The Sword and the Sorcerer by Norman Winski Read Free Book Online

lunged at him and wrestled him to the ground.
    “You tyrant! You scum! You—” He stopped reaching for Cromwell’s throat at the flash of a dagger in Quade’s hand.
    “Die, Richard!”
    “Not yet!” Cromwell screamed.
    But Quade’s four inches of blade was already plunging through Richard’s throat with the ease of a knife going through butter.
    Richard toppled off Cromwell’s chest and fell to the ground, a fountain of blood gushing from his neck.
    Cromwell jumped to his feet and violently shook Quade. “Jackass! You killed him too soon! I had plans for him!”
    “Cromwell—look!”
    It was Malcolm, tilting his chin in the direction of Xusia, who dragged his bent figure towards them. Cromwell released Quade’s shoulders, used one booted foot to roll the lifeless body of Richard over the edge of the cliff, and faced the exhausted sorcerer.
    In his voluminous black robes and cowl Xusia’s wasted form seemed lost. And the sluggish movements of his whole being reaffirmed how debilitating his work in Cromwell’s behalf had been. Even the gleaming intensity of his reptilian eyes had faded, leaving opaque orbs, swiveling laboriously.
    Cromwell vibrated with grisly excitement. The time to scotch the snake was when he was weak, not when he was in full striking force.
    “Thou hast sent for me?”
    Xusia’s voice was funereal, hoarse, in keeping with his deathlike appearance.
    “Behold our hero!” Cromwell mocked.
    “Get to the point, king! I’m weary from labors in your behalf!”
    Swiftly and stealthily was the way to catapult this half-human, half-ghoulish creature into eternity. Using his cloak to conceal the action, Cromwell deftly unsheathed his dagger and held it hidden at his side.
    “Weary you are, sorcerer? Then you should rest—forever!”
    Bemused and befogged with tiredness, Xusia did not see the knife but felt it ripping open his belly. “Oh treachery most foul!” he shrieked, reeling backwards as he tried to clamp the eruption of blood with both hands over the wound. Before he could cry out again the scoundrel Quade drew his sword and sliced him across the back and chest. Dizziness blinded him but he felt the cruel shove and kick from someone and a darkness darker than the darkest night enveloped him as he careened headlong over the cliff.
    Cromwell, Quade and Malcolm stood watching Xusia soar downward until he hit the ground, hundreds of feet below. Surely every bone in his body must have been broken upon impact.
    Cromwell looked over his shoulder at the fading Klaws. “Several of you fetch the sorcerer’s body below!”
    The cadre of soldiers heard his booming command and immediately started running down a twisting path that led to the bottom of the cliff.
    “Well, that’s that,” Quade said, sorry to have lost so potent a weapon as Xusia.
    “Not quite,” Cromwell hissed, pushing the general also over the cliff. Quade’s trailing scream sounded like a falling meteorite.
    “He was a coarse man,” said Malcolm.
    “His breath always bothered me,” Cromwell quipped. “But his willfulness and covetous looks at my crown bothered me even more.”
    The Klaws who had been ordered to recover Xusia’s smashed body used the vulture hovering in the sky as a beacon to where the sorcerer lay.
    “We should have brought a shovel and bag,” one of the soldiers remarked. “Surely after that fall the sorcerer will be more mush than solid.”
    “Look!” Another Klaw pointed to the vulture they had been following and who was now flying away from the site where they estimated Xusia lay. “First time I ever saw one of those scavengers fly away from a waiting dinner.”
    When the Klaws arrived at the spot where they expected to see the repulsive remains of Xusia they froze in their tracks.
    The sorcerer was gone.
    In the clean white sand was a bloody outline of where a man had recently lain—but there was no sign of Xusia anywhere. Nor were there any footprints to indicate that someone had