command.
As she wove her web of terror, Randal’s mage’s talent screamed silently for
help.
It screamed so well and so loudly, with every atom of his imperiled being, that
far away to the west, in his cabin before a pool of gravel neatly raked, high on
a cliffside overlooking the misty seascape of the Bandaran Islands’ chain,
Nikodemos paused in his meditation and rubbed gooseflesh rising suddenly on his
arms.
And rose, and sought the cliffside, and stared out to sea awhile before he bent,
picked up a fist-sized stone, and cast it into the waves. Then Niko began making
preparations to leave-to forsake his mystical retreat once more for the World,
and for the World’s buttocks, the town called Sanctuary, where of all places in
the Rankan Empire Niko, follower of maat-the mystery of Balance and Transcendent
Perception-and son of the armies, least wanted to go.
Even for Niko’s sable stallion, the trek from Bandara to Sanctuary had been long
and hard. Not as long or hard as it would have been for Niko on a lesser horse,
but long enough and hard enough that when Niko arrived in town, bearded and
white with trail dirt, he checked into the mercenaries’ guild north of the
palace and went immediately to sleep.
When he woke, he washed his face with water from an ice-crusted bedside pot,
scratched his two-months growth of beard and decided not to shave it, then went
down to the common room to eat and get a brief.
The guild hostel’s common room was unchanged- wine-dark even in morning, quiet
all and every day. On its sideboard stood steaming bowls of mulled wine and