Book I of III: The Swords of the Sultan (46 page)

The second that he pulled his lips back from
the man’s neck, he felt incredibly powerful, once again—this time
Baltor had the power to remain in human form the entire time.

After concealing the body in the bushes, with
the speed of shadow, he ran toward the wall and leapt over to the
other side.

A man and a young girl happened to see him
land in the middle of the street, only a dozen feet away in the
very direction they were walking.

The man cried out as he stood protectively in
front the young girl, “Leave—leave me and my daughter alone! We
have no money if that’s what you want!”

Baltor replied, “I do not want your money or
anything else from you. Say nothing of what you just saw for I am a
phantom of your imagination. Go about your business.”

After a very short pause, the man still
answered nervously, “Ok. Jonish, come with me.”

“Yes, Popa,” the girl said with fright—they
departed away at a rather brisk pace.

As Baltor watched them disappear around the
next corner, he wondered for a moment if he might ever be a daddy
one day. But then the present hit him, and he realized that he must
find his wife first.

He combed out the seaport and soon located
the palace walls. After waiting for the right time, he leapt to the
top of the sixty-foot walls, and while standing on top of the wall,
he looked over to the other side.

There he observed a truly magnificent
two-story palace and gardens, but nothing even close to the one in
Pavelus. With but a willed thought, he literally flew across all of
the guards and landed on the deck of a balcony on the top
floor.

After Baltor looked into the interior of this
room from the balcony, he observed that this wasn’t a bedroom, yet
a huge royal banquet hall, containing more than two-dozen elongated
tables, all covered by red tablecloths heavily interwoven with
golden threads.

Seated around the tables were gold chairs
that had red velvet cushions upon the seats and backrests, and
hanging from the ceiling were more than a dozen gold chandeliers
that filled the cozy room with their lustrous lights.

All but one of the tables was empty—sitting
at this table was a group of ten nobles, six men and four women,
lightly eating away upon their dinners and socializing.

The rest of the room was empty, except for
two guards who stood by a set of large gold doors at the far end
about fifty feet away from his current position.

Without fear or caution, he walked straight
in, and boldly called out, “Any of you happen to know where
Princess Brishava is?”

At that question, the group all looked toward
the direction of the voice—with a lot of surprise and shock.
Strangely enough, none of the guards apparently had heard the
comment, nor seen Baltor’s bold entrance right in front of where
they stood.

An old bald man dressed in ridiculously rich
purple garments asked, “Who—who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter who I am. Any of you know
where she is?”

The obese man slowly stood and then said, “To
answer your question, no one knows where the princess is, nor have
they for over a month…

“Why—do you know where my betrothed is? Or
should I say was? Now you will answer my question, as I am the Duke
of Vispano!”

Baltor didn’t answer, but instead turned back
around to leave out the way he had come in … the balcony.

The duke also had begun to run that same
direction as fast as his fat old body possibly could, while
screaming, “Guards! We have an intruder! Get him and bring him
before me!”

Before they could even react, Baltor had
already flown across the grounds and over the entire height of the
wall. As he continued to fly out of the seaport, he could hear
guards trying to alert all of their other fellow guards, but he was
already long gone.

In fact, with his vampire speed, it took him
less than a minute to depart the perimeter of the seaport and
travel the southeastern road.

For the new few hours to pass, Baltor flew
the forty miles or back to the cave where his wife had been
kidnapped. However, he arrived back at the cave with a few more
hours to spare before the sun would rise over the eastern
horizon.

As he sat still in the dark and lonely cave,
his worries and frustrations increasingly began to get worse while
contemplating the fate of his beloved, especially for the fact that
her kidnappers could have gone any direction at all!

About thirty minutes later, his agonies
exploded into a fit of rage as he screamed, “Trendon Harrn! It is
I, Baltor! Come to me! Look at what you’ve made me! A worthless
creature by day, and a powerful creature at night, and only when
I’ve feasted on a human being!

“I could not even protect my wife, Brishava,
when she needed me the most! Come to me, damn you! You told me that
when the time was right, I would know when, where, and how to
find—”

He stopped in mid-sentence, as he saw that
brilliant prismatic light appear in the middle of the air.

This time, however, his eyes could handle the
intensity of the light as the portal opened up to its full size,
and without so much as a squint, he watched Trendon step through
it. Not unlike the sun whose indirect rays greatly hurt Baltor’s
eyes.

“Well there, young one,” Trendon said,
sounding sympathetic, “it appears that you have quite a dilemma on
your hands now, doesn’t it?” The portal shut behind him.

Baltor screamed with actual bloody tears
flowing out of his eyes, “Yes, I do!”

Trendon extended his arms in front of him,
and then slowly lowered them until they were by his sides. He then
soothingly said, “Shush there, young one, and listen
carefully.”

Trendon pointed one finger in the air. After
shaking it from side to side only once, he said, “Baltor, I am
going to assist you this one time, and that’s it. Next time, you
can beg, rant, or scream all you want, but you will entirely be on
your own. I will not help you again until I am sure that you are
fully ready to begin your training with me. Do you understand me
clearly? One time only.”

Baltor nodded, almost in shame.

After a nod, Trendon said, “Good. As you are
already aware, several members of a rather large caravan kidnapped
your princess. The caravan itself was heading east from Lasparus.
What you are not aware of is the fact that there are fifty-eight of
them to be exact. What this caravan does for a living is to travel
from town to town, stealing young and attractive girls, and then
selling them off at the next—basically, your run-of-the-mill slave
traders…

“It is quite fortunate for you that they do
not know who she is, or they would have altered their route
directly toward Pavelus and the Sultan. As I speak, they are camped
about eighty miles southeast of us within the desert, and have just
woken up to prepare for their journey today.

“Tomorrow night, take the path east. You
shall soon find that it veers off into two different directions,
one going northeast and the other going south. Take the southern
route, which shall lead you straight into the Sharia—”

Before he could continue, Baltor interrupted
like a little child, “But—but how am I supposed to find her in the
middle of such an enormous desert?”

Trendon shook his head and sighed, as he had
been about to forthright reveal that answer. Instead, the cryptic
bit of advice that Trendon had been given nearly ten thousand years
ago and now gave to Baltor was “Will it and you shall.”

Baltor was about to ask, “What the hell is
that supposed to mean?”

However, Trendon, with a snap of a finger,
had already disappeared into oblivion.

In the next moment, Baltor could feel that
the sun had arisen, and he fell instantly asleep.

Just after Baltor had awoken the next night,
and was about to exit the cave, he looked back around one last
time. For the very first time, he noticed that his wife had left
her backpack in the far right corner of the cave.

Therefore, he walked over, picked it up,
donned it, and then began to trek eastward, still with that speed
of shadow. As he shot through the night, he also began to think
long and deep. He first realized that the way he behaved last night
toward Trendon was rather childish, and he began to feel sorry for
it. He then began to think about his beloved wife, and of the
immense amount of love that he had for her, and that anyone else
probably would have reacted the same way.

The more that he meditated, the more memories
of his past victims began to surge through his consciousness, as
well. He saw the relationships and twisted love affairs that
Salmot, Big Bear, Briggs, Lydia, and of course, Vushna.

He also saw that even though each one of them
had their own unique share of tragedies when it came to losing
loved ones, they each had their own particular way, some were bad
and some were good, when it came to dealing with their losses.

His thoughtful conclusion to all of this
information in the end was, “Yes, I did act rather immature. But
that was not an unusual response from my part, either, especially
given my history.”

By the time he had come to this conclusion,
he had just entered the desert, and could see that the skies were
lightening. He pushed on for another fifty minutes, dug himself a
hole, and then completely covered himself with the sand.

The following night, after he had pulled
himself out of the ground, he asked himself, “Now how am I going to
‘will it and it shall’?”

As an idea popped into his head, he recalled
the entire world map with his physical eyes shut. In his mind’s
eye, he first saw the perimeters of the desert pitted up against
the mountains or the sea—he next shifted his focus upon the image
of Brishava.

A minute or so later, her image formed, and
he could see that she was sitting in a very large cage with a dozen
or so other women—it was sometime during the daylight hours.

A moment later, he saw two horses pulling
that cage at a decent pace through the desert. He next saw that
there were many other men, before and after the horse-drawn cage,
riding on horses themselves.

Still in the parameters of Baltor’s mind,
this entire image of the caravan began to shrink, until it had
shrunk into a dot upon the world map he had earlier conjured within
his mind—by now, they were already one-quarter the way through the
desert, and still going southeast.

Excited he knew her location, he hurriedly
ran in that direction with that speed that was slightly faster than
the fastest runner in the world could.

As he continued to travel, yet with nothing
else to do, he began to think more. His thoughts first reminisced
back to the time when he had first met this Trendon Harrn.

Specifically to the point in the conversation
when Trendon had informed, “As I have already explained, you must
use your wit and resources to help you overcome all your
weaknesses, and upon every level—even with the initial need to
feast upon human blood! Even in the beginning, be selective by
removing only the human vermin from the earth, or feasting upon the
blood of your enemies.

“Ultimately, in order for anyone to
understand the future, one must also learn from the past; in the
same way, in order to understand absolute good, one must also
understand absolute evil first. If that’s not enough of a hint,
then let me put it in a way that even you will understand—in order
to beat your enemy, you must first become that enemy!

“Now, since we’re talking about you, young
one, let me confirm that there are many obstacles in your past,
which prevent you from clearly seeing the potentials for your
future! But, the signs are also clearly there.”

Baltor thought aloud, “What parts of my past
could possibly be preventing me from seeing the future?”

He immediately began to think about his days
of youth, prior to his parents’ murders, which thoughts came to
dwell yet another of his Uncle Baltor’s exciting, bedtime tales.
This tale revolved around a very famous sea hero named Captain
Percos.

In it, a giant sea serpent hungrily erupts
from the bosoms of the sea, swims to a nearby river, locates a
nearby village, and slowly begins to stalk and eat the villagers at
night and on land.

The villagers, in response, send a large
hunting expedition to kill the serpent, but Percos becomes the only
survivor of the hunting expedition, as the surprisingly clever
serpent has taken out the rest of them, one by one.

During the first of many battles between
Percos and the serpent, Percos slightly wounds the creature with
his spear, and the serpent retreats back to the river. Percos does
not let it get away, but immediately takes a rowboat, and follows
the beast back out sea.

“The eleven seas” is what it ultimately
becomes, as Percos chases the creature all across the world;
meanwhile, he visits other towns, cities, nations, and cultures,
and even earns a galleon-class warship and crew that ultimately
destroys the sea serpent in the end of the tale.

The following day, just as eight-year-old
Baltor clamped a horseshoe down onto the anvil for his father, he
then informed his father that he wanted to become just like
Percos.

Instead of getting the congratulatory reply
as he expected, his father yelled at him, and said, “There are no
sea-serpents, there are no heroes; there is only reality. You and
your uncle need to get your head out of the clouds. And you, boy,
need to hold that horseshoe still right now!”

That memory faded, yet another one surfaced,
an earlier one. He remembered watching his parents arguing shortly
after Baltor had just turned seven.

This argument came about because his mother
had wanted to continue babying him, while his father insisted that
he was big and old enough to begin the family practice.