5 Blades

By Drew Briney, Jason King, Jaime Buckley and 2 more

Thriller paced action, shocking twist endings, alternative history, engaging characters, visionary science fiction, suspenseful page turners, epic adventures, and barbaric fantasy all wrapped up in one entertaining bundle. 5 Blade authors are endorsed by an International and New York Times best-selling author, multiple magazines, and thousands of readers spanning dozens of countries across the world. This is your one stop for top tier science fiction fantasy short stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Drew Briney
• Release date: Aug 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781386663058

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by each individual author.

All Rights Reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

Please consider leaving a review on goodreads and on social media

to help the authors spread the word.

If you do, sign up for Drew Briney’s newsletter and he’ll send you a free bonus story!

Thank you for your support and for letting us share some of your valuable time.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dream Breaker

Dareth battles another Arkyn (magic user) across two planes of existence as he fights to protect his client from assassination.

Slice

Half orphaned and struggling to survive, can Tzun save his family with a drug that enhanced his powers?

The Serpents Root

A quest for a dangerous item to cure the sick may not be as simple a delivery as a thief expects. Love can be a killer.

Assassin Hunter

When Kaden is hired to hunt down his brotherhood of assassins, mind blowing revelations begin to surface. Drew expanded this short story into a much more in depth novella in 2018.

Fangs of the Dragon

Blessed by a holy man, Porter Rockwell was promised that if he never cut his hair he would not be harmed by bullet nor blade ... But what if monsters strike with tooth and claw? This might be Port's last ride ... Or will he send them crawling back to the abyss? Either way it's gonna be a helluva fight!

Siren Witch

Even a murderer can be surprised by a victim's cause of death.

Demoni Vankil

When the world falls into shadow, the Kings of old are forced to embrace the darkness ... in order to banish it forever. An ancient puzzle box. Fourteen letters. A Council of Whispers … and a clerk. Discover the 700 year old secret millions died to protect.

Invincible Shadow

Argentus fights for his life against Orryn Ghostblade in a heist gone wrong. But the treasure that he does find will change his destiny and the destiny of the world.

The Dig

An archaeologist struggles with the semantics of who is the real grave robber with a rogue Italian captain in WW2 when they find something buried that should not be.

Desolation of the Na’Eedna

What if the fate of the world rested in the hands of a mediocre mage on the verge of insanity? The year is 1663 and the world is about to find out.

Worms of the Wasteland

A moment of neglect, a lifetime of regret.

The King in the Wood

Music and mythology merge as a young woman buys a strange instrument in a curiosity shop. Things will never be the same.

The Glory of Intelligence

From humble beginnings, Yushin soars to academic success only to discover an unorthodox solution for intelligence enhancers.

Sample: Unproven

PRAISE FOR 5 BLADE AUTHORS:

Drew Briney

Riveting story, relatable heroes, and nasty villains. … Brilliantly woven storyline.

- Victoria Lucas

Unforgettable, imaginative, and unbelievably exhilarating.

- M. Hamilton

Will impress even the most critical fans of the genre.

- J. Lavuire

David West

Brutal, gory and depressing.

- Jennie Hansen, Meridian Magazine

And he just keeps getting better.

- Keith West, Amazing Stories

One of the most well-written fight scenes I've ever had the opportunity to read.

- Darkeva, Hellnotes

Jaime Buckley

Jaime is an amazingly talented storyteller, artist, and illustrator. The first time I saw his work I was blown away - and he’s only gotten better since.

- Barry Eisler, New York Times & International Best Selling Author

[In Demoni Vankil], readers are invited to solve the mystery alongside Hobin as he reads fourteen letters. Trust me, you will be surprised by just how many emotions you will feel reading them. As Hobin says, Eamon will begin to feel like a friend. Reading these letters was my favorite aspect of the book. I felt the hope, love and sometimes despair that Eamon felt.

- Jennifer Elgy, Books That Spark (UK)

Jason King

Fresh and fun … Jason King's imagery is breathtaking.

- James Wymore

I was instantly wrapped up in the story.

- Melissa Anne Curtis

DREAM BREAKER

by

Jason King

DARETH’S DISEMBODIED SELF FLOATED LAZILY through the colonnade room. Well, that’s what he called it. It wasn’t a room, not really. It was a stone field with marble columns rising into a black, starless sky. It didn’t have any walls either, but the sound-suffocating darkness extending in all directions made Dareth feel as though he were enclosed in a chamber, and so he called it a room.

Corporeal beings always interpret the metaphysical in physical terms. We cannot help but to do so, the line from Alegar’s Treatise on Dimensional Sensory Input and the Nature of Reality, automatically sprang to his mind.

Quiet, Alegar!

The words thundered throughout the chamber making Dareth wince. He hadn’t spoken them, but thought and sound were interchangeable in this place. A person’s inner monologue could ring forth as an unending stream of spectacular clamor, especially if that person didn’t deliberately will the words to remain within the bounds of their own consciousness.

What am I, a first week initiate?

Dareth felt foolish. He knew better. He’d been coming to this place since he was a child. In fact, he’d only been eight when he first did what he would later come to know as Dream Breaking. He remembered telling his grandfather, in great excitement, of what he’d accomplished and was shocked when the usually gentle, soft-spoken man flew into a rage. He’d walloped Dareth across the behind with a birch branch so hard Dareth hadn’t been able to sit for a week.

He later learned the reason for his grandfather’s panicked fury. Dream Breaking was singularly dangerous, not because your body was inanimate and defenseless while your consciousness was here—that was a given. No, in this place, one could become separated from their body entirely and spend the rest of eternity as a lost spirit wandering the Aether. Worse, another Dream Breaker could attack you, overcome your will, and then claim your mind; making you little more than a puppet both here and in the physical world. It was also heresy according to the Faelen Church. So in his grandfather’s view, Dareth might not only die, but he could lose his very soul.

Dareth had promised his grandfather that he would never do it again, but it’d only taken him a few weeks to break that promise. What he had done sparked an obsession within Dareth, and as soon as he’d turned fifteen he had left his grandfather’s secluded cabin deep in the woods, and journeyed to The Jade Arcas where his unusual talent earned him quick admittance into that school. With access to the Arcas’s vast library, Dareth obsessively sought out everything he could find on the subject, soon becoming a lay-expert in his own right.

Dream Breaking, he mentally chewed the name. That term was a bit of a misnomer, for dreaming played such a small role in it. Dream Breaking is the process of reaching through one’s subconscious into that state of being that exists between life and death. He’d studied so much that the recitations had become automatic and compulsive, and he had to shoo them away with ritualistic mantras lest he end up repeating them aloud.

Although Alegar was an arcane genius, Dareth never had liked his writings. The centuries-removed sage possessed a knack for taking something as fantastic and magical as reaching another plane of existence and making it sound technical and boring. If the desire to understand what he could do hadn’t burned so hot within him, Dareth wouldn’t ever have been able to abide reading the man’s seemingly endless volumes.

Dream Breaking. He supposed the name fit, mostly because he couldn’t think of anything else to call it. And dreams were the beginning, the path, the gate. The trick was finding the boundary of your dreams―Dareth had been surprised to learn that dreams could have boundaries―and forcing your will against it until you broke through that barrier. Supposedly it was considered terribly difficult to do even with learning and practice, but Dareth had done it as something of an accident.

He still remembered that dream, the first one that had led him into the Aether. It had been a vivid and terrible nightmare in which Dareth was desperately running up an endless flight of stairs while being chased by black, cat-like creatures; living shadows that hissed and laughed while calling out in horrible detail what they were going to do to him once they caught him.

The memory of that awful dream still made him shiver, and he remembered the moment he’d hit the dream’s outer boundary. It wasn’t a location but something more abstract, a moment of perfect enlightenment. He remembered the desperate panic he felt at realizing the staircase would never end no matter how many steps he climbed. The awful, primal fear he’d felt in that one eternal moment ignited his will and he used that fire to press against the invisible wall of inevitability. It was then that the dream shattered like pieces of living glass and he found himself here, in this place. Since then, he hadn’t needed a nightmare in order to find the boundary of his dreams. It was as if once he had felt it, he instinctually knew how to find it again.

Returning to your dream and waking was much easier. An exit, represented in the Aether as a crystal archway filled with light, stood at the far end of the room against what would’ve been the chamber’s north wall. Simply moving through it took one’s soul back to his body. It was all very metaphysical, and Dareth couldn’t claim to fully understand it. He doubted even Alegar had completely understood this place.

Dareth moved across the stone floor to where a concentric arrangement of holes marked the center of the field. He looked down and saw in each hole a watery image, like the reflection in a pond. They were landscapes, living paintings of places in the real world. Real is a subjective term that is not completely applicable when analyzing the planar strata of existence. As always, the quote came unbidden.

Bugger off, Alegar!

If Dareth were to dive into any one of those portals, he would return to the material plane but remain in his disembodied state. That’s what most Dream Breakers did and for a variety of reasons: some to learn the secrets of their enemies, others to explore geographic locations inaccessible to a person trapped within a body, and some to control people in the real world through influence or even possession. But none of those things were the real reason an Arkyn came here. No, they came here to drink Drenn.

Drenn was the power an Arkyn—the common vernacular for one with arcane talent, derived from the term arcane-kind—needed to execute a spell. Anyone had access to spells, which were really nothing more than words on a page, the recorded thought patterns that had been determined by Arkyns over time to be the most effective way to achieve an arcane result. An Arkyn with Drenn in his soul could imbue energy into the words of a spell as they were recited and, depending on the amount of Drenn used, execute the spell with varying degrees of effect.

Dareth peered through one of the portals, one that looked down over a snow-capped mountain range. This was his favorite portal to use for the simple reason that the scenery was the most beautiful. He flexed his will and materialized in resemblance of his physical form before stepping onto the liquid painting. Immediately he found himself atop one of those snow-capped mountains. The wind howled and whipped about him, but neither the force of it nor the cold could touch him. He was not here in the flesh, and so the things of the flesh could neither affect nor restrict him. It was a freedom that only Dream Breakers could know.

Dareth allowed himself to float downward, through the ice and rock until he found himself in the vast hollowness of a cavern. It was dark, and had he been in his body he would’ve been wholly blind, but as a spirit he could see everything as though the sun itself lived within the mountain. Dareth moved forward passing sparkling stalagmites and veins of gold. If he could access this place in the flesh, he very well could become rich, but no, that was not why he’d come. Dareth walked until he found a bubbling fountain of luminescent, emerald-colored water in the middle of a small pond.

A Drenn Fountain.

The strange, glowing water only existed on the ethereal mirror of the physical plane. Of course, it wasn’t really water, it only manifested itself to his mind as such; likely the product of his training in the ancient traditions of the Arcases. In theory, it could appear as whatever the Dream Breaker thought it to be. But Arkyns for centuries had clothed the knowledge of how to tap Drenn in the metaphor of drinking from a fountain, and so that notion had come to solidify the idea in the collective minds of everyone.

Dareth moved to the edge, knelt, and scooped up a handful of glowing liquid. He drank and warmth begin to spread within him, weaving itself throughout his entire spirit-body. Two more handfuls were all that he needed to quench his thirst and he knew then that he held as much Drenn as he could, which was considerable when compared with his peers.

Great capacity to hold Drenn does not make one a great Arkyn, Alegar’s dry voice echoed from the pages of some book Dareth had memorized years ago. It was true enough. Many of the most powerful Arkyns could drink in only half of the Drenn that Dareth could store. They learned early on to ration their energy, never imbuing a spell with more than what was needed. On the other hand, Dareth had read about Arkyns with great capacities who gave in to their hubris, opting for showy magic and recklessly flaunting of theirs power. Their tragic falls had been warning enough for him to never do the same.

A heartbeat later, he was standing atop the mountain again, his portal of entry still open twenty feet in the air above him. Dareth took one last indulgent look at the breathtaking view one could only find on the top of the world, and then ascended. He left the material plane and found himself again in the colonnade room that was not really a room.

It would be dawn soon on his side of the world. That thought set Dareth’s mind to work, automatically listing everything he needed to prepare for his mission. That had been the impetus of his coming to the Aether, to refill his Drenn store. He knew he probably had enough left to perform his assigned duty, but Dareth was a careful man. He released the manifestation of his physical self and began to float toward the crystal archway at the far end of the colonnade, the door that would take him back to into his dreams.

Hello, a small voice said, breaking the abnormal quiet.

Dareth reflexively coalesced into one of his many disguised physical forms; an old man that looked much like his grandfather. He whipped around and found a little girl staring at him. She looked about nine, dressed in a child’s play dress with pink ribbons tying two pigtails. She had golden hair, and blue eyes.

Those eyes! They were not a child’s eyes. They were too intent, too knowing, too deep.

No, she said shaking her head. "I want to see the real you."

Dareth felt a wave of the girl’s will slam into him, tearing away his disguise and forcing him to manifest true. He tried to counter with his will, but she had caught him off guard.

That’s better, the girl said.

Who are you? Dareth readied his will in case she struck out at him again.

My name is Saesha. The girl smiled and curtseyed.

Who are you really? Dareth said as he put one of the columns between them.

The girl’s smile faded. Don’t be rude, Dareth of the Jade Arcas.

She knows who I am and which school I belong to, Dareth thought with a stab of panic. While it wasn’t uncommon to encounter another Dream Breaker exploring the Aether, they seldom acknowledged one another, to say nothing of actually communicating. It was something of an unspoken rule. Everyone in the Aether usually disguised themselves if they chose to manifest at all. On those rare occasions when they did approach someone, it was usually to attack.

The weapons of an ethereal duel were different than that used in the physical world. There were no swords, spears, or even magic in the Aether. The way you defeated an opponent here was simple; overcome their will and bend it to your own. The result was enslavement, or possession; something considered an atrocity amongst most Arcases.

How had this Arkyn found him? She probably heard the noise I made earlier. He began to scold himself for the amateur slip, but then realized he’d only been responding to Alegar. Therefore, this was Alegar’s fault. Stupid Alegar! he muttered.

What was that? Saesha asked.

What do you want? Dareth said as he continued to inch toward the crystal arch.

Saesha followed him with her intense eyes. I am not going to attack you.

You already did, Dareth replied as he readied his will to strike.

Saesha scoffed. That wasn’t an attack.

Was she bluffing? Her force of will had been terrible, not as strong as Dareth himself could muster, but if she had only been using a small portion…

I say again, what do you want?

Saesha smiled. I just wanted to see you here before I see you there. She motioned to the circular portals set in the floor at the center of the room.

Why? Dareth asked.

To know what I will be up against when I assassinate the High Priest of Faelen.

She’s the assassin!

His assignment from the Jade Arcas had been to act as the High Priest’s bodyguard this very day; the entire reason he’d come to refill his Drenn. The old man was going to be making his annual speech to the followers of Aul, and his vicars had caught wind of plans to assassinate him as he did so. Of course there were always plots to assassinate the High Priest, making this assignment largely routine, but if the assassin was another Arkyn…

You’re one of the disgraced! What Arcas were you expelled from?

Saesha smiled. So sure that I am just an expelled rebel, are you?

Was Saesha implying that she had been sent by her Arcas to kill the High Priest? Such a thing was ridiculous. The Arcases all had strict laws forbidding any Arkyn to kill save for self-preservation, or for the protection of the innocent. This thing Saesha was insinuating was unthinkable.

You lie!

Saesha shook her head. You are naïve, Dareth. For someone with your reputation of brilliance, you sure are blind to the reality of human nature and politics.

But the law of the Arcases forbids―

Saesha laughed. Who do you think controls this land? Faelen’s Kings and rulers are just puppets, and the Master Arkyns pull the strings. It’s something of a game to them.

Dareth shook his head. I won’t believe it.

Saesha frowned. It doesn’t matter to me. I will accomplish my mission, and if you get in my way, I will kill you.

So sure that you can best me, are you?

Saesha smiled again, making her little-girl face look a nightmarish parody of innocence. I wasn’t. That’s why I came here to meet you. I needed to know. And now I do.

Abruptly Saesha lashed out with her will, but this time Dareth was ready. He raised his will like a shield, deflecting Saesha’s attack while striking back at her at the same time. The little girl resisted Dareth’s attempt to dominate her and laughed.

I hope you are better at casting spells than you are at Dream Breaking. And with that she was gone.

Dareth released his physical representation and hurled his consciousness through the crystal arch. He found himself back in his dream, one of swimming in an endless ocean. Fighting off the disorientation―there was always a moment of confusion when returning to one’s dream from the Aether―Dareth remembered he was sleeping and willed himself to wake.

He sat up in bed, his entire body covered in sweat. He looked to the window and found that the sun had just started creeping up over the mountains. Dawn had come and Dareth had to meet the High Priest’s vicars in less than an hour. And then I’m going to have to face another Arkyn in combat; an anonymous opponent that he would have to find in the crowd of devotees. He splashed his face with water from his washbasin, tore off his night shirt, and quickly dressed.

The vicars didn’t take kindly to Dareth’s assertion that the High Priest’s potential assassin was another Arkyn. In fact, they accused Dareth of fear mongering in an attempt to negotiate a higher rate for his services. And they laughed at him when he suggested that they cancel the High Priest’s annual pronouncement of blessing upon his followers. It was all very frustrating.

Because of his rising anxiety, Dareth attempted to talk to the old man himself, but the vicars were instant in putting him off each time. The blessing was going to happen and Dareth had to be ready. The High Priest, two vicars, and Dareth walked out onto a stone balcony overlooking a sea of faces. They were two stories above the crowd of hundreds making them perfect targets.

Dareth went to work searching the eyes of the people standing at the front of the crowd.

He needed to dismiss all notions of looking for a little girl, or even a woman. One could disguise themselves in whatever way they wished when in the Aether. The only sure way Dareth would be able to recognize Saesha, or whoever she was, would be to find her eyes. You could change much about yourself when you manifested a different physical likeness in the Aether, but it was very difficult to hide one’s eyes. Oh you could change the color or shape, but there was something behind the eyes that couldn’t be hidden.

The High Priest began his prelude speech which was really nothing more than quotations of scripture and tired platitudes. Dareth was not a follower of Aul, but as an Arkyn he enjoyed an oddly duplicitous relationship with the church. They preached against the Arcases as pagan institutions that meddled with dark powers, while at the same time hiring them to perform certain essential functions, like protecting their High Priest in public. Dareth had once called them on that incongruity and received a heated dogmatic explanation that reeked of hypocrisy.

Movement in the crowd below caught his attention and Dareth reflexively dipped into his Drenn reservoir and readied a spell recitation. The figure was trying to appear unassuming as it carefully shouldered past a big man with a little girl riding his shoulders. He was a bearded man shrouded in a grey cloak, his hood drawn to hide his face.

The man neared the front of the crowd and that’s when Dareth saw light glint off of something in his hand. A dagger! Before Dareth could cry out, the man cocked back and hurled the knife up towards the balcony. It spun blade over handle on a trajectory that would bury the knife directly in the High Priest’s forehead. Dareth’s training took over and he mentally recited his spell. He began with a transmutation prefix to one of the three states of matter, all the while pouring Drenn into the words. The words of the spell moved before his mind’s eye as the Drenn highlighted them in an emerald green glow. He cut off the infusion as he ended the spell.

The dagger was only inches in front of the High Priest’s face when it changed into water, splashing the old man in the eyes and making him yelp as he brought his hand up. Smoke would’ve been better, but changing matter from solid to gas took more energy. Transmutation ascends and descends the ladder of matter states; solid to liquid, liquid to gas. Skipping a rung on this ladder expends more energy. Alegar certainly was an insufferable know-it-all.

Silence hung in the air for a moment as the import of what was happening dawned on the crowd. Screams and shouting followed and Dareth saw one of the vicars rush forward and tackle the High Priest to the ground. It was heroic, but would’ve come too late. The other vicar joined in and raised the elderly High Priest up enough so that they could drag him off the balcony and back into the basilica.

Dareth searched the panicked crowd for the assassin. He saw the man retreating into a group of women, and Dareth searched his memory for a spell that would let him apprehend the man while not endangering any of the people in the audience. A strategy had just sprung to mind when someone yanked on his sleeve. He turned to find one of the vicars excitedly motioning for him to follow the High Priest, who was being rushed away by a group of his attendants.

Dareth cast one more glance back at the crowd before following the High Priest. It made sense. It wasn’t likely that the elderly man was in any more danger, but it was Dareth’s duty to stay with him. He had been paid to protect him and he would do so. It wasn’t necessarily his duty to apprehend the would-be assassin. Saesha is a man. Although it hadn’t come as a complete surprise, something about that bothered him. He hadn’t been able to see the man’s eyes, but then again he hadn’t needed to. The man’s actions had marked him as the assassin. And he had used a knife!

No Arkyn worth his training wouldn’t carry a weapon, Dareth himself carried a long knife in his belt. But there were a dozen different magical methods that the assassin could’ve used to try to kill the High Priest; methods that would’ve been far more difficult for Dareth to counter.

The clergy rushed Dareth and the High Priest into a room without windows. It must have been the elderly man’s personal study as the walls were lined with shelves full of tomes and the air was thick with the musty smell of old paper. The vicars sat the High Priest down in an oversized, plush armchair, and lit candles before they closed the double doors.

Dareth glanced at the old man and found him pale and shaking. He chuckled to himself as he realized it was likely not from the attempt on his life, but instead from the use of a transmutation spell inches in front of his face. The religious were an odd sort. Things like suffering and the poverty of the peasant class wouldn’t upset them, while the manifestation of a simple spell that could be learned by week-old initiates made them shudder.

The lead vicar, a round faced man, turned to face Dareth and hissed, That was no Arkyn!

Instead of letting himself be drawn into an argument with the man, Dareth shook his head and replied, No, it wasn’t.

A few moments later, the doors opened for a girl carrying a tray full of cups and a steaming teapot. Even in her white and brown servant’s dress, Dareth could see that she possessed a superb figure. He looked at her face and admired her pouting lips, full and just the right shade of pink. She had to be in her early twenties, not much younger than Dareth himself. Her lustrous black hair reflected the dancing flickers of candle flames, and those blue eyes—he stiffened. He knew those eyes.

Dareth immediately reacted, mentally reciting another transmutation spell. The woman’s silver tray exploded into a spray of water and the teapot fell, splashing scalding brown liquid down the front of her dress. She yelped and jumped back, eyes shooting up to meet Dareth’s. They were hard and full of rage.

One of the vicars cried out as Dareth drew his knife and lunged at the serving girl. Saesha mouthed something and immediately a spasm in Dareth’s left calf muscle caused him to stumble to his knees. How had she done that? Affecting one’s environment was one thing, affecting the body of one’s opponent was far more difficult and generally discouraged as inefficient. Something to do with unknown interference from a living creature’s aura, Alegar had theorized.

Maybe that meant Saesha had lost control of her fear and acted rashly, leaving her with insufficient energy to duel. Maybe she would just try to escape.

That hope proved folly. Just as the cramp faded and Dareth stumbled back to his feet, flashes of light and popping sounds echoed throughout the study as the candle flames exploded and extinguished. Darkness enveloped the room and Dareth found himself unable to see. He called to mind another spell, this one more complex. He fished in his pockets for a pair of spectacles, found them, and put them on while reciting an incantation that would change the composition of the glass so that it would bend heat into light, making the rooms occupants appear as pulsating outlines of red, oranges, and yellows.

Once he could see, Dareth found the High Priest’s heat aura. The elderly man was still seated in his chair, rapidly glancing around the room and calling for his vicars. Another heat aura was rushing toward him. Saesha can also see in the dark!

Dareth flung himself at her and internally recited another spell. The gravity beneath Saesha’s heat aura intensified and she went down. That spell had taken Dareth a year to master, and learning just the right amount of Drenn to infuse into it had been tricky. He could sustain it, thereby keeping Saesha pinned, but it would drain his reservoir if he didn’t let it go. So he did.

Saesha’s heat aura remained on the ground a little longer than Dareth expected. He could tell that she was moving her arm, but what was she doing? She abruptly stopped and scrambled up. Dareth couldn’t see her eyes in the dark, but he could feel her glaring at him. He leapt and tackled the woman to the floor. He brought his dagger up to strike, but the weight of it vanished, leaving him with a palm full of gritty sand. She can see more than just heat. Dareth’s realization came a moment too late as the heel of Saesha’s boot slammed into the bridge of his nose, breaking his spectacles and knocking them off of his face.

Again, everything went dark. Dareth did the first thing that popped into his mind. He caused the particles that made up the cloth of Saesha’s dress to speed up in their invisible motion and a heartbeat later her skirts combusted. The spell took too much Drenn though, and he realized with a jolt of panic that he was already at half his capacity. The flames lit up the room, and Dareth saw Saesha rushing toward the exit. She shouldered her way through the massive doors, light from outside outlined the panicked vicars and stunned High Priest.

Dareth launched to his feet and threw himself after her. He slid to a stop on the marble floor in the hall and found a charred dress crumpled in a heap. He snapped his head up. Saesha was running down the hall dressed