The Ruby Knight

himself and swam down head-first. After a painfully long minute, he came up again. It was not a crown he held in his hand, though, but a brown-stained human skull. He swam to the raft and laid the skull up on the logs. Sparhawk squinted up at the sun and swore. Then he followed Berit to the raft. He hauled himself up on the logs. ‘That’s it,’ he called to Kalten, whose head had just popped up out of the water. ‘We can’t stay here any longer. Gather up the others, and let’s get back to shore.’
    When they reached the shore, the sunburned Ulath curiously examined the skull. ‘Seems awfully long and narrow for some reason,’ he said.
    ‘That’s because he was a Zemoch,’ Sephrenia told him.
    ‘Did he drown?’ Berit asked.
    Ulath scraped some of the mud off the skull and then poked one finger into an aperture in the left temple. ‘Not with this hole in the side of his head, he didn’t.’ He went down to the lake-shore and sloshed the skull around in the water to rinse centuries of accumulated mud out of it. Then he brought it back and shook it. Something rattled inside. The big Thalesian laid it on the mounded-up stones of the grave of the Earl of Heid, took up a rock and cracked the skull open as casually as a man might crack a walnut. Then he picked something up out of the fragments. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘Somebody put an arrow in his brain-pan, probably from shore.’ He handed the rusty arrowhead to Tynian. ‘Do you recognize it?’
    ‘It’s Deiran forging,’ Tynian said after examining it.
    Sparhawk thought back for a moment. ‘Ghasek’s account said that Alcione Knights from Deira came along and wiped out the Zemochs who’d been pursuing the Earl of Heid. We can be fairly certain that the Zemochs saw the Earl throw the crown into the lake. They’d have gone out after it, wouldn’t they? – and in the exact spot where it hit the water. Now we find this one with a Deiran arrow in his head. It’s not too hard to reconstruct what happened. Berit, can you pinpoint the precise spot where you found the skull?’
    ‘To within a few feet, Sir Sparhawk. I was taking bearings on things along the shore. It was straight out from that dead snag over there and about thirty feet out into the lake.’
    ‘That’s it, then,’ Sparhawk said exultantly. ‘The Zemochs were diving after the crown, and the Alciones came along and raked them with arrows from shore. That skull was probably lying no more than a few yards from Bhelliom.’
    ‘We know where it is now,’ Sephrenia said. ‘We’ll come back for it later.’
    ‘But -’
    ‘We must leave immediately, Sparhawk, and it would be far too dangerous to have Bhelliom in our possession with the Seeker right behind us.’
    Grudgingly, Sparhawk had to admit that she was probably right. ‘All right, then,’ he said in a disappointed tone, ‘let’s break down the camp and get out of here. We’ll wear mail instead of armour so we won’t be so conspicuous. Ulath, push that raft back out into the lake. We’ll wipe out any traces that we’ve been here and ride on up to Venne.’
    It took them about half an hour, and then they moved out. They rode north along the lake, moving at a gallop. As usual, Berit rode to the rear, watching for signs of pursuit.
    Sparhawk was melancholy. Somehow it seemed that for weeks he had been trying to run in soft sand. No matter how close he got to the one thing which would save his queen, something always seemed to interfere, to force him away from the goal. He began to have darkly superstitious feelings. Sparhawk was an Elene and a Church Knight. He was at least nominally committed to the Elene faith and its rigid rejection of anything remotely related to what the Church called ‘heathenism’. Sparhawk had been abroad in the world too long, however, and seen far too many things to accept the dictates of his Church at face value. He realized that in many ways he hung suspended between absolute faith and total scepticism. Something somewhere was desperately trying to keep him away from Bhelliom, and he was fairly certain he knew Who it was – but why would Azash bear such enmity towards the young queen of Elenia? Sparhawk grimly began to think of armies and invasions. If Ehlana died, he vowed to himself that he would obliterate Zemoch and leave Azash weeping alone in the ruins without one single human to worship Him.
    They reached the city of Venne not long after noon of the following day and returned