World Gate_A Kethem Novel by Dave Dickie

Author:Dave Dickie [Dickie, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-01-03T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

Entering the polychromatic fires was both frightening and disorienting, if what they did could rightfully be called “entering.” It seemed like the flames were a veil you couldn’t see through, but so thin you never actually touched it, you were just suddenly on the other side.

Stegar had experienced his fair share of narrow scrapes before. Less than some, since his Hold had been on the inner side of the Kethem peninsula, facing the Lanotalis sea rather than the Cair ocean. But when the Stangri raiders struck from the Cair, it happened in waves, and the Kethem Guard and the Kethem Navy could not protect the entire southern coast. These were the older Stangri, not the ones that had settled in Kanday like Gyeong’s people had. Where they landed, towns were pillaged and burned, people were killed. So wardens from the north went south when the raids started, to help where they could.

Stegar had seen four such battles before he had been stripped of his Gold Ring, been reduced to a commoner. Each of those had been single instances between long periods of inaction, during which you needed constant training to keep your edge. Never had he been in a situation that was a continual battle to stay alive, escaping death each time by a razor’s edge and a lucky roll of the dice.

He was accustomed to magic, fire beams, and artificer’s weapons, as well as the myriad daily magics, glow disks and weather shields and cold runes and, occasionally, teleporting. He’d seen the more subtle but powerful magic of the priests, calling forth some aspect of their gods. Never had he seen magic like this, magic whose power you could feel in your bones, sheets of multicolored flames twenty feet high, spectacular and terrifying and leaving you with the feeling that it was just the point of the arrow, a minor aspect of the powers flowing between those pillars. He did not understand it, could not comprehend it.

It didn’t matter. For the first time in a long time he felt no need for a drink, no need to blot out the world, no need to seek dark oblivion to escape his memories. No need to find some obsessive activity to focus on, something to keep his mind from turning inward. He was living moment to moment. He would deliver these people home or he would die trying, and if dying was what the gods of the dice wanted for him, well, that was the ultimate dark oblivion, and it might balance the scales a bit for his other failures. For his brother.

On the other side of the polychromatic flames was an empty room. Where they had moved into the large area between the obsidian poles, now they were facing out from it. In front of them was a panel like the one in the temple they had just left. Stegar held his buckler in position, had the sword rigid and extended in front of him. He maintained that until everyone was out and Daesal called the all clear, then relaxed a bit.

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