Kitabı oku: «Wrath of a Mad God»

• CHAPTER ONE •
Escape

MIRANDA SCREAMED.

The searing agony that seized her mind relented for the briefest moment, and in that instant she found what she had been seeking. The preponderance of her awareness was occupied with the battle of wills with her captors, but a tiny fragment – a disciplined fraction of her consciousness – had been readied. Over the days of interrogation and examination she had used every respite to partition off this one sliver of her intellect, to somehow overcome the blinding pain, and observe. During the last four encounters with the Dasati Deathpriests she had achieved that detachment and willed her body to withstand the pain. It was there, she knew, inflamed nerves protesting about the alien energies coursing across the surface of her mind, probing it, seeking insights into her very being, but she had learned to ignore physical pain centuries before. The mental assaults were more difficult, for they attacked the root of her power, the unique intelligence that made her a supreme magician on her home world.

These Dasati clerics lacked any pretence of subtlety. At first they had ripped open her thoughts like a bear pulling apart a tree stump looking for honey. A lesser mind would have been savaged beyond recovery on the first assault. After the third such onslaught, Miranda nearly had been reduced to idiocy. Still, she had fought back and knowing there was no victory if there was no survival, she had focused all her considerable talents first on endurance, then insight.

Her ability to shunt aside the terrible assault and focus on that tiny sliver of knowledge she had gained kept her sane. Her determination to overcome her captivity and return with that knowledge gave her purpose.

Now she feigned unconsciousness, a new ploy in her struggle with her captors. Unless they possessed finer skills than she had so far encountered, her charade was undetected: to them she appeared incapacitated. This counterfeit lack of awareness was her first successful conjuration since her captivity began. She risked just enough body awareness to ensure that her breathing was slow and shallow, even though she suspected the Deathpriests who studied her still knew too little about humans to understand what physical signs to observe. No, her struggle was in the mind, and there she would eventually triumph. She had learned more about her captors than they had about her, she was certain.

Individually the Dasati were no match for her, nor even for one of her more advanced students back home. She had no doubt without the snare concocted by Leso Varen to disorient her, she would have easily disposed of the two Deathpriests who had seized her. But Varen was a force to reckon with, a necromancer with centuries of experience, and she alone would be hard pressed to best him: three times one of his bodies had been killed that to her knowledge, by multiple foes and taken by surprise, but still he survived. Between Varen and the Deathpriests, she had been quickly overwhelmed.

Now she knew the Deathpriests for what they were, necromancers of a sort. Throughout her life, Miranda had chosen to ignore clerical magic, as was common for most magicians on Midkemia, as being some sort of manifestation of the gods’ powers. Now she regretted that oversight. Her husband Pug had been the only magician with whom she was familiar who had some insight into clerical magic, having made it a point to learn as much about it as he could, despite the tendency of the various orders to be secretive. He had learned a great deal about this darkest of magic because of his repeated encounters with the Pantathian Serpent Priests, a death cult with their own mad ambitions. He had confronted several attempts on their part to wreak havoc throughout the world. She had listened indifferently to several discussions on the subject, and now she wished she had paid closer attention.

Now, however she was learning by the minute; the Deathpriests were clumsy and imprecise in their investigation and often revealed as much about their own magical nature as they learned about hers. Their lack of subtlety worked in her favour.

She heard her captor leave, but kept her eyes closed as she slowly let her consciousness return to the upper levels of her mind, every instant clinging to the insight she had just achieved. Then clarity returned. And with it, pain. She fought back the urge to cry out, and used deep breathing and mental discipline to manage the agony.

She lay up on a slab of stone, but stone that had its own evil nature, a sense of energy alien to Miranda. Simply touching it was uncomfortable, and she was strapped to it without benefit of clothing. She was drenched in perspiration and nauseous. Her muscles were threatening to cramp and with her limbs restrained, the additional pain was unwelcome. She employed every trick at her disposal to control the urge, calm herself, and let the pain flow away.

For almost a week she had undergone the Dasati examination, enduring humiliation as well as pain, as they sought to learn as much about her and the human race as possible. She was secretly grateful for their heavy-handed approach for it provided her with two advantages: they had no experience with human guile and they vastly underestimated her.

She put aside her speculation on the Dasati, and turned her attention to escape. Once trapped by Leso Varen and the Deathpriests, she had quickly realized that her best course of action was to give her interrogators just enough truth to make credible everything said. Varen, his malignant consciousness currently inhabiting the body of the Tsurani magician Wyntakata, had not appeared since she had been taken, a fact for which she was grateful, as he would have given the Dasati a far greater advantage in dealing with her. She knew he had his own mad agenda and had only been in league with the Dasati for as long as it suited him, and cared nothing for the success of their insane ambitions, only for his own.

She opened her eyes. As she expected, her Dasati captors were gone. For an instant she had worried that one might have lingered quietly to observe her. Sometimes they spoke to her in a conversational manner as if chatting with a guest, at other times they subjected her to physical violence. There seemed little pattern or sense to their choices. She had been allowed to keep her powers at first, for the Deathpriests had been supremely confident and had wished to see the scope of her abilities. But on the fourth day of her captivity, she had lashed out at a Deathpriest with the full fury of her magic when he had presumed to touch her naked body. After that, they had reined in her powers with a spell that had frustrated every attempt at using her magic.

The screaming nerves of every inch of her body reminded her that they were still in torment. She took a long, deep breath and used all her skills to lessen the pain until she could ignore it.

Miranda took another deep breath, and tried to see if what she had just learned from her captors was true or merely grasping at vain hope. She forced her mind to work in a new fashion, applying a minor spell, saying it so softly there was barely any sound. And the pain slowly leached away! At last she had discovered what she had sought.

She closed her eyes, reclaiming the image she had gained while being tortured. She knew intuitively that she had found something critically important, but she was still uncertain of exactly what it was. For an instant she wished she could somehow communicate with Pug or his companion Nakor, for both had keen insights into the nature of magic, down to the very bedrock of the energies used by magicians – what Nakor insisting on calling ‘stuff’. She smiled slightly and took another deep breath. She would have laughed had she not been in so much discomfort.

Nakor would be delighted. Her newfound intelligence on this realm of the Dasati was something he would take great pleasure in: the ‘stuff’ of this realm was similar to those energies familiar to every magician on Sorcerer’s Isle, but it was … how would Nakor put it, she wondered? It was bent. It was as if the energies wanted to move at right angles to what she knew. She felt as if she were learning to walk all over again, only this time she had to think ‘sideways’ to move forward.

She reached out with her mind and let mental ‘fingers’ touch the buckles of her restraints. It took almost no effort for her to unfasten them. Quickly she freed herself.

Sitting up, she flexed shoulders, back and legs, feeling circulation returning and a soreness that seemed to run to her marrow. Miranda had lived a lifetime measured in centuries, but she looked no more than forty years of age. She was slender, but surprisingly strong, for she took delight in walking the hills on Sorcerer’s Isle and taking long swims in the sea. Her dark hair was dusted with a little grey, and her dark eyes were clear and youthful. The effects of magic, she had come to believe, gave a long life to certain practitioners.

She took another deep breath. The churning in her stomach subsided. At least the Dasati hadn’t used hot irons or sharp implements, being content for the time being merely to beat her when they thought it might provide better information.

If she ever saw Nakor again she’d kiss him, for without his insistence that magic was somehow composed of a fundamental energy, she would never have understood what made it work differently here within the Dasati realm …

She was certain she was still on Kelewan, in the black energy sphere she had observed moments before she was captured. This ‘room’ was nothing more than a small compartment and high above was an inky void, or at least a ceiling so high it vanished into the gloom. She glanced around, studying what she should see clearly, now that she wasn’t lashed to the slab. The enclosure was curtained off, but she could see the curve of the dome rising above her head, for the stanchions and rods holding the curtains were only about ten feet high. The material was uniformly dark grey-blue in colour, if she could judge from the light in the room, a pulsing glow from an odd-looking grey stone placed upon a table nearby. She closed her eyes and let her mind extend and after a few seconds she encountered what could only be the shell of the sphere.

How then, she wondered, had the familiar rules of magic been replaced by Dasati rules? It was as if they brought their own world with them …

She stood up. Suddenly she understood. They weren’t just going to invade Kelewan; they were going to change Kelewan, convert it into a world in which they could comfortably live. They were going to colonize it!

Now it was imperative that she get free of this prison, find the Assembly at once and return to warn the Great Ones. The Dasati needed only to enlarge this sphere. It would not be easy, but it was straightforward. Given enough energy and this sphere would encircle the entire world, converting it into one like those in the second realm of reality, or at the least turn it into one like Delecordia, the world Pug found that somehow existed between the two realms.

She sent out her mental probes. Keeping them tiny and weak, preparing to withdraw them the instant they touched anything sentient, lest they alert a Deathpriest or some other Dasati that she was free.

She glanced around the room, saw her clothing tossed into a corner and quickly dressed. While she had no problem appearing naked in the halls of the Assembly of Magicians, and while the Tsurani were far less concerned with nudity than many of the cultures on Midkemia, there was something simply undignified about it.

Miranda hesitated. Time was pressing, yet she wished she could linger, investigate more, and return to the Assembly with better intelligence. For a moment she wondered if she could contrive a spell to make her invisible, so as to creep around in this … bubble. No, better to carry the warning and return with the might of the Assembly behind her.

She closed her eyes and probed at the shell above her. It was painful, and she quickly withdrew, but she had learned what she needed to know. It was the boundary between her realm and the Dasati realm, or at least the part they had carried with them to Kelewan. She would be able to traverse it, but she required more time to prepare.

Wondering how many captors were with her, she sent out a tiny fibre of perception, a minuscule feeler to sense life energy. It should arouse no notice if she managed it correctly. She felt a brushing of energy as faint as a dandelion seed carried by the breeze touching the cheek, and she recoiled instantly, lest she be noticed. That was one. Again and again she quested, until she was certain that only two Deathpriests were presently in the dome.

She took a deep breath, and readied herself. Then she hesitated. She knew the wise choice would be to flee, to find her way to the Assembly as quickly as possible and then return with a host of Black Robes to crush this intrusion into Kelewan. But another part of her wished to know more about these invaders, to better understand who they faced. A sense of dread in her completed the thought: in case Pug did not return from the Dasati world.

She was confident in her power that she could overcome both Deathpriests, and perhaps take one of them prisoner. She would welcome the opportunity to return the hospitality shown to her. She knew however that Varen had most likely returned to the Assembly, and when asked as to her whereabouts, would have simply said she had returned to Midkemia unexpectedly. It could take weeks for word to reach Kelewan that she hadn’t returned home and then the Assembly would begin enquiries into her disappearance. One of the disadvantages of being who she was, of being an agent for the Conclave, was the secrecy associated with much of what she did. It could be a month or more before she was missed.

She studied the ‘wall’ nearest to her. Probing gently with her senses, she tried to feel the rhythm of the energies. This would be a tricky proposition as she knew little of the surrounding terrain, and a long-distance jump to a familiar spot, say in the Assembly, through the dense magic sphere also presented unknown problems.

She decided it was wiser to jump a short distance away, to a rise she remembered because the lordsbush flowers were in vivid bloom, something she had noticed just before cresting the rise and seeing the sphere.

Then she felt a presence. At once she turned only to find a Dasati Deathpriest raising a device of some sort, pointing it towards her. She tried her best to apply what she had learned about magic here and sent out a spell which should have merely knocked him off his feet. Instead, she felt energies rush from her, as if yanked from her body, and saw the shocked expression on the alien face as he was slammed by an invisible force that propelled him through the curtain.

Beyond the curtain was a wall constructed of some alien wood. It exploded as the Deathpriest’s body crashed through it and into the cubicle beyond. His lifeless corpse left a bloody smear on the floor and Miranda was surprised to note that Dasati blood was more orange than red.

The unexpected ferocity of the attack had one unanticipated benefit. The second Dasati Deathpriest was lying on the floor, stunned senseless by the impact of his companion as he had flown across the gap between them.

Miranda quickly inspected the two Dasati, and confirmed that the first was dead and the second unconscious. She looked in all directions to see if anyone else might have escaped her probes but after a moment she accepted that she was now alone with a corpse and a potential prisoner.

With one wall shattered and another knocked flat she finally saw her prison in its entirety. The sphere was no more than a hundred feet in diameter, partitioned by wooden walls and curtains inside which were two pallets with bedding, a table with writing materials and another of those alien stone lamps, a chest and a large woven mat over the earth floor. She quickly scouted the other spaces and found an almost incomprehensible array of items. The one thing she failed to discover was the device that had provided the means to make the journey from the Dasati realm to Kelewan. She had anticipated something large, similar to the Tsurani rift machines, or at least something like a pedestal upon which to stand, but nothing presented itself as an obvious choice.

She was already angry, and now the frustration of the moment drove her to the edge of rage. How dare these aliens come into this realm and assault her! All her life Miranda had battled a violent temper, a heritage from her mother and while she maintained a relatively calm demeanour most of the time, when she finally lost that temper her family had long since decided that giving her a wide berth was the only practical choice.

A stack of papers, oddly waxy, lay around the floor, and Miranda knelt to grab a handful. Who knew what was written upon them, in this alien language? Perhaps some insight into these creatures might be forthcoming.

She heard a soft groan, and saw the still-living Deathpriest start to twitch. Without thought she stood up, took one step and kicked his jaw as hard as she could. ‘Ow!’ The side of the Dasati’s jaw felt like granite. ‘Damn me!’ she swore, thinking she had broken her foot. With the papers in one hand, she knelt next to the unconscious form and gripped the front of his robe. ‘You’re coming with me!’ she hissed.

Miranda closed her eyes and turned the entirety of her attention to the walls of the sphere she was probing until she felt the peculiar flow of energy and then attuning herself to it as if turning pegs on a lute to change the pitch of the strings.

When she judged herself ready, Miranda willed herself outside, a short distance from the other side of the wall. She screamed as her entire body was torn for a moment by cascading energies, as if ice were cutting into her nerves, then she found herself kneeling on the dry grass in the hills of Lash Province. It was morning, which for some reason surprised her and she could barely stand the pain that came even from breathing.

Her entire body protested the reversion to her native environment. Whatever the Dasati had done to provide her with the means to live in their realm, or that piece of it under the dome, the translation back was agony.

The Deathpriest appeared to have also survived the transition. She knelt beside him, clutching his robe as if it were the only tether she had to consciousness. A moment passed and the pain lessened, and after another, she felt herself beginning to adjust. Taking a deep, gasping breath, she blinked to clear her vision before immediately closing them again. ‘That’s not good.’

Taking another deep breath, she ignored the searing pain that opening her eyes had caused her, and willed herself to the Pattern Room in the Assembly.

Two magicians were in the room when she appeared. She cast her captive down in front of them. ‘Bind him. He is a Dasati Deathpriest.’ She did not know if these two were privy to the knowledge Pug had passed to the Assembly since the Talnoy had been brought to Kelewan for study, but every Great One living had heard of the Dasati. Finding one lying unconscious at their feet caused them to hesitate for a moment, but then the two Black Robes hurried to do her bidding. The stress of escape and bringing a captive had taken Miranda to the end of her already-depleted resources. She took two staggering steps, and then slumped unconscious to the floor.

Miranda opened her eyes and found herself in quarters reserved for her or Pug when they came to visit. Alenca, the most senior member of the Assembly of Magicians sat on a stool beside her bed, his face composed and untroubled, looking like a grandparent waiting patiently for a child to awaken from an illness.

Miranda blinked, then croaked, ‘How long?’

‘One afternoon, last night, and all this morning. How are you?’

Miranda sat up, gingerly, and discovered that she was wearing a simple white linen shift. Alenca smiled, ‘I trust you don’t object to our having cleaned you up. You were in quite a state when you appeared before us.’

Miranda swung her legs out of bed and carefully stood up. Her cleaned, pressed robes waited for her on a divan in front of a window overlooking the lake. The afternoon sun sparkled off the water. Unmindful of the old man watching her, she slipped off the shift and put on her robes. ‘What about the Dasati?’ she asked, inspecting herself in the small mirror on the wall.

‘He is still unconscious, and it appears, dying.’

‘Really?’ said Miranda. ‘I didn’t think his injuries that severe.’ She looked at the old magician. ‘I need to see him and we need to call as many members as you can to the Assembly.’

‘Already done,’ said the old man with a chuckle. ‘Word of the captive quickly spread and only those members too ill to travel are absent.’

‘Wyntakata?’ asked Miranda.

‘Missing, of course.’ He waved Miranda through the portal to the hallway and followed her, falling into step beside her. ‘We assume he is either dead or had some hand in this.’

‘He’s not Wyntakata,’ said Miranda. ‘He’s Leso Varen, the necromancer.’

‘Ah,’ said the old man. ‘That explains a great deal.’ He sighed as they rounded a corner. ‘It’s a pity, really. I was fond of Wyntakata, though he tended to ramble when he spoke. But he was clever and always good company.’

Miranda found it difficult to separate the host from the parasite that occupied it, but realized the old man was sincere in his regret. ‘I’m sorry you lost a friend,’ she said, ‘but I fear we may lose a great many friends before this business is over.’

She stopped at a large intersection and glanced at her companion, who indicated they should turn down a long corridor. ‘We have the Dasati in a warded room.’

‘Good,’ said Miranda.

Two grey-robed apprentice magicians stood guard at the door. Inside the room a pair of Great Ones stood beside the figure of the Dasati Deathpriest.

One, a man named Hostan, greeted Miranda while the other kept watch over the unconscious figure on the sleeping pallet. ‘Cubai and I are convinced something is very wrong with this … man.’

The magician inspecting the Deathpriest nodded. ‘He has not shown any signs of reviving, and his breathing appears to be more laboured. If he were human I would say he has a fever.’ He shook his head in dismay. ‘But with this creature, I don’t have a remote idea what to look for.’

Cubai was a magician who was far more curious about healing arts than most Black Robes, since it tended to be the province of healers of the Lesser Path of magic and clerics of certain orders. Miranda thought him an ideal choice to be watching over the Deathpriest.

Miranda said, ‘While a prisoner, I deduced some things about these creatures.

‘The Dasati are not that different from humans, at least in the sense that elves, dwarves and goblins are similar: roughly human-like in form, standing upright on two legs, eyes in the front of a recognizable face, all the rest you can see, and I know they have two genders, male and female, the women bearing their young within their bodies. I gleaned that much while being closely examined by the Deathpriests. I can’t speak their language, but I did pick up a word or two along the way and now have some sense of what they presume about humans.’

She turned to a handful of magicians who had come into the room when word had spread she was up and with the Deathpriest. She raised her voice so all could hear. ‘They are physically stronger than us by a significant margin. I judge it to be a quality of their nature magnified by their presence on this world. But I think they have some difficulty with the differences between the two worlds, hence the dome of energy they created in which to reside. But one of their average warriors can overpower all but the most powerful human, be it Tsurani warrior or Kingdom soldier.’ No time like the present to start planting the idea of Midkemian help, she thought.

She looked down at the Deathpriest and tried to reconcile what she saw with what she had observed while he and his companion had experimented on her. ‘He doesn’t look well, that is clear.’ She leaned over and saw a sheen of moisture on his brow. ‘I think you’re right about the fever, Cubai. I think his colour is pale, but that may be the difference in light in the two …’ Her voice trailed off as she saw the creature’s eyelids flutter. She stepped back. ‘I think he’s waking!’

Instantly two magicians began incanting wards while others readied spells of confinement, but the Dasati did not awake or rise. Instead, with a low moan of agony, his body arched and began to convulse. Miranda was hesitant to touch him and that hesitancy prevented her from stopping him from flopping off the pallet onto the floor.

As he thrashed violently now, his skin started to blister. Not quite sure why, Miranda shouted, ‘Stand away!’

The magicians drew back. Suddenly a flame engulfed the Deathpriest’s body and then a huge discharge of heat and light nearly blinded those standing nearby, singeing hair and causing everyone within proximity to fall back.

The stench was that of sulphur and rotting meat being cooked, and many were gagging from the smell. Moving backwards from the site of the immolation, Miranda saw only the faint outline of a body in white ash on the floor.

‘What just happened?’ asked Alenca, obviously shaken by the experience.

‘I don’t know,’ answered Miranda. ‘I think that outside the dome they are unable to deal with the abundance of energy that we take for granted. I think it proved too much for him and … well, you saw what happened.’

‘What now?’ asked the old magician.

‘We go back to the dome and investigate,’ answered Miranda, assuming command of the situation without being asked. ‘That incursion is a threat to the Empire.’

That alone was reason enough to mobilize the Great Ones of the Empire. Alenca nodded. ‘Not only must we investigate, we must eradicate this dome.’ He turned to another magician and said, ‘Hochaka, would you be good enough to carry word to the Light of Heaven in the Holy City? The Emperor must be made aware of what is taking place, and convey to him our intentions of providing a fully-detailed report after we finish.’

Miranda was amused by the steely tone taken by the old magician: in his youth he must have been an impressive figure. He was the type of man who often surprised others when he took control, a quiet authority figure, effective at gaining attention when other louder voices are demanding it and being ignored.

Miranda followed his lead. Quietly she said, ‘I had to … sense my way around inside the dome before I could escape.’ She paused for effect before saying, ‘I ask that you allow me to guide you in this.’

The Great Ones in the room looked taken aback by the request – a woman, and an outlander at that, leading them? But others looked to Alenca who quietly said, ‘It is only logical.’ With those four words he handed the power of the Assembly of Magicians, the single most puissant gathering of magic on two worlds, over to Miranda.

She nodded. ‘Please ask as many of the Assembly as can be here to gather in the Great Hall of Magicians in one hour’s time. I will tell what I know and suggest what I think should be done.’

Magicians quickly left to use their arts to summon as many of the members of the Assembly as they could reach. Miranda knew that whatever else might be true, once word of a threat to the Empire reached even the most distant member, all would return to hear her warning. Only those out of touch or too ill to travel would not be in the Hall when she explained that the Empire of Tsuranuanni, and the entire world of Kelewan, now faced the gravest threat ever known.

Miranda retired to her quarters. She slumped down onto the soft divan. She dared not lie down on the bed as she knew she would quickly fall asleep again. One night’s rest and a meal didn’t undo the damage the Dasati had wrought on her. She had to stay focused on the task at hand using fear, pain and the need to act quickly as if they were food and drink, for she knew time was working against them.

Whatever processes the Dasati had begun would only become more difficult to interrupt as time went by. A knock at the door announced the arrival of a grey-robed apprentice, one of the few young women now a student of magic. She carried a tray bearing a porcelain pitcher, a cup, and a platter of fruits and breads. ‘Great One, the Great One Alenca thought you might need refreshment.’

‘Thank you,’ said Miranda, indicating that the girl should put the tray down. As soon as she left, Miranda realized she was starving. She fell to eating and quickly felt energy returning to her aching, damaged body. This was one of those times she wished she had been more disposed to study clerical magic, as her husband had. Pug had called upon those arts several times and Miranda knew he would soon have had her feeling as if she had slept a week and had not endured days of humiliation and torture with an incantation or a draught of some foul-tasting but effective elixir.

Thinking of Pug made her pensive. She couldn’t imagine three people better able to withstand the journey into the Dasati realm – the second level of reality as Pug called it. Yet she worried. A complicated woman with complex feelings, Miranda loved her husband deeply. Not with the passionate abandon of youth – she had outgrown that when Pug was still a child – but rather with a deep appreciation of his unique qualities and why they made him perfectly suited for her as a life companion. Her sons had been an unexpected benefit of powerful life-magic, and had proven a blessing she had never anticipated. She might not be the best mother by some people’s judgment, but she enjoyed being one.

Caleb had been a challenge, when it was discovered he possessed no overt talent for the magic arts, especially after Magnus proved to be such a prodigy. She loved both her sons – with that special feeling for a first-born she had for Magnus, and that equally special feeling for the baby of the family, amplified by her awareness of how difficult Caleb’s childhood had been in a community of magic-users. The other children’s pranks had been especially cruel, and Magnus sticking up for his younger brother had been both a blessing and a curse. Still, both children had grown to be men of exceptional qualities, men she looked upon with pride and love.

She sat silently for a moment, then stood up. Those three men – Pug, Magnus and Caleb – were as much a reason as she needed to destroy the Dasati world if need be, for they were more important to her than any three beings in her long history. She found herself growing angry and knew that if he were here, Pug would be telling her to rein in her fiery temper because it only clouded her judgment.

Miranda stretched, ignoring protesting muscles and aching joints. She would find time later to deal with her own physical discomfort. Right now she had an invasion to deal with.

A knock at the door announced Alenca’s arrival. ‘They are here,’ he said.

Miranda nodded. ‘Thank you, old friend.’ She walked with him to the Great Hall of the Assembly of Magicians.

As she anticipated, nearly every seat was filled and the low murmur of voices fell away as Alenca took his position on the podium.

‘Brothers … and sisters,’ he began, reminding himself there were now female Great Ones scattered around the room. ‘We are here at the behest of an old friend, Miranda.’ He stepped aside letting her take his place. No one in the Great Hall needed to be told who Miranda was. Pug’s status as one of the Great Ones had been established even before Alenca had been born, and Miranda benefited from this association as well as being a powerful magic-user in her own right.

‘Kelewan is being invaded,’ Miranda said without preamble, ‘At this very moment, a dome of black energy is being expanded in a vale in the far north. At first I saw it as a beachhead, much like the rift your forebears used to invade my home world.’ The reference to the Riftwar was intentional. She knew that every student in this Assembly had been taught the entire tragic history of that ill-fated invasion in which the lives of so many had been spent in a bid of raw political power. The deadly ‘Game of the Council’ had seen thousands of Midkemian and Tsurani soldiers dead as a ploy on behalf of a political faction in the High Council. Several Black Robes had been party to that murderous plot, to establish the then Warlord and his faction in an unassailable position of power. Only the intervention of Pug, and the rise to power of a remarkable woman, Mara of the Acoma, had changed that deadly game.

Miranda continued. ‘Each of you here knows why the Riftwar was conducted, so I will not lecture you on what you already know. This is not an invasion for political gain, wealth in booty, concessions in victory, or any sort of conventional war.

‘This is not merely an invasion, but the beginning of a colonization, a process that will end with the complete annihilation of every life form on this world.’

That brought a collective intake of breath and murmurings of disbelief. Miranda held up her hands and continued. ‘Those who have studied the Talnoy and the Dasati Deathpriest prisoner, I urge you to disseminate to as many of the other members as to what you know.’

She paused, looking around the room, making eye contact with as many members of the Assembly as possible. Then she said, ‘Here is what I know. The Dasati wish to remake your world. They will change it, utterly and completely, to resemble their own. They will seed every square inch of land taken with their own world’s creatures, from the smallest insect to the largest beast.

‘The water will become poisonous to drink, the air will burn your lungs, and the touch of even the least creature from that world will pull the life out of your body. This is no tale made up to scare children, Great Ones. This is what the Dasati are already doing under that black dome from which I escaped.’

One of the younger members shouted, ‘We must act!’

‘Yes,’ agreed Miranda. ‘Quickly and certainly, but not in haste. I suggest a group of those among us who are most masterful in the arts of light, heat and other aspects of energy, along with those of us who are masters in the arts of living beings – and perhaps we need the most powerful of the Lesser Path magicians we can contact, as well – must go at once to that valley to weigh and study the threat, and then we must destroy the dome.’

‘When?’ asked the young magician who had spoken out.

‘As soon as we can,’ said Miranda. ‘We must contact the Emperor, and we will need soldiers. The Dasati will not sit idly by, I fear, and let us destroy their dome. We are likely to face beings who are unafraid to die, beings who are able to counter our magic, and we will need strong arms and swords to deal with them.’

Alenca said, ‘I suggest you break up in to smaller groups and discuss what has been said and tonight we will reconvene here, after the evening meal. At that time we will discuss Miranda’s warning and choose the course of action most appropriate to this threat.’ He slammed down the heel of his walking stick on the stone floor, emphasizing that the meeting was over.

Miranda turned towards the exit and whispered to Alenca, ‘You asked that youngster to stir things up?’

‘I thought his timing was perfect.’

‘You are a very dangerous man, my old friend.’

‘Now we wait,’ said Alenca. ‘But I think we’ll have a full agreement tonight, and I cannot see any other course of action than the one you suggest.’

As they walked back towards Miranda’s quarters, she said, ‘I hope so, and I hope my plan works. Otherwise we must ready the Empire for war against the most belligerent warlord in your history.’

Two hundred men stood ready, honour guards from four of the nearest estates in the province, answering the call of the Great Ones of Tsuranuanni without hesitation. They were arrayed in two groups, each under the command of a Great One awaiting orders from Miranda. While peace had reigned throughout the Empire for more than a generation, Tsurani discipline and training remained unchanged. These were tough, determined men ready to die for the honour of their lords’ houses.

Miranda and a dozen Great Ones walked slowly up the ridge to where she had first caught sight of the Dasati dome. She spoke softly, ‘Everyone ready?’

Men nodded and glanced at one another. Not one living Great One of the Empire had seen any sort of conflict: the last Great One to die in combat had done so in the Riftwar, more than a hundred years ago. These were scholarly men, not warriors. But these magicians were those best able to bring incredible power to bear if the need arose.

Slowly the thirteen magic-users, arguably the most powerful practitioners of the arcane arts, moved up the hill. At the rise, Miranda actually stood up on tiptoe to peer over, and then she said, ‘Damn!’

Before them was an empty vale, the only evidence of Dasati occupation being a large circle of blackened earth where the sphere had been.

‘They’re gone,’ said one of the younger magicians.

‘They’ll be back,’ said Miranda, turning her back. Taking a breath, she said, ‘I suggest you spread the word to every house in the Empire, that every village and farmstead, valley and dell, every isolated nook and cranny be inspected, searched, and searched again.’ She looked at every face nearby. ‘They will be back, and next time it won’t be a small dome. I think next time they’ll be coming to stay.’