THE YNGLING AND THE CIRCLE OF POWER by John Dalmas

She stared, her almond eyes wide, almost round.

“Sh-h-h!” he hissed, then pulled himself over the rail and stood. She moved only a short step back, still staring, not at his strange eyes now, but at all of him, huge, bull-muscled, half naked, and utterly foreign. She decided this was all a dream, strange and unreal.

He put a finger to his Tips, and parted the curtains. Heart thudding, she stepped aside to let him pass. Lo Pu-Pang still slept; Nils felt the young wife’s unbeliev­ing eyes as he leaned over the bailiff. He reached— clutched! His grip was inhumanly strong. His thumbs crushed the trachea and compressed the carotid as the fingers dug deeply into the man’s poorly toned neck mus­cles. The bailiffs eyes bulged open, and for just a mo­ment his body strained upward before collapsing back.

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Nils held his grip long enough to ensure the man’s death, then straightened and breathed a long sigh. He’d been holding his breath. He’d killed many men in fights, and some fighting men by stealth, but this was his first murder. The wife was beside him now with her candle, staring at the corpse’s gaping face. Then she set the can­dle on the bedside table, threw her arms around the Northman’s waist, pressed her face against him and wept silently.

There was no grief in it, only an upwelling of relief, an unburdening of repression, and she clung to Nils thus for a long minute, her tears wetting his chest. When she stopped, she looked up at him, and he could sense her arousal. She stood on tiptoes, and he bent till they kissed, long and passionately, her fingers pressing his lean flesh.

Then she led him to a couch beside a wall.

Afterward she fell asleep, and he left as she’d ex­pected. She’d already decided: When she awoke, if her husband … If this had been real, and no dream, she’d scream, then say she’d wakened to find him dead. No one could accuse her of such a murder; she hadn’t nearly the strength for it.

Nils, didn’t go down the rope. He left it where it hung, and silent as smoke, slippect down the inside stairs. In the entry hall, a single oil lamp burned on a bracket. The guard had been changed while Nils had been with Chen’s daughter, but the new guard already dozed in a chair by the door. Nils killed him with a knife thrust through the eye socket, deep into the brain, avoiding the slippery blood that followed slitting throats.

It seemed to him there’d be a direct connection be­tween the bailiffs residence and the guard barracks. There was—a set of double doors. Before trying them though, he unlatched the front entrance, a possible re­treat lane. Then, with sweat starting again, he opened the doors to the barracks wing, just a crack, and looked through.

On the other side, a hall led to another set of double

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doors, and on each side of the hall were two separate doors. He slipped inside, and very carefully opened one. A candle guttered in the small room, and a man lay sleeping, presumably an officer. A young woman, actually a girl, slept beside him. The man s breastplate, greaves, and plumed helmet hung on pees, and his sword belt on another. Without waking the gin, Nils killed him as he’d killed the entry guard, then left, closing the door behind him.

On the other side, a man lay in bed alone. He died the same death. In the third, two men lay sleeping to­gether, legs tangled. Very carefully he killed one, but something, some psychic thread, caused the other to stir, to mutter. The man’s lids fluttered, and the knife slashed deeply across his throat. Blood gushed, then slacked off, and Nils wiped his hands and knife on the bedding. The fourth room was empty. Its occupant was either on duty or had died across the hall.

Next Nils went to the double doors at the hall’s end, and opened one of them. Here as in the entry hall, a single oil lamp flickered, this one by the door. This was the barracks proper, with two rows of long grass-filled mattresses on the floor, about forty in all. He could smell the grass through the odor of lampflame and unwashed bodies. Some of the mattresses were unoccupied. At the head of each was a wicker chest, and on the wall, pegs with gear hanging. Between the rows was abundant room to muster and stand inspection.

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