it seemed that there was no retreat now, and no choice but to put on a good

face

and go along with all the nonsense.

It seemed grotesquely inappropriate to Royce to be playing at such glorified

schoolboy games the day after his youngest son had been found murdered, and

he

regretted his decision to come. He wanted to leave immediately, but as if

Jeremy

had expected just such a reaction, he had promptly disappeared the moment

they'd

entered the great hall.

The spacious, two-story-high great hall of the castle bore only a superficial

resemblance to what the interior of an actual medieval castle must have

looked

like, with huge, beamed wooden ceilings—graced with large, very unmedieval

chandeliers—and an arched cross wall dividing the room. Colorful tapestries

hung

upon the stone walls, as well as emblazoned shields with broadswords, spears,

and battle-axes crossed behind them. Torches set in iron sconces shaped like

gargoyle heads with crystalline eyes blazed upon the walls.

There was a raised dais at the end of the hall, where the lord was meant to

hold

court, but instead of a lord and his retinue seated at a table, there was a

five-man band wailing away, complete with a thaumaturgic light show

orchestrated

by the band's effects adept. Multicolored explosions blossomed in midair like

orchids, flowing into graphically sexual Rorschach images that shifted in

time

to the driving tempo of the bass line and then burst apart into flurries of

strobing moths and butterflies or multicolored insects with prism-glass wings

and carapaces.

Elaborate stained-glass windows set high up in the walls depicted Dionysian

scenes of a shockingly blasphemous nature, and hidden diffraction laser

lighting

augmented the illumination from the torches, making it appear as if a heat

storm

had erupted within the hall. Shadowy figures dressed in a cacophony of

neo-medieval and renaissance punk styles gyrated on the floor, and other

groups

congregated around the several bars that had been set up at the sides of the

hall. Royce groaned inwardly. It was just the sort of thing he'd been afraid

of.

He felt about as out of place as an archbishop at a Black Mass.

He fled back out through the heavy iron-studded wooden doors to the entrance

hall and out into the garden, where he took a deep breath of the cool night

air.

"Excuse me," said a low, feminine voice behind him, "I don't mean to intrude,

but you looked as though you could use one of these."

Royce turned to see a stunning-looking young woman standing just behind him,

holding a goblet in each hand. She had raven-black hair held back by a thin,

hammered-gold circlet, and a lush figure draped in a long, clinging white

gown

with a thin gold cord worn loosely as a girdle around her waist. She looked