Free The Warlord's Domain by Peter Morwood Page A

it. Crisen Geruath is dead, his father the old Overlord is dead, Prokrator Bruda who was your senior officer while you pretended to be a member of the Emperor’s Secret Police—he’s dead, too; Kathur you raped and broke with your fists…” Yakez was working himself into a passion that would end in one of two ways; either he would attack with whatever that cretin Hault had let slip through his search—Voord’s right hand moved inside his tunic and found the knurled-steel grip of the slender dagger that went everywhere with him—or he would break down…
    Fingers still tight around the dagger-hilt, Voord watched dispassionately as the old man dropped on to both knees and folded over his own anguished sobs. There was an exposed place the size of a florin coin on the exposed nape of ar Gethin’s neck, and Voord was torn between driving his knife-blade into it or using the pommel to stun so that the Vreijek could be sliced to dripping shreds later and at leisure. He debated too long for either chance, because the old man straightened abruptly with more energy in his short fat frame than anyone of such a shape had right to own.
    Someone… several someones were hammering at the outside of the door, jolting it on its hinges and making the wrist-thick bolts clatter derisively. Apart from the noise, they were producing no effect. Yakez Goadec ar Gethin stood up very straight, and for all that he had to tilt back his head on its thick neck, he looked Voord in the eye. “There are so many things that I would like to do to you,” he said, “but all of them would end in death. Kill, die, death, that’s all you know, that’s your only solution. Voord, I am no sorcerer. I learned only the two spells: one for the door, to let us have this little chat without interruption, and one other. Because I looked at what was left Of Sedna when you and the thing you conjured up were done, and I read the books in her locked library cabinet…”—Voord’s narrowed, watchful eyes went wide—”and I decided to be merciful. I decided to take death away from you.”
    He reached into the money-purse strapped to his belt and pulled out its lining in a chiming shower of coins. A lining that was fine, smooth leather, as fine as the binding of the book that still rested on Voord’s lap. The same leather, even to the grain…
    “
NO
!” Voord’s voice soared to a scream as Yakez flung the flap of woman’s-leather at him and he felt it strike his face, felt it stroke against his cheek as warm and soft as the innermost skin of a lover’s thigh. The scream was drowned by a monstrous crash as the doors, their bolts snapping back in response to the same gesture which had first locked them, flew open under the weight of shoulders pressed against them.
    Tagen was first in, his regulation shortsword already clear of its sheath and lacking only something to cut. Voord supplied that something; flinging out his hand, he pointed at Yakez as the small man smiled up at him and roared, “Take that one!”
    Whatever the meaning of the order, no matter what words were in it, Tagen heard only the words which he had always heard in a command uttered with that urgency. His balance shifted as he ran forward, the fist holding his sword swung back, reached the high point of its swing and came whirring down. He didn’t hear what the small man was saying, or make sense of the Commander’s frantic shout, but saw only that his target neither dodged nor ducked, and corrected the arc of his sweeping stroke as much by deadly reflex as intent.
    “And my death will seal—” Yakez had begun to say.
    “Don’t hurt him, you damned—” Voord had begun to shout.
    But the sound of Tagen’s sword as it sheared off the Vreijek’s head made a thick, wet nonsense of all the words. Blood splattered everywhere, over the steps, on the newly-scrubbed floor, onto Tagen’s armor and all over Voord’s feet as Yakez Goadec ar Gethin’s severed head smacked against the stone