“I’m playing the guitar, J.B.,” Mildred replied, her eyes closed. “Jimi Hendrix. Purple Haze. Before your time.”
The Armorer considered this for a few seconds. “Oh. Okay.”
Unlike most of the companions, all of whom subconsciously held their breath as the eldritch process of matter transfer began, Mildred always breathed deeply, taking the ion-charged atmosphere down into her lungs. She honestly believed it helped with me dispersal and recalibration of her individual molecules when they were broken down and reassembled on the other side, at their eventual destination.
Plus the deep breathing aided in calming her nerves. Matter transfer was almost routine now, but she still didn’t like the process. Too many variables were involved to avoid the eventual happenstance of an error beyond their control, and when that happened, she could only pray it wouldn’t be a fatal one.
‘”Excuse me, while I kiss the sky,'” she sang, and then the white was replaced by darkness and blissful unconsciousness.
Chapter Four
Ryan was dreaming, adrift and helpless in the suspended state between living and dying that the mat-trans journey created within the souls of sentient, conscious beings. The only way the human mind could hope to effectively survive the experience of total molecular disassembly and reassembly was to reject the reality of what was happening during a jump and enter instead into a waking dream cobbled together of truth and fiction, past and regret.
In layman’s terms, one could always count on a gateway journey to give a man triple-bad nightmares.
In Ryan’s current case, he was running flat out, putting his back into it, arms pumping, legs straining, running, running, running. The air in that part of Front Royal tasted electric and sharp, and to his young eyes-young? eyes?-gave a dark and fearsome aura to everything in sight, alternating their colors between black and blue as a maze of storm clouds raced across the evening sky.
The drawbridge was up, so he had to stop before plunging headlong into the moat. His legs flew out from beneath him, and he fell hard to the cobbled surface of the road leading to the drawbridge. Gasping for breath, he quickly examined his lower ex- tremities and gave particular care to his left kneecap, which had suffered the brunt of his sudden landing. The fabric of the trousers was torn away from the knee, revealing shredded flesh and blue blood.
Blue blood? the boy thought stupidly, looking at the bodily fluid in numb surprise. He might be royalty of a sort because of his father’s position of power in this southeastern pocket of Deathlands, but unlike some of his relatives he rarely flaunted the elevated seat he currently held as a son of the late, great Lord Titus Cawdor.
And since when did he think of himself as a boy?
“There you go again, Ryan, showing off your so-called heritage,” a voice said with a sneer. It was a familiar voice that had much of the cadence and timbre of his own, but pitched higher and dripping with thinly veiled envy and hate. “It’s time I took a more active role in your future status as a member of the House of Cawdor.”
Somehow, while Ryan had been examining his injuries, the drawbridge had managed to come whispering down without his noticing. Concentration was a good thing to possess, but shutting out his surroundings would be the death of him yet. He had already decided the wounds and bruises were superficial, but now they were completely forgotten as he took in the sight revealed by the dropped drawbridge.
Harvey Cawdor loomed before him in all of his terrible crooked glory.
“Hello, Brother. Time to die,” Harvey said, and suddenly Ryan was a child again, a boy of fifteen, lost and injured in the cold, betrayed by the very blood he shared with his brother. There would be no pleading of familial ties for mercy in this battle challenge.
The same brother who’d overseen the murder of their father wasn’t the sort to grow misty-eyed over family.
Harvey was grotesquely fat, poured into the finest silken robes his subjects could buy with a half-crown studded with jewels atop his lumpen potato head. Hanging at the sides of his jiggling hips were twin Colt pistols of shining metal in tooled holsters crafted by the finest leathersmiths in Deathlands and paid for with money smeared in blood.