Read Sliding Void for Free Online

family retainer, boy.’
    ‘That’s Noak. He’s alive too?’
    ‘Yeah, I was feeling generous.’
    Calder’s hand snaked down to his leg. Calder’s trousers had been removed along with his tunic, and he was wearing some kind of white dressing gown cut from a material that seemed impossibly light and soft, yet as warm as a bearskin jacket. And even more impossibly, his leg seemed in perfect working order. The skin where the crossbow bolt had slammed through muscle and bone was red and slightly itchy, but apart from that, as good as new. He touched his chin. Someone had shaved him. An expert barber too, his cheeks felt as clean as a babe’s. ‘By the gods, does your sorcery know no bounds?’
    ‘One of the advantages of working with me, your highness, is you get full medical.’
    ‘Yet you don’t have a poultice capable of healing wounds without leaving my head feeling like hell’s own hangover?’
    ‘That’s the effect of a different potion you’re feeling, nothing to do with your injuries. Just a little something to help you on your way.’
    Calder felt a shiver of fear as he saw that the wizard’s familiar – a large black hunting hound – slip through an open door into the stone bedchamber. Whenever some fool called into question Matobo’s mastery over sorcery, the wizard would mumble a spell over his dog, and then the hound would speak, converse with the doubter as if the animal was a human. Calder had seen this magic many times with his own eyes. Matobo would then smile menacingly as he informed the sceptic that the hound had once been a merchant who had cheated him, and explain how he turned the trader into a dog for the crime. It wasn’t a trick of ventriloquism, either. The wizard could walk a mile away, and the cursed dog would still plead with you to save it from its evil master.
    ‘You can keep on feeling generous, wizard. I’ll need your sorcery to sneak me into the palace, and then I’m going to carve out the skull of every member of the Privy Council that supported my removal.’
    Matobo sighed. ‘Magic I may be, but suicidal I am not. Every nation on the continent knows that you’ve been removed from the throne, and there’s no spell of forgetfulness big enough to fix that. A few palace guards I can handle, the army of mercenaries and foreign shield-warriors your princess has brought to the party is another matter.’ He turned to his familiar. ‘Let my friends in.’ He looked down at Calder again as the hound trotted obediently out. ‘I’ve got alternative arrangements for you. I’m going to send you to a place where the price on your head won’t mean a whole lot. As you might imagine, that’s pretty damn far away.’
    ‘This is where I was born, this is where I will die,’ Calder insisted. ‘It is my birthright. Sibylla will see me. She’ll help me regain my throne.’
    ‘You think so?’ He rummaged around in the pockets of his purple robes, digging out a tiny globe the size of a marble.
    ‘Is that your crystal ball? It looks too small to see into the future.’
    Matobo grunted. ‘Even better. This shows you the past, kid. At least, it does when it scurries into the right room and its cameras are working properly.’
    He mumbled something at the globe and it unfurled into a spider-like creature. The little metal beast flexed its pincers, rising up on its hind legs, as if begging Matobo the Magnificent for food. The wizard whispered at it again. ‘Sibylla surveillance file. Six days ago. Central bedchamber.’ At his command a flat square of light formed above the spider, little black lines flickering down the brightness until a picture appeared, like a priest’s illumination on parchment. It was a perfect picture, though, capturing Sibylla’s gorgeous flawless skin as if Calder were spying on the scene through a keyhole. Sadly, the flawless picture came with perfect sound too. Sibylla was naked and writhing in the arms of someone else he recognized, the high marshal