Kral brooked no insolence, and no man in his right mind was ready to face the wrath of the tundra giants who flanked her as she walked. Even an ogre, it was said, was no match for such men in combat.
New sunlight sparkled on the gems encrusting the ward-regent’s sword and visor, and cast patterns of reflection from her mirror-bright armor. Her flowing cloak was rich with color, all the heraldry of the royal house of Gelnia emblazoned in its weave. As ward-regent, Chatara Kral had proclaimed herself the voice and the will of the infant Prince Quarls, last survivor of Gelnia’s last great house.
In Gelnia, Chatara Kral’s word, even her slightest gesture and whim, was law.
After making the rounds of the encampment, where men labored to prepare an attack on the Tarmite stronghold, the regent led her assemblage to a log-walled little stockade at the western perimeter. Along its final hundred yards, the path was lined with gruesome trophies-the still, dangling forms of crucified men, and here and there tall, upright poles crowned by the severed heads of decapitated prisoners.
Some of these unfortunates were Tarmish warriors, captured in the hills. Others might have been spies, traitors or saboteurs, or simply Tarmish farmers caught in their fields when the Gelnians advanced. Most of them, in fact, were guilty of no greater offense than having displeased Chatara Kral. Nevertheless, at the hands of the regent’s Nerakan inquisitors they had gladly confessed to any and all crimes suggested to them.
Chatara Kral barely glanced at the trophies as she passed. She went directly to the little stockade and was admitted by bowing guardsmen. Inside the gate, the chief inquisitor bowed low. “Have you come to see the old spy, Excellence?” he asked.
“I have,” she said. “What have you learned from him?”
“Considerable,” the chief inquisitor said, grinning. “He is very old and has little strength. He required only the slightest prompting to talk to us.”
“And is he truly a spy?”
“Oh, indeed he is, Excellence. His name is Clonogh, and he was sent directly by the Lord Vulpin, in search of some relic that has been lost.”
“Relic?”
“Something he calls the Fang of Orm. It seems this Clonogh attempted to deliver the thing to Lord Vulpin, but he somehow lost it, instead. He claims it is a thing of magic, Excellence.”
Chatara Kral’s dark eyes glittered beneath her visor. It was almost too good to believe. Vulpin
The chief inquisitor led her to a reeking cell and gestured. “That is the spy, Excellence.”
Chatara Kral looked at the feeble, old body stretched between the timber arms of a torture rack. “That man is ancient!” she rasped.
The chief inquisitor chuckled. “He swears his true age is thirty-seven,” he said. “He says he has been aged by magic.”
“He looks dead,” the regent observed.
“Very nearly so, Excellence. We are a bit surprised. A man so feeble should have perished an hour ago, yet he still lives. I inquired about that the last time he was conscious. He says he cannot die because the Lord Vulpin holds his life in contract.”
“My brother is still up to his old tricks, it seems,” Chatara Kral muttered. “Very well. Put this Clonogh into the cellar. If he can’t die, then he can rot there. But tend his wounds. He might be a handy pawn to play when we take the castle.”
She watched as burly Nerakans freed the bonds from the old man’s wrists and ankles, threw a noisome blanket over him and carried him out of the stockade. The “cellar” was a hole in the ground, a hundred yards away from the stockade. It was covered by slabs of stone, and its only access was a hinged iron grate in the top.
Outside the stockade, the ward-regent of Gelnia felt as though a weight had been lifted from her. Throughout her preparations for the siege of Tarmish, there had been the foreboding sense that Vulpin might turn the tables at any moment. With the Fang of Orm in his possession, there was magic he could use.
Her best advisors had been able to tell her little about the Fang of Orm, except that it was extremely dangerous. All of them had agreed that the person who possessed it had the power to win wars. And her spies had alerted her that it was on its way to Vulpin at Tarmish.
But now, it seemed, Vulpin did not have the relic. The thing had been lost before it could be delivered.
She turned to her coterie of officers. “Complete all preparations before the sun sets. Tomorrow we attack Tarmish.”
Nearby, an armored lancer had paused. Dismounting, he made various adjustments in the fittings of his armor while his “squire” inspected the trappings of his great war-horse. A knight-errant preparing for combat, the little group fit right in with their surroundings. But of the three, the only one concentrating on preparedness was the horse.
“That was Clonogh,” Graywing said. “He’s older than I thought, and he’s a mess with all that blood on him, but I’m certain it was him.”
“Then maybe he knows where the Fang of Orm is,” Dartimien suggested. “Maybe we should talk to him.”
“We can’t,” Graywing growled. “Didn’t you see? He’s dead.”
“Look around you, plainsman,” the Cat purred. “Those wretches on those poles are dead, and those in that pile out there behind the stockade. When people die in that place, they either display them or throw them out. They don’t lock them in cellars, with Nerakan guards at the grate.”
“You could be right,” Graywing admitted, gruffly. “Well, then, if Clonogh isn’t dead, let’s go talk to him.”
“Easy enough to say,” Dartimien squinted, studying the bleak, open area around the cellar hole. “But how do we do it?”
“We just do it,” Graywing said, gritting his teeth. Dressed in three hundred pounds of armor, even a shrug was an effort. He wondered, as he had wondered many times before, what kind of people Solamnians were, that so many of them could choose to spend their lives in such fetters.
He had fought with Solamnian knights in the past, sometimes against them and sometimes alongside them, and still he wondered what made them tick. When he was much younger, he had thought of the armored knights on their armored horses as “clanking churls.” But that was before he first saw a charge of heavy cavalry, lances aligned and hooves a’thunder.
He had discovered that those “clanking churls,” with their massive armor and their great, battle-trained mounts, were as efficient and formidable a war machine as anything human and horse could be.
Still, he would be glad to get rid of these massive trappings as soon as possible, though right now they served a purpose. It would be hard to find a better disguise for rummaging about a hostile encampment. Everyone expected to see knights, but few men had the temerity to ever stop and question one of them.
Atop the stone-slab dome of the “cellar,” two burly Nerakan guards squatted on their heels, playing a round of bones. During the regent’s inspection, the two had remained at rigid attention. But now boredom was setting in. Their task as guards wasn’t to keep anyone out of the hole. No one in his right mind would want to get into the hole. Their purpose was to guard against escape by those inside, and at the moment there was only one prisoner-a feeble old man so tormented that he was nearly dead.
The two didn’t even notice the approaching knight until morning sun cast his shadow across them, and then they only glanced up, squinting. “Wha’dya want?” one of them growled.
“Oh, all sorts of things,” the knight said, cheerfully. “I want fame and fortune, beautiful women and fine horses, and maybe even a quiet little kingdom somewhere to call my own. What do you want?”
The bones stopped rolling. Both of the guards shaded their eyes, squinting up at him as though he had lost his mind. Slowly, they rose to their feet and hefted their axes, their eyes flicking here and there over the armored juggernaut before them. The trouble with knights was that it was hard to tell where to hit them, if one needed to do that. “State your business here!” one of them demanded.
“I want you to open that grate,” Graywing said. “Otherwise I’ll have to do it myself.”
“You want us to-” the Nerakan’s voice ceased abruptly and his eyes rolled upward in their sockets. Beside him, almost simultaneously, the other guard twitched violently and blood gushed from his mouth. Then they both crumpled, facedown and unmoving on the stone. In the back of each of them stood a businesslike dagger, sunk to the hilt.
“I never did care for Nerakans,” Dartimien said, kneeling to recover his weapons.
