The Sword And The Dragon (20 page)

The other men in the room were standing out of the candlelight at the back wall. Their faces couldn’t be discerned. This was obviously intentional. They were either observing, or silently guarding. Duke Fairchild knew that they were there whether
they
wanted him to or not. Their presence only served to put him on the defensive, and his liege, Lord Brach, noticed.

“There’s no time for formalities, Vincent. I can sense your concern,” Lord Brach said. “I trust you can keep the words spoken here to yourself?”

It wasn’t really a question, but the Duke answered with a nod. The two men knew each other as well as any two men possibly could. The trust between them was deep and generations old. Brach often used Fairchild’s skills to extract information from rogues and road bandits, and Duke Fairchild’s stronghold was ideal for housing prisoners, who might suddenly need to disappear from the realm altogether. Duke Fairchild was relieved by the expression on Lord Brach’s face. From it, he could tell that he was not the focus of this strange meeting.

Pael looked at Duke Fairchild as if he were studying the inside of his skull. Pael’s gaze was unnerving, but Vincent Fairchild didn’t blanch under the scrutiny. He had committed horrors that were unspeakable. It would take more than the stare of a man, so white that he could’ve been carved out of marble, to unsettle him.

“The King is dead,” Lord Brach said finally. “Poisoned, or magicked; we’re not sure which, but that is not your concern. We’re keeping it quiet for now. I only tell you so that you might see the magnitude of the duty we’re placing upon you.”

“Bring the stableman!” Pael commanded. 

The strange wizard had a sinister, giddy quality about him that touched a nerve in the Duke.

Two of the men standing against the back wall stepped forward into the light. Fairchild instantly recognized one of Lord Brach’s personal guards. He acknowledged the man with a nod. 

The other was dressed in what were once probably quality working clothes, but were now stained filthy with sweat, vomit, and more than a little blood. The stableman’s face was swollen on one side, as if he held an apple in his cheek. Fairchild saw that there
was
another man still concealed in the shadows. He silently congratulated himself for counting correctly.

“Last night, while the King lay dying, the King’s Squire, a boy called Mikahl Thayne, made ready for a sizable journey, and then fled the castle,” Lord Brach explained.

Thayne, Fairchild knew, was the name given to bastard born children. Thayne was the god of the needy, the protector of the lost and alone. The Duke filed that bit of information away and continued listening.

“He left sometime in the night after assaulting this man.” Lord Brach indicated the stableman with a look of extreme distaste. “We assume he left through the Northroad Gate. It was the only one open throughout the night.”

Duke Fairchild, at that point, knew what his duty was. He was, after all, a hunter and interrogator. He was glad he had brought Tully and Garth with him on this most fortunate of errands. They were both experienced and loyal men, men who understood how to track and kill the sort of prey they would be after. A look of eagerness and longing crept over Duke Fairchild’s face. The expression was lustful and predatory, like a hungry beast with the scent of blood finding its nostrils. Pael, who had been silently studying the Duke, read the intent in the man’s countenance, and found that he was pleasantly surprised.

“Learn what you can from the stableman, and then
dismiss
him properly.”

Fairchild hadn’t needed the emphasis on the word “dismiss” to understand his Lord’s meaning, but he nodded for the benefit of the wizard, and the hidden spectator. Lord Brach continued:

“We want this squire alive, if at all possible. His manner of departure, and the timing, suggests that he was involved, and is possibly carrying a message to an unknown party. We would like to know who that someone is, no matter what the cost.”

“Bring him alive!” Pael commanded then, his eyes conveying an intensity that Fairchild understood completely. “No matter what his condition is, if he is alive and can speak, I will be able to leech his mind of the knowledge we seek!”

“I understand,” Fairchild told them, with more than a little eagerness showing in his voice. “If it pleases milord, can your man escort the stableman back to the stable? I would do so myself, but it seems that time is of the essence here. I have other preparations to make, and men to round up and outfit before I get to him.”

With a nod, Lord Brach granted the request. Duke Fairchild was turning toward the door to leave, when a voice he recognized right away, caught him short.

“Your diligence in this matter will be well remembered,” Prince Glendar said from the shadows. Duke Fairchild smiled to himself.
King Glendar
, he corrected his thought, and continued on with his duty with that much more fervor.

After he had exacted what information he could from the stableman, and cleaned the blood and skin from his dagger, Duke Fairchild met his men at the Northroad Gate. The trio of night watchmen his men had cornered seemed annoyed at being rousted this early in the day. They grew quite cooperative, and obedient, however, after the Duke threw all ten of the stableman’s bloody fingers in the dirt at their feet. 

No one had left through the gate after dark, they all agreed. And only a single wagon, and later a lone post rider had entered. Duke Fairchild knew from experience that the watchmen were telling the truth, so he left them and moved on.

The next morning, on the Northroad, just south of Crossington, Duke Fairchild found a farmer who had heard, but hadn’t seen, two horses galloping towards the crossroads two nights previous in the pre-dawn hours. The Duke split his men then, and sent them to all of the farmhouses that were close enough to the road to hear a passerby. By midday, the first man’s story had been confirmed by a man who claimed he had seen a post rider, with a pack horse, galloping eastward on the cutoff road away from Crossington. It was no post rider Fairchild knew, and for the first time on this new hunt, he felt like he had the true scent of his prey. 

Duke Fairchild didn’t believe in luck, he believed he was a favorite of the gods, so he credited them as the cause of his recent good fortune. When one of the two extra men he had hired in Crossington was relieving himself at the side of the Midway Passage Road, and heard the distant sound of a man groaning, the Duke’s faith in his gods was confirmed. 

They found a trail leading north into the Reyhall Forest that was as obvious as a cobbled road. They found a dying bandit there, who confirmed that it had been a King’s man who had pig stuck his inner thigh and left him for dead. After torturing the man for all the information he was worth, Duke Fairchild slit his throat, and ordered Garth, Tully, and the two extra men he hired to get rid of the two bodies. He then lit a fire and camped in the same place Mikahl had only nights before.

The Duke started growing confident then: the gods had smiled upon him again. They continually led him in the right direction. It was like Coldfrost, he mused, when all those feral half breed giants had confessed to the things he needed them to confess to. Lord Brach and old Lord Finn had praised him. His victims always told him what he needed them to say when he pressured them properly. It never occurred to him then, or even now, that the tortured almost always end up saying what the torturer wanted to hear, if only to quicken their own death. 

Sitting there in the woods at Mikahl’s camp, the Duke had become so confident, that he never even questioned how a lowly squire could’ve killed two hardened road bandits all by himself. Garth, Tully, and the other two men wondered about that though. In their mind’s eye, their prey suddenly seemed a little more formidable than merely a simple spoiled castle boy.

The next afternoon, when they came into the clearing where the half eaten carcass of the giant skinless lizard lay, they were attacked by a greedy pack of wolves. One of the men’s horses was dragged down, and while he was pinned beneath it, the wolves set upon him. Tully killed two of them with his well placed arrows. The Duke killed two more with his sword, while trying to save the pinned man. He rode into the fray, fearlessly hacking and slashing, with little or no concern for his own safety, but it was wasted bravado. The hungry wolves tore the man to pieces. Garth had to run down the other hired man when he tried to flee, but he still managed to trample a wolf under his horse’s hooves as he did so. The dozen or so wolves that remained, reluctantly scattered, and skulked away. One wolf turned and growled at them, as if to rally his pack-mates for another attack, but one of Tully’s arrows nipped it, and sent them all darting back into the forest.

Duke Fairchild wiped the blood from his blade, and sheathed it. He dismounted his horse, dragged the hired man out of his saddle, and knocked him to his knees, with a brutal blow to the temple. He almost killed the man then and there, but to Garth and Tully’s disappointment, he made the man gather up all of the arrows from the area around his half eaten comrade. 

Tully went with him, and filched the dead man’s pockets and pouches. The man’s saddle bags were next. Tully stopped pilfering only long enough to waggle one of the corpse’s severed hands at the craven man. 

Garth and Tully had been reminded of their liege lord’s strength and fearlessness, when he rode into the pack of wolves without a care. They were then reminded quite brutally of his ruthlessness, when, after the craven man handed Tully back his arrows, the Duke ran his sword through his stomach and rode away, leaving him to die slowly in the field. He would still be bleeding out when the wolves returned. Garth and Tully would’ve had full confidence in the Duke’s plan to catch up to, and overtake, their prey, had they not found the old sword protruding proudly up out of the huge, dead lizard’s throat. It shone in the sun like a cross rising out of a sea of reddish brown death. After confirming that it was standard Westland issue, they decided that the lowly squire they were after might be more of a predator than Duke Fairchild himself.

The three of them made good time then, because the trail wasn’t all that hard to follow. That night, Garth and Tully took turns leading the horses on foot by lantern light. The next morning, they learned just how close they were to catching their quarry, when they came upon a newly deserted camp. They started stalking then, gaining on the squire slowly. The Duke decided to wait until the boy made camp that night. They would take him in his sleep. They learned from the tracks at the camp that there were two men. Duke Fairchild hoped that it was the squire and the conspirator that Lord Brach and King Glendar wanted to learn more about. 

Thoughts of praise and grandeur carried the Duke through the long day, but he was never distracted from the scent of his prey. He felt certain that the gods had led him to this very moment in time. A place where he could do what he loved to do, while raising his standing with his liege lord, and gaining the favor of the new King of Westland. He had no doubts that when the boy and his companion finally bedded down for the night, he and his men would overtake them; but as nightfall came and the darkness deepened, he began to wonder.

They dared not light the lantern. They were too close now. The Duke didn’t want to spook his quarry. Knowing that the squire couldn’t move any faster through the darkness than they could, they pressed on. Fairchild had Tully dismount and lead them on foot. The Duke was still reveling in the greatness this capture would bring him, when Tully stopped, and bent down to retrieve something shiny he saw on the ground. The horrible, primal yell the man made when the iron jaws of Loudin’s trap snapped shut on his arm, carried a long way through the forest night.

The bone chilling scream frightened every living thing to silence, but the sound that threatened to scare the trees up out of their roots was the low, menacing growl of rage, that rose up from deep inside of the Coldfrost Butcher.

Hyden hovered over Little Condlin’s wounded body to shield him from the arrows that were still raining down on them. As strange as it seemed, the three elves formed a protective ring around them as well. One of the elves voiced his displeasure at the deed, but complied with his peers anyway. Condlin’s squirming struggle underneath him let Hyden know that his cousin was still alive. 

Talon had narrowly missed being crushed when Hyden had dived on Little Condlin. He was trying to fly away from the mayhem, but his untrained wing muscles weren’t cooperating with his will. He was half flapping, half hopping his way across the turf. Yells and screams, and the sound of battle, could be heard breaking out all around them. The sound of steel clashing on steel and wood was unmistakable, even to Hyden, who had never so much as touched a sword, save for one in an armory shop along the Ways. 

“The arrows have stopped,” the elven archer with the blood streaked face said, as he knelt down to look at Little Condlin’s wounds. Hyden would’ve tried to stop the yellow eyed creature from touching his cousin, but the elf’s tone, and the gentleness of his movements, belayed his objection. 

Hyden glanced around them. His father, and Uncle Condlin, were both charging toward him. Anger and fear showed plainly in their eyes. Beyond them, Hyden could see Little Condlin’s mother on her knees with her face in her hands. In the last few weeks, she had lost one son and seen another crippled. Hyden couldn’t imagine what she must be feeling, after seeing another one of her children being struck by an arrow. It appeared as if the Redwolf soldiers were torn between joining the growing battle around them, and protecting those few who were still on the tournament grounds unarmed. There were enough of them present on the archery range that the attackers, and the other angry people seemed weary, and were staying away from that particular area.

Hyden felt it in his blood, like a gritty tingle, before he saw the elf’s magic working. It was such a sudden and powerful thing, that he was drawn to it reflexively. The elf had opened the top of Little Condlin’s shirt, and was pulling the arrow slowly out of him with one hand. The other hand was making a slow, circular motion over the boy’s chest. A place, deep inside the child’s skin, was glowing a reddish orange color. The glow moved along the arrow’s path, out towards where the shaft protruded from his collar. They eventually could see that it was the arrow’s sharpened steel tip that was glowing, and it was still glowing when it came free of the flesh.