felt positively buoyant in anticipation of the coming fight. He liked some of the things Nakor made him do, but he hadn’t been in any sort of combat for far too long. He’d bashed a few skulls in a tavern or two, but there had been no serious bloodletting since he’d killed that emperor for Nakor the year before. That had been fun. He almost laughed aloud thinking of the stunned expressions on the faces of everyone looking up at where he stood, his sword thrust straight though the old man’s back.
A man wearing black armour but no helm walked around a corner and before he stopped moving, Ralan Bek had run his sword point into the man’s throat, which was exposed above the cuirass. The man dropped with a fairly loud noise, but Bek didn’t care. Less than a hundred feet ahead light beckoned and he was anxious to bring havoc.
He strode down the last length of shadowy hall into a high-ceilinged chamber. It was an old-style keep hall, where in the dead of winter the family and close retainers of the original ruler of Cavell Keep would sleep during winter’s coldest nights. Once magnificent, the great hall had fallen into drab disrepair.
The vaulted roof was still supported by massive wooden beams so ancient they were as hard as steel, but the once whitewashed walls were now dark grey and high in the darkness above Bek could hear bats fluttering. No tapestries hung on the walls to shield the inhabitants against winter’s chill in the stones, nor were there rugs on the floor. But a fire burned in the massive fireplace to the left of the door through which he entered. Sword drawn and with a maniac’s grin in place, he surveyed the two dozen men resting before the fire.
In the centre of this group sat two men, both in large chairs made in an older style – a ‘u’ of wood set on top of another to make the legs, with a wooden back nailed across the upper half, stuffed with cushions or furs. The rest sat on camp stools or on black cloaks spread on the floor. All were dressed in black armour, the hallmark of the Nighthawks, except for the two men in the centre. One wore a tunic of finely woven linen and trousers and boots worthy of a high-born noble, though his clothes hung loosely on this frame, as if he had lost a great deal of weight lately; the other wore the black robes of a cleric or magician. The man in the tunic wore a heavy amulet of gold around his neck, identical to the black amulet Bek had been shown by Nakor. The robed man wore no jewellery whatsoever. He was thin and there wasn’t a hair on his face or head.
A moment after Bek appeared the eighteen seated men were scrambling, two blowing bone whistles that sent a shrieking alarm throughout the keep.
The man with the gold around his neck looked harried, and his eyes were wide as he pointed at Bek screaming, ‘Kill him!’
As the first swordsman raised his sword, Bek gripped his own weapon with two hands, his eyes narrow slits, focusing with keen anticipation on the coming slaughter. But the robed man shouted, ‘No! Halt!’ His eyes locked onto Bek’s in wonder.
Everyone, including Bek, froze as the man wove between the swordsmen. He passed the man closest to Ralan Bek, and came straight towards the young warrior. Bek sensed some strange power in this man, and his lucky feeling told him something unusual was about to happen. He hesitated, then began to swing at the man in the robe.
The man held up his hand, not in defence, but in supplication. ‘Wait,’ he said as Bek hesitated again. He reached out slowly, almost gently, and put his hand on Bek’s chest, and said again, ‘Wait.’
Then slowly the robed man went to his knees and in a voice that was little more than a whisper, he said, ‘What does our master bid us?’
The man with the amulet looked on in mute astonishment, then he too went to his knees, followed moments later by every other man in the room. Another half a dozen men ran into the hall from other parts of the keep, answering the alarm. Seeing their brethren on their knees, their eyes lowered, they followed suit.
Bek’s sword lowered a little. ‘What?’
‘What does our master bid us?’ asked the robed man again.
Bek tried to puzzle out what to say next, from what he had overheard Nakor, Pug and the others say at Sorcerer’s Isle. At last he said: ‘Varen’s gone. He’s fled to another world.’
‘Not Varen,’ said the robed man. ‘He was highest among our master’s servants.’ The man slowly reached out and touched Bek on the chest. ‘I can feel our master, there, inside you. He lives within you; he speaks through you.’ He raised his eyes to Bek’s again, and asked once more, ‘What does our master bid us?’
Bek had been ready for combat, and this was beyond his ability to comprehend. Slowly, he looked around the room, rising frustration in his voice as he said, ‘I don’t know …’ Then suddenly, he raised his sword and brought it down, shouting, ‘I don’t know!’
Minutes later Magnus rushed into the room with a company of Erik’s soldiers at his back, and more Kingdom soldiers entered through the same door as Bek. All of them stopped at the scene before them. Twenty-six corpses littered the floor, but there was no sign of a struggle. Twenty-six headless bodies lay in a wash of blood. Heads still rolled on the crimson stones and blood-soaked cloaks.
The fire crackled. Bek stood beside it, covered in blood. His arms were crimson to the elbows and gore was smeared across his face. He stood like a fiend possessed by madness. Magnus could see it in his eyes. He was trembling so much he looked like a man about to go into convulsions.
Finally, Ralan Bek threw back his head and gave out a howl which rang off the stones high above. It was a primal burst of rage and frustration, and when even the echoes had passed away, he looked around the room, then directly at Magnus. Like a petulant child he pointed to the corpses, and said, ‘This wasn’t fun!’
He wiped his sword on the tunic of a nearby corpse, and sheathed it. Then he picked up a bucket of water which had been set near the fireplace to heat and lifted it, letting it wash down over his head, without even bothering to remove his hat, and then picked up a relatively clean cloak to use as a towel. Cleaning himself off as best he could, Bek said in a more controlled tone, ‘It’s not fun if they don’t fight back, Magnus.’ He looked around the room and then said, ‘I’m hungry. Anyone got anything to eat?’
MIRANDA SHOUTED.
‘Are you mad?’ she cried far louder than was necessary in the small room.
Magnus watched his mother with guarded amusement as she strode away from her husband’s desk for as far as she could in the small study, then turned with a dramatic frown. She often would vent loudly over matters that eventually would end up exactly as his father wished them to be. But Pug had over the years come to understand that his wife’s often volatile nature required a physical expression of her frustrations.
‘Are you mad?’ Miranda shrieked for the second time.
‘No more than you were to spend almost a half-year shadowing the Emerald Queen’s army down in Novindus,’ said Pug, calmly, as he rose from behind his desk.
‘That was different!’ shouted Miranda, still not through venting. ‘There was no Pantathian snake priest who could find me, let alone challenge me, and I’m the one who can transport herself without a Tsurani sphere, remember?’
Magnus
