Knight Watch by Tim Akers

Author:Tim Akers [Akers, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Action & Adventure, Urban, Contemporary
ISBN: 9781982124854
Google: xyU_zQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1982124857
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2020-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

The flame was closer than it looked. Just as I re-entered the forest, I came to a smooth hillock with a short, squat pillar of stone in the middle and a precipitous dropoff on the far side. The light that I had seen was coming from the cliffside of the hill and reflected off the trees that surrounded a small clearing at the base of the cliff. The hill wasn’t more than fifteen feet high at the apex.

With visions of dragon’s dens and other fire-breathing ghoulies crowding for equal anxiety in my head, I crept around the edge of the hill, sword drawn. The blade still pulsed with a muted light, dim enough that I was confident it wouldn’t give away my presence to whatever waited at the base of the cliff. I quickly learned that the cliff face was artificial; wooden beams protruded from the grass along the base of the cliff, like pilings in a dock. I came around the edge of the hill, ready to face whatever waited for me.

The hill was a house. The cliff face was simply the front elevation, overhung by timber eaves that supported a roof of sod and grass. The front of the house itself was made of thick timber, roughly hewn, with a sturdy wooden door and two shuttered windows. The shutters were open, and the light of a bright fire flickered through dense glass panes. The glass was so distorted that I couldn’t see inside clearly. I looked around the clearing and saw signs of habitation. There was a woodpile tucked under the eaves at the far side of the hill, a well, and a hitching post that was so old it looked like it might rot away at any moment. The smell of woodsmoke filled the front yard, and I could now see that the stone pillar on top of the hill was a chimney. I sheathed my sword.

“Hello! Is anyone home?” I shouted. There was no immediate answer. Then there was no eventual answer, and then it was clear that there was never going to be an answer. I waited for quite a while, occasionally greeting the vacancy on the other side of the door in various pitches and with various amounts of pleading and threat. Finally, I resolved to enter the house uninvited.

“Surely there’s nothing suspicious about an empty house in the middle of a hellish forest, right?” I mused. “Certainly the safest place in the whole world. Sure.”

I stood nervously in front of the door for another few minutes, flexing my wrists and wondering if there was a way out of this. It certainly felt like a trap, in the sense that, other than Chesa’s glowing tree of pectoral-delivery, it was the first peaceful and inviting thing I’d seen in this domain of terror since I’d arrived.

It started raining on me. A few heavy drops at first, followed closely by an absolute deluge. I was just thinking that I hadn’t noticed the sky cloud over when I saw that it hadn’t clouded over at all.

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