The others also took cover from the shooting. Before Nate Freeman or Jak could return the fire, Harvey had dropped one of his guns and darted back into the inner courtyard. He was pursued by Ryan, knife gleaming in his hand.
It was a bizarre chase from the present into the past.
Just inside the main gate, by the guardhouse, Ryan bumped into Doc Tanner and Lori, but there was no time for conversation. Harvey knew the ville like a rat knows its burrow, and Ryan knew he had to keep close if he wasn’t to risk losing him. There was just time to throw a message over his shoulder, for the others to retrieve their own clothes and weapons as swiftly as they could. And to watch out for any ambush.
“Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber.” That was the rhyme that one of the old servants of the ville used to sing to little Ryan to try to lull him into sleep. In
305
his mind’s eye he always saw it literally, imagining him-self following the twisting passages and blind corners of the mansion, taking himself inside his own head into every room and staircase of Front Royal. It had been an exer-cise that had saved his life when he’d had to run for it the night Harvey had come to kill him. Now, all those long years later, the memories were still there, and he followed after his brother like a loping timber wolf after an elk.
His brother had a good head start, slipping through one of the entrance doors to the main body of the house and across the courtyard. Harvey had time to slam the door shut and slide across the bolt. But Ryan knew other ways. It struck him immediately that the ville was deserted. Not only the sec men had fled. Every single person who had served the Cawdors had left. The fires in the kitchens were dying, food prepared but uncooked. Bowls with eggs broken in them stood on scrubbed tables. Piles of wash-ing dripped in the sinks. A cooling iron rested on its stand.
It helped Ryan. When he heard a distant slamming of a door, or feet pattering along a corridor a floor above him, he knew it could only be Harvey. It crossed his mind as he ran silently through his childhood home to wonder where Lady Rachel had gone, guessing she had either run with the pack or lay sleeping off her latest lines of jolt. Probably she had fled the doomed ville.
Once a fluffy white kitten came gamboling from an open doorway, fighting a large ball of yellow wool. Sev-eral times Ryan heard the unearthly noise of the wild boars in their cellar pens.
And all the time he drew closer to his brother.
“Closer, brother, closer.”
Once he entered a long room, lined with dull paintings of muddy European rivers, just as Harvey was at its far-ther end. Ryan dodged back at the waspish snap of the
306
small handgun, hearing the bullet whine into the wall some yards away. It wasn’t likely that Harvey was carry-ing a spare magazine, and ammo must be running low.
He still had only the dagger to face his brother with. And that was how he wanted it. Face-to-face. Blood spurting hot against his hand. Looking into Harvey’s piggy little eyes as they blanked in death. That would set-tle the debt.
He heard Krysty calling to him as he passed a third-story window, but he was sprinting toward a closing door and ignored her.
He was within a few paces of Harvey when he was dis-tracted by a door that was gently shutting. He knew it was a dead end where his father had gone to check the ac-counts of the ville. It had no other exit, and he flattened himself against the wall, glancing around him. Over the entrance to the chamber he recognized the bust of an aristocratic man with a hooked nose. The name was carved into the marble plinth. Pallas. There was no sound from inside the room.
The door began to open, and Ryan tensed, fingers holding the blade low, ready for the classic knife fight-er’s upward thrust to the belly. But the door continued to open, and he felt the fresh breeze from the window. The room was dusty and empty.