Dancer's Lament: Path to Ascendancy Book 1 Read Free Page A

about the chamber before he returned to set an enormous battered full helm upon the stone slab, its grille facing him, and sat once more, sighing. He eyed the helm. ‘So?’ he demanded.
    ‘Your problem, Gothos,’ came a weak, breathless voice from within the bronze helm, ‘is that you give up too easily.’
    Gothos snorted his scorn. ‘And what of you, Azathani?’
    After a long silence the helm answered, sounding almost sad. ‘Our problem is that we cannot.’

Chapter 1
    DORIN RAV WALKED the dusty beaten earth of Quon’s storied Trunk Road. It was an ancient traders’ way that crossed the midsection of Quon like a narrow belt. From great Quon and Tali in the west, it stretched to the proverbial midsection clasp of Li Heng, and from there onward to the rich vineyards and orchards of wealthy Unta in the east.
    Over thousands of years countless armies had trodden this route. They came marching out of both the east and the west: Bloor and Gris nobles convening to subdue the plains and the populace to the west of them; Tali and Quon kings emptying their treasuries to assemble vast infantry hordes, and eventually succeeding in subjugating the far eastern lands beneath their Iron Legions. Meanwhile, across the central plains, generation after generation of the Seti Wolf, Eagle, and Ferret clans raided all points indifferently.
    He walked at a leisurely pace. He was not worried that his quarry might have struck out in any direction other than east. To the west and north lay the vast central grasslands of the Seti. To the south it was many days to any Dal Hon settlement or coastal Kanese confederacy. No, only to the east lay any nearby haven of civilization: the greatest of the independent city states, Li Heng itself.
    The Trunk Road might be storied, he reflected as he walked, but these days it certainly wasn’t busy. Pedestrians such as himself consisted almost entirely of local farmers. Long distance travellers tended to band together into large caravans for protection against Seti raids – and to discourage the attentions of the great man-beast, Ryllandaras.
    When he’d come down out of Tali lands, he’d hired on as a guard with just such a band of traders, religious pilgrims and wanderers. Unfortunately for him, after more than a week without a sighting of the feared Seti, the caravan-mistress had let half her guards go. And so he’d found himself unemployed and cast adrift in the empty, dusty middle of nowhere.
    Unlike his brother guards, he’d not been concerned for his safety. Being mostly of Tali extraction, they’d ganged together to strike back west. He’d continued on, quickly outstripping the caravan’s rather disorganized, laborious pace. He did not fear any attack from the tribesmen, nor did he expect any attention from the legendary man-beast. Alone, he knew he could hide his presence. His opinion differed from his fellow travellers’ regarding strength in numbers: the great clattering mass of banging copperware, shouting drivers, bawling donkeys, and rattling bric-a-brac was to his mind nothing less than an
attracter
of raiders and unwanted attention.
    And so now he neared Li Heng, and somewhere nearby, ahead or behind, lay his quarry. A fellow who had dared to cheat him . . . Or, perhaps more to the point, had
succeeded
in cheating him. That was not to be borne. Not by Dorin Rav. Who had been beaten by no one.
    The second day of travel revealed smoke over the prairie to the north, not so far off the trader road. He altered his path to investigate. After pushing through the tall-grass for a few leagues, he came to a wide swath of trampled and broken stalks. The first thing he found was a man’s boot. When he picked it up, he found that it still held a foot.
    It was a caravan, attacked and massacred in the night. By Seti tribesmen, probably. Old treaties existed – once enforced by the Tali Legions – that forbade predation on the road, but they were hardly honoured any longer. And there were