The Fell Sword Read Online Free PDF

head. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
    The Duke raised his hand. ‘I didn’t tell anyone. That’s how you keep a secret.’
    The magister watched them carefully as they rode up to the Duke. His men were well arrayed in ranks, their armour polished, and their pennons flapping in the late spring breeze.
    Duke Andronicus’s eyes met the magister’s.
    The magister rose in his stirrups, extended his wand, and blew the heads off two of the Emperor’s guard. They continued to sit on their horses, headless, as he turned, pointed his wand at the two junior Nordikans and struck them – one with a massive kinetikos blow to the chest that shattered the man’s ribs through his breastplate, and the other with a neat cut that opened his neck. He was showing off for his new master, and wanted the man to remember exactly what he could do.
    The skill he couldn’t display in the real was that every attack had to overcome the complex, layered, and in some cases quite brilliant artefactual defences that the Nordikans carried. The lead Spatharios, for example, had tattoos that should have defended him – which would have, against a lesser caster.
    As far as Aeskepiles knew, no practitioner had ever succeeded in killing a member of the Guard by the art – much less four in ten heartbeats.
    He allowed himself a moment of triumph, and took a dagger in the side as a result.
    The Logothete.
    The magister had never imagined him a man of blood. He produced a sword – quite a long one – from the air, and rode to the Emperor’s side.
    Aeskepiles raised a series of shining shields – too late, as the dagger’s bite was deep and his side was growing cold. He could feel the poison on the blade.
    It was like getting a test back in Academy and finding that he’d forgotten one small thing and, as a result, all his answers were invalid.
    He knew counter-spells for poison. He just had to stop panicking for long enough to think of one . . .
    The Despot saw the Logothete bury a slim dagger in the magister’s side and draw a sword from the air. In the same breath, the Duke’s household knights made for the Emperor’s reins, and an unarmoured man sitting on a fine Eastern horse behind his father raised a light crossbow. He took a shot – and it went right past the Emperor.
    The Logothete seemed to flow under the crossbow bolt. It should have been impossible.
    His slim sword cut through a knight’s vambrace – right through his wrist, so that the man’s reaching hand dropped into the grass. The Logothete’s back-cut took out another knight’s eyes. He screamed.
    The Emperor backed his horse – obviously uncertain what to do.
    The Guardsman whose chest had been shattered by the showy sorcery was not dead. Somehow, he got his axe up – one-handed. His blow cleaved the helmet of another of the Duke’s knights, spattering every man present with his brains.
    The Logothete got his hand on the Emperor’s bridle. He made a parry with his sword, turned the Emperor’s horse—
    —and the Despot’s sword beheaded him. He had leaned out, horse already at a canter, and swung as hard as he could, afraid that the man had phantasmal protections. But the sword struck as it should have, and the Logothete’s head, containing every scrap of every secret that the Emperor had, rolled away in the grass.
    The Guardsman, drowning in his own blood, pitched from the saddle.
    The Duke took the Emperor’s reins.
    The Emperor was looking at his Logothete’s headless body. Tears welled in his eyes.
    ‘Majesty, you are my prisoner,’ said the Duke.
    The Emperor’s eyes met his. The contempt there was absolute.
    ‘You have just killed the Empire,’ he said.
    Ser Raoul watched the taking of the Emperor from the edge of the Field of Ares, where rowan and quince grew wild. He’d seen the violence in the magister and in the Duke.
    He shook his head. ‘Son of God,’ he said, and turned his cart horse towards the city gates.
    He wanted to think it all through. He