He backed away from the Throne Globe while the beady, sardonic eyes of the King Emperor regarded him. Huon’s prehensile tongue darted out to touch a jewel floating near the shrunken head and the milky fluid swirled, flashed with rainbow colours, then gradually turned black once more.

Meliadus wheeled and began the long march back to the gigantic doors, feeling that every eye behind the unmoving mantis masks watched him with malevolent humour.

When he had passed through the doors, he turned to the left and strode through the corridors of the twisted palace, seeking the apartments of the Countess Flana Mikosevaar of Kanbery, widow of Asrovak Mikosevaar, the Muskovian renegade who had once headed the Vulture Legion. Countess Flana not only was now titular head of the Vulture Legion, but also cousin to the King Emperorhis only surviving kin.

Chapter Two

Human Thoughts of

The Countess Flana

THE HERON MASK of spun gold lay on the lacquered table before her as she stared through the window, over the curling, crazy spires of the city of Londra, her pale, beautiful face full of sadness and confusion.

As she moved, the rich silks and jewels of her gown caught the light from the red sun. She went to a closet and opened it. There were the strange costumes she had kept since those two visitors had left her apartments so many days before. The disguises that Hawkmoon and D’Averc had used when posing as princes from Asiacommunista. Now she wondered where they wereparticularly D’Averc whom she knew loved her.

Flana, Countess of Kanbery, had had a dozen husbands and more lovers, had disposed of them in one way or another as a woman might dispose of a useless pair of stockings. She had never experienced love, never had the emotion known to most others, even the rulers of Granbretan.

But somehow D’Averc, that dandified renegade who claimed to be permanently ill, had aroused these feelings in her. Perhaps she had remained so remote heretofore because she was sane, while those surrounding her at court were not, because she was gentle and ca

pable of selfless love, whereas the lords of the Dark Empire understood nothing of such feelings. Perhaps D’Averc, gentle, subtle, sensitive, had awakened her from an apathy induced not by lack of soul, but by a greatness of soulsuch greatness that it could not bear to exist in the mad, selfish, perverse world of the Court of King Huon.

But now that the Countess Flana was awake, she could not ignore the horror of her surroundings, the despair she felt that her lover of a single night might never return, that he might even be already dead.

She had taken to her apartments, avoiding contact with the rest, but while this ruse afforded her some surcease from understanding of her circumstances, it only allowed her sorrow silence in which to grow.