by James Axler
"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
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 R
yan 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.
