The Sapphire Rose

Talen slipped up behind Sparhawk and rapped on his armour.

‘Don’t do that, Talen.’

‘It got your attention, didn’t it? I’ve got an idea. Are you going to argue with me about it?’

‘I don’t think so. What was it you wanted to argue about?’

‘I have certain talents that are rather unique in this group, you know.’

‘I doubt that you’ll find very many purses to slit open, Talen. I don’t see all that many people about.’

‘Ha,’ Talen said flatly. ‘Ha. Ha. Ha. Now that you’re past that, are you ready to listen?’

‘I’m sorry. Go ahead.’

‘None of the rest of you could really sneak through a graveyard without waking up half the occupants, right?’

‘I wouldn’t go quite that far.’

‘I would. I’ll go on ahead – not too far, but just far enough. I’ll be able to come back and tell you about anybody coming – or hiding in ambush.’

Sparhawk didn’t wait this time. He made a grab for the boy, but Talen slipped out of his reach quite easily. ‘Don’t do that, Sparhawk. You just make yourself look foolish.’ He ran off a few feet, then stopped and slid his hand down into one boot. From its place of concealment he drew a long needle-pointed dirk. Then he vanished up the dark, narrow street.

Sparhawk swore.

‘What’s the matter?’ Kurik asked from not far behind him.

‘Talen just ran off.’

‘He did what?’

‘He says he’s going to scout on ahead. I tried to stop him, but I couldn’t catch him.’

From somewhere off in the maze of twisting streets there came a deep, mindless kind of howling.

‘What’s that?’ Bevier asked, taking a tighter grip on his long-handled lochaber axe.

‘The wind maybe?’ Tynian replied without much conviction.

‘The wind isn’t blowing.’

‘I know, but I think I prefer to believe that’s what’s causing the noise anyway. I don’t like the alternatives.’

They moved on, staying close to the sides of the houses and freezing involuntarily in their tracks with each flash of lightning and crack of thunder.

Talen came back, running on silent feet. ‘There’s a patrol coming,’ he said, staying just back out of reach. ‘Would you believe they’re carrying torches? They’re not trying to find anybody; they’re trying to make sure they don’t.’

‘How many?’ Ulath asked.

‘A dozen or so.’

‘Hardly enough to worry about then.’

‘Why not just cut over to the next street through this alley? Then you won’t even have to look at them, much less worry.’ The boy darted into an alleyway and disappeared again.

‘The next time we choose a leader, I think I’ll vote for him,’ Ulath murmured.

They moved on through the narrow, twisting streets. With Talen probing ahead of them, they were easily able to avoid the sporadic Zemoch patrols. As they worked their way nearer to the centre of the city, however, they reached a quarter where the houses were more imposing and the streets were wider. The next time Talen came back, a momentary flash of ghostly lightning revealed a disgusted expression on his face. ‘There’s another patrol just ahead,’ he reported. ‘The only trouble is that they’re not patrolling. It looks as if they broke into a wine shop. They’re sitting in the middle of the street drinking.’

Ulath shrugged. ‘We’ll just slip around them through the alleys again.’

‘We can’t,’ Talen said. ‘There aren’t any alleys leading off this street. I haven’t found any way to get around them, and we have to use this street. As nearly as I can tell, it’s the only one in the district that leads to the palace. This town doesn’t make any sense at all. None of the streets go where they’re supposed to.’

‘How many of these revellers do we have to contend with?’ Bevier asked him.

‘Five or six.’

‘And they have torches?’

Talen nodded. ‘They’re just around this next turn in the street.’

‘With the torches flaring right in their eyes, they won’t be able to see in the dark very well.’ Bevier flexed his arm, swinging his axe suggestively.

‘What do you think?’ Kalten asked Sparhawk.

‘We might as well,’ Sparhawk said. ‘It doesn’t sound as if they’ll volunteer to get out of our way.’

It was more in the nature of simple murder than a fight. The carouse of the Zemoch patrol had advanced to the point where they were aggressively inattentive. The Church Knights simply walked up to them and cut them down. One of them cried out briefly, but his surprised shout was lost in a tearing crash of thunder.

Without a word the knights dragged the inert bodies to nearby doorways and concealed them. Then they gathered protectively around Sephrenia and continued along that wide, lightning-illuminated street towards the sea of smoky torches that appeared to be encircling Otha’s palace.

Once again they heard that howling sound, a sound devoid of any semblance of humanity. Talen returned, making no effort to evade them this time. ‘The palace isn’t far ahead,’ he said, speaking quietly despite the now almost continuous thunder. ‘There are guards out front. They’re wearing armour of some kind. It’s got all kinds of steel points sticking out of it. They look like hedgehogs.’

‘How many?’ Kalten asked.

‘More than I had time to count. Do you hear that wailing noise?’

‘I’ve been trying not to.’

‘I think you’d better get used to it. The guards are the ones making it.’

Otha’s palace was larger than the Basilica in Chyrellos, but it had no architectural grace. Otha had begun his life as a goatherd, and the principle which seemed to guide his sense of taste could best be summed up in the single word, ‘large’. So far as Otha was concerned, bigger was better. His palace had been constructed of fractured, rusty-black basalt rock. Because of its flat sides, basalt is easy for masons to work, but it offers little in the way of beauty. It lends itself to massive construction and not much else.

The palace reared like a mountain in the centre of Zemoch. There were towers, of course. Palaces always have towers, but the rough black spires clawing at the air above the main building had no grace, no balance and in most cases no evident purpose. Many of them had been started centuries before and then never finished. They jutted into the air, half-completed and surrounded by the rotting remains of crude scaffolding. The palace did not exude so much a sense of evil as it did of madness, of a kind of frenzied but purposeless effort.