closed her eyes, willing the feelings to remain, even as they drifted away. Such an experience, to fight on every level, to pit herself against someone in an evenly matched contest using every scrap of their very beings. So intimate, so sensual; attempting to destroy someone and they you, yet doing so by sharing each other utterly and completely in a way no mere lovers could hope to imagine. She wondered whether the other girl was feeling the same way.
The last remnants of the connection faded away and, with a snort of disappointment, Ceceline turned to the confused Clansmen who still stood, hesitant and wary at the entrance to her chamber. There were matters to attend to. She had a feeling she hadn’t seen the last of the shaman.
“Marzban.”
The warrior snapped to attention, his eyes darting guiltily to her face having been roaming her figure while her back was turned.
“Yes, milady?”
“Have the King meet me in the Council Chamber. I have a feeling we shall be calling upon the Huntsman and his Hounds.”
Chapter Five :
His calluses screamed at him like little pin-pricks of fire on the palms of his hands, yet he pushed the pain to one side, for he knew that to stop in his toil, even if just for a moment, would be to invite further punishment from the cruel whips of his masters.
His back still sang the tune of his previous encouragement.
The stone block before Jafari was dark grey as to be almost black, and perfectly smooth, its flat surfaces finely hewn by the myriad expert masons levied from across the kingdom in recent months. Yet this smoothness didn’t lessen its hideous weight, as Jafari’s – and those others to his sides – screaming leg muscles would testify as they heaved its bulk further up the ramp.
For the Beacon of Unity was well underway, the monolith looming already a hundred yards above the sharp rocks of the Isle of Storms, Jafari’s team of three only one of hundreds, thousands even, that swarmed the blighted rock, shifting by virtue of fear and willpower the building blocks that would form Invictus’ vision of hope.
Hope, pah; no such term applied here, in this place.
Another spray of ice-cold brine as the howling wind smashed yet another rearing wave against the side of the Isle, blasting hundreds of feet up, gnawing away at the unyielding rock as a dog with a bone. This cold, he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t get used to it. How he longed for the hot, desert haze of his homeland.
His people.
If he were not so dehydrated, perhaps he might shed yet another tear in their memory. Where were they now? He remembered the roaring cries of the Barbarian Hunters as they’d descended on his makeshift village, their Clan steeds swapped for camels to cope with the ever-shifting sands of the Western Deserts.
Such horrific, despicable luck, that their paths should cross; his people were nomadic, never settling for long in one place, roaming the dunes from oasis to oasis, hawking their wares and learning the news from the people they met. He’d heard of the King’s enterprise, the folly of the giant lighthouse of emerald and he knew that the slavers were abroad. But who could have expected them to find him, his family, his friends? The desert was vast, untamed, its ever changing dunes wracked with storms of sand that blotted the sun and turned you about in an instant.
What were the odds?
Yet some dark fortune had caused the Huntsmen to stumble on his family, in the dead of night, howling their battle-cries in that Barbaric Steppes tongue as they waved their scimitars in the air. They’d not gone down without a fight, of course; he remembered with grim
The last remnants of the connection faded away and, with a snort of disappointment, Ceceline turned to the confused Clansmen who still stood, hesitant and wary at the entrance to her chamber. There were matters to attend to. She had a feeling she hadn’t seen the last of the shaman.
“Marzban.”
The warrior snapped to attention, his eyes darting guiltily to her face having been roaming her figure while her back was turned.
“Yes, milady?”
“Have the King meet me in the Council Chamber. I have a feeling we shall be calling upon the Huntsman and his Hounds.”
Chapter Five :
His calluses screamed at him like little pin-pricks of fire on the palms of his hands, yet he pushed the pain to one side, for he knew that to stop in his toil, even if just for a moment, would be to invite further punishment from the cruel whips of his masters.
His back still sang the tune of his previous encouragement.
The stone block before Jafari was dark grey as to be almost black, and perfectly smooth, its flat surfaces finely hewn by the myriad expert masons levied from across the kingdom in recent months. Yet this smoothness didn’t lessen its hideous weight, as Jafari’s – and those others to his sides – screaming leg muscles would testify as they heaved its bulk further up the ramp.
For the Beacon of Unity was well underway, the monolith looming already a hundred yards above the sharp rocks of the Isle of Storms, Jafari’s team of three only one of hundreds, thousands even, that swarmed the blighted rock, shifting by virtue of fear and willpower the building blocks that would form Invictus’ vision of hope.
Hope, pah; no such term applied here, in this place.
Another spray of ice-cold brine as the howling wind smashed yet another rearing wave against the side of the Isle, blasting hundreds of feet up, gnawing away at the unyielding rock as a dog with a bone. This cold, he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t get used to it. How he longed for the hot, desert haze of his homeland.
His people.
If he were not so dehydrated, perhaps he might shed yet another tear in their memory. Where were they now? He remembered the roaring cries of the Barbarian Hunters as they’d descended on his makeshift village, their Clan steeds swapped for camels to cope with the ever-shifting sands of the Western Deserts.
Such horrific, despicable luck, that their paths should cross; his people were nomadic, never settling for long in one place, roaming the dunes from oasis to oasis, hawking their wares and learning the news from the people they met. He’d heard of the King’s enterprise, the folly of the giant lighthouse of emerald and he knew that the slavers were abroad. But who could have expected them to find him, his family, his friends? The desert was vast, untamed, its ever changing dunes wracked with storms of sand that blotted the sun and turned you about in an instant.
What were the odds?
Yet some dark fortune had caused the Huntsmen to stumble on his family, in the dead of night, howling their battle-cries in that Barbaric Steppes tongue as they waved their scimitars in the air. They’d not gone down without a fight, of course; he remembered with grim
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