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“No, I don’t… I mean, my lord… What shall we do with ’em?”
“Flog them and turn them out of the ville!” Ryan’s brother picked irritably at the chipped blue varnish that decorated his chewed nails.
“They could be traitors and friends to these four,” said Rachel Cawdor, leaning forward in her seat, eyes staring above and beyond Ryan’s head.
“I don’t think so, my lady,” the sec man said. “The oldster’s barely three bullets in a blaster and the girl’s a near-dummy. I say flog ’em out of the ville.”
Harvey shifted his enormous bulk and belched, glow-ering at his sec officer. “You say that, do you, Sergeant? I’ve a mind to flog you. Cut your ears off. Slice the lids from your eyes. Peel off those fucking lips. What then? I’ve heard the girl is pretty, Sergeant. What d’you say to that, man?”
The sec man swallowed convulsively. “Yes, she is. I’m sorry, Lord, that-”
“Shut up,” Harvey muttered, his violent anger pass-ing as fast as it had risen.
Ryan glanced at the line of grim-faced guards, each of whom carried his M-16 at port arms. The windows were flung open, letting in the clean morning air. He could hear a young child crying to his mother for attention. There was the crack of a slap and a scream from the toddler. Another slap rang out, and then silence once more. A young brindled puppy wandered in, looking around for a familiar face. It ambled over to Jak and rubbed itself against his legs. The boy stooped to pet the animal, chucking it under the chin. It was an oddly normal scene, hardly one where four people were about to be sentenced to their deaths.
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“I think it was some black magic that took my son,” Harvey Cawdor said, levering himself to his feet. “We’ve heard how he came to question a prisoner. And she… or someone…raised a devil, who lifted my dear Jabez to the realms eternal.”
Ryan’s hands were still cuffed behind him. Krysty, sensing that the word of doom was coming, took a half step forward to be beside him and rested her hand on his arm. Jak ignored the baron, continuing to stroke the puppy that now rolled on its back to have its stomach tickled.
J.B. stood at ease, the dawn’s light glinting off his spectacles, his fedora pushed back off his forehead.
“My order is… Sergeant!”
“My lord?”
“Chill that fucking dog!”
“Now, my lord?”
“Now, man!”
The sec officer gestured angrily to one of his men on the far side of the hall. The guard was tall and skinny, the blaster looking as if it weighed him down. Ryan could al-most smell the sec man’s fear at being picked on in front of the baron.
“Move away, Jak,” he said quietly. For a moment he wondered if the boy was going to try to make an issue of it, but after a split second’s hesitation, Jak stepped away from the puppy, shaking his head, the pure white hair seeming to float in the shafts of light streaming from the high casements of the hall.
“Chill it, Trooper Vare,” the sergeant ordered.
The young man had his M-16 set on continuous fire, and his finger froze on the trigger, pouring all thirty rounds into the fawning dog. The bullets kicked and
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sparked from the stone floor, ricocheting and whining off the far wall, tearing an old tapestry into colored rags.
The puppy disappeared in a spray of blood and jagged bone that frothed in the air, splattering the sergeant. He staggered back, hands clawing at the warm slush that blinded him, spitting out crimson hunks of phlegm onto the flagstones. Ryan closed his eye, wincing at the burst of violence, feeling Krysty’s fingers tighten on his arm. He heard Jak’s voice whisper an obscene threat to the sec man, but it was drowned out by a great guffaw of laugh-ter from Harvey Cawdor, his rolls of fat quivering under the bright silk robe.
“Wonderful, Sergeant. Triple fucking A. There’s magic. Like Jabez. The disappearing dog. Wasn’t a sec man blowing our son apart like that? Course not. Course not. Nothing left to hunt for.”