And closer to the baron and Emma.
There was no sign of life in any of the rooms, except for the last of them.
Jak had thrown open a tall door, sending it crashing back onto its hinges. He coughed as the movement sent up a cloud of fine gray dust.
The room was much bigger than the others, with a high vaulted roof in black and white. It was filled with dozens of wooden carvings, all brightly painted, looking like parts of roots or branches that had been cut and polished and then covered in layers of startling colors.
A hammock was suspended between two of the taller sculptures, and the noise of Jak’s entrance woke the occupant, an unbelievably ancient man in filthy clothes, with a ragged beard and a mane of long, matted hair.
“Who in the name of the mips of Beelzebub are you?” squawked a high, cracked, angry voice.
“How get to ground and baron’s zoo?” Jak asked.
“Why do.” Venomous little eyes focused on the teenager. “You’re a poxy mutie runt!”
Jak suddenly noticed a narrow iron staircase that spiraled down from the far corner of the room. Without any hesitation he ran through the room, leaving footprints in the dust, past the hammock, to the top of the stairs.
“You’ve not seen my collection, you snow-top bastard! First visitor in a year or more and you don’t wait to-”
The vituperative anger drifted into silence behind Jak as he raced around the dizzy staircase, emerging through a creaking door at the bottom to find himself behind a huge moth-eaten tapestry. The light was poor, but Jak’s night sight was preternaturally sharp, and he could see that the wall-hanging showed a handsome youth swooning away as he was attacked by a pack of hunting dogs, while an elegant woman with a bow looked down at his distress with an expression of vicious sensuality.
Jak cautiously looked around the corner of the tapestry, seeing that he was in a wide passage with torches flickering in all sconces.
He recognized it from his previous visit to the mutie collection, knowing that only one door now separated him from Emma and the baron.
RYAN HAD LED Doc and J.B. back down the flight of stairs that had brought them up to the third floor of the mansion. He turned to his right and headed for the main stairs that would bring them to the first floor and give them access to the part of the ville that housed the mutie collection.
A tall plump sec man appeared at the far end of the corridor, hastily pulling on his green jacket. As soon as he saw the three outlanders moving fast toward him, he yelped and bolted back around the corner like a startled rabbit. There wasn’t much time for a clear shot at him, but there was no longer any point in needlessly killing anyone.
They’d sprung Jak, and Ryan had the strong feeling that events were now moving inexorably toward their ending, going faster and faster, like the progress of a lethal rad cancer. He doubted that the race would still be being run by dawn.
There was nobody around the stairs to the dining room, and Ryan paused a moment, halfway down, the short hairs prickling at his nape.
“We got someone.” he began warningly, when a musket fired from above and behind them.
The ball thudded into the rounded oak balustrade, eight inches from his left hand, stripping away a long splinter of white wood. Ryan spun, seeing the giveaway cloud of black powder smoke hanging in the air, a yard from the top of the wide staircase. He had the SIG-Sauer already drawn, and he aimed and fired as part of the same lightning reflex.
He heard a yell of pain and a body falling to the floor, and a musket clattered down the stairs, sliding all the way to the bottom.
As Ryan turned back, moving toward the dining room, Joaquin appeared by the door that led through to the rear of the ville. He was holding a machine pistol in his right hand and had two men with him, both armed with the old cap-and-ball revolvers.