boy was going to try to make an issue of it, but after a split second’s hesitation, Jak stepped away from the puppy, shaking his head, the pure white hair seeming to float in the shafts of light streaming from the high casements of the hall.

“Chill it, Trooper Vare,” the sergeant ordered.

The young man had his M-16 set on continuous fire, and his finger froze on the trigger, pouring all thirty rounds into the fawning dog. The bullets kicked and sparked from the stone floor, ricocheting and whining off the far wall, tearing an old tapestry into colored rags.

The puppy disappeared in a spray of blood and jagged bone that frothed in the air, splattering the sergeant. He staggered back, hands clawing at the warm slush that blinded him, spitting out crimson hunks of phlegm onto the flagstones. Ryan closed his eye, wincing at the burst of violence, feeling Krysty’s fingers tighten on his arm. He heard Jak’s voice whisper an obscene threat to the sec man, but it was drowned out by a great guffaw of laughter from Harvey Cawdor, his rolls of fat quivering under the bright silk robe.

“Wonderful, Sergeant. Triple fucking A. There’s magic. Like Jabez. The disappearing dog. Wasn’t a sec man blowing our son apart like that? Course not. Course not. Nothing left to hunt for.”

“Get on with it,” Rachel grated from between clenched teeth. It was obvious to Ryan that she was craving a line or two of the white elixir of life. Once jolt had the noose around your soul, it pulled it tighter and tighter until you finally snapped.

“Wait, bitch. I said ‘hunt.’ Hunt.” Harvey’s thick pink tongue ran over his fleshy lips, and he giggled to himself. “You always liked the thrill of the hunt, didn’t you, brother?” Ryan didn’t answer him. “Yes, you did. And I love it. My dogs love it. Even my trained boars love being hunted, using their sharp tusks to rip open bellies and throats. Ah, yes. The hunt.”

“Hunt them?” Rachel said, suddenly alive. She gave Ryan a look of such intent that it puzzled him, not understanding what lay at the back of her vicious and ambitious mind. Seeing his blank face, she turned away from him, biting her lip in disappointment.

“Yes, hunt them. Sergeant, get everything ready. We shall ride out at noon. Horses, weapons. All the sec men that can be spared from the ville’s defense. We eat at eleven.”

“The dogs, Lord?”

“Of course, cretin! Make sure they have no food today.”

“The old man and the girl?”

“The old what? Oh, them. Keep them. They can do us no harm. I’ll question the girl tonight. I shall be in the mood.”

“The prisoners?”

“Feed ‘em. We are kind, brother, are we not?” Again Ryan ignored Harvey. “Give ‘em clothes and boots. Keep them locked up and bring them to the drawbridge at eleven. They shall have an hour’s start. Escort them out to the Oxbow Loop. We’ll hunt them in there. String out a patrol so they can’t break back. This will be…” He hugged himself gleefully.

“No blasters, brother?” Ryan asked.

“Last time you gave me this, Ryan,” Harvey spit, touching the puckered scar that deformed his mouth and nose. “A fair trade for your left eye.” He stepped closer to his brother, right shoulder hunched, leg trailing. To Ryan, he resembled a mutated, brilliant-colored spider.

“Give us blades,” J.B. demanded.

“Blades, little man? You might cut yourself.” Close up, Ryan could see from his older brother’s eyes that he floated in a sea of tranks, his ferocious temper spurting through on occasion.

“Scared might find an’ take throat out?” Jak said.

The sergeant raised a fist and moved toward the boy, who dropped into a fighting crouch. Harvey squeaked and cowered back, hands tangled like a praying monk.

Jak’s white face stared menacingly at the sec man. “Not little whelp, bastard,” he hissed. “Not forget.” He beckoned to the tall officer, fingers waving softly like the fronds of a virulent sea anemone. The sergeant stopped, hesitating, looking to the baron for orders.

“Leave…him,” Harvey stammered. “He can…he is… Why not a knife each? One hunting dagger for each man, and for the redhead witch.”

Ryan dropped a deep bow to his brother. “One knife against all your men and dogs. Still the white-bellied coward, brother.”

“I could have you all torn and burned,” Harvey Cawdor protested, his voice a petulant squeak.

“That would show your fear even better, fool,” Rachel whispered. “Close your mouth and let us go to our rooms. I have…” The sentence dangled in the dusty dawn light of the long, vaulted hall.

To have a knife was better than anything Ryan Cawdor could have hoped for.

He’d sensed a new spring in the steps of his three friends. J.B. nodded to him almost imperceptibly as they parted company in the upper corridor. Jak whistled a song Ryan had heard before, something about feeling on fire. And Krysty recovered from the horror of the dark night that had seared her soul. She almost glowed as she walked away from the hall. To be burned alive had faced them all. Now they had a chance.

Four blades against thirty or so men who had M-16s, horses and dogs.

That was their chance.

The Trader used to say that if you found yourself with no hope, or odds of a million to one, you took the long odds.

“Long odds,” Ryan said to himself as the sec men slammed the door of his room, having chained him once more to the wall.

 

THE MEAL WAS SOUP and fresh bread. Good soup, rich with vegetables. And half a loaf, still warm on the outside, sweet and crumbling on the inside. They freed his hands to eat but left the chain around his neck.

One of the guards stared curiously at him. “You’re truly Lord Ryan Cawdor, aren’t you? My father spoke well about you until his death.”

“It was speaking well cost him his life,” the other young sec man mumbled. “Baron set him waltzing on air on the river road, these five years past.”

“If Harvey is such a blood-eyed chiller, why not rise against him?” Ryan asked.

“Would you swallow the barrel of a blaster? First man to say treason dies. And then the second. The baron is careful and ruthless. It would take a great rising and his death. And his lady’s.”

The sec man was nudged by his friend. “Enough. Too much. Lock him again and let’s get out of here ‘fore we do the oxyjean jig like your father did.”

Ryan could just see the edge of the rising sun through the window. His guess was that it was around eleven o’clock. The sky was a light blue-green, tinted with flecks of orange cloud. Far below him he could hear the excited yapping of the hunting dogs, sensing that they were to be set free on a hunt. Ryan closed his eye and tried to relax, but the sound of the door opening disturbed him.

Oddly he wasn’t all that surprised to see that his visitor was Lady Rachel Cawdor.

She stepped toward him, eyes bright in the sunlit room. The lady had obviously been enjoying several lines of jolt, and her whole body seemed to tremble with an eager anticipation.

“Your life is measured in short hours, brother-in-law,” she said.

Ryan nodded, wondering why she had come yet again to see him.

“Don’t you realize you’re going to die?” she asked, drawing nearer to him.

“We all are,” he replied.

Rachel sighed. “If we could… But that’s all water under the mill. You’re twenty times the man your brother… that blubbering pile of lard… It can still be done. I can have him done to death. Half the ville would dance on his grave.”

“Replace him with me?” Ryan asked. “The long chill is sweet compared to that.”

“But now Jabez has been taken by… By who, Ryan? Not wizards. Tell me how it was done. Where is the boy’s corpse?”

“Hell, bitch. I hope.”

She nodded slowly. “You and I could rule the Shens and beyond, Ryan. I picked wrong with Harvey. And now he… I came for a last chance for you. Will you join me?”

“If I’m going’t‘die before dark, then I can go with that. It’s paying the price to live with yourself on your own terms. Not something a murderous slut like you can understand. Just fuck off, and leave me be, Rachel.”

“You scorn the chance to be one of the lords of life, Ryan. Then I leave you—”

A line of verse came back to Ryan that Doc was fond of using: “To the pleasure of my high vices, that I’ll have to pay for at higher prices.”

“You think dying in the jaws of his dogs is going to be funny, you double-stupe? I wish I could ride to watch, but Harvey’ll take his funning, then come back for the yellow-head girl in the cells. And life, Ryan Cawdor, will go on.”

She stooped over him, and he felt the brush of her lips against the stubbled skin of his cheek, as cold as the tomb, her breath carrying the sharp flavor of jolt. Then she straightened and walked quickly to the door. She paused a moment with her hand on the latch, as if she were about to say more, but she turned away without another word and left him alone.

 

Krysty buckled the sheathed knife onto her leather belt.

Jak drew his and tossed it a few times into the air, feeling for its balance before sheathing it at the small of his back.

J.B. tested the edge against the palm of his hand, stooping and pressing the steel against the stones of the courtyard, trying out the tension of the blade.

Ryan also drew the dagger that he’d been given. It had a handle of narrow strips of hide, bound around a steel hilt. The blade was single-edged, very sharp, around eleven inches in length and two inches broad at the haft. It was a workmanlike hunting knife.

He thought that it would probably do.

 

Chapter Twenty-Nine

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THE SUN RODE HIGH in the heavens, its brassy glare beating down pitilessly on the forests and streams of the Shens.

Ryan was the first one out of the rattling cart, jumping down, stretching, feeling the freedom in his shoulders and wrists. His eye was caught by a flicker of movement high in the wrack of lemon-yellow clouds. He stared up at it and saw it was a massive mutie hawk with a wingspan of about twenty feet and a hooked beak that would take the arm off a man.

J.B., Jak and finally Krysty stepped onto the dusty lane. The mounted sec men gazed blank-faced at them, their rifles slung across their shoulders on webbing straps. The sergeant with the damaged mouth was in charge of the patrol, and as they had clattered along from the ville, he told Ryan a little of what to expect.

“Oxbow Loop’s where the baron does his man-hunting. It’s ‘bout two miles across. Be men blocking off this end, so the only way’s in. River’s too fast and wide to swim. Muties on far side, if’n you want to try it. Rain we’ve had’ll make it swollen and twice as fast as usual. Lotta trees in there. Streams. No buildings. One trail to a gas store for the ville’s main generators. Nothing to help. Nobody to help. And nowhere to go. Nowhere. Best time was a breed, coupla years back. Made it for better’n two hours. And killed a dog.” There was a note of grudging admiration in the sec officer’s voice.

Ryan knew his brother would be along with the pack of hounds in about a half hour. And more sec men. Dinner had taken longer than Baron Harvey had anticipated, and the hunt would now begin as soon as the sonorous bell in the tower of Front Royal tolled once for the hour after noon.

 

LORI QUINT LAID BACK on the narrow bed, knees tucked up to her chin, watching a gray-brown spider as it wound its way across the ceiling. She was wondering who that immensely fat man had been who’d appeared for a moment in the doorway, licking his fleshy lips and muttering in a monotonous and obscene whisper. She’d only managed to catch the words “Later, pretty bitch.”

It was more than enough to make her restless and fearful. The sudden booming of the bell in the tower above made her jump and cry out in shock.

 

OUT IN THE DEPTHS of the woods, only four miles from where Ryan and his friends waited, Nathan Freeman also heard the noise of the ville’s bell chiming out the first hour after noon. He wondered where Ryan was and what had happened to the old man and the beautiful girl with hair like summer wheat. A little earlier he’d detected the sound of horses moving on the old Oxbow Road.

The tall young man adjusted the Smith & Wesson Model 39 at his hip and began to walk toward the sweeping bend of the river.

 

BARON HARVEY HAD BEEN assisted into the saddle of his huge stallion while ville servants tucked the silver-and-maroon cloak about his crooked shoulders. The pair of matched Colts were settled snugly on both sides of his belt. His thinning hair was protected from the baking sun by a feathered cap of crimson velvet.

He sat atop his mount, beaming happily and vacuously around his demesne. The pack of crossbred Rottweilers and Dobermans was behind him, moving excitedly, muzzles thrust into the warm air, sniffing. Now that the hunt was close, they made little noise. Their handlers moved among them, occasionally striking out with short-hafted whips to keep them under control.

The tranks the baron had gulped down after his meal, swilling them into his gullet with brandy, kept him afloat in a cherry-red cheery cloud of gentle warmth and happiness.

His son was dead and vanished. His bitch-wife would soon have jolted herself into the grave. There was a pretty little doll with the longest legs waiting in the guardhouse.

And his prodigal brother would soon be ragged flesh and gnawed bones.

“Life is so good,” he said to himself. The bell chimed once, and he gave the signal for the hunting party to move out.

“So good, good, good, good,” he chanted.

 

“TIME,” SAID THE SEC OFFICER, looking toward the distant bell tower.

“Yeah,” Ryan said, leading the others off among the trees.

 

Chapter Thirty

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RYAN CAWDOR FELT fiercely exultant. There was going to be some chilling done, and that was something he was good at. Maybe the thing he was best at. He had three people he could trust with his life, running free in a country that he knew well. And there was a stout blade sheathed in his belt.

He’d read in an old book once—or it might have been in a crumbling vid: If you’re goin’ down, take some of the bastards with yer.

Ryan was a realist, and he knew that long before sundown they would probably all be mangled corpses, dragged behind horses, ready to be shown to the people of the ville.

“So die all traitors.” Something like that.

But right now they were sprinting along a narrow trail, beeches and sycamores on either side, the sound of their feet softened by the carpet of dead leaves. Ryan led the way, followed by Krysty, flaming hair tied back to avoid its catching on branches. Jak came third, his white mane similarly clutched in a length of twine. J.B. jogged easily at the rear. Despite his slight build and age, the Armorer kept himself honed to a critical edge of fitness.

They’d only had a few minutes for a council of war. There had been two simple possibilities: split up or stay together. They had all agreed that their only, razor-slim hope was to keep together.

Ryan remembered the area called the Oxbow Loop. The river was known locally as the Sorrow, on account of the number of times it flooded and took away livestock and homes. And folks.

It was true that nobody could hope to try to get across the Sorrow. She ran at this time of year like a ravaging animal, her course studded with jagged granite boulders that turned the brown flood to scudding foam. With a long, fixed rope from bank to bank, it might be worth the gamble. Set against dying it might be worth it. But without a rope it was a fine way of chilling yourself.

Across the neck of the Oxbow was a strip of trail less than a quarter mile long, with an expanse of stunted bushes and low scrub. With mounted men keeping watch there it would be death to try to cross it.

Krysty had suggested they could hide until dark and then break out. Ryan had shaken his head. They could escape the dogs by going for the trees, but they’d get trapped, and the men would follow the barking of the hounds and pick them off.

“Easier’n fish in a can,” he said.

“What looking for?” Jak panted after they’d gone a half mile into the dense, prickling woods.

“Place to fight and kill us some hounds. Mebbe bring in a sec man or two. Then get us a couple of blasters. Then…?” Ryan hesitated a moment. “Then we’ll see what happens.”

They heard the pack arrive with Baron Harvey Cawdor a little after two hours past noon.

There was a moment of silence, with only cicadas and a few mosquitoes. Then, the second the pack caught the trail of the runaways, there was the spine-freezing sound of hunting dogs in full cry: a belling, endless wailing that rose and fell but never ceased.

“Best draw the blades,” J.B. suggested quietly. “Be needing ‘em soon.”

“Guts or throat with hunting dog,” Jak said.

“Take out a hamstring,” Ryan added.

“Any place we could make a stand?” Krysty asked.

“Places I knew as a kid. No good for this. There’s a small redoubt where some of the ville’s gas is stored. Always double-locked. In any case, you get inside it and they got you.”

The sound of the dogs was already beginning to close in on them with frightening speed.

“Water fuck ‘em,” Jak said, looking to their left where there was a narrow stream meandering gently between low, muddied banks.

“Not these bastards. Mutie bred. Take the scent out of the air as well as the ground.”

“When hounds are on a trail, you can distract them with blood. Any blood’ll turn them,” J.B. suggested.

Ryan nodded, gripping the hilt of his knife. “Yeah. That’s my thinking.”

The Oxbow Loop was a wilderness of tall trees and stunted bushes with patches of deep swamp and tangling willows. There were a few clearings where the sun lanced through with a startling brightness that made you blink at it—and acres of leprous earth where only spear grass grew. Streams divided and subdivided the land. No birds ever seemed to fly above the Oxbow Loop, and no creatures scurried there. Even as a child, Ryan had known it as an eerie place, tainted with death. Renegades had been driven there to die for several generations, and there were handed-down tales of runaway slaves being hunted to their lonely and fearful deaths in the Oxbow Loop during the Civil War.

Ryan led the others at a fast pace, moving to where he’d once had a hiding place, a den where he would come when the bullying of Harvey became too much to bear. Nobody ever found it. Nobody ever tracked him into the wilderness by the Sorrow. He knew that the wind and the rain would have torn down his woven brushwood secret, but the place was good for a stand.

The dogs would split up into smaller hunting units, and the terrain would make it impossible for them to maintain close contact. The biggest and strongest animals would be in the lead, the rest strung out behind them.

Not far from the gas store, where a smaller stream looped in a near-circle, was a steep bank with several stately live oaks nearby, places a man with a knife could turn and dodge and protect his back against a charging dog.

They were nearly there. The howling was very close, so close that they could distinguish the echoing sound of individual animals. One, in particular, was racing ahead, seeming less than a hundred paces from them.

Jak looked at Ryan. “Can hear horse. Sec man?”

“Could be. Wanna go for him?”

The albino boy, face streaked with gray mud, hair plaited with dirt, nodded. “Get blaster. Be help. You take dogs.”

Ryan patted him on the shoulder, watching the lad as he vanished into the undergrowth, wriggling through invisible gaps. Raised in the bayous of Louisiana, this was like home to Jak.

“I’ll take the first one. J.B., you gut the second. Krysty, pick up what’s left. Make it quick and ugly. Put ‘em down and put ‘em out.”

They stood in a loose semicircle, backs against the earth bank, tall trees on either side to give some measure of protection on their flanks.

“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed as the pack leader burst over a rotting stump of a decayed walnut tree.

The fragmented sunlight dappled the animal’s sleek coat like scattered gold. The crossbreed frothed at the muzzle, teeth bared. Its eyes glowed like embers and it howled as it sighted its prey, far louder than the baying sound as it had tracked them down.

“Mine,” Ryan said, taking a half step forward. He didn’t have time to say more.

The dog was enormous, its sides streaked with innumerable old scars. Its muzzle was long and narrow, the jaws wide. The top of its lean head came higher than a man’s waist, and its weight must have been close to 120 pounds.

Dogs like that were trained to go either for the throat or for the genitals. Ryan had seen sec dogs bred to take an intruder’s arm and hold him. Not the Cawdor pack. They were trained only to hunt and to kill.

It went for his groin.

Ryan half turned, protecting his testicles from the foaming teeth. He used the dagger almost like a hammer, ramming it with all his power at the side of the animal’s muscular neck.

In the last fraction of a torn second, the hound tried to avoid the blow, but it was too far committed to its attack. The knife opened up its throat, blood jetting sideways, soaking the dry earth fifteen feet away. The howl died, and the animal jerked and kicked, hooked on the blade like a gaffed salmon. Ryan used the impetus of the rush to push it away, withdrawing the knife, feeling hot blood spurting over his wrist. His thrust had been so deadly that it had penetrated into the chest cavity, and as the dog fell there was blood and air frothing from the cut.

The black beast stumbled forward, muzzle striking the dirt, its hind legs scrabbling to give it purchase to turn and go again at the man. But Ryan was quicker.

He stooped and hamstrung the dog, crippling it, leaving it a whining, helpless thing. It snapped feebly at him as he moved back, but it was no longer a threat.

Even as he straightened, Ryan saw the second, third and fourth hounds come leaping into the small clearing.

J.B. stood straight and calm, waiting until the last second before ducking and turning, hand faster than the eye could follow. He opened up the dog’s belly, spilling its guts in bloody loops, stepping away from the crazed animal as it bit and tore at its own stomach.

Krysty faced a smaller, leaner dog, a sinewy bitch that jumped incredibly high, going for the woman’s exposed throat. Krysty’s reflexes were breathtaking. She stooped, knife held point up, and stabbed the dog through the center of the breastbone, ripping its heart in rags of pumping muscle. The creature tried to twist in the air, teeth meeting with an audible click, but it was dying even before it hit the earth.

Three of the four were down and done in less time than it took to draw a deep breath.

The last of the dogs was a grizzled veteran, seamed along the flanks, one eye staring blankly ahead of it. It hesitated between the three potential victims for its slavering teeth. Krysty was off-balance, and Ryan saw the dog turn to her. He shouted, trying to distract it, drawing its attention to where he stood above the corpse of the chilled pack leader.

It came in on a crabbing, sidling attack, keeping its belly low to the earth, head to one side, watching Ryan through its good eye. In the brief pause Ryan could hear more dogs coming toward them. And the clatter of hooves. Someone was shouting in an enraged, hoarse voice.

“Watch it!” J.B. called out.

The warning wasn’t necessary. This animal wasn’t like those in the first trio. This was a wily campaigner that saw three of its pack dead or dying and a man with a long silver tooth in its hand. It came in, feinting to spring, then snapped at Ryan’s knee. He only just dropped his guard low enough, cutting the dog along its shoulder.

But it was lightning fast, biting at Ryan’s knife hand despite its own wound. The teeth missed, but the muzzle rapped him across the knuckles.

Making him drop the blade.

“Gaia!” Krysty yelled, quickly reversing her own knife to throw it at the dog, but the animal was too close to Ryan to take the risk.

The dog jumped for the throat, jaws gaping, its foul breath making Ryan gag. Its sightless eye rolled skyward, the other fixed on the man’s face with a demonic intent. There wasn’t time to dodge.

As it jumped, he braced himself for the charge, grabbing at the raking front paws, gripping one in his right hand and one in his left. A Tex-Mex puma hunter from down south, near Lubbock, had told him this trick during one long night of drinking.

Ryan had never had the chance to try it before now.

And he was only going to get one chance to try it. Or the crossbred black dog would rip his face off.

With all of his power, Ryan wrenched the animal’s forelegs apart. There was a ghastly sound like splitting a hickory log with a long-handled ax. The hound’s rib cage was burst apart by the savagery of the man’s attack, rupturing its heart and lungs in a single devastating moment. Its head snapped back, and its good eye glazed. The body shuddered as life departed, and Ryan was able to drop the lifeless corpse into the dirt at his feet.

“Nice,” J.B. said admiringly. “Very nice.”

“Thanks, friend.” He stooped to pick up the fallen dagger and grip it ready for the next wave of attacking dogs.

“Getting real close,” Krysty said, stooping to clean her own blade in the dry earth by her boots. “If they all come together, we’ll go down.”

It was undeniably true.

Over the years Ryan had seen a few vids from before the long winters and read some books as well. One or two were adventure stories, where the hero always seemed to have a plan. Right at that moment, Ryan didn’t have any real plan at all.

Kill as many of the dogs as possible. Even take a few sec men along to the chilling. Live for an hour or so before buying the farm yourself.

Wasn’t much of a plan.

Half a dozen of the pack appeared, muzzles foaming, red-eyed, on the edge of the clearing. They were hesitating, cautious, as they scented and then saw the dead dogs. Ryan, Krysty and the Armorer faced them, knives blood-slick and ready, knowing it wouldn’t be easy to hold off so many of the killer animals at once.

“Back-to-back,” Ryan said. “Don’t let ‘em get in behind us.” He paused a moment. “For as long as we bastard can.”

The dogs sniffed uncertainly at the trampled ground, edging closer to their prey. The open space reeked with spilled blood, and it quietened the animals, their howling sinking to low growls. In the woods beyond them, the noise of horsemen and shouting came nearer.

Ryan licked his lips, tasting his own sweat. It wasn’t going to be long now. He was conscious, not for the first time in the past few hours, that he had fled the ville of Front Royal to save his life. Now, within a day or so of his return, after twenty years, he was going to lose it.

A whip cracked, and it seemed to trigger the crossbreeds. Like greyhounds loosed from the slips, they charged simultaneously. Ryan braced himself for the shock of the attack.

The burst of automatic gunfire scattered the dogs in a heap of kicking, biting, mewing flesh. Ryan’s keen ear heard about a dozen rounds, continuous fire. Only one animal escaped the burst, and it turned tail and ran back toward the huntsmen.

“Thanks, Jak,” J.B. shouted, grinning at Ryan and the woman. “One of the M-16s. Once you’ve heard it, you never forget.”

The fourteen-year-old albino boy appeared like a ghost from the thick brush. He held the smoking rifle in his right hand, and his lips were parted in a broad smile.

“Found this in hand of dead sec man. Didn’t want no more.”

“Thanks, Jak,” Ryan said. “Now they know we’ve got a blaster, it’s a different game. They’ll hold the dogs back and press us in toward the river. Trap us there. Spare ammo?”

“No. Bitch, ain’t it?”

Krysty pulled at Ryan’s sleeve. “I can hear them, lover. You’re right. Calling the hounds in. I can hear your brother ‘screaming for sec men to come in after us. No takers. Not with half a mag left in the blaster.”

“Without the dogs, we could…” Ryan checked himself. “No. They’d… Fireblast! Best we got. Follow me.”

“Where?” J.B. asked.

“Gas store,” he threw back over his shoulder as he ran toward the northeast, farther into the Oxbow Loop.

 

“KILLED HOW MANY?”

“A dozen of the bravest dogs, Baron Cawdor. Some with knives, others with Trooper Rogers’s stolen blaster.”

“And he’s chilled by the twisting, turning, whoreson Ryan?”

“Throat opened, my lord,” the sergeant said. He’d known things were going wrong ever since that mumbling dotard had turned up and broken off his rotting tooth. Then the embarrassment of the puppy being splashed all over the main hall of the ville. Now it was going from bad to much, much worse. A dozen hounds butchered. The best of the pack. And signs that the baron was about to slip over the edge into one of his trank-fueled rages.

“They can’t get through to the ville?”

“No, my lord. Every yard across the neck of the land is patrolled. Not even a water rattler could slip by. No, my lord, your brother and his friends are still in the Loop.”

“His traitor friends, Sergeant,” Harvey said, smiling his crooked smile. Sweat was pouring off his lardy face in rivulets, drenching the ornate cloak.

“Traitors, indeed, Baron,” the sec officer agreed. “We got the dogs leashed. Only place they can be is near the gas store, close by the Sorrow’s banks.”

“What if they get in there?”

“Then they never get out. We’ll have ‘em like flies in a bottle. Shall we all lead on after the dogs, my lord?”

“Lead on, bleed on, read on, weed on, bleed on and on.”

The sergeant turned away, face schooled to impassivity from years of working for Baron Harvey Cawdor.

 

THE GAS STORE was a squat, ugly building isolated at the end of a narrow trail that cut off the main road away from the ville. It dated from before the holocaust, but nobody had ever known what its use had been. An old woman once told Ryan that she’d heard from her gran that it had been used for taking and storing ice from the Sorrow, before the turbulent river had been called by that name and before the nuking had upset some of the shifting rocks underpinning the Shens, making the Sorrow the untamed terror it now was.

Trees grew thickly around the store, which measured around thirty feet square. The walls were of stone, held together by crumbling mortar. There was a window at the rear that had been filled in a century before. The door was of iron, secured by a massive padlock, now rusting. Knowing what the price of failure would be, nobody from the ville or the country around would have dared to try to break into the baron’s own store of gasoline. The liquid was stored in metal drums, placed along the inner walls of the building.

One of the greatest necessities in all of Deathlands was gas—for the wags and for powering generators that were generally the sole source of power in most villes. Occasionally a cache would be found hidden in redoubts from before the winters. But this was of superior quality and greatly valued. Most gas came from near the Gulf of Mexico and from places in the high plains country, where it was crudely refined by small, highly armed communities. Front Royal got most of her gas from a ville close to what had once been the border with Canada.

The store held several thousand gallons.

Ryan led them there.

 

Chapter Thirty-One

« ^ »

THE DOOR WAS a little way open, the inside of the gray building—its walls splashed with a sickly lichen—in almost total darkness. The dogs had brought the hunt straight to it, past the mangled corpses of the other hounds. The sergeant had ordered them held back on long leashes, keeping anyone from going near the store until the baron himself arrived to give them his orders.

Any conversation was difficult against the thunderous roar of the Sorrow, pounding its crazed route toward the distant sea.

The sec officer refused anyone the chance of going closer, keeping them back in a skirmishing line at the edge of the clearing. A couple of men held the horses while the rest of the party dismounted and waited, carbines at the ready, for further orders. Eventually Baron Harvey Cawdor came up, swaying in the high-pommeled saddle, humming a tuneless song to himself. With the help of a half-dozen sec troopers he battled his way to the ground, immediately deciding that he wanted to be back on his horse.

“To be able to see better, Sergeant,” he explained in ringing tones.

“Yeah, my lord.” It took several minutes before the grossly fat man was once more in the saddle of the shire stallion.

“We’ve got ‘em caught, eh?” Harvey bellowed, though the sergeant stood patiently waiting right at his stirrup. “Caught?”

“In the gas store. Looks like they shot off the old lock. Or, likely, smashed it with a stone or the butt of the carbine.”

“They’re in there?”

“Must be. Dogs covered both ways and they don’t come out. There’s only the Sorrow behind. Must be in there. If’n you look close, my lord, you see the patch of blue from the ville’s clothes they wore.”

Harvey giggled, rubbing his pudgy hands together, the array of gold rings jingling and clashing. “The end, brother dearest. At last, after so many years and years and years and years and… Get the men to close in.”

“Still got a few rounds left in the blaster, my lord.”

“Can’t kill you all. I’ll wait there.” He pointed behind him to where the screen of trees would protect him from astray bullet.

The sergeant still didn’t quite understand. “Just move in, all together, my lord?”

“Do it. Dogs an’ all. What’s that smell in the air?”

“Gas, my lord.”

“Leaking?”

“Store always smells.”

Harvey wrinkled his scarred nose. “Why not burn them out?”

The sec officer shook his head. “No! No, my lord. There’s enough gas in there to blow away half the Shens. We can…” A thought struck him. “Would you not rather have them taken alive, for the sporting, my lord?”

Harvey began to kick his heels into the ribs of his gigantic horse. “Yes. Good. Have them alive, Sergeant. Alive.”

Nobody was in any hurry to be the first to push open the door of the store, knowing that there were four renegade traitors waiting inside, one of them with a loaded M-16. It was like being first man up a siege ladder.

Most men, given the choice, might prefer that someone else got to be the dead hero.

The sergeant chivvied them on. The dogs were subdued, hanging back, having to be whipped on. The stench of gasoline, combined with the rich scent of blood from the dead animals, was enough to put them off their hunting desire.

There had been no sign of life inside the store. As the sun came and went from behind tattered banks of high-altitude purple chem clouds, the advancing sec men could glimpse the sleeve of a jerkin just visible in the gloom. The baron’s men closed in, ringing the front of the building, glancing nervously at one another, the noise of the Sorrow pounding in their ears like the drumming of the gods. The nearest of them was less than fifteen paces from the door.

Ten paces.

Still no shot. No sign of resistance. The sec men looked back at their sergeant, who waved them on with the barrel of his own carbine. He’d given them the orders to take the four alive, warning them to watch for the knives.

Five paces, and the line held, motionless, nobody eager to take the next few steps.

 

Ryan cradled the stock of the M-16 against his shoulder, just touching the side of his cheek. At such close range there wasn’t any point in using the adjustable rear sight. The selector on the left was pointing straight down between Safe and Auto. It was on Semi, which meant single-shot. Ryan’s finger was on the tapered trigger, hand cradling the pistol grip, his eye lining up the front and back sight, ready. His breathing was slow and regular.

The noise of the Sorrow seemed to fill the inside of his skull.

 

The sergeant looked back over his shoulder. The afternoon was oppressively warm and humid, and he could feel sweat soaking through his uniform at the armpits, across his stomach and the small of his back. Baron Harvey was barely visible, head sticking up above an earth bank, the absurd feathered hat nodding like a child’s toy.

“Why not send the dogs in, Sarge?” one of the troopers asked.

“Because the baron wants to see it happen right in front of his eyes. That’s bastard why, Trooper. Course, you can go and tell him you want to do it your way, if you want? No? Then let’s get to it.” He was shouting at the top of his voice in order to be heard above the river.

The inside of the store was still silent, the rich smell of refined gasoline filling the nostrils. It vaguely crossed the sergeant’s mind that the scent was stronger than usual.

“In!” he yelled, straining his lungs, suddenly finding himself in the lead, nearest the half-open metal door.

 

Ryan had watched the hesitant advance of the overwhelming force of sec men. Apart from a skeleton guard left behind to protect the ville, this was virtually the entire strength of the Front Royal garrison.

He whistled soundlessly between his teeth. A stupid little kids’ song came to him, sticking in his mind. It was something Doc had taught Lori a week or so ago, and the girl had kept singing it, laughing to herself at its absurdity.

“Wop bop a loobop, a wop bam boom,” was all it was, repeated over and over again. Now it clogged Ryan’s brain. His finger was still taut on the trigger of the M-16.

“Wop bop a loobop…”

 

Baron Harvey Cawdor’s skull was awash with tranks so that he drifted in and out of reality. Now he was a teenager, chasing his little brother, Ryan, hunting him through the wilderness of the Oxbow Loop. When he caught him he’d kill him, tell their father it had been an accident. Harvey knew that to kill Ryan was to end his troubles. He smiled to himself, craning his neck to peer over the slope at the gray gas store, now with its entrance packed with dozens of his loyal, steadfast and true followers. Perhaps they would give three rousing cheers for Baron Harvey as they conquered.

“Hurrah, hurrah,” he said to himself.

The sergeant was first in, carbine at his hip, blinking in the darkness. Sec troopers crowded behind him, jostling and pushing.

 

“A wop bam boom,” Ryan hummed, the Sorrow overpowering his own voice.

The sergeant’s feet felt deathly cold. Wet and cold. He tried to look down to see what was wrong, but the crush around him was too great, men and dogs all tangled together in the opening to the small building. The smell was overwhelming.

His eyes swiftly accustomed to the poor light, the sergeant could see the interior of the building. He didn’t believe what he saw. There was a blue jerkin draped over an opened can of gasoline, placed so that it would be just visible to men outside. A dozen of the metal drums had been opened and overturned, the liquid spilled onto the floor. Many of the other large cans had their tops unscrewed and dropped in the dirt.

Apart from that the place was empty. The fugitives weren’t there.

The sec officer opened his mouth to scream out a warning for everyone to get away from the lethal trap.

Thirty yards away, hugging the steep bank of the Sorrow, hidden by its lip, Ryan Cawdor squeezed the trigger of the captured M-16, aiming the round so that it would ricochet and spark off the metal door of the gas store.

His lips moved. “Wop bop a loobop, a wop bam…boom!”

 

Chapter Thirty-Two

« ^ »

IT WAS ONE of the biggest explosions since the world had suffered the megachill of January 2001.

The spark of the 5.56 mm bullet was enough to ignite the massive store of gasoline in the small stone building. The strength of the walls compounded the horror, containing the force of the explosion for a vital fraction of a second, giving it the chance to build to a dreadful proportion.

Ryan flattened his face against the steep bank of the Sorrow, eye closed, hands over his ears, mouth open, taking the classic precautions against an intense blast. Despite everything, he wasn’t prepared for the huge concussion as the store exploded. He was nearly plucked from his perch and dashed into the murderous current of the wide river. Krysty was lower down, as was Jak and J.B., and they were better protected.

None of them witnessed the result of their plan. They didn’t need to see it to know that it had worked.

Worked better than any expectation.

 

For Baron Harvey, it was like witnessing the hammer of the gods.

His pretty cap with its nodding feather was whisked from his head and disappeared forever in the maelstrom of torn air. Heat seared his face, scorching the straggling hair, blistering his scalp. A giant’s fist punched at the baron, striving to knock him from his saddle. But like his enemies he was protected by the bank of earth. Dirt and pebbles scoured at him, tearing the elegant robe across his shoulders. The horse whinnied its terror and whirled about. Fortunately it didn’t rear, for the screaming shards of masonry would have ripped its lord and master to tatters of flesh. With Harvey hanging over its neck, his fingers tangled in its flowing mane, the huge horse began to gallop back along the narrow trail toward the ville.

 

The sergeant had had his mouth open, ready to bellow his warning. He heard the pinging sound of the bullet hitting the door behind him and out of the corner of his eye he noticed the trail of sparks from the contact. But his brain didn’t have time to make the connection, and he died ignorant of his own chilling. The ignition of the gasoline fumes and then the spilled liquid took a lightning moment. And a quarter heartbeat later the opened drums went up, taking everything and everybody with it.

The sec officer’s skull literally exploded, the fumes gushing into his mouth, tearing apart his sinuses, flaming through eyes, ears and nose. His brain boiled instantly, and the bones of his head simply disintegrated under the force.

All but a half-dozen men and a couple of the dogs died instantly.

And they were blinded, naked, hideously burned, their bodies thrown forty yards away in every direction.

 

Ryan, clinging to the living rock for his own life, felt the shock wave pass over him like the beating of the wings of the angel of doom, the heat taking his breath for a moment. The noise drowned out the roaring of the Sorrow, deafening him. The thunder rolled on, diminishing, and then things began to fall around them.

A few large chunks of stone dropped to the ground—edges charred and blackened by the explosion—and several of the twisted drums that had held the gasoline. Ryan looked up, seeing the sky was filled, blotting out the sun. He pointed upward, trying to warn the other three, then shielded his head as best he could. Fortunately the force of the blast carried most of the heavier chunks of granite and metal toward the north loop of the Sorrow.

But smaller lumps of stone, some the size of a baseball, began to thud on the turf and patter in the river. One big as a hen’s egg hit Ryan on the left shoulder, bringing a sharp dart of pain.

A piece of gray metal he recognized as an old flash suppressor from an M-16 landed in the mud of the bank near his left hand. A jagged butt stock off another blaster dug out a gouge in the grass a yard in front of him.

Then came the meat.

You could hardly describe it as being any functioning part of human bodies, or animal. They fell all over them, covering them in a slick coating of sticky crimson dew, with globs of flesh and glittering white bone. Strings of tendon and fragments of dark blue cloth floated in the gentle breeze like falling leaves. An eye bounced just to the left of Jak, but it wasn’t possible to tell if it was human or canine. A right hand, missing the thumb, hit Krysty on the back of her thigh, lying there like a bleeding hairless spider. A whole leg, still attached to part of the hip, thudded heavily into the bank by J.B.’s feet, slithering the last few inches and being instantly whirled away by the scything current of the Sorrow.

Eventually even the bloody mist ceased and a momentary quiet descended. Then a dog began to howl, thin and high like a woman in childbirth. Ryan, ears ringing, squinted over the lip of the bank, wiping blood from his face. He saw the animal, smashed against the trunk of one of the tall trees, one of the trees that had been tall seconds earlier. Now the top fifty feet were gone, torn away, the branches shredded and white from the impact of the gas explosion. The dog, hardly recognizable, was a broken husk of the proud hunting animal that had padded out of the ville. It was blind and broken and close to death. The howling quickly stopped.

Only one of the sec men was still conscious. He had been at the back of the press, saved from instant slaughter by the bodies of his fellows. Now Ryan could see him lying, like a discarded puppet, thrown into the smoldering undergrowth near the trail.

“That’s it,” Ryan said, standing up. He tried to brush himself clean, but found that his hands were covered in blood.

Krysty climbed the steep bank, dusting off her clothes. “Gaia! The smell of gas!” she exclaimed. “The world’s filled with it.”

J.B. was next up. He’d taken the precaution of tucking his fedora into the front of his jerkin, and he pulled it out and beat it on his knee, placing it carefully back on his head. “Worked well,” he said. “Where’s your brother?”

Jak answered him. The boy wore only a thin shirt, having sacrificed his own jacket to help fool the sec men. “Seen fat Harvey. On horse there.” He pointed toward the high earth bank, near where the dying man lay and moaned to himself. “Gone now. Hill would protect him an’ horse.”

Ryan nodded. He, too, had seen his brother’s grotesque hat bobbing above the top of the slope just before he’d squeezed the trigger on the M-16. “Probably halfway back to the ville by now.”

“Where we should be,” the Armorer said, looking down at his hands and clothes. “Be good to wash up some on the way.”

Ryan looked around the stinking shambles. The land was littered with pieces of stone and fragments of twisted metal. And the bushes and torn trees around were draped with what looked like the contents of several butchers’ stores, draggled and dripping.

In all his years with the Trader, which had encompassed much chilling, Ryan had never seen such a totally appalling slaughterhouse.

Jak wandered around, picking his way between the puddles of watery mud and blood. He called out that one or two of the sec men still retained a kind of life. But only the man flung against the bushes was still conscious.

“Lost arm an’ leg!” Jak shouted. “One eye gone. Other leg broke an’ bits o’bone showing.”

Ryan joined the boy and looked down at the remnants of his brother’s soldier. The moaning was low, bubbling through the crimson froth that dribbled from the slack jaws.

“Mum, Mum, want… to bed. Stop, Mum…”

Ryan gently inserted the tip of the M-16’s muzzle between the jagged, chipped teeth. The man closed his lips on it like a babe at the bottle, the moaning stopping. Ryan squeezed the trigger once, feeling the gun buck against his wrist. The impact bounced the sec trooper’s head hard against the earth. The leg kicked and then the body was still.

Ryan straightened. “Nothing to keep us here.”

“We going back to the big house?” Krysty asked.

“That’s where Doc an’ Lori are.” He paused. “And that’s where my brother is. Come this far to settle up the account. Might as well walk the last mile to finish it.”

 

A quarter mile away from the scene of the explosion they found a pool of pure, still water, unsullied by gas or by blood. In turn they knelt and washed away as much of the human detritus as they could. Jak rinsed out his mouth, spitting away the taste of death.

J.B. was stooped on the ground, hands cupped, the others around him, when Krysty suddenly snatched at Ryan’s arm.

“Listen!”

“What?” he asked, swinging around to probe the forest with the carbine.

“Someone there.” Krysty pointed into the deepest part of the undergrowth where Ryan could just make out a dark silhouette. The figure stood, watching them.

Before he could challenge the stranger, the branches of the witch hazel parted and out walked Nathan Freeman, holding his Smith & Wesson.

“The goodest of afternoons, Uncle Ryan,” he said, half bowing. “Would that great explosion be something to do with you?”

The Virginian told them about Doc Tanner and Lori Quint’s abortive attempt to infiltrate the ville, how it had gone wrong and how the word was they were held prisoners in the cells of the guardhouse. Nate also outlined what he had done, waiting for news of Ryan and the others. Hearing of the death hunt, he had followed the killer dogs and sec men.

“I’d decided that I’d try for the baron with this,” he informed them, flourishing the blaster, “if he’d had you all chilled. Then the sky opened yonder.” The young man laughed. “Heard me some chem storms over the Shens. Never nothing like that. Thought the nukes were back again. Then I glimpsed the baron, face like a madman, double-stupe, galloping toward the ville. Streaked with blood and dirt. Thought I’d come see what had been going down with you.”

“They all died,” Ryan said.

“What?” Nathan shook his head. “That can’t be, Uncle.”

“You keep calling me ‘Uncle’ and I’ll start calling you ‘Nephew.’ Understand, Nate?”

“Sure, Ryan, but…all of ‘em? That’s nine tenths of the sec men from the ville.”

“Guess that’s ‘bout right.”

“And Harvey’s driven clear-crazed. That means that anything could be happening back at Front Royal right now.”

Ryan nodded his agreement. “That’s right. Which is why we’re heading there. Back to the ville.” Under his breath, so that only Krysty heard him he added, “Homeward bound.”

 

Chapter Thirty-Three

« ^ »

SEC TROOPER BAKER was in charge of the main gateway into the ville, with young Sec Trooper Lesser as his companion. They were two of the dozen or so guards left behind when Baron Cawdor had ridden out to hunt an hour past noon. They’d watched him go, each man rigidly at attention, carbines at port arms.

The ville was quiet. Word had quickly gotten around the small settlements that surrounded the main house—word that the long-lost Lord Ryan had returned and been captured; word that during the day, he and his companions would become the victims of the hunting pack of crossbred hounds.

It was something over an hour later—neither man was sufficiently high in the rankings of the sec men to merit his own chron—and they were talking quietly about the merits of a two-edged knife against a single blade.

Then the explosion came with a shock wave that fluttered dried leaves on the cobbles leading to the drawbridge, rippling the surface of the filthy moat.

The noise was like a hundred distant peals of thunder collected into one great booming crash.

Baker jumped, nearly dropping his M-16. “May Blessed Ryan save us!” he exclaimed, the words out before he could stop them. But his companion was too startled himself to notice the treasonable utterance bursting from Trooper Baker.

A cloud of smoke gushed straight up. It was dark and oily, and Lesser’s sharp sight picked out black shapes that rose within it and then fell again into the trees. The light breeze tugged at the toppling crown of the smoke, tearing it into ragged streaks of gray. Within a couple of minutes the wind brought the faint smell of gasoline to the two men, overlaid with another scent, oddly familiar, yet elusive. It reminded Lesser of something in the kitchens, but he couldn’t say what.

Neither man knew quite what he should do. The explosion certainly had come from the direction of the Oxbow Loop, where the hunting always took place, and it had been a truly awesome explosion. But what it portended…? That was the question.

Neither man even knew who was supposed to be in charge of the ville. The baron was gone, and he’d taken virtually everyone with him, including the senior sec officer. Lesser wondered, nervously, if one of them ought to go and tell Lady Rachel about the explosion. But that meant going all the way to her suite of rooms and risking her anger if she was sleeping. Or “busy.” And both men knew what “busy” might mean to the Baron’s wife.

So they did nothing.

About half an hour later Baker heard a horse coming toward them at a fast canter from the general direction of the Oxbow Loop Road. And they could hear shouting—a man roaring in a hoarse voice.

With barely a dozen men in the whole ville, there was no question of turning out the guard. All they could do was move cautiously back inside the main gateway, readying their M-16s for whatever might be approaching them.

“It’s the baron,” Lesser said.

“Lost his hat.”

“Cloak’s torn.”

“Gone stark crazy,” Baker suggested, “shouting like that.”

The horse was lathered, rolling from side to side with utter exhaustion, stumbling as it reached the far end of the drawbridge, nearly tipping Harvey Cawdor in to join his son. He hung along the neck, eyes wide and shot with blood, mouth open. It was difficult to make out any words in the harsh raging.

“Nevermore… all… all fucked. My brother comes and—”

Once inside the courtyard, Baron Harvey Cawdor slithered from the saddle and fell to the cold stones, lying on his face, weeping. The two sec men were joined by two more from the guardhouse.

“Bastard smell of gasoline,” one said.

“And he’s drenched in blood,” Lesser observed.

“Where’s the others, my lord?” Trooper Baker asked. “They coming, my lord?”

Harvey turned, and they all took an involuntary step backward. The face they saw was scarcely human. The eyes were frozen, the pupils like the pricks of a needle. The color had gone completely, and there were deep furrows etched around mouth, nose and eyes. Hundreds of tiny specks of crusted blood dotted his cheeks, matting the scorched hair. His whole body trembled.

“Coming? Who? Brother Ryan? Nevermore. Never ever more more.”

“Where’s the rest of the men and the dogs, my lord?” Baker asked, showing amazing courage to press the madman. Or incredible foolishness.

Lesser went back on the drawbridge, shading his eyes with his hand. The wind had freshened, veering to the east, with the promise of colder weather and some rain within the next day or so. The roads all around the ville were deserted. “Nobody coming,” he called. “Not a sight of ‘em.”

“The rest?” Baker repeated.

Harvey Cawdor rose to his feet, drawing the remnants of his tattered dignity around him. “The rest, my good fellow, is gone. Are gone. Chilled. Blown to a better place or world or whatever. Each dog and each horse and each man are here, in my face.” He rubbed at the congealed blood. “Each spot a life. And all chilled by my brother. I think he will be here shortly. So keep good watch.” He clapped Baker on the shoulder and then kissed him on the cheek, turning on his heel and waddling crookedly away into the main body of the great ville.

Baker gathered together the remaining sec men, talking in whispers of what had happened. Their lord was utterly insane. His wife a jolt junkie and his son disappeared in a bloody mist. All of their fellows were slain in some gigantic explosion, and the ville was surrounded by hundreds of villagers, all waiting for the moment to rise against Front Royal and take their vengeance for the years of bloody oppression. And that vengeance would also spill against the sec men who’d helped the Cawdors keep their hold on that part of the Shens.

“And Lord Ryan will come…” Lesser said. “And he will hold us for…” The sentence trailed away into the late afternoon sunshine.

It took only four or five minutes for the dozen sec men to reach their decision. Within fifteen minutes they had gone and changed into civilian clothes, out of the ville’s hated uniforms, making their way by ones and twos into the surrounding woods.

Most were recognized and murdered before they’d gone five miles.

 

RACHEL CAWDOR MET her husband in one of the maze of corridors that wound through the upper floors of the rambling house. She had woken from her drug-frozen sleep, calling for her servants, finding the ville was inexplicably deserted. The air carried the taint of roasted meat and gasoline. In the silence she began to wonder whether the jolt had finally scrambled her brains and transported her to some different world, familiar, yet oddly altered in detail.

Then she met Harvey, and the feeling of alienation intensified. His eyes stared at her, bloodshot and blank. There were spots of mud all over him, and his hair and eyebrows were grizzled to stubble. His clothes were torn and stained, hanging from his limping body like an ill-fitting and ornate shroud.

“Where’s everyone? What’s happened? Tell me, damn you!”

“Dead, my dearest dove,” he said in the hushed tones you might associate with some great church.

“Dead? Ryan and the others? All the prisoners dead?”

He smiled with a surpassing gentleness, frightening Rachel more than any rage might. “No, my pearl of the Orient. I think they all live. It is us who are chilled. Chilled forever more, nevermore.”

She shook her head, feeling a band of icy steel tightening around her temples. “If Ryan and the others live, then who is dead? And where are…?”

Harvey nodded to her, still smiling. “He is clever, my little brother. Led us on and in and then… Boom!” He clapped his chubby hands together. “Boom. They all died at once. It was wonderful. Fire and noise, and they were gone. More witchery, like Jabez.”

“All dead!” she screamed, voice like a saw cutting across sheet glass. “Then we are lost? Everyone’s gone off and left us to die! It’s your fucking brother. Why didn’t you give him to me to kill? You fool…”

Her hand went to the dagger at her belt, wanting nothing more than to slit the flabby throat of her husband and then run and run.

From the basement, they could both hear the hideous cacophony of the wild boars, upset by the scent of death that filled the Shens.

“At least the old man and the yellowhead still live,” she screeched. “I can butcher them. Then we must go.”

“Go? Where? Here’s home. I’m home now, my sweet child. Ally, ally oxen free. Home and safe. I shall soon… The yellowhead girl? I had forgot her. Before I… I shall go and…”

The knife was out, flashing through the air. With a deceptive speed, Harvey batted it away from his neck. Bunching his ringed fist, he smashed it into his wife’s face with a casual ferocity that sent her spilling to the stone flags, blood seeping from her mouth, a livid bruise springing to her cheek.

“The yellowhead,” he said, turning away from his unconscious wife as though he’d already forgotten her.

 

DOC TANNER SLEPT CONTENTEDLY on the bunk, lying flat on his back, hands folded on his chest like a crusader resting in a cathedral vault. The explosion had hardly ruffled him. Lori had called out to ask him what it had been, and he had mumbled some reassurance before sliding again into a dreamless sleep.

Lori was also lying on her bunk, wishing that she was in bed with Doc, wanting him to cuddle her and do the nice, gentle things that made her feel all squirmy inside.

“Wop bop a loobop, a wop bam boom,” she hummed to herself, repeating the nonsense verse over and over, like a mantra, lulling herself with it. The girl wondered how long it would be before they were released. It was getting really boring in the little stone room with the barred window. She stood up and looked out, seeing that the afternoon was wearing on. “Wop bop…”

She turned at the sound of the cell door grating open.

“Hi, there, yellowhead. Having a nice day?” Baron Harvey Cawdor asked.

 

“LOOKS DESERTED,” J.B. said, squinting through the screen of trees at the ocher walls of the ville. There was nobody in sight, not a single guard on the ramparts or on the drawbridge.

“Trap?” Jak suggested.

Ryan turned to Krysty, raising an eyebrow in a silent question. She shook her head. “I can hear those bastard pigs he breeds. Nothing else. Feels empty to me, lover.”

“Me, too,” he agreed. “Nathan? You ever know it with no sec men showing?”

“No. Never. Baron doesn’t sleep well o’nights. Fears death. If he came back here, he’d have the bridge up and blasters everywhere. I think…” He stopped, hesitating.

“What, Nate?” Ryan asked.

“If’n I didn’t know better, I’d figure they’ve all done a runner on him. Heard of the massacre and fucked off. That’s my guess.”

“One way to find out,” Ryan said. “I can’t figure it for a trap. No reason. Let’s go see.”

 

DOC TANNER CLUNG to the bars, terrified that he might faint. His brain creaked with the effort of trying to do something. He knew the man was hopelessly mad, but he had to find the words that might save Lori.

Harvey stood against the door, his grotesque bulk blocking it. One of his pretty little pistols was in his right hand, pointing at Lori’s stomach. The man was whistling tunelessly to himself, gesturing for her to hurry. His cloak hung open and he had unzipped his hunting breeches, revealing his tiny, budlike penis. Lori had taken off her top, showing her breasts, and she was now, slowly, stepping out of the skirt.

“She is my daughter, Baron Harvey. A child. Can you not spare her?”

“You croak on like some raven, old man. Mebbe I should close your beak,” Harvey sneered, pointing his pistol at Doc’s anxious face.

Lori was naked at last, hands by her sides, making no effort to cover herself from the baron’s stare. His cock was struggling toward a partial erection, and there was a thread of spittle hanging from a corner of his mouth.

“I’ll not…” Doc began, nearly weeping in his helpless frustration.

“Don’t, Doc,” she called out. “Don’t hurting me. I’m used fit. Don’t watch it, Doc.”

Lori was crying.

“Like tears and fears, child.” The baron laughed. “Lie down and spread ‘em.”

“Beware of the teeth,” Doc shouted, voice cracking with emotion.

“Keep her mouth shut. Mebbe fill it later, know what I’m meaning, huh?”

“Not the teeth in her mouth, my lord!”

“How’s that?”

“Shames me to admit it to a great noble like yourself, and you ready to do her honor, but the girl’s a mutie, my lord. Don’t show much. Normal, apart from the teeth in…in her…you know, my lord. Can do fearsome harm to a double-stud in the coupling.”

“Teeth…inside her…in her…teeth in…teeth for… You mean she could bite my cock off with…? You can’t…”

“Try her, my lord,” Doc babbled. “Times they only close a little. But they have razor-sharp points to ‘em and… she can’t help it, my lord. It’s being a mutie.”

Harvey drew back, reaching down to zip himself up again, the gun wavering. “Muties should be shot and killed,” he muttered.

“She is a good girl, my lord.”

“So many dead today,” the baron said, letting himself out of the cell, leaving the key dangling in the lock. Without a backward look he left the guardhouse.

Doc let go of the bars, finding great weals across his palms.

Lori started getting dressed again, unconcerned by what had nearly happened. “Doc?” she asked.

Somehow there wasn’t enough air in the cell for him to answer. So he cleared his throat and tried again. “What is it, child?”

“That about teeth in my… you know?”

“Yes, Lori?”

“Ain’t true, is it?”

Doc laughed, feeling suddenly a great deal better than he had for some time. When he’d finished laughing, he pointed out the key to the blond girl.

 

RYAN LED THE WAY, now only a few paces from the end of the drawbridge. There was still no sign of any threat to them. The ville seemed utterly deserted. Jak was behind him, carrying the M-16. Then came Krysty, followed by Nathan with his blaster in his hand and J.B. with his drawn knife.

The sky was darkening, and the air over the Shens seemed heavy and threatening. The wind rose and fell, driving a whirling column of dust ahead of Ryan’s boots, which collapsed in on itself as it reached the water of the moat.

“See any guards?” Ryan asked. Nobody answered him.

Suddenly, with no warning, there was a figure in the main gateway to the huge house, under the spiked portcullis, a staggering person in burned clothes that shone and glittered. Ryan’s first thought was that he was seeing some monstrously fat, drunk old gaudy whore. Then he saw the two matched Colts pointed at him.

And he realized.

“Harvey!” he shouted.

“Farewell, brother!” Baron Harvey Cawdor bellowed, opening up with both blasters.

 

Chapter Thirty-Four

« ^ »

A SMALL-CALIBER PISTOL—like Harvey Cawdor’s pair of .22 Colts—wasn’t the most accurate of weapons over any kind of distance. And it took a lot of skill and control to hit a target under any kind of pressure.

It didn’t help much if you were stark mad, either.

Ryan dived to the cobbles, hearing the pettish snap of the blasters, bullets kicking off the stones around him. As far as he could tell, none of them went within three yards of him.

The others also took cover from the shooting. Before Nate Freeman or Jak could return the fire, Harvey had dropped one of his guns and darted back into the inner courtyard. He was pursued by Ryan, knife gleaming in his hand.

It was a bizarre chase from the present into the past.

Just inside the main gate, by the guardhouse, Ryan bumped into Doc Tanner and Lori, but there was no time for conversation. Harvey knew the ville like a rat knows its burrow, and Ryan knew he had to keep close if he wasn’t to risk losing him. There was just time to throw a message over his shoulder, for the others to retrieve their own clothes and weapons as swiftly as they could. And to watch out for any ambush.

“Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber.” That was the rhyme that one of the old servants of the ville used to sing to little Ryan to try to lull him into sleep. In his mind’s eye he always saw it literally, imagining himself following the twisting passages and blind corners of the mansion, taking himself inside his own head into every room and staircase of Front Royal. It had been an exercise that had saved his life when he’d had to run for it the night Harvey had come to kill him. Now, all those long years later, the memories were still there, and he followed after his brother like a loping timber wolf after an elk.

His brother had a good head start, slipping through one of the entrance doors to the main body of the house and across the courtyard. Harvey had time to slam the door shut and slide across the bolt. But Ryan knew other ways. It struck him immediately that the ville was deserted. Not only the sec men had fled. Every single person who had served the Cawdors had left. The fires in the kitchens were dying, food prepared but uncooked. Bowls with eggs broken in them stood on scrubbed tables. Piles of washing dripped in the sinks. A cooling iron rested on its stand.

It helped Ryan. When he heard a distant slamming of a door, or feet pattering along a corridor a floor above him, he knew it could only be Harvey. It crossed his mind as he ran silently through his childhood home to wonder where Lady Rachel had gone, guessing she had either run with the pack or lay sleeping off her latest lines of jolt. Probably she had fled the doomed ville.

Once a fluffy white kitten came gamboling from an open doorway, fighting a large ball of yellow wool. Several times Ryan heard the unearthly noise of the wild boars in their cellar pens.

And all the time he drew closer to his brother.

“Closer, brother, closer.”

Once he entered a long room, lined with dull paintings of muddy European rivers, just as Harvey was at its farther end. Ryan dodged back at the waspish snap of the small handgun, hearing the bullet whine into the wall some yards away. It wasn’t likely that Harvey was carrying a spare magazine, and ammo must be running low.

He still had only the dagger to face his brother with. And that was how he wanted it. Face-to-face. Blood spurting hot against his hand. Looking into Harvey’s piggy little eyes as they blanked in death. That would settle the debt.

He heard Krysty calling to him as he passed a third-story window, but he was sprinting toward a closing door and ignored her.

He was within a few paces of Harvey when he was distracted by a door that was gently shutting. He knew it was a dead end where his father had gone to check the accounts of the ville. It had no other exit, and he flattened himself against the wall, glancing around him. Over the entrance to the chamber he recognized the bust of an aristocratic man with a hooked nose. The name was carved into the marble plinth. Pallas. There was no sound from inside the room.

The door began to open, and Ryan tensed, fingers holding the blade low, ready for the classic knife fighter’s upward thrust to the belly. But the door continued to open, and he felt the fresh breeze from the window. The room was dusty and empty.

Harvey climbed toward the top floor, then took the water-operated elevator toward the kitchens, hoping to fool his pursuer. Ryan heard the familiar creaking noise of the ropes, cables and gears and darted to a spinning staircase with narrow, worn treads. He was within two turns of the bottom when he heard the grille of the elevator slamming shut.

Now the noise of the boars was much louder.

“The night’s come and the land’s dark,” an eldritch voice shrieked from somewhere ahead of Ryan, beyond the storage rooms that fed the kitchens. Harvey was going ever deeper, singing to himself in a wild, cracked voice.

There were other knives and axes in the kitchens, and Ryan considered getting a better weapon, electing in the end to stick with the hunting dagger that felt right to his hand.

Now Ryan knew where his brother was going. The passage was damp, the walls slick with moisture. A ramp led up to the right, slippery with wet mud and animal droppings. It went in a great winding bend to come out in the courtyard and was the way that the boars were brought in and out of the ville. The sound of the ravening creatures was stifling.

And Ryan remembered. On the occasions that his oldest brother Morgan had stood up for him against the bullying of Harvey, the middle brother had often gone cowering into the bowels of the ville, where he fled now.

Twice more he glimpsed the scurrying shape ahead of him, and once Harvey turned and fired the pistol at him. Ryan ducked back, bullets sparking off the walls. He listened until he heard the familiar click of a hammer falling on a spent cartridge.

“No more bullets, brother!” he shouted, feeling his whole body racing with tension and the anticipation of pleasure.

There was one more doorway.

It stood ajar and Ryan, ever-cautious, eased himself through it. His nostrils filled with the ammoniac stench of the pigs, his ears bombarded with their squealing.

Harvey had made changes down there since Ryan had lived in the ville. The boars were milling together in a circular pit, a barred door at the bottom showing how they were moved. The sides were of slimy granite, fifteen feet high. A balcony, six feet wide, ran around the top of the pit, with a low wall as its parapet: Harvey and any of his guests who wished to could come and admire the creatures from a position of safety. Apart from the entrance door where Ryan waited, accustoming his eye to the dim light, there was no other way out.

Except into the boar pit.

“You’re dead, Ryan! Been dead for twenty years! Go back to the grave, Ryan!”

“Gonna kill you, brother,” Ryan called out.

He could make out Harvey now, on the far side of the room, wrapped in the tattered cloak, holding the empty pistol. His face was in deep shadow, only the eyes gleaming like tiny chips of molten gold.

Ryan glanced down into the pit, seeing better than a dozen of the animals jostling one another, all of them looking up at him. They were at least five feet tall at the shoulder, weighing several hundred pounds. They all had ruby eyes, and curling ivory tusks that ended in needle points.

Now, in a way that sent a chill down his spine, they stopped their squealing, and the basement pit fell silent, except for the shuffling of their hooves in the wet straw.

“This is the end, brother,” Ryan shouted, holding the dagger up as though it were a holy relic. “Gonna cut your throat with this.”

“No, never, no, my dear little brother.” Harvey’s voice was calm and gentle. Ryan recognized the style. Harvey had used it when he was attempting to fool Ryan into something, or trying to con him. Or when he had some unsuspected trick up his sleeve.

“All these years, Harvey, and now it’s you and me. Like I dreamed, hundreds o’nights. At last I can do it and get on with living.”

Harvey moved from behind a pillar, aiming the handgun at Ryan. “Got a fresh mag for the blaster, brother. Never thought of that, did you?”

“Bluffing, Harvey.”

The obese figure clambered clumsily onto the parapet, waving down to the watching, motionless boars. “See, my pets,” he called. “I shall shoot this one-eyed renegade from the shadows and then you shall have his corpse for food.”

Ryan stood where he was, watching Harvey’s insane posturing. The knife was nicely balanced, and the range was short enough, but he wanted to feel his brother sweat as the blade sliced open the soft flesh and drew out his life.

Somewhere above them they both heard the sound of feet and a voice calling out. “My sec men, brother.” Harvey Cawdor beamed.

“No. Fireblast! Can’t you fucking see the truth, Harvey? It’s done and finished. Your power’s gone. The ville’s empty. They’ve all gone. There’s nothing left for you.”

“Nothing left?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, there is, Ryan. There’s this!”

The little gun flashed, and Ryan staggered back, feeling the fiery pain in his left shoulder. Even a small-caliber gun like the .22 packed enough of a punch to knock a man off-balance. Harvey laughed delightedly, seeing blood flowing on the jerkin.

“And again, brother,” he said.

Ryan threw the hunting dagger underhand, seeing the lamplight catch the blade as it spun in the fetid air. Despite his own wound, Ryan’s aim with the knife was deadly accurate.

It thunked home where Harvey’s rippling chins melted down into the top of his chest, burying itself deep in the soft flesh. Harvey Cawdor squeaked in shock, dropping the Colt from numbed fingers, watching as it fell into the pit. He leaned forward, swaying, his vast bulk making it hard for him to keep his balance on the shallow wall.

“May you die of nuke rot,” he said in a reasonable, conversational sort of voice.

Then, as though he’d given up on the struggle, he fell heavily into the pit, landing with the clear crack of breaking bones.

Ryan, holding his shoulder, feeling that it was only a minor wound, looked down into the semidarkness. His hands told him that the bullet had gone clear through without hitting the scapula or the collarbone. He felt dizzy for a moment, but knew he was going to be all right.

Below him the last rites were swift and deadly for Harvey Cawdor.

Both ankles broken by his fall, the gross man lay there on his back like some obscene insect, his rich cloak spread around him in the straw. His mouth opened and closed, but no sounds came from it. One hand touched the taped hilt of the knife where it protruded from his chest, but Harvey made no attempt to withdraw it. The great boars had eased away from the thing that had come crashing down into their pit, but now they were gathering courage, shuffling nearer, snouts lowered, jaws gaping.

Ryan watched, leaning on the wall, flexing the fingers of his left hand to make sure the bullet hadn’t severed any ligaments or tendons on its way through. Apart from a dull ache, it didn’t feel too bad.

One of the great brooding heads dipped, and the teeth closed on Harvey Cawdor’s right leg between knee and ankle. There was the savage crunch of gnawed bone, and the man screamed, a terrified cry of gut-deep anguish.

“Brother… help me!”

The sudden noise disturbed the rest of the tusked monsters, and they all seemed to attack at once. The bloated body vanished under the bristled boars, and the last scream was muted and silenced, ending in a dreadful gagging, bubbling noise. Then there was only the grinding of teeth and the rending of meat.

Ryan straightened and heard the voice from behind him, a dull, flat voice that seemed bereft of any life.

“Now you can join your brother, Ryan. Jump in after him.”

He turned and looked into the meltwater eyes of Lady Rachel Cawdor. She was holding the lethal dart gun that had once belonged to her son, and it was aimed at Ryan’s stomach.

 

Chapter Thirty-Five

« ^ »

THE DART GUNS HAD originally been manufactured by an armament firm with government contacts operating out of a guarded sec complex east of Butte, Montana. Not many of them were still around. Ryan had only seen a dozen or so in his life, mostly out west in the deserts and lagoons of what had once been called California.

They used a tiny explosive charge and held a half-dozen or so darts, a half inch long, barbed and made from the finest surgical steel. They tumbled on impact, for maximum impact, and were lethally difficult to locate and remove.

Rachel had been bleeding, and there was blood crusted around her mouth. Her face also bore the clear imprint of a ringed fist. The eyes were venomous with hatred for Ryan. She wore a long black dress that dragged on the floor, hiding her dainty feet. The stiletto was sheathed at her belt. The bag that she normally carried was missing.

Her voice was quiet and gentle, difficult to hear above the crunching of bones from the pit below them, but loud enough for Ryan to hear every word.

“I offered you the chance, didn’t I? Now see what you’ve done. Harvey dead. Jabez, sweet child, dead. The ville ruined and everyone gone. All by the return of a middle-aged, one-eyed double-poor hired killer. You, Ryan.”

“Aw, it weren’t nothing, lady,” he replied, grinning wolfishly. “Anyone would have done the same if’n they’d had the chance.”

“I’m going, as well. I have my jewels packed. My favorite mare is in the stables, saddled and ready. She can outrun anything in the Shens. By sundown I’ll be forty miles south of here.”

“I thought you could run from your past,” he said, feeling warm blood easing itself stickily down the side of his chest. “I ran for twenty years. In the end, I find I’d run clear back to where I’d started. You can’t run from what you’ve done.”

“Watch me, Ryan.” A ghost of a smile flitted at the corners of her bloodless lips.

“You won’t even get out of the ville.”

“You won’t even know, Ryan. Because you’ll be dead with a gutful of steel darts. And I shall look back and enjoy watching you kicking at my feet. I shall remember that…” she concluded, leveling the gun, finger tightening on the flat, broad trigger.

“Nevermore,” Doc Tanner said, squeezing the trigger of his beloved antique Le Mat pistol.

The blast of the .63-caliber scattergun damned near blew Rachel Cawdor’s head clear off her narrow shoulders.

Ryan ducked away from the devastating noise and power of the old handgun, but he was splashed with blood and brains. The noise stopped the boars at their feeding for a few seconds. Then they resumed dining on the ragged body of the baron of Front Royal.

Rachel’s corpse slipped untidily to the stone floor of the balcony, the dart gun still held in her right hand. Powder smoke hung in the cool air of the pit, and the stench of cordite was heavy in the nostrils.

“Just before being trawled forward by Project Cerberus, I worked in a laboratory with an elderly English geneticist,” Doc said, holstering his blaster. “At the end of each working shift he would fold away his coat and say, ‘And that, gentlemen, concludes the entertainment for today.’ I think, my dear Ryan, this concludes our entertainment for today.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

 

IT WAS RAINING HEAVILY.

Evening had come early to the Shens, borne in on the teeth of a rising wind and the threat of a severe chem storm sweeping from the blue-ridged mountains to the north and west of Front Royal. Ryan and his friends regained their own weapons and clothes, then found ample food in the empty kitchens. None of the local villagers came near the fortress that first night of freedom from the oppression of Baron Harvey Cawdor.

In the abandoned palace it was easy for Ryan and Krysty to find an empty bedroom for themselves for the night. There was some wine from a crusted green bottle that Doc found in one of the old cellars. Called Château-neuf-du-Pape, it was a delicious soft red wine that lay like a silk ribbon on the palate. There were words on the dusty cobwebbed label that Krysty said she thought were French.

They made love with an infinitely gentle slowness, relishing each other’s body, doing for each other the things they knew would give limitless delight. Afterward Ryan lay with his head cradled on Krysty’s stomach, one hand stroking her breasts. The shoulder wound had been thoroughly cleansed and bandaged, and the pain had now abated to a steady throbbing. Nothing vital had been harmed by the .22, and he knew from previous experience that he would be as good as new within a week or so.

“Decision time, lover,” she said.

“Stay or go, you mean?”

“You’ve done what you came for. Revenged your brother, Morgan, and cleared out the stables. Now you can take over.”

“I know.”

“Nobody’d say a word ‘gainst it. I’d stay here. Mebbe Doc and Lori would stay on.”

“Not J.B. or the kid?”

She shook her head. “Some men need to keep on moving. Can’t stay still. Both of them.”

Ryan sat up and pulled the sheets around him against the chill of night. “What ‘bout me, Krysty? Can I stay here for the rest of my life? Do I want that? Step into Harvey’s shoes? Live as baron of Front Royal?”

She reached out and laid her hand against his face. “If you want to, Ryan. That’s the only reason. It’s there for you. That’s what we came for—to give you the peace of mind from knowing. Twenty years wondering. Now you know. Gaia, lover! Inside your head you must know what you want to do!”

Ryan knew she was right.

 

THE HEADS AND OLD MEN and women from all the hamlets within the control of Front Royal ville had been sent for and brought in. It took four days, by which time the place was back and running, with most of the servants returning to their old jobs. But there were no new sec men appointed. Ryan had made it clear he wouldn’t agree to that.

He made a long speech—the first he’d ever undertaken—and told the listeners what was going to happen.

When he spoke of the ville existing for the good of all, there were scattered cheers.

But his announcement that he and his friends were moving on and leaving Nathan Freeman, now called Cawdor, as the baron of Front Royal was greeted with a stunned dismay.

“Why him, Lord Cawdor?” called out a toothless old crone in the front row, leaning on a blackthorn staff.

“Because he is the son of my oldest brother, Morgan Cawdor, murdered by Harvey. He is baron by right and by succession. I name Nathan Freeman as my own heir to Front Royal.”

So Nathan, son of Morgan Cawdor and the mutie girl Guenema, was duly installed as the baron of Front Royal in Virginia, controlling the lands and woods for many miles around.

 

Chapter Thirty-Six

« ^

THE BATTERED WAG that had brought them so many miles south was brought in and refueled from one of the other gas stores that serviced the ville. The six friends were once more dressed in their own clothes and carrying their own weapons. Nathan had asked Ryan if he wished for something from his old home to carry with him.

“I’ve carried this place with me for twenty years, Nate. Now I’m finally free of it.”

There had been no discussion between them as to where they should go. All of them wanted to take the long road north, back to the hidden gateway up on the Mohawk.

Jak engaged the gears, and the big wag lumbered off, its engine and exhaust fixed. It was a fine sunny day, and they had the ports and ob-slits open. Ryan hung on the main door, staring back as the ville disappeared behind them. He had one arm around Krysty, the other hugging his Heckler & Koch G-12 caseless blaster.

“Glad you came, lover?” she asked him. It was difficult to hear above the rumbling of the powerful wag, and she had to repeat the question. “Are you glad you came back, lover?”

“Yeah. Paid all the debts. Laid it all to rest. Now we can move on again.”

They held each other tight as the wag moved steadily away north.

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