As the guards pulled the two men into the passageway inside the stable, Richard instinctively lifted his sword a few inches, making sure that it was clear in its scabbard, before letting it drop back.

As one of the guards turned to look at something, the prisoner with the long hair suddenly and savagely kicked the shin of the man holding him from behind. The guard cried out in pain and shock as he crumpled to the ground. The man violently broke the grip of the men holding his arms by twisting and flinging them away. Some of the nearby people were toppled to the ground. Guards pounced on the free man. In the scramble, several crashed to the ground bloodied and another tumbled back over a rail.

In an instant, the subdued mood in the stable changed as the entire place erupted in panic. Women screamed. Children, when their mothers screamed, shrieked. Older children started wailing. Men yelled. The guards cried out orders. Confusion and fear swept through the crowd.

The free enemy spy, a powerful man who knew how to handle adversaries and how to create a break for himself in a relatively confined space where they couldn't employ the numbers necessary to apply overwhelming force, sprang up with a roar.

He had Jamila's little girl by the hair.

Somehow, in the scramble, the man had managed to snatch a knife from someone and now had it pressed to the girl's throat. The child squealed in terror. Jamila dove for the girl, only to be side-kicked in the head. The powerful blow knocked her aside. Another guard on the ground at the other side also received a wicked kick to his head as he tried to use the opportunity to get close.

Richard was already methodically advancing, his attention focused on the threat.

"Everyone back!" the man growled at all the people close in all around him.

He tossed his head to flip his greasy hair back off his face. His eyes darted around at the people trying to back up out of the away. He still panted from the effort of the brief struggle. Sweat ran down his pockmarked face.

"Everyone get back or I'll slit her throat!"

The girl, a meaty fist holding her aloft by the hair, again shrieked in terror. He held her fast against his stomach. Her feet kicked in the air as she struggled in vain to escape.

"Let him go!" the man ordered the guards holding his partner. "Now! Or she dies!"

Richard was already lost in a rage unleashed. There would be no compromise, no negotiations, no quarter given.

He stood sideways, in a slight crouch, his right side to the man holding the girl, preventing him from seeing his sword. The man kept glancing at the guards to his left who were holding the other man. He wasn't paying any particular attention to Richard.

The burly man holding the wailing girl didn't know it, but in Richard's mind the deed had already been completed. In Richard's mind the man was already dead.

The fury of the magic from Richard's sword had been freed before his hand even found the hilt. When it did, the storm thundered unrestrained up through him, powering his muscles, joining his overwhelming lust to consummate the deadly thought.

In an instant, calm had been swept away by a terrible avalanche of need for action.

In that instant, there was nothing Richard wanted more than the man's blood. Nothing less would stop him. Conviction burned away all uncertainty. The Sword of Truth was a tool of the Seeker's intent, and that intent was now simple and clear. Now that Richard's hand was on the hilt of his sword, nothing else existed but his purpose, and his singular purpose was to bring death raining down on the man before him.

His vision tunneled toward his target. His entire life narrowed down to that singular lethal commitment.

The man with the knife had only to pull it across the tender veil of flesh and the girl would die. But that would take time, brief time to be sure, but time nonetheless because he would first have to decide to do it. At that moment, the man's life was tied to the life of the girl; if she died, his shield would lose its value. He would have to weigh that choice and decide on killing her before he resolved to it. That decision would take a fleeting glimmer of time.

Richard had already made his decision and had fully charged himself to the task. He now had a sliver of time that gave him an opportunity to alter the nature of the situation, to be the one to control the outcome. He would not let that small slip of time escape him.

But even that no longer mattered to him.

Now, powered by lethal rage, both the sword's and his own, he wanted the man's blood. Nothing else would satisfy him, nothing else would stop him, he would accept nothing less.

Richard twisted away from the threat, putting the back of his shoulders to the man with the girl, feigning that he was turning away, that he was backing off as the man had commanded. In so doing, Richard knew that, with so many things pulling for his attention, the man would discount Richard and direct his concern to the more obvious threat of the men to his sides and back.

With his fist tightly gripping the wire wound hilt of his sword, Richard pulled a breath. The world around him seemed to go silent and still.

As he reached the apex of his backward twist, he paused.

Richard felt his heart begin a beat.

With all his power, as people stood frozen, as the man with the knife stood at the brink of murder, as the girl's shrill scream drew out into a wire-thin sound filling the empty void in time, Richard unleashed himself in an explosive movement.

With all his strength he uncoiled. His blade erupted from its sheath fully charged not only with a wrath of its own but with Richard's deadly resolve.

At the same time as the Sword of Truth rang with the unique sound of its liberation, Richard released a cry of fury. As he spun, he emptied all his rage into that roar. With every ounce of effort he had, he drove the blade around with as much speed and power as he could put behind it.

In a crystal-clear instant in time, Richard's vision focused on the man with the knife standing rigid with surprise. Into that void in time Richard poured all his effort, all his muscle, all his wrath, all his need. That instant belonged to him alone and he used it to his singular purpose.

He could see the drops of sweat leave the man's face as his head snapped toward Richard. Yellow-orange light from the lanterns reflected in tiny points on those drops as they floated weightless in midair. Richard could count each point of light from each lantern in each individual droplet of sweat as his sword ever so slowly swept around. He could count each greasy strand of the man's hair as it whipped around, floating up into the air with the droplets.

Richard knew that eyes all around the stable were watching, that the eyes of the girl, too, were watching, but that made no difference. The only eyes that mattered to him were the dark eyes that at last met his glare.

In those black eyes Richard could see the initiation of thought. The tip of Richard's sword whistled through the dusty air. Lantern-light glinted off the razor sharp steel. He could see the blade mirrored in the man's dark eyes. Those eyes reflected the recognition of the full dimension of the threat.

Onward came the sword, sweeping like the crack of a whip toward those eyes, sweeping around toward the target Richard held in his own sight.

In that instant, the man completed his thought and made the decision to act. But even in the infinitesimal fragment of time that it took to come to the conclusion of that thought, the lightning arc of the blade closed most of the distance. Even as the man's decision was being made, flinching fear from Richard's battle cry caused the man to tense.

For that instant in time, the muscles of the man's arms paused as fear fought intent.