“Gone stark crazy,” Baker suggested, “shouting like that.”
The horse was lathered, rolling from side to side with utter exhaustion, stumbling as it reached the far end of the drawbridge, nearly tipping Harvey Cawdor in to join his son. He hung along the neck, eyes wide and shot with blood, mouth open. It was difficult to make out any words in the harsh raging.
“Nevermore… all… all fucked. My brother comes and-”
Once inside the courtyard, Baron Harvey Cawdor slithered from the saddle and fell to the cold stones, lying on his face, weeping. The two sec men were joined by two more from the guardhouse.
“Bastard smell of gasoline,” one said.
“And he’s drenched in blood,” Lesser observed.
“Where’s the others, my lord?” Trooper Baker asked. “They coming, my lord?”
Harvey turned, and they all took an involuntary step backward. The face they saw was scarcely human. The eyes were frozen, the pupils like the pricks of a needle. The color had gone completely, and there were deep fur-rows etched around mouth, nose and eyes. Hundreds of tiny specks of crusted blood dotted his cheeks, matting the scorched hair. His whole body trembled.
“Coming? Who? Brother Ryan? Nevermore. Never ever more more.”
“Where’s the rest of the men and the dogs, my lord?” Baker asked, showing amazing courage to press the mad-man. Or incredible foolishness.
Lesser went back on the drawbridge, shading his eyes with his hand. The wind had freshened, veering to the east, with the promise of colder weather and some rain
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within the next day or so. The roads all around the ville were deserted. “Nobody coming,” he called. “Not a sight of ’em.”
“The rest?” Baker repeated.
Harvey Cawdor rose to his feet, drawing the remnants of his tattered dignity around him. “The rest, my good fellow, is gone. Are gone. Chilled. Blown to a better place or world or whatever. Each dog and each horse and each man are here, in my face.” He rubbed at the congealed blood. “Each spot a life. And all chilled by my brother. I think he will be here shortly. So keep good watch.” He clapped Baker on the shoulder and then kissed him on the cheek, turning on his heel and waddling crookedly away into the main body of the great ville.
Baker gathered together the remaining sec men, talk-ing in whispers of what had happened. Their lord was ut-terly insane. His wife a jolt junkie and his son disappeared in a bloody mist. All of their fellows were slain in some gigantic explosion, and the ville was surrounded by hundreds of villagers, all waiting for the moment to rise against Front Royal and take their vengeance for the years of bloody oppression. And that vengeance would also spill against the sec men who’d helped the Cawdors keep their hold on that part of the Shens.
“And Lord Ryan will come…” Lesser said. “And he will hold us for…” The sentence trailed away into the late afternoon sunshine.
It took only four or five minutes for the dozen sec men to reach their decision. Within fifteen minutes they had gone and changed into civilian clothes, out of the ville’s hated uniforms, making their way by ones and twos into the surrounding woods.
Most were recognized and murdered before they’d gone five miles.
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rachel cawdor met her husband in one of the maze of corridors that wound through the upper floors of the rambling house. She had woken from her drug-frozen sleep, calling for her servants, finding the ville was inexplicably deserted. The air carried the taint of roasted meat and gasoline. In the silence she began to wonder whether the jolt had finally scrambled her brains and transported her to some different world, familiar, yet oddly altered in detail.
Then she met Harvey, and the feeling of alienation in-tensified. His eyes stared at her, bloodshot and blank. There were spots of mud all over him, and his hair and eyebrows were grizzled to stubble. His clothes were torn and stained, hanging from his limping body like an ill-fitting and ornate shroud.
“Where’s everyone? What’s happened? Tell me, damn you!”
“Dead, my dearest dove,” he said in the hushed tones you might associate with some great church.