‘Let’s get rid of this,’ Ulath said to Kurik, bending to pick up the shoulders of the dead officer. The two of them carried the body off to one side, and Tynian thoughtfully scraped the puddle of brains off the top step with one foot.

‘Do you people always chop your enemies to pieces like this?’ Talen asked Sparhawk as he dismounted and went over to help Sephrenia down from her horse.

Sparhawk shrugged. ‘Vanion wanted the soldiers to see what would happen to them if they offered any more resistance. Dismemberment is usually quite convincing.’

‘Must you?’ Sephrenia shuddered.

‘You’d better let us go in first, little mother,’ Sparhawk said as Vanion joined them with twenty knights. ‘There may be soldiers hiding in there.’

As it turned out, there were a few, but Vanion’s knights efficiently flushed them from their hiding places and took them to the main door and gave them pointed instructions to join their comrades in the stables.

The doors to the council chamber were unguarded, and Sparhawk opened the door and held it for Vanion.

Lycheas was cowering, slack-lipped and trembling behind the council table with the fat man in red, and Baron Harparin was desperately yanking on one of the bell-pulls. ‘You can’t come in here!’ Harparin said shrilly to Vanion in his high-pitched, effeminate voice. ‘I command you to leave at once on the authority of King Lycheas.’

Vanion looked at him coldly. Sparhawk knew that Vanion bore a towering contempt for the disgusting pederast. ‘This man irritates me,’ he said in a flat voice, pointing at Harparin. ‘Will someone please do something about him?’

Ulath strode around the table, his war-axe in his hands.

‘You wouldn’t dare!’ Harparin squealed, cringing back and still yanking futilely at the bell-pull. ‘I’m a member of the royal council. You wouldn’t dare do anything to me.’

Ulath did, in fact, dare. Harparin’s head bounced once and then rolled across the carpet to come to rest near the window. His mouth was agape, and his eyes were still bulging in horror. ‘Was that more or less what you had in mind, Lord Vanion?’ the big Thalesian asked politely.

‘Approximately, yes. Thank you, Sir Ulath.’

‘How about these other two?’ Ulath pointed his axe at Lycheas and the fat man.

‘Ah – not just yet, Sir Ulath.’ The Pandion Preceptor approached the council table carrying the case containing the swords of the knights who had fallen. ‘Now, Lycheas, where is the Earl of Lenda?’ he demanded.

Lycheas gaped at him.

‘Sir Ulath,’ Vanion said in a tone like ice.

Ulath grimly lifted his blood-stained axe.

‘No!’ Lycheas screamed. ‘Lenda’s confined down in the cellars. We didn’t hurt him at all, Lord Vanion. I swear to you that he’s –’