LITMIR.BIZ

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invulnerable, Erik, but he’s a lot harder to kill than any of your men. Magnus will look out for those guarding the main entrance to the keep, but if there’s magic on this back door, Bek has the best chance of survival.’

      ‘Time was I would be the first one up the rope.’

      Nakor gripped his friend’s arm. ‘I’m glad to see you’ve got smarter over the years, Erik.’

      ‘I notice you’re not volunteering to be up there, either.’

      Nakor just grinned.

      Bek waited, running his fingers over the door’s outline. It was a rock, like the others, and in the darkness he couldn’t see the crack his fingertips told him marked the edge of the entrance to the bolt-hole. He let his senses drift, for he had discovered early in life that sometimes he could anticipate things – an attack, an unexpected turn of the trail, the mood of a horse, or the fall of the dice. He thought of it as his ‘lucky feeling’.

      Yes, he thought. There was something just beyond this door, something very interesting. Ralan Bek did not know what fear was. As Nakor had suggested to him, there was something very different, even alien, about the young man from Novindus. Glancing down to where the little man waited with the old soldier, he found he could barely make them out in the dark. ‘Lantern,’ he whispered, and a soldier behind him handed him a specially constructed, small, shuttered lantern. He pointed it at Nakor and Erik and opened it and shut it again quickly. That was the agreed-upon signal to proceed cautiously.

      Not that Ralan truly understand caution. It was as alien to his thoughts as fear. He tried to understand a lot of things Nakor talked to him about, but sometimes he just nodded and pretended to understand the strange little man in order to keep him from repeating himself endlessly.

      Ralan continued to run his fingers along the seam until he determined that the door was designed to be opened only from the inside. He shrugged. ‘Bar,’ he demanded, and a soldier stepped past him and inserted the crowbar where he pointed. The soldier struggled for a moment, until Bek said, ‘Let me.’

      With preternatural power, he forced open a crack, and the door swung suddenly wide with a protesting sound of twisting metal as an iron bar was ripped from its restraining mechanism. With a loud clank it hit the stones and instantly Bek had his sword out and was through the opening. Unconcerned about the noise, Bek turned towards the soldiers and held up a restraining hand. ‘Wait!’ he said in low tones, and then he entered.

      The soldiers knew their orders. Bek would enter first and they would only follow when he gave the order or ten minutes after, whichever came first. One soldier turned over an hourglass bearing markings, red lines drawn to indicate demarcations of ten minutes. Erik’s hand-picked men hunkered down before the entrance, along the edge of the pool, listening to the sound of the waterfall in the darkness.

      Bek moved cautiously, ignoring his lack of sight. He stepped lightly as he progressed, not putting his full weight down until he knew he wasn’t stepping into a pit, or triggering some sort of trap. He knew he could take a lot of damage – he’d been wounded several times in his short life – but he had no more appetite for injury than the next man. Besides, if what Nakor said was true, there should be some fun ahead.

      Thinking of the little man caused Bek to pause a moment. Bek didn’t like him; but then again Bek didn’t like anyone; he didn’t dislike anyone either. His feelings towards other people were fairly predictable: they were either allies or opponents – or they were inconsequential, like a horse or some other animal, sometimes useful, but mostly not worth the attention. But the little man stirred some strange feelings in Bek, feelings he couldn’t put a name to. He didn’t know if it was familiarity, or enjoyment or what. His pleasures tended to the intense: watching men bleed and scream, or rough coupling with women. He knew he liked fighting. The crashing of steel, the clamour of voices, blood and … death. He liked watching things die, he had decided some time before. It fascinated him to see that one moment an animal or a man might be alive, aware, moving, and the next it was lying there, just so much meat. Not even useful meat if it was a man.

      Bek expected to kill some very dangerous men, and looked forward to it.

      A faint sound from ahead caused him to forget Nakor and his confusion over things the odd gambler said all the time. Someone was moving at the far end of a tunnel and Bek’s entire body quivered with anticipation.

      He was supposed to go back, but he had lost track of time – how long was ten minutes, anyway? The other soldiers would come in after him, and besides, Bek was anxious to be about some slaughter. It had been a very long time since he’d enjoyed a good fight. Nakor had done something to him, and often his head hurt when he tried to think about things. But Nakor had said it was all right for him to kill anyone who was hiding up in this old keep, except for more of the old soldier’s fighters who might be coming in from the other side.

      Ralan Bek found his head swimming, so with a grunt he shoved aside all thoughts except finding the author of the noise he had heard in the darkness. He picked up his pace, and almost fell face forward into an open pit. Only his ‘lucky feeling’ caused him to pull back at the last instant.

      He took out a small cylinder Nakor had given him, and pulled off the top. Inside was a bundle of sticks, one of which he pulled out. He recapped the cylinder and put it back in his tunic, then waved the stick rapidly in the air, and after a few seconds a tiny flame erupted from the end. As Nakor had promised him, after the total darkness of the tunnels, he’d be surprised at the amount of light the small burning stick could provide.

      Bek looked down at a pit that yawned at his feet, and couldn’t see the bottom. He was glad he hadn’t fallen, not because he feared injury, but because he would have had to wait at the bottom until the old soldier’s fighters caught up with him. He didn’t know if they’d even notice until one of them fell in and he didn’t relish the notion of one of them landing on top of him; and he didn’t know if they’d bring enough rope to haul him out.

      He took two steps back then with a powerful stride launched himself above the pit and landed easily on the other side, a dozen feet away from his take-off. He dropped the flaming stick to the floor, grinding it under his boot heel.

      He paused to see if anyone might have heard his landing, and when he was certain he had gone unnoticed, he continued down the hall. For an instant he wondered if he should have left something to warn the soldiers behind him of the pit. Then he wondered where that thought had come from; why should he worry if one of the old soldier’s men fell into the pit? This was too difficult to consider now: it was something Nakor would understand. He had no time to dwell on it.

      Ahead he could hear faint voices, and he knew mayhem awaited.

      Magnus studied the sky and judged that it was time to move, so he signalled to two guards to accompany him up the long entryway to the ancient keep. The road appeared to have not been in use for years, but Magnus had secretly inspected it at dawn and saw by tiny signs that the ‘disuse’ had been artfully forged. Someone had been using this road recently, but endeavouring to keep that fact a secret. That as much as anything convinced him that his father’s faith in Joval Delan, the hired mind-reader, had not been misplaced. Some local bandit, smuggler, or gang of errant youths would not have the means or inclination to do so thorough a job.

      The soldiers had been creeping up the draw known as Cavell Run, which was the only obvious approach to the ancient keep. Magnus was not the student of things military his father and brother were, but even he could imagine what a lethal prospect attempting to storm this keep would present. Only the rumours of demonic possession and a curse, followed by nearly a century of peace in the region would have kept such an obvious military asset unused.

      Still, he had other concerns, the first of which was to ensure that the men with him went undiscovered for as long as possible. Magnus was still young compared to most powerful practitioners’ of magic, and he had inherited certain abilities from his parents. His mother had always possessed a finer instinct for detecting the presence of magic than his father, though Pug was better able to determine the nature of a spell or device once it was uncovered. Magnus had the happy fortune to have inherited both abilities.

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