It was late afternoon, the copper bowl of the sun sinking slowly out of sight toward the far west. A few high, thin clouds streaked across it, tinted purple and pink.
“We’ll go back tell the others,” J.B. said. “Then get ready to go in after full dark.”
SHARPE WAS WEARING a dark suit with narrow pinstripes of lighter gray. Beneath it he had on a T-shirt with a picture of a revolver, and a message that said New York-Kansas It Ain’t. His own satin-finish Ruger GP-160 double-action revolver was jammed casually into his belt.
“Pretty vest, Baron,” Doc said. “Guess that must be a predark replica.”
“Why?” The voice sounded tired.
“Because it’s a sort of reference to The Wizard of Oz and there haven’t been any yellow brick roads since the nukecaust, have there, Baron?”
“I have no idea what you’re droning about, old man. The shirt was brought to me by Joaquin a month ago from some newly discovered ruins. What you say might be true. I don’t know. And I don’t care.”
“I always said that conversation was killing the art of eating,” Doc muttered.
Not that the food was any better than the rest of the meals they’d been offered in the ville. The meat in an overcooked stew had disintegrated into a dark sludge, and most of the vegetables had melted into the liquid. It was utterly impossible to try to guess what sort of animal had provided the base for the stew.
There was a side dish of chopped greens that had barely been shown the steam from a cooking pot and were inedibly raw.
Doc had sliced into his blackened roll to find that the inside of it was a runny, watery dough that trickled out onto his plate.
For dessert the women servants brought in platters of fruit: waxen apples that looked wonderful and tasted like cotton; plums whose interiors revealed tiny mealy grubs, white with crimson eyes.
The beer in pitchers was warm and sour.
During the meal, with Joaquin seated at one end of the long table opposite his master, and the others placed along the sides, there had been no conversation at all. Jak had chosen to sit next to Emma and held her hand throughout the dire supper.
Each door to the dining hall had a pair of armed guards, and four more had escorted the trio down from their locked room to the first floor.
Sharpe suddenly threw his goblet across the room, where it smashed in the vaulted fireplace.
“I had thought that the redhead woman was possibly a mutie. There was something about her that whispered to me of a power lying close beneath the skin.”
His meltwater eyes turned to Jak. “An albino. Rare as unmined gold. White hair and skin, and eyes like rubies. Surely someone that would grace my collection. And perhaps you still will, boy.”
“Don’t call, ‘boy,'” Jak said quietly.
“Call you what I like, boy. Call you ‘mine,’ if I want, so shut that white-lipped mouth. I’ll decide soon enough what I want of you.”
Emma stood, the legs of the carved beechwood chair scraping on the stone flags of the floor.
“I won’t tell you,” she whispered.
Sharpe smiled, his brutally handsome face relaxing for a moment. “Very good, my dear,” he said. “Oh, that is so good. You knew what I was about to ask you?”
“Yes.”
“Joaquin?”
“Baron?”
“It was a tornado?”
“Biggest twister I ever seen, Baron. We were lucky to avoid it. Came swooping down like the wrath of God.”
Sharpe smiled at Emma. “The wrath of God. The seventh seal was opened. A darkness upon the face of the earth. The horsemen bringing pillage and pox and plague and. Destroyers of worlds. And you, little lady, saw it all.”
Emma had hardly touched any of the food. Now she sat slumped, not looking up, seeming unaware that Baron Sharpe was talking to her.
Joaquin called a warning down the table. “Baron’s speaking to you, Emma.”
Sharpe glowered at his sec man. “I expect that visitors prefer to listen to the organ-grinder and not to his monkey, Joaquin. No need for interruptions!”
“Sorry, Baron.”