Dreams of Steel

Chapter Four

It was a bizarre little parade. At its head was a black thing that could not decide if it was a tree stump or someone weirdly built carrying a box under one arm. Behind that a man floated a yard off the ground, feet foremost, inelegantly sprawled. An arrow had pierced his chest. It still protruded from his back. He was alive, but barely.

Behind the floating man was another with a lance through him. He drifted a dozen feet up, alive and in pain, sometimes writhing like an animal with a broken spine. Two riderless horses followed him, both black stallions bigger than any war charger.

Crows by the hundred circled above, coming and going like scouts.

The parade climbed the hills east of Stormgard, moving in twilight. Once it paused, remained motionless twenty minutes while a scatter of Taglian fugitives passed. They saw nothing. There was magic at work there.

The column continued moving by night. The crows continued flying, formed a rearguard, watched for something. Several times they cawed at shifting shadows, but settled down quickly. False alarms?

The party halted ten miles from the beleaguered city. The thing leading spent hours collecting brush and deadwood, piled it in a deep crack in a granitic hillside. Then it seized the floating lance, dragged its victim off, stripped him down.

A bitter, remote, whispering voice exclaimed, "This isn't one of the Taken!" when the man's mask came off.

The crows became raucous. Discussing? Arguing? The leader asked, "Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from?"

The injured man did not respond. Maybe he was beyond communication. Maybe he did not speak that language. Maybe he was stubborn.

Torture produced no answers.

The inquisitor tossed the man into the woodpile, waved a hand. The pile burst into flame. The stump thing used the lance to keep its victim from escaping. The burning man had a bottomless well of energy.

There was sorcery at work here.

The burning man was the Shadowmaster Moonshadow. His army had triumphed outside Stormgard but his own fortune had been inglorious.

The party did not move on till the Shadowmaster was consumed, the fire burned to ashes and the ashes cooled. The stump thing gathered the ashes. As it travelled it disposed of those pinch by pinch.

The man with the arrow in him bobbed in the stump thing's wake. The stallions brought up the rear.

The crows maintained their patrols. Once a large catlike thing came too near and they went into paroxysms. The stump did something mystical. The black leopard wandered away, absent of mind.