hand.
“Thank you,” she said. “Indeed this will help.”
The burly Freemen moved quickly, grabbing Duke Kerrigan and leaping to restrain the two nobles sitting beside him. Chairs tumbled over as the fourth member of the party, Sir Blayne, dived to the ground and, for just a second, eluded the grasp of the guards. The young knight no sooner broke free from the clutching hands than he abruptly disappeared from sight.
“Where’d he go?” demanded one of the Freemen, looking around in confusion.
His partner reacted with more imagination, diving onto the ground where the knight had disappeared, grappling with an unseen presence there. Abruptly a sharp smack sounded, and the guard’s head snapped back. Blood spurted from his nose as he lay, stunned, in the tangle of chairs and feet and milling confusion.
“He’s made himself invisible somehow,” Jaymes declared calmly, pointing as one of the chairs was knocked out of the way. An edge of exasperation crept into his voice. “Surround him! Stop him!”
Then the bearlike Lord Kerrigan suddenly broke free from the two men holding him. With a strangled cry of rage, he lunged toward the emperor, his hands outstretched. One of the Freemen, blade raised, lunged to intervene, and the duke ran headlong onto the blade, forcing the swordsman back a step. With a groan, Kerrigan staggered, dropping to his knees.
“Damn!” snapped Jaymes, grimacing. He looked down at the stricken duke, a crimson blossom spreading across his chest.
And chaos still reigned in the camp. The emperor barked at his men, who ran around like clucking hens trying to locate the invisible Sir Blayne. “Fools!” he demanded. “He’s getting away!”
Another man stepped forward from the army’s entourage. He didn’t wear a knight’s mailed shirt; instead, his tunic was emblazoned with the Kingfisher. He was Sir Garret, one of the mages who like the clerists, had become an integral part of the emperor’s military machine. Garret spoke a word of magic, holding out his hand, fingers splayed.
Immediately young Blayne appeared as the dispelling incantation took effect. The knight could be seen, crouched between a pair of guards, looking around wildly; at first, he didn’t seem to realize that he could be seen.
“There he is!” cried a dozen men at once. As Jaymes’s men lunged for him, Sir Blayne vaulted away with a wild spring-bursting out of the council circle as if he had been shot out of one of the bombards. He streaked toward the waters of nearby Apple Creek with shouts trailing after him.
“Run! Get away from here, my lord!” cried Vingaard’s priest of Kiri-Jolith, firmly in the grasp of several burly Freemen.
Lord Kerrigan writhed on the ground, bleeding from the wound in his chest, breathing bubbles of blood from his mouth and nose.
“More magic, this one a haste spell,” Jaymes remarked, standing above the dying man. “He surprised me. He was prepared for anything, your son.”
“He was prepared-for you!” challenged the duke, struggling bravely for breath, the words bubbling thickly from his bleeding mouth. “He had your measure… I was a fool to think there was a reason… to parley.”
Jaymes shook his head in irritation. That was not in his plan. “Lord Templar!” he shouted. “We need you-at once!”
“Yes, Excellency!” the Clerist Knight reported, dashing up to the emperor and kneeling beside the dying man.
“See if you can help him,” Jaymes ordered irritably.
The priest touched the deceptively small wound, murmuring a prayer to his just and lawful god. The emperor ignored the healing attempt, gazing off into the distance instead, watching as the young knight darted right, then left, evading the rush of a dozen men-at-arms. Horses reared as he darted past a picket line. The alarm was spreading; a score of men moved to block his path.
Still running like a madman, Blayne dropped to his hands and knees and scooted right under the belly of a startled charger. The horse reared, feathered hoofs flailing in the faces of the pursuing men, while the fleeing knight popped to his feet, dashed past another line of picketed horses, and rushed to the riverbank.
He shucked his tunic off, the silken material seeming to hang in the air briefly as the human was bared. Then, inches ahead of his pursuers, he made a clean dive, plunging into the cool, deep water with barely a splash. He disappeared beneath the waters as the knights shouted and pointed and waded in different directions. But Blayne was halfway across the creek before he surfaced, swimming with amazing speed downstream, toward Vingaard Keep. The magic propelled him. Arms churning, legs kicking, he seemed to swim even faster than a man could run.
“Archers! Ready a volley! He can’t outrun an arrow!” shouted an enthusiastic sergeant of longbows. His men, some fifty of them, had been standing guard duty, so their bows were already strung. They put arrows to the strings and drew them back. The sergeant raised an eyebrow, looking at the emperor.
Jaymes frowned and shook his head, a very slight gesture but enough to cause the sergeant to hold his command.
“Let him hie back to the castle,” the emperor said calmly. “We’ll catch up with him later, when we conquer the place.” He looked down at Lord Templar, who was gently closing Lord Kerrigan’s eyes.
“I am sorry, Excellency,” the clerist said. “His heart was pierced-there was naught that I could do.”
The emperor nodded, turning to the other prisoners. The Vingaard priest, squirming in the arms of two brawny Freemen, looked at Jaymes with eyes spitting hatred.
“So you’ll take Vingaard?” he challenged, looking helplessly at his slain duke. “You have killed our lord! You will destroy our keep! And then what? Thelgaard? Solanthus? Palanthas? How long are you going to make war on your own country?”
“As long as it takes to build the future,” Jaymes replied.
“You have no sense of honor, no sense of tradition-you mock the greatness of this country. You’re a blight on Solamnia.”
“And you think it’s honorable to withhold taxes and men, the lifeblood of the nation, from its lawful ruler? Is that right? Is that the kind of virtue you espouse?”
“Est Sularus oth Mithas!” declared the priest stiffly.
“Your honor is your life?” Jaymes repeated the oath contemptuously, his tone drawing looks of unease from several of the knights in his own entourage. He ignored their expressions.
“That’s your luxury, then-worry about your honor, your life. As for me, I must look out for the greater good.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Everywhere loomed chiseled faces of granite, their color so dark a gray that it almost looked black. The mountains offered no sheltered groves of aspen, no rounded shoulders gently cloaked in a mantle of firs or pines. The open rock faces seemed to have been assembled without a pattern: one summit was a knife edge of two cliffs rising back to back; the adjacent peak was nearly flat at the top, a broad smooth shelf of rock dropping off on every side like some great towering cube. The gorges were deep, shrouded with shadows, sometimes slashed by raging torrents of icy water.
Snow still lingered in the shadowed couloirs and swales, but it was a dirty kind of gray slush, thick and wet and slowly melting away. There was water in the mountains, but it mirrored the colors of the rocks. Lakes and ponds were flat and the color of slate, lacking reeds at the shore or lilies in the sheltered bays. The streams connecting those pools were the only breaks in the monotonous landscape: they tumbled through cataracts, over falls, through rock-choked chasms, like ribbons of froth against a backdrop of ash.
There were no houses in the heights of the mountains, not a farm or village, not so much as a single herdsman. Anyone who tried to live off the land would find a world that was barren, cold, and to all appearances
