Chapter 20

Terimak turned back to his Cavalry commander as he let go of the limp body of one of the captured scouts. “So these ‘demons’ that invaded our camp were little more than men painted to blend with the night.” His scorn was evident in his words and he savored the flinch he saw from the man. “And Mistrew is dead. The power apparently belonged to another. Regardless it seems Mistrew did indeed find a way to empower their weapons to be able to injure some of the normal demons.” He stopped considering before continuing, “No matter though. We will merely bring up the rest of the army. They can’t do more than delay us and you will see to it that no more of these infiltrators can get into the camp now won’t you. And set about rounding up the rest of the horses. We will continue south when the rest of my army reaches us. Now that I know we will face some partially trained apprentices, and these other demons we will prepare appropriately. Go. And send a messenger to the north for the army to begin moving southwards immediately.”

The commander fled from his lord’s wrath gratefully, glad he hadn’t shared the same fate as that lone insurgent had. He had been brought to Terimak, mostly dead, drained of blood from a surely deadly wound in the side. But he had screamed loudly enough to wake the dead when Terimak had realized that Mistrew truly was dead, and the attack had been lead by another. And the screams hadn’t stopped quickly either, for Terimak reveled in the pain. He had been upset when the man’s heart had given out quite suddenly, but it had lasted long enough to sate his anger.

The guards followed Terimak as he walked into his own tent and settled into his chair. The attackers had evaded him, some odd form of magics had prevented them from finding them, and even now he felt misgivings over the entire episode. Unraveling the strange shield had taken him some time and the weavings had been stronger than he would have expected, but of an unusual flavor. They seemed to lack the kind of pain he was used to finding in the spells and he had spent an inordinate amount of time looking for traps that just weren’t there. Who would weave a protective shield without giving it some teeth, something to injure those who contacted it. And who would leave such a shield without some trap laid into it to deal with the unwary and force your foe to be at least a little cautious. Either his foe was particularly stupid, the nature of the raid suggested against that, or they just didn’t think that way. That likelyhood seemed even more ridiculous than the fact that they were just magically stupid but it added to the feeling that he was dealing with something completely unknown. And that made him worried.