Read Online The Last Bastion by Nathan Hawke - Free Book Online Page B

themselves as much as everyone else and just kept their heads a little better and got lucky. He snorted. ‘You remember the Foxbeard said he saw horses? And then he and Valaric went on their own to look, and Valaric came back and it was just him? How we all thought he’d done for the forkbeard?’ He chuckled again and looked at Reddic. ‘The Wolf only told us the truth later, and even then only because there were some Vathen who just wouldn’t stop following us until Valaric skinned a few of them to find out why. That’s when it came out. Ask Sarvic if you like – he was there too. Don’t ask Valaric though. Valaric doesn’t talk about it. He and the Foxbeard got a history . . .’
    He froze. A noise. Outside. The look on Reddic’s face said he’d heard it too. Then it came again. A heavy broken shuffle, as though someone was dragging a load through the snow in long slow pulls with a good rest between each one. Reddic jumped up, startled, eyes darting from one door to the other and one hand already on his axe. ‘Forkbeards?’
    Torvic shook his head. ‘Not out here.’
    Stannic waved at them both to sit down. ‘Wolf maybe.If it is then it’s got something. Leave it be. Dead of night in that cold?’
    He snorted but now Torvic got up too. ‘Didn’t sound like an animal to me.’ He crept to the door and opened it. Cold air froze his face but at least the winds weren’t the gales they’d been a week ago. The moon was full and high, its light bright on the snow except where long deep shadows spilled from the wood pile and the low barns. A soldier in mail and a helm stood not more than a dozen yards in front of him. Hard to make out much in the moonlight but he had a naked sword hanging loose and long from his hand and he was too big to be a Vathan. Torvic snatched his shield from beside the door and whipped out his axe. ‘Reddic! Stannic!’ The soldier was a forkbeard. Had to be, although only Modris knew what a forkbeard was doing all the way out here. He couldn’t see the forkbeard’s eyes but he felt them staring at him, and when the forkbeard moved, he lurched a stride closer, dragging one leg as though crippled. Crippled was good. Torvic tried to tell himself that one crippled forkbeard was more a gift than something to fear but he couldn’t quite make himself believe it. One forkbeard out here all on his own? One?
    Then again, the Vathen had taken a forkbeard from Hrodicslet. It made him pause a moment. He took a step closer and peered. ‘Foxbeard?’
    The forkbeard took another step and this time it wasn’t so slow. His sword came up fast and lunged and Torvic barely got his shield in the way. The sword was odd. It wasn’t a forkbeard sword. Too long, Torvic thought as he brought his axe down hard on the man’s helm, not hard enough to split the iron but hard enough that the forkbeard would see stars long enough for a killing blow. But the forkbeard grabbed at his shield as though he hadn’t felt anything, and Torvic stepped back, and that was when the moon caught the forkbeard’s face and he saw it wasn’t a man at all. Thesight froze him stiff, and in that moment the shadewalker drove its long Aulian sword through Torvic’s guts and then caught him as he crumpled. While one hand still held the sword, the other grabbed Torvic by the throat and pulled him close. The shadewalker stiffened; and as it squeezed Torvic’s life out of him, its crippled leg twisted and straightened and its eyes gazed hard at the door.
    And that was how Reddic found him, Torvic gasping and gurgling while his blood ran out of him over his belly and down his legs and dripped off his dangling feet to pool blackly in the snow, and the shadewalker on the other side of him, crushing his throat. For an instant Reddic was paralysed, and in that second the only sound was the snap of bones as the shadewalker finally crushed Torvic’s throat. Reddic struggled for breath and backed away. The shadewalker dropped Torvic and