Krysty grabbed his dangling left hand and crushed it between her palms.
At this point, Jabez Pendragon Cawdor fainted, slumping in her arms, his blood smearing the stone floor. He lay on his back, legs outstretched. Krysty looked down at him, eyes blank and cold, breathing faster.
As though in a trance, she measured her aim, leaped high and came down with both heels on either side of the left knee, springing the joint so that the patella popped out like a metal bearing between finger and thumb.
Jabez stirred at the appalling pain of the injury, but before he was jerked back into consciousness, Krysty re-peated the attack on his other knee, destroying the joint.
250
Had he lived, Jabez would have been a helpless crip-ple, unable even to crawl.
Had he lived.
Krysty stood, panting. Her eyes were half-closed, and she was swaying on her bare, blood-smeared feet. She glanced down at the naked, broken, unconscious man lying crookedly on the gray stones of the bedroom floor.
If any of Krysty’s friends had seen her at that mo-ment, they would have backed away from her, horrified that she’d been seized by a killing frenzy. She touched Ja-bez with a toe, and he jerked away from her. She laughed quietly, an ugly, tinkling little noise, like a cracked silver bell.
Jabez’s eyes flickered open, and she heard a choked groan of purest pain. She could see the pulse that flut-tered unevenly in his throat, just beneath the ear.
As she stared at him, the mutie power of her mind stripped him to the soul. She saw the stunted, evil core of Jabez’s being, when pleasure came only through the pain and suffering of others. She saw the festering slime that a religious person might have called the soul. And was ap-palled.
Jabez Cawdor stirred, head rolling to one side. A thin trickle of bile, tinted with blood, drooled from his open mouth.
Krysty lashed out with her heel, hitting the heir to the ville of Front Royal at the base of the nose. Cartilage burst, and the septum shattered into a dozen splinters of jagged bone. Gouts of blood spewed in the air and all over Jabez’s naked chest. The power of the kick jammed the shards of bone high into the soft spaces of the skull, driving them into the brain.
251
ryan heard nothing of Krysty’s fury from where he lay in his own room, watching the light fade away. He’d heard the clattering of hooves on the cobbles in the morning and the excited yapping of the hounds. A bowl of gruel and some crusts of dry bread had been his only meal, given to him so cautiously that he’d lapped at it like an animal. He knew nothing of the disastrous and farcical entry of Doc Tanner and Lori Quint into the ville.
And he knew nothing at all of the visit of Jabez Pen-dragon Cawdor to Krysty Wroth. Not a hint of the young man’s hideously violent chilling.
The sec men hadn’t bothered to leave Ryan any lamps lit in his prison room. Despite the discomfort of his bind-ing and the imminence of his departure from life, Ryan still managed some sleep, dozing until the links of the chain around his neck jerked him awake.
But something else had disturbed him. He lay still, eye open, straining to listen. It had been a creaking noise, like a piece of wood being slowly split in two. There was si-lence, and then another, sharper sound. In the blackness, Ryan could make out a narrow strip of golden light shin-ing in the middle of the shelves.
Where he knew the secret door was hidden!
A figure moved against the thin rectangle of pale yel-low, then the door closed and the chamber was in total blackness. Ryan tried to wriggle into a position where he might at least try a kick at whoever had entered the chamber.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Come on, you bastard! Come on.”
His hearing was better than most, and he strained to listen to the pounding stillness. Bare feet moved with an infinite caution on the cold, dusty stones of the room. And the ragged breathing sounded like that of a man at