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"Hung six weeks so it's rich and strong. There's refried beans with chilies I
grew and dried myself. Soda bread and salted butter. And a dish of whipped
potatoes there.
Got some beer in the jugs." She picked something out from between her back
teeth and flicked it across the room.
"Eat in good spirits," she said.
"THAT WAS EXCELLENT." Doc didn't quite manage to stifle a belch.
"Long as we don't all start to throw up around midnight." J.B. absently wiped
the last of the gravy off his plate with the last of the bread. "It tasted
fine. Just wish I
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could've stopped myself seeing that woman's filthy hands all over it."
Knuckles was looking at the tureen. "Anyone mind if I lick it out?"
Capestrano folded his hands over his stomach. "My dear boy, this is liberty
hall.
Eat away and right welcome."
Ellie dabbed at her mouth with the corner of a kerchief, embroidered with tiny
strawberries. "That was good ale," she said. Her cheeks were unusually
flushed.
Ryan couldn't help noticing that her fingers trembled a little as she poured
herself another mug of beer.
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"What do we do now?" Michael asked. "We learn this play?"
Ryan pushed himself back from the table and stood, looking out over the
mountains. By pressing his face to the cold glass he could just see along the
backs of the houses on the street. It was growing dark, and he could make out
flurries of snow, wreathing among the skeletal trees that lined the edge of
the sheer precipice.
"Mebbe we should go see the baron, Wizard Sidler. Don't want sec men calling
around to drag us to his place."
"Day two finished," J.B. warned.
"Yeah. Michael's right. If we're going to put on this play tomorrow night,
we've got a shit lot of work to do."
Capestrano beamed. "Miss Morte and I will take the lion's share of the parts.
Doc will be wonderful. I have him in mind for a shabby and irascible old man.
Perhaps inebriated. The sort of fellow who runs around with a thick stick,
compelling his nephew to marry an heiress."
Doc snatched up his lion's-head sword stick and flourished it. "Ah, the smell
of the crowd and the roar of the greasepaint," he said, nearly knocking a
small china figure of a ballerina off the table at his side with his cane.
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"Simmer down, Doc." Ellie smiled. "Save it for tomorrow."
"I'll go check out the baron in the morning," Ryan said.
"I'll come with you," Michael offered.
"No. You must stay and learn your part for the performance," Capestrano
insisted.
"Perhaps John Dix will accompany you, Ryan?"
"No," said both J.B. and Ryan, the snapped word overlapping.
"Think I'd rather stay around here," the Armorer added. "Can't act, and this
way
I'll keep out of trouble. Mebbe use your room, Ellie, and watch over the
ville."
"Of course."
The evening ended with everyone going to bed early. As Ryan lay there, the
night sounds of Yuma occasionally disturbing him, he thought about J.B. He'd
never seen his old friend so tense and edgy.
Outside there was an occasional burst of singing. A couple of times a scream
or a yell. Once a shot, away in the distance.
But Ryan eventually drifted into an uneasy sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Four
J.B. stood in the corridor, beckoning urgently to Ryan.
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"What?"
The Armorer was wearing a small pair of glasses, with diamond-shaped, heavily
smoked lenses. He held a slim-bladed knife in his right hand, using it to call
Ryan toward him.
"What is it?"
J.B.'s mouth opened, but the only sound that Ryan heard was a faint buzzing,
like a swarm of wasps, contained inside a tall chimney.
"No good, man," Ryan called. "I can't hear a plain word."
J.B. turned and started to walk away, shoulders slumped, as though he'd
suffered some dreadful defeat. The passage extended into pools of deep shadow,
with moonlit windows ranged along to the right. At irregular intervals there
were sculpted heads on tall plinths of brown flecked marble.
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As Ryan began to follow his oldest and closest friend through the sighing
echoes of the empty house, he looked at each bust as he passed it, noticing
that the nose had been hacked off each face, and that the eyes were savagely
gouged pits of rough stone.
J.B.'s steel-cleated combat boots rang out as he moved down the corridor, but
above the sound, Ryan could catch the susurration of a tinkling harpsichord,
delicate, plangent notes.
"J.B.! Hold up there!"
As he stepped outside, the rain teemed down around him, soaking his hair and
running behind the patch over his raw eye socket, the long barreled .38
revolver on his right hip banging painfully against his thigh as he ran
through the dripping spruces.
J.B. had disappeared over the top of one of the large dunes, his foot marks
barely
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visible in the powder-dry sand.
Ryan dug into his enormous reserves of strength, tackling the dusty path up
the side of the cliff. Far below him he could see a white-necked condor,
swinging across the valley on spread wings. The rock beneath his feet was
crumbling, forcing him to go higher and higher.
"Come on, Ryan. Why don't you take the road less traveled?"
J.B.'s voice sounded oddly like Ryan's long-dead father, Baron Titus Cawdor,
of the powerful ville of Front Royale.
Now the whole side of the mountain was sliding away. Each time Ryan jumped to
a higher, parallel path, that too started to tumble. His boots scrabbled
frantically for purchase.
"Secrets make for bad neighbors, Ryan."
"Wait for me, J.B., and I'll tell you what's happening."
The corridor was finished.
The row of sculpted heads was behind him, and all that remained in front of
Ryan was a blank wall of dull sec steel.
He was vaguely aware of the sound of a war wag's engine, rumbling up a steep
incline, struggling as though it were working at altitude. Coughing and
spluttering, it seemed to be coming closer.
Ryan moved uneasily.
"Dark night!" J.B. sounded angry.
Ryan blinked his good eye, wincing at the brightness of the light that cut
across the bedroom like an Apache lance.
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"Stop snoring, Doc!"
This time it was Michael.
"Throw a pillow at the noisy old fart. Shut him up!"
Ryan finally woke up, feeling tired and ready for a few hours' more sleep.
THE BREAKFAST EGGS were over-easy. They were also over three weeks old and
grievously overcooked.
"We could use them to block off the big gap at the side of the window,"
Michael suggested. "Or shoot them at this Baron Sidler when we go after that
gang."
Ryan had been sitting across the table from the teenager, with J.B. on his
left and
Doc picking thoughtfully at some green bacon on the right. Knuckles was
checking out the horses while Capestrano and Ellie were having a working
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breakfast, discussing the play they were planning to put on that evening.
Ryan stood and walked toward Michael, who saw the expression on his face and
got to his feet, adapting a defensive Tao-Tain-Do posture.
Ryan feinted with his right hand, seeing Michael react with lightning speed,
already anticipating the blow from the left. The one-eyed man third-guessed
him and followed through with the right, open-handed. The slap rang out, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]