Chapter Thirty-Four

 

 

All that Ryan knew was the reality that Straub had showed him. His mind was bound in limitless shrouds of sweltering midnight linen, closing off all his perceptions.

 

Straub whispered in his ear as he sat there, motionless, paralyzed, explaining how he and the countess had worked out the only way to secure what she most wanted.

 

"Stiff-backed pride, Cawdor. Your downfall. As it was with that withered old fool called the Trader. He thought he was immortal until he faced death on that beach."

 

"Dead?" Ryan barely forced out the single word through gritted teeth.

 

Straub's face was close to his, so that he could taste the rotten odor of his breath, foul on his cheek. "You can go to your grave without ever being sure of that, you one-eyed, scum-sucking imbecile! But it might be you'll be meeting him again very soon. After you've performed your duty for my lady. But I only say mebbe. Why give you an inch of knowledge when you can more easily die ignorant?"

 

 

 

THE BALD MAN TOOK Ryan by the wrist, leading him unprotestingly through the shadowy passages of the huge, rambling mansion. It was oddly deserted, with no sec men at doors and cross corridors. There was no sign of any servants, nor of his friends. Ryan's feet seemed to float over the thick carpets, and his eye gazed incuriously around him.

 

"It was so easy. They chose to separate and go to different places. There was no need to be cunning. Simply to find them and slay them. Let me show you all your friends, outlander. All of your dead friends."

 

The combination of the powerful drug in the drink and the vicious skill of the bald man's mesmerism had robbed Ryan of all sense and reduced him to a feeble puppet in the hands of the sniggering Straub.

 

"First let us see your redheaded slut, Ryan. In the library, I think she said."

 

The door swung open silently, and Ryan and his captor drifted through into the dusty stillness.

 

"Smell the death, Ryan. Smell the spilled blood of your lover. See the way her hair melts into the flow of crimson from the slit throat, lying there, on the floor, with old books scattered around her corpse. See it."

 

Ryan saw it, exactly as Straub described it. Krysty was on her back, hands spread, fingers clenched, her fiery hair floating out around her shoulders, free and loose, the ends sodden in the lake of dull blood that still trickled from a deep gash that opened up the whiteness of bone in her throat.

 

Ryan blinked, stricken, feeling a vague surprise that her sentient hair hadn't coiled up defensively at the last. That was odd. But it was such a tiny, foolish detail.

 

"If you want to weep, then do it," Straub said, still grinning widely.

 

"No," Ryan said slowly. "After I've chilled you and the bitch then then"

 

 

 

JAK HAD BEEN MURDERED in the armory As they moved through the dark stillness, Straub had described what Ryan would see behind the hair-open door. And it was true.

 

The albino had been shot once through the back of the head, matting the fine, silken white hair with clots of pink-gray brain and splinters of bone. Then in the last, ghastly shock of dying, he'd managed to draw one of the throwing knives, holding it, unthrown in his hand.

 

 

 

J.B. AND MILDRED had returned to their bedroom to be close to Doc.

 

"Room still stinks of cordite," Straub said as they paused in the passage. "Sec men went in mob-handed on this one. Weren't taking any chances. Six of them, and it looks like they emptied their Rugers into the bodies. Kind of messy. Sure you want to see them?" He pushed Ryan through into the shambles.

 

The bodies were almost unrecognizable, and the room was filled with the biting fumes of the gunfire. It was just as Straub had said it would be. Mildred lay across the corpse of the Armorer, one arm blown off at the shoulder, most of the ragged wounds in her chest and stomach. J.B. stared at the ceiling, blank eyed, one lens of his glasses smashed like a star. Neither of them had had any chance of reaching their weapons.

 

"See," Straub said. "Just as I told you. They were such easy meat, and all because of your stubborn pride. Want to see the old man?"

 

"Yeah. See the butcher's bill that needs paying," Ryan said, grating out the harsh, helpless words. He barely hung on to the shreds of sanity at the realization that he had been completely defeated. All of his friends dead. All of them. And his own death only an hour or so away.

 

He felt physically beaten, hardly able to move, yet somehow movement was easy as Straub showed him everything that had happened. It was oddly dreamlike, with no sense of walking from place to place. The bald man clung to his arm and whispered it in his ear, and there it was.

 

 

 

"LOOKS PEACEFUL, DON'T HE?" Straub sneered. "Weak as a kitten, the lousy old prick."

 

"Why did you have to chill them all?" Ryan whispered, head spinning, feeling his stomach knotting with bitter bile. "Just take me."

 

"Not good enough for my lady. You spit in her face, and she couldn't just walk away from that."

 

Doc was on his back, eyes closed, the only sign of his violent passing his hands, clenched in front of his face as if he were trying to ward off a blow.

 

"How?" Ryan asked.

 

"Pillow. Didn't struggle too much."

 

 

 

TIME WAS STRETCHED and meaningless.

 

One moment Ryan was listening to Straub's painting the picture of Doc's bleak and lonely passing, then he was seeing it in every detail. And then he was back again in Straub's room, lying on the sofa, one hand absently rubbing at the wound in his thigh. He was vaguely aware of its prickling heat and how tender the flesh felt.

 

Straub was leaning over a large crystal, polishing it with a strip of aquamarine satin, breathing on it, his gleaming, skull-like face grotesquely distorted in the internal reflection of the globe.

 

He was whispering to himself in a childlike, crooning voice. Ryan heard the words and recognized that they had to make some sort of sense, but he still failed to understand them. Only snatches penetrated into his drugged, paralyzed mind.

 

"Feed her cream. Mebbe allow her the child. Take him under my wing. Use my powers to close the lady down. Careful and slow and gentle. Think of the enemies, all dismayed, creeping in the corridors, frightened of my shade."

 

Ryan slept, his mind brimming with the hideous, deathly images of his butchered comrades. His memory flicked back over adventures gone, never forgotten, looking out to the empty future, alone.

 

When he came back into the misty half world, Straub was still polishing, still whispering, hugging himself like an old woman against a bitter cold.

 

"Or pluck the flower from the nettle now? Let the plan run. Let the deaths come at her hands. Finish them all and finish the one-eyed rat king himself. You're such a fine, brave fellow, Straub, aren't you? You have two plans, and both are brilliant. Finest ever. Each one a glittering, flawless gem, with its own beautiful facets to cut and polish. You the best, Straub. The very, very best."

 

 

 

THE COUNTESS was in the room, looking down at Ryan, stretched helpless on his sofa. She wore a knee-length white robe of embroidered silk, cut low across her swelling breasts, with a long crimson scarf wrapped around her neck. On her feet were boots of white Spanish leather.

 

"You are sure, Straub?"

 

The bald man was capering around, playing an imaginary flute, using a carved human femur as his instrument. "Of course. First the drink and the potion. Then my little silver pendant to draw him and bind him and keep him. Now he sees only the pictures that I paint for him and does what I command."

 

"I wish him to do what I command."

 

Straub giggled again. "But of course. My plans are for you, Mistress."

 

Ryan watched as she drifted in slow motion across the thick carpet and touched the man softly on the cheek with her long fingernail, drawing it across the taut skin, leaving a needle-thin thread of scarlet.

 

"Yes," she hissed, the syllable dragging on and on like an angry cobra.

 

"Where will you take him, Mistress?" Straub asked, ignoring the bead of blood that dangled from his chin.

 

"My room."

 

"Not here?" A note of faint disappointment crept into the unctuous voice.

 

"No." She paused. "In fact I think it should be more special. Perhaps that is why I have been failing. The setting has not been right for the fathering of a fine son. Not a dull bedroom in a dull house. The attic of the old mill above the gardens. With its fine view. On the way to the ob platform over the gorge."

 

Straub laughed. "The one-eyed stupe had said he wanted to see the river. Why not show it to him after he has fulfilled your requirements, Mistress?"

 

The woman smiled and nodded at him, turning her face toward Ryan, who unaccountably shuddered, unaccountably since none of the words being spoken made any sense to his crazed, fogged mind.

 

 

 

THEY WERE OUTSIDE in a fine drizzle, with a light breeze whipping through the tops of a gigantic pair of live oaks near the rear entrance to the ville.

 

Straub had seen them off, bowing to the countess and slapping Ryan gently and contemptuously across the cheek. "I pray it will be success."

 

"I know it will. And after, I shall follow your idea and send him to view the river."

 

"And I go into the house, Mistress, to make everything he saw into reality."

 

 

 

SHE HELD HIM BY THE HAND as they strolled like lovers across the terracing, down the side of the long pool toward the squat building. Ryan could hear a faint roaring sound in the background, like ferocious animals trapped deep underground. He had no idea what it might be.

 

"Soon, lover," she said. "It will take time, so that I am properly satisfied, but I shall tell you what to do. Anything I want, anything. And your seed will fill me, and I will rule on here through my son, through eternity. Soon, Ryan."

 

 

 

STRAUB WENT FIRST into the room where Doc lay on his back on the bed, eyes closed, motionless. He looked around the room and picked up a large stuffed cushion from an armchair, hefting it and moving silently across the room.

 

"So long, you babbling old fool," he whispered, bending low over the frail figure beneath the coverlet.

 

"So long," Doc said, squeezing the trigger on the concealed Le Mat and blowing Straub's guts out through his spine.