Free The Warlord's Domain by Peter Morwood Page B

between them.
    The torso didn’t remain upright the way they sometimes did; it didn’t stagger, sway or even reel, but slammed straight down after its own head under the impetus of the blow. Breathing hard, Voord looked at it for perhaps a hasty count of five and then glared at Tagen.
    “I said
no
, Tagen. You disobeyed my direct order.”
    “Commander, I heard you cry out and I saw this one in a threat position. If I had waited, he might have—”
    “Enough. It doesn’t matter.”
Small use having a perfect instinctive killer like this one and then expecting him to behave like someone normal
... “Be about your duties.”
    The itch was just a tingle on his skin, an irritating need to scratch. Voord’s wave of perfunctory dismissal became an unembarrassed raking of his ribs that was such a relief, that felt so good… until his fingers sank to the knuckles in the sorcerously healed stab-wound that suddenly reopened in his side. He looked down and saw it, and went chalk-white with shock. Then the pain hit him, all the rending anguish of a sword-thrust in the belly, so that his back arched convulsively and a reflexive jerking in the muscles of his legs sent him tumbling from his seat down on to the bloodied floor.
    There was no blood of his own, only the gash with his hand in it and the sickening wash of agony that was worse even than when he gave the use of his left hand in sacrifice to the Old Ones. Voord had thought his maiming was the most terrible pain that he had ever borne until this moment.
    He was wrong. Even as he squirmed on the blood-greased tiles, first one hole opened in his head and then a second in his neck; the ragged punctures left by Alban
telek
darts. There was a crater of splintered bone above his right eye, and beneath his chin the clearly visible cartilage of his gullet had been perforated so that even his screaming sounded strange.
    Some of the soldiers who had come running to the rescue choked, and retched, and fled, while others remained but clenched their teeth and gazed in every direction but at the man they had thought to save… who, pierced by wounds that should have killed him three times over, still writhed and shrieked and tried without success to die.

Chapter Three
    The sword was red oak, straight and smooth and polished, and it had been in his hands since the gray time just before dawn. More than two hours of striking-practice, with only enough rest breaks to prevent his muscles from cramping in protest as they blurred the sword through cut and thrust, parry and block, or brought it to those snapping stops which require as much control as any sweeping stroke.
    He had spent years learning how to be lethal with a sword. Years of focusing the force of a strike; years of learning how to bring steel edge and human anatomy together with an executioner’s rather than a surgeon’s skill; years of learning how to deliver the classic cuts with no thought for what they did.
    To face a human being perfect in the eyes of the Power which had made it; and to strike it with a sword perfect in the eyes of the smith who had forged it, in a movement perfect in the eyes of the master who had taught it. From the sum of all that perfection,
defeat
left only food for worms.
    And what—or Whose—was the purpose behind such a consequence as that… ?
    Aldric looked at the wooden
taidyo
braced in his hands. Even now, ostensibly relaxed and with his thoughts turned inward, he had adopted the ready posture of mid-guard-center, a stance from which he could develop three separate killing forms. He breathed out through his nostrils, the breath drifting away in twin plumes like smoke on the cold air, and lowered the weapon’s point with slow deliberation to the ground. Only then did his gaze shift to the left, to where
she
awaited his attention; and all at once the winter’s chill ground through the glow of well exercised muscle. He shuddered, just once, but with such violence that it brought both rows of his