Tides of Darkness by Judith Tarr

Author:Judith Tarr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

By day mages and makers rebuilt the Ring of Fire, the chain of hill-forts and sea-holdings round the rim of Anshan. By night they stood guard against the dark.

Merian remained in the first of the ruined cities, which had a name again: Ki-Oran, Heart of Fire. That had been its name in older days, the men of Seahold assured her. A fort had risen within the walls, a small citadel and quarters for a garrison.

The enemy had begun to raid abroad in Anshan, in the smaller towns and the fishing villages. Those, unlike the forts and cities, had no mages to ward them. They fell in black ash, their strong people taken, the weak slaughtered. What had become of those who were stolen, mages feared they knew: Batan’s twelve wounded men were still in Asanion, healing slowly and incompletely when they healed at all.

Yet there was no lack of men to offer themselves for defense. Men in Anshan were all either pirates or bandits at heart, and they knew no fear. Given a fight, even a fight they could not win, and faced with a fate that truly was worse than death, they laughed long and hard, and brought their brothers and cousins to join them in the villages. They were bait, the lure that kept the sea-dragons away from the fish, and it was their pride to be so.

Merian had not forgotten the strange vision in the water, but its meaning eluded her. There was too much else to think of: finding mages to ward every village without weakening the guard and the wards outside of Anshan; building forts and strongholds; raising a wall of lightmagic that would, she hoped, keep the raids within its circle.

The gaps in the web of lesser Gates were closed, except here. It was a monstrous task, and strained the mages to the utmost. They were warding a world. Everywhere that human creatures were, they must be, and be strong.

Winter deepened. In the deepest of it, the raids grew less frequent. Then for a while they stopped. But only fools celebrated a victory. The world was still under shadow. The greater Gates were gone, the Heart of the World destroyed. A few brave souls had tried to raise the nexus again, or find some sign that it could be restored, but those that survived the attempt would never heal completely. Where the nexus had been was a maw of darkness, growing inexorably wider, deeper, stronger. It swallowed magic; it devoured mages. It was beyond any mortal strength to conquer.

With the first breath of spring, the shadow-warriors came back. Already in sheltered valleys, fighting men had turned farmer and were plowing the steep rocky fields. When Greatmoon waxed again, they would plant.

“Man’s got to eat,” one of them said to Merian. She had ridden out of Ki-Oran to the village where the enemy had struck anew. The raiders had taken five men but injured none; the village’s young mage had driven them off.

He was in his house under a healer’s care, with his magic half burned away.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.