something—he didn’t quite know what—stopped him. His gloved hand took hold of
the knoblike handle, twisted it firmly, though tugging at it so that no hint of
a sound came from the movement. He gently eased the door open slightly. Two
inches. There was only darkness beyond. The smell of incense was much stronger
here, a positive assault on the senses. He could hear the faint murmur of
someone talking, but as if from afar. He pushed the door more, slipped through.
He sensed that Hunaker was behind him and half turning his head he muttered,
“Close it, but not tight.”
He stared at the warm blackness, half closing his eye, then opening it again,
wide. Over on his left, in front, was a narrow smear of murky light in the air,
which at first he could make no sense of. The light danced, a flickering glow.
Then gradually he began to sort out details of the room.
Or half room. It was big, high ceilinged. There was no furniture, but the floor
was carpeted. Across the room, from wall to wall, hung some kind of thick
curtain. Two curtains, actually, pulled together. Hence that chink of light in
the center where the inner folds of the two draperies didn’t quite meet.
He slid the SIG back down into its belt rig and reached for the LAPA, holding it
one-handed as he silently stepped across the room toward the curtain. There was
no point now in using a silenced piece. He’d reached his goal. The voice he
could hear beyond the thick draperies belonged to Jordan Teague.
He reached the gap in the curtain. It couldn’t have been positioned better if
some guy had actually set it up for him. Eye high. Breathing through his mouth,
the LAPA held down at his side, he peered through.
One bizarre scene.
One bizarre goddamned scene.
There were candles everywhere, their flames fluttering and guttering in the
drafts. It seemed as if there were a thousand candles at first, ten thousand,
seemed as though the room itself was vast, extending way beyond the bounds of
sanity. But of course it was a mirror effect. Long mirrors on all the walls, to
the front of him and to the sides, even fixed down over the closed shutters of
the windows on the right-hand wall. Ryan glanced up, his eye widening. Even
covering the ceiling.
For the rest, there was not much furniture in the room although the place could
not be said to be bare. On the floor were thick rugs, all sizes, all shapes and
patterns and colors or combinations of colors. There were two potbellied stoves
on the right, doors wide, heat belching out; pipes from the top of each rose
into the air, sagging drunkenly in badly welded sections, disappearing into the
mirrored ceiling. A couple of small tables, both of which seemed to Ryan’s
mildly discriminating eye to be more than just well-carved—really old period
pieces, probably—stood toward the center, smoke rising from large bowls on them.
He couldn’t see what was burning, but it was sure as hell the source of the
rich, cloying stink that permeated the room.
It was what reared up high, center stage but toward the far end, that dragged
the word “bizarre” into his mind. A kind of stepped pyramid, twice the height of
a man, maybe more, and flat on top. Ryan couldn’t see how it was constructed
because it was covered with a piece of rich red material, tacked in so that the
step treads were tight and thus climbable without getting his boots tangled up
in the folds. Atop it, a wide, high-backed wing chair, plain wood from what he
could see, although that wasn’t much, because of its occupant and the fact that
it was partially covered in more material that, as he stared at it, became
vaguely familiar, then all at once, after a few seconds searching his memory,
became entirely recognizable. He could just make out white stars on a patch of
blue, vivid red bars on white. A real relic from pre-Nuke days: a huge version
of what they’d called the national flag of this land when it had been a unified