Emma realized that he wasn’t listening to her and tried again. “Let the others go, Baron.”
The cold milky blue eyes turned toward her as if he’d just seen her for the first time. “Perhaps I will. I can’t believe that among my other creatures, I will have access to a true, living, breathing doomie. In my struggles against other barons and other villes, your foreseeing will give me total power. I can make no mistake with you to guide me.”
“And Doc and Jak?”
“Later, woman, later. The question that all men seek to know. This first.”
“How will you die?”
He smiled eagerly, like a child about to open an expected present. “Yes. But I am also puzzled. Do you see your own death, Emma? See it clear?”
“I see it in symbols, which I will understand only in the moments before death touches me.”
“What are they?” He moved closer, and she could see that he was naked beneath the robe.
“For me?” She closed the golden eyes and her face went slack. “For me it will be to drown in a sea of brightest crimson.”
“What’s that mean, woman?”
She shook her head, rubbing her hand across her face. “I don’t know, Baron. I’m so tired I don’t-”
He grabbed her and shook her, surprising her with his anger and his strength. “Don’t snow me, woman! I know what you are and what you know. And-” he smiled at his own cunning, “-you know that I know it!”
“True. But why do you want to know how you’ll die? Can’t you imagine what a bleak secret that is? One that you will carry, in every sense, with you to the edge of the grave. And then-only then-will you understand it.”
He smiled gently, and Emma realized with a frisson of fear what she had already suspected. That Baron Sean Sharpe was as crazy as a shithouse rat.
“I love knowing secrets, woman. Love them. My friends whisper them to me during the long hours of the night. I hear them, now. They’re precious to me. So precious. And this is the biggest secret of them all, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
He still held her with fingers like steel. “So, tell me of my death.”
Emma had hoped in her inmost heart to be able to barter with Sharpe, but it was impossible. Only her certainty that Jak, Doc and the others would be able to escape to safely kept her from collapse.
Her eyes closed, and she allowed the power to enclose her in its dark veil.
“Your tongue will turn to silver and you.you will pass through the mirror into the desert. And from there you will become nothing.”
The room was quiet. A small fire was burning in the hearth, and a log crumbled in on itself in a whisper of gray ash.
Sharpe let go of her and took a step backward.
“Tell me it again.”
“Your tongue will turn to silver and you will pass through the mirror into the desert. And from there you will become nothing.”
“Nothing?” His brow wrinkled. “How can I become nothing? That’s impossible, woman.”
“That is what I see.”
“Then see something else. Something better that makes some sort of sense!”
“You want me to lie? Is that it, Baron? I’ll lie if you want. You’ll die on your hundred and fiftieth birthday in bed with your six teenage slut mistresses. That better? More the sort of crap you want to hear?”
He ignored her outburst. “A tongue of silver. A broken mirror. A desert. And. nothing.”
“That’s the truth. I don’t know what it means, but that’s all I see.”
He nodded. “Well, and why not? Now we were going back to my collection of precious muties. Find you a home. And you shall be the sun in that system.”
“Jak and Doc?”
“They can come or go, be drunk or sober, dead or alive for all I care.”
“You swear they’ll go free?”
“I promise you, Emma my doomie princess, that within the hour they will no longer be my prisoners.”
And Sean Sharpe began to laugh.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ryan just managed to divert the murderous blow with the panga, though the hissing blade brushed against Doc’s left shoulder, making the old man jump sideways, starting to cut at Ryan with his drawn rapier.