Bastion of Darkness by R. A. Salvatore Read Free Book Online Page B

motion—a single, fluid movement that turned him about and brought his legs over the lip of the rocky jut, then had him sliding, sliding, to theend of his balance and dropping fast to the stone, drawing his sword as he descended, and landing lightly right beside the sentry.
    The talon gasped, then gasped again as Bryan’s sword plunged through its chest.
    The young warrior spun about, slashing as he went, gashing hard and deep across the sloped forehead of the second as it tried to rise. He leaped to the side, stabbing hard and repeatedly on the third, until movement from the stubborn second forced his attention once more.
    The talon, blood pouring over its face, was up in a crouch, bringing its spiked club to a ready, defensive position.
    Bryan thrust high, thrust low, then launched his sword into a series of graceful, tantalizing sweeps, left to right, right to left, and back again, and again. Once or twice, the club got in the way to parry, but only a slight deflection that hardly disrupted the graceful dance of Bryan of Corning. He came ahead suddenly, breaking his momentum and altering the angle in midswing, stabbing wickedly, but the talon, no novice to battle, turned and blocked with the club. On came Bryan, and away backed the talon, matching him stride for stride.
    “Yous will find no holes, human,” the wretch taunted, as an evil yellow smile, one of pointed, broken teeth, widened on its face. “Garink’s friends wake.”
    Bryan leaped forward, then stopped, then came on again, sword jabbing hard. That talon, Garink, was too far from Bryan for the thrust to score a hit, but Bryan understood that well, and understood, too—though the talon apparently did not—that the backing creature had retreated just a bit too far. The talon countered the first thrust by skipping back, smile widening, even offering a taunting laugh.
    “Garink’s friends wake,” it said again, laughinglouder and then skipping back again, Bryan’s second thrust falling harmlessly short.
    Or not. For the talon’s continuing laugh shifted suddenly to a scream of the sheerest horror as the creature slipped off the edge of the outcropping and plummeted and tumbled away into the darkness.
    Bryan rushed back to the fire to meet the fourth of the group as it groggily staggered to its feet.
    “Duh?” it asked when it wiped the sleep from its eyes and noted that this was no talon but a human standing before it.
    Bryan grabbed the creature by its scraggly hair, yanked its head back, lifting the chin, presenting a target that his sword tip was fast to find. He retracted the blade quickly, its work complete, then quick-stepped across the flat stone, dying talon in tow, and with a powerful twist of his slender frame—a movement strengthened by the recollection of Rhiannon’s slumping shoulders—heaved it from the ledge.
    That left only one, and Bryan shook his head as he regarded it, sleeping soundly, undisturbed though its four companions were all dead about it. He killed it with a single stroke, then rolled it, and the remaining two, from the ledge. Then he sat down at the fire to chase the nighttime chill from his bones. As he rocked quietly, basking in the heat, letting it sink into cold skin and chilled bones, the thought occurred to him that he shouldn’t have so quickly disposed of the bodies, that he should have taken something, their ears perhaps, to prove to Rhiannon that the task had been completed.
    “Rhiannon,” the young man whispered into the dancing flames, picturing her asleep where he had left her, so soft and so beautiful.
    He fell asleep with that not-unpleasant image in his mind.
    “Bryan.”
    The word came from far away, from the depths of his dream, he believed. The whisper of his lover—not a call to him, but rather, just the reciting of his name, the acknowledgment of him as the other half of a love that completed them both.
    “Bryan,” Rhiannon said again, more insistently, giving the grinning half-elf a