Sliding Void Read Online Free PDF Page A

plan started off as Calder had foreseen. Outside, the seven brutes piled down the slope and headed past the oil derrick and the driller’s hut, intent on following the false trial of footprints in the snow left by Calder and his manservant. They didn’t bother checking the hut, and why would they? Nobody in their right mind was going to take on a company of shield-warriors. Was it Calder’s imagination, or were the two slaves outside walking the circle a lot slower now? He lay that thought aside, he didn’t have time to be distracted by their silent toil. The hunters had kept their crossbows strapped and dangling from their armour. So, they weren’t about to shoot Calder down as he fled. This suggested that his treacherous ex-ally, Baron Halvard, had expressed a desire to have the notorious Prince Calder taken alive. Not out of any sense of mercy, but so that the dog would have something more than a corpse to hand over to the enemy. A bad memory sprang forth. Outside the walls of Narvalo, the priests threatening Calder that unless he abandoned the siege forthwith, they were going to give him a criminal’s death tied to a stake, personally dipping him in tar and lighting the match. Yes, a living prince would be worth quite a lot to the Narvalaks. It wouldn’t matter if there were a blizzard pummelling their city, Calder could foresee standing room only in the large square outside their high temple.
    Calder timed it just right, springing the door open a second after the hut fell out of sight of the fighters. Much to Calder’s surprise, Noak came sprinting right behind him, seemingly as eager as Calder to take the shield-warriors in the rear. Well, if they were planning to take Calder alive to burn at the stake, Noak’s only chance of life was that the seven thugs would seize the manservant for the local slave market. On the baron’s lands, that would probably mean Noak ending up blind and tongueless as the third cog on a driller’s well. Not really living at all. Even as Calder closed the gap on the warriors, the snow muffling his boots, it was hard to know where to plunge his dagger. Somewhere between the round iron shield and the chainmail? Try to pierce the leather neck-guard hanging down from the back of the horned helmet? Back of the thighs? One up the ass?
    The problem was solved when Noak brained one of them from behind and the remaining heroes suddenly became aware that maybe they should’ve checked the driller’s hut behind them after all. With one of their number collapsing forward, pole-axed by a first-rate head trauma, Calder shoved his blade into the exposed neck of the shield-warrior who’d whirled around to face him. The giant went down gurgling behind the metal facemask, no doubt a look of surprise on his face to match Calder’s shocked realisation that the shield-warrior had taken his dagger with him. Showing a little more foresight than his master, Noak was trying to pull a loaded crossbow off his victim, right up until the second when one of the assassins shoulder-charged the manservant and sent him flying sideways.
    Calder didn’t have the luxury of trying to retrieve weapons from his victim, as four of the baron’s bulls jumped over their comrade’s corpse and kept on coming at him. He back-pedalled, turned and ran, followed by the killers’ roars of fury. He didn’t have their armour to slow him down. But then, he wasn’t running with leg muscles the circumference of a tree and pursuing hungry, unarmed prey, either. It took a lot to sweat in weather this cold, but Calder managed it, reaching the shadow of the creaking oil derrick a couple of steps ahead of his pursuers. He swivelled around desperately. To one side the two slaves were still blindly pushing the turning arm. He lunged for the wooden measuring stick half-covered in tar and held it up, a blunt useless spear against the five giants closing in on him. They still hadn’t drawn their crossbows, leaving Calder to face a thicket