The Demon Lord (The Book of Years Series 2) by Peter Morwood

Author:Peter Morwood [Morwood, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Venture Press
Published: 2017-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

The shadows of dusk were lengthening in Seghar town as they approached it at a leisurely walk. Torches and ornate lamps had been lit at intervals along the outer wall and their effect, like a string of jewels, did little to offset an all-too-plain dilapidation. Marek Endain had described it well enough, but the seedy reality was worse.

Reining Lyard to a halt, Aldric glanced over his left shoulder for Gueynor’s reaction and saw what he had expected: shock, disbelief, and finally outrage that the fine place of her cherished recollections had been reduced to what they saw now. The indignant lines of her face softened and collapsed towards tears.

“Stop that!” The snap in his voice was to attract her attention before her behaviour attracted someone else’s and put them all at risk. “You’re a stranger here, you’ve never seen the place before, so you’ve got nothing to cry about.”

He almost said ‘not yet, anyway’ but closed his teeth on the heartless phrase before it left his mouth. If Dunrath had degraded as far as this place must have done from Gueynor’s ten-year memory of it he might have cried too. Seghar was old, and that was excusable for Dunrath was also old, but it had no time-mellowed dignity, only the decrepitude of age. Its stonework had crumbled, then been quarried as house-building material or just rubble to pave roads, and the few attempts at repair were haphazard, incomplete and altogether ugly.

More depressing still were the echoes of long-faded grandeur, scattered like discarded rags among the buildings of the fortress proper. A sprawl of overgrown parterres almost covered the gravelled walks of a formal garden, weeds choked its ornamental ponds, and the once-neat trees and bushes that lined its avenues were slowly degenerating into tangles of dying vegetation. Yet not everything was failing. Even at this distance Aldric could detect the heavy scent of roses on the evening air, a cloying perfume he was coming to associate more and more with the name of Seghar, and one he was starting to detest.

“Cowards,” Gueynor whispered. “They didn’t dare destroy what my father had made of Seghar, but they let it fall into this…”

He looked beyond her at Marek Endain, saw the demon-queller frown, and knew the demon-queller was recognising what he had already seen. All this wasn’t because of poverty or apathy but a policy of deliberate neglect, proving the Geruaths capable of far greater subtlety than he had expected. The gardens were all that remained of past overlords, and letting them go to ruin before removing them was someone’s notion of doing the same to the memory and reputation of those who had planted them. Whose idea had it been? Overlord Geruath himself? Or was it Crisen? Now there was a man he had never met, but already disliked as much as the smell of those damned roses.

“Mind what you say about this dump,” he warned. “Compliments will fool nobody, and insults are dangerous.”

A few armed retainers mingled with the

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