cross were bequeathed capabilities of mastery over anything the holder touched. Sustaining a feeling of sovereignty Forkbeard fitted his bow and tracked the rabbit. With exercised ascendancy, his specialized experience accomplished hitting the catch with an arrow as it fled deeper into the forest. Lost in the temporary vigor of his hunt, Saoel ran to where the hare lay. He bent down to touch his mark.
In shock after being wounded, a finalizing blow was usually required to liquidate such quarry as birds or rabbits. Paralyzed, yet still full of vitality, the animal weakened and merged into death at the first contact with his fingers. Astonished, the burly Scandinavian puzzled over the rapidity with which the hare lapsed into death after he handled it. Saoel carried the hare, petulantly, back to where his associates waited by a now burgeoning fire.
"I see that you have captured a morsel to eat," Chin Le extended Saoel in a vexed greeting.
With blundered benevolence, Forkbeard cast his game at Landregal's feet. "Prepare our supper!" he ordered the slave.
Landregal begged his shiv from Utanba, skinned Forkbeard's kill, cleaned out the sinuous intestines, and propped it over the fire with a sharpened wooden stake. In a shroud of darkness and hunger the men huddled by their fire. Night slowly surrounded them; the fatigued travelers listened to hollow sounds of the woods as the forest called to them in its callous whispers. Landregal thought despairingly of Thorvald, Marmalock and Liana; hopefully, they had escaped their pursuers, returning safely to Midgard and the country of Glassel.
A faint spark of expectancy and faith existed in the hunter's restrained indignation as he watched the deceptively languishing embers in Utanba's small cooking fire. His own culture's tumultuous technique, of raiding neighboring coastlines, led him to regard, with an amount of serious contingency, the possibility of Thorvald's return to Aboregale. While winter did not render Aboregale's northern ocean impossible to the Vikings, it was doubtful to Landregal that Thorvald would return with an army from Midgard before the following spring. The motivation to go on plundering rampages was greatest when crops failed to sustain inhabitants of Glassel through the long winter. As he stared at Saoel Forkbeard, Landregal wondered what chance he stood, if any, of escape before the party returned to Trome.
The next morning was cold and bitter. Landregal tightened the rope securing the book on magic inside his warm burnoose while Chin Le tended the men's horses. Readied for another day's journey, the men reloaded treasure onto their horses' backs.
As he mounted, Saoel ordered the Mongol to ride ahead as a point man in front of him. "Keep a sharp eye out for game, as well as any inhabitants who may still be left alive in this area," warned Forkbeard. "We need men, particularly men with horses, to carry our gold."
As was the usual order of march, Utanba and Landregal brought up the rear. The despairing old nag Landregal had been riding seemed stronger after the long night's rest; their animals had been allowed to graze the day before. Grass was still plentiful along the roadway. Passing the small river, over which the burned bridge now stood, Landregal took a final look at where Saoel and Chin Le fought off the menacing ogre some days before. There was no sign of him, though the carcass of the dead horse, lost to that grotesque demon, still lay beneath burned timbers supporting the overpass.
The seeded lowland, which spawned abundant farms, now lay directly in their path---as well as the decimated church over which the qualm of splendent energy hovered when they first came upon the town. The church's ruins stood, still, in rueful suggestion of violence which had preceded them into the region. Landregal watched for return of the bright gleaming presence which indicated an omen to them once before.
Astonishingly, the electrically respondent admonition still gleamed, in agitated warmth, over scattered rubble of the church. The four men hastened their horses to pass it. Suddenly, however, Landregal was struck. And as though by lightening, a pretentious omen, that seemed to hover in the form of energy, sent out streaming rays of force to engulf him; their intensity caught him off guard.
An awakening seemed to envelop the savage hunter, Landregal's, consciousness. The awareness was not painful; it was as though a voice, talking to him from all directions at once, issued the simple validity to his being human and above the adversity of antagonistic violence. As Landregal passed the church's remains, with the other three men, the three disreputable raiders spurned the light's inviting warmth. They ignored the illumination. It was an inviting source of intelligence and salvation. The men who had taken him prisoner refused enlightenment from that presence; they shaded their wicked eyes as all four hastened away from the church's devastation, into twisting foothills of the nearby mountains.
Dispirited, the horses again moiled along rocky crags of the mountains back to Trome. Not nearly as sure footed now, under more of a load, they sweated and stumbled over the narrow alpine paths. The fertile green valley behind them, it was four days travel to Aboregale's border with the southern kingdom of Trome. The men traveled on near empty stomachs until they were out of the mountains, then stopped again, at the sheep herder's barn, to collect anything eatable left in the dwelling of the dead flock tender. Landregal asked permission to bury the poor farmer.
"Do you always leave the men you have killed exposed to the elements like that?" He complained.
"Go ahead and bury him," agreed Saoel. "If you want to wind up just like him then, try to escape."
Landregal watched the intimidating Norseman, now his owner, dismount and looked about for something to dig the herder's grave. "The Turks would call Forkbeard one of their sahibs," intoned Utanba. "In Trome he is the owner of many slaves. As he sees fit, you may be sold once we reach Trome. I too was sold to a sahib, before I was taken prisoner by men ruled by the master of Dormanquest Castle."
As they dug the poor herder's grave, Landregal talked with Utanba about what to expect once they arrived in Trome. "The country is ruled by a man who has only to give his word and ten thousand men would cast their bodies against their own swords for him," Utanba assured him. "Dormanquest is a forbidding castle in the heart of Trome. Those who go into her dungeons never return as free men. Their sentence is for only one term: until their lives have ended. Most of the prisoners in Volki's dungeons die of sickness or malnutrition within a year. Those who live longer than that are slowly worked to death."
"You mean once you are sent to prison, you can never get out?" Landregal asked, astonished that the law of Trome could be so server.
"I mean that there are: the rulers, free men, soldiers like myself, and slaves. That is all. The prisoners are slaves until they die. And you will be a slave unless you elect to fight."
Landregal thought this over as he rolled the musty body of the sheep herder into its shallow trench. "I shall make every effort to volunteer my services to Volki's army," he assured Utanba. "How am I elected to serve in the army?"
Request to be tested in battle," said Utanba. "If nominated, you will be required to fight one or more of the local dissenters from areas around the kingdom. If you are able to defeat them, by killing one of them in a fair fight, you will be allowed to serve in Volki's army.
Again Landregal contemplated this. He had killed men before. It would not be a new experience, and yet he wanted for some reason, now, to follow a new light. The unique experience which had engaged him, passing by the ruins of the church, had changed him; he strove now to bend to the guidance of an enlightenment entirely new to him. He would play along with the raiders from Trome though, to stay alive, only now, after he was effected by the inviting warmth of salvation from the ruined church, he ached for a different life. 'A diminutive, very possibly short existence, yes,' he thought to himself inwardly, 'but a new kind of a life, none the less.'
As the party of greedy men passed over mountains of Aboregale, back to Trome, Lardock Trappler lay still, helplessly injured, on the bottom of the muddy moat surrounding his ornate castle; the persistent theurgist grappled for his life with singular, admonished, determination. Warlock witchery and his own recollection of magic trances used by the other two enchanters, Feydor Volki and Marmalock Arabolis, to awaken the dead, kept him, fatefully, alive. Now in his unpretentious mode of existence, the malfeasant conjurer experienced distressing memories of the last battle with Marmalock, just before the untimely fall of Aboregale to the villainous assemblages of Trome. Even as a repulsive reptile, mystically changed from the decisive bearing he had as a wizard, Lardock Trappler's vitality was strikingly stalwart.
Lardock felt Saoel's delusive attack to be the third fateful strike against him in a catastrophic succession of misfortunes; his one incentive for living was a single-mind for revenge upon those tormentors who had so mercilessly ravaged the country and his castle. The determined spirit of the thwarted wizard was persistent; Lardock knew Marmalock's power to be, also, the source of redemption from his present form of reincarnation. Beneath a blurry exterior of pain and wretchedness the disposed magician clung to his demoted state of existence. As the days passed slowly by Lardock pulled himself to the surface of the moat and surveyed the damage to his stronghold. The lowered drawbridge and toppled wall to the blockhouse reminded him that what he guarded and valued, above all the treasure in his lair, had been stolen: the jar containing Hel's necklace and his indispensable book on magic. He winced over the mental pain of the contents of that jar's loss, and affliction of Forkbeard's arrows, with an equal disparity.
Surveying further losses to the contents of his lair, Lardock concluded that he would have to make the best of winter above ground someplace inside the castle. Fire would be necessary for warmth, along with food to sustain his hunger. Combing the inside of his estate, fuel for warmth was no problem. Enough food to last out a long cold winter, however, was going to be a problem. Agony over the latest affliction, his attack by the indignant marauders, set him conclusively against any and all inhabitants from the southern kingdom of Trome, a government he had once considered forming an alliance with.
Lardock Trappler's determination and will for survival were conclusive, though day by day, everlasting pain spread over his body in recurring bursts of stabbing discomfort. An anguishing torment from his latest affliction, the dull ache of the new wounds, became just another part of the diminutive existence he was forced, temporarily, to live with.
Lardock huddled by a small fire and despairingly watched the coming of winter. With little to eat but tree bark, moss and plant roots, the cold weather was less than heartening. Still, the elusive craving for existence, no matter how meager it be, propelled the pitiful ghoul in his unfailing lust for life.
Matching his power with that of Marmalock Arabolis had been Lardock's first blunder. Stumbling onto Saoel Forkbeard and his raiders was his second error. Finally, allowing himself to be recklessly ambushed beneath the drawbridge was his third, hopefully last, mistake. As a bitter wind outside the stronghold carried with it the first disappearing flecks of winter snow, Lardock Lagarias Trappler eyed a deserted domain that surrounded extensive grounds, once protected entrances, outside the extensive manor. No signs of life echoed in the joyless air that circled his prodigious castle. As winter descended on him Lardock shuddered and spiritlessly gathered fire wood to burn, inside the mansion's immense chateau. With nothing to guard of great mystical value, Lardock abandoned the