Read Online Sunset Mantle by Alter S. Reiss - Free Book Online

watching the shadows.
    There were three of them, slinking like jackals in the shadows of the walls and trees. They had come into his orchard; they had made themselves free within his walls. He could feel his blood rising, the shaking of the hands, the tightening of the vision.
    Three was too many, if they were any good at all. If he charged in, axe swinging, he’d be cut down. He let his shoulders slope, leaned against the spear as though he needed it to support his weight. It was not much of a performance, but it was what they’d hoped to see; perhaps it would be enough.
    They came in, closer, their boots crunching down the summer-dry earth beneath the trees, the faint clink of mail audible over the distant hooting of an owl and the buzzes of the night insects.
    Cete had not let himself feel rage at Radan Termith, and what the Reach general had done. It was too large a thing; there were too many ways his wrath would serve his enemy. But now, in Marelle’s orchard, fury was rising up from where his toes gripped the earth, up the back of his spine. Three to slay one injured man, one blind woman? Three in armor? His anger filled him so full there was nothing else beside anger. The spear rose up in his hand, and he threw, no craft, no plan, his hand moving without any act of thought or will. He threw so hard that the spear seemed to flicker out from his hand into one of those shadows, catching the man in the shoulder and driving him back into an olive tree.
    His axe was in his hand, though he could not recall pulling it from his belt, and he was in among the other two, though he could not remember crossing that ground. There was the ring of steel against steel, sparks from axe and blade. They did not expect anything like this. Cete had not expected anything like this. It was not the measured practice of morning or evening routine; it was not even the clash of arms on a battlefield. It was the clawing of a wild beast, injured in its lair.
    He came in, and the sword of one of the men cut in along his arm. The pain was . . . it was become pleasure; he howled in the joy of it, struck out with his axe, cutting through armor and chest, laughed to see dark blood in the moonlight.
    The other man stepped back when he should have stepped in, tried to line up a proper attack. Cete came in too fast for that, his axe swinging around, hungry. The man was pale in the moonlight; he held up his hand to stop the blow, rather than his axe or a knife. Cete’s blade sheared through his fingers and buried itself in his shoulder. The man staggered back, screaming. Another blow with the axe, and he was dead as well.
    Cete howled, a long, ululating cry more like a tribal yell than anything taught in the cities. It was not enough; three men were not enough. He had his axe in his hand and the pain in his arm, and there was a man in the city who was his enemy. He could go and slay, and glory in the slaying forever.
    He breathed, once, twice, fought back the nausea he had felt at Marelle’s bedside, that he had felt when Mase had been beating him to death. There was a constellation of pain from his back, there was a cut along the length of his arm, and there were two dead men lying at Cete’s feet. This had been the madding, the real thing.
    The hills still echoed with Cete’s howl. The echoes sounded no different than what had burst from Eber Hainst, when he could no longer bear the leadership of the Hainst of the Hainst. It was well that he had not allowed the captain of the Antach’s guard to keep watch over his house. If there had been anyone else standing in the orchard with him, friend or foe, that man would only have lived if he had killed Cete.
    Cete walked over to the man whom he had hit with the spear. He was still standing, impaled—the spear had gone through the mail shirt, and the shoulder, and through the mail again, the head buried deep into the tree. The man shivered as he stood there, like a man struck with fever, or one caught in a