Free Kings of Clonmel by John Flanagan Page A

followed.
    He was only a few meters behind his quarry now and could actually hear the man breathing. He’s tense, Halt thought. With his veins charged with adrenaline, the stalker’s breath was coming more heavily—probably without his knowing.
    If he looked around now, he was bound to see Halt right behind him, cloak or no cloak. It was time to act. Halt rose slowly from the ground and crept forward in a low crouch, one of the strikers clenched in his right fist.
    Perhaps Halt made some infinitesimal noise, or perhaps the other man just sensed a presence behind him, but he started to turn. Unfortunately for him, it was a few seconds too late. Halt swung an overhand blow and brought the striker knob down hard onto the man’s skull, just behind the left ear. He felt the shock up his arm as the man emitted a strangled grunt and collapsed, limp as a rag, onto the ground.
    Still in a crouch, Halt grabbed him under the arms and quickly dragged him into the shelter of the rocks. Abelard looked at him curiously but made no sound.
    “Good boy,” Halt said briefly. The horse responded by raising then lowering his head.
    “Let’s see what we have here,” Halt said, and rolled the unconscious man onto his back. The would-be stalker was armed with a small arsenal of weapons. There was a short sword slung across his back. In addition, he had a long stabbing dagger in a belt sheath, another smaller knife in a scabbard strapped to his left forearm and a third tucked into the cuff of his boot. Halt examined them briefly. Cheap weapons, but kept well sharpened. He tossed them to one side. There was a length of cord looped around the man’s left shoulder. It was just over a meter in length and had a weighted ball at either end. A bolo, Halt recognized, a hunting weapon designed to be whirled around the head and thrown at a target’s legs. When the rope snagged the target, the weighted ends would whip around, tripping the victim and binding the feet together. Drawing his saxe knife, Halt cut the weights off the end and tossed them into the gorse.
    The man was wearing a soft hat, folded up to form a narrow brim, and a thigh-length jacket of rough wool, belted at the waist. Halt fastened the stalker’s thumbs behind his back with a pair of wood-and-rawhide thumb cuffs. Slipping the man’s patched and shabby boots off, he fastened his big toes with another pair of cuffs, wrinkling his nose at the rank smell of the man’s feet. When his prisoner was secured, he slipped his hands under the man’s arms, dragged him to a large rock and leaned his shoulders against it. Then Halt sat down to wait for him to regain consciousness.
    After several minutes, he moved away from the downwind position he had taken, his nose twitching again.
    “Those feet of yours smell like something crawled into your boots and died there,” he said softly. There was no reply.
     
    It was some fifteen minutes later that the man emitted a shuddering sigh. His eyelids flickered open, and he shook his head to clear it.
    Involuntarily, he tried to reach up to rub his eyes, then discovered that his hands were fastened securely behind his back. He struggled briefly against the restraint, then winced and uttered a cry of pain as the leather thong of the thumb cuffs cut into the soft skin at the base of his thumbs.
    “Stay still and you won’t hurt yourself,” Halt told him quietly.
    The man looked up in alarm, registering Halt’s presence for the first time. The Ranger had been sitting, quiet and unmoving, only a few meters away. Halt now saw a bewildered look pass over the unshaven face as the man tried to recall what had happened, how he had arrived in this predicament. Judging by the expression on his face, he had no idea. Then bewilderment gave way to anger.
    “Who are you?” he demanded roughly. His aggressive tone left no doubt that he was used to berating people to get his own way.
    Halt smiled thinly. Had the man known anything about the gray-bearded