The Covenant Rising by Stan Nicholls

Author:Stan Nicholls [Nicholls, Stan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epic, Magic, Utopias, Fantasy fiction, Revenge, General, Fantasy fiction; Sword and sorcery, Fantasy, Immortality, Immortalism, Fiction, Swordsmen
ISBN: 9780060738907
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

17

‘Are you sure you’ll not take some wine?’ Karr said, offering the flagon again.

Reeth shook his head.

The patrician eyed Caldason’s modest platter of dry bread, cheese and a few grapes, which he was picking at with scant enthusiasm. ‘You’re not exactly eating extravagantly either.’

‘I take a sufficiency.’ He was in a brooding temper.

Kutch, tucking heartily into his heaped plate, asked, ‘Can I have some of that, please?’

Karr smiled. ‘You seem to have developed a taste for the stuff since Reeth took you into that tavern. Here.’ He poured a little wine into a cup, then topped it up from a jug of water. When he passed it across, Kutch’s look of gratitude was tempered with just a smidgen of disappointment at the dilution.

They went back to eating in silence.

The large, solid table they sat around stood in a sizeable kitchen in a spacious house on the edge of Valdarr. Sitting on a small rise and surrounded by a high wall with stout iron gates, the house was located at the end of a road with open fields beyond. There were several exits. When he first saw the place, Caldason correctly assumed it had been chosen because it was defendable.

Since they had arrived, a stream of visitors had been discreetly coming and going. Karr introduced some of them to Reeth and Kutch, usually by name only, with few if any personal details. But mostly he didn’t. Other people seemed to be permanently based in the house, acting as staff and bodyguards.

Sighing, Karr finally put down his knife. ‘This sort of atmosphere can affect a man’s appetite. What’s on your mind, Caldason?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Covenant.’ He said it with the air of a man who’d heard the word too often.

‘It has been a couple of days now. And you did –’

‘Promise. Yes, I know. I’m trying, Reeth, believe me. They’re not the easiest group to contact and they don’t exactly advertise their presence.’

‘You said you’ve dealt with them.’

‘So we have. We’re in an alliance with them, in fact, as we are with other like-minded groups. But it’s early days and communication tends to be on their terms.’

‘Nevertheless, we had an agreement.’

‘And I’m doing my best to honour it. I have somebody working on this right now as a matter of fact. But to put it bluntly, Reeth, I have problems other than yours to sort out. Plenty of them, just in the couple of days we’ve been here.’

‘It feels longer,’ Caldason remarked acerbically.

Karr decided to ignore that. ‘I’ve seen people who want my help because they’ve had their children taken away by government officials, or their brothers have been unjustly sentenced. People who’ve caught diseases after being forced to work in the eastern mines, had their sons conscripted, or their property seized to house Gath Tampoor’s bureaucrats. To mention just a few.’

‘Do you normally get so many requests?’ Kutch asked.

‘Their numbers climb the more the empire encroaches on personal freedoms. On top of that,’ he added, warming to his subject, ‘we’ve just learnt that Ivak Bastorran himself is in Bhealfa, along with his sadist of a nephew.

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