was malice in him. It was just more deeply hidden than it was in most elves. And there was a terrible anger too although most times he hid it from everyone, even himself.
Tyrion heard a knock at the door. Cautiously he padded over on his bare feet and answered it. He could hear someone just outside. He was not too worried but he slid the bolt back cautiously and pulled the door open. He was surprised to see Liselle standing there. She was dressed in a night robe which clearly had nothing underneath it.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘I’m sure you already know,’ she replied.
‘Then I suppose you had better come inside,’ he said. He pulled the door fully open and gestured for her to enter. She strode inside and looked around.
‘My room is just down the corridor,’ she said. He reached out and pulled a strand of hair from behind her ear. He leaned forward as he had done earlier, and whispered into that ear, ‘That is very fortunate.’
She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. It was a long kiss and it started experimentally, tentatively but it ended up being very passionate.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is. Let us both make the most of that fortunate accident of geography.’
She led him by the hand towards the bed.
N’Kari roared as he raced through the streets of Tor Yvresse, killing as he went. He was strong now. He had eaten many souls and supped on many pleasures, his own and others. He felt almost as mighty as he had been on the day he had faced Aenarion millennia ago.
His army was an army now, no longer a mere raider band or an ill-organised group of cultists. It was a force strong enough to take even an ancient walled city like this one.
Hundreds of partially altered warriors had joined him. He had found more humans, shipwrecked mariners from the Old World. Groups of beastmen who had somehow survived in the high mountains and kept to the old ways had been drawn to him. Decadent elves had responded to the summons of his magic. Souls offered up in sacrifice had multiplied the number of daemons bound to his will. All of them rampaged through the streets of the city now, maiming, killing, raping, torturing, pillaging.
Terror and pleasure and hatred and fear pulsed through the air around N’Kari. It was like a banquet to him. He drank it all in.
A company of elf soldiers formed up in the square ahead, moving in a disciplined phalanx to repulse a company of his beastmen. The brutes threw themselves against that steady line with simple-minded ferocity that might have worked if they had been facing tribesmen as primitive as themselves but which had no chance of success against these foes.
Briefly N’Kari considered aiding his followers, of using his own power to break the bodies and spirits of the enemy but he sensed the opposition to his presence was growing and he still had a task to perform here. Somewhere out there a cabal of wizards was using its power to strengthen the ancient wards against his kind that had been built in ancient times. These were spells that could hurt him. They were already making him uncomfortable and they had the potential to banish him from this place if he was not careful. He was not going to take the risk of that happening, not until he had completed his vengeance on the Blood of Aenarion.
He could sense the nearness of the prey he sought. His nostrils flared in response to what his spiritual senses detected. Saliva filled his mouth and dripped onto the ground. Elrion leapt forward and grovelled in the dirt, licking it up, moaning in ecstatic pleasure that contact with N’Kari’s secretions always gave to mortal things. N’Kari trampled on his back, leaving great talon marks on the writhing acolyte’s flesh, forcing Elrion face down in the puddle of drool as he strode forwards.
Ahead of him was a small tenement house, inside of which a few warm bodies huddled. The ones he sought, two elves half-garbed in their militia gear who had obviously been trapped here en route to joining their unit, were being menaced by a group of beastmen. They bore the spiritual scent of the Blood of Aenarion.
N’Kari shifted his form, becoming an elf of spectacular beauty, goddess-like. He blasted his own beastmen in the back with a bolt of purple lightning and raced up to the elves. They stood there