Free Palaces of Light by James Axler Page A

insights were important, and whose cache with a sometimes disgruntled populous could never be an underestimated tool—was an invaluable ally, and as such would be privy to things that it was best others didn’t know. Morgan had seen the worst of the baron, and he knew to what lengths K would go to achieve his aims. The old man had been smart in the past, and had known when to counsel and when to shut up and nod. Never had he been so—what was the word?—defiant.
    Whatever the old man had seen, it had frightened him so much that he was prepared to incur the wrath of his baron rather than relive it. For it wasn’t as if he didn’t want to speak. It was stronger than that. It was as though to just speak what he had seen would bring it all flooding back in such a way that would drive him into the abyss of insanity.
    K mused that he could make the old man talk. That would be easy. Everyone had his or her point of no return, after which their tongues would be loosened no matter what their threshold and their tolerance to pain.
    But what would that achieve? Did he really want to hear whatever it was that Morgan had seen?
    He reached his palace. His wasn’t a rich ville, and in truth his home was only a palace in relation to the hovels that the rest of the population had for homes. K may be the ruler of this land, but it was a poor land in relation to much of the rest of the wasteland. The soil was poor for farming and the keeping of livestock, and much of the food they had came about as a result of trade. Not that they had much to trade with. When K had arrived here, it was a ville that was on the verge of extinction. Now it was barely alive and breathing. But it was there, crawling and scratching its way to some hope of prosperity.
    It might not be much, but it was K’s own. He had built it from nothing, and intended to keep it that way. To do so he had flexed considerable muscle. So it was that Morgan’s defiance shook him on more than one level. It wasn’t just the refusal, so out of character. It was also the fact that it reinforced that which he had been unwilling to face: his own uselessness in the face of this enemy. Rather than go after them himself, he had been more than happy—no, relieved was a better word if he was honest—to let the one-eyed man and his band of mercies go after the children. Even though his own daughter—the one thing he prized more than his own existence—was among the ones taken.
    The one thing that K had never been—the only thing that his detractors couldn’t hold against him—was a coward. Yet that was how he felt. He could try to explain it to himself in many ways: he couldn’t leave his people at this time; he couldn’t risk his best men and leave the ville undefended; he was sending the one-eyed man and his mercies as a scouting party for the real raid. No matter how he dressed it up, that sickness in the pit of his stomach remained. It was a sickness that was in part his own loathing of not going after the bastards in person and in part a dread admission of his own fear.
    He waved away the servant who came to him as he went through the tarnished and barely disguised squalor of the old house that was his base. It was the largest and best preserved. That wasn’t saying much when you looked at the rest of the buildings around, though. The ville was built around the remains of a small settlement that had serviced some nearby attraction for visitors on the days before skydark. That much was clear from the remains of an old display that took up part of the wing at the rear of his palace. That part remained unused, although at times he had gone in there and by lamplight had mused at the landscape described by the faded pictures and broken models that littered the unused rooms. Had the land around really looked like that? Shit, it had been so green. Just his bastard luck to come along when it was a dust desert.
    The servant hurried away. Baron K wasn’t a man to be disturbed when he