LITMIR.BIZ

      After Dad regained the throne, in what is now called the Troid e Ewan Macha, or The Battle of the Twins of Macha, I had a lot of time on my hands and I spent most of it exploring Castle Duir. I even revisited the dungeon and issued my one and only executive order to have the cells cleaned out. I still feel sorry for whoever got that job. The only place that I never got to see was the armoury. After the battle, Dad still couldn’t be sure if there were any of Cialtie’s loyal followers still lurking around incognito, so he decided to seal off the weapons room until security could be normalised.

      So that made this trip to the armoury my first one. Brendan and I hiked to the north wing, sailed past three sets of ten-hutting armed guards and found ourselves in front of a set of huge oak doors inlaid with a fine gold latticework.

      Light flooded the hallway as we pushed our way in. Like Gerard’s armoury, this was a glass-roofed gymnasium, but size-wise it made the winemaker’s weapons room seem like a walk-in closet. Racks upon racks contained carefully stacked weapons: swords, axes, maces and rows and rows of banta sticks. Tournament practice areas were marked off on the floor and the entire far length of the room was an impossibly long archery range that could accommodate eight archers abreast, each with their own targets. At the far end there was a huge contraption that looked like it might be a catapult.

      ‘Wow,’ I said.

      The sound of Brendan’s and my footsteps echoed in the huge space. Surprisingly there was no one around.

      Brendan whispered like he was in a church. ‘Where is everyone?’

      ‘Probably off pillaging.’

      ‘Damn,’ Brendan said, ‘you mean it’s pillaging season and no one told me?’

      I smiled and shouted a tentative, ‘Hello?’

      ‘So,’ Brendan said in a normal tone, now that it looked like we were alone in there, ‘where do they keep the AK-47s?’

      ‘I’m afraid if you want a long-range weapon, Brendan, it’ll have to be one of those.’

      Brendan turned to where I had pointed; the entire wall was covered with both long and short bows mounted neatly in rows. They were all unstrung with their strings hanging slack from the top notch. There were hundreds of them.

      ‘Ah,’ Brendan said, ‘you may laugh, but I was a pretty good archer in my youth. My mother made me take lessons.’ Brendan walked over to the wall and reached up to take down a medium-sized bow.

      I never heard the twang of the bow that fired the arrow at him, I didn’t even see it while it was in the air, I only heard the thwap of the arrow hitting its target and Brendan’s yelp as he realised his arm was pinned to the wall.

      The arrow had tacked Brendan’s shirtsleeve to the wall, missing his skin by inches. I hit the ground, rolled to my left, upsetting a stand of bantas, and came up crouching with a stick in each hand. I poked my nose over the now-empty banta stick holder to see Brendan reaching to extract the arrow that stuck him to the wall. As his hand crossed his body another arrow pinned that sleeve as well. This time clothing wasn’t the only thing it pierced – he howled in pain.

      ‘I’m hit!’

      Chapter Eight

      Spideog