asks that question. Look at him; you can see his value.”
“You’ve used him before? But not asked me?”
Mallich glanced over. “Not everything I do concerns you and your Red Slash. Some things I do are for other people and different reasons. The Hammer has been useful in a few of those.”
He stopped suddenly when they reached the basement stairs and turned to face Usurient. “Don’t question me further on this or I will let you find someone else to handle it. You’ve done your part, all but the payment. I make the decisions on how we get to Arcannen and how we dispose of him. You stay out of it.”
He turned away and started up the stairs with a dismissive gesture. After a moment’s hesitation, inwardly seething at the other’s treatment of him, Dallen Usurient followed.
SIXTEEN
IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDDAY WHEN ARCANNEN PILOTED HIS Sprint over the last of the coastal landscape separating him from the ruins of Arbrox and made a cautious landing in the sheltered area he had chosen earlier for his craft’s concealment. On the coast, vessels were in constant danger from high winds and sudden storms, but he faced an equally daunting prospect from the risk of discovery. If anyone found his vessel and commandeered it, he would be trapped in his lair. Escape without a flying vessel was out of the question. Between the miles of barren terrain surrounding his hiding place on three sides and the churning maelstrom of the ocean on the fourth, the only way a man could flee with any hope of success was through the air.
So hiding his Sprint was a necessary effort each time he returned. His current choice was a deep depression in the rocks inland from the coast proper about a mile from Arbrox, tucked back in a mass of boulders and broken rock that no one could successfully navigate on foot without knowing how to do so beforehand. Using rock walls and cliff overhangs, he was able to place his airship almost completely out of sight. Finding it on foot would require an extraordinary stroke of luck. A careful air search in the right weather and with sufficient sunlight might reveal it, but the persistent marine layer and frequent rains reduced the chances of that happening considerably.
Besides, he lived in the ruins of a village to which no one came.
Or hadn’t before now. But come they would, and very soon. He had made sure of that—all part of his plan to provide Dallen Usurient with an irresistible opportunity to bring the Red Slash back to the coast to find him. Not that he expected Usurient himself would do so. No, Usurient would take a different approach, one less obvious to those watching for it. He would send someone other than himself, reluctant to make a return trip if it wasn’t necessary, believing that hunting down and killing off Arcannen could be achieved without his personal involvement. He would send men skilled at the sort of undertaking with which he would task them, their orders clear and their destination determined through the rumors and reports with which he had provided them.
And they would journey to their doom.
But that was all part of the game, and Arcannen loved nothing better than contests of wit and machinations and, ultimately, surprises.
He covered the Sprint with a canvas that was the exact same mottled gray-and-brown as the rocks within which it nestled and began the walk back to the remains of the village. All about him, the damp and the gray bore down in a heavy shroud. The wind whipped about him fiercely, constantly changing direction and force, a wild thing that nothing could contain. Ahead, the crashing of waves against the rocks was a steady booming that drowned out the rest of the world’s sounds.
By now, he was thinking, Usurient would have begun the process of choosing the men he would send and providing the equipment and supplies they would need. By now an expedition would have been mounted, and if it had not already been dispatched it soon would be.
He must prepare for them. He must anticipate their arrival and their intentions in ways that would allow him to dispose of them quickly.
The seeds were planted, he assured himself. He had planted them himself. It would be interesting to discover what sort of crop they would yield.
Arcannen was, at heart, a fatalist. He believed that most of what happened was predestined and that his own involvement was preordained. Life