Lost and alone, disheartened by failure and wanting only to go home, Thomas Gown and his companions face the darkest hour of their lives when they stumble across a remnant of the once mighty Agglemonian Empire. There they make a stunning discovery t...
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Robert Drake knew that the loose slope of stones and gravel would give way under his weight a fraction of a second before he set foot on it, but by then it was too late for him to stop. His brain had already sent the instructions to his leg muscles and he could only watch, a helpless observer, as they obeyed and completed the step. He felt the ground beginning to move under him in a kind of slow motion as his mind raced, searching for away to regain his balance, and then he was falling, almost breaking his leg again as he slipped twenty feet down the scree slope to lie in a heap at the bottom.
The seven Ilandian soldiers who were travelling with him ran, slipping and sliding, down to see if he was hurt. They were once among the defenders of Silverlode, a fortress city like Fort Battleaxe which had also recently fallen to the Shadowhordes. By the time they reached him, though, he was already climbing back to his feet, cursing his clumsiness and stupidity at not spotting the unstable patch earlier.
“Are you all right, Sir?” asked Grantis Fletcher, the first man to reach him. The regimental badge on the left breast of his rusty and dented breastplate bore the emblem of the First Ilandian Pikers and the service bars on his shoulder recorded twenty two years of military service. He gave the priest a quick look over, answering his own question, then turned to scan the surrounding mountainslopes with his serious brown eyes, looking for any enemy scouts who might have been alerted to their presence by the disturbance.
“Fine, I think,” replied Drake, examining a deep graze on his left hand and wondering whether it was serious enough to merit a healing prayer. After a moment’s thought he decided not and broke the ice on a nearby stream to wash the grit out of the wound before wrapping a not too dirty rag around it. Praying for healing tired him rapidly. Much more rapidly than the clerics of Caroli for whom healing was a vocation. A way of life rather than just a way to maintain peak fighting fitness. Samnos had healed several of their minor injuries already, and the young priest was already feeling tired, as if he'd spent hours straining his eyes to read a book in poor light. There was no telling when one of them might suffer a much more serious accident requiring immediate healing, and the young priest was determined to keep as clear a head as possible.
He braced himself to endure the pain for the time being, therefore, and pray for healing when they stopped for the night, so that he would have the night to recover from the exertion, assuming that the war God still considered him worthy to receive His divine favour. He wasn’t too optimistic of that, however. Not considering the misfortunes that had befallen him since leaving the city, all of which, he had convinced himself, were the result of his own ineptitude and incompetence.
Drake’s flight from the doomed fortress city had taken him just twenty miles towards Tharia before his flying carpet had stopped responding to his commands and started veering off to the north, manifesting the malfunction which Resalintas had warned him of. Knowing very little of wizard magic, he hadn’t known that a faulty carpet can sometimes be brought to a safe landing by carefully cutting some of its strands and so he’d just sat there, watching the land speed past a thousand feet below, wondering what to do.
