"By the three Kennedy's!" Doctor Theophilus Tanner exclaimed, tripping over the gnarled root of an ancient live oak. It had rained, briefly but fiercely, and the ground had become soggy and treacherous. The low clouds veiled the moon, making it difficult to see more than ten feet ahead.
"You okay, Doc?" Lori asked, helping him to his feet and wiping ineffectually at the smears of mud on his black coat.
"Yeah. Just this path doesn't run straight for more than twenty yards at a time."
Nate Freeman looked back over his shoulder, face a pale blur ahead of them. "Want to get nearer than this to the ville 'fore sunup. We're close to Shersville here, and they might have patrols out, watching for me to head home."
The clouds parted, and the moon broke through, bathing the region in a bright silver glow. Doc looked around him, admiring the beauty of the forest, the rain glistening off the boles of the endless ranks of trees.
"How far?" he asked the young man.
"Sunup or the ville?"
"The dawn's early light."
"Two hours."
"The ville?"
"Three. If we don't all keep falling over our feet like clumsy old stupes."
"You'll watch your mouth or..." Lori threatened crossly. But Doc patted her arm.
"No, my dear heart. Nathan is right. I must take more care."
"Should have fetched the fast blasters." The girl sighed.
"Safer in the wag," Freeman argued. "You go through your plan to try and get in the ville then that mini-Uzi and the gray rifle'd have you in the moat 'fore you could say, 'Blessed Ryan spare us.' Know what I mean?"
Doc was thinking about the plan as they walked briskly through the Shens. Part of it had been his, but he kept forgetting bits of it. He was to be a traveling quack who was calling at the ville to treat any minor ailments and to draw teeth. But he'd lost his bag of tools. He could remember all of that. But Nathan hadn't liked the idea.
He'd wanted to wait and see, to try to sneak some news from those in Shersville who were still loyal to him. But even the young man had admitted that there had to be a real risk that Ryan's cover had been blown inside the ville. Doc had asked how long he thought Ryan would live once Harvey knew who he was.
Nathan had replied by simply snapping his fingers once.
So, that was why Doc and Lori were going in. For news. And if that turned out bad, for a try at a rescue.
"How?" Doc mumbled to himself. And after a little while he realized he didn't have an answer to that question.
The swordstick helped the old man over some of the rougher parts of the trail, and Lori was always at his elbow with encouragement.
"Path here goes through a swamp, so step careful. Mud's near bottomless on both sides. And we're closest we come to my home village. Fast and careful and quiet's the way."
Ironically it was Nathan Freeman who nearly brought disaster upon them all. He had looked back to make sure that his two companions had safely negotiated a tumbled willow tree that was rotting across the path, when his own foot slipped and he crashed to the ground. In falling he clutched at a low branch of a stunted elm tree, which broke in his grasp with a loud report that sounded like a Magnum going off.
"That you, Beau?" called a voice. It was a thin, whining sort of a voice, like a querulous old man asking when his supper would be ready.
Nathan drew his blaster from his belt, a double-action Smith & Wesson Model 39 handgun. Dropping into a crouch, he waved to Doc and Lori to take cover behind him.
"Beau? You fallen in the fucking water 'gain? I'm not pulling yer out if n..."
"Hi, there, Tom," Nathan said, straightening up, holding the pistol on the hunched little figure that had appeared out of the rags of mist that hung over the muddy water. "Thought I knew your voice, my trusted old friend."
Doc and Lori also stood up, seeing that the other villager was paralyzed with fear. The old man was literally shaking in his boots at the sudden appearance of the man he'd betrayed.
"Ramjet! Nathan, is?.. I didn't know you was going't'come back. Me an' Beau..."
"Here," Nathan said quietly, beckoning to Tom. "Come here."
The little villager stumbled toward Freeman, wringing his hands like an abject penitent. "Didn't mean trouble, Nate, you know that. Hell, we bin friends longer than most. I taught you to shoot an' told..."
"Shut up, Tom," Freeman said. "Kneel down here, in front of me."
"I'll get my breeches fouled in the dirt, Nate. You know what Becky's like if'n I get muddied up. I'll just stand."
"Kneel. That's good. Now get your mouth open real wide, Tom."
"What for? I don't... Urrgh..."
Doc looked away, knowing what was going to happen. Lori also guessed, and she clapped her hands together delightedly, eyes sparkling in the moonlight. "Yeah," she said. "Do it, Nate."
The little villager knelt in the slime, hands together, looking up at Nathan Freeman. The muzzle of the heavy automatic pistol was jammed in his mouth between his broken and stained teeth. His eyes were as wide as saucers, and he was moaning to himself.
"Close your lips, Tom. Suck on it, real good, like it was mother's milk. Good. So long, Tom."
The gun bucked, the sharp edge of the foresight cutting open the man's mouth. The explosion was muffled, sounding no louder than a man slapping a mosquito off his wrist. Out of the corner of his eye, Doc saw a hunk of bone burst out of the back of the scrawny villager's skull, landing with a plopping noise in the water on either side of the trail. A fine spray glittered in the moonlight for a second, like a ballooning fountain of fireflies, mushrooming from the hole in the head. The dappled mess of blood and brain tissue pattered in the dirt. The body jerked violently backward, legs kicking in the air, the mouth hanging open.
"Help me roll him into the swamp, Doc," Nathan said, holstering his smoking piece.
Tom's clothes held pockets of air, and at first it didn't sink, floating like a sodden log in the scum-covered water. Nathan glanced around. He found a broken branch from one of the willows and used it to push at the corpse, hold it under. He watched the bubbles, some bursting with crimson centers. When they stopped, he let go of the branch and threw it away. The body stayed beneath the surface.
Without a word, Freeman turned away and led Doc and Lori onward.
When they reached the screen of trees that fringed the open space in front of the fortress of Front Royal, it was a little after sunrise. The dawn was brilliant, the flaming disk of the sun lurching over the eastern horizon, coloring everything with its crimson light. The ville looked as though the stones glowed with a dreadful inner heat, and the water of the wide moat lay like congealing blood.
The drawbridge had just been lowered, and villagers were beginning to enter, hurrying past the dozen guards that lined the main gateway. Nathan looked worried.
"Normally only a couple of sec men there. Smells of trouble."
"Then I venture to suggest that we might consider our entrance as a matter of some immediacy. Time is of the essence, my dear young man, would you not say?"
"Yeah. I'll wait up here. You get out with news, take the trail runs due west. But don't go as far as Shersville. I'll pick you up. Don't look for me. I'll find you."
They heard the brazen howl of a trumpet from within the gates and the baying of a pack of hunting dogs, a sound that Doc and Lori recalled only too well from their arrival in the Shens. The girl shuddered at the noise and clutched at Doc's hand for comfort.
"Baron might be going hunting," Nathan said. "Nothing stops for that. Nothing. After the wild boars he breeds in the cellars of the ville. Best keep under cover until he's gone by."
Doc Tanner parted the branches of leaves and peered out at the fortress, grim and invincible, surrounded by the bloody aura of the rising sun.
"I doubt either of you are familiar with the poetic works of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe? No, I thought not. Poor man. Tragic life. My grandfather on my father's side knew him slightly. This scene recalls one of his verses, concerning a haunted palace."
"I like you reading poems, Doc," Lori whispered, glancing proudly at Nathan. "Doc knows millions of poems, doesn't you, Doc?"
"Perhaps hundreds rather than millions, my dear chickadee," Doc replied.
"Tell me the poem you said. About a haunting palace."
"It starts about a fine castle, like the ville here, that was once a place of great riches, splendor, pomp and circumstance. Then it fell upon bad times."
"Go on," she whispered. Nathan Freeman half listened, watching the road into Front Royal for the best moment to move.
"But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!
"Then it goes on about how the wonders of the olden times are sunk forever and locked into the grave, as they are here. The crimson of the rising sun is so strong in recalling this verse."
"Something's happening, Doc. Look. Horsemen and the pack of dogs. Stay still and keep your voice low."
First came a squadron of mounted sec men, their uniforms tinged with dazzling scarlet by the dawn. Then came a huge mutie stallion — the biggest horse Lori and Doc had ever seen, not that the girl had actually ever seen a live horse in her entire life. Mounted on it, wrapped in a silver cloak that the sun streaked with bloody splashes, was an immensely fat man. He wore a feathered cap that nodded and danced.
"Lord Harvey Cawdor, baron of Front Royal," Nathan whispered, unable to hide his hatred.
Then came a pack of twenty or so dogs, slavering black hounds with narrow muzzles and long legs. They were controlled with whips by a half-dozen mounted grooms. At the rear came another squadron of sec guards.
They cantered by, only a hundred paces from the hiding place of the three companions, who watched them pass.
The sec men were laughing at some shared jest. From the tone of the laughter, it was a cruel joke. Doc Tanner continued his remembered poem by Poe.
"Somehow it is even more suitable now that we have seen that procession of death," he said.
"Tell it, Doc," the girl urged.
"And travelers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door;
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh — but smile no more.
"Watching the front of that dreadful pile, lit by the vermilion rays of the rising sun, seems as ominous and frightening as the haunted palace of that verse." Doc's rich melodious voice had carried the poem well, sending a shiver down the back of both listeners.
Nathan suggested that it was as good a time as any to try their luck. With the baron out of the way for the day, heading toward Fishers' Hill, it was unlikely he'd be back before sunset.
They made their farewells quickly, then the old man and the pretty girl strode confidently out of the cover of the forest, joining other commoners on the road into the ville.
"You outlanders? Beyond Shens?" a stout young woman asked, dragging a trio of snot-nosed brats behind her as she wheeled a barrow along the rutted trail. The rickety cart was loaded with a mixture of mud and potatoes, heavy on the mud. Her accent was so barbarous and rude that it took all of Doc's frail concentration to understand what on earth she was saying to him.
"I regret that we are not fortunate enough to enjoy the benefits of a domicile in these attractive parts."
"What? You talk like a double-stupe mutie!" She spit to show her disgust as they joined the lineup at the drawbridge.
"He's not for here," Lori said, doing her best to ease the sudden tension.
"Yeah. Bin here 'fore?"
"No, never," Doc replied. "You know the ville well?"
"Should do. Bleeding scullery maid here for eight bastard years. Cleaning shit an' sodding grease off whoring plates. Then I landed these little pissers and me man went off south. Now I sell what I can."
The sec men were passing everyone through at a fair speed, seeming to recognize them as regulars. But Doc noticed that one of them was already eyeing Lori and himself, muttering to the guard next to him.
"Sees are busy today. Someone must have farted in front of her ladyship."
"No-o-o-o," jeered an elderly man at their side, who carried a string of diminutive onions on a long pole across his shoulders.
"How come you know so much, Eddy Pungo? Riddle me that."
"Hasn't heard? Course not. You's not gotten daughter in ville. Your man left you, dinne?"
"A stone an' a stick can make me sick, but words don't ever harm me, Eddy Pungo. You got news, then tell us."
The old man looked both ways, then leaned toward her, casting an anxious eye first at Doc Tanner and Lori, seeming to recognize them as being harmless. "Ryan. Ryan Cawdor."
The woman laughed, a short, coughing kind of a laugh that made her disbelief obvious.
"True," the old man insisted. "Girl says so. Seen the sees taking him and some friends. Tried to raid the ville."
"Lord Ryan come back? One eye an' all?"
"Ssh. One eye an' all. It's him all right, like the old stories say."
"What has happened to him?" Doc asked, hoping that the fluttering in his chest was only an attack of nerves.
"To Lord Ryan, stranger? I hear he was 'trayed. A servant, brother to Kenny Morse, gave him up from shock. Now he's bound and waits death when the baron comes back from his hunting."
"Oh, dear!" The woman with the barrow sighed. "Fucker, innit? Wait twenty years or more for the lord to come and release us. Then next day stupe bastard gets chilled by Baron Harvey and us no better for it."
"No worse, no worse. Gotta look it that way. That's why gate's crawling with sees, as thick as lice on a horse blanket."
Soon enough it was Doc and Lori's turn to face the guards on the cobble-lined approach to the main entrance to the ville. Up close Doc realized what a difficult operation it would be to try to take the fortress.
"Could use a Peacemaker or a Minuteman missile here," he said.
"What's that, stranger?" a sec man barked. Doc hadn't even realized he'd spoken out loud, and he became confused.
"Don't wish to cause any fuss or alarm. Sorry if I spoke out of turn, only the volume of a given mass of gas is inversely proportional to... to something or other."
Two more of the sec men turned their way. "What's he saying?" asked one, a brutish looking bully with a number of unhealed sores across his upper lip. "Heard him say something about wanting gas."
"No, that wasn't quite..." Doc Tanner paused, fighting hard to gain control of his wandering wits, knowing that for the first time in many, many years, the lives of others rested with him.
Lori was holding his arm so tightly that it was hurting him, but it suddenly seemed to be his sole contact with reality and sanity. With an effort the old man pulled himself together.
"I am Doctor Tanner and this is my..."
"I'm his assistant," Lori put in quickly, remembering from the planning session in the abandoned wag that this was to be her role in their attempted deception.
"Yes, my assistant. I wish to gain entry to this eminent ville." The splendidly rounded vowels rolled out from between the immaculate set of teeth.
"Why?"
"I am a traveling medicine man."
"What d'you do?" the sec man asked. Now there were six of them around the strangers, mostly there to leer at the blond vision that was Lori Quint.
Then Doc recalled something of the spiel he'd contrived as they'd walked through the forest. "Hallelujah, my brothers. I'm here to help to heal the sick and make the lame walk. To aid the blind in obtaining the miraculous gift of sight and the deaf to be able to worship at the shrine of the muse of orchestral sound. If your piles itch or your skin flakes or your glands swell or your kidneys leak or your lungs wheeze or your teeth ache, then let Doc Tanner be your hope and your blessed salvation."
He ended on a silence that seemed respectful. The old man thought that he might have missed his true vocation.
"I have missed my true vocation," he said, not intending to speak out loud. Fortunately his tumbling speech had fascinated all of the guards, and nobody listened to his comment.
"You say you draw teeth, old man?" asked a skinny man with a stubbly beard sprouting amid a lake of warts.
"I do, indeed. But sadly all my tools were taken when we were attacked by muties some days ago. They took all our possessions."
"We got tools in the guardhouse. Come in. Our sergeant's been moaning for days and nights about a tooth that ails him."
Doc was brought sharply back to earth. "Draw a tooth for your sergeant? I don't... I mean to say that it's not..."
"Not what, old man?"
Doc swallowed hard, wondering why his mouth had become bone-dry. The crowd pressed around him, and he heard Lori squeak as someone goosed her. He struggled to hang on to his unique role as the savior of the group. Everyone was depending on him.
"If the tools are suitable?"
There was a disturbance in the throng, with men and women staggering sideways. A tall man appeared in an immaculate uniform, gesturing for the drawbridge to be kept clear.
"With the renegade caught, we have to watch for any spies or enemies," the sergeant barked at the sec men. "And who the sweet crucifix is this?"
"Traveling quack-salver," the corporal replied. "Says he can treat bad teeth."
"Then get him in and he can treat mine. Pain's burning my brain. Is the gaudy with him?"
"My assistant, Captain," Doc Tanner said. "Did I hear you mention some renegade?"
"Only the missing Ryan Cawdor, come sneaking back like a diseased rat after barley. But he's locked safe. And by dawn tomorrow he'll likely be another fruit a'dangling in the baron's prize orchard yonder."
When the pliers slipped on the sergeant's rotten tooth and Doc heard the ominous crunch of broken bone, he knew that he and Lori were in deep trouble.