remainder of his treasure to the elements of winter and tried to make the best of living inside his plundered estate.
CHAPTER 4
In Trome, beneath a somber sky which was joyless and overcast, Feydor Volki watched his army. He contemplated diverse fates of various subservient people over which he ruled. The conclusions he reached were a series of justifications, each for a depraved, often vicious, existence he led as the ruler of a harsh dictatorship. Butchery, genocide and murder had been the keys to his rise to power, an exacting supremacy he was wholly disinclined to renounce for more inconsequential obsessions.
Volki talked with grave sincerity to a subordinate governor, Gulari, about the control of Trome and its citizens. "You know, Governor Gulari," Volki stipulated to his somewhat cautious but brilliantly contriving, local authority, "that passive men are the easiest of all my subjects to conquer. The holy ones, in particular, have only one course of action when confronted with violence; their alternative to militancy is simply to allow men who believe in brutality to over run them, thinking when the violence is over, like a passing storm, they will be allowed to continue their faith. If they lift a hand, in anger, to stop you, it is viewed to them as sin. And so they wait and pray. But what little good it does when a man is standing over them with a sword in his hand who intends to use it, eh?
"Malicious men, like ourselves, could not exist without apathetic subordinates, like the ones who preach about ideals of brotherhood and kindness; what would the concepts mean without cruelty and betrayal anyway; one term exists only relative to the other. There would be no good men if wicked ones did not exist along side them. This heaven, wherein all the world's innocent are claimed, by the Christians, to abide, can be viewed to me only as an unproven niche in the universe which proceeds people of soaring purity after their extinction. Nay, I say that it is for fools to believe in that afterlife. Live your life to the fullest, Gulari, for it is in that adventure that experience lies. Breathe every breath as if it is your last and have no trust in tomorrow. Believe only in what is real my friend, those things which can be seen, felt and touched."
"I completely agree," Gulari confided in the master of Trome. "How true it is that the concepts of love and hate take on their own distinctions, one pertinent only to the other. And yet they seem continuous, carried on through generations by men like ourselves, taught to our sons and daughters since, both, time and our world began. Pleasure and pain---can you experience cheer without unhappiness? No, and yet to living things the concepts are without an end. Their end is the inescapable conclusion of life. The culmination of our existence, I agree with you, should be viewed as totally terminating; after death, there is no awareness of pain or pleasure. Belief in a hereafter is for gullible and weak individuals who place little or no value on the wonder and beauty of life itself. Life itself is our highest from of awareness. The men who call themselves Christians, who adhere to beliefs in heaven, are ineffective weaklings in my mind. They exist only to be taken advantage of. Their ideology is too timid. It waits only to be dominated by a harsher set of rules: an existence imposed on them by men who do not care to be persevering or restrained."
"We will rule the world together," Volki assured Gulari. "And those timid weaklings will come to know us as their masters. They will hate us too, you see, for their own determined goodness stands only as light in the shadows of our unyielding strength. You my friend must report to me the coordinators of those faithful individuals. Bring me their names. Make me a list so that I can round them up and corral them in my prison. I wish an end to all who dispute me. My will must be conclusive."
As Feydor Volki spoke with Governor Gulari about his determination to imprison the holy men, four wearisome travelers, haggard by their long journey from the northern kingdom, entered an outer courtyard to Dormanquest Castle. Saoel Forkbeard, still wearing protective armor, heisted contents of his horse's packs across his shoulders. He talked with a sturdy sentry who stood watch at a main entrance to the castle.
"Tell Lord Volki that Saoel Forkbeard wishes an audience with him," he instructed the guard. As the other three men unpacked, Utanba helped Landregal unload his old nag. Their slave had a strange and distinguishably different look in his eye. His appearance was one of a man apart, slightly, from the cruel reality of being a prisoner and above really caring.
"Tell me," Landregal asked Utanba lackadaisically. "When will I be offered an opportunity to fight for the ruler of Trome?"
Utanba looked around with a discerning stare then back at Landregal. "It is not likely you will be given a golden opportunity like that directly," he advised Landregal. "You must make the best of your predicament; be positive in your determination or else you will remain a slave. You must create your own opportunity I am afraid; cause the moment to happen. It will not be, simply, offered to you. It is not all that easy to create such a circumstance; you, my friend, must make the situation happen."
Saoel Forkbeard became more insistent with the men guarding the entrance to a great hall inside the building. As he stood before the guards, Saoel clutched the ansate cross, wishing its power to give him his way. "Give him my message, he will know who am," Forkbeard insisted. "Tell Volki that I have urgent news from Aboregale and that we bear pretentious wealth as proof of our intelligence regarding the northern kingdom."
The guard weakened under the power of Hel's necklace and was barely able to stand. He fell to his knees, as though mortally stricken, before hailing the commander of his relief. Arriving at the scene, the commander assessed the credibility of Forkbeard, the man who was making the appeal, then attended to his impaired sentinel. A man in charge of the guards relayed Saoel's request.
Feydor Volki greeted Saoel, who had once been a captain in his army, with an anxious, suspicious, anticipation. As Saoel Forkbeard entered his chamber, at a distance, Volki could feel the ascendant presence of Hel's key to the Vikings' world of the dead. In vicinity with the man who requested conference, Volki encountered an unspoken awareness of the handled cross's presence.
Gulari watched the tautness and strain in Volki's face as Saoel approached him; he sensed somewhere in the nefarious lord's aggressive temperament there existed a weakness. Feydor broadened the powerful fingers, in his forcefully reflexive hands, and motioned to two soldiers who stood guard inside his chamber. "Escort the governor out of the room," he commanded.
The guards stood by both sides of Governor Gulari, obligating him to accompany them out the door. They then returned to stand watch inside the chamber. "Now then," Volki continued, in a threateningly vindictive temperament. "Pray tell, what information have you from Aboregale on this dismal day?"
Forkbeard lay the heavy bags of gold coins on the floor of the throne room. The coins made a deceptively revealing rattle as they landed at his feet. He opened one of the sacks to reveal its contents to Feydor Volki. "A token of the wealth we discovered in one of the southern provinces of Aboregale," Saoel dicated bravely. "I brought four horses back with the same amount of treasure. It is but a small memento of what is left there in an underground storeroom. Let me have just a hundred men with horses and I will fetch the rest of it."
You have served me well," congratulated Feydor Volki as he stared, with hearty greed, at the plentiful bags of treasure. "My men looked long and hard for that particular hoard of wealth. Unconcealed, my telepathy tells me that you also bear a talisman. Relinquish it to me, now, that I may look at it!"
Saoel was surprised that Volki knew, with no hint of disclosure on his own behalf, about the handled cross. He drew it from the dirty wool shirts beneath his armor and handed it, reluctantly, to Feydor Volki.
"Where did you find this?" Volki asked. Predominantly, he paid it a great deal more attention than the treasure. With more emphasis on the engraved silver cross than on the sacks of gold, Saoel speculated to himself on the necklace's value to the ruler of Trome.
"It was in a jar, guarded by a ghoulish kind of reptile," Forkbeard admitted. We came across him as we entered the castle, above which the treasure was buried."
Volki held the handled cross tightly in his hand, rolled his eyes back, and felt the intaglio design's fundamental surge of darkness begin to creep through his own ominous will. Along with his knowledge of magic, acquainted with the key's terrible power, he was able to direct, now, the forces of death it controlled. Saoel shuddered at the look of impenetrability imbibed by Feydor Volki upon taking possession of Hel's necklace.
"The treasure you have returned with to Trome is yours to do with as you wish Captain," Volki instructed. "Take a rest. When your feel adequately prepared to lead an expedition, select two companies of my best men to accompany you and return the rest of Aborgale's wealth to my castle."
Saoel thanked Lord Volki for his generosity, picked up the sacks of gold, and returned to the courtyard. Not far from Dormanquest Castle was his own small household and farm. Chin Le and Utanba elected to remain with the other soldiers in Volki's stronghold. "Volki says we may keep the gold," Saoel told his two compatriots.
Elated over the riches, the two men shouted with joy. "I will own my own house and have a dozen beautiful women to live with," yelled Utanba, "slaves to do my every biding."
"Well, our gold is good only because we are men who have lived long enough to enjoy it," speculated Chin Le. "I will see my share of the spoils are secured in one of Dormanquest's vaults. And then tonight, we will celebrate."
Landregal eyed the three men deceptively. He paid close attention to Forkbeard. "The hunter goes with me," Saoel told his partners, "another slave to work my land. If he does not fit in well with my other workers, a stint in prison will straighten him out I am sure."
At the small town of Obrian, not far from Dormanquest Castle, Landregal became put to work on a farm belonging to Saoel Forkbeard. Days, as winter approached, found multitudes of work to become completed. The slaves had not become kept well. They became overworked and quarrelsome. So pitiless were their overseers, that they had not become allowed to build fires to stay warm or even to prepare their own food. In winter months' workers had become frostbitten and lived on stale bread. At first glance, the circumstance into which Landregal had become forced seemed dismal and hopeless. The first night he spent in Obrian, Landregal discussed escape with a slave who had been on Forkbeard's property since the beginning of Trome's war with Aboregale. The man, nicknamed 'Sawtooth,' because of his many missing teeth, told Landregal about men who had attempted run away.
"We are completely landlocked here," explained Sawtooth to Landregal. "There are rivers in Trome, but every where you go there are Volki's soldiers. If you run away, and they catch you, you are fair prey. They can run you through with their swords and nothing would become said nor would compensation be paid to your owner. Many times owners themselves lay a bounty on the head of escaped slaves. If you get returned to them, you will become punished. If you refuse to work for them, they can put you in prison; nobody wishes the prisons; working slaves live longer and better than do prisoners."
"Tell me," asked Landregal. "What are the prospects of a slave becoming a member of Volki's army?"
Sawtooth looked at Landregal very mistrustfully. Cynically, he pointed out to him that almost all the slaves in Obrian were once inhabitants of Aboregale and that they held only hatred toward anyone who would form alliances with the soldiers of Trome or Feydor Volki. "You are not from Aboregale are you," guessed the spent looking thrall? "I judge from your stature that you were once a warrior of some kind."
"You are right," admitted Landregal. "I came to Aboregale from Glassel, contracted by your emperor, Nicholas Torymorton, to defend his counsel."