The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [63]
It was the Master of Bats.
"Surrender, and live," the wizard whom Embra thought she'd slain laughed at her, his eyes cold and cruel as he let his hard gaze range across the Four, "or defy us, and…"
12
Aglirta Beset
"Die," one of the warriors muttered, so low that only the man beside him could hear. "Defy the king, and die…" The hollow around them was like many others in the heights: a small, fern-choked cleft overhung by the spreading boughs of massive blackbark trees. A place of moss-girt stones and dappled shadows, where birds whirred from bush to bush, or trilled briefly from high perches.
In one place, the birds shared leafy boughs with two grim and silent men-warriors, by their garb, who sat huddled in dark cloaks peering tirelessly out across the Vale below the heights, where the woods of Silvertree gave way to farms and lanes and shops, falling away to the silver ribbon of the river winding in the distance.
The hollow below these sentinels was also unlike most others in the heights. It held not darting birds and furtive furry things, but a grim and ragged handful of men. Four warriors in well-used armor, three with drawn swords ready across their knees.
All of them sported bandages dark and stiff with dried blood. The standing, restlessly pacing one whose bindings were across his brow and around his arms was the one called Bloodblade, who'd lately dared to try his hand at kingslaying, and found it a harder sport to master than he'd thought.
The men around Bloodblade had followed him on his foray with eagerness, but there was little that could be termed "eager" in the hollow now.
They had run miles to reach this place, sprinting and stumbling even more desperately than they'd fled from barons' patrols since their return from the Isles. They'd run panting, the screams of dying fellows in their ears, as they stumbled over uneven ground and before that fine things that broke underfoot on the tiled floors of the palace-routed by one man and a few scrambling guards. Whatever else might be said of the man who called himself king in Aglirta, he could fight.
Bloodblade himself had escaped the cold doom of the king's swordtip only because of a chair.
A gilded, overstuffed chamber seat, hurled through the fray by Mararr in a timely manner. It had swept Snowsar and his blade aside from Sendrith Duthjack's throat long enough to let an overmatched rebel leader scramble away from the spot he'd begun to think he'd die in, and flee like a fearful child through the palace, abandoning all in his hunger to be well out of reach of a blade he could not parry, that leaped through his guard time after time to kiss flesh and spill Duthjack blood.
Those wounds burned and itched now, and fear lay on Sendrith Duthjack like an ever-present heaviness beneath his snarling anger. Bloodblade had never been afraid before, and he was discovering it was a feeling he hated more heartily than anything else.
King Snowsar had to die. Not to put Sendrith Duthjack on a throne now, but to shatter and banish this fear forever.
He was half-expecting to see the glitter of speartips and armored men on horseback bobbing up the slopes below, guided by wizardly prying to slay the handful of men who'd escaped the king's blade and Flowfoam's stone guardians to reach this place.
That was what he'd have done, were he king. Give no time for finding far lairs or calling on aid, but fare forth and sl-
"Claws of the Dark One!" one of the sentinels in the trees hissed, leaves dancing as he leaned forward for a better view.
Every head lifted to look at him, but he held silence as long minutes passed. Mararr finally growled, "What is it?"
"I know not," the man above him muttered. "Some sort of-beast."
Mararr squinted up at the sentinel. "What sort of-?"
The man pointed. "Look for yourself. I've not seen such before."
The men on the hollow shared frowns and questioning glances-and then, as one clambered cautiously up out of the cleft and forward, between shrubs, to crouch on the rocks at the edge of the heights.