She paused, looking around the room, making eye contact with as many members of the Assembly as possible. Then she said, “Here is what I know. The Dasati wish to remake your world. They will change it, utterly and completely, to resemble their own. They will seed every square inch of land taken with their own world’s creatures, from the smallest insect to the largest beast.
“The water will become poisonous to drink, the air will burn your lungs, and the touch of even the least creature from that world will pull the life out of your body. This is no tale made up to scare children, Great Ones. This is what the Dasati are already doing under that black dome from which I escaped.”
One of the younger members shouted, “We must act!”
“Yes,” agreed Miranda. “Quickly and certainly, but not in haste. I suggest a group of those among us, who are most masterful in the arts of light, heat, and other aspects of energy, along with those of us who are masters in the arts of living beings—and perhaps we need the most powerful of the Lesser Path magicians we can contact, as well—must go at once to that 1 7
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valley to weigh and study the threat, and then we must destroy the dome.”
“When?” asked the young magician who had spoken out.
“As soon as we can,” said Miranda. “We must contact the Emperor, and we will need soldiers. The Dasati will not sit idly by, I fear, and let us destroy their dome. We are likely to face beings who are unafraid to die, beings who are able to counter our magic, and we will need strong arms and swords to deal with them.”
Alenca said, “I suggest you break up into smaller groups and discuss what has been said and tonight we will reconvene here, after the evening meal. At that time we will discuss Miranda’s warning and choose the course of action most appropriate to this threat.” He slammed down the heel of his walking stick on the stone floor, emphasizing that the meeting was over.
Miranda turned toward the exit and whispered to Alenca,
“You asked that youngster to stir things up?”
“I thought his timing was perfect.”
“You are a very dangerous man, my old friend.”
“Now we wait,” said Alenca. “But I think we’ll have a full agreement tonight, and I cannot see any other course of action than the one you suggest.”
As they walked back toward Miranda’s quarters, she said,
“I hope so, and I hope my plan works. Otherwise we must ready the Empire for war against the most belligerent warlord in your history.”
Two hundred men stood ready, honor guards from four of the nearest estates in the province, answering the call of the Great Ones of Tsuranuanni without hesitation. They were arrayed in two groups, each under the command of a Great One awaiting orders from Miranda. While peace had reigned throughout the Empire for more than a generation, Tsurani discipline and training remained unchanged. These were tough, determined men ready to die for the honor of their lords’ houses.
Miranda and a dozen Great Ones walked slowly up the ridge to where she had first caught sight of the Dasati dome. She spoke softly. “Everyone ready?”
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Men nodded and glanced at one another. Not one living Great One of the Empire had seen any sort of conflict: the last Great One to die in combat had done so in the Riftwar, more than a hundred years ago. These were scholarly men, not warriors. But these magicians were those best able to bring incredible power to bear if the need arose.
Slowly the thirteen magic-users, arguably the most powerful practitioners of the arcane arts, moved up the hill. At the rise, Miranda actually stood up on tiptoe to peer over, and then she said, “Damn!”
Before them was an empty vale, the only evidence of Dasati occupation being a large circle of blackened earth where the sphere had been.
“They’re gone,” said one of the younger magicians.
“They’ll be back,” said Miranda, turning her back. Taking a breath, she said, “I suggest you spread the word to every house in the Empire, that every village and farmstead, valley and dell, every isolated nook and cranny, be inspected, searched, and searched again.” She looked at every face nearby. “They will be back, and next time it won’t be a small dome. I think next time they’ll be coming to stay.”
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Chapter 2
gambit
Jommy frowned.
Sitting under a canvas cloth hastily rigged to provide shelter from the pitiless rain, he hugged his knees to his chest, and said, “But what I don’t understand is why?”
Servan, huddled next to the young officer, replied,
“We don’t ask why; we simply follow orders.” They sat on a hillside, overlooking a distant cove: a vantage point that prevented anyone from arriving without being noticed. The problem for the moment was that the rain shrouded the area and lowered visibility to the point at which someone was required to sit close by; in this case, that someone was Servan, and Jommy had been selected to sit with him.
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Jommy regarded his companion. The slender face, dark hair matted wet against his forehead, had aged dramatically in the last few months. An arduous life on the march had drained pounds from his youthful frame, while days in the sun and sleeping on the ground had given a tough, leathery quality to his skin. The court-bred noble whom Jommy had come to know well over the last few months had been replaced by a young veteran embarking on his third campaign in as many months.
Never friends, the two, along with their other four companions—Tad, Zane, Grandy, and Geoffry—had come to appreciate one another as reliable colleagues. In the relatively short time since they had been unceremoniously taken from the university at Roldem and cast into the role of young soldiers of rank, they had received an intensive tutelage in the reality of military life. To Jommy’s unending irritation, Servan had been appointed senior for this campaign, which meant Jommy was expected to follow his orders without question. So far there had been no hint of any reprisal for the mischief Jommy had inflicted on Servan during the last operation, when Jommy had been appointed senior, but Jommy just knew it was coming.
The two young officers had been detailed to a position low in the foothills of the region known as the Peaks of the Quor, a rugged, mountainous peninsula jutting northward from the eastern side of the Empire of Great Kesh. About a hundred men, including these two young officers, had been deposited on this beach a week earlier, and all Jommy knew was that a landing was expected here, though the exact identity of the invaders had not been shared with the young officers. All Jommy knew was they wouldn’t be friendly.
Jommy also had aged, but as a farm youth and caravan worker, already used to a harsher life than his companion, he revealed less dramatic evidence of his recent experiences. Rather, his already cocksure brashness had evolved into more of a quiet confidence, and his time spent with the other young officers from the university at Roldem had taught him a fair dose of humility; all were better at something than he was. Still, one part of his nature remained unchanged: his almost unique ability to 2 1
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see humor in most situations. This one, however, had tested his limits. The downpour had been unrelenting for four days now.
Their only source of warmth was a fire built in a large cave a mile up a miserable hillside, and the enemy they were told to expect had shown no evidence of arriving on schedule.
“No,” said Jommy, “I don’t mean why are we here. I mean why are we here?”
“Did you sleep through the Captain’s orders?” came a voice from behind them.
Jommy turned to see the shadowy figure who had approached undetected. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he complained.
The man sat down next to Jommy, ignoring the fact that half his body was still outside the scant protection offered by the makeshift shelter. “I wouldn’t be much of a thief if I couldn’t sneak up on you two in a driving storm, would I?” he replied.
Both youn
g officers looked at the newcomer. He was only a few years older than them, yet his face showed premature aging, including an unexpected sprinkling of grey hair in his dark mus-tache and beard, a neatly trimmed affair that revealed a streak of vanity in an otherwise chronically unkempt and slovenly person. He was nearly as tall as Jommy, but not quite as burly, yet his movement and carriage betrayed a lean hardness, a whipcord toughness that had Jommy convinced he’d be a difficult man to contend with in a stand-up fight.
Servan nodded. “Jim,” he acknowledged. The young thief had somehow managed to get caught up in the same net of intrigue that had brought Servan and Jommy to this lonely hillside in a remote part of Kesh. He had put in an appearance the week before, arriving on a ship with supplies for what Jommy had come to think of as the “Cursed Expedition.”
Servan and Jommy were both currently serving in the Army of Roldem, though Jommy came from a land on the other side of the world. Servan was nobility, royalty even, somewhere in line to be king should perhaps ten or eleven relatives expire unexpectedly. Yet they were now assigned to what could only be generously called an unusual company, soldiers from Roldem, the Kingdom of the Isles, Kesh, and even a contingent of min-2 2
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ers and sappers from the dwarven city of Dorgin, all under the command of Kaspar of Olasko, former Duke of what was now a province of the Kingdom of Roldem. Once a hunted outlaw with a price on his head, sometime over the last few years he had managed to rehabilitate his reputation and now had special status with both Roldem and the Empire of Great Kesh. His adjutant was a Roldem captain named Stefan, who happened to be Servan’s cousin, which also made him another distant cousin to the King of Roldem.
The arrival of the newcomer had revealed another puzzling aspect of this expedition. Jim was one of a half dozen men who were not by any stretch of the imagination soldiers yet were bil-leted with the soldiers, sent out on missions with soldiers, and expected to follow instructions without question as if they were soldiers. All Jommy and Servan could get from the usually voluble self-confessed thief was he was part of a special group of
“volunteers” that were here to train with the combined forces of Roldem, Kesh, the Kingdom, and a scattering of officers from the Eastern Kingdoms.
The usually curious Jommy was beside himself to discover what was going on, but the last few months of serving with various forces from Roldem had taught him that a young officer’s best course was to keep silent and listen. Servan had that knack by nature.
Still, Jommy’s curiosity couldn’t be entirely stemmed, so he thought perhaps a different approach to the subject might get him some hint of what was going on. “Jim, you’re from the Kingdom, right?”
“Yes,” said the young thief. “Born in Krondor; lived there all my life until now.”
“You claim to be a thief—” began Jommy.
Jim shifted his weight, lightly brushing against Jommy, then with a grin held up Jommy’s belt pouch. “This is yours, I believe?”
Servan tried hard not to laugh while Jommy snatched back his belt purse, which had been tucked up under his tunic. “Very well,” he said, “you are a thief.”
“A very good thief.”
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“A very good thief,” Jommy conceded. “But what I want to know is how a very good thief from Krondor finds himself out here on the edge of the world.”
“That’s a story,” said Jim. “I’ve traveled a lot, you see.”
“Oh?” said Servan, welcoming the distraction from the tedious rain.
“Yes,” said the agreeable thief. “Been to some very odd places.” He smiled, and years dropped away from his visage, showing an almost boyish glee. “There was this one time, not unlike here, when I was forced to seek shelter from just this sort of driving rain in a cave on a distant island.”
Jommy and Servan exchanged a glance, and both smiled and nodded, silently communicating the same thought: not one word of what they were about to hear would be true, but the story should be entertaining.
“I was . . . taking a journey out of Krondor.”
“Business?” asked Servan.
“Health,” said Jim, his grin widening even more. “It seemed like a good idea to be out of Krondor for a while.”
Jommy tried not to laugh. “So you went . . . ?”
“I took ship out of Krondor, bound for the Far Coast, and then in Carse found a likely bunch of lads who had come by some information on a . . . venture that would net all involved a handsome living.”
“Pirates,” said Jommy and Servan at the same moment.
“Freebooters, out of Freeport in the Sunset Islands.” Jim nodded. “At the time the captain claimed they sailed under a letter of marque from the Crown, though I never saw it. But being a trusting lad at the time, I took his word.”
Jommy doubted there had been a single moment in the thief’s life when he had ever been a “trusting lad” but he let the comment go.
“Well, I find myself on this island, in this cave, with this elf lass . . .”
“Did you leave something out?” asked Servan.
“Oh, a lot actually, but I’m talking about strange places I’ve been.”
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“Let him go on,” said Jommy with ill-concealed mirth.
“Anyway, the lads I had shipped with were out looking for me, as I had tumbled to their less-than-honorable intentions as to my share of the treasure—”
“Treasure?” began Servan, but Jommy held up his hand. He wanted to hear this story.
“Well, that’s another part of the tale,” said Jim. “Anyway, as I was saying, I was hiding in this cave when I encounter this elf lass, name of Jazebel—”
“Jazebel,” echoed Jommy.
“Jazebel,” repeated Jim. “And she had her own story of how she’d got there. She was trying to keep from being killed by these bears, only they weren’t rightly bears, more like big furry owls.”
“Big furry owls,” said Servan, open astonishment now on his face. Jommy could barely contain himself, all cold wet misery forgotten in the moment.
“Well, as I was saying, it was an odd place, far outside the Sunset Isles. She was gathering eggs for some elf magic. But anyway, she and I managed to fend off the creatures long enough to let my bloody companions pass by the cave, then we slipped out and got to a safe spot.”
“How did you ever get home?” asked Jommy.
Jim grinned. “She had this magic stone, some elf thing, and once we were where she could do some magic, it took us to Elvandar.”
“Elvandar? Is that near Cloud Land?” Servan asked, invoking the name of a mythical land from children’s tales.
Jommy said, “Elvandar’s real, Servan. I know people who’ve been there.”
“Next you’ll be telling me you know some elves, too.”
Jommy smiled. “Not personally, but I know people who do.”
“Well,” said Jim. “As I had helped save the girl and all that, the Queen and her husband feted me with a supper, gave me their thanks, and told me I was welcome any time I wanted to come calling. Then they helped me get to the outpost at Jonril—the 2 5
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one up in Crydee Duchy, not the one in Kesh it’s named after—and from there I got back to Krondor.”
“Amazing,” said Jommy.
“More than amazing,” said Servan, shivering again. “Unbe-lievable.”
Jim reached inside his tunic and pulled out a leather cord around his neck bearing a beautifully carved trinket. “The Queen herself gave me this,” he said. “She said any elf would recognize it and I would be named Elf-friend.”
Both Jommy and Servan leaned forward to inspect the trinket more closely. It was a pattern of interlocking knots, carved in what looked to be bone or ivory, and there was something about the design and shape that seemed more than human.
Suddenly serious, the thief said, “I’m a lot o
f things, lads: rogue, adventurer, thief, and, when needs be, downright murderous thug, but no man has ever called Jimmyhand a liar.”
“Jimmyhand?” asked Jommy.
“My . . . professional name, as it were. After a famous old thief, from back in the day, Jimmy the Hand. Some say I’m a lot like him. Others say he might have been my great-grandda—but I think that was my mum trying to make me feel special. So, when I was a wee tyke I’d say, ‘I’m Jimmyhand,’ ’cause I never quite got the ‘the’ part right. So it stuck. I’m rightly named Jim Dasher.”
In the time he had spent with Caleb and his family at Sorcerer’s Isle, Jommy had heard a fair number of “back in the day”
stories from the old-timers, not a few of which revolved around the notorious Jimmy the Hand, a thief who according to legend became an agent of the Prince of Krondor, then later was given a noble title, rising to the rank of Duke of both Rillanon and Krondor, the two most powerful offices in the Kingdom after the King.
Jommy studied the thief. He hardly knew him, but found him agreeable company; his outrageous stories were a welcome relief from the tedium of days spent waiting for an enemy who might never appear. He had no doubt Jim was every bit as dangerous as he claimed to be, but there was a quality under the 2 6
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surface that Jommy had learned to recognize at an early age out on the road alone: an instinct about who he could trust and who he couldn’t. He nodded, then said, “Jim, I’ll never call you a liar until the day I catch you out.”
Jim stared at Jommy for a long moment, then the grin returned. “Fair enough.”
Servan turned his attention back to the distant beach they had been assigned to watch. “How much longer?”
“As long as it takes,” said Jommy.
“Which won’t be much longer,” said Jim, pointing off into the rainy gloom. “Boat coming.”
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