The guards were talking, babbling almost giddily, like young hunters after their first kill. Fallion couldn’t make out all of their words.
“How did it get over the walls?” someone asked, and another added, “Without being seen?”
There were mumbled responses. No one seemed to know, but one guard, the one who had first raised the cry, said distinctly, “It came from there,” nodding toward the keep. “It’s all shadows there. I would not have seen it if someone hadn’t launched a torch at it.”
The guards stared up at the window: at Fallion. Even though the room was not lit, Fallion had no doubt that they saw him, for these were force soldiers, gifted with endowments of sight.
They peered at him in breathless silence, and someone said softly, “Fallion.”
He saw fear in the men’s faces. They were imagining the punishment they’d get for letting such a monster near the royal heir.
“I’m all right,” he said weakly, reassuring them.
But from the far-seer’s tower came the long plaintive bellow of a warhorn, and suddenly the warriors were bounding off, running up to defend the castle walls.
Fallion’s heart raced as he imagined strengi-saats attacking in force.
5
Every lord at some time must resort to intimidation to govern his people. I find it best to be consistently swift and brutal, lest my enemies confuse my kindness with a lack of resolve.
But it was not strengi-saats that came against Castle Coorm.
Iome stood upon the walls above the gate and looked down upon a small contingent of warriors, perhaps fifty in all, mounted upon their horses out in the darkness, out beyond the moat. Three of them bore torches, and Iome could see the party well. They were a mixed bag-knights from Crowthen in their black mail upon black horses; minor nobles from Beldinook in their heavy steel plate, their tall white war lances raised to the sky; burly axmen from Internook dressed in gray.
Behind them came a train of long wagons, the kind used for transporting horsemen’s lances.
Taken altogether, they looked as scruffy as poachers, as cruel as a band of brigands.
Their leader though, he was something altogether different: he was a tall man, and lean, and sat aback a reddish destrier, a blood mount from Inkarra, bred to travel dark roads.
The leader wore no armor or device to tell where he came from. Instead he wore robes all of gray, with a deep hood that hid his face. His cape pin was made of bright silver-an owl with flaming yellow eyes-and his only weapons seemed to be a boot dagger and a war bow of black ash that was very tall, strapped in a pack on the back of his horse.
There was a darkness about the man, as if shadows bled from his pores and drifted about him like a haze.
He is not of this world, Iome thought, her heart pounding in fear. King Anders of South Crowthen had given himself to a locus, a creature of the netherworld, a being of pure evil, and if anything was left of Anders, Iome could not see it. The creature before her had been transformed into something altogether different.
Iome studied the warriors around the dark rider, looking for anyone that might be his accomplice, the man she had heard called Shadoath.
One ruffian spoke up, a fat strapping warlord of Internook, “We come to parley.” Iome recognized him.
“Draw near, Olmarg,” Iome said, “and speak.”
Olmarg glanced at the shadow man, as if seeking his permission, then spurred his own potbellied war pony to the edge of the drawbridge.
Olmarg looked up at Iome, the old cutthroat’s face a mass of white scars. He wore gray sealskins, and his silver hair was braided in ringlets and dyed in blood. “We’ve come for your sons,” Olmarg said.
Iome smiled. “Never one to mince words, were you,” Iome said. “I appreciate that. What happened to your face since the last time I saw you? Was it eaten by wolves?”
Olmarg grinned. In his own lands, friends often exchanged insults as a form of jest, and Iome was relieved to see that he took her cut in the proper spirit. Olmarg shot back, “Harsh words-from a hag. To think, I once dreamed of bedding you.”
“Eunuchs can have such dreams?” Iome asked.
Olmarg chortled, and Iome felt that she had won. She got to the point. “So, you want my sons?”
“Give them to us and we’ll raise them like our own: good food, ale in their bellies, women in their beds. And a promise: your boy Fallion, he can have the run of Heredon when he’s fifteen.”
Iome grinned, a smile that was half wince, amused that Olmarg would think that she’d want women in her son’s bed. “Royal hostages?” Iome asked. “And if I say no?”
“Then we’ll take them,” Olmarg said, “dead, if need be.”
Fifty men didn’t represent much of a threat. But these weren’t commoners. They were Runelords, and would put up a fierce battle. More than that, they represented half a dozen nations, and might well have powerful allies back home.
And then there was the shadow man. Iome couldn’t even guess what powers he might bring to bear.
“I see,” Iome said. “You want to make it easier for the assassin’s knife to find them?”
“We’re coming as friends,” Olmarg said. “We want Fallion to know us as friends, and allies. That’s all.” He smiled as persuasively as possible, the scars on his face rearranging into a mockery of friendliness, and his voice became sweet. “Come now, think on it. You’re wasting away. You’ll be dead in no time, and who will raise the boys then?”
Iome gave Olmarg a dark look. Olmarg was a pig, she knew. A murderer and worse. She could dismiss his request without a thought. But she gazed down upon the shadow man. “And what of you? Do you wish to raise my sons as your own?”
The shadow man rode forward, stopped next to Olmarg. He did not look up, and Iome could not see his face. Thus he kept his identity hidden, causing Iome some lingering doubt.
It’s not Anders after all. If it were, he’d show me his face.
“You have my word,” the shadow man said, his voice as resonant as a lute. “I will raise the boys as my own.”
His tone drove a spike of fear into Iome’s heart. There was something wrong with it, something dangerous, as if he had taken hundreds of endowments of Voice. Iome could not tell if it was Anders who spoke or some other being. He sounded too pure and lofty to ride with these men.
And Iome knew that he would be handsome, that he had taken endowments of glamour. If so, the luster of his appearance and the persuasiveness of voice would combine to seduce the boys, bend them to his will. He’d have them eating from his hand in no time.
In Rofehavan it was said, “When you look upon the face of pure evil, it will be beautiful.” Suddenly Iome wished that the shadow creature would pull back his hood, reveal his beauty.
“I know you,” Iome said, and she spoke the name of the locus that had crossed from the netherworld, “Asgaroth.”
The stranger did not deny it. “If you know me,” he said, “then you know that you must submit.”
He glanced back at his men, gave them a nod.
Half a dozen men dismounted and rushed to the lance wagons, then removed their wooden lids. What they pulled out were not lances.
Instead, they pulled out three large stakes, like thickened spears with dull points, and even in the shadows
