Chapter One
Krysty Wroth stood and stared blankly into the singing space, spray pasting her fiery hair across her forehead, her bright emerald eyes dulled and lifeless. Her fingers gripped the rusting remains of the security fence that ringed the crumbling viewing platform above the abyss.
Her lips moved, and she whispered Ryan’s name as she peered into the gorge. The two tiny figures were spinning, vanishing and rising again in the turbulent water of the racing river, moving at incredible speed between the sheer walls of wet rock.
“Mebbe he can stay up,” said John Barrymore Dix, the Armorer, as he stood by her elbow, pushing back his fedora.
Jak Lauren shook his head, his red eyes glowing in the gloomy half light like burning rubies. His torrent of snowy hair dripped in dreadlocks across his scrawny shoulders, his face, pale beyond belief, staring out over the steep ravine.
“No,” he whispered, responding to J. B. Dix’s comment. “No way could make it there. Not after fall.”
Mildred Wyeth, the stocky black woman doctor of the group, had one arm resting lightly around Krysty’s waist, comforting her. Her right hand was on the butt of her Czech target revolver, but there was nobody left to shoot.
The last member of the group, panting heavily, arrived late as ever. Doc Tanner had witnessed the last scene of the dreadful drama from farther away, blinking through his watery blue eyes at the fight and the fall. Now he stood stricken, his hands clasped in mute prayer in front of him, the ebony swordstick glistening with water, its ferrule resting on the soaking concrete.
“I wonder whether we should not be trying to convey ourselves down the stream, following it along, until we can do something to recover the body of our dear, dear friend.”
Krysty turned slowly to face the old man, seeing the tears that clung to his lined cheeks, and felt the first numbing awareness that Ryan was possibly dead.
Probably dead.
“He’s gone, Doc,” she said quietly. “Never be able to find the body.”
Jak coughed. “Look far along. Seems cliffs get lower. Not right leave Ryan to vultures and coyotes. Rest of you stay if want. Going to try find him.” He looked at the other four companions. “He’d have done it for me.”
THEY LEFT the huge mansion behind them and set off along the windswept, barren rocks, moving westward, following the line of the river.
A watery sun peeked through ragged strips of dark purple clouds, barely bright enough to cast a weak shadow behind the friends. They picked their way, slowly climbing lower toward the river, though its foaming surface still seemed to be several hundred feet below them.
Ryan’s body had long vanished.
The woman’s corpse had been caught within their sight for a few minutes in a vicious backwash under a jagged fall of twenty or thirty feet, where the water stripped away the tattered remnants of the clothes, leaving the corpse pink and dappled with blood, then as white as a wind-washed bone.
Finally, perversely, the river let the body go, washing it farther away at dashing speed until it, too, vanished as the gorge curved toward the north.
Evening was closing in.
J.B. eased the Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scattergun on his shoulder. “Take five, people.” With Ryan gone he had automatically assumed control of the friends.
Jak was carrying Ryan’s rifle on his back, the Steyr SSG-70 bolt-action, 10-round, 7.62 mm hunting weapon. Though their exit from the ville had been close to the edge of panic, everyone had their clothes and weapons.
Krysty sat and leaned against a stunted pinon a few paces from the edge of the drop. Her face was drawn and tense, her hair matted close to her nape in a tight ball. She closed her eyes and spoke a brief prayer to Gaia, the Earth Mother, that a miracle might have happened and that Ryan might be spared from the pounding, grinding doom.
But her heart told her the inalienable truththat nobody could have survived that drop.
Not even Ryan.
THEY FOUND WHAT REMAINED of the corpse of Countess Katya Beausoleil just as the sun was finally sinking in a copper glow behind a range of low hills toward the west. The river was widening and becoming a little more gentle, flowing between wooded banks of thick gray mud.