Homeward Bound

by James Axler

  The only hope left now to Ryan was that they might get careless at the end and give him a chance to at least settle the old debt by killing his brother. He could do it easily enough with his bare hands, given just a couple of seconds and a scant yard of space.

  Somewhere he could catch the distant sound of a piano playing, and he wondered who was at the keyboard. An aunt of his had come to the ville when Ryan had been eight years old, an immensely tall, skinny woman whose name escaped him. It was some sort of flower, he thought. She'd loved dancing and had teased the solemn young boy by snatching him as they'd passed in one of the long corridors. Pressing him to her flat, bony chest, she'd called out, "Heel and toe, heel and toe, one-two-three, one-two-three. Lovely, Ryan, lovely."

  As the wasting sickness that had killed her had begun to set its teeth in her body, she'd grown more melancholy. -Once she'd been playing an old tape of music, a dance tune called a tango. She'd looked up at him from the thin birdlike face, with eyes bright and fevered, the bones scraping at the inside of her skin.

  "They say the tango is a merry rhythm, Ryan. It is not. It is infinitely mournful."

  She'd died a week later and been buried in the family plot with the rest of the line of Cawdors, back to the long winter.

  Ryan didn't recognize the tune the piano was playing. After a while it ceased, and he slipped into an uneasy sleep.

  The rattle of the spyhole woke him, and he peered across the room. The lamp was burning low, near to guttering out, and the chamber smelled of oil. There was a momentary flash of brighter light as the door opened a narrow crack and then closed again. Someone slipped through the gap, and for a split second Ryan allowed himself a glimmer of hope, knowing the foolishness of such a thought.

  He heard a voice, speaking with a frighteningly cold intensity. "On your life, trooper. I'll spill your heart blood myself. Not until I knock to be let out. Understand?"

  One of the sec men murmured his assent as the door closed.

  There was plenty of light for Ryan to immediately recognize Lady Rache! Cawdor, wearing the same dark clothes and carrying the same worn leather purse. Without a word she knelt at his side, drawing a slim-bladed stiletto from her belt. The point rested for a moment on the material of his pants, just above his groin. She began to push, the steel slicing through the material, touching cold on the flesh of his stomach.

  "Now," she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THE KNIFE WAS VERY OLD. Ryan had never seen it before, but he knew that the ville had once housed a remarkable collection of early weapons of all sorts. The hilt was silver, heavily embossed with floral decoration, and the blade was steel.

  He tried to relax against the sharp pricking of the knife as she moved it lower and lower. Despite himself, Ryan winced and tried to ease himself down, avoiding the steel as it brushed the top of his penis.

  Lady Rachel Cawdor laughed delightedly, a soft, gentle sound in the stillness of the room.

  "So brave, brother-in-law, yet so like all men. Filled with stupid pride until your pathetic little pricks are threatened."

  "Harvey wouldn't like me spoiled."

  She patted him on the cheek, running a sharp nail along the jagged scar that furrowed his face. "He did that. And the eye. He talks of it. When he sleeps, racked by horrors, he talks of you. He knew you'd come back one day. Knew it. You're his walking nightmare, Ryan Cawdor."

  He didn't speak. The knife was still poised, like a honed nemesis, ready to descend and hack at his manhood. She was very beautiful. Ryan corrected that thought. She had once been very beautiful. Now she was raddled by the jolt.

  "You can't move. I could do anything to you, dear brother-in-law. Anything. I could rape you. Use that cock of yours, then cut it off. I could kiss you. Make you kiss me. Make you use your tongue on my body. Would you like that, brother-in-law?"

  She was leaning across him, her breath running faster. The front of her dress gaped open, and he could see her breasts, the nipples erect with desire.

  "What would you like, Ryan?"

  "I'd like you to die, and take your husband and that sick little bastard of a son with you."

  He waited for the thrust of the knife, but nothing happened. Ryan had closed his eye, and he opened it when he heard her laugh. She had sat back on her heels, the velvet dress hitched up between her knees, showing a smooth expanse of pale thigh.

  "You talk big for a helpless one-eyed man, Ryan Caw-dor."

  "Why've you come?"

  Rachel's dark eyes were almost invisible in the half-light. "I wanted to see you. Wanted to see you before that sottish husband of mine had you thrown to his boars or his dogs or whatever unoriginal way of chilling he picks."

  Ryan didn't reply. There was nothing to say. He'd read pulps where the captured hero talks to the mistress of the villain and uses his charms to persuade her to release him. Life wasn't at all like that. Steel cuffs held him helpless, and the chain around his throat made it impossible for him to move. Tomorrow they'd come and take him to Harvey, and then he'd be dead. The best to look for was a quick passing, which was why he'd tried to provoke the woman into wasting him with her knife. That had failed, and there wasn't anything else left.

  "Don't want to talk?" She was becoming more nervous, hands moving, head turning from side to side. He recognized the symptoms from the dinner table. The woman needed more jolt.

  "Need a snort," she said, voice as taut as a bowstring. "Need something to rest my mirror on. You'll do, brother-in-law."

  She took the knife again and slit his clothes, opening the jerkin and pulling it back across his flat, muscular stomach. Then she cut through the crotch of his trousers. Placing the knife on the floor, she tugged his trousers over his thighs. She touched him, very gently.

  "Oh, my dear relative, I've cut you. A tiny ruby that glistens here. Should I kiss it better for you, Ryan?"

  Despite the effects of the jolt on her appearance, Rachel Cawdor was still an attractive, skilled woman. Ryan tried to pull away from her, fighting for control.

  She laughed. "Very good, Ryan. But I shall win. Like all men…" she began, then bent once more to her task.

  When she lifted her head again, the woman was grinning. "There, brother-in-law, that wasn't so awful, was it?"

  Ryan didn't reply, feeling soiled by the contact, certain only that he would kill Rachel Cawdor if he was given half a chance.

  "Bad loser," she said. "While you're here like this I might give myself some…" She stopped, and her body suddenly twisted with a violent shudder. "Oh, the cramps are… First things first."

  Rachel took out the little brown bottle and uncorked it. Holding the mirror in her hand, she looked round the room for somewhere to set it, eventually placing the chill metal on Ryan's stomach. She cut the powder into finer grains, then formed it into several narrow lines.

  "Forget the fucking, after all," she breathed, breasts rising and falling. "This is…"

  The ivory tube in one nostril, the other pinched tight, she again lowered her face toward his body. She sniffed up the lines of jolt, her body trembling with the powerful sensation of the drug. Only when the mirror was clear did she sit up again, face wreathed in a broad smile.

  "Now, what shall we do, Ryan?"

  "Get out," he said.

  "Worried the mutie redhead'll find out you enjoyed me doing you? I might go tell her right now."

  "That jolt'll kill you soon," he said.

  "I can stop when I like."

  "Like everyone else can. I seen the stiffs from coast to coast. Heart gives up the effort. You're dead, bitch."

  "Harvey won't live long. His heart's near finished, brother-in-law. Then I rule the ville."

  "What about your son?"

  "Jabez? The darling does everything I tell him to do."

  "Like fuck you?"

  At last he got through her guard. She slapped him hard across the face so that his head banged back against the wall. She snatched up the knife and stared at him, eyes open
wide in an insensate rage.

  "You don't…don't…" she stammered, spraying him with her spittle. "I'll…Jabez loves his mother. That's all."

  Rachel put the dagger down once more, leaning close to Ryan so that he could almost taste the scent of her sour-sweet breath. With a swift movement she sat astride him, her weight on his groin. Her left hand tangled in his hair, pulling so hard that it brought tears to his eye.

  "Keep very still," she hissed at him, her white face inches from his.

  Her right hand stretched and touched the leather patch over his blinded left eye, easing it upward.

  "No!" he cried involuntarily.

  "Ah, so the brave hero has his weakness. I only want to see what good work my dear husband did on his little brother. There…"

  Ryan closed his right eye. He knew what Lady Rachel was seeing. He'd seen it often enough in pools of water or in polished metal or in mirrors. The empty, raw socket, the skin puckered, red and scarred. Often the scooped cavity would weep a little. A clear liquid, as though it wept for the missing eye.

  He winced again as she laid her thumb on the skin at the very corner of the eye. "What does it feel like, Ryan?" she whispered.

  He screamed. For the first time in countless years, Ryan Cawdor screamed in helpless, mindless terror, feeling the jagged nail probe into the deeps of the empty eye socket, pushing hard against the agonizingly delicate skin. The pain went on and on as she turned her finger around, still keeping her iron grip on his hair. Through the mist of raw red pain, he could hear her laughing at him.

  Ryan jerked so hard at the handcuffs that blood sprang from the ends of his fingers.

  A millenium of suffering crawled by until at last she took the finger away. He could feel a warm liquid coursing down his cheek, but he didn't know if it was tears or blood. It touched the corner of his lips and it tasted salty.

  Her weight moved off him, and he blinked open his good eye. Rachel stooped and adjusted the patch back over the blank socket.

  "So much blood, brother-in-law. Such a deep scar, isn't it?"

  Ryan didn't trust himself to speak, knowing that his voice would shake with his pain and anger.

  "I think I shall go and kiss my son a fond good-night. After all, I doubt you could please me with this—" she touched him contemptuously with the toe of her dark blue shoe "—this worm." She giggled, the jolt coursing through her body, making her hyperactive for a brief few minutes. "Know what I do if I see a worm in my path, brother-in-law? I crush it beneath my heel. Perhaps… No, it would be a waste. If it was Harvey's pathetic worm, then…"

  "Why stay with him?"

  "He is the baron, Ryan. You know what that means. After I throttled your father, Harvey stopped sleeping in the same bed as me, fearing for his wretched life. And he is right. Now he will soon die. There have been two attacks already, and the doctor says he cannot live through another."

  "In twenty years you could have…"

  The woman shook her head, bending to collect her dagger and thrust it back into the sheath at her belt. "Not until Jabez was old enough. This ville runs on fear, Ryan. And now you've come back. All my life here you've been a shadow on every wall. A listener behind every door, the poison in every dish, the fear in every dream."

  "Now I'm here."

  "The older servants prayed to you. We flogged and branded them and still they believed that one day you'd come back and save them all from… Harvey and from me. They call me the Lady of Pain, you know, Ryan. Me! This time tomorrow Harvey will return from the hunt. You and your friends will die in a fine public ceremony. Soon Harvey will die, and Jabez and I will run the Shens. And there will be no more shadows!"

  Her voice soared like an eagle as she ranted at the bound man at her feet. She kicked out at him in a vicious temper, her feet cracking into his ribs, leaving deep purple bruises.

  As quickly as it had come, the anger left her, the wild swinging of moods that was typical of a jolt junkie. She stood panting, her face growing blank. "There, brother-in-law, you made me… Relatives shouldn't anger each other."

  "Goodbye, sister-in-law," he managed.

  "I came to see you," she said, pausing near the door, "to see if you might be of use. You could have killed Harvey. That would have been pleasant, wouldn't it? All the double-poor stupes that live on our lands would have flocked to worship at the shrine. Ryan, the miracle baron of Front Royal. You could have had me as well, brother-in-law."

  "Why not?" he asked. Behind her the last of the lamps was guttering out, making her shadow dance, shift and vanish.

  Rachel smiled. "No, Ryan. Not now. You should have been the baron. You and I could… once… Not now. I know men, Ryan. I know you. You might agree, to save your skin, then break my neck without a single backward glance. No. You aren't weak enough."

  She pulled at the door handle, pausing a moment in the brightly lit opening to glance back at him. Then the door slammed shut, and Ryan was left alone in silence and in darkness.

  The blood congealed on the tips of his fingers, around the nails and on the grazes around his throat from the tearing of the rough iron chain.

  As the night wore on, Ryan managed to slip into an uncomfortable slumber, waking often from the pain of his position. He wondered how the others were bearing up, thinking specially of Krysty Wroth.

  Ryan also wondered about Lori and Doc Tanner.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  "BY THE THREE KENNEDYS!" Doctor Theophilus Tanner exclaimed, tripping over the gnarled root of an ancient live oak. It had rained, briefly but fiercely, and the ground had become soggy and treacherous. The low clouds veiled the moon, making it difficult to see more than ten feet ahead.

  "You okay, Doc?" Lori asked, helping him to his feet and wiping ineffectually at the smears of mud on his black coat.

  "Yeah. Just this path doesn't run straight for more than twenty yards at a time."

  Nate Freeman looked back over his shoulder, face a pale blur ahead of them. "Want to get nearer than this to the ville 'fore sunup. We're close to Shersville here, and they might have patrols out, watching for me to head home."

  The clouds parted, and the moon broke through, bathing the region in a bright silver glow. Doc looked around him, admiring the beauty of the forest, the rain glistening off the boles of the endless ranks of trees.

  "How far?" he asked the young man.

  "Sunup or the ville?"

  "The dawn's early light."

  "Two hours."

  "The ville?"

  "Three. If we don't all keep falling over our feet like clumsy old stupes."

  "You'll watch your mouth or…" Lori threatened crossly. But Doc patted her arm.

  "No, my dear heart. Nathan is right. I must take more care."

  "Should have fetched the fast blasters." The girl sighed.

  "Safer in the wag," Freeman argued. "You go through your plan to try and get in the ville then that mini-Uzi and the gray rifle'd have you in the moat 'fore you could say, 'Blessed Ryan spare us.' Know what I mean?"

  Doc was thinking about the plan as they walked briskly through the Shens. Part of it had been his, but he kept forgetting bits of it. He was to be a traveling quack who was calling at the ville to treat any minor ailments and to draw teeth. But he'd lost his bag of tools. He could remember all of that. But Nathan hadn't liked the idea.

  He'd wanted to wait and see, to try to sneak some news from those in Shersville who were still loyal to him. But even the young man had admitted that there had to be a real risk that Ryan's cover had been blown inside the ville. Doc had asked how long he thought Ryan would live once Harvey knew who he was.

  Nathan had replied by simply snapping his fingers once.

  So, that was why Doc and Lori were going in. For news. And if that turned out bad, for a try at a rescue.

  "How?" Doc mumbled to himself. And after a little while he realized he didn't have an answer to that question.

  The swordstick helped the old man over some of the rougher parts of t
he trail, and Lori was always at his elbow with encouragement.

  "Path here goes through a swamp, so step careful. Mud's near bottomless on both sides. And we're closest we come to my home village. Fast and careful and quiet's the way."

  Ironically it was Nathan Freeman who nearly brought disaster upon them all. He had looked back to make sure that his two companions had safely negotiated a tumbled willow tree that was rotting across the path, when his own foot slipped and he crashed to the ground. In falling he clutched at a low branch of a stunted elm tree, which broke in his grasp with a loud report that sounded like a Magnum going off.

  "That you, Beau?" called a voice. It was a thin, whining sort of a voice, like a querulous old man asking when his supper would be ready.

  Nathan drew his blaster from his belt, a double-action Smith & Wesson Model 39 handgun. Dropping into a crouch, he waved to Doc and Lori to take cover behind him.

  "Beau? You fallen in the fucking water 'gain? I'm not pulling yer out if n…"

  "Hi, there, Tom," Nathan said, straightening up, holding the pistol on the hunched little figure that had appeared out of the rags of mist that hung over the muddy water. "Thought I knew your voice, my trusted old friend."

  Doc and Lori also stood up, seeing that the other villager was paralyzed with fear. The old man was literally shaking in his boots at the sudden appearance of the man he'd betrayed.

  "Ramjet! Nathan, is… ? I didn't know you was going't'come back. Me an' Beau…"

  "Here," Nathan said quietly, beckoning to Tom. "Come here."

  The little villager stumbled toward Freeman, wringing his hands like an abject penitent. "Didn't mean trouble,

  Nate, you know that. Hell, we bin friends longer than most. I taught you to shoot an' told…"

  "Shut up, Tom," Freeman said. "Kneel down here, in front of me."

  "I'll get my breeches fouled in the dirt, Nate. You know what Becky's like if'n I get muddied up. I'll just stand."