Read Blood of the Redd Guard - Part One for Free Online

him and he’d thought about what it would take to force his way in. Even ten of the famous Redd Guard would fall if they had too many soldiers to fight.
    Ten men. That was all that had stood between him and the weapons his people needed to fight the Hunwei when they returned. Once he’d cut down those men, he could hold the Portal and deal with the other Redd Guard as they came at him.
    He’d have to ramp up his recruiting. There were less than fifty men that Helam would trust to that particular task today. He’d want at least two hundred. As near as he could figure there were about one hundred in the Redd Guard. Two hundred would give him the ability to swarm them.
    Recruiting that many men was a tall order. Each man had to be vetted and tried. He had considered more than four hundred men to get to the ones he’d already recruited and sworn to his cause. If he waited for Adar Rahid to pass the Rarbon Council’s ridiculous tests in order to become Ghar and finally gain access, it would be too late.
    “Sir, there’s something else. I had to lock up a guard.”
    This caught Helam’s attention. “Why?”
    Briggs looked away. “Your wife. The guard overheard her…” He trailed off and Helam didn’t need to hear the rest. Elaire seemed to think it was funny sometimes to talk about the Kopal as if they weren’t a hidden conspiracy. “You must do something about her. If word of who she is gets around… Bloody Melyah! I don’t like to think about it.”
    “I manage my personal affairs. I don’t need help.” If the brash actions of Helam’s wife were any indication, the Kopal believed that the Hunwei were close to returning. His wife wasn’t alone in the uptick of her activity; other people for whom Helam knew with a certainty were Kopal had become far more active in the last year. Sometimes at night, Helam would lay awake, fear keeping him from sleeping. What if he didn’t get into the Rarbon Portal in time? What if his wife killed him in his sleep because an order had come down from one of her superiors? It had been years since they’d shared a room but Elaire refused to allow any of his personal guards into the house and Helam had been reluctant to argue the point.
    As much as he hated to admit it, there was a certain benefit to having discovered that his wife was a member of the Kopal. He would never know what it was that had caused her to join a group that believed the Hunwei would bring with them salvation. She hadn’t revealed much about them and was becoming bolder in her threats. Several months back he had considered having his wife followed, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had focused on the master archivist instead , but was beginning to rethink that decision.
    While things had never been worse between him and his wife, the high level of tension in their marriage combined with her increasing unexplained disappearances made him see something in the shadows wherever he turned. He had wondered on multiple occasions if the Kopal had some way of knowing that the Hunwei were about to return.
    If the Hunwei were close, then he might have to move sooner than he’d planned. The Rarbon Portal, even though Helam and his scribes hadn’t been able to pinpoint what was inside, was the best hope they had of being able to defend themselves against the Hunwei and their formidable technology when they came.
    It was the utter height of insanity that the council hadn’t already let a Rahid open the portal, but since they hadn’t and it didn’t look like it would happen soon—the challenges Adar was up against would take years for him to pass—Helam had long ago made plans to go around the system.
    Most of his plans were still in motion, but their outcomes were becoming less certain with every meddlesome act of Adar. Helam was confident that if his original master plan had played out that he would have been on track to rid Rarbon of Abel Rahid and his son Adar, along with the hegemony associated with