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Witterquick was revived by heavy rain pelting down on New Valarak and the surrounding countryside. He lay where he had fallen, exhausted and barely able to prop himself up on one arm - until a scream from one of the children jarred him fully awake.
"Belizar!"
A woman hurried over, her clothes drenched with rain and her wet hair clinging to her face. "Was that my Nenyah screaming just then?" she asked anxiously. She and Witterquick hurried to where a little girl of not quite eight years old knelt under a tree, seemingly oblivious to the mud that was staining her trousers. The young Khemirite, Belizar, lay face-down on the ground and appeared equally oblivious to the child's attempts to rouse him.
"Belizar, get up," the girl pleaded, shaking him. "Please try - you'll get soaked if you stay there."
"Leoric, over here!" called Witterquick as he drew level with the little girl and realised something must be seriously wrong. "We've got to find out what's happened - looks like Belizar's been attacked. Take Nenyah inside and get her into some dry clothes, Alysonya," he said to the woman.
Alysonya sheltered her daughter as best she could as they hurried into New Valarak. Leoric and Witterquick watched them go before kneeling beside Belizar, while, all around them, people milled about in confusion. The last thing anyone remembered was the appearence of a wizard and what they could only assume were his acolytes, swiftly followed by the entire population of New Valarak suffering a mass blackout. And it appeared they had woken to a crisis, a situation more dire than any the city of New Valarak had yet experienced.
"What happened?" someone mumbled.
"I don't know, but it looks like the tournament's over," said another person.
"Wonder what made us all go to sleep like that . . ."
"And what's going on over there? Who - or what - are Leoric and Witterquick looking at?"
Leoric turned Belizar onto his back, prompting a sharp intake of breath from Witterquick when he saw that the Khemirite youth's throat had been cut, slit from left to right by a sharp blade. Belizar's eyes stared sightlessly at the two Spectral Knights and his mouth was slightly open, frozen into a final silent scream.
"He's dead! Leoric, who could have done such a thing?" Witterquick demanded, aghast at the idea that murder had been committed right under the Spectral Knights' noses.
Leoric stood up and spoke, trying to keep the grief and rage out of his voice - he too was appalled by what had happened, but he never let personal feelings get in the way of his duties as both the leader of the Spectral Knights and the governor of New Valarak. "I don't know, Witterquick - and we won't find out standing around here. I'll get Feryl to scout round in the Capture Chariot and . . ." A groan cut him short.
Gleering staggered over, holding a cloth to a deep cut on his head, the patch he wore over his blind eye knocked askew. Holding onto Leoric for support, he told the two knights of the horrific crime he had witnessed. "Stop them . . . no . . . don't! Belizar . . . hurt . . . leave him alone! The wizard . . . the wizard . . ." He could get no further.
Something resembling normality was restored in New Valarak, although no-one felt much like continuing with the tournament. Most of the inhabitants had returned home, leaving the Spectral Knights and the Council to try and unravel the mystery of Belizar's death and the attack on Gleering.
"I don't know about anyone else," Ectar began, "but I'm fairly sure that wizard and his band had something to do with it. Leoric, didn't Gleering say something about . . .?"
"Aye, it was the wizard all right!" cut in a young woman, pounding the table to emphasise her words. "I'll bet he magicked us as well."
"Magicked nothing!" retorted Ectar, rising in his seat and seething with anger at the interuption. "That was a powerful sleeping potion - I knew we couldn't trust that lot!"
Leoric hammered with his gavel; Ectar had a habit of turning meetings into shouting matches and this one was too important to waste time on things like that. "Enough!" he shouted above the ensuing argument. "Ectar, Allaryn - don't bandy wild accusations; either of you could be right, but we won't know until Gleering is ready to tell us what he saw. Which brings me to the next point - what did they want?"
"Not our Power Staffs, that's certain," said Witterquick, unable to think of anything else that might of interest to a wizard. "I checked - they're all in the armoury."
Leoric nodded to acknowledge this statement. "All right, then - if it wasn't our Power Staffs, what was it?"
"And another thing, Leoric," piped up the young woman, Allaryn. "Three of your knights seem to be missing . . ." Leoric scanned his followers - sure enough the chairs normally occupied by Galadria, Arzon and Feryl were empty, and it wasn't like any of the three not to turn up for a meeting. In all the confusion and panic over what had happened, he had forgotten to check that all the Spectral Knights were present. And if the disappearence of his three comrades was connected to what had happened to Belizar and Gleering . . .
"Your attention, please," he said, standing up and keeping his voice as level as he could. "Has anyone seen Galadria, Arzon and Feryl?" Everyone in the room shook their heads.
"Not since we all passed out," replied Ectar, who had been with Feryl when the young knight fainted. "We'd better find them - and fast. I'll go get the Lancer Cycle."
He got up to go, but Leoric pressed him back down, unwilling to risk losing another of his followers. "No, Ectar - we'll have to organise proper search parties. We don't even know if they're all together."
"Anyway," Leoric went on, resuming his seat and tapping a pile of papers on the table to straighten them out. "It seems we have a crisis on our hands and, until we can be sure those . . ." He was about to utter a word that betrayed how he really felt about the men who had caused so much trouble but thought better of it. " . . . people won't come back, I'm declaring a dusk-to-dawn curfew. In addition, no-one is to set foot outside the city walls unaccompanied until further notice."
Having dismissed the meeting, Leoric and Ectar went to check on Gleering, now recovering in the house which he and Fletchen had moved into only two weeks earlier, and question him about what had happened.
"Just before the wizard arrived, I felt a bit faint so I decided to go lie down for a while," Gleering explained. "But I'm fairly certain you were all drugged - every one of you. A sleep spell would have knocked all of you out at once. Anyway, I soon felt better and decided to head back outside - and that's when I saw what was happening . . ."
"What happened, Gleering?" asked Leoric, sitting beside the older man, an urgent tone in his voice. "What were they after?"
"Our young people," Gleering replied. "They - they took Arzon, Galadria, Fletchen . . ." He struggled to continue, to force himself to reveal the names of the other victims.
"Did they take anyone else?" asked Ectar who, like his leader, was trying not to let Glearing know how anxious he was. He had a feeling he knew what one of the names would be, but that feeling needed to be confirmed.
Gleering forced himself to continue. "Little Pallenne and Feryl too - they took all five," he told them, confirming what Ectar and Leoric knew on a gut level already. "They tried to take Belizar too, but he was still awake enough to try to escape. The wizard threw something - a metal spike on a stick - it got Belizar right in the throat. I went after them alone, but there were too many - I couldn't do anything against them . . . I'm sorry, Leoric."
Leoric stood by the window, fighting back tears of anguish, as he struggled to take in Gleering's news. Some deep instinct told him the young Spectral Knights had been deliberately targetted, but that failed to explain why Fletchen, the young woman he loved, and Pallenne, an innocent eleven-year-old girl with no connections to the Spectral Knights, had also been kidnapped. What was more, Pallenne was Alysonya's daughter - Alysonya and Nenyah would have to be informed.
The rain lashed at the window, making it impossible to see what was happening outside, its vicious onslaught mirroring the turmoil in Leoric's mind. Ectar had gone to talk things over with Witterquick and Cryotek, but Leoric wanted to be alone for a while to get over the initial shock of learning what had happened to his young comrades and plan what to do next.
"Leoric?" It was Alysonya, who had appeared in the doorway with Nenyah at her side. The woman was trying to be brave for the sake of her remaining daughter, but her tone of voice betrayed her true feelings. "I - I've been talking to Ectar and he says those . . . fiends have Pallenne. Please, tell me it's not true!"
Leoric shook his head slowly and with much reluctance. "I wish I could Alysonya, but I'm afraid they do," he told her.
"Oh - oh no!" Alysonya drew Nenyah close to her as if to shield her from the danger that now threatened her sister.
Seeing the stricken mother and child was all it took to rouse Leoric from the state of numbed shock he had been in since talking to Gleering. When he next spoke, his voice had assumed its usual authoritative tone but with an underlying desire to avenge the wrong that had been done.
"I will follow you where-ever you may go, Bogavus!" he vowed, realising at last who the wizard was. "And nothing will prevent me from rescuing my friends!"
Feryl woke to find himself lying on hard concrete, his head pounding as the effects of the sleeping potion wore off. He lay still for a moment before attempting to move, but, when he did, he quickly fell back with a jerk and a clanking of metal. He was chained.
He raised his head slowly and took stook of his surroundings. He was in what appeared to be an old warehouse - packing cases lined the far wall where they had been left after the Age of Technology ended - and there were others chained with him, all young people, three of whom he recognised.
"Galadria! Arzon! Fletchen! What . . .?"
"Silence, slave!" Brother Turel crossed the room in three strides and gave Feryl a hefty blow with his strap.
With that, Turel marched off, leaving Feryl dazed and struggling to work out what was going on. His immediate neighbour on the slave-chain was a fair-haired youth of around seventeen years old who, judging by the fact his clothes were not as ragged as those some of the prisoners were wearing, had only recently been captured himself. "That's Brother Turel," he explained in a hurried whisper. "He's among the worst of this lot, so try not to get on the wrong side of him. By the way, I'm Dagan - what's your name?"
"Feryl - I come from New Valarak."
"So you're one of the three knights Bogavus was after," remarked Dagan, who had overheard Bogarvis and his gang going over their plan the previous day. "This lot are a slaving band, but where they're taking us is beyond me."
"My friends and I have met Bogavus before," Arzon added, after casting a discreet eye round to make sure their captors couldn't hear. "About . . . seven months ago, I think it was." He was about to tell Dagan the story of how the Spectral Knights had been sent to recapture three rogue wizards and how Bogavus had, seemingly, passed an honesty test set by Merklynn when something interupted him.
Pallenne, chained to the other side of Dagan, began to stir. "Wh - where am I?" she mumbled, struggling to sit up. "What's going on? Who - who put these chains on me?"
"They did," replied Feryl as Bogavus and several of his followers approached the young captives.
The slavers removed the five new prisoners from the slave-chain and marched them outside with two slavers flanking each slave. Once they stood in the disused car-park, getting wetter by the second, Bogavus materialised in front of them and produced a sharp spike on a stick from under his robes.
"I am Bogavus and you are now my slaves!" he told them, pacing up and down as he spoke. "From this day forth, I will see to it that none of you ever knows freedom again; my little toy here will see to that if you try escaping. You wouldn't even know what hit you. Oh - and, in case you think you can dodge out of its path, there's a marksmanship spell on it so don't bother! Meanwhile, we are going to take a walk and you will not slow down or straggle. If you do, you'll get a taste of strap. Now, get moving!"
"Nutty as a fruitcake," Fletchen remarked under her breath. Unfortunately, she spoke a little louder than she intended and was rewarded with a sharp blow from Brother Gudd's strap.
"Keep your mouth shut!" he ordered. "When we want your opinion, we'll ask for it!"
"Yes," Brother Turel added. "Remember this - you're a slave now; if we say you're to do something, you better do it!"
The five prisoners were escorted back into the warehouse and reattached to the slave-chain, which Brother Gawonde had unfastened from the forklift truck. Bogavus paced the line, checking everything was secure, before giving the order to start marching.
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