Necromancer Falling: Book Two of The Mukhtaar Chronicles Read Free

absence, I’d forgotten just how unlike your father you are.”
    “ Birth father,” Nicolas said.
    Tithian nodded. “I meant no offense, Archmage.”
    “Dammit all!” Nicolas had had enough. He needed an adviser, not a subordinate. “You’re not offending me. And if your idea about these protoforge fragments doesn’t pan out, we’ll try something else. I’m not going to get pissed off because you tried something that didn’t work. Just tell me what you need to tell me. I’m not Kagan.”
    Tithian grinned. “You most certainly are not. Right, then. When I received word from my contacts in Tildem, they had no idea what they’d uncovered. But I suspected. So I attempted to use a translocation orb to teleport to Hiboran—that’s a city in the far west of Tildem, close to the mountain range where the fragments were uncovered.”
    “Attempted?”
    “It didn’t work. Not… exactly . Instead of materializing outside of Hiboran, I felt a… deflection . I ended up some fifty leagues to the northwest of Hiboran, outside a city called Tur . Gave an onion farmer a pretty good fright when I materialized in his house. Every subsequent attempt to travel there met with the same result.”
    “How will these fragments help us?”
    “They seem to disrupt magic. We don’t know what the Barathosians have at their disposal, but it certainly can’t hurt our efforts.”
    Nicolas helped Kaitlyn back up.
    “She needs food pronto ,” Nicolas said.
    “You both need rest. We’ll regroup tomorrow before the ceremony.”
    Nicolas nodded and followed Tithian out of the sanctuary.

    Aelron grunted as the trailer rolled over a deep rut on the forest road.
    Forty years ago he’d joined the Shandarian Rangers as an equal. Now he was in a cage on the back of a trailer being kicked out and taken back to his home. All because he couldn’t moor —telepathically bond—with an adda-ki. Only rangers could tame and ride the massive feline mounts. So, if he couldn’t moor, he wasn’t worth keeping around, in their opinion.
    That wasn’t entirely fair. He had killed a fellow ranger as well. That might have played into their decision to evict him.
    Letcher had it coming. But they don’t see it that way.
    He banged his head on the side of the cage as the wagon lurched over another deep rut.
    “I’m not complaining,” Aelron said, “but can we try to miss a few of those?”
    “Someone forgot to gag him,” a ranger said. The others erupted in laughter.
    Aelron didn’t catch which one had said it, but it was a reminder to keep his mouth shut. His escort hadn’t bound his wrists or ankles—he was in a steel cage, so why bother?—and he wanted to keep it that way.
    As he glanced around his rolling jail cell, it became clear the dense forest of towering pines was a prison unto itself. With the seasons turning, if he didn’t die of exposure between here and Caspardis, which was two-hundred miles to the south, then a shriller or roaming crag spider would do what the frigid weather couldn’t. And it would be no use trusting this unmaintained roadway they traveled. For four decades, the road dead-ended in an impenetrable yellow dome. No one knew whether anyone under it was still alive.
    Aelron didn’t know what the rangers had in mind for him, but he was certain riding into the area once covered by that dome was a bad idea. He’d lost friends to that dome when it was still up, and he didn’t have many friends left to spare.
    More accurately, he had no friends left. Forty years their brother, but now they treated him like a pariah.
    If only I had more time!
    It was no use lying to himself. Time would solve nothing. He was twenty years past the age most Shandarian Rangers had moored with an adda-ki, forming a bond that ended only when rider or mount died. But his ageless face was another difference they wouldn’t let him forget.
    And he couldn’t give them a reason for it, because he didn’t know why he’d stopped aging.
    Killing