James M. Ward The Pool 01 Pool of Radiance

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appreciation and affection for the big animal she had not felt before. "Well
done, Cerulean! Ranthor would be proud of you."
Ranthor is gone, Mistress.
Cerulean nodded toward the room with his head.
I hope you are proud of me.
Shal patted the familiar again, then stepped past him into the spell-casting
chamber.
Ranthor's body lay crumpled behind the casting stand. Crystal fragments
littered the room, many glued to the floor in Ranthor's blood. As Shal knelt
beside her former master, her shoulders and then her whole body began to shake
as she felt the tears come. She had held on to the faintest, most minute hope
that what she had seen in the globe was a vision only and not reality, that
the chill she had experienced at her teacher's passing was only a reac-tion to
a vivid nightmare. Now the truth lay before her. It was irreversible. And so
she wept.
Tarl knelt behind Shal, encircling her in his arms, his head bowed. Silently
he prayed, both for his friend and for the man he had not known. There were no
words, he knew, to comfort Shal, any more than there were words that would
make him feel better about Anton or Sontag or Donal or any of the others.
Ren didn't share Tarl's talent for offering comfort. His mind thought in terms
of action. He walked silently past his two friends and leaned over the body,
then turned the stiff corpse over and examined the wounds. What he found made
him recoil. Ranthor had been stabbed in the back, over and over again, with a
dagger that would have killed with the first scratch, for it was tipped with
the same green acid poison that had killed Tempest. From the angle and the
profusion of the wounds, Ren knew that Ranthor's murderer was taller and
probably less skilled than the assassin who had killed Tempest, but
un-fortunately no less deadly.
Mistress . . .
Cerulean's gentle call penetrated Shal's grief.
Mistress, I will bring Ranthor with me into the darkness of the cloth. Once
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you have sealed this tower, I will take Ranthor on one last ride to put his
soul to rest. It will be my final duty as his familiar.
But can he truly rest if his murderer remains unpun-ished?
Shal communicated mentally.
In the back of her mind, Shal heard Ren relating his theories about what he
had found in his examination of the body, but it was Cerulean's answer that
Shal listened to.
Ranthor will be at rest, Mistress. It is you who will not.
Shal stood and quietly explained the familiar's bidding to Ren and Tarl. They
lifted the rigid mage's body onto the horse's back and watched as Cerulean
reared up, then disappeared into a small pocket of the indigo cloth. After
being witness to an entire day of magical wonders, they barely thought twice
about the horse's unique method of departure.
Though near exhaustion, Shal moved through the tower hurriedly, sealing door
after door, making sure all was as they found it. She spoke her assurances to
the robe as they reached the second floor, but the ghostly garment continued
to follow them as they removed the bodies of the cook and the servant. Finally
it stood hover-ing inside the front door as Shal closed it and sealed it by
reversing the same utterance she had used to open the great bronze door.
As they reached the park where Ren's mare was teth-ered, Tarl and Ren strapped
the two bodies across the roan's broad back. Shal called Cerulean forth from
the Cloth of Many Pockets. The horse leaped from the cloth and straight into
the air with the grace of a unicorn and flew upward. Shal watched, misty-eyed,
as it left a blue Stardust trail behind it. She could just barely make out
Cerulean's message:
See you soon, Mistress.
7
Deceived
Porphyrys Cadorna held in his hands the official proc-lamation from the
council making him Fourth
Council-man. It praised him for "prudent judgment in the matter of assigning
punitive tasks for the betterment of the com-munity." It commended him for
recognizing the caliber of the three barroom brawlers and for immediately
act-ing on the information they provided by arranging to add new shipping
lanes in and out of the harbor. Advi-sors to the council were suggesting that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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