The masked rider spurred his horse forward and reined
it to a halt near the blazing wagon. He merely nodded at the man with the eye-patch, but his minion understood, and Kane had the awful notion that the raiders had just a single evil soul between them. The man hauled Samuel to his feet and dragged him away from his family, into the middle of the glade. The raider’s one eye glinted like a snake’s at Kane, and so did the eyes within the mask. “Leave him be,” Kane yelled and started down the slope.
Nobody else could rescue Samuel. Several raiders stood over the Crowthorns, swords poised to cut them down if they should move. Katherine and Meredith cried out, and William groaned from the depths of his soul while Edward mumbled some prayer, because Samuel’s captor had drawn a knife from his belt. The blade was the length of the boy’s forearm and serrated along one edge. The other looked sharp as a razor, and that was the edge the man put to Samuel’s throat. “Don’t you hurt him,” Kane shouted.
“Solomon,” Meredith pleaded, “help him.”
It seemed to Kane that the horseman and his minion were issuing some kind of challenge to him, perhaps for daring to confront them. Otherwise, why had he not been overpowered or slain? He took a pace towards Samuel, but the boy’s captor pressed the blade against Samuel’s throat, and Kane saw it was close to breaking the skin. He held his ground and strove to fix the horseman’s gaze with his. “Listen to me,” he said as evenly as he could. “These people are no threat to you. You can see they’re Christians. They want only to leave this land.”
The eyes in the mask seemed to gleam with malicious amusement, and Kane saw the identical expression in the raider’s one eye. Perhaps Kane should not have mentioned Christianity, and he was searching for words when Samuel, inflamed by the bite of the knife or by the
treatment of his family, called out “Kill them, Solomon. Kill them all.”
Kane thought he glimpsed anticipation in the horseman’s eyes, and fancied that the look had appeared in the eyes of every raider. “Don’t struggle, Samuel,” he urged. “He knows you can do him no harm. I am certain he will let you go.”
“Listen to him, Samuel, listen,” William cried.
Katherine and Edward and Meredith exhorted him too, but perhaps the boy’s plight made him deaf to their advice. “I know you can do it, Solomon,” he pleaded. “Kill him!”
“Just be quiet, Samuel,” Kane said with a savagery born of desperation, and turned to the rider. “You,” he said and glimpsed some kind of response deep in the eyes of the unseen face. “Are you their master? What is it you want?”
The eyes considered him and then found Samuel. The horseman lifted one gloved hand, and Kane was afraid what the gesture might be about to convey. “I’ll do anything,” he vowed.
The hand closed into a fist with a creak of leather. The raider who held Samuel moved, and Kane grew fearful for the boy, but the man was only lifting his disfigured head. The face overgrown with symbols twisted as if it was straining to adopt a different shape. The man’s throat worked convulsively while the solitary ebon eyeball bulged in its socket. The thick greyish lips were distorted by a violent grimace, and blood trickled from one corner. The eye focused on Kane, and the mouth spoke. “Kill me,” it said. “Can you?”
The voice was scarcely human. It was deep and harsh and resonant, and seemed to reverberate through the forest. Kane understood at once that it belonged less to
the speaker than to the man behind the mask, who had commandeered his minion’s body to speak on his behalf. Kane hardly knew which of them to address, but he appealed to the leader. “I cannot,” he said. “I am a man of peace.”
The rider’s eyes were as unresponsive as his mask. Kane heard Samuel attempt to suppress a cry, and turned to see that his captor had pulled the boy’s head back by the hair. The family cried out, and Meredith’s plea was loudest. “Solomon, stop him!”
Kane dug his fingernails into his palms in an agony of powerlessness. “Don’t you hurt that boy,” he snarled as though his words might have the force of prayer.
“This boy...” For a grotesque moment the hand that gripped Samuel’s hair might almost have been laying a benediction on his head. “This child has more heart than any of you,” the voice that had borrowed the distorted mouth declared. “He is the only man here.”
Kane saw the horseman lift his gloved hand. The eyes in the mask were blank with indifference, and all at once Kane was filled with dread. “Listen to me,” he begged. “A child can be no use to you. Take me instead.”
Before he had finished speaking, the emotionless gaze abandoned him. It fastened on Samuel, and the raised fist fell like a hammer. The gesture was weighty enough to drive a nail into a coffin, but its effect was deadlier. In less time than it took Kane to draw a breath, the one-eyed man cut Samuel’s throat from ear to ear.
The boy’s eyes widened in disbelief that looked very much like betrayal. They were gazing straight at Kane as they dimmed and misted over. The man with the eye-patch held up Samuel’s body as if to display it for his master’s approval. Once it had twitched its last he let it fall to the frozen earth, where it turned the leaves around it red.
Kane heard cries of horror that fell short of expressing his own. “Oh God,” Katherine wept, “my son...” Grief seemed to have separated her from William, who moaned “My boy, oh Samuel...” Edward attempted to pronounce a prayer while Meredith found nothing to say except, in worse than despair, Kane’s name. As Kane struggled to find some response, the one-eyed raider spared Samuel’s body a glance. “This was the only man here,” said the voice that occupied his mouth.
He turned to stare at the Crowthorns with the same detachment that he had applied to cutting Samuel’s throat. “Take the marked one,” the unnatural voice said. “Kill the rest.”
As the raiders guarding the family moved to obey, Katherine cried out to Kane. “Do something,” she pleaded. “Help us.”
The raiders grew as still as puppets while their masked leader observed him. When Kane took a pace towards the Crowthorns, the one-eyed man stepped into his path and raised the blade stained with Samuel’s blood. Kane halted beside the ashes of the dead fire and lifted his eyes heavenwards, stretching his arms wide. He might have been offering himself up as a sacrifice, which was how he felt. “What is it you want of me?” he said, so quietly that only God would have heard him. “Is this all I am to you?”
The sky was hidden by the mist that had overwhelmed the forest, and there might as well have been nothingness above him. The blank expanse at which all the topmost branches appeared to be pointing offered not the least sign of a response. Everyone in the glade might have been holding their breath – everyone but Samuel, who had none to hold. The masked rider’s horse snorted and pawed the earth, and the impatient sound seemed to be
the nearest to an answer Kane could hope for. “Then so be it,” he said.
He lowered his gaze to the man with the knife, who cocked his head as much in mockery as threat. “If I kill you,” Kane said, “I am bound for Hell.”
The one eye glinted in derision, and the thick lips curled in a sneer. Kane heard one of the Crowthorns whisper what might have been a prayer. “It is a price I will gladly pay,” Kane said and advanced on the man with the knife.
The man lumbered to meet him, slashing almost negligently at him. He seemed to view Kane as sport rather than as any kind of danger, and looked ready to linger over despatching his unarmed adversary. Kane sidestepped and, grabbing the man’s sword-arm by the wrist, twisted it over his own shoulder and threw all his weight against it. Brawny though the arm was, it snapped at the elbow like a branch. As the man’s fingers writhed Kane seized the knife and drove it backwards. He felt it slice deep into flesh and puncture a kidney. He turned the knife in the wound and dragged the serrated edge upwards, sawing open the man’s back.
As Kane wrenched the blade free the man toppled to his knees and then fell prone. The nearest of the raiders rushed at Kane, roaring like beasts and brandishing their swords. Their ferocity was feeble by comparison with his. Once again he was the man he had been, but he was no longer impelled by the lust for wealth; he was driven by pure rage. When the first man cut at him with a sword Kane blocked it with the knife, which he drove deep into his assailant’s heart. The man staggered backwards, and Kane snatched the sword from him.
He was unstoppable now. A wide sweep of the sword met two men as they ran at him from either side, and cut them both down like a scythe. He parried their
companion’s sword and dashed it from the man’s grasp before chopping into his neck. He hacked at it and hacked again, and the headless corpse fell away from him, gushing blood. More raiders hurled themselves at him, and Kane stepped aside to let the impetus carry one past him, then sliced through the tendon behind the man’s left knee. As the man crumpled to the earth Kane slashed open a raider’s throat, and the man tottered away, gurgling like a crimson fountain. Another man jabbed viciously at Kane, but Kane avoided the lunge and lopped off the man’s hand, which fell to the ground with the sword still in its clutch.
Kane was fighting his way towards the Crowthorns, but not swiftly enough. Two raiders had seized Meredith and, despite her struggles, were hoisting her into the rough embrace of one of their number on horseback. As William made a grab for her, a sword was thrust clean through him, and he collapsed with a despairing groan. Edward cried out with grief and rage, throwing himself on the attacker, but two raiders seized him and flung him on his back so that one of them could plunge a knife into his heart. The sight inflamed Kane’s fury, and as more raiders came at him he spilled one man’s entrails with his sword and drove the point deep into the chest of another. The blade snagged between the ribs, and he was striving to heave it loose when two men with axes rushed at him.
One of them clubbed him in the stomach with the handle of an axe. The blow doubled him up and sent him backwards to fetch up against a rock at the edge of the glade. He saw the raider on the horse spur it past the remains of the wagon, Meredith sprawling across the animal’s back, one brutal hand pinning her down. Kane straightened up with a painful effort, only for his attackers to pinion him against the rock with his arms
stretched wide. One man swung his axe up single-handed to split him open.
Kane pressed his spine against the rock and kicked out with all his strength. His boot caught the man in the groin. As the grip on his wrist slackened Kane broke free of it and grabbed the axe before the man could stagger out of reach. He slammed it against the haft of the second raider’s weapon with such force that the axe sprang out of the man’s hand. Without pausing Kane swung the blade and sliced the raider’s belly open. The man floundered away, spilling blood and innards, and Kane sprinted after Meredith’s captor.
It seemed that he might overtake the raiders. While the horses that had drawn the Crowthorns’ wagon were nowhere to be seen, and all the remaining men were on horseback, they had waited on the track for their master. The masked rider gave Kane a dismissive glance before spurring his horse out of the glade. He might have been inviting Kane to pursue them and, equally wordlessly, deriding the proposal. As Kane dashed past the blazing wagon, the rider urged his steed into a trot – a canter – a gallop.
The other horsemen matched his speed, and the foremost was Meredith’s captor. Kane sucked in an icy breath and put his soul into a dash along the track. He was gaining on the riders; in moments he might be close enough to bring the hindmost rider down and take his steed. He saw Meredith struggling helplessly across the back of her captor’s horse, and the sight lent him a swiftness that he would never have believed he had in him. The last horseman was almost within reach of a sweep of Kane’s sword, and the horse stumbled on a fallen branch that was frozen to the track. It regained its balance, and the rider spurred it faster to keep up with
his companions. As Kane managed not to slow down while he filled his lungs with a great breath, the riders drew ahead.
They had reached the mist, which seemed eager to embrace them. Kane’s entire body felt like a single ache that had its source in his raw lungs, but he did not slacken his speed. In seconds the horsemen and their steeds were no more than fading silhouettes, and then there was only a receding thunder of hoofbeats. Kane heard Meredith utter a cry that seemed muffled by the murk before the sounds of hooves retreated out of earshot like the last rumble of a storm.
At last Kane stumbled to a halt and stood panting as the mist gathered among the trees around him. The only sounds in the forest might have been the thudding of his heart and his harsh efforts to recapture his breath. His body burned as though it were in the grip of a fever, the taste of which was in his mouth. As he came near to shivering with exhaustion and the chill of the mist he trudged back to the camp.
His first glimpse of the glow of the smouldering wagon put him in mind of a corpse light hovering over a grave. The mist retreated, unveiling the glade strewn with corpses. Samuel’s chest was stained with his own blood like an infant’s with food, and his face looked almost as youthful. Edward lay near him, hands clenched on the dagger in his chest as if he had died in the act of a last prayer. They were surrounded by the bodies of raiders, a sight that made Kane’s gorge rise – and then he saw that more had departed from the raiders than their lives. Their flesh no longer bore the signs of magical subjugation. One man was still alive, but he died as Kane watched. The livid marks disappeared, sinking into his flesh, and his eyes grew blank but human – clear as an empty sky after a storm.
William was resting in Katherine’s arms against a tree at the far side of the glade. He was alive, but only just. Although he was scarcely able to raise his head as Kane picked his way through the carnage, his eyes fought off their dimness to focus on him. “Solomon,” he said in a low but fierce voice that might have been reaching up from the depths of his soul. “Get her back.”
Kane made to take the hand that was not in both of Katherine’s. “I will,” he said.