The faces of the six knights went flat at his words. As one man they drew their swords and spread out, moving with raised shields toward Mandorallen. There were gasps and cries of alarm as the nobles and their ladies scrambled out of the way.

"What treason is this?" Mandorallen demanded of them. "Are ye so enamored of this Murgo and his gold that ye will draw weapons in the king's presence in open defiance of the law's prohibitions? Put up your swords."

But they ignored his words and continued their grim advance.

"Defend thyself, Sir Mandorallen," Korodullin urged, half rising from his throne. "I free thee of the law's constraint."

Barak, however, had already begun to move. Noting that Mandorallen had not carried his shield into the throne room, the red-bearded man jerked an enormous two-handed broadsword down from the array of banners and weapons at one side of the dais. "Mandorallen!" he shouted and with a great heave he slid the huge blade skittering and bouncing across the stone floor toward the knight's feet. Mandorallen stopped the sliding weapon with one mailed foot, stooped, and picked it up.

The approaching knights looked a bit less confident as Mandorallen lifted the six-foot blade with both hands.

Barak, grinning hugely, drew his sword from one hip and his war axe from the other. Hettar, his drawn sabre held low, was circling the clumsy knights on catlike feet. Without thinking, Garion reached for his own sword, but Mister Wolf's hand closed on his wrist. "You stay out of it," the old man told him and pulled him clear of the impending fight.

Mandorallen's first blow crashed against a quickly raised shield, shattering the arm of a knight with a crimson surcoat over his armor and hurling him into a clattering heap ten feet away. Barak parried a sword stroke from a burly knight with his axe and battered at the man's raised shield with his own heavy sword. Hettar toyed expertly with a knight in green-enameled armor, easily avoiding his opponent's awkward strokes and flicking the point of his sabre at the man's visored face.

The steely ring of sword on sword echoed through Korodullin's throne room, and showers of sparks cascaded from the clash of edge against edge. With huge blows, Mandorallen smashed at a second man. A vast sweep of his two-handed sword went under the knight's shield, and the man shrieked as the great blade bit through his armor and into his side. Then he fell with blood spouting from the sheared-in gash that reached halfway through his body.

Barak, with a deft backswing of his war axe, caved in the side of the burly knight's helmet, and the knight half spun and fell to the floor. Hettar feinted a quick move, then drove his sabre point through a slot in the green-armored knight's visor. The stricken knight stiffened as the sabre ran into his brain.