by Bibby, James
When Nekros had met and tricked the witch Shikara all those years ago he had been of the opinion that magic was easy. All you needed was the Power and a Spell-book. With his savage fighting ability, his charisma, his evil intelligence, and now his magical powers, he expected to be ruling the world pretty damn quickly. Yet here he was, five hundred years later, and he still hadn't made it. And all because this magic lark wasn't as straightforward as he'd thought.
True, he had enough basic powers to run rings around the average non-magical warrior. But when it came to the more complex stuff, things were different. It was a bit like cooking. Some people can take a strange recipe, bang about in the kitchen for a bit, and produce a perfect meal. Others can practise the same damn recipe for weeks, yet it still turns out tasting like a plate of orc-dung half the time. You either have the aptitude or you haven't. And when it came to magic, Nekros didn't. Sometimes the tricky stuff worked, to be sure. Sometimes he could rap out a spell and everything would work perfectly. But other times, it just went totally wrong.
Recently, it hadn't mattered too much. The Backers had contacted him, providing organisation and planning, and had brought in Anthrax. Then the wizard had warned him about the threat offered by the black warrior who sported a teddy-bear head at his chest. For some reason this reminded Nekros of something, but he couldn't quite pin it down. The guy had duly turned up out of nowhere and looked like being a real pain in the backside. Firstly Welbug had slipped from Nekros's grasp, and then Anthrax had calmly mentioned that this lone warrior presented a threat to his very life! And every time Nekros thought he'd trapped him, the guy slithered out from his clutches. And now, for some reason, Anthrax had gone incommunicado. Nekros had thought it wouldn't matter, as he had the power to make his own predictions, but now, just when he dearly wanted to see a mere twenty-four hours ahead, his powers were playing him up again.
Scowling, he racked his brains to try and work out what he'd done wrong, and deciding to have one last go at contacting the wizard he grabbed the crystal ball in both hands and muttered another incantation. To his surprise, this time it appeared to work. There was the faint humming noise that meant his crystal was linking itself to another, then it went dark and an opaque mist began to grow inside it, swirling and eddying until it seemed to fill the crystal. The mist vanished, to be replaced by the face of an old woman.
"Malvenis 371," she said.
"What?" said Nekros, a little taken aback.
"I said Malvenis 371. Who is this please?"
"Er... Nekros the Black."
"What?" screeched the woman. "Did you say the necklace is back?"
"No! Nekros! Nekros the Black! Look, get me Anthrax!"
"What hand-bags?"
Nekros stared crossly at the image, puzzled. This couldn't be Anthrax's number after all. Maybe he'd connected to the oracle, instead of linking with the wizard. "Listen," he yelled, "I need a prediction!"
"A free what?" The old lady looked totally baffled. Nekros sighed. It was just his luck to get an oracle that was as deaf as a post.
"A forecast!" he yelled. The old woman looked affronted.
"There's no need to shout," she said. "And anyway, this is a cake-shop, not a betting-office. Good-day!"
The crystal ball went blank again and Nekros covered his eyes with one hand and silently counted to ten. Then he stood up, retrieved the book from where it lay, and thumbed through it until he came to the Spell of Precognition section. Hmm. Perhaps that did say Nacre after all. He wrenched open a wooden chest that sat on the ground by the table, replaced the vial of Nitre, and took out a small bottle of powdered oyster-shell. He muttered the incantation again and sprinkled some of the powder over the burning flame. There was a loud bang and a flare of indigo smoke. When it had cleared, Nekros found that the burning flame had turned into a bunch of freesias. His face darkened in rage, and he was just about to storm off in search of a neck to sever when there was a ringing tone from the crystal ball, and Anthrax's face suddenly appeared inside it.
"Ah, Nekros, my dear chap!" beamed the wizard's image. "Sorry I haven't been in touch. Been up to here with things. You know how it is."
Nekros grunted, mentally counting to ten. Whenever he heard the wizard's smug, middle-class, patronising tones he found that he was seized with an almost irresistible urge to smash a sword straight through the middle of the crystal ball.
"Well, now," continued the image of the wizard. "I have new orders for you from our backers. They want you to send some men down to the River Betw ferry this afternoon. And then, tomorrow, they want you to stop off at a little village in Tak..."
Anthrax sat back as the crystal ball faded and Nekros's ugly face disappeared, and frowned. Then he glanced down at the slim, solid-gold token he was holding in his right hand. On one side of the token were etched the letters DCGP, on the other side was the image of a stylised pair of hand restraints. A slow smile began to spread across his face, and he stood up.
"May the best man win," he murmured, and went off to pack.
The filthy old ferryman poled his battered little boat up to the jetty and flung the mooring-rope over a wooden bollard with unerring aim. Ronan and the Guardian, who had been deep in a conversation about weapons, stood up, and Ronan stirred the sleeping Tarl with his foot. Grumbling, Tarl dragged himself up and followed the other two onto the jetty, where they stood looking round.
In front of them was a group of wooden shacks that were leaning drunkenly against each other seeming in imminent danger of collapsing. A couple of moth-eaten dogs were snarling warnings at each other in the middle of the dusty track, but there was no other sign of life and, apart from the distant call of a Pakas which had got extremely lost and was beginning to sound rather cross, there was no other sound. Ronan and the Guardian began to walk along the track, but Tarl paused. The hairs on the back of his neck were rising again. Something was wrong. He turned and saw that the ferryman had cast off from the jetty, and was heading towards the other bank as quickly as possible, occasionally casting frightened glances back over his shoulder. Something was most definitely wrong.
Tarl turned back and stared at the tumbledown buildings ahead of them. They seemed to be deserted. Everything was still. Too still.
"Ronan!" he called. The warrior heard the nervous edge to his voice, stopped, and looked back inquiringly. At that moment Tarl saw a flash of movement at two of the windows. "Ambush!" he yelled, and dived for cover. Ronan, with his experience of Tarl's in-built threat-ometer, threw himself behind a large rock without looking round, but the Guardian stood rooted to the spot for a couple of seconds. Black-shafted arrows whizzed about him, but luckily for him they had been aimed at Ronan, and by the time the ambushers had altered their aim and loosed a second flight, he had joined Ronan behind the rock.
"What's going on?" he asked in an aggrieved tone as Tarl came wriggling through the dust to join them.
"Oh, it's just that Ronan here is a really popular guy," said Tarl. "Wherever he goes, people want to give him things. Arrows. Knives. Swords. Fetters. Poison. That sort of thing. You soon get used to it."
Ronan peered round the rock and gestured to Tarl. "Give me the bow," he ordered. There was an awkward silence and Ronan ducked back and stared at Tarl, who was giving him one of his wide range of cheesy grins. It was a particularly ingratiating one, which was a sure sign of bad news. Ronan sighed sadly.
"You haven't got it, have you?" he said.
"Well, I thought that once we'd left Samoth, we were safe," gabbled Tarl. "I mean, I'd been carrying all that stuff for miles, I just thought I could lighten my load a bit. I did keep my dagger, though!"
"Oh, great!" snarled Ronan. "Pass it here. I'll chuck it at them, and maybe with a lucky shot I might kill all fifteen of them!"
He sat back and thought for a moment or two, and then drew The Sword from his scabbard. It was pulsing with a faint light, and began to make an eerie keening sound that set their teeth on edge.
"Of course! The Sword
!" cried Tarl. "It's magical! Couldn't it sort of fly through the air like an angel of death and maybe kill all the... erm...." His voice died away into an embarrassed mumble. Ronan and the Guardian were looking at him pityingly.
"Get real, guy," said the Guardian.
Tarl pretended to look for something in his pack. "Klatting sword," he mumbled in embarrassment. "It's no klatting use at all!" The Sword immediately stopped its keening and muttered something. Tarl wasn't sure, but he thought the second word sounded like "off".
"You reckon there's fifteen of them?" asked the Guardian.
"About that, from what I can see," answered Ronan.
"Better make it twenty," said the Guardian, who was staring out over the river. Ronan saw that the ferryboat was now heading towards them, and crouched behind the ferryman were five black-clad warriors, armed to the teeth. He peered round the rock again, urgently scanning their surroundings and looking for an escape route. The occasional arrow was still winging its way past and Ronan knew that trying to run for it would be tantamount to suicide.
"Er, shouldn't we do something?" asked Tarl, who was now beginning to get a little nervous. Ronan peered up the track past the decrepit wooden buildings for a few seconds, and then stared steadily at his friend.
"Yes," he said. "Surrender." And to Tarl's horror, he thrust the Sword into his scabbard, threw it out into the open, then raised his hands, and walked out after it. Tarl and the Guardian stared blankly at each other, and then the Guardian shrugged and stood up. Tarl waited for a few more seconds, just to see if anyone was likely to fill surrendering people full of arrows, and when the Guardian remained upright and unhurt he stood up himself and waited apprehensively.
The door of one of the shacks opened, and a black-clad warrior strolled insolently out. Ronan recognised him as the one who, five years before, had forced the odious Prior Onion from his lair. What was his name? Angnail, that was it. Nekros's second-in-command. Well, well, well. It would be a pleasure to kill him.
Angnail stood smirking at Ronan while his men swarmed out of the shacks and took up their positions, five to one side with bows ready to fire, the others lined up behind him, swords in hand. At the river's edge, the five remaining men clambered out of the ferry. Ronan and his two companions were surrounded.
Angnail swaggered forward and raised his sword until the tip was resting at Ronan's chest. Ronan gazed at him steadily, without flinching. Angnail's eyes fastened on the bear head at Ronan's chest and he smiled scornfully. "Say night-night to teddy," he mocked, and raised the point of his sword until it was resting under Ronan's chin.
Tarl couldn't bear to watch. He was feeling horribly sick. It looked as though these guys took no prisoners! He couldn't believe it, after they had come so far! Was this how they were all fated to die, butchered in the wild by the Tribe of Fallon? Were they to be slaughtered off-hand, with no witnesses save for the frail old peasant-woman who was limping down the track towards them with her moth-eaten donkey? He stared hopelessly at these two pathetic creatures, praying that they would realise the danger they were stumbling into.
The donkey stared back at him and winked.
Tarl's heart gave a lurch. It couldn't be! But there was only one donkey who looked that knackered, and the old peasant-woman might be limping, but when you looked closely she didn't seem all that frail... Puss and Tyson! No wonder Ronan had surrendered with such a confident smile on his face! But he'd mistimed it! Angnail wasn't going to mess about, and they were too far away to help. Ronan only had seconds left...
"Hey, do you know what we've found?" Tarl suddenly found himself babbling. "Up in those mountains behind us? A dragon's hoard!"
There was a sudden silence as every eye turned to look at him. "I'm not joking," he rushed on. "You wouldn't believe how much loot is there! Just take a look at this!" He lowered one hand to the dagger at his belt, and became painfully aware that five arrows were instantly pointing directly at his heart. Slowly, so as not to nudge anyone's trigger finger, he lifted the dagger from its scabbard and held it up. The solid gold handle gleamed dully and the silver tracery and inlaid jewels flashed in the afternoon sun. The men all stared at the weapon with avarice, and for a brief moment you could have heard a pin drop.
Then all at once the silence was shattered by a maniacal and unearthly braying. Tarl thought that Puss must have been practising. Not only did its horrible bray chill the blood, but somehow it had added a sort of demonic quality that froze the muscles, too. For an instant the Tribesmen were all rooted to the spot. Out of the corner of his eye Tarl saw Tyson snatching a bow from within the folds of her tattered disguise, and Puss seemed to turn into a small brown thunderbolt streaking towards the foe. Beside him, Ronan stooped to grab the Sword, jerking it free from the scabbard, and as it came loose it blazed with light, emitting a keening wail that was even more chilling than the donkey's foul racket. Then he was swinging it in a vicious backhand cut at Angnail's throat.
Yammering with fear, Angnail leapt backwards and the sword hissed past a hair's breadth away from his neck. He turned to run, yelling at his bowmen to shoot, but the words froze on his lips. Three of them were lying there with arrows sticking out of their eye-sockets, and as he watched, the old peasant-woman calmly put another arrow straight into the mouth of a fourth, who fell backwards with a horrible choking scream. The fifth had managed to notch an arrow to his bow and was drawing the string back when the dragon-hoard dagger whirled through the air and thumped home in his neck.
The rest of Angnail's men were faring no better. He watched in dismay as the black warrior attacked them, his triumphantly wailing sword dismembering or disembowelling five men in as many seconds. Behind them, a small brown whirlwind with teeth like knives and eyes like windows on hell was hamstringing others with vicious slashes of its powerful little jaws. At the riverside, the five from the boat were being cut to bloody ribbons by the whirling scimitar of the other warrior. Wherever he looked his men were screaming and dying in a welter of spouting blood and flayed flesh.
Three of them broke and ran, and Angnail, who had been Nekros's lieutenant more for his sly cunning than for any valour or fighting skill, ran with then. To his horror the old woman brought them down with carefully placed arrows, but then she threw down her bow and drew a toothpick of a sword. Under the rags he could now see that she was really quite young, a mere slip of a girl. Excellent! She was out of arrows and none of the others had a bow. All he needed to do was hack her down and run to the horses hidden behind the shacks and he'd be away. They'd never catch him!
Grinning mirthlessly, he slashed at the girl, but just as his blade was about to slice home she seemed to shimmer, and somehow his sword was deflected. And then there was a shrieking pain in his guts that felt as though someone had poured red-hot lava straight into his stomach. Staring down, he saw that her sword was plunged deep into his midriff, and he looked up unbelievingly to meet the gaze of a pair of flinty green eyes. His vision faded, and as the day turned suddenly to night he heard a soft whisper.
"No-one threatens my man. Welcome to hell, baby!"
Tyson tugged her sword free and watched dispassionately as Angnail's lifeless body toppled forward. Stooping, she wiped the blade clean on his clothing, and then she turned and found Ronan walking towards her, a silly grin on his face. Her heart did a funny little skip inside her.
"Hiya, Muscles," she said. "Miss me?" She lifted one hand, brushed a couple of dreadlocks back from his face, and gently stroked his cheek with the back of her fingers. Ronan put one arm around her, pulled her to him, and held her against his chest. In his other hand, the bloodstained Sword was pulsing faintly and humming softly to itself in a satisfied tone.
Tarl was watching the two of them with a soppy smile when he realised that something was rubbing against his leg and looking down he saw that the donkey was nuzzling against him. "Hey, Puss!" he said, scratching it behind its ears. "Was I glad to see you! I thought we'd had it!" The donkey closed its eyes blissfully and
revelled in the scratching for a moment. Then it wrinkled its nose delicately, and looked up at Tarl.
"Here," it said, "when are you going to realise that, just because you're on the road, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't take a bath every once in a while. Or is it some new after-shave you've found? Old Socks for Men? Eau de Iferous, perhaps?"
Tarl stared at it. "I'm glad you can talk," he said dryly. "Remind me to thank Anthrax, won't you."
The donkey smiled to itself and rubbed its bloodstained muzzle happily against his legs. Like both Tarl and Ronan, Puss was beginning to appreciate the value of friends.
Three hours later Ronan, Tyson, and Tarl were sitting around a campfire passing a wineskin back and forth, while Puss lay on his side nearby. The Guardian had already left, clutching a slim gold token with DCGP on one side and an image of a pair of hand-restraints on the other. It was a Dragon's Claw Gold Pass, valid for one year, presented to him by a grateful Tyson. The Guardian was jogging along the Welbug road as fast as his legs would carry him, with a song in his heart and a warm but urgent glow in his loins.
Tarl gazed up at the stars and savoured the wine. No lumps at all. Ah, well, never mind.
"What's puzzling me," he said after a while, "is how you knew where we'd be?"
"Anthrax," answered Tyson. "He said you'd be in danger. We followed you to Carn Betw, but we missed you by half an hour, so we took a boat downstream and waited."
"I wouldn't trust that wizard an inch," muttered Tarl.
"Oh, he was as good as gold," said the donkey. "Mind you, Tyson had something he wanted."
There was a brief silence. Ronan had gone very still. Tyson looked at him with a mischievous grin on her lips. "It was only a Gold Pass," she laughed. "When I told him about Takuma, our muddy pond specialist, he couldn't do enough for us!"