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razored barbed wire.
Father Sandor stayed a safe six paces behind them, not giving them a ghost of
a chance to jump him.
"Ring in the floor. Lifts easily with the aid of the gods and a good
counterbalance. Find a lamp and some self-lights just inside it and some steps
down. Get the lamp going and walk down the steps. Go straight to the far wall
and wait there for me. Don't thee move or speak."
Ryan stooped and tugged on a wrought-iron ring set in the stone floor close by
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the altar. He heaved on it, surprised at how easily it swung open.
"Gaia!" Krysty gasped in horror at the noxious miasma that floated up from the
black hole.
And Ryan knew instantly what the smell had been that he'd first noticed in the
church, clinging to the person of gross Father Sandor.
It was death, spilled blood, fresh and old, putrefaction of human flesh,
ancient and modern. The vault below the aisle was nothing more or less than a
charnel house.
Ryan hesitated at entering the pit, and the priest grew angry.
"Now or later. Matters not a jot to me, outlander. But most of my parish find
breath oddly attractive and cling to it. Longer than one would have thought
possible."
"I'm going." Ryan lighted the oil lamp and adjusted the wick to give a steady,
golden light that showed him a narrow flight of steps that wound down into a
deep cellar.
"I think the time has come for thee to lay aside the weapons of
unrighteousness, brother and sister. The two blasters can go down on the
floor, at the top of the stairs. Perhaps that crooked stick, as well."
"Can't walk without it. Got a bullet in my leg. Can't even stand."
There was a long, menacing stillness, and Ryan knew that the monk was
considering the option of blasting him in the spine. But the first option of
having them both untouched in his crypt finally won out.
"Very well. But thy automatic and thy double-action Smith amp; Wesson,
daughter of ungodliness. Very slow and very careful. Lay them down, pilgrims."
Ryan and Krysty obeyed the soft, oily voice, gently putting down their
handblasters.
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"Now thee may creep into my crypt."
THE CELLAR was unbearably hot, with two coal fires burning in iron braziers,
one at each end, casting a fiery, crimson glow across the space that
heightened the images of Hell.
Rows of torture instruments were hung on strong metal hooks probes, files,
hammers and pokers; whips in all shapes and sizes; knives, razors and
cleavers; a rack and thumbscrews; chains and loops of thin wire, manacles and
iron collars with padlocks.
It was a fully equipped torture chamber, like an engraving from an ancient
tome about the horrors of the
Spanish Inquisition.
And it was occupied.
Ryan and Krysty immediately saw the body of a young person, hung from one of
the hooks like a rejected side of meat, so mangled that it was impossible to
tell its sex or its age.
The corpse had been torn and battered in a hideous manner that screamed of
endless hours of unimaginable pain and suffering.
Father Sandor was all too obviously a man who enjoyed his own skills.
"Ah, that," he said, beaming again in the light of the oil lamp, the fires
casting a sweating sheen over his jowls. "A local youth who helped me with a
service for good crops for the ville. A successful operation, but the patient,
sadly, died." He laughed at his own humor.
He gestured for Ryan and Krysty to stand against the far wall of the cellar
while he laid several probes and pokers in the braziers to grow hot.
"Suffering is pleasure and pleasure is suffering," the fat monk muttered,
still keeping the Winchester scattergun aimed at his two prisoners.
It was obvious to Ryan that the priest intended to chain them, then torture
them both to death. This was as inexorable as the sun rising in the east and
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setting in the far west. It meant that the moment was coming like a runaway
train when some sort of move would have to be made, go up against the menace
of the shotgun, whatever the outcome.
It was the most slender of chances, but it was a whole lot better than no
chance at all.
He knew that Krysty would be thinking exactly the same, but there was no way
of communicating with each other, no plan to be hatched.
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At the back of his mind was the desperate idea of making a suicidal attack and
hope that Sandor fired both of the barrels, giving Krysty a good chance of
making a break for safety, then bringing J.B., Jak and the others back with
her to avenge his own death.
Even at that dark moment, Ryan grinned wolfishly to himself, amused by his own
shadowed plan of dying.
If the monk had been holding a handblaster, there would have been a goodish
chance that he might miss.
Ryan remembered seeing a nervous bounty hunter in a clothing store in a
nameless ville in Pennsylvania fire eight shots from a Ruger P-85 at a dodging
killer. All of them were at a range of less than ten feet, and every single
bullet missed the target.
That wasn't going to happen at that range with a 20-gauge scattergun.
Father Sandor was breathing heavily with his own bustling exertion, readying
himself for hours of sheer delight. His voice had become high and thin, like a
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