4 City of Strife Read Online Free Page A

dwarf-forged blade. They grew rich and fat and extorted money even from the Kings of Men and eventually the kings turned against them and banished them. He said they still fight the Old Ones for money. And sometimes they even fight for the Old Ones when paid.”
    Kormak wondered at the way stories mutated as they travelled. He supposed it was inevitable the way merchants gossiped and bards exaggerated.
    “A wizard told me that the dragon was the sign of the Order of the Dawn, an organisation feared by all his kind. That they were implacable enemies of magic, hated mages like cats hate rats.”
    “You think I am one of these men, these wizard haters?”
    “You carry a very old sword. You have as many amulets as a wandering holy man. You look to be in your forties and you move like a man of twenty. And you have a lot of strange scars. What am I supposed to think?”
    He looked at her steadily. Anger twisted her face. “Are you going to deny any of this?”
    “Would it help if I did?”
    “I don’t know. I do know this though . . . five years ago terrible things were happening here and when you went they stopped as if somebody had pulled a lever. And now, today, the city is going to hell in a hand-basket and suddenly you are here again, out of nowhere, in my bed.”
    He put his arms around her. She seemed to want to say something more. “And?” he said as gently as he could.
    “And I am afraid . . .” She reached out and pulled him hungrily to her before he could say anything more.

Chapter Three

    IN THE MORNING, they went down to the kitchen. The cooks were already up. Several of them had been so for hours, baking. The smell of fresh bread reached Kormak’s nostrils and made his mouth water.
    Lila went into the pantry and produced a jug of milk, poured some into a bowl then went to another cupboard and put the bowl down. Kormak looked down. There was a small, very sick looking kitten in the basket. Its ear was torn and one of its eyes was milky. It meowed feebly, rolled over and started lapping the milk.
    Lila tickled it under the chin but it ignored her and looked at him beseechingly. “Typical,” Kormak said.
    “That’s right, you don’t like cats, do you?” Lila said. “I remember now.”
    Kormak shrugged. “I neither like nor dislike them.”
    “That’s what people say when they really don’t like them.”
    “You have an interesting approach to understanding people,” Kormak said.
    “There’s not so many about these days. They mostly seem to have vanished. Cats, kittens, all of them.”
    Kormak felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck. “Is that right?”
    “Storytellers in the market say they have all gone to the Moon for the winter. I don’t think so.”
    “Where do you think they have gone?”
    “Not the Moon.”
    One of the cooks looked up and said, “And not into any of my pies no matter what anyone says.”
    Lila went over to the man, clapped him on the shoulder and said, “No one is accusing you of anything.”
    The big doughy faced man smiled and then just as suddenly looked angry. “Somebody is killing them though.”
    “What?” Kormak asked.
    “For a couple of months there, every full moon, dead cats were showing up everywhere. Some were skinned. Some were skeletons. Some were found on middens. Some looked as if they were half eaten.”
    Lila nodded. “Bounce’s mother had just had a litter. Last full moon, they vanished. I found Bounce in a hole in the yard wall, mangled he was, bleeding, as if he had been in a fight, his fur all ripped and bloody. I thought he was going to die.”
    “He might well have,” said the cook. “If the mistress had not tended to him with her own hands.”
    “I felt sorry for him,” Lila said. “He lost his brothers and sisters and his mother all at the same time.”
    The cat was moving around now. Kormak could see that he was limping. He started feeling a certain sympathy for the battered little beast but he did not let it show on his