by Pierre Pevel
‘Take him,’ said one of the men.
Lorn wanted to move but found himself incapable of doing so.
He realised that some kind of poison had paralysed him. The wounds he’d received would be fatal, but not until all of his blood had drained into his own entrails.
The assassins carried him down the stairs and deposited him in the large fencing room which occupied almost the entire first floor of the keep.
‘Set him up,’ said the one who seemed to be the leader.
Two assassins sat Lorn on the floor, with his back against a wooden bench, and spread his arms wide so that his hands rested flat upon the piece of furniture.
The one in command crouched before Lorn. He was tall, very slender and graceful. And his eyes were a grey so pale they seemed white.
Lorn knew he would never forget those eyes.
‘I’ve been asked to make you suffer,’ the man said, as the other assassins emptied goatskin pouches of lamp oil over the walls and the floor.
Lorn could not yell but an atrocious pain shot through him when they nailed his left hand to the bench.
Then his right hand endured the same fate.
‘Suffer a lot,’ added the assassin’s leader in a gentle, compassionate voice.
His eyes filling with tears of anger, suffering and impotence, Lorn saw one of the killers bringing Daril into the room.
‘My lord!’ the frightened boy implored. ‘Help me!’
They forced him to kneel and slowly slit his throat before the knight’s eyes.
Lorn was barely able to moan, barely able to lift his shoulders when all he wanted was to scream, rise up, tear himself from the bench and throw himself on the assassins to kill them with his tortured hands.
Daril fell, choking, his throat opened and his hands bound behind his back, his eyes frozen in an expression of incredulous terror. He thrashed in his own blood, until the last bit of life he desperately clung to finally left him.
‘That’s fine,’ said the assassin’s leader.
Alone with Lorn, he leaned over him, lifted the bottom of the leather mask and placed a kiss upon the knight’s still lips. After which he set fire to the floorboards which burst into sudden flames, and walked away.
‘Farewell,’ he said.
Lorn vowed to return from hell to seek his revenge.
Also by Pierre Pevel from Gollancz:
The Cardinal’s Blades
The Alchemist in the Shadows
The Dragon Arcana
A Gollancz eBook
Original text copyright © Pierre Pevel/Editions Bragelonne 2014
English translation copyright © Tom Clegg/Editions Bragelonne 2014
All rights reserved.
The right of Pierre Pevel to be identified as the author of this work and of Tom Clegg to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2014 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10799 1
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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