"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."

"Now that we've seen you, you can eat with us," Lady Rachel Cawdor called down. "And you can all tell us more about yourselves. Then we can decide whether you... what happens to you."

There was a third person behind the ornate pillars of the balcony, indistinct and shadowy, with a pale round blur of a face. The clothes were as dark as Rachel Cawdor's, with what looked like a chain of gold around the neck. It held a single large amethyst, cut so that its facets reflected bolts of violet light across the room.

As quickly as he appeared, the person vanished, moving with a gentle ease, not making a sound. Ryan looked again at the space where he'd been, doubting his own sight. But he noticed that Krysty had also seen him.

She mouthed the single word "Jabez" to Ryan.

Suddenly the audience with the rulers of Front Royal was over.

Rachel had begun to show signs of a strange unease. Her hands fluttered around her mouth, like startled birds, and she rubbed at her lips, chafing the skin of her cheeks. When she spoke, her voice had dropped, becoming rapid and urgent. She told Ryan and the others that they should wait for the sec men, who were posted at each corner of the large hall, to take them to their quarters for the night.

"We eat at six in the evening. Don't leave your rooms, or you'll be killed on the spot."

It was said with a chilling finality. Ryan watched them go, his brother shuffling haltingly like a mountain of blubber after his wife. One thing was sure: Lady Rachel Cawdor wasn't someone to screw around with.

Locked away in the heart of the castlelike ville of Front Royal, Ryan and his friends found that the day passed with infinite slowness.

They had been taken away by the sec patrols, along winding passages, up and down narrow stone staircases, to what Ryan thought must be the third or fourth floor of the fortress. Each of them was pushed firmly into separate rooms, the doors slamming shut behind them, keys grating in locks.

To his amazement Ryan found that he was in a chamber that had once been his nursery. The pictures on the walls of stags and boars being torn apart by ferocious hounds were gone, and the draperies were now of plain blue material. The window, which was barred, looked out over the scum-covered moat across the strip of cleared land to the rolling waves of the forest ocean.

Shelves — mainly empty — lined the wall that had once held Ryan's toys and the handed-down model blasters and soldiers of his two older brothers. Morgan's toys had been well used but serviceable. Harvey's had been generally in mint condition, but with sly damage: a leg severed from a soldier, or a wing cut through on a USAF F-4C Phantom.

There had been something about the shelves, something that Morgan had once shown him. There was some way to get behind it into the room next along the corridor, which had once been used by an earlier baron for his illicit affairs with serving maids. There had been a simple catch, Ryan remembered, but it had been too high and too stiff for him to reach easily.