Krysty’s words were quiet in his ear. “You feeling all right, lover?”
Before he could reply he heard the paper-thin voice of Mary Cornelius, showing once again the uncanny hearing that the Family seemed to have. “He’s as well as can be expected, Krysty. But with my help he can be so much better.”
“If you can make him see again, then you’ve got my support, every step of the way.”
The albino woman’s voice was dismissive and patronizing. “Thank you, my dear, but I believe that we can manage perfectly well without your support.”
Krysty instantly pushed back her chair, the legs grating on the floor. “Why don’t you go take a flying fuck at a rolling pretzel, lady?” she said, storming away from the refectory table, the sound of her heels diminishing until they ceased altogether.
“Dad?” Dean’s voice sounded worried.
“It’s all right, son.”
“What a sadly disappointing reaction,” Mary said. “I had thought better of her. Still” Ryan could hear her crumpling a napkin and dropping it by her plate. “Let me lead you to my room, Ryan. There is so much that we can do for each other. Unless”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you are frightened of me.”
“Course not.” He turned to J.B. and the others. “Get together for a talk in our room, around noon.”
“Sure,” the Armorer replied. “Take care now.”
Mary’s hand was on his right arm, her grip surprisingly powerful for a woman, as she led him across the galleried room, up the main stairs.
They walked along a carpeted corridor, stopping in front of what Ryan guessed was the entrance to the topmost story of the mansion. He heard a jingle of keys and a door swinging open, releasing another wave of the stinking air.
“Up here,” she said, helping him through, then locking the door behind them. “Nearly there.”
NORMAN HAD WAITED until his mistress had taken Ryan out of the dining hall before he tugged back the heavy velvet draperies, releasing clouds of pale dust, the motes floating in the rectangles of bright sunlight.
“There,” he said. “Let there be light and there was light. Makes one feel quite like a little god, doesn’t it?”
“The lady somewhat dislikes sunshine, does she not?” Doc asked.
Norman picked his way around the room, stopping in front of the old man. “Did you hear the fable of the heron whose beak was so long that he had it trapped in a jar of gold, and thus he perished? It’s a parable of inquisitiveness, Dr. Tanner. A moral for us all.”
“The moral being to keep your beak out of other people’s affairs,” Mildred said.
The butler nodded, the smile vanishing from his face like that of a rich man encountering a beggar. “Precisely. I have lived as long as I have in the employ of the Cornelius Family only by studiously closing my eyes and ears and my mouth, when I felt it proper to do so.”
“Proper? That another word for cowardly?” Jak asked sarcastically.
“Cowardly is another word for keeping your head when all about are losing theirs, Master Lauren.”
THE ROOM WAS large and cold. That was Ryan’s immediate reaction as Mary closed the door. His keen hearing caught the faint click of a key turning in a lock, and he dropped his hand to the reassuring butt of the big SIG-Sauer.
“Here we are, Ryan. Can I help you to a chair? Does the chamber feel at all chill?”
“Yeah. Cold and damp. Like the Banbury Hotel back in the ville.”
He felt her shudder, transmitted along his arm. “There is a fire laid. I can light it.”
“Be good.”
He eased himself into a deep armchair, feeling the worn brocade that covered it, sitting still while she bustled around. He heard the hiss of the material of her dress, the striking of a self-light and then the crackling of tinder and dried twigs. There came the faint smell of green wood smoking.
Mary coughed, waving her hands in front of her face. “Dear me, such a smell.”
That was the moment that Ryan realized they weren’t alone in the room. Someone else was fighting to control his or her breathing, finding the cloud of billowing smoke intrusive, trying hard not to cough.
Two others.
At least two others.
“There,” the woman said finally. “The wood’s caught at last. It was hard to see with only one guttering oil lamp to light the room.”
“Why not draw the draperies?” Ryan asked. “Seems it’s a good bright morning.”
She totally ignored his question.
“Once it’s warmed up a little, we can get on with our business.”
THE SIX FRIENDS FOUND themselves back once more in the warren of high-ceilinged rooms with their jigsaw puzzles and antique rotting books.
“Least can get out,” Jak said.
“Remember what happened to poor Johannes when he went outside. It was only yesterday.” Mildred stood alone by the windows, looking across the silvery gray rocks, her eyes falling to the shadowed river far below.
“Dad be all right?” Dean asked, standing by Krysty, who was looking up at the rows of moldering volumes. “Can they make him see?”
Krysty shook her head, the fiery sentient hair clinging tightly to her nape, a sure sign of an atmosphere of threat and menace.
Mildred heard the question and turned from the casement. “Ryan’s blindness is in God’s hands, Dean. I can’t pretend otherwise. Back in the predark times, folks expected doctors to have a total and absolute knowledge. Medicine isn’t like that. Take a crude example. Put a .38 round through one man’s brain and he dies instantly. Second man lives but is a vegetable. Third man recovers, untouched. Same with your father’s loss of sight. In the next two or three days we’ll know, one way or the other, whether Ryan has good luck, or no luck.”
FROM THE WEIGHT of the crystal goblet, Ryan knew that it was old and of top quality. He tapped the edge with his nail, hearing it ring like a fine bell.
Mary was at his side. He could smell her body. There was the odd stateness, overlaid with feral sweat. Despite the strangeness of his position, Ryan found himself reacting to her scent of sexual excitement. And he was still aware of the presence of at least one other person in the room.
Liquid gurgled into the glass, the flavor of peppermint filling the bedroom. Ryan recalled the suggestion that the liqueurs the previous evening had been drugged.
“Drink up, Ryan,” Mary said, her hand feather light on his shoulder.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ryan had drunk the liqueur. Trader often said that in a situation where you were going to have to do something, then you might as well do it willingly, with a good grace.
And watch your chance for retaliation.
The peppermint flavor almost covered up the slightly bitter aftertaste of the drink. Almost, but not quite.
Ryan contrived to spill some of the fiery liquor, but he caught a whisper of warning from one of the other people in the room with himself and Mary.
“Take care,” the woman said very quietly, her fingers tightening a little on his shoulder. “Don’t want it to go to waste. It’s so fine, so rare. One of the last vintages from before the days of sky dark. Let me fill your glass once more. There. Now finish it.”
Ryan drained it, feeling his head already beginning to swim a little from the combination of alcohol and the drug that he was certain it contained.
“Feeling dizzy, Ryan?”
“Yeah. Some. You put some kind of sleeper in the drink, didn’t you?”
“Possibly.”
Mary’s voice was coming from a long way off, sounding as if it drifted into his mind from the back of an underground cavern filled with dark water.
“Anything happen me, others’ll see”
“I’m sure they will,” the voice said, echoing around and around his brain.
“Blasters good enough to”
Then the darkness rose, boiling around him, and Ryan slipped away into it.
“DELIGHTFUL THOUGH these jigsaw puzzles are, recapturing the many happy hours that I spent with my darling Emily locked away in such activity, I feel a deep unease racking my aged bones. Do none of you others feel this? Am I quite alone in my suspicions? Krysty, my dear lady, do you not?”
The redheaded woman sat by the empty grate, her booted legs stretched out in front of her, head back on the antimacassar, green eyes closed.
She answered without stirring.
“Sure, Doc. We all feel it.”
“But do none of you share the midnight tenor that possesses me?”
“What talking about?” asked Jak, who had been wandering around the room like a caged snow panther.
Mildred looked up from the new jigsaw that she and J.B. had just begun, an infinitely complex design of birds and lizards in black and white.
“You got a theory about the Cornelius Family, Doc? Like to hear it. Find out if it matches one that I’m developing. What do you reckon?”