Blades of the Banished - Robert Ryan Page 0,29

the guards lost control of their horses. The animals bolted away from the flames and into the gully. As they jostled forward, they pushed many others ahead of them. Soon many had entered the killing ground of the gully.

Talgin drew his bow and fired. Within moments other arrow shafts sped through the smoke-filled air. They came from left and right. They came from low and high. Most found their mark.

Horses screamed with fright. Men cried out. The smoke thickened and roiled through the gully, choking breath and dimming sight. Heat came with it now as the flames ran like a wave, the wind driving them.

Many guards toppled from their saddles. Confusion and fear reigned. Some tried to turn back and face the flames. These were cut down by arrows. Some tried to move to the sides. These also were cut down by the unerring skill of the Raithlin.

The captain gathered some few men around him and charged Talgin.

Talgin sprang up on the boulder again, waited a moment, and then drew his bow once more. The smoke stung his eyes. Tears marred his sight. But three arrows he sent winging in quick succession, and three men, one of whom was the captain, dropped from their saddles.

Men yelled in confusion, swords flashed, but only arrows and throwing knives answered them. It was a massacre.

The flames drove down the gully. Riderless horses bolted to safety. Talgin mounted his own, which had also grown skittish, but he calmed it and moved up the slope and into the trees away from the smoke.

He looked back, ready to shoot again, but there was no need. The guards were dead. They lay in the gully, the fire racing over their corpses and speeding down the channel. But at its far end it began to slow. There was less grass there, and the banks opened up so that the wind diminished and drove the flames with less force.

Already he saw Raithlin leaving their hiding spots and working to put out the flames. And that was well, for nothing drew the attention of eyes, friendly or unfriendly, like smoke in the wild.

The Raithlin stamped with their boots and used bushes and branches to beat out the flames. It was hard work, but the patch of dry grass was burned out and the flames were already dying without their help.

Talgin looked back with a stony gaze into the gully. So much death filled it, all so needless. And the Witch-queen lay behind it all. He gritted his teeth in anger. There would be more of this before it was all over. Much more.

But a reckoning was coming. Ebona would pay for every life that was lost.

10. The Price of Malice

Lanrik stared at the iron door.

The three slanted struts forming the drùgluck sign unsettled him. Above them was a small viewing window, only one foot by one foot across. Iron bars ensured nothing could pass through it, though the window was too small for that anyway.

A new thought struck him, and it disconcerted him more than the drùgluck sign. He guessed the purpose of the window. No doubt Assurah had brought sacrifices to the serpent. He had forced them through the door, secured it behind them, and then watched as the creature devoured them, growing strong on the lives he fed it.

He felt deeply sickened. And then fear for himself and Erlissa set his heart fluttering. But a cold anger washed over him a moment later. He would not die down here. Nor would he fail in the quest to free Aranloth, for the lòhren was the best chance to defeat such evil in Alithoras.

He peered through the window. The room beyond was dim and he saw little. Standing on his toes he looked down at the bottom of the door’s other side.

It was secured at its base by an iron bar thick as his arm and bent over at its top to form a convenient handle for hands to lift it, though it was beyond his reach from this side. The bolt dropped deep into a hole bored into the stone floor, and the strength of twenty men would not force the door open.

And yet the discovery gave him hope. But even as he considered the situation the serpent hissed behind him, and he knew it was about to strike again.

He left their defense to Erlissa and did not look. He trusted her. She would do what could be done to protect them, just as he would do what could