If he recognized Ryan as his missing brother, then death would follow as surely as night followed day. But would he?
That was the question that occupied Ryan as he pulled off his steel toe-capped boots and replaced them with the soft leather ankle boots. He placed all of his clothes in a large canvas bag, putting his weapons on top of it — the long panga and the slim-bladed flensing knife, with the 9 mm SIG-Sauer on the very top.
He tried to recall what this part of the ville had been used for when he'd been there, but time had blurred the edges of his memory. Some kind of storeroom, he thought.
"Rutabagas," he exclaimed out loud, remembering now that there had been a great dump of yellow turnips in the room. They'd been piled high in the corner where the boots were stacked near the farther door. He'd used it when playing hide-and-seek with Morgan when he'd been about nine years old. He'd carved his name with a battered horn-hafted knife on the side of the door. Ryan went and peered to examine the frame, but it had been rebuilt and painted several times and there was no sign of his initials.
Dressed and ready, he now had to go and face the next room in the ville, and hazard the chance of being recognized by his brother. Ryan took a deep breath and pushed the door open. The chamber beyond was dimly lit, and he blinked into the darkness.
A voice bubbled out from above and behind him. "Welcome to Front Royal, brother."
Chapter Twenty-One
Brother!
He knew. Harvey Cawdor knew, had known all along! Someone had recognized Ryan, had spotted the blind eye and the torn face and put two and two together. It had all been a setup to take him off-balance, to get his weapons away without a fuss. The gentle approach.
Ryan winced, waiting for the crushing impact of a .45-caliber bullet between his shoulder blades. Or would it be slower?
"For any man that comes to our home is surely our brother, is he not? Or our sister. If he is a woman she is... then she is not our brother but our sister. Then our sister and our brother are all men and women who visit us." The muddled sentences dribbled away into a gurgling, chortling laugh, which sounded like thick gruel boiling on an open fire.
Ryan turned around slowly, fighting for control as he realized he was not down and doomed. Not yet.
His eye was quickly becoming accustomed to the smoky half-light, which was generated by flaming torches placed in wall sconces around the room. There was a balcony that ran clear around the second-floor level. This had been a small dining room when Ryan had been a child, and there had been music — mandolin, dulcimer and banjo — played from the balcony.
Now Harvey Cawdor, baron of the ville, stood there with his woman at his side.
"We welcome you, Master Thursby, to Front Royal. You will understand that we must take precautions..." he stretched the word out to an absurd length, as if he savored every elongated syllable "…precautions... against them that trespass against me. You saw our crop of flowering trees as you came here, Master Thursby?"
"Yes, Baron." Ryan made a half bow to the shadowy figure.
"Good, good, good. You see, dearest, that here is a man of culture and understanding who will be welcome. Not some ragged and double-poor fucking bastard who would covet everything I own!"
Ryan took a deep breath. The change from the effusive and elegant welcome to the foul words — delivered in a rising and hysterical scream — was totally unexpected, bringing to Ryan the realization that his older brother might well be full-crazy.
"Where are the other visitors, brother? Brother Thursby?"
At that moment the door opened again, and Krysty Wroth came in, wearing a dark blue blouse and knee-length skirt of the same Front Royal livery. Her ankle boots were of plain untanned leather with a low, stacked heel. She'd used a piece of thin cord to tie back her cascade of hair. Even in the poor light of the vaulted room it still blazed like a coronet of living fire.
"Brother, wel... Come... sister. Sister welcome. Is she?.."
Ryan heard a woman's voice for the first time, pitched low, but with the crack of a command to it. The bulky figure of the man shifted sideways a few steps, until it stood directly beneath one of the torches.
Then, at long last, Ryan was able to properly see his brother. He had the same clumsy, shuffling, crablike walk with the right leg trailing and the right shoulder lifted in an unsightly hump. His face was partly in shadow, but Ryan could detect that there was some malformation of the mouth and nose. After so many years it gave him a thrill of vicious pleasure to see that his parting punch into his brother's hooked nose had been so brutally successful.
But above all of this was the astonishing way that Harvey Cawdor had grown grotesquely fat.
Not plump. Not just obese. But grossly, obscenely fat. He wore a flowing gown, like a cerise bed sheet, but it couldn't conceal his size. A quick guess put him around the 350-pound mark. His clothes were covered in delicate filigree embroidery, in woven patterns of silver and gold. His chubby hands were smothered in rings, one with what looked like a human eye set in a stone of amber.
Lady Rachel moved, with an infinite grace that caught Ryan's attention, to stand near the lord of the ville. Her face turned away from the light to peer down into the gloomy cavern of the hall at the man and the woman. She was taller than Harvey Cawdor, slim and elegant, wearing a gown that looked like black velvet, soft as sin. Her hair was cropped to her narrow shoulders, dark and lustrous. Her cheeks were very pale, and her eyes had vanished like gemstones of midnight jet in the hollows of their sockets. She wore no facial makeup, and her fingers were long and strong without any jewelry.
"Is the woman mutie?" she asked in a soft, caressing, melodious voice.
"No, she's not, Lady Rachel," Krysty replied in a loud, ringing voice, startling Ryan as he felt it wash over him like a breath of fresh air. Only then did he realize that the room carried the scent of some floral incense. One of his father's serving women had used something like it. The odor was clinging and sickly sweet, like the rotting meat that attracts the most beautiful of butterflies.
"Where are the others of your party, Master Thursby?'' the lady asked. "There are two more men and then two more that have fled our hospitality into the unfriendly Shens."
"True, my lady. Doctor Theophilus Tanner and his... and Lori Quint. I am Floyd Thursby, as you know, and this is Krysty Wroth, from the ville of Harmony." He turned as the door opened once more. "This is Jak Lauren from the far south of the Deathlands."
The woman on the balcony gasped aloud. "Azrael! His hair, husband!"
"Mutie. A mutie, here in the heart of my ville. Take him, guards! Slit his throat and in the boar pit for my precious pets."
"He is not a mutie, great lord," Krysty said. "His hair is natural. Where he comes from it's as common as red or black hair."
Harvey Cawdor laughed, shaking like a massive cherry jelly. "'Great lord!' Rachel, did you hear? The red-hair is... I like her, like her, like her." His voice edged up the scale toward a falsetto shriek that made the torches dance and flare into bright flames.
At that moment, as quick and neat as ever, J.B. came into the room, glanced up at where the lord and lady of the manor stood and folded himself into a bow so deep it held the taint of parody. Fortunately neither of the Cawdors seemed aware of that. Ryan introduced him.
"John Barrymore Dix, from Cripple Creek in the Rockies. A man with a great skill with all blasters and weapons."
"Could use him, Rachel," a slobbering Harvey said. "Lotsa blasters going home, sweet home on the range. Need a good man to put them together again, again."