Lords of the Seventh Swarm Read Free

hardly notice how much they rely on it, how easily a scent is remembered.
    After all these weeks, all the answers the dronon had forced from him, Maggie was here.
    Thomas’s heart sank. Captured. She’d been captured; held prisoner with him. The dronon would kill her. The would force Gallen to fight, for Gallen and Maggie held the title of “Lords of the Sixth Swarm.” The dronon imagined that by winning this title, they would gain legal claim to the worlds of man.
    Of course when Gallen lost the battle, the dronon would also kill Maggie. Thomas’s ignorance would lead to the death of his only kin.
    “Maggie?” Thomas cried, straining against his blindfold. “I’m sorry! They made me tell. I tried to hold back. I tried to be quiet! Can you forgive me, lass?”
    She did not answer. Only circled him, lightly brushing his shoulder with her woolen shawl, padding around him.
    “Maggie?” he pleaded once again.
    She reached out, tugged vainly for a moment at his blindfold, then pulled it away, raking the skin around his eyes with her long nails.
    The figure standing before Thomas was not Maggie. Instead, a man all dressed in black robes stood, a man in a golden mask. It was the kind of mask common on Fale, a thin film of incandescent material. Behind the mask were deep brown eyes. Thomas’s interrogator, Lord Karthenor.
    “Forgive the minor deception,” Karthenor said. “The wanted assurance that they had Maggie’s scent right.”
    Karthenor raised a small perfume bottle, then sprayed it on his wrist, held it up for Thomas. It smelled like Maggie, as true and clear as if she were in the room.
    “A person’s scent is marvelous,” Karthenor said, “as distinctive as a retinal scan, as individual as genetic mapping. Yet we leave it wherever we go.”
    “How, how did you do this?” Thomas asked.
    “ You did it,” Karthenor laughed. “We had only to send emissaries to Tihrglas, to collect samples of her body oils from the comforter on her bed. Recreating her scent is a minor thing.
    “For this, I thank you. Now our dronon Seekers will be able to track Maggie across the worlds.”
    “Och, damn your sorry hide!” Thomas shouted. “I hope you never catch her. If I were free, I’d break your spine!”
    Karthenor smiled benignly, glanced up to the silver circlet weighing on Thomas’s head. With the Guide on, Thomas could not fight, could not flee. Yet Karthenor still kept Thomas chained. Thomas could only imagine one reason for the shackles: meanness. A minor torture.
    Karthenor mused, “If you were free, I’m sure you would do more than merely break my spine. But you will never be free again.”

Chapter 2
    “Och, this is no proper place for a bear,” Orick growled. He sniffed at the dead monster at his feet.
    The creature looked like some huge gray slime mold. It had just come slithering out of the stream not forty feet distant, and Gallen had been forced to fry it with his incendiary rifle. Now it lay, burned and quivering, just outside camp. It was the third monster Gallen had killed in the past three hours.
    Orick shook his head, wondering if the slime was edible. “My mother always said that you’d bring me to Ruin, Gallen, and here we are.”
    “It’s just the name for the planet—because of all the alien ruins hereabouts,” Gallen said. He grunted, pulling at some vines near the edge of camp, trying to get them from the ground so that he could burn them for a campfire. The little bear, Tallea, went to his side and began pulling with her teeth, trying to help Gallen out.
    Orick glanced off at the skyline. Ruin was a strange world—too far from its primary sun, which sat directly overhead like a child’s purple ball. It gave the landscape a violet hue.
    Here, strewn across the desert, were huge red boulders, shaped like eggs, lying in the sand, and farther in the distance, a wind-sculpted sandstone mesa rose above the desert floor like some castle. Odd bushes grew all around—some sprouting