Lord of the Isles Read Free

though the pair had been carved from the same tourmaline prism … which they had not been, could not have been. One piece had the brown metallic hue of a crystal with a large admixture of iron in its structure. It was darkly translucent, and shapes swam in its depths. The other helix was water-clear, though like water it had the least tinge of color; in this case the gleam of dawn’s first rosy figurings.
    She touched her fingertip to the twin spirals. They felt cold or hot, but she could not be sure which; in all the time she had spent studying the pieces, some of their aspects remained an enigma. She must separate and examine them individually, for one was the key: the piece that would uncover the Throne of Malkar where Lorcan of Haft had hidden it a thousand years before.
    All the power in the cosmos lay with that piece, and the piece could be controlled. It would move as she directed or to the direction of her opponent, the hooded figure she sensed but never saw. There was no third player in the game!
    And yet …
    This night between dusk and dawning a spike of blue tourmaline had appeared on the board in conjunction with the four pieces of power. She must learn what it meant, that slim piece, and still more the fact that the piece was here.
    She tossed a thin silken coverlet over the board and strode to the outer door. The only apparent bolt was a wisp of spiderweb, but anyone attempting to force the panel from the outside would find himself in a place other than where he intended—and very little to his liking.
    She opened the door. The cold-faced servitor nodded obsequiously.

    â€œI’m not to be disturbed for any reason,” she said. She nodded toward the tray of covered salvers waiting on the small table beside the door. “I’ll be fasting, so get that away.”
    The servitor nodded again. “As you wish, milady queen,” he said.
    She closed and sealed the door. Her hooded opponent could not have placed the new piece on the board … .
    And if not him, who?

2
    G arric or-Reise tossed in his bed in the garret of his parents’ inn, dreaming of a maelstrom.
    The water was icy and so thick it seemed solid. Strings of dirty-white foam marked spirals like the bands of an agate. Garric’s head and right arm were lifted from the swirling currents but the rest of his body was caught like that of a fly frozen in amber.
    â€œHelp me!” he cried, but roaring currents smothered his voice. The pressure squeezing his chest prevented him from drawing in a further breath.
    Other creatures were trapped in the maelstrom’s slow gyrations. Most were monsters.
    A seawolf struggled almost directly across the funnel of water from Garric’s dream viewpoint. Seawolves had raided the pastures around Barca’s Hamlet several times during Garric’s lifetime, but this beast was twenty feet long—twice the length and many times the mass of any that he’d ever heard of. The beast’s skull alone was as long as Garric’s arm, and the yellow teeth could shear a man’s body in half if they closed on it.
    Higher on the spiral was a segmented creature whose flattened,
chitinous body was longer than a fishing boat. Its scores of paddle legs trembled in vain effort against the gelid water. It had two pincers like those of a nightmare scorpion, and the facets of its bulbous eyes shimmered in the wan light.
    Far below was a tentacled ammonite whose shell was the size of a farmhouse. Its yellow eyes glared up at Garric with unreasoning hatred, but it too was a prisoner in the maelstrom’s grip.
    On the bottom of the sea, infinitely distant, a human figure stood casting a hooked line of quivering violet fire. The figure wore a long black robe with a cowl that hid its face. The crackling purple fire arched upward, ever closer to Garric as the figure laughed louder than the maelstrom. Closer …
    Garric woke up with a shout trapped in his throat to choke him. He