The Sword and the Sorcerer (23 page)

The luminously white serpent was long enough to be a dragon. Fortunately as Talon crept up on the snake he saw that it was more interested in toying with its soft, pretty catch than eating or crushing it. And every time Alana whimpered—and whimpers were all that the snake’s arresting coils allowed her to make—the soft baby cries of hurt would make the serpent stir a little, as if the sounds gave it pleasure. The reptile’s velvety movements were in slow-motion time—like Death lazily debating taking or not taking a life. It kept ponderously winding around Alana’s limp form as if it had all of eternity to play with this pink, soft toy.

It was the crunching of dirt under Talon’s boots that brought the mammoth worm into electric alertness. The snake’s convex head shot up and swiveled around to track the noise with such quickness and readiness to strike that a second’s delay would surely have cost Alana and Talon their lives.

Before the serpent had time to stick its forked tongue out twice, a single blade from Talon’s firing sword severed its huge head, causing the coils that held Alana to collapse like a long string suddenly untied.

With the mammoth reptile stretched its full length dead at their feet, Talon bent to clasp Alana’s outstretched hand, her face now radiant with relief and love. But before she could take his hand, a movement in a dark niche behind Talon caught her eye and she cried out, “Behind you, Talon!”

Talon instinctively ducked and spun around—sword in hand—only to incredulously find himself confronting Xusia, wounded but about to bring a stone ax down on his head. Talon dodged the blow and plunged the remaining blade of his weapon into the sorcerer’s chest, opening up another fountain of blood.

“Damn you through eternity!” Xusia howled, while Talon stabbed his collapsing body again and again.

As much as she despised the fiend, Alana had to hide her eyes from Talon’s merciless, gory thrusts and slices.

The sorcerer impaled on the end of his blade like a long eel in robes, Talon hoisted Xusia over his head and dashed him on the cave’s rocky floor. Still the sorcerers gashed and broken body billowed with angry life. It wasn’t until Talon grabbed the hilt of the sword with both hands and plunged the blade straight through the wizard’s heart that Xusia stopped breathing.

As stout of heart as Talon was, he too had to look away from the horribly mutilated body of Xusia, for it looked as if a pack of wolves had torn it apart.

Talon now helped Alana to her feet and pulled her away from the gory sight of the dead snake and the sundered sorcerer. At the lip of the cave, where there was enough torchlight for them to gaze into each other’s faces, Talon took Alana into his strong arms and they had their first kiss. Their bodies longed for each other and while she trembled he tensed.

Alana pulled her tongue out of his mouth to look deep into his diamond-blue eyes. “Talon! Dear, precious Talon! Is it really you? Childhood hero of my dreams!”

“Yes, my darling! The same Talon who used to pull your hair and then, later, had dewy fantasies about you while watching the rabbits and horses make love!”

She blushed and wrinkled her nose at him. He couldn’t resist crushing her mouth with his once more. After they kissed so long that she had to unglue her lips from his to catch her breath, Alana was amused to see that Talon was ready for more than just romantic kisses.

She brushed her lips against his bare chest and stepped back. “Easy, my love. We should get back to my brother. He must be worried sick about us.”

Alana started ahead of him but Talon reached for her hand and made her stop for a moment. “I hope you haven’t forgotten our bargain, Alana?” he asked, husky of voice.

She smiled. “I always keep my word, Talon,” she replied, melting all over, it seemed. “But must it be here—in these awful surroundings?”

Talon resignedly sighed. “I’ve waited all these years for you, my darling, I suppose I can wait another hour or two.”

Before she realized what he was about, Talon swept her off her feet into his arms and began to walk with her out of the catacombs. “I know a soft, green, woodsy hill high above Elysium—the perfect place for sowing the seeds of eternal love. What say you, my sweet lady?”

“I’ve always loved planting things and watching them grow!”

Dawn bathed the courtyard with pink light, bringing into bold relief the spoils of last night’s siege. In the midst of the upturned tables, broken wine casks and piles of dumped food was strewn the grim litter of chopped noblemen and Klaws. Only a short time ago the serfs and servants of the castle had started carrying out the corpses from the courtyard to a site beyond the moat for a massive funeral pyre.

Although the battle was an unqualified victory for the rebellion, a pall of grave concern hung over the battle-weary men who won it, their dress stained with gore, while they sipped wine, chatted idly with the slave girls or slept to replenish their sapped strength. For the triumph was hollow without the man who, more than any single warrior, had been responsible for winning it. Any thought of a victory celebration was out of the question until Talon and the fair Alana—whom he had set out to retrieve from Cromwell and Machelli—were safely among them once again.

If Talon and Alana were not restored to them soon that could only signify that the king had instrumented some kind of ill fate for them. Furthermore, if Cromwell still lived that augured he would soon return with the full force of his armies guarding the borders. If that were the case, the contender for the throne, Mikah, would find himself trying to hold the castle with a skeletal crew of fighters; the citizens of Elysium, fearing Cromwell’s retaliation, would never rally around Mikah as the legitimate heir to the throne until they saw the king’s crown on his own head.

While Darius, Morgan and Rodrigo conversed with the concubines, the six kings who had risked their lives for Talon were sitting around a table lugubriously discussing these weighty matters with Mikah, when the clatter of approaching hooves instantly pricked their ears. An untrammeled silence immediately prevailed throughout the courtyard, as the sound of a galloping charger grew closer and closer.

“Could it be him?” Mikah whispered, articulating everyone’s thoughts at the table, his clean-cut features suffused with straining hope.

The air in the courtyard seemed to crackle with expectation and unspoken excitement, as the mount and its unknown rider galloped nearer and nearer to the main entrance. Slowly the throng of mercenaries, pirates, kings, slave girls, concubines and servants rose to their feet, gazing longingly at the courtyard entrance.

When the crowd heard the pound of the horse’s hooves crossing the drawbridge the tension reached a peak of anticipation that was almost unendurable in its intensity.

Suddenly the man who had been uppermost in their minds for hours—a hero’s hero and beloved watchdog of fair play—came charging into the courtyard astride a raging black stallion, Alana clinging to his waist behind him. The happy sight of the wild-eyed, brave and bloodied warrior was so riveting that the crowd’s enthusiasm hung suspended in awed silence for another moment.

Talon reared his horse high in triumph and yelled to the wide-eyed mob of fighters and friends.

“Ho, all you rogues, rascals and wenches! Why the long faces? Did you think the ogre Cromwell got me, perchance? Well, I bring you glad tidings! The outlaw king is dead! Rejoice, brothers and sisters! You’ve snatched a kingdom back from a thief!”

And now the tidal wave of excitement that had been dammed back broke, flooding the courtyard with tumultuous roars of unbridled jubilation. In an explosive flash the night’s worries and tensions were washed away, leaving clean, joyous spirits that were but minutes ago leaden prophets of doom. The cheering, shouting and jumping crowd clamored and eddied around the two panting riders as if they wanted to lift Talon and Alana from the horse onto their shoulders. But Talon discouraged any such action with a wave of his hand. Then he spotted Mikah nearby but having trouble cutting through the tight press to him and Alana. Talon brought Cromwell’s bejeweled crown into view. At the sight of the crown another wave of jubilation swept through the crowd. Talon tossed the glittering crown to Mikah’s outstretched hand.

“Wear it in good health, your majesty!”

Mikah’s face was a sunburst of smiles. He placed the crown on his handsome head. The cries of joy that went up from the crowd was deafening. The men nearest to the new king hoisted Mikah onto their shoulders, Talon and Alana watching with moist eyes. Raised above his adoring subjects, Mikah motioned that the crowd hoist his childhood friend and beloved sister to their shoulders too.

But Talon averted the rush toward him again by rearing his steed once more and spurring it towards the entrance through which they came. An ecstatic dual chant now spread throughout the courtyard: “Long live the king! Talon! Long live the king! Talon!”

But Talon would not be deterred. As much as he enjoyed basking in the glory, he enjoyed the prospect of being alone with Alana on the hill even more. As he began to trot out of the courtyard—Alana clinging to him with even bolder embrace—Talon waved goodbye to Mikah. When he saw the six kings standing on the table shouting “Talon! Talon!” with the commoners, he smiled at the miracle of equality the victory had wrought and waved at them too, shouting, “I hope your majesties will have further need of my services! For I will soon have a wife to support!”

This announcement caused the mob to surge toward Talon and Alana with even greater excitement but Talon continued to spur his horse onward to the archway.

“Take us with you!” Darius pleaded with his leader, running beside Talon’s powerful charger. Talon winked at his friend and reached around to pat the outside of Alana’s thigh.

“This is one venture I share with no man, Darius!”

By noon, bodies stickily entangled atop a soft green carpet of grass, under a shaded canopy of leafy branches, Talon delivered Alana from the burden of her maidenhead.

At that luminous moment in their lives neither of the happily sated pair had cause to be anything but blissfully hopeful about their immediate future. They had been reunited and they loved each other implicitly, body, mind, and soul. Mikah was king. Cromwell was dead. And the abominable sorcerer was no longer free to roam through Eh-Dan wreaking havoc as his malevolent spirit so inclined.

Thus it appeared. But sometimes the gods provide man with an idyllic holiday before unleashing a raging pack of dogs upon his serenity. At least that is the way it looked for these two lovers. For at the precise moment that Talon and Alana transcended themselves in a union of ineffable bliss—a blaze of ecstasy that seemed to carry them to the stars and moon and back—another kind of bliss was being experienced in a secret cove a dozen miles west of Elysium’s harbor.

A small, black galleon, with no visible sailors raising its anchor or hoisting its sails, was slowly plying its way out to sea, operating with the smoothness of a full crew.

The only sign of life was a life that defied comprehension, logic and any human compassion (for how can pure evil inspire compassion?). It was a form of life that appeared to be the outgrowth of a grotesque union between the human, demonic and reptilian worlds. And the bliss that this hybrid creature experienced while standing at the stern of the galleon—a thousand sword cuts in its body slowly and mysteriously closing without scars—was the bliss of merciless revenge he plotted, gazing back at the Kingdom of Eh-Dan he was leaving—but only long enough for Xusia to recharge his powers.