Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ and while you sat idle as three of us cleaned up the carnage after a drake war, I demand to hear from your lips: by our sworn covenant to protect the Paravians, why have you not stirred to explore what’s befallen the guardian at Northgate? Restored to flesh and bone, can’t you lessen the burden on Asandir? Explain now, in full! By Dharkaron Avenger, why not pursue the reason for Chaimistarizog’s absence?”

      Davien straightened and jettisoned his bread-crust. “Sethvir likely knows. And if not, only Asandir has earned the right to inquire.”

      Air shrieked to Kharadmon’s incensed recoil. The blast creaked the ropes, and whitened the plies a hairbreadth from flash-freezing the fibres. “Enough cagey evasions. I’ll have answers no matter the threat to your self-centred independence.”

      “Some other day,” Davien dismissed.

      Behind him, the guardian stone slung on its precarious ropes emitted a crack like the snap of a whip. The gryphon his artistry had yet to carve glowed briefly inside the unstructured granite, while the orb to become the watchful eye suddenly flared livid red. The precursor spell seating its protective enchantments scribed a ring of white fire around Davien’s planted stance and also encompassed the indignant swirl of Kharadmon’s indignant essence.

      “What outrageous bombast!” The discorporate Sorcerer’s temper cracked before incredulity. “We’re not under attack.”

      “We are, in fact.” Etched in the sharp sunlight and shade of high altitude, Davien flaunted an insolent grin. “Try a surprise visitation steered by the Prime Matriarch. She’s trying the might of the Waystone against us, backed by twelve circled Seniors.”

      “You’ll have staged that charade,” Kharadmon huffed.

      “Do you truly think?” The Betrayer measured the Fellowship entity pinched in the malicious breach. “If you can’t believe me, at least curb your pique. We’re stuck together for the duration. Unless, of course, you snatch your safe exit and flit?”

      Kharadmon snorted. “What, turn tail and run from Prime Selidie’s wiles? Try my patience again!”

      Davien laughed. “Then stay at your peril. Her sally to test me isn’t a feint.”

      No toothless threat: wielded by a Prime at full strength, the amethyst focus packed force enough to endanger a discorporate Sorcerer. Particularly if the Matriarch drained her subordinates to leverage the contest.

      Kharadmon’s presence snuffed out, condensed to a frosty vacuum.

      Then Prime Selidie’s concerted blast struck and shattered the rudimentary wards laid into the unfinished cap-stone. Spelled ropes and unpolished granite exploded. Shards flew like knives. Planted inside the nexus with folded arms, Davien seemed unfazed as though he outfaced a social embarrassment. Yet the actualized spells that wrested the lethal missiles aside and crashed them impotently at his feet broke a sweat on his forehead.

      He mocked, “A stone-throwing tantrum’s the best you can do?”

      Reckless strategy, to taunt a powerful rival maimed under his past round of trickery: bolt lightning stabbed downwards out of clear air. Harm deflected just shy of electrocution, Davien held fast, caged in branched forks that scribbled scorched channels of carbon around him. Through smears of wisped smoke, he needled again, “You won’t have your way using pique for diplomacy.”

      Yet his challenge just missed the dismissal of sarcasm. His straits were dire. Yield one step, and the entrance to his library would lie open to rifling trespass. Too many dark secrets were cached within: volumes of knowledge too dreadful to be shelved with the Paravian archives at Althain Tower.

      Selidie had rancorous bones aplenty to pick with the Seven and a vengeful personal score outstanding against Davien for centuries. Which ferocious awareness scarcely prepared him for her next scalding strike. Dazzled nearly blind and hammered to his knees, Davien seized the moment to palm a flake of stone from the wreckage. The fragment yet retained the grant of permission to stand ward and guard for him in free partnership.

      Also, within, the eidetic stamp of the violence that had snapped the harmonic working asunder. Davien tapped the mineral’s matrix and grasped the aggressive thrust of the Prime’s motivation: a fury that echoed from her past failure to best Sulfin Evend. Thwarted plots to separate Lysaer from his steadfast war-captain’s moral influence had balked her order’s intentions. Again poised with the True Sect priesthood as agent under her thumb, Selidie raged to find a new obstruction guarding Lysaer’s vulnerability. Hell-bent, the Prime sought the secret that sheltered the sen Evend heir, Daliana.

      Davien sorted his counter-moves, appalled by the stakes. Barraged under the lightning shimmer and crack of the Prime’s hostile charge, he seized the split second and sounded the chip for the remnant of his burst ward. Since mineral forgot nothing, the imprint remained, a plan configured to perfection well before the disruptive attack.

      But set-back dealt him an unforeseen shock: the founded circle had included no safe passage for crossing, and Kharadmon’s wise retreat had never occurred. The discorporate’s choice to take cover in hindsight posed a drastic mistake.

      Davien dared not risk that appalling disclosure with his resource taxed under fire. Pitched on the defensive with the Prime unaware of his colleague’s collateral peril, he stared down disaster and pressed the end game.

      The stone fragment held the template of the wardspells already designed to withstand a hostile assault. Davien wielded the pattern. A further split second’s reckless intent engaged other forces that no Fellowship Sorcerer before this had been hardened to bear.

      His hands flared into unnatural fire: a shimmer azure as gas-flame, and reactive beyond all imagining. Naked flesh and blood, Davien’s finger-tips unfurled the prepotent aura possessed by Athera’s great drakes.

      The phenomenon, until now kept shrouded, exposed how profoundly Dragonkind’s dreaming had changed him. The volatile power sparked to his will and ripped the air with an ozone-spiked crack. The elements screamed. The staid cliff-face before him ignited to the might of his focused desire and restored the pulverized statue. Reshaped in completed manifestation, the sentinel gryphon gargoyle engaged its guardian spells at one stroke.

      Prime Selidie’s thrust tangled in the matrix.

      White fire met blue with a shriek that cracked bed-rock. The ground rumbled and shook, while the elements bled light, a wild coruscation that fountained aloft and unfurled the shimmer of an aurora.

      Prime Selidie’s lightnings snuffed instantaneously.

      Socked by the earthquake punch of the recoil, Davien wrestled, hands locked, and vised his thoughts still. Crouched with singed hair, seared clothes smoking, he regarded the blackened ash dusting his skin.

      “I’d rather the meddling Prime was not privy,” he gasped, while a land-slide of stones ploughed into the vale with a thundering roar. “Insolent shade! Were you endangered?”

      “The question is moot!” Kharadmon’s presence unfurled with a whoosh. “If the Prime was desperate before, you’ve just torched the core of her insecurity.” The shade added, thoughtful, through a chattering storm of loose gravel and carbon, “I had not expected that move to protect me. If this force-majeure bequest of Seshkrozchiel’s is behind your feckless delinquency, consider my grievance reproved. Your absence from the crisis at Northgate was justified.”

      “Do you think?” СКАЧАТЬ