“Only the missing Ryan Cawdor, come sneaking back like a diseased rat after barley. But he’s locked safe. And by dawn tomorrow he’ll likely be another fruit a’dan-gling in the baron’s prize orchard yonder.”
when the pliers slipped on the sergeant’s rotten tooth and Doc heard the ominous crunch of broken bone, he knew that he and Lori were in deep trouble.
Chapter Twenty-Six
krysty had watched the departure of Baron Harvey Cawdor and his entourage for their day’s sport in the Shens. By peering through the window of her room she could just see the road that wound out across the draw-bridge, vanishing into the trees on the far side of the moat.
With nothing else to do, she had sat on an old-fashioned stickback chair by the open casement, watch-ing the men and women from the surrounding villages file in to sell their produce.
And she saw the silver-haired old man in the cracked knee boots and stained frock coat, who was accom-panied by the tall blond girl with the wide smile. For a moment Krysty stood and leaned on the sill, hoping to try to catch the eye of Doc and Lori. Then she withdrew into the room as she realized that they were playing a danger-ous game, hoping to infiltrate the ville in some secret guise.
A few minutes later she could hear yelling and cursing, floating up from the guardhouse just inside the main gateway. She hoped it wasn’t anything to do with Doc and Lori.
She’d heard something of what had gone on in the chamber next door to hers during the darkness of the night. Krysty’s part-mutie birthright had given her cer-tain peculiar skills, including enhanced sight and hear-ing. The visit of the Lady Rachel Cawdor to Ryan had
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been largely audible to Krysty, though some parts of it had been left to her imagination, not that much imagination had been required!
Once it was daylight, the tall redheaded girl had de-voted her energies to examining her prison in the most careful detail.
She’d spotted the interconnecting door immediately. But it was sealed with an old iron bar, secured with a huge brass padlock. She rocked it with her hands, but the bar was rooted in the stone wall and hardly moved at all. The window opened on the moat, but it was a drop of forty feet. Though it didn’t have any heavy security bars, the window frame was split into eight by metal rods. With a great effort it would have been possible for a small, skinny person to wriggle through. But for someone of Krysty’s height and build, it was unthinkable to escape that way.
The main door into the room was locked and bolted from the outside. There was no judas hole for the sec men in the corridor to spy on her, but she could hear from the sound of boots and quiet conversation that there were at least a dozen guards in the passage.
The room was eighteen feet by fourteen, with no other exits or entrances. There was a fireplace, but the chimney was blocked off with stone and concrete. She even checked the stone flags on the floor, rolling back the coarse woolen drugget. The furnishings were sparse, and seemed very old.
A carved wooden chest at the foot of the double bed opened at her touch, revealing a pile of cloth. The smell was unpleasant, like damp earth. Krysty pulled the top bolt of cotton out of the trunk and unfolded it. The cloth was spotted with speckles of green mold, which carried the rich, moist odor. She wrinkled her nose as realization came to her. It was a cerecloth that had been used as a
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shroud or winding sheet for a corpse. Though, by the look of it, the cerement had done that duty on several occa-sions.
The chest also held a number of iron and pewter vases, which were cold and dusty with age. A wardrobe at the head of the bed on the left was completely empty, except for the stub of a pencil and an empty can of fly killer. A faint message had been scrawled on the inside of the door Cathy Supports Lynx.