“Help me roll him into the swamp, Doc,” Nathan said, holstering his smoking piece.
231
Tom’s clothes held pockets of air, and at first it didn’t sink, floating like a sodden log in the scum-covered wa-ter. Nathan glanced around. He found a broken branch from one of the willows and used it to push at the corpse, hold it under. He watched the bubbles, some bursting with crimson centers. When they stopped, he let go of the branch and threw it away. The body stayed beneath the surface.
Without a word, Freeman turned away and led Doc and Lori onward.
When they reached the screen of trees that fringed the open space in front of the fortress of Front Royal, it was a little after sunrise. The dawn was brilliant, the flaming disk of the sun lurching over the eastern horizon, color-ing everything with its crimson light. The ville looked as though the stones glowed with a dreadful inner heat, and the water of the wide moat lay like congealing blood.
The drawbridge had just been lowered, and villagers were beginning to enter, hurrying past the dozen guards that lined the main gateway. Nathan looked worried.
“Normally only a couple of sec men there. Smells of trouble.”
“Then I venture to suggest that we might consider our entrance as a matter of some immediacy. Time is of the essence, my dear young man, would you not say?”
“Yeah. I’ll wait up here. You get out with news, take the trail runs due west. But don’t go as far as Shersville. I’ll pick you up. Don’t look for me. I’ll find you.”
They heard the brazen howl of a trumpet from within the gates and the baying of a pack of hunting dogs, a sound that Doc and Lori recalled only too well from their arrival in the Shens. The girl shuddered at the noise and clutched at Doc’s hand for comfort.
232
“Baron might be going hunting,” Nathan said. “Nothing stops for that. Nothing. After the wild boars he breeds in the cellars of the ville. Best keep under cover until he’s gone by.”
Doc Tanner parted the branches of leaves and peered out at the fortress, grim and invincible, surrounded by the bloody aura of the rising sun.
“I doubt either of you are familiar with the poetic works of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe? No, I thought not. Poor man. Tragic life. My grandfather on my father’s side knew him slightly. This scene recalls one of his verses, concerning a haunted palace.”
“I like you reading poems, Doc,” Lori whispered, glancing proudly at Nathan. “Doc knows millions of poems, doesn’t you, Doc?”
“Perhaps hundreds rather than millions, my dear chickadee,” Doc replied.
“Tell me the poem you said. About a haunting pal-ace.”
“It starts about a fine castle, like the ville here, that was once a place of great riches, splendor, pomp and circum-stance. Then it fell upon bad times.”
“Go on,” she whispered. Nathan Freeman half lis-tened, watching the road into Front Royal for the best moment to move.
“But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch’s high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
“Then it goes on about how the wonders of the olden times are sunk forever and locked into the grave, as they
233
are here. The crimson of the rising sun is so strong in re-calling this verse.”
“Something’s happening, Doc. Look. Horsemen and the pack of dogs. Stay still and keep your voice low.”
First came a squadron of mounted sec men, their uni-forms tinged with dazzling scarlet by the dawn. Then came a huge mutie stallion-the biggest horse Lori and Doc had ever seen, not that the girl had actually ever seen a live horse in her entire life. Mounted on it, wrapped in a silver cloak that the sun streaked with bloody splashes, was an immensely fat man. He wore a feathered cap that nodded and danced.
“Lord Harvey Cawdor, baron of Front Royal,” Na-than whispered, unable to hide his hatred.
Then came a pack of twenty or so dogs, slavering black hounds with narrow muzzles and long legs. They were controlled with whips by a half-dozen mounted grooms. At the rear came another squadron of sec guards.