Sliding Void Read Online Free Page A

over to where Noak was examining the gear reducer on the oil well. What’s he trying to do? Calder scooped up a snowball and threw it at the manservant’s back. ‘You found a crossbow hidden behind the tubing? Come on, we’ve got to run past the hut and double back before the baron’s swords turn up.’
    Calder and his manservant followed the plan. Wading through the snow past the driller’s hut a good distance, then carefully walking their footprints in the snow back towards the hut. There wasn’t a lock on the driller’s door, but it could be bolted from inside. Just light planking on the door, not up to much. Good for keeping out wolves and bears for long enough to lift a crossbow off the empty hook on the wall. Calder could have kicked in the door himself, if he wanted to advertise their presence inside to the assassins. The prince had to hope that two of them, as good as weaponless against a company of shield-warriors, was a plan so crazy that the element of surprise was the one thing they would be armed with.
    ‘Check the room,’ whispered Calder Durk. ‘See if there’s anything here.’  Not that there was going to be. A fireplace with a roasting spit. Some straw to sleep on, a few blankets in the corner of the sunken floor. Spare netting and line hanging on the wall to fish the river. Anything metal or sharp had gone to the river along with the driller living here.
    Calder kept a wary eye on the top of the rise, peering through the planks of the wooden door. The two slaves were still working the noisy, creaking wheel, the oil derrick nodding back and forth in time to their labours, black liquid dripping out into a large wooden barrel from a pipe pushed into the down-hole. Doesn’t seem much coming out of there. Maybe the well’s nearly tapped out ? Calder hadn’t spotted any sled tracks in the snow, so that meant the driller who lived here had left on foot. Too poor to keep his own dogs, and pay for sled and harness. There was a wooden measuring stick leaning against the barrel, half-covered in tar. So, the driller had dipped it into the barrel to take a measure of its contents, just to see if his pair of slaves slacked off while he was away catching fish for his dinner. Not a trusting man. His slaves might be blind and mute, but Calder suspected they’d feel the crack of the whip well enough if they stopped turning the well’s crank.
    Noak rifled through the scant possessions behind him. ‘No weapons.’
    ‘Any clay pots, something we could fill with oil to burn the fuckers when they pass by?’
    Noak lifted up a solitary metal frying pan. ‘I can hit them with this.’
    Calder laughed, despite their predicament. ‘You really are an old woman, now.’
    ‘Just rub the amulet, my prince, please,’ pleaded Noak. ‘Before Halvard’s killers turn up and see the light of sorcery under our roof.’
    Well, what the hell. In for a lump of copper, in for a lump of gold. Calder lifted the amulet out, and resting his hand on its diamond surface, chanted the incantation the sorcerer had made him memorise. It took a second for the evil whining noise to fill the silence. A ghostly face appeared before them, hovering in the centre of the hut, and Calder had to work at keeping the shivers from freezing his spine. Off to the side of the hut, Noak was making the sign of the Fire Goddess across his chest. Something used to ward off demons. Skin as black as night on the face – it didn’t matter how much snow-glare you took, no skin should get that tanned – his accent exotic and strange, a voice all-too knowing and cock-sure. Hair curled like a woman’s. Smug too. How could the sorcerer still appear so bloody smug after he had dispatched the manhood of an entire nation to such an untimely end?
    ‘I am betrayed,’ said Calder. ‘Baron Halvard burnt my schooner at her moorings and murdered my crew with poison at his own table. He has broken the compact and sold us out to the enemy for a weight of silver.