Serpent Mage Read Free Page A

bring perfect peace to the man.
    Moved by compassion, by pity, Alfred stretched out a hand to smooth back a lock of hair that fell forward over the implacable face.
    The dog raised its head, growled menacingly.
    Alfred snatched his hand back. “I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking.”
    The dog, knowing Alfred, appeared to accept this as a plausible excuse. It settled back down.
    Alfred heaved a tremendous sigh, glanced nervously around the lurching ship. He caught a glimpse through the window of the fiery world of Abarrach falling away from them in a confused swirl of smoke and flame. Ahead, he saw the rapidly approaching black hole that was Death's Gate.
    “Oh, dear,” Alfred murmured, shrinking. If he was going to leave, he had better get going.
    The dog had the same idea. It leapt to its feet, started to bark urgently.
    “I know. It's time,” Alfred said. “You gave me my life, Haplo. And it's not that I'm ungrateful. But… I'm too frightened. I don't think I have the courage.”
    Do you have the courage to stay?
the dog seemed to ask in exasperation.
Do you have the courage to face the Lord of the Nexus?
    Haplo's lord—a powerful Patryn wizard. No fainting spell would save Alfred from this terrible man. The lord would prod and probe and drag forth every secret the Sartan had in his being. Torture, torment, lasting for as long as the Sartan remained alive … and the lord was certain to ensure his prey lived a long, long time.
    The threat must have been sufficient to drive Alfred to action. At least that's what he supposed. He remembered finding himself standing on the upper deck, without the slightest notion how he had come to be there.
    The winds of magic and time whistled around him, grabbed disrespectfully at the wisps of hair on his balding head, set his coattails to flapping. Alfred gripped the rail with both hands and stared out, horribly fascinated, into Death's Gate.
    And he knew, then, that he could no more hurl himselfbodily into that abyss than he could consciously end his own miserable and lonely existence.
    “I'm a coward,” he said to the dog. Bored, it had followed him up on deck. Alfred smiled wanly, looked down at his hands, clinging to the rail with a white-knuckled grip. “I don't think I could pry myself loose. I—”
    The dog suddenly went mad, or so it seemed. Snarling, teeth slashing, it leapt straight at him. Alfred wrenched his hands from the rail, flung them up in front of his face, an instinctive, involuntary act of protection. The dog struck him hard on the chest, knocked him over the side….
    What had happened after that? Alfred couldn't remember, except that it was all very confused and all extremely horrible. He had a vivid impression of falling … of falling through a hole that seemed far too small for a gnat to enter and yet was large enough to swallow the winged dragonship whole. He remembered falling into brightly lit darkness, of being deafened by a roaring silence, of tumbling head over heels while not moving.
    And then, reaching the top, he'd hit bottom.
    And that's where he was now, or so he supposed.
    He considered opening his eyes, decided against it. He had absolutely no desire to see his surroundings. Wherever he was, it was bound to be awful. He rather hoped that he would lose himself in sleep, and if he was lucky, he wouldn't find himself again.
    Unfortunately, as is generally the case, the more he tried to go back to sleep, the wider awake he woke. Bright light shone through his closed eyelids. He became aware of a hard, flat, cool surface beneath him; of various aches and pains in his body that indicated he'd been lying here for some time; of being cold and thirsty and hungry.
    No telling where he'd landed. Death's Gate led to each of the four worlds created magically by the Sartan following the Sundering. It led also to the Nexus, the beautiful twilight land meant to hold the “rehabilitated” Patryns after their release from the Labyrinth. Perhaps he was there.