Oath of Swords

Harnak’s ears twitched agreement, and the priest frowned once more. “Nor, I think, should we involve a greater servant in this. I doubt Bahnak guards the wenches as well as his own family, in which case the dog brothers can deal with them whenever we wish, perhaps even make it seem an accident. Yes,” he nodded, “that would be best-an accident that points no fingers at you. And to help with that, it would be as well to wait a time, I think.”

“I want them dead now! ” Harnak snarled, but Tharnatus shook his head.

“Patience, My Prince. Patience and stealth, those are the virtues of the Scorpion. It may be unpleasant, but you must endure it for a time longer. Think, My Prince. If nothing befalls them for weeks, or even a few months, few minds will leap to the conclusion that you had them killed. If you wanted that done, would you not have acted sooner?”

Harnak grunted, then jerked his head in assent.

“So,” the priest went on after a moment, “that leaves Bahzell, and in order to slay him, we first must find him. Not, I think, too difficult a task. The Scorpion’s least servants can find him even in deepest wilderness, in time, yet I doubt we will require their services. A hradani in other lands should be easy enough for the dog brothers to track without the Church’s aid, and if he’s found a place for himself far from Navahk or Hurgrum, so much the better. He’ll feel more secure, unthreatened and unwary until the dog brothers can take him. And,” Tharnatus smiled unpleasantly, “he is an outlaw, with a price on his head. What more reasonable than that someone should return that head to Navahk to claim blood price, and so prove his death to all the world?”

“He won’t die easy,” Harnak growled, one hand pressing his ribs. “I’ll not deny I thought him a weakling, but that’s a mistake I won’t make twice. In fact, I’d feel safer sending one of the greater servants after him.”

“Come now, My Prince!” Tharnatus chided. “He’s only one man, and any man is mortal. The dog brothers can deal with him-and the Scorpion’s servants are not to be squandered on tasks others can accomplish. We may use each of them but once for each blood binding.”

Harnak clenched his jaw, then sighed, for the priest was right. Sealing a demon to obedience was a risky business, even for the Church of Sharna. A single slip could-and would-spell the grisly death of the creature’s summoners, and such exercises of power were difficult to hide from those with eyes to see. Fortunately, there were few such eyes in hradani lands, where even Orr and his children were looked upon askance, but it would take only a single misstep to spell the destruction of this temple, for the hradani had not forgotten the Dark Gods’ part in the Fall of Kontovar. Harnak’s own cronies would cut his throat if they even suspected to whom he’d given his allegiance, but that was a risk he was willing to run. The secret power of the Scorpion had smoothed his way more than once, and the rituals that raised that power fed other, darker hungers.

“Very well, Tharnatus,” he said at length. “Let it be the dog brothers. And let it be soon. I’ll wait for the sluts, if I must, but I want that whoreson’s head to piss on in front of my father’s court!”

“And you shall have it, My Prince,” the priest murmured, then raised his head and smiled as a sound echoed down the hall behind him. He and Harnak turned to the open doors, and the sounds grew louder-and terrified. Pleas for mercy and the desperate, panting sounds of struggle floated through the doors, and then two cowled priests thrust a twisting, fighting figure through them.

The girl was young, no more than fifteen or sixteen, just ripening into the curves of womanhood and clad only in a thin white robe, and her arms were bound behind her. Her ears were flat to her skull, her eyes huge with panic, as she fought the binding cords, but there was no escape, and a dozen more priests and worshipers followed into the temple.

The captive’s pleas died in a strangled whimper as she saw the huge scorpion and the altar it crouched above. She stared at them, terror gurgling in the back of her throat, and then she threw back her head and shrieked in horror as her captors dragged her kicking, madly fighting body forward.

“As you see, My Prince,” Tharnatus purred through her hopeless screams, “your business here tonight can be mixed with pleasure as well.” He reached into his robe to withdraw the thin, razor sharp flaying knife and smiled at the crown prince of Navahk.

“Will you stay to share our worship?”

Chapter Twelve

Patchy frost glittered in shadowed hollows, but clear morning sunlight touched the city’s stone walls to warm gold as Kilthan’s wagons creaked and rumbled towards Derm. The road sloped steadily down to the city’s colorful roofs, the Saram River swept around its western flank in a dark blue bow, gilded with silver sun-flash, and the final line of rapids and cataracts foamed white less than a league above the bustling docks. The sails of small craft dotted the Saram’s broader reaches below the city, lush farmland stretched away from the river in both directions, and the mighty, snowcapped peaks of the Eastwall Mountains towered far beyond it.

The Barony of Ernos had been blessed in many ways, from the richness of its soil to the accidents of history and geography which gave it unthreatened frontiers and a ruling family noted for sagacity. The current Baroness Ernos was no exception. She’d inherited and maintained both her father’s efficient and well-trained army and his longstanding alliances with the neighboring Empire of the Axe, and she used them with considerable business acumen. Her relations with Axeman merchants were good, tariffs and taxes were low, and she allowed no brigands to take root in her well-settled lands. All of which, coupled with her capital’s location as the northernmost port on the Saram River, had conspired to turn Derm into a major trade entrepôt.

It would be too much to expect Rianthus to lower his guard anywhere, yet a palpable sense of relief had settled over the wagon train as they crossed into Ernos from Moretz. The duty schedule remained as arduous and the penalties for inattention as severe, but now the road-far better maintained than on the Moretzan side of the border-ran through rich, well-tended farmland and comfortable villages, not rough hills ideal for outlaw roosts.

Brandark was fascinated by a land where most villages lacked so much as palisades and not even larger towns had any serious fortifications. The chance of any Navahkan army’s reaching Ernos were slight, yet he shuddered at the thought of what one would do to those defenseless towns if it ever should. But the truly remarkable thing was that none of them seemed to feel any need to protect themselves from their own neighbors. He’d known from his reading that there were places like that, yet he’d grown to adulthood in Navahk, and even now, with the evidence before him, no Navahkan could quite believe in them.

Bahzell could. He could even see in this secure land the ideal to which his father aspired. Prince Bahnak could never have been happy ruling such a peaceable realm; there was too much of the hradani warlord in him for that, and Bahzell doubted, somehow, that his father had ever fully visualized the end to which he strove. Yet that was beside the point. Bahnak looked not to the reward of his labors but to their challenge, for it was the struggle he loved. The sense of building something, content in the knowledge that the task was worth doing.

In an odd sort of way, Bahzell understood his father far better now. Prince Bahnak would die of boredom in a world bereft of intrigue or the deadly games of war and politics. Indeed, he would regard the mere notion of such a world with puzzled incomprehension and laugh at the idea that things like altruism had any place in his life. He was a practical man, a pragmatic builder of empire! His reforms aimed simply at making that empire stronger, more self-sufficient, better able to withstand its enemies and conquer them when the time was right. Anything else was nonsense. Bahzell couldn’t have begun to count the times he’d heard his father declare that a man looked after himself and his own in this world. Those who tried to do more were bound to fail, and the sooner they did it and got out of everyone else’s way, the better!