Read Online A Company of Heroes Book Three: The Princess by Ron Miller - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ron Miller
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Its mismatched eyes have just begun to turn in the baron’s direction, one slightly ahead of the other, when the latter reaches out and snatches the broom from the startled fingers. The warder’s slow brain has not begun to react even by the time the baron has stepped behind him and placed the broom handle across his knobby throat. Only then, when the pressure begins, does the massive arms begin to flail at the constricting rod. The baron keeps his face well back from powerful-looking fingers that snap at his nose and eyes like angry crustaceans, while at the same time he presses a knee into the small of the dwarf’s undulating spine. After a very short span of time, and without a sound, the dwarf collapses to the flagstones, though slumped might be perhaps a more accurate word; he is so short there is little significant difference between erect and prone.
The baron has just stepped out fully into the corridor, which he only has a moment to perceive is just fifteen feet or so in length, with only his own door breaking the irregular stone walls, and heavy doors blocking either end, when the warder’s companion reenters through one of them. He is no more attractive than the other, although considerably skinnier, and has only time to utter a startled Uh ? before his mouth is filled with bits of teeth and tongue pulverized by the force of the broom handle which has been swung into his face like a baseball bat. The baron has a brief second to notice that the creature actually looks a little improved with the club imbedded in its face. The skinny assistant drops as though his bones have suddenly evaporated. Taking no chances, the baron grasps the head by its large, waxy ears and bounces it once or twice against the stones until the tongue sticks out and stays that way.
The baron now takes the time to make a thorough search of the two bodies, something that offends his fastidiousness almost as much as his cell had lately done. Other than amazement at the sheer number and variety of vermin (including but certainly not limited to lice, weevils, crabs, roaches, leeches, flies, fleas, ticks, mites, mice, roundworms, flatworms, heartworms, tapeworms, flukes, and various molds and fungi), the only worthwhile discovery is a ring of perhaps a dozen heavy keys. He is disappointed to find no weapon. Taking the keys, he cautiously steps through the door that the assistant warder had left open. This gives onto a cross corridor that curves off to the left and right.
He chooses the latter direction at hazard. A dozen feet along he discovers a massive oak double door. It is barred with half-inch iron staples bearing locks as large as both of his fists together. There are a pair of small windows and he peers through their heavy iron mesh. Holy Musrum’s pendulous testicles! he whispers reverently. Beyond is a vast, high-ceilinged room that has been transformed from whatever its former purpose had been into a treasure warehouse. It is filled, with a studied and organized compactness, with more wealth than even the highly imaginative baron can have dreamed existed: endless, pyramidal mounds of canvas bags, each neatly stenciled with some fabulous amount, scores of enormous wooden chests (one is open and its jewelled contents allow him to dizzily extrapolate the contents of the others), famous paintings stacked ten deep, rolls of tapestries, mountains of objects too large to fit into the chests: chandeliers, lamps, urns tea sets, samovars, sculptures, all, he has no doubt, as solidly silver and gold as they looked.
Damn his withered little soul ! he growls to himself, recognizing a boxed set of matched brushes. Those were mine!
This is unquestionably Payne Roelt’s treasury, the accumulated loot of two years’ intense and single-minded labor. Here are the liquid assets of an entire nation. The baron suspects, and rightly, that this is merely one of many such vaults.
The right-hand passage ends in steps that are evidently at the bottom of a
The baron has just stepped out fully into the corridor, which he only has a moment to perceive is just fifteen feet or so in length, with only his own door breaking the irregular stone walls, and heavy doors blocking either end, when the warder’s companion reenters through one of them. He is no more attractive than the other, although considerably skinnier, and has only time to utter a startled Uh ? before his mouth is filled with bits of teeth and tongue pulverized by the force of the broom handle which has been swung into his face like a baseball bat. The baron has a brief second to notice that the creature actually looks a little improved with the club imbedded in its face. The skinny assistant drops as though his bones have suddenly evaporated. Taking no chances, the baron grasps the head by its large, waxy ears and bounces it once or twice against the stones until the tongue sticks out and stays that way.
The baron now takes the time to make a thorough search of the two bodies, something that offends his fastidiousness almost as much as his cell had lately done. Other than amazement at the sheer number and variety of vermin (including but certainly not limited to lice, weevils, crabs, roaches, leeches, flies, fleas, ticks, mites, mice, roundworms, flatworms, heartworms, tapeworms, flukes, and various molds and fungi), the only worthwhile discovery is a ring of perhaps a dozen heavy keys. He is disappointed to find no weapon. Taking the keys, he cautiously steps through the door that the assistant warder had left open. This gives onto a cross corridor that curves off to the left and right.
He chooses the latter direction at hazard. A dozen feet along he discovers a massive oak double door. It is barred with half-inch iron staples bearing locks as large as both of his fists together. There are a pair of small windows and he peers through their heavy iron mesh. Holy Musrum’s pendulous testicles! he whispers reverently. Beyond is a vast, high-ceilinged room that has been transformed from whatever its former purpose had been into a treasure warehouse. It is filled, with a studied and organized compactness, with more wealth than even the highly imaginative baron can have dreamed existed: endless, pyramidal mounds of canvas bags, each neatly stenciled with some fabulous amount, scores of enormous wooden chests (one is open and its jewelled contents allow him to dizzily extrapolate the contents of the others), famous paintings stacked ten deep, rolls of tapestries, mountains of objects too large to fit into the chests: chandeliers, lamps, urns tea sets, samovars, sculptures, all, he has no doubt, as solidly silver and gold as they looked.
Damn his withered little soul ! he growls to himself, recognizing a boxed set of matched brushes. Those were mine!
This is unquestionably Payne Roelt’s treasury, the accumulated loot of two years’ intense and single-minded labor. Here are the liquid assets of an entire nation. The baron suspects, and rightly, that this is merely one of many such vaults.
The right-hand passage ends in steps that are evidently at the bottom of a
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