Excerpt: The Red-Eyed Knight: a story of blindness in light

Despite having a larger population than about half the towns in the country, the Wolves' Den was not a place you would find on a map of Cikinjeros. If you looked at a map, its basic location would be covered by a vast expanse of desert, with maybe a few scrawled skulls to symbolize the danger of the area.

Of course, just because the town wasn't officially recognized as being real didn't mean people had never heard of it. When asked of a list of the major cities in the country, any normal citizen of Cikinjeros would include Wolves' Den. After all, it was the main source of cheap labor to most of the country, and was one of the few places in the world where one could buy enchanted goods. Despite this, very few citizens who had been to Wolves' Den didn't call the town home. If people from Wolves' Den had goods or services for people in the outside world, then they snuck over to the outside world, and if they didn't then the people in the outside world found substitutes from elsewhere.

Very few outsiders went into the Wolves' Den, and absolutely no one went there by trekking across the desert; there were secret tunnels for that purpose.

Yet there was one man walking across the desert in that direction. And cursing under his breath.

Wolves' Den was created about twenty-five years before when a few fugitives who were wanted by the board escaped into the desert, found a rocky cliff and managed to build themselves some houses in the cliff while the knights chasing them went back to Williamton to raise an army to assist them in the chase. Then one of them, who had apparently understood some amount of rudimentary magic, had cast an enchantment over the desert.

By the time those knights had arrived at the desert, their army at their heels, it was pouring rain. This was odd for a desert but not unheard of, so they set up camp and decided to wait out the rain before heading in there.

Two weeks later, the knights gave up and went back to Williamton. The rain had not let up since.

The most important thing that any criminal of Cikinjeros could know about the knights of his country was that they were lazy. They were fine with keeping the peace and the like, but the second too much work was involved they got a bit spotty at their job. A knight wasn't going to go walk across a vast expanse of so much sandy gloop just to catch a few guys who weren't really doing all that much harm out in the middle of nowhere if he didn't have to.

But this knight did have to. Those were the orders he was given.

The board was incredibly clever with the orders they gave their knights. They seemed to be overly paranoid that some knight might get too smart or be too good and rise too high in the ranks, and they couldn't afford to have any underling who could somehow dethrone them. They were always sending missions to knights for them to complete, but they had a list of impossible tasks ready to give to knights they wanted to get rid of.

Sir Christopher had already been given two such tasks, and had succeeded in completing both of them. Now he was in the middle of the desert, trying to tug his right leg out of the soaking sands, getting ready to take on his third one. In fact, he hadn't yet actually been given a mission that wasn't a thinly veiled attempt to kill him. The first job he'd ever been was to kill a dragon that had been attacking a small town to the south, and he'd barely accomplished that one. After that, he'd been sent to kill the evil lord Mordax - he may have succeeded at that one as well, but he still had nightmares about it some nights. Still, he now had Mordax's old sword because of it - a beautiful five-foot long blade he'd lovingly dubbed Anguispira.

This latest mission promised to be about as enjoyable as those last two. With a final, exhausting tug he liberated his foot from the muck and set off on his way again. He dug the paper with his orders from his soaking pants pocket.

The paper itself was dry, since he had taken the time to enchant it to repel water. He would have done the same to himself, but he really didn't want the board to find out he was capable of using magic yet. It read:

"Sir Christopher, Dragon Slayer and Vanquisher of Darkness,

"The venerable Emperor William the Third, acting monarch of Cikinjeros, our great country, has ordered for you to travel to the settlement of Wolves' Den located somewhere in the desert to the east of Williamton to do your duty to your country by ridding the entire area of all illegal activity, which has run rampant throughout the desert for at least three years and which, we have reason to believe, includes a secret force which wishes to instill rebellion throughout the country.

"We wish you good fortune on your journey and hope that you will use wisely our gift of one umbrella, of decent radius and height, and twelve hundred safrees, a sum of money that, we are sure you will agree, should be more than sufficient to sustain you for the journey.

"The Board."

Considering that over the last two days he was wading through the sand more often than he was walking atop it, Christopher had found the umbrella less than useful. A few times he had completely sunk through the sand and gone under, but thankfully a flick of his finger was enough to magically tug him out of the sinkhole, and as far as the board had to be concerned, the only reason he hadn't drowned yet was because he was incredibly lucky and had just missed all the sinkholes. Still, considering that the number of years that the letter admitted that Wolves' Den had existed was less than an eighth of the actual time, the umbrella being useful wasn't the most glaring of the lies in that letter.

No time to worry about that, though. Christopher had a job to do, and he'd better get through this rain as quickly as possible in order to do it.