by James Axler
They sat side by side, on the bank of the narrow, twisting river. Nathan had said that it didn't have a name. It was just "the river." That was all it had ever been. As there was only the one, it didn't need to be called anything.
The water gurgled over round moss-green stones, forming small pools where delicate silverfish weaved and darted. Ryan watched them, leaning back against the sun-warmed bole of a toppled beech tree.
"Good feeling, Nate," he said.
"Not many of those within a country mile of Front Royal and the Cawdors. Father, mother and devil brat."
"Tell me a bit 'bout the ville and the Cawdors. I don't know this region well."
"Don't you, Master Thursby?" Freeman asked with an odd insistency. "Sure 'bout that, are you?"
"Course. You lived here all your life?"
"Yeah. Father was a local man. My mother came to Shersville when I was around three years old. Never rightly found where we'd been till then. Traveling some was all she'd tell me. Died when I was still a boy. Neighbors raised me."
"The Cawdors?"
"Run the ville since the long winter, so the oldsters say. Old baron died around twenty years back. Whispers tell of his being choked by Lady Rachel. But…" He allowed the sentence to drift off into silence. "There were three brothers. One good, one bad and one… one that just up and vanished, Master Thursby. He was… I'll come to him last. There was Morgan, who was everything good. Murdered by Harvey, who now runs the ville, who's every evil you could set your mind to. A gross and perverted bastard who shadows the earth he waddles over. Married to slut Rachel. One son, Jabez Pendragon Cawdor. Has every stinking, rotten part of both his parents in him. I can't… There aren't words for someone like him."
"The other brother?"
"Ryan Cawdor. Fifteen when he disappeared. Word was of an attempt on his life. That left him… Swift and vengeful boy, they say. Some think him rotting in the moat, like many another. But a lot of honest folks still think that one day he'll come riding in from the west on a stallion of pure white. He'll slaughter the Cawdors, take back the ville and the sunshine days will come again to all in the Shens. What d'you think of that, Master…Thursby?"
This time the hesitation was plain.
"What do you think about this missing brother, Master…Freeman?" Ryan dragged the pause out even longer.
"I think that I believe some things and not others. You know?"
"What?"
"I believe he escaped. I believe he lives. I don't believe in the dreck about a white stallion or a blaster that fires golden ammo. No!"
"I heard a tale, Master Freeman."
"Tell me." The young man picked up a handful of dried cones from a nearby pine tree and flicked them underhanded into the water, staring after them as they bobbed and leaped through the shallows and falls of the narrow river. He kept his face turned away from Ryan.
"Morgan Cawdor, they say, had a woman, and the woman bore a child after the death of her husband. Murdered, we agree, by Harvey. A son, I heard. The mother was mutie."
"She was…" the young man began, pale face flushing, dark eyes glaring. He threw the rest of the cones into the water with a barely controlled viciousness.
"She was what? I heard she was a woman with the power of seeing. If there had been a son, could he have inherited that?" He waited a moment, then answered his own question. "Perhaps."
"They say that Ryan Cawdor was desperate wounded when he fled the ville."
"Do they?"
"They say that a blade from Harvey's fist took out an eye, neat as a stone from a ripe plum—so they say—and opened a cut that ran from eye to mouth along the right side of the boy's cheek."
Then he turned and looked straight into Ryan's good eye, a fierce intensity in his glittering black eyes.
Neither man spoke for several heart-stopping seconds.
The moment broke into shards of crystal time as a voice wafted to them from the trail that led to the village.
"Nate? You there?"
"Yeah."
"Seen Tom?"
"No. Saw him late last night. Not this morning. Why d'you…?"
"Missing. Horse gone an' all."
Ryan felt the short hairs rising on the back of his neck— the familiar warning of imminent danger. Sitting close to the young man, he was aware of Nathan's whole body tensing and stiffening. His mouth hung open, and the breath hissed through the man's teeth.
"We've—"
"I heard it," Ryan interrupted.
"The horse? The bastard's gone to the ville."
There was a cold horror in Nathan's voice and blank, shocked face.
"Couple of hours after midnight. Listened. Didn't hear anything more."
Freeman stood up, uncoiling with an easy grace. "You heard it! By all the gods, Ryan! Didn't you feel it? Didn't you see it!"
Ryan also stood, hardly noticing in the sudden, dreadful tension that Nathan had admitted he was indeed part rnutie. And he had called him "Ryan." He knew him.
And, in turn, Ryan realized his own guess was correct. He knew who Nathan Freeman was!
"Morgan's son," he said softly. "You're the son of my brother. Your mother was Guenema. I'm your uncle, lad."
"Hell," Nate said. "I guess I knew that all along, Uncle Ryan." His expression changed. "But now's not the time. Gotta move, and fast."
"We been betrayed?"
"Tom. Wants to be sec chief of Shersville. Guess he'll get his way now." The words tumbled over one another in the young man's haste to explain.
"When will they come, Nate?"
The water was covering their conversation from the villager standing a few paces behind them.
"They're here."
"What? Fireblast! We have—"
Nathan Freeman laid a hand on his arm. "Too late. Now I'm concentrating I can hear 'em. Load of sec men, on all sides. They'll take you, even in a firefight. Listen, I can make it through the woods. Get to the old man and the straw-head girl. To your wag. Other blasters there?"
"Yeah. Couple."
"I know paths and ways. I'll do what I can, Ryan. Don't fight. Harvey and Rachel aren't muties. Won't expect you. Won't think it's you, mebbe. Play Floyd Thursby. Stick to your story. Could get away. Watch
Rachel. More, watch Jabez. Warn others. Me and the other two'll do what we can, when we can."
Ryan's fighting brain was racing. He still hadn't heard any sound of a sec patrol closing in on them, but he'd seen enough of mutie skills in his life to know that his nephew was probably telling the truth. There'd been a blind listener up in the high plains who could hear a kerchief of satin fall on soft earth at two hundred yards.
"Yeah," Ryan said. "Don't charge in after us. If'n we can fool 'em, we could get away free. Foolish to lose lives for nothing. Wait and listen, Nate. That's the best."
Then Ryan heard them—horse-mounted sec men, clattering along the main blacktop through Shersville. He knew they'd be good mounts. Front Royal had always been famed for the quality of its horses. Right back to the time before the long winter.
"Gotta go," Nathan whispered. "Just meet the man I dreamed of for twenty fucking years. And we gotta part."
"Watch your back, Nate," Ryan said, quickly shaking hands with his nephew. The grip was brief but firm.
The young man leaped at the river, balancing for a moment on a large flat stone near the center, then hopped to another, smaller stone. With a splash, he reached the opposite bank. Pausing for a second and waving a hand to Ryan, he then disappeared into the dense screen of bushes.
Ryan turned away to make his way back to Shersville, where the sec men were already in control.
FOR A MOMENT Ryan's head whirled, and he felt himself transported back to his fifteenth year, battling for his life in a blood-slippery passageway in the stone heart of the ville. The uniforms of the sec men were unaltered: maroon jerkins, with breeches tucked into high boots. They wore helmets that hugged the skull, and some wore goggles. They were armed with the same M-16 assault rifl
es that Ryan also remembered well enough from his childhood—trusty weapons that had served the barony well over the years since the endless chilling.
Krysty, Jak and J.B. stood in a group outside the barn, surrounded by at least thirty of the guards. The old man, Tom, preened himself nearby. He was grinning broadly, chest out like a little pigeon, bursting with pride at his own achievement.
The leader of the sec guards was a sergeant, tall and with shoulders nearly as broad as the doors on the barn. He saw Ryan coming toward him and grinned.
"Hurry up, One Eye. That's four plucked and two to go."
"Where's Nathan Freeman?" Tom yelped.
"Who? "Ryan said.
"You know, you bastard!" screeched the venomous little villager. "Make him tell," he whined to the sergeant.
The sec man spit in the mud, not bothering to hide his contempt. "Baron says you get to be sec chief of this dung heap until someone better comes along. So zip up that mouth of yours or I'll shut it. I decide what happens."
"And what's that, Sergeant?" Ryan asked. "We're travelers who only arrived in the Shens a day ago. We hoped to move on."
"Came in a wag?"
"Yes."
"Where? Where's the wag?"
"Ran dry way back north. Dumped it. No chance of gas around here?"
The big sec officer laughed. "Not for the likes of you scum. Baron controls all gas for fifty miles around."
"Why are you here with this army?" J.B. asked.
"Old runt said you was armed and dangerous. Said there was two more of you. Old man and pretty little girl. True?"
Krysty stepped forward and smiled at the sergeant. "Do we look dangerous? Our two friends have gone to try to make their way back to the wag. But we fear they might be lost in the forest."
"Don't waste all that fucking charm, sister," the sec man said, the smile vanishing. "Got my cock and balls blown off by an old anti-pers mine ten years back. Don't fuck a lot now. We'll get moving." He shouted an order to the patrol, standing stone-faced in a maroon circle. They snapped to attention and began to shepherd Ryan and his companions toward the road, where they saw a couple of horse-drawn wagons with barred sides and roof, obviously built to accommodate prisoners.
As he passed Tom, Ryan whispered to the old man. "One night you'll feel cold steel in your groin."
The villager turned as white as a sheet and tottered, hand going to his heart.
Ryan smiled at him as they were led into the wagons. The three men were put in the first cart, Krysty in the second one.
THE SKY THREATENED RAIN. The air felt cool and damp and the breath of the horses hung about them like fog. They could see mist filling the hollows on the other side of the wide valley, leaving only the tips of the trees emerging from the pale blue haze.
The sergeant was at the head of the convoy, followed by a dozen mounted sec men. Then came the cart with the men, and a dozen more troopers, followed by the wagon with Krysty, and another dozen horsemen at the rear.
Oddly there had been no attempt made to disarm them. Ryan had seen the eyes of the sergeant home in on the butt of the SIG-Sauer, but it remained in its holster. He guessed they would lose their arms when they reached the ville.
For Ryan it was a journey deeper into his own past.
Every rattling turn of the wheels brought him closer to the ville. Every now and again he'd recognize some bridge or building or turn of the road. Once a massive wild boar thundered across the trail, making half the horses rear and whinny, throwing a couple of the sec men. Its eyes were vicious rubies, and Ryan saw fresh blood on its curved tusks.
They also passed more signs of the tyranny of Baron Cawdor and his family. Eight corpses. One in chains at a crossroads gibbet, not a shred of flesh remaining on the dry bones. Three on makeshift gallows, one a woman. Three crucified, two of them children, whose frail little bodies looked no more than six years of age. And the charred remnants of a corpse, smoldering in glowing metal links at the center of a heap of ashes.
It took close to two hours for them to finally reach the massive ville of Front Royal. And when they did, Krysty stared out in disbelief. The ville was just about the biggest building she'd ever seen in her entire life. It was like pictures of medieval castles in the old books she'd read as a child in Harmony. The brick was weathered to a glorious golden hue that shone, even on such a dull morning. The windows were mainly narrow slits, as in most armored wags. But high up on one wall was an arched window that looked as if it were made of colored glass. There was a wide river around the outside with only a single bridge that crossed it, which could be raised or lowered on chains from inside the ville. Through the archway, under a spiked gateway, Krysty could make out a central courtyard, where armed men patrolled. For at least two hundred yards on all sides of the squat building, the trees and bushes had been hacked down to prevent them being used as cover by any would-be attackers.
She realized then why the Cawdors had been able to control so much of the Shens for so many years. With a hundred armed sec men and a ville of this strength, it was impossible to conceive of the baron ever being humbled.
Krysty began to feel very frightened.
As soon as the wagons had rattled over the cobblestones of the bridge across the sedge-crusted moat, they reined in to a halt. The four friends were hustled with an overfirm politeness through a studded doorway, along a narrow corridor, past other guards and into a large chamber.
"One at a time into there," the big sergeant said, pointing at another door. "Everything off. There's a bolt on the inside, in case you worry about your privacy or whatever. There's clothes and boots on racks on the walls. All sizes. Leave everything there. It'll be boxed up and kept for if… for when you get out of the ville."
"Blasters?" J.B. asked.
"Watch my lips, short-ass. Everything. Know what that means? It means ev-er-y-thing. Far side there's another door. Go through it and wait. Don't try to fuck off anywhere else. You'll be watched. And don't forget to unbolt this door before you go on through. You read me?" He glowered at J.B.
"Sure you don't want us to unhook our balls in there, so we can all be the same?" the Armorer replied, never one to be faced down, even when he was at least a foot and a half shorter than the sergeant.
The sec man stared, stone-eyed for a moment, then nodded and laughed. "Mebbe that old coot back in Shersville had something, little man. Mebbe you're more than… Mebbe we'll talk after the baron and the lady've spoken to you. I hope so. That jest of yours could turn sour." He looked at the others. "Now who goes first?"
"Me," Ryan said.
He pushed the door shut behind him, not bothering to slide the heavy iron bolt. If the sec men wanted to get in at him, a single bolt wasn't going to hold them off, and the far door had no lock, anyway. But to make up for that the farther doorway was encircled by what he recognized as a sophisticated metal detector in top condition. The only better one he'd ever seen had been in a double-class gaudy house down in Norleans, years ago.
The sets of clothes that lined the wall, which looked like sucked-out corpses, were in the familiar dark color that was worn by most of the interior servants of Front Royal ville. They had a strip of black on the lapels, with a neat red star that showed they were guests.
His mind raced with what was happening. The last time he'd seen his brother, Harvey, it had been through a welter of streaming blood. The air had been filled with murder. Now, after so many years, he was about to meet up with Harvey Cawdor once more.
If he recognized Ryan as his missing brother, then death would follow as surely as night followed day. But would he?
That was the question that occupied Ryan as he pulled off his steel toe-capped boots and replaced them with the soft leather ankle boots. He placed all of his clothes in a large canvas bag, putting his weapons on top of it—the long panga and the slim-bladed flensing knife, with the 9 mm SIG-Sauer on the very top.
He tried to recall what this part of the ville had been used for when he'd been
there, but time had blurred the edges of his memory. Some kind of storeroom, he thought.
"Rutabagas," he exclaimed out loud, remembering now that there had been a great dump of yellow turnips in the room. They'd been piled high in the corner where the boots were stacked near the farther door. He'd used it when playing hide-and-seek with Morgan when he'd been about nine years old. He'd carved his name with a battered horn-hafted knife on the side of the door. Ryan went and peered to examine the frame, but it had been rebuilt and painted several times and there was no sign of his initials.
Dressed and ready, he now had to go and face the next room in the ville, and hazard the chance of being recognized by his brother. Ryan took a deep breath and pushed the door open. The chamber beyond was dimly lit, and he blinked into the darkness.
A voice bubbled out from above and behind him. "Welcome to Front Royal, brother."
Chapter Twenty-One
BROTHER!
He knew. Harvey Cawdor knew, had known all along! Someone had recognized Ryan, had spotted the blind eye and the torn face and put two and two together. It had all been a setup to take him off-balance, to get his weapons away without a fuss. The gentle approach.
Ryan winced, waiting for the crushing impact of a .45-caliber bullet between his shoulder blades. Or would it be slower?
"For any man that comes to our home is surely our brother, is he not? Or our sister. If he is a woman she is… then she is not our brother but our sister. Then our sister and our brother are all men and women who visit us." The muddled sentences dribbled away into a gurgling, chortling laugh, which sounded like thick gruel boiling on an open fire.
Ryan turned around slowly, fighting for control as he realized he was not down and doomed. Not yet.
His eye was quickly becoming accustomed to the smoky half-light, which was generated by flaming torches placed in wall sconces around the room. There was a balcony that ran clear around the second-floor level. This had been a small dining room when Ryan had been a child, and there had been music—mandolin, dulcimer and banjo—played from the balcony.