Read Online Wild Cards [07] Dead Man's Hand by George R.R. Martin - Free Book Online Page A

to the first floor. He waited for a moment, but neither saw, nor heard, nor smelled anything to indicate that anyone else was in the Palace. He hadn't figured there would be. He went down the corridor to Chrysalis's office and paused at the door, strangely reluctant to enter the room.
    He realized that once he saw her blood splattered on the walls, he would know without a doubt that Chrysalis was dead. She'd kept too much of herself to herself for him to have loved her, but he had shared her bed and some of her secrets. He'd known the lonely woman under the cool exterior. He hadn't loved her, but he could have. He couldn't forget that. It kept gnawing at him like the pain from an open wound, unbound and bleeding.
    He remembered Chrysalis's office as a dark, quiet, charming room. It had a fabulous Oriental carpet on the floor, floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of leather-bound volumes that Chrysalis had actually read, solid oak-and-leather furniture, and dark, purple-patterned Victorian wallpaper. The room had even smelled of Chrysalis, of the exotic frangipani perfume she wore and the amaretto she drank. It had been a peaceful room, and he didn't want to see it transformed into a scene of death and destruction. But he had to. He took a deep breath, pulled away the tape that sealed the door, and entered the office.
    It was worse than he had suspected. The room had been utterly devastated. Her huge oak desk was on its side halfway across the room from its usual place. Her black leather chair had been shattered. Her bookcases had been torn from the walls and the volumes scattered on the floor. The visitors' chairs had been smashed to kindling. Her wooden file cabinets had been upended and their contents strewn all over the floor and the broken furniture. Worst of all was a light spray of blood, barely visible on the patterned wallpaper, splattered low on the wall behind where her desk and chair normally stood.
    Brennan had seen a lot of destruction, but this devastation filled him with anger. He took the anger and forced it down, pushing it deep inside himself until it was a glowing pinpoint in the pit of his stomach. This was no time to give in to emotion. Perhaps later he could afford to vent it, but now he needed a cool, dispassionate intellect. Not knowing yet what might constitute an important clue, he memorized the horrible scene in as much detail as he could so that he'd be able to reconstruct it in his mind later.
    Brennan left the office with the room locked in his memory. He couldn't face the stuffiness of the tunnels running under the streets. He wanted to breathe fresh, clean air, as fresh and clean, anyway, as could be found in the city. He went to the stairs that led to the exits of the upper floor, and he heard a voice, the last voice he ever expected to hear again, whispering from the dark stairwell ahead of him.
    "Yeoman," it said, sending shivers up his spine, "I'm waiting for you. Come to my room. I'll be waiting, my archer."
    It was her voice. Chrysalis, speaking in her almostEnglish accent. He stood still for a moment, but heard no one or nothing move in the darkness.
    Brennan didn't believe in ghosts, but the wild card made nearly anything possible. Maybe Chrysalis hadn't even been killed, maybe it was all an elaborate hoax, perhaps perpetrated by Chrysalis herself for whatever unfathomable reason. Whatever it was, he couldn't just walk away from it. He drew his Browning Hi-Power from his hip holster and crept up the stairs as quietly as a stalking cat.
    The door to Chrysalis's bedroom was open, and as he peered around the jamb he could see that someone had been here before him. The intruder had been searching for something and hadn't bothered to be neat about it. Chrysalis's canopied bed had been pulled apart and its mattress shredded. All her Victorian portraits and elegantly framed antique mirrors had been stripped from the walls and lay in silver slivers scattered about the floor. The crystal decanter that