Sliding Void Read Online Free

Noak. ‘But there are no ports hereabouts. What are the chances of us spotting and flagging down a passing ice schooner out on the flows?’ It was a purely rhetorical question.
    ‘Somewhere between fuck and all,’ sighed Calder. It wasn’t fair, it really wasn’t. Surviving the war, surviving the long journey back home. All that way, all that blood, only to die here, so close to... glimpsing Sibylla’s immaculate naked body again , a voice within him whispered. He shut that down fast. Survive first, princess later.
    Over the rise and down below lay a structure, something more than the endless snow and forest that their desperate escape had passed to date. A round stonehouse alongside an oil derrick, two blinded slaves walking the circle in chains and driving the oil well’s pumping-beam up and down. The hut’s thatched roof wouldn’t be proofed against crossbow bolts, but the flint stone walls would serve as cover enough against Baron Halvard’s assassins. No windows, of course. Anyone rich enough to put glass panes in their walls wouldn’t be milking the ground so far from town or village. Whoever else lived in that hut was probably off fishing at an ice-hole on the river that they had passed a mile back. The house’s chimneystack was cold and smokeless, and the one thing you knew about a driller, they always had enough oil spare to light a fire.
    Calder brushed black tufts of hair out of his young snow-tanned face and pointed to the stone hut. ‘There’s our luck. We go down and past, then walk our own footprints back to the hut and shelter inside. When the shield-warriors go past, we take them in the rear.’ Maybe if we’re lucky, there will be some clay pots inside we can fill with oil. Something more than harsh words to toss at the bastards... oil grenades. The two of them, boy prince and manservant, stumbled down the rise towards the hut.
    ‘I think you should use it, my prince.’
    ‘Use what?’
    ‘The amulet.’
    Calder’s hand snaked to the crystal hanging from the chain beneath his fur-covered tunic. ‘Damned if I will.’
    ‘You were given it to call for help in time of need, my prince. If this is not such a time, then will it not do until a darker hour deepens?’
    ‘You think so?’ Calder spat. ‘It was that useless warlock, that shitting singer of spells, that fuck-brain of fuck-brains, who happily waved our fleet off when we departed in search of glory. If thousands of our men stretched out as pale corpses in front of the walls of Narvalo really were his plan, then it is true glory we have brought back in his name. You think old allies like the baron would have switched sides to the Narvalaks if we’d had the good sense to send that filthy sorcerer off with a flea in his ear? Why, the same bastards chasing us would be dragging our sleds across the border towards home and raising a song in our honour!’
    The prince’s manservant didn’t appear to agree with his assessment. ‘The wizard is powerful.’
    ‘He’s mortal! His plans can be snapped as easily as the skis on an ice schooner. If it were otherwise, the shaking hand of a Narvalak priest would be crowning me king of the world now while you would be drinking your gourd off in some sacked Narvalo tavern.’
    They had reached the hut. Calder was about to threaten the two slaves outside with murder unless they held their silence, but then he noticed the reason the two oil-pushers were still intent on the progress of the wooden wheel they stood chained to. Their cheeks were hollow from the time long ago when their tongues had been cut out. Blinded as well. Tough luck for them . The peasants should have put up more of a struggle when the baron’s warriors arrived at whatever piss-hole of a village these two jokers had been living in. There’s a lot of darkness in the winter . That had been one of Calder’s father’s favourite sayings, before he had fallen off a horse with a crossbow bolt through his left eye.
    Calder glanced