Into a Dark Realm. Raymond E. Feist

brethren on their knees, their eyes lowered, they followed suit.

      Bek’s sword lowered a little. ‘What?’

      ‘What does our master bid us?’ asked the robed man again.

      Bek tried to puzzle out what to say next, from what he had overheard Nakor, Pug and the others say at Sorcerer’s Isle. At last he said: ‘Varen’s gone. He’s fled to another world.’

      ‘Not Varen,’ said the robed man. ‘He was highest among our master’s servants.’ The man slowly reached out and touched Bek on the chest. ‘I can feel our master, there, inside you. He lives within you; he speaks through you.’ He raised his eyes to Bek’s again, and asked once more, ‘What does our master bid us?’

      Bek had been ready for combat, and this was beyond his ability to comprehend. Slowly, he looked around the room, rising frustration in his voice as he said, ‘I don’t know …’ Then suddenly, he raised his sword and brought it down, shouting, ‘I don’t know!’

      Minutes later Magnus rushed into the room with a company of Erik’s soldiers at his back, and more Kingdom soldiers entered through the same door as Bek. All of them stopped at the scene before them. Twenty-six corpses littered the floor, but there was no sign of a struggle. Twenty-six headless bodies lay in a wash of blood. Heads still rolled on the crimson stones and blood-soaked cloaks.

      The fire crackled. Bek stood beside it, covered in blood. His arms were crimson to the elbows and gore was smeared across his face. He stood like a fiend possessed by madness. Magnus could see it in his eyes. He was trembling so much he looked like a man about to go into convulsions.

      Finally, Ralan Bek threw back his head and gave out a howl which rang off the stones high above. It was a primal burst of rage and frustration, and when even the echoes had passed away, he looked around the room, then directly at Magnus. Like a petulant child he pointed to the corpses, and said, ‘This wasn’t fun!’

      He wiped his sword on the tunic of a nearby corpse, and sheathed it. Then he picked up a bucket of water which had been set near the fireplace to heat and lifted it, letting it wash down over his head, without even bothering to remove his hat, and then picked up a relatively clean cloak to use as a towel. Cleaning himself off as best he could, Bek said in a more controlled tone, ‘It’s not fun if they don’t fight back, Magnus.’ He looked around the room and then said, ‘I’m hungry. Anyone got anything to eat?’

       • CHAPTER FIVE •

       Preparation

      MIRANDA SHOUTED.

      ‘Are you mad?’ she cried far louder than was necessary in the small room.

      Magnus watched his mother with guarded amusement as she strode away from her husband’s desk for as far as she could in the small study, then turned with a dramatic frown. She often would vent loudly over matters that eventually would end up exactly as his father wished them to be. But Pug had over the years come to understand that his wife’s often volatile nature required a physical expression of her frustrations.

      ‘Are you mad?’ Miranda shrieked for the second time.

      ‘No more than you were to spend almost a half-year shadowing the Emerald Queen’s army down in Novindus,’ said Pug, calmly, as he rose from behind his desk.

      ‘That was different!’ shouted Miranda, still not through venting. ‘There was no Pantathian snake priest who could find me, let alone challenge me, and I’m the one who can transport herself without a Tsurani sphere, remember?’

      Magnus saw his father begin a comment – probably on how Nakor, Pug, and Magnus were all becoming adept at the skill – but think better of it and say nothing as Miranda continued.

      ‘You’re talking about going to an alien world! Not only an alien world, but one in a different plane of reality! Who knows what powers you may have there, if any?’ She pointed her finger at Pug. ‘You don’t even know how to get there in the first place, and don’t tell me you’re going to use the Talnoy on Kelewan to anchor a rift there. I know enough about rifts to know that you could find yourself swimming at the bottom of some poison sea, or standing in the middle of a battlefield or any other number of deadly places! You’d be going in blind!’

      ‘I won’t be going in blind,’ said Pug, holding up his hands in supplication. ‘Please, we must learn more about the Dasati.’

      ‘Why?’ demanded Miranda.

      ‘Because I’ve been to see the Oracle.’ He didn’t need to tell either his wife or son which oracle.

      Miranda’s anger leeched away as curiosity took over. ‘What did she say?’

      ‘They’re coming. There are too many uncertainties for her to say more, now – I will return to her later as events draw closer. But for now we must learn more of these people.’

      ‘But the Talnoy down in Novindus are warded, as motionless and without magical presence as they were for the countless years they lay hidden,’ countered Mirada. ‘If they’re warded, how could the Dasati find us?’

      Pug could only shake his head. ‘I don’t know. The Oracle is rarely wrong when she speaks of certainties.’

      Magnus sensed an argument coming and deftly changed the subject. ‘And again I ask, as I have many times before,’ he said, like a patient schoolmaster, ‘who put them there?’

      Pug knew the question was rhetorical, since they had several theories and no facts, but he thanked his son silently for diverting his wife’s ire. Their first thought had been that one of the Valheru, a Dragon Lord of fabled antiquity, had brought the Talnoy back, but there was no proof of that. Tomas, Pug’s boyhood friend, was imbued with the memories of one of the ancient Dragon Host, and had no recollection of any of his brethren returning from their ill-fated raid on the Dasati homeworld with a single Talnoy as a trophy. They had been too busy trying to keep those fiendish creations from destroying them; several dragon-riders had fallen during the incursion into the Dasati realm. In the end, there was only one inescapable conclusion.

      ‘Macros.’

      Miranda nodded in agreement. Her father, Macros the Black, had been an agent of the lost God of Magic. ‘Every time we turn around we bump into one of Father’s schemes.’ She crossed her arms, getting a far-away look as she seemed to remember something. ‘I remember … once …’ She looked down at the cavern floor, her face revealing flickering emotions as if what she recalled was painful. ‘I spent so many years being angry with him for abandoning me …’

      Pug nodded sympathetically. He had been with his wife when she had last been reunited with her father and remembered her poorly-hidden anger at seeing him after years of estrangement. He also remembered her grief when he had been swallowed up in the rift that closed around him as he held the Demon Lord Maarg, giving his life in a desperate act that saved this world.

      Pushing aside her memories, Miranda said, ‘But we do end up with another of his bloody messes, don’t we?’ Her tone held a hint of affectionate humour, as well as some bitterness.

      Before his mother could get back into another black mood because of his grandfather, Magnus spoke. ‘We know that Grandfather had a hand in warding off the Dasati rifts from the one Talnoy we found, and his wards are still in place around the others.’

      Both parents regarded their eldest son and Miranda said, ‘This we all know, Magnus. What’s your point?’

      ‘Grandfather never did anything without a reason, and everything you have both told me about him leads me to conclude that he knew, somehow, that the day would come when one or both of you would discover the Talnoy, and that leads me to believe he also knew there would be a confrontation with the Dasati.’

      Pug