Homeward Bound

Chapter Twenty-Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not much," he muttered to himself.

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

"Baron and Lady Rachel eat at six," he said. "You'll be ready."

"I'm not going anywhere," Ryan replied.

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

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

Or Lady Rachel did.

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

The door opened at five to six.

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

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

"I'd kill you," Ryan replied, voice quiet and neutral.

"You reckon?"

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

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

"I'll wait."

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

"Not a threat. It's a promise. One day you'll learn the difference."

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

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

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

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

"No elec?" Krysty asked. "Must have."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The chair to the left of the baron remained empty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah, Baron Cawdor."

"Dreck," whispered Jak Lauren. "Eaten better from a double-poor swampie's chuck-out pile."

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

"Good food, my lady," he replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good, my lady?" Ryan asked politely.

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

"And we know how much you enjoy death, don't we, dearest mother?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And you have lost an eye. How careless."

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

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

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

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

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

"A rabbit, Master Thursby?"

"You're well informed."

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

"Yeah."

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

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

"What'll you do, Father?" Jabez asked. "Thursby the killer and his friends are listening."

"They can leave after breaking their fasts tomorrow morning. I'm bored with 'em. Hear me, Thursby? You can go tomorrow."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Your hair is the most beautiful hair I've ever seen. So soft and... Aaaaarrrggghhh!"

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

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

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