"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.