2 Defiler of Tombs by William King Page A

him of the wolf. It was the look of a predator revealing its fangs. “Only in part? That’s not very flattering. What else did you talk about?”
    “I think we may have problems with the Old Ones in Elderdale.”
    “You have a dwarf-forged blade,” she said.
    “The secret of staying alive is knowing when to use it,” he said.
    “And you have stayed alive for a long time,” she said. “That’s an impressive achievement for a Guardian. Most of you die fulfilling your oaths.”
    “I’ve heard people say that,” he said.
    “Meaning we should not talk about things of which we have no knowledge.”
    “Meaning I have heard people say that.” The wolf growled as if annoyed at the tone he was taking with its mistress. Kormak glanced at it.
    “Most people are frightened of Shae,” Aisha said.
    “I’ve killed wolves before. I’ve killed familiars too.”
    “And witches?”
    “And witches.”
    “I am sure you are a very dangerous man,” she said. There was mockery in her voice. Kormak let it pass. She was clearly one of those people who was always going to have the last word. She noticed his expression.
    “You do not like me, do you?” she said.
    “I do not know you,” he said.
    “But you’ve met my sort before.”
    “You are not a Tinker,” he said.
    “What do you know of the people you call Tinkers?”
    “The same as everybody else.” He spoke as mockingly as she, to see whether he could goad her into saying more. “They go everywhere, trade with everyone. They repair things. They work petty magic. They tell fortunes.”
    “They are suspected of being thieves…”
    “They are suspected of being thieves.”
    “I have heard it said your Order are assassins,” she said.
    “My Order are assassins,” he said. “When it is called for.”
    Kormak was not sure why he said that. Perhaps he was the one being provoked here. It was certainly within the realms of possibility that she was cleverer than he was. She looked at him closely.
    “Have you ever been called on to be?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is that why you always look so sad?” It was not what he had expected her to say at all. He glanced at her sidelong and kept his mouth shut. She looked at him. The wolf looked at him mockingly.
    “Sad?” he said eventually.
    “You are a moral man, Sir Kormak, even I can see that. It cannot sit well with you to be a murderer.”
    “Is a soldier a murderer when he kills on a battlefield? That is what this world is,” he said.
    “I can see you have been well provided with answers.”
    “Is that what you think?” Kormak asked. The words came out a little more angry than he had intended. Aisha smiled and fell silent. That had not gone quite as he planned, Kormak thought.
    Ahead of them he could see the wagon. He rode forward to join the people there.

CHAPTER NINE
    RAIN SLEETED DOWN from the grey sky. It soaked through Kormak’s cloak and dripped down his forehead. He looked down on the town below, glad that he would soon have an opportunity to get out of the rain.
    Elderdale was bigger than Kormak had expected, a sprawl of huts and compounds and smelters and fortified inns with a lot of muddy space between them and clouds of smoke rising into the air above. In the valley sides, mine-shaft entrances gaped, propped open by wooden arches. Piles of slag and rock lay outside them; men came and went with wheelbarrows and picks.
    Over everything loomed a massive rock and on that rock rose a castle of very strange appearance, taller and narrower and more rickety that anything a knight would build to defend his home. It was made of stone piled on stone in a haphazard way and it looked unstable. It was only when he paused to consider how big the structure must be that Kormak realised how large those individual blocks were. He wondered how they got them into place on the hilltop. It would have taken a lot of serfs a lot of time to pull them there but something told Kormak the construction had not been achieved by the