Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [205]
YNIS (Dev.) An island.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KATHARINE KERR spent her childhood in a Great Lakes industrial city and her adolescence in a stereotypical corner of southern California, from whence she fled to the Bay Area just in time to join a number of the various Revolutions then in progress. Upon dropping out of dropping out, she got married and devoted herself to reading as many off-the-wall, obscure, and just plain peculiar books as she could get her hands on. As the logical result of such a life, she has now become a professional story-teller and an amateur skeptic, who regards all True Believers with a jaundiced eye, even those who true-believe in Science.
Kerr is the author of the Deverry series of historical fantasies; Polar City Blues; Resurrection; and the new series, The Dragon Mage, of which The Red Wyvern is the first volume.
A Special Preview of
Days of Air and Darkness
the sequel to
Days of Blood and Fire
by Katharine Kerr
As Rhodry and Arzosah make their way south, Cengarn lies besieged by the Horsekin. Though the city is under Jill’s powerful protection, there are things that even such a consummate master of the dweomer as she cannot prevent. In the following excerpt from Katharine Kerr’s latest novel, Days of Air and Darkness, which starts in the next breath after Days of Blood and Fire, both Jill and the reader encounter for the first time the true scope of the threat she and the city face….
Jill went up to the roof. Although she’d just renewed the dweomer seals that noon, she wanted to check them on the off chance that they’d been breached. She stood in the middle of the roof, faced east, and raised her inner sight to etheric level.
Over and around her the golden dome shimmered unbroken with all its seals of the Elemental Kings still safely in place. Jill turned in a slow circle, studying each seal and segment, but she found not the slightest sign of tampering. Yet danger pricked at her like a touch of ice, a deep stab of dweomer-warning. She sat down cross-legged, because she would have to be in a stable position if she should need to go into a trance, then considered the sky beyond the dome. To her etheric sight it hung silvery and alive, swirling with energy and the darting forms of innumerable Wildfolk. The long beams of light from the setting sun shot through, seemingly as solid as silver rods.
In the midst of all this confusion it was hard to see, yet Jill felt the warning intensify when she peered out to the east. She waited, on guard, until all at once she saw a white mist forming high in the sky. She dropped her sight down, found no trace of the mist on the physical, and brought it back up to the etheric in time to see the opalescent mass billowing outward from some other plane, as if an invisible blacksmith were using a bellows to blow smoke through a crack in the wall of sky. Jill went tense and rose to a kneel. Light-shot and pearly, it sank toward the golden dome in a single cloud.
All at once the cloud cracked open like a tapped egg in a cook’s strong fingers. Out stepped the figure of an enormous woman as calmly as if she were stepping onto solid ground instead of midair. She was dressed like an elven huntress in tight doeskin trousers and a belted tunic, with a quiver of arrows slung at her hip and a bow held loosely in her hands. Her honey-blond hair hung to her waist in swept-back Horsekin fashion, laced with little charms and thongs, but it had to be Alshandra. Like Evandar and indeed most of their race, she preferred to appear in elven form, mostly because those incorporeal beings had no true form of their own. Here on the etheric she shimmered in an aureole of silver light.
Jill forced herself to breathe calmly, slowly, to gather power from the Light and to focus her mind as Alshandra drifted over the apex of the dome and looked down at the seal set there. Jill was expecting this powerful being to banish the thing with ease, and she knew she’d have but a bare moment to set it back