Zandru's Forge Read Free

energy of the Veil scoured every nerve raw, leaving him sensitive to the slightest telepathic whisper.
    Much of the work of a Tower was done during the hours when ordinary men slept, to minimize the psychic static of so many untrained minds. This close to the city, even the occasional stray thought or burst of emotion, hardly worth calling laran, became cumulative, low-grade interference, or so he’d been told. For this reason, Towers like Hali and the now-ruined Tramontana stood apart from other human habitation. In the long quiet hours of darkness, Gifted workers sent messages across hundreds of leagues through the relays, and charged immense laran batteries, used for a myriad of purposes, including powering aircars, lighting the palaces of Kings and mining precious minerals, even performing the delicate healing of minds and bodies.
    Varzil had drowsed and woken a dozen times that night, each time resonating to a different pattern. Whenever he roused, it seemed that his senses had grown keener. With his mind, he felt colors and music he had never known existed. He heard voices, a word here and there, phrases shimmering with secret meaning that left him hungry for more. The rainbow Veil no longer glinted from a distance, it reverberated through the marrow of his bones.
    Movement caught Varzil’s attention, a shadow among shadows. Slender, gray-furred, bent over like a little wizened man, a figure slipped through the Veil. It halted, an empty basket clutched in its prehensile fingers, and stared at him.
    Varzil sat straighter, pulling his thin cloak more tightly around his shoulders. He recognized the creature as a kyrri, although Serrais, seat of the Ridenow, had few of them as servants. They were said to be highly telepathic, but dangerous to approach. His father, in preparing him for the visit to Arilinn, warned him about their protective electrical fields. Nevertheless, he reached out one hand.
    “It’s all right,” he murmured. “I won’t hurt you.”
    Something brushed against the back of Varzil’s skull, at once feathersoft and grating, as if sand were being rubbed into his skin. But no, it was inside his head. Suddenly, a sensation of curiosity flickered through him and vanished as quickly.
    The creature was studying him. Did it want something? He had no food—and then he realized he thought of it as an animal, instead of an intelligent, if nonhuman, being.
    Without a sound, the kyrri hurried away. Varzil watched as it crossed the outer courtyard and turned aside at the street. He felt as if he had been tested in some mysterious fashion, and he did not know if he had passed.
    “Look down there!” a voice cried from above. “Some ne‘er do-well rascal has camped upon our doorstep!”
    Varzil craned his neck back to stare up at a balcony running alongside the Tower to either side of the arch of the Veil. Two older boys leaned over, pointing. They looked to be in their late teens, their voices already deepened, waists and hips slender but with the shoulders of young manhood.
    “You there! Boy! What are you doing here?”
    Something in the voice rankled Varzil’s nerves, or perhaps lingering irritability from the encounter with the kyrri drove him to snap back, “What business is it of yours? I have come to see the Keeper of Arilinn Tower, and that isn’t you!”
    “How dare you speak to us in such a manner!” The youth in the Tower leaned over. “You impudent good-for-nothing!”
    The second boy pulled his friend back. “Eduin, you gain nothing in taunting him this way. He can do us no harm where he is, and he is clearly no street beggar. These words are unworthy of you.” He spoke with the accent of a lowland aristocrat.
    Varzil scrambled to his feet, heart pounding. A dozen retorts leaped to his mind. His hands curled into fists. He kept his teeth clamped tightly together, though the breath hissed through them. He had not spent the better part of his years shrugging off far worse insults, only to