Night Winds Read Free

unseen hand was drawing the bolt aside. Silently, slowly, the iron bar turned and crept back along its mounting brackets. The lock snapped open. With nightmarish suddenness, the door swung wide.
    Darkness hung in the passageway. Burning eyes regarded them. Advanced.
    Dessylyn screamed hopelessly. Numb with terror, Mavrsal clumsily swung his blade toward the glowing eyes. Blackness reached out, hurled him with irresistible strength across the cabin. Pain burst across his consciousness, and then was only the darkness.
II: "Never, Dessylyn"
    She shuddered and drew the fur cloak tighter about her thin shoulders. Would there ever again be a time when she wouldn't feel this remorseless cold?
    Kane, his cruel face haggard in the glow of the brazier, stood hunched over the crimson alembic. How red the coals made his hair and beard; how sinister was the blue flame of his eyes... He craned intently forward to trap the last few drops of the phosphorescent elixir in a chalice of ruby crystal.
    He had labored sleepless hours over the glowing liquid, she knew. Hours precious to her because these were hours of freedom--a time when she might escape his loathed attention. Her lips pressed a tight, bloodless line. The abominable formulae from which he prepared the elixir! Dessylyn thought again of the mutilated corpse of the young girl Kane had directed his servant to carry off. Again a spasm slid across her lithe form.
    "Why won't you let me go?" she heard herself ask dully for the... how many times had she asked that?
    "I'll not let you go, Dessylyn," Kane replied in a tired voice. "You know that."
    "Someday I'll leave you."
    "No, Dessylyn. You'll never leave me."
    "Someday."
    "Never, Dessylyn."
    "Why, Kane!"
    With painful care, he allowed a few drops of an amber liqueur to fall into the glowing chalice. Blue flame hovered over its surface.
    "Why!"
    "Because I love you, Dessylyn."
    A bitter sob, parody of laughter, shook her throat. "You love me." She enclosed a hopeless scream in those slow, grinding syllables.
    "Kane, can I ever make you understand how utterly I loathe you?"
    "Perhaps. But I love you, Dessylyn."
    The sobbing laugh returned.
    Glancing at her in concern, Kane carefully extended the chalice toward her. "Drink this. Quickly--before the nimbus dies."
    She looked at him through eyes dark with horror. "Another bitter draught of some foul drug to bind me to you?"
    "Whatever you wish to call it."
    "I won't drink it."
    "Yes, Dessylyn, you will drink it."
    His killer's eyes held her with bonds of eternal ice. Mechanically she accepted the crimson chalice, let its phosphorescent liqueur pass between her lips, seep down her throat.
    Kane sighed and took the empty goblet from her listless grip. His massive frame seemed to shudder from fatigue, and he passed a broad hand across his eyes. Blood rimmed their dark hollows.
    "I'll leave you, Kane." The sea wind gusted through the tower window and swirled the long red hair about his haunted face.
    "Never, Dessylyn."
III: At the Inn of the Blue Window
    He called himself Dragar...
    Had the girl not walked past him seconds before, he probably would not have interfered when he heard her scream. Or perhaps he would have. A stranger to Carsultyal, nonetheless the barbarian youth had passed time enough in mankind's lesser cities to be wary of cries for help in the night and to think twice before plunging into dark alleys to join in an unseen struggle. But there was a certain pride in the chivalric ideals of his heritage, along with a confidence in the hard muscle of his sword arm and in the strange blade he carried.
    Thinking of the lithe, white limbs he had glimpsed--the patrician beauty of the face that coolly returned his curious stare as she came toward him--Dragar unsheathed the heavy blade at his hip and dashed back along the street be had just entered.
    There was moonlight enough to see, although the alley was well removed from the nearest flaring streetlamp. Cloak torn away, her gown ripped