There had been something about the shelves, some-thing that Morgan had once shown him. There was some way to get behind it into the room next along the corri-
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dor, which had once been used by an earlier baron for his illicit affairs with serving maids. There had been a simple catch, Ryan remembered, but it had been too high and too stiff for him to reach easily.
There was a sliding panel in the center of the heavy oak door, and as Ryan glanced at it, the square moved back silently. An eye appeared briefly, staring in at him. Then the eye was gone, and Ryan thought he glimpsed the vi-olet flash of an amethyst before the panel closed.
If there was a hidden doorway between his room and the next one, it was dangerous to try to find it with some-one manning the spyhole. Ryan went back to the win-dow, looking out toward the west over the blue haze of the distant mountains.
He knew Jak Lauren was in the first room along the corridor, and he thought Krysty had been put in the chamber on his right, the chamber that he remembered had the connecting door. It was a possibility worth hang-ing on to.
Several times during the afternoon he saw or heard someone watching him.
There was a rainstorm at four o’clock. He could hear a bell chiming the hour from the central tower of the ville, a sound that once again plunged his mind back twenty years to his childhood. He remembered standing in this very room, staring out through the window-before it was barred-watching a bald eagle, with a monstrous wing-span of more than twenty feet, pluck a young foal from the meadow and carry it off, whinnying. The mare had run below in hopeless, desperate circles.
His thoughts went to Doc and Lori, out there in the sheeting rain that came slanting in gray clouds from the west. The trails were so complex that he feared they would have become lost, though the girl sometimes displayed an
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uncanny sense of direction. And there was also the hope that Nathan Freeman would have been able to find them and lead them to the wag. But what could they do against the massively invulnerable pile of stones that was the ville of Front Royal?
“Not much,” he muttered to himself.
just before five a tray was brought in by a young man with hard eyes and the kind of formal clothes that a sec man wears when he wants you to know he’s a sec man. There was a cup of milk on the tray and some biscuits.
“Baron and Lady Rachel eat at six,” he said. “You’ll be ready.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Ryan replied.
“No. You’re not,” the sec man said. He backed away to the door, shut it firmly and turned the key in the lock.
Through the brief gap, Ryan noticed a pair of crim-son-uniformed sec guards with their M-16 carbines car-ried at port arms. Despite his gross personal appearance, Baron Harvey ran a tight ville.
Or Lady Rachel did.
There was another flurry of a storm around five-thirty, with surging clouds of dark green and purple skating across the pale blue sky. Lightning crackled through the dark chem clouds, throwing violent shadows across the room where Ryan waited patiently.
The door opened at five to six.
Krysty smiled at him from the corridor. “Don’t know ’bout you, lover, but I could eat me a mutie buffalo, horns an’ all.”
“Pretty mouth, lady. Shut it or lose it,” said the ser-geant who’d brought them in from Shersville. His eyes met Ryan’s stare, and he came close to a smile. “You ‘nother wants to try me, One Eye?”
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“I’d kill you,” Ryan replied, voice quiet and neutral.
“You reckon?”
“I know. You’re big and strong, but you’re also soft. You gotten used to breaking the arms of women and kids.”
“If the baron says what he usually says, we’ll have a chance to see if you’re right, One Eye.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Threats are cheap.” The sergeant grinned, but Ryan could hear that the edge had gone from his voice. The ar-rogant confidence had been eroded a little by Ryan’s calm manner.