“Welcome back,” the Akkad-Dar said. “You almost didn’t survive.”
Linsha did not bother to answer. She swept her eyes over the tent again, and this time she saw Varia sitting on a crude perch near the Akkad-Dar’s black seat. A chain connected a band fastened around the owl’s leg to the perch, and her wings looked like they had been clipped. Varia sat hunched, her feathers fluffed out and her dark eyes vacant. This more than anything else stirred some emotion in Linsha’s numb mind. She frowned. The warm drink had had some surprising effects, and she realized her stomach was not churning any more and her head felt somewhat better. She pushed herself to a sitting position on the pallet. But that was as far as she could go. Her entire body felt as if it had been caught in an avalanche and beaten to a pulp with several thousand tons of rocks.
“What have you done to Varia?” Her voice came out in a croak.
“The same thing I have done to you. Cared for you. Kept you subdued. You are lucky I did not kill you both when I discovered you’d found a way to free the dragon. I had looked forward to killing him myself.”
Linsha swayed slightly in the effort to stay upright. “How long have you kept us like this?” she asked huskily.
He sat down in his chair and lounged back on the fur pads with all the arrogance of the Tarmak. His skin was scrubbed clean now, and his long hair was pulled back behind his head. A shadow of a beard darkened his jaw and outlined the ragged scar down his cheek. He wore a black tunic and pants, which Linsha found an improvement over the blue paint and linen kilt. There was no outward sign of his arrow wound.
“About four days. Long enough to crush the feeble attempt made by the tribes and clans of this land to stop us and to take the towns of Stone Rose and Willik. In a few days we will attack Duntol. They have no chance, but I am hoping they put up a fight.”
“Gods,” she moaned. “Leonidas should have killed you.”
“Thanks to the One God, he did not. Now, I have a proposition for you.” He poured more of the warm, sweet liquid into the cup and brought it to her. Kneeling, he offered it to her with gentleness and the grin she remembered from their time in Missing City. “Drink this. It will make you stronger.”
Linsha looked at him. “What is your proposition, Dark Knight?” she snarled.
The reminder of his erstwhile profession pushed the smile off his face. “I was a Dark Knight only long enough to learn dark mysticism and establish my relationship with Takhisis. After she sent me my Vision, I left the Knighthood and returned to the Isle of the Tarmaks. I am the Akkad-Dar.”
Linsha snorted her disdain. “You are a traitor, an assassin, and a Brute. They deserve you.”
He set the cup down beside her. Swift as a snake, he clamped a hand behind her head and pulled her against him. He kissed her long and hard, then let her fall back on the pallet, panting.
“Urudwek told me I should just take you,” he said, jumping to his feet. “But that is for whores. You have earned my admiration this past year. I would rather offer you a choice. Stay with me. Fight by my side. Bear the children of my new dynasty, and you will have my respect and the power of my name. You will be the empress of these Plains. Stay with me, and I will free your owl and allow your dragon friend to live. However, if you refuse me, I will keep the owl and send you back to the slave pens in Missing City. And when I find Crucible as a dragon, cat, or man, I will sacrifice him to the Dark Queen and present his skull to her in tribute.”
Linsha looked into his vivid blue eyes and thought that once, perhaps before the death of Iyesta, if Lanther had offered his hand to her as a lover and a companion, she might have taken it. Now it was too late. Lanther was dead to her, and this tall, blue-eyed man that stood before her was a stranger who offered her the wages of dishonor and prostitution. There was no decision to be made.
“There was a man before you,” she replied in an almost conversational tone, “who also tried to seduce me. He was a Dark Knight, too. An assassin and a treacherous spy who deceived me and tried to kill me.” She sighed. “He died on the side of a volcano. Where would you like to die?”
The Akkad-Dar’s eyes glinted with cold humor. “I’ll take that as a no.” He snapped an order to a guard just outside the tent and watched as a Tarmak warrior fastened shackles around Linsha’s ankles and wrists and chained her to the heavy center tent pole. “However, I will give you a little time to change your mind.”
He turned on his heel and strode from the tent into the darkness.
Four days later the city of Duntol fell to the Tarmak invaders. Because of its importance as a trade city in the northwest plains, the Tarmaks treated it and its population in a similar manner to Missing City. They massacred all of the members of the government and the city watch, they drove off or killed all the defenders, and they selected many young, able-bodied people to be used for slave labor. They set about repairing much of the damage caused by the battle and swiftly organized a military government to run the city.
There was little organized resistance against them. Most of the fighting men and centaurs of the Plains tribes and clans who survived the Battle of the Red Rose had fled into the desert, and those who had not come in time to fight found themselves without an army to join.
Duntollik was no longer a free realm.
Meanwhile, the Akkad-Dar worked on consolidating the Tarmaks’ hold of the vast realm he had helped conquer. He left a large contingent of warriors in Duntol to hold the city and made a slow march back across the northern stretch of the Run to pacify the region and accept the surrenders of any chiefs willing to save their people from attack. He led his warriors in several skirmishes against reluctant tribes and in a pitched battle against a large force of the Windwalker clan of centaurs. He left their bodies unburied to insure the word would spread across the Plains that the Tarmaks could not he defeated.
True to his word, the Akkad-Dar searched hard for Crucible, sending out trackers and patrols of brigands to hunt down the dragon. But the bronze had disappeared into the wilds of the vast Plains. No one knew of him. No one had seen him. Everyone believed he was dead. Everyone but Linsha. The Akkad-Dar tried several times to force her to talk about the dragon and where he might have gone, but in spite of his strongest mystic spells, she could not tell him. She simply did not know. The Akkad-Dar knew she liked the dragon, but there was something about the bronze that stirred up powerful emotions in Linsha that shut out many things he tried to use against her. He was both impressed and frustrated.
Finally, he put off his desire for revenge and set his mind on other goals. The eastern half of the Plains of Dust and most of the northern grasslands were his, a huge realm of desert, rivers, plains, and grass. But he only had perhaps ten thousand warriors to defend this land and take what more they could. Kharolis to the west was now free of the green dragon, Beryl, and the Silvanesti Forest might be something to consider. The Knights of Neraka were there now, but they did not need all of those woods. He smiled when he looked at his maps and considered the possibilities. To fulfill these grand plans, he would need more warriors. The emperor at home needed to be informed and more warriors sent. There was much to do before winter set in on the Plains.
The Akkad-Dar left most of his remaining warriors behind to control Duntollik and took only five fast-moving ekwul with him back to the Toranth River and the trail to Missing City. He also took the plunder of three towns and a dozen tribes, a large herd of horses, perhaps two hundred slaves captured from the Plains people, and Linsha.