the meal was soup and fresh bread. Good soup, rich with vegetables. And half a loaf, still warm on the out-side, sweet and crumbling on the inside. They freed his hands to eat but left the chain around his neck.
One of the guards stared curiously at him. “You’re truly Lord Ryan Cawdor, aren’t you? My father spoke well about you until his death.”
“It was speaking well cost him his life,” the other young sec man mumbled. “Baron set him waltzing on air on the river road, these five years past.”
“If Harvey is such a blood-eyed chiller, why not rise against him?” Ryan asked.
“Would you swallow the barrel of a blaster? First man to say treason dies. And then the second. The baron is careful and ruthless. It would take a great rising and his death. And his lady’s.”
The sec man was nudged by his friend. “Enough. Too much. Lock him again and let’s get out of here ‘fore we do the oxyjean jig like your father did.”
Ryan could just see the edge of the rising sun through the window. His guess was that it was around eleven o’clock. The sky was a light blue-green, tinted with flecks of orange cloud. Far below him he could hear the excited yapping of the hunting dogs, sensing that they were to be set free on a hunt. Ryan closed his eye and tried to relax, but the sound of the door opening disturbed him.
Oddly he wasn’t all that surprised to see that his visitor was Lady Rachel Cawdor.
She stepped toward him, eyes bright in the sunlit room. The lady had obviously been enjoying several lines of jolt,
264DEATH LANDS
and her whole body seemed to tremble with an eager an-ticipation.
“Your life is measured in short hours, brother-in-law,” she said.
Ryan nodded, wondering why she had come yet again to see him.
“Don’t you realize you’re going to die?” she asked, drawing nearer to him.
“We all are,” he replied.
Rachel sighed. “If we could… But that’s all water under the mill. You’re twenty times the man your brother… that blubbering pile of lard… It can still be done. I can have him done to death. Half the ville would dance on his grave.”
“Replace him with me?” Ryan asked. “The long chill is sweet compared to that.”
“But now Jabez has been taken by… By who, Ryan? Not wizards. Tell me how it was done. Where is the boy’s corpse?”
“Hell, bitch. I hope.”
She nodded slowly. “You and I could rule the Shens and beyond, Ryan. I picked wrong with Harvey. And now he… I came for a last chance for you. Will you join me?”
“If I’m going t’die before dark, then I can go with that. It’s paying the price to live with yourself on your own terms. Not something a murderous slut like you can un-derstand. Just fuck off, and leave me be, Rachel.”
“You scorn the chance to be one of the lords of life, Ryan. Then I leave you-”
A line of verse came back to Ryan that Doc was fond of using “To the pleasure of my high vices, that I’ll have to pay for at higher prices.”
“You think dying in the jaws of his dogs is going to be funny, you double-stupe? I wish I could ride to watch, but
265
Harvey’ll take his funning, then come back for the yel-low-head girl in the cells. And life, Ryan Cawdor, will go on.”
She stooped over him, and he felt the brush of her lips against the stubbled skin of his cheek, as cold as the tomb, her breath carrying the sharp flavor of jolt. Then she straightened and walked quickly to the door. She paused a moment with her hand on the latch, as if she were about to say more, but she turned away without another word and left him alone.
krysty buckled the sheathed knife onto her leather belt.
Jak drew his and tossed it a few times into the air, feel-ing for its balance before sheathing it at the small of his back.
J.B. tested the edge against the palm of his hand, stooping and pressing the steel against the stones of the courtyard, trying out the tension of the blade.