Read Dark Crusade for Free Online Page A

our northern borders for a time," Esketra went on. "To personally assess the danger from Shapeli. Kane would have done that."
    Jarvo tasted gall. "Orted's peasant army presents no threat to Sandotneri," he growled. "A mob of poorly armed louts can't face a charge of heavy cavalry."
    "Did I not hear something of a mercenary army the Satakis slaughtered?"
    "Cumdeller was a fool! He thought to challenge Orted on his own ground--in a forest where a snake can't pass between two trees without sucking in its breath. It's four days march across open savannah to reach Sandotneri--four days for trained infantry. For the Satakis there would no march back."
    "But a new general would be expected to make a personal appraisal of the situation," Esketra persisted.
    Jarvo stood silent. The breeze rustled his fine blue cloak and cooled his silvered mail. It carried a scent of her perfume upon the breath of roses, and his palms still sweated against his tight trouser. Esketra remained an arm's length from him and showed him her exquisite profile.
    "You were badly burned by Kane's fire?" she wondered, gazing sidelong at his bandaged face.
    Jarvo's mouth felt dry. "The surgeons applied unguents and compresses to soften the scarring. They say my left eye will never know day from night."
    "Blinded," mused Esketra with a shiver. "Maimed because you sought to preserve my name from blemish. I owe you a great debt of gratitude."
    She held her slim fingers over the surface. An iridescent-scaled body lurched from the pool, nuzzled for her fingers. She held nothing in her hand, and, still groping, the bright fish tumbled back into the pool. The other goldfish, assuming it had accepted a morsel, set upon it.
    Esketra laughed with the willows and the fountain. She extended her fingers for Jarvo's kiss.
    "Be certain to come see me," she smiled. "When you return from your your of the northern frontier."
IV: Shadows That Slay
    From deep within the forests, terror crawled forth. It's tentacled advance was as crushing and relentless as the numberless and strangling roots of the shadowy forestland--massive roots that twined endlessly through the soil, pried apart the crumbling rock beneath. Terror was power. Irresistible power of uncounted arms raised to destroy; power directed by one sinister mind that commanded its numberless creatures to pillage and to slay. Power was terror.
    From out of the night and the forest, the Satakis ringed the city wall. For hours now Erill had listened to their chanting. From her vantage atop a flat roof she could see their torches flickering beneath the massive trees. Torches more numerous than the stars in the cloudless sky, enclosing Gillera as surely as the star-flecked night enclosed the forest.
    Erill smelled the soot of their torches, reflected that soon the cloudless skies would be obscured with the smoke of Gillera. Bitterly the girl cursed the lord mayor and his aldermen for their stupidity in believing the city walls could withstand such a siege. Further she cursed the spiteful turn of fortune that had left her carnival troupe caught up in the advance of the Satakis, trapped here in Gillera. As an afterthought she cursed the invidious fate that had destined her to become a mime in a threadbare travelling carnival.
    She had seen a lot, lived a lot, for a girl not past her teens; that she would live to see more seemed to her problematical. If hers had been a hard life, its experience had in turn hardened Erill, tempered her with a resourcefulness and resilience that told her when to cringe and when to twist the knife. It was a toughness that served her well in the decade since her dimly remembered parents sold her to a brothel in Ingoldi.
    Old Wurdis, who bossed the motley troupe of acrobats, conjurers, grifters and mimes, found her hidden in one of the wagons as they rolled away from Ingoldi and its inhospitable officials. Having no cause to love that city or its authorities, Wurdis let her remain with the carnival. He