The Twilight Herald: Book Two Of The Twilight Reign by Tom Lloyd

Author:Tom Lloyd [Lloyd, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2009-12-30T06:00:00+00:00

Mikiss sat in the broken chair and sank slowly into its cushioned back. They were in the cellars of the house, a damp, cramped network of rooms that served as home for Isherin Purn and his servant Nai. The smell of mould and stone was overlaid by the scent of dead vegetation and dank earth which crept in through a grille near the ceiling. There was no one else around as far as Mikiss could tell, but he couldn’t shake off the feeling that they were not entirely alone. A presence seemed to linger in the dim corridors and gently creaking rooms above; Mikiss knew nothing about necromancers and had no wish to, but his imagination was producing any number of alarming ideas.

‘What you thinking about, sir?’ Shart asked from opposite Mikiss. ‘You’re looking kinda spooked over there.’

‘Aren’t you? You do remember what our host’s calling entails? ’

‘Sure,’ Shart chuckled.

‘And you don’t find it at all unnerving?’

The soldier grinned, chiefly out of amusement at Mikiss’ discomfort. ‘Of course all this daemon crap is weird, but you serve in the Cheme Third and you get used to it after a while.’

Mikiss had guessed as much from the stories they had told him on the journey north. The Cheme Third Legion was Lord Styrax’s favourite, made up of men he trusted above even the Bloodsworn and the Reavers.

‘Also,’ Major Amber growled from the corner of the room, a brown earthenware bottle clamped firmly in his lap, ‘the whole stench-of-death thing becomes familiar enough when you serve in the Third. Us three have holed up together with a nice pile of corpses keeping us warm before; had to, else we’d have been caught and spitted.’ His eyes were fixed on the bottle in front of him; from the way the man had been pulling on it, Mikiss guessed it was almost empty. ‘You watch a man you know go through various stages of decomposition and death becomes just another comrade.’

Mikiss watched the oil lamps flicker. They were turned low, just enough for him to make out the lines and corners of the room. The door to the room was open, in the vain hope of a breeze; from where Mikiss was sitting he could see the dim light from the cramped kitchen where Nai was preparing something for his master. Somewhere beyond that, sheathed in shadow, was the door to Isherin Purn’s study, a room Mikiss never wanted to see inside.

‘Karkarn’s horn,’ Shart exclaimed, ‘you’re being miserable tonight -if you don’t mind me saying so, sir. Stench of death and presence of daemons aside, we’ve got food I can recognise bits of, drink so we don’t care what the rest of the food is, and we can make Keneg sleep in a different room to us. In my book, that puts us well ahead of where we were yesterday.’

‘Ah, this house puts me on edge; this whole damn city puts me on edge.’ The major grimaced. ‘Don’t any of you feel it?’

‘Feel what? All I feel is this heat.

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