"No elec?" Krysty asked. "Must have."
"Yeah. Most is wind— or water-generated. Storage batteries in the cellars. Always been a tradition here at the ville to use candles and lamps and torches like those."
"Stand for Lord Harvey Cawdor, Baron of Front Royal and his wife, the Lady Rachel!" a voice bellowed from near the fireplace. The four friends stood up, chairs scraping on the rush-covered stone floor.
In the brighter light of the great hall, Harvey Cawdor was even more grotesque than at first sight. Ryan upped his guesstimate of his brother's weight to four hundred pounds, contained in a billowing coat with horn buttons. It was a dark maroon color and seemed to have used up enough material to make a fair-size tent. The clothes were designed to try to minimize his deformities, but nothing could conceal the crooked back or the dragging leg.
The wide belt of polished snakeskin held two small holsters with the gleaming butts of twin Colt pistols peeking from them.
Harvey took a reinforced carving chair at the head of the long table, waving a hand to his wife to sit on his right side.
Rachel Cawdor was in her middle thirties, and it looked as though she worked hard to keep her appearance down in the twenties. The reward was that in the half-light of the big chamber, she could pass for twenty-nine. Maybe.
Her black hair supported a narrow silver coronet that sparkled with diamonds. The piece was a Cawdor heir-loom, and Ryan felt a flush of surprising anger at seeing the murderous slut flaunting it. Her dress was a blue velvet so deep that it could be taken for black. A silver brooch shaped like a long-necked flamingo, its tail a mass of different colored precious stones, decorated the low front. She nodded to Ryan and his friends, totally ignoring her husband. On her arm was a small purse of scuffed black leather, at odds with the rest of her immaculate appearance.
The chair to the left of the baron remained empty.
"Is?.." Harvey said, getting an almost imperceptible shake of the head from his wife. "Ah, no matter, matter is energy is mass and matter. Doesn't matter to me. No damn matter."
Once they had both seated themselves, Ryan and his three friends also sat down. The table was so long that they were twenty yards away from Rachel and the baron.
Harvey Cawdor clapped his hands and servants, dressed in the livery of the ville, appeared bearing platters and tureens and great serving dishes. Ryan had somehow expected it would be the same blue dinner service with the willow pattern design that he'd eaten from during his childhood. As the meal began, he realized why that no longer existed. The Baron Cawdor was an intemperate and violently clumsy eater.
There was no question of soup followed by fish, followed by game, followed by salad, followed by a main course of meat with desserts and then cheese and fruit. Everything came at once. The servants lined up at the far end of the table while their lord and master ladled out slopping portions of anything that caught his eye. He piled it all into a bowl in front of him that must have been able to hold five gallons of liquid or thirty pounds of solid food.
At that distance it was difficult for them to see what precisely went into the bowl, but the servants eventually made their way to the guests' end of the table. Lady Rachel only indicated a small portion of steamed fish for herself, with a spoonful of sugar peas. She took only water to drink.
Ryan had rarely seen a more spectacular array of food. There was steak and great hunks of horsemeat, marinated in white port wine, lamb cutlets with a red fruit sauce; pork, overfat, smothered in honey and wild ginger; flounders, served with toasted almonds; bowls of shrimps, wallowing in a pepper sauce and crabs, still in their shells; meat that Krysty identified as turkey, pallid and waxen, dripping with melted goat's cheese and crushed peppercorns; tomatoes and onions in sour cream, sprinkled with mushrooms and little green berries; a thick gray-brown soup that had, unnervingly, dozens of hard-boiled eggs bobbing greasily around in it; potatoes and rutabagas and beans, minced and fried in gravy.
There were also bowls of fruit, cooked and raw, mostly in sweet and sickly sauces that drenched them. There was water to drink, or a thick lilac-colored liqueur that had an unusual taste.
"Like something a gaudy whore would bathe in," J.B. muttered, struggling to conceal his disgust at the scented flavor, opting for the water instead. He followed Rachel Cawdor's example and took only a portion of boiled fish and a side helping of vegetables.
Ryan chose a steak, finding it grievously underdone, blood seeping from the meat before he even laid a knife into it. He ladled some fried beans on the side and discovered they'd been soaked with grated red chilies that almost took the skin off his tongue.
Krysty contented herself with a chipped goblet of springwater and some of the potatoes, which had been fried in butter. She also took a couple of slices of the whole wheat bread from the wooden board, which was carried by an elderly man with trembling hands who kept his head bowed and didn't look at any of the guests. He repeatedly muttered, "Thank you, my lord, thank you, my lady, thank you..." regardless of the sex of the person he was serving at the time.
With a shudder, Krysty noticed that the old servant's hands had been branded several times, and his fingers and knuckles showed the unmistakable signs of having been brutally broken more than once.
"Food good, Brother Thursby?" Harvey Cawdor bellowed from the murky distance at the head of the table. His face and beardless chins were beslobbered with runnels of grease, carrying particles of several different courses of the meal. His piggy little eyes had almost vanished behind rolls of fat.
"Yeah, Baron Cawdor."
"Dreck," whispered Jak Lauren. "Eaten better from a double-poor swampie's chuck-out pile."
"What did the whitehead say?" Rachel Cawdor asked, blazing eyes focused on Ryan.
"Good food, my lady," he replied.
"I have lost the taste for food, Master Thursby. I no longer get any pleasure from the act of eating."
Her voice was low and uneven, and her hands folded over each other, fingers writhing like ten white snakes.
As they watched, ignoring the grunting and wallowing of Harvey Cawdor, the woman fumbled in her black purse and took out a circular mirror with an ornately sculpted edge where tiny dragons fought amid a tangled forest. It was another of the Cawdor heirlooms. She also removed a small sliver of polished steel and a tiny brown vial, which was tightly corked.
"Jolt," Jak mouthed to Ryan, but the one-eyed man had already recognized what was happening. The woman was probably addicted to the hallucinogenic mix of coke and mescaline. Not everyone who took jolt became quickly addicted. But once you were well hooked, then you were on a steep and icy slope that carried you down faster and faster. All the way to the bottom. If Lady Rachel Cawdor needed to snort some lines of jolt in the middle of a public meal, then the bottom of the slope couldn't be that far away for her.
While Harvey Cawdor snuffled and grunted his way through his trough of food, his wife methodically began her preparations for doing the drug. Ryan and the others continued to eat quietly, occasionally beckoning to one of the silent servants for more bread or vegetables.
Rachel eased the cork from the narrow neck of the small tinted bottle, tipping a half gram or so of the sparkling white powder onto the scored surface of the mirror. She concentrated on the task, oblivious to the glances of her guests. Gripping the thin section of surgical steel and using it to chop and grind the jolt into smaller grains, she eventually arranged the drug into a half-dozen, neat, ordered lines across the glass.