“Not a threat. It’s a promise. One day you’ll learn the difference.”
J.B. and Jak joined them in the passage, each with a trio of guards at the shoulder. J.B. made the fortress clothes look like a neat military uniform. The albino boy had already ripped the sleeves out of his jerkin and wore the breeches low on the hip to give himself greater free-dom of movement.
“This way,” said the sec officer, heels ringing on the stone flags.
They ate in what had always been the old banqueting hall of the ville. Ryan’s father had told him that the re-gion around Front Royal had mainly been hit by missiles that killed but didn’t destroy. Ryan later came to under-stand that the missiles had been neutron bombs. It ex-plained why the ville itself was in such remarkable condition for a prewinter building.
The table was the same. Hewn from two pieces of an enormous oak tree, it had been sliced through and joined to give room to seat at least twenty a side. The four “guests” sat together, Ryan and Jak opposite Krysty and the Armorer, at the far end of the table, farthest away
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from the log fire that crackled and spit brightly and nois-ily. Sec men, as silent as statues, stood at regular inter-vals around the perimeter of the hall, and more watched from the gallery on the second floor. The light came from a dozen multibranched candelabra on the table and burning torches spaced along the four walls of the room.
“No elec?” Krysty asked. “Must have.”
“Yeah. Most is wind- or water-generated. Storage bat-teries in the cellars. Always been a tradition here at the ville to use candles and lamps and torches like those.”
“Stand for Lord Harvey Cawdor, Baron of Front Royal and his wife, the Lady Rachel!” a voice bellowed from near the fireplace. The four friends stood up, chairs scraping on the rush-covered stone floor.
In the brighter light of the great hall, Harvey Cawdor was even more grotesque than at first sight. Ryan upped his guesstimate of his brother’s weight to four hundred pounds, contained in a billowing coat with horn buttons. It was a dark maroon color and seemed to have used up enough ma terial to make a fair-size tent. The clothes were designed to try to minimize his deformities, but nothing could conceal the crooked back or the dragging leg.
The wide belt of polished snakeskin held two small holsters with the gleaming butts of twin Colt pistols peeking from them.
Harvey took a reinforced carving chair at the head of the long table, waving a hand to his wife to sit on his right side.
Rachel Cawdor was in her middle thirties, and it looked as though she worked hard to keep her appearance down in the twenties. The reward was that in the half-light of the big chamber, she could pass for twenty-nine. Maybe.
Her black hair supported a narrow silver coronet that sparkled with diamonds. The piece was a Cawdor heir-
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loom, and Ryan felt a flush of surprising anger at seeing the murderous slut flaunting it. Her dress was a blue vel-vet so deep that it could be taken for black. A silver brooch shaped like a long-necked flamingo, its tail a mass of different colored precious stones, decorated the low front. She nodded to Ryan and his friends, totally ignor-ing her husband. On her arm was a small purse of scuffed black leather, at odds with the rest of her immaculate ap-pearance.
The chair to the left of the baron remained empty.
“Is… ?” Harvey said, getting an almost impercepti-ble shake of the head from his wife. “Ah, no matter, matter is energy is mass and matter. Doesn’t matter to me. No damn matter.”
Once they had both seated themselves, Ryan and his three friends also sat down. The table was so long that they were twenty yards away from Rachel and the baron.
Harvey Cawdor clapped his hands and servants, dressed in the livery of the ville, appeared bearing platters and tureens and great serving dishes. Ryan had somehow expected it would be the same blue dinner service with the willow pattern design that he’d eaten from during his childhood. As the meal began, he realized why that no longer existed. The Baron Cawdor was an intemperate and violently clumsy eater.