Solomon Kane by Ramsey Campbell Page B

will let you go.”
    “Listen to him, Samuel, listen,” William cried.
    Katherine and Edward and Meredith exhorted him too, but perhaps the boy’s plight made him deaf to their advice. “I know you can do it, Solomon,” he pleaded. “Kill him!”
    “Just be quiet, Samuel,” Kane said with a savagery born of desperation, and turned to the rider. “You,” he said and glimpsed some kind of response deep in the eyes of the unseen face. “Are you their master? What is it you want?”
    The eyes considered him and then found Samuel. The horseman lifted one gloved hand, and Kane was afraid what the gesture might be about to convey. “I’ll do anything,” he vowed.
    The hand closed into a fist with a creak of leather. The raider who held Samuel moved, and Kane grew fearful for the boy, but the man was only lifting his disfigured head. The face overgrown with symbols twisted as if it was straining to adopt a different shape. The man’s throat worked convulsively while the solitary ebon eyeball bulged in its socket. The thick greyish lips were distorted by a violent grimace, and blood trickled from one corner. The eye focused on Kane, and the mouth spoke. “Kill me,” it said. “Can you?”
    The voice was scarcely human. It was deep and harsh and resonant, and seemed to reverberate through the forest. Kane understood at once that it belonged less tothe speaker than to the man behind the mask, who had commandeered his minion’s body to speak on his behalf. Kane hardly knew which of them to address, but he appealed to the leader. “I cannot,” he said. “I am a man of peace.”
    The rider’s eyes were as unresponsive as his mask. Kane heard Samuel attempt to suppress a cry, and turned to see that his captor had pulled the boy’s head back by the hair. The family cried out, and Meredith’s plea was loudest. “Solomon, stop him!”
    Kane dug his fingernails into his palms in an agony of powerlessness. “Don’t you hurt that boy,” he snarled as though his words might have the force of prayer.
    “This boy...” For a grotesque moment the hand that gripped Samuel’s hair might almost have been laying a benediction on his head. “This child has more heart than any of you,” the voice that had borrowed the distorted mouth declared. “He is the only man here.”
    Kane saw the horseman lift his gloved hand. The eyes in the mask were blank with indifference, and all at once Kane was filled with dread. “Listen to me,” he begged. “A child can be no use to you. Take me instead.”
    Before he had finished speaking, the emotionless gaze abandoned him. It fastened on Samuel, and the raised fist fell like a hammer. The gesture was weighty enough to drive a nail into a coffin, but its effect was deadlier. In less time than it took Kane to draw a breath, the one-eyed man cut Samuel’s throat from ear to ear.
    The boy’s eyes widened in disbelief that looked very much like betrayal. They were gazing straight at Kane as they dimmed and misted over. The man with the eye-patch held up Samuel’s body as if to display it for his master’s approval. Once it had twitched its last he let it fall to the frozen earth, where it turned the leaves around it red.
    Kane heard cries of horror that fell short of expressing his own. “Oh God,” Katherine wept, “my son...” Grief seemed to have separated her from William, who moaned “My boy, oh Samuel...” Edward attempted to pronounce a prayer while Meredith found nothing to say except, in worse than despair, Kane’s name. As Kane struggled to find some response, the one-eyed raider spared Samuel’s body a glance. “This was the only man here,” said the voice that occupied his mouth.
    He turned to stare at the Crowthorns with the same detachment that he had applied to cutting Samuel’s throat. “Take the marked one,” the unnatural voice said. “Kill the rest.”
    As the raiders guarding the family moved to obey, Katherine cried out to Kane. “Do something,” she