Solomon Kane by Ramsey Campbell Page A

camp. Twoof them were dragging Meredith backwards to fling her down at the edge of the glade. Her mother threw herself at them, but a thickset raider felled her with a punch to the back of the head and slung her like a sack next to Meredith. William had found a sword and was slashing at several attackers, but they evaded him with mocking ease. Two seized his arms and wrenched them back until the sword dropped from his fist, and a third seized it by the blade to club William to his knees with the hilt. Edward was being punched almost insensible by a raider while two others held the victim’s arms. Both men were thrown down beside the women while Samuel watched in dismay from behind a tree halfway down the slope. Kane shouted a warning, but it was too late; a raider whose lividly blemished face was additionally decorated with an eye-patch had captured the boy with a forearm around his throat. “Stop,” Kane shouted.
    The raiders became still, but not in response to him. Something was approaching through the mist that had risen with the dawn. Kane heard a sound like a victorious drum, which resolved itself into hoofbeats as a shape appeared between the trees. The horse was as black as the eyes of the raiders, and so was the garb of its rider. His hands were hidden by leather gloves, and his face by a mask. Stitches reminiscent of raw flesh crisscrossed the mask, whose mouth was an implacable slit devoid of emotion. While the eyes that peered out of the mask might belong to a man, Kane saw no soul in them; they seemed inhumanly indifferent to the victims of the raid. They gazed at Kane as if he were hardly worth noticing, and then they turned to Samuel as the raider who had captured him flung him down beside his family. “Leave them alone,” Kane shouted.
    The masked rider spurred his horse forward and reinedit to a halt near the blazing wagon. He merely nodded at the man with the eye-patch, but his minion understood, and Kane had the awful notion that the raiders had just a single evil soul between them. The man hauled Samuel to his feet and dragged him away from his family, into the middle of the glade. The raider’s one eye glinted like a snake’s at Kane, and so did the eyes within the mask. “Leave him be,” Kane yelled and started down the slope.
    Nobody else could rescue Samuel. Several raiders stood over the Crowthorns, swords poised to cut them down if they should move. Katherine and Meredith cried out, and William groaned from the depths of his soul while Edward mumbled some prayer, because Samuel’s captor had drawn a knife from his belt. The blade was the length of the boy’s forearm and serrated along one edge. The other looked sharp as a razor, and that was the edge the man put to Samuel’s throat. “Don’t you hurt him,” Kane shouted.
    “Solomon,” Meredith pleaded, “help him.”
    It seemed to Kane that the horseman and his minion were issuing some kind of challenge to him, perhaps for daring to confront them. Otherwise, why had he not been overpowered or slain? He took a pace towards Samuel, but the boy’s captor pressed the blade against Samuel’s throat, and Kane saw it was close to breaking the skin. He held his ground and strove to fix the horseman’s gaze with his. “Listen to me,” he said as evenly as he could. “These people are no threat to you. You can see they’re Christians. They want only to leave this land.”
    The eyes in the mask seemed to gleam with malicious amusement, and Kane saw the identical expression in the raider’s one eye. Perhaps Kane should not have mentioned Christianity, and he was searching for words when Samuel, inflamed by the bite of the knife or by thetreatment of his family, called out “Kill them, Solomon. Kill them all.”
    Kane thought he glimpsed anticipation in the horseman’s eyes, and fancied that the look had appeared in the eyes of every raider. “Don’t struggle, Samuel,” he urged. “He knows you can do him no harm. I am certain he