Demon Lord VI - Son of Chaos Read Online Free

had inflicted
upon others and know his crime before he died. That he would not
did not spark the rage in her that it should have, and again she
blamed his influence for stripping her of her rightful hatred of
him and all his kind.
    Jonar arrived
with his little bag of tricks and took out the syringe of amber
poison. Nikira averted her eyes as he entered the shredder room,
wanting to leave before he administered the fatal injection. It was
barbaric, she told herself, that was why it sickened her so. The
dra’voren was a living person, a human being, even if he was a
depraved and evil creature who deserved death. Only the fact that
he was a dra’voren made her force herself to condone what was to
happen to him.

 
     
    Chapter Two
     
    Intervention
     
    Crouched in
the Channel, Tryne watched the three men enter the metal room, one
approaching the tar’merin with a vial of poison. Cloaking himself,
he stepped out and crept up behind the man, who stopped beside the
Demon Lord, the vial of poison held loosely at his side. Seizing
the opportunity, Tryne leant forward and snatched the vial from the
man’s hand, turned and stepped back into the Channel as bedlam
erupted behind him.
     
     
    Nikira jumped
up as Jonar bellowed in alarm and sprinted for the door, the two
soldiers close behind him.
    “ Stunner! Now!” Jonar shouted as he leapt through the
doorway.
    Enyo tapped
the control panel as the shredder room door slid shut, and the
floor shook with another dull thud. Jonar ran to the observation
window and peered through it, frowning. Nikira joined him, but
apart from the dra’voren, the shredder chamber was empty.
    “ What is it?”
    “ There’s something in there!”
    “ What?”
    “ I don’t know. Something invisible!”
    Nikira glanced
around the shredder room again. “If there was, it would have become
visible when the stunner hit it.”
    “ Well clearly it didn’t. Unless it was the
dra’voren.”
    “ He’s unconscious.”
    “ We don’t know what he can do. He might -”
    “ What happened?” she interrupted.
    “ Something took the syringe right out of my hand.”
    Nikira turned
to Enyo. “Activate the shredder. If there’s something in there that
can remain invisible even when it’s stunned, the shredder will
destroy it.”
    Enyo looked at
the scanner screen. “But there’s nothing on the scanner, Commander,
and the lodestones are active.”
    “ Perhaps it’s something that can cloak the dark power too,”
Jonar muttered.
    “ And that the lodestones can’t drain? If that’s the case, we’re
in big trouble.”
    “ A dra’voren can only be drained once his form has been
stripped away,” Nikira pointed out.
    Enyo signalled
to his contechs, who turned to their consoles. The oscillating
light guns around the shredder room spun, their tips glowing as
they warmed up, then blue fire strafed the air, intensifying until
Nikira was forced to look away. The flickering brilliance continued
for several minutes, and when it stopped, Nikira studied the
shredder room again. The dra’voren remained unharmed, but the grey
trousers he wore were tattered and smouldering.
    She turned to
Jonar. “There’s nothing there.”
    “ There was. It must have left after it took the
syringe.”
    “ If it was a dra’voren, why didn’t the scanners detect it, and
why didn’t the stunner work on it?”
    Jonar threw up
his hands. “I don’t know! I’m a medtech, not a contech!”
    Nikira turned
to Enyo, who shrugged. “It must have left the room before the
stunner was activated, but I don’t know why the scanners didn’t
pick it up. A dra’voren should have set off all the alarms, like
that one did.”
    “ You’d better check your equipment then.” Nikira leant on the
sill of the observation window. “If we’ve got another dra’voren
loose in the ship, our only hope of destroying it is to lure it in
there and shred it. But I find that hard to believe, because if
there was, it would have started killing