Marris cleared his throat. “I don’t know where my family is and I don’t know who took them. I saw a man, at least I assume he was a man, with pale skin, and black lines running under his skin like overfull veins. His eyes were crimson pits. He came to my castle, landed right in the courtyard. My guards tried to stop him, but he swatted them away like insects. We tried everything—swords, axes, arrows—but nothing fazed him. He wrapped my family in a black bubble and said unless I did what he wanted I’d never see them in one piece again.”
“What, exactly, did he want?” Lane asked.
“He told me to leave the kingdom and swear allegiance to him. I said I needed to talk to the others and he gave us until our annual meeting to decide. My family has been gone for three months.”
“That’s too simple,” Lane said. “The kidnapper had to know the king wouldn’t just let you leave the kingdom.”
“Unless the king was dead.” The assassination attempt was starting to make more sense to Damien now. “If the assassin had succeeded it would have taken Karrie and her mother months to solidify their authority. By then who knows how many bandits might have crossed the border or how much damage they might have done.”
Lane stared at him, her eyes wide.
“Didn’t your mother tell you about the assassination attempt?”
Lane shook her head. “Apparently a couple of things slipped Mother’s mind when she briefed me about this mission. What now?”
“We need to talk to the rest of the barons and see if we can learn anything else. Where’s Trasker?”
Marris chewed his lip. “The opposite end of the hall. Please, don’t let the guards know I talked. If word gets to the Bandit King my family’s dead.”
“How are we going to sneak past the guards to see the other barons?” Lane asked.
“I thought we’d take the direct route.”
Damien pointed at the connecting wall and a golden beam lanced out from his finger. He sliced a disk out of the wall, pulled it out, and leaned it beside the hole. “See, no problem.”
Damien and Lane visited the next eight barons and received almost identical stories. Their families had been taken and unless they did what they were told they’d be killed.
Before he approached the last wall Damien turned to Lane. “What do you think Trasker will have to say? He’s the one that was supposed to have hired the assassin.”
“If he was willing to leave the kingdom to keep his family safe I see no reason he wouldn’t hire an assassin if so ordered.”
“I suppose. Well, he can tell us himself in a second.”
Damien sliced through the wall just as he had all the others. Trasker lay sleeping in his oversized bed. Lane was starting toward him when shouts sounded from out in the hall. Sounded like someone was raising the alarm. Damien poured power into the sound barrier changing it into a solid wall. That would keep the barons safe.
The door to Trasker’s room burst open and a pair of guards charged in, their swords drawn. Damien wrapped them in golden cocoons. The guards fell to the floor, completely immobilized.
The baron sat up, sputtering. “What’s going on here?”
Damien gagged him with a band of soul force. The baron mumbled unintelligibly and pawed at his mouth.
When no more enemies presented themselves Damien walked to the door and poked his head out. The hall was empty. Where’d the other guards go? Even the one he bound had disappeared.
Chapter 38
Damien raced back through the barons’ rooms. Everyone was huddled in their beds just as he left them, all except Marris. The fat tub of goo was gone. He must have been the one that alerted the guards. The question was why. Damien couldn’t imagine, but he hoped some of his prisoners could tell him.
He rejoined Lane in Trasker’s room. The baron sat on the edge of his bed holding his head in his hands, a heavy dressing gown around his shoulders. “Marris is gone,” Damien said.
Trasker looked up. “Of course he is. Marris belonged to the bandits long before this most recent assault. We could never prove anything, but we all suspected he allowed the bandits to slip across the border in exchange for a cut of their loot and a promise not to raid in his territory.”
“It didn’t occur to you to mention this to someone in the capital?” Lane sounded as outraged as Damien felt.
“We had no proof!” Trasker ground his teeth. “Without something solid it would have been an empty accusation. Marris would have brushed it off as nothing but envy on our part.”
The man had a point, Damien had to concede that. Still, if the barons had at least mentioned their suspicions, agents of the crown could have kept an eye on Marris and tried to find proof.
The other barons gathered in the opening Damien had cut in the wall to listen in.
“Did you hire the assassin that tried to murder the king?” Damien asked.
“Yes.” Trasker’s head slumped into his hands again. “If I hadn’t done it someone else would have. That pale monster threatened to send me my daughter’s left foot if I refused.”
“I don’t suppose you know where your family is?” Damien asked.
Trasker gave a mute shake of his head.
“Marris might know,” one of the barons in the other room said. “Or Sloan, the head guard.”
Damien gestured and one of the bound guards floated upright. A quick search revealed the hellfire ward in the same place as the men that broke into their room. He neutralized the ward and caused the cocoon around the bandit’s head to vanish, revealing a terrified face.
“Where did Marris and the rest run off to?” Damien asked.
The bandit opened his mouth, but
