James Axler - Homeward Bound

"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.

Krysty had watched the departure of Baron Harvey Cawdor and his entourage for their day's sport in the Shens. By peering through the window of her room she could just see the road that wound out across the drawbridge, vanishing into the trees on the far side of the moat.

With nothing else to do, she had sat on an old-fashioned stickback chair by the open casement, watching the men and women from the surrounding villages file in to sell their produce.

And she saw the silver-haired old man in the cracked knee boots and stained frock coat, who was accompanied by the tall blond girl with the wide smile. For a moment Krysty stood and leaned on the sill, hoping to try to catch the eye of Doc and Lori. Then she withdrew into the room as she realized that they were playing a dangerous game, hoping to infiltrate the ville in some secret guise.

A few minutes later she could hear yelling and cursing, floating up from the guardhouse just inside the main gateway. She hoped it wasn't anything to do with Doc and Lori.

She'd heard something of what had gone on in the chamber next door to hers during the darkness of the night. Krysty's part-mutie birthright had given her certain peculiar skills, including enhanced sight and hearing. The visit of the Lady Rachel Cawdor to Ryan had been largely audible to Krysty, though some parts of it had been left to her imagination, not that much imagination had been required!

Once it was daylight, the tall redheaded girl had devoted her energies to examining her prison in the most careful detail.

She'd spotted the interconnecting door immediately. But it was sealed with an old iron bar, secured with a huge brass padlock. She rocked it with her hands, but the bar was rooted in the stone wall and hardly moved at all. The window opened on the moat, but it was a drop of forty feet. Though it didn't have any heavy security bars, the window frame was split into eight by metal rods. With a great effort it would have been possible for a small, skinny person to wriggle through. But for someone of Krysty's height and build, it was unthinkable to escape that way.

The main door into the room was locked and bolted from the outside. There was no judas hole for the sec men in the corridor to spy on her, but she could hear from the sound of boots and quiet conversation that there were at least a dozen guards in the passage.

The room was eighteen feet by fourteen, with no other exits or entrances. There was a fireplace, but the chimney was blocked off with stone and concrete. She even checked the stone flags on the floor, rolling back the coarse woolen drugget. The furnishings were sparse, and seemed very old.

A carved wooden chest at the foot of the double bed opened at her touch, revealing a pile of cloth. The smell was unpleasant, like damp earth. Krysty pulled the top bolt of cotton out of the trunk and unfolded it. The cloth was spotted with speckles of green mold, which carried the rich, moist odor. She wrinkled her nose as realization came to her. It was a cerecloth that had been used as a shroud or winding sheet for a corpse. Though, by the look of it, the cerement had done that duty on several occasions.

The chest also held a number of iron and pewter vases, which were cold and dusty with age. A wardrobe at the head of the bed on the left was completely empty, except for the stub of a pencil and an empty can of fly killer. A faint message had been scrawled on the inside of the door: Cathy Supports Lynx.