Crimson Shadow, The - R. A. Salvatore Page 0,111

him the item.

Luthien took it gingerly, not understanding.

His eyes went wide when he slipped off the blanket and saw Blind-Striker, his family’s treasured sword.

“From Gahris, your father and the rightful eorl of Bedwydrin,” Katerin O’Hale explained, her tone stern and determined.

Luthien looked searchingly into her green eyes, wondering what had happened.

“Avonese is in chains,” Katerin said. “And there is not a living cyclopian on Isle Bedwydrin.”

Luthien found breath hard to come by. Gahris had followed his lead, had taken up the war! The young man glanced all about, from the smiling Katerin, to the smiling Oliver, to the snow-covered rooftops of the quiet city.

He was faced with a decision then, Luthien knew, but this time, unlike the many events that had led him to this fateful point, he was making it consciously.

“Go out, Oliver,” the young man said. “Go out and tell the people to take heart. Tell them that their war, the war for their freedom, has begun.” Luthien again locked stares with the proud woman from Hale.

“Go out, Oliver,” he said again. “Tell them that they are not alone.”

LUTHIEN’S GAMBLE

To Diane, and to Bryan, Geno, and Caitlin

PROLOGUE

IT WAS A TIME in Eriador of darkness, a time when King Greensparrow and his wizard-dukes blanketed all the Avonsea Islands in a veil of oppression and when the hated cyclopians served as Praetorian Guard, allied with the government against the common folk. It was a time when the eight great cathedrals of Avonsea, built as blessed monuments of spirituality, the epitome of homage to higher powers, were used to call the tax rolls.

But it was a time, too, of hope, for in the northwestern corner of the mountain range called the Iron Cross, in Montfort, the largest city in all of Eriador, there arose cries for freedom, for open revolt. Evil Duke Morkney, Greensparrow’s pawn, was dead, his skinny body hanging naked from the tallest tower of the Ministry, Montfort’s great cathedral. The wealthy merchants and their cyclopian guards, allies of the throne, were sorely pressed, bottled up in the city’s upper section, while in the lower section, among the lesser houses, the proud Eriadorans remembered kings of old and called out the name of Bruce MacDonald, who had led the victory in the bitter cyclopian war centuries before.

It was a small thing really, a speck of light in a field of blackness, a single star in a dark night sky. A wizard-duke was dead, but the wizard-king could easily replace him. Montfort was in the throes of fierce battle, rebels pitted against the established ruling class and their cyclopian guards. The vast armies of Avon had not yet marched, however, with winter thick about the land. When they did come on, when the might that was Greensparrow flowed to the north, all who stood against the wizard-king would know true darkness.

But the rebels would not think that way, would fight their battles one at a time, united and always with hope. Such is the way a revolution begins.

Word of the fighting in Montfort was not so small a thing to the proud folk of Eriador, who resented any subjugation to the southern kingdom of Avon. To the proud folk of Eriador, uttering the name of Bruce MacDonald was never a small thing—nor were the cries for Eriador’s newest hero: the slayer of Morkney, the unwitting leader of a budding revolution.

Cries for the Crimson Shadow.

CHAPTER 1

THE MINISTRY

THE REVOLT HAD BEGUN HERE, in the huge nave of the Ministry, and the dried blood of those killed in the first battle could still be seen, staining the wooden pews and the stone floor, splattered across the walls and the sculpted statues.

The cathedral was built along the wall separating the city’s merchant class from the common folk, and thus held a strategic position indeed. It had changed hands several times in the weeks since the fighting began, but so determined were the revolutionaries that the cyclopians still had not held the place long enough to climb the tower and cut down Duke Morkney’s body.

This time, though, the one-eyed brutes had come on in full force, and the Ministry’s western doors had been breached, as well as the smaller entrance into the cathedral’s northern transept. Cyclopians poured in by the score, only to be met by determined resistors, and fresh blood covered the dried blood staining the wooden pews and the stone floor.

In mere seconds, there were no obvious battle lines, just a swarming mob of bitter enemies, hacking at each other with wild abandon,