Sword Chosen (eBook)

Donald Haynes (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018 | 1. Auflage
248 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-5439-2550-0 (ISBN)

Infos

The Swordthane Saga tells a story about power, both personal and public. Sword Chosen is the first in a series of seven volumes.

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Apprentice Storyteller Cormac aspires only to become a Master of Lore, but when he receives the news that he has been chosen of the sword, he is stunned to realize that the future of the world rests on his shoulders. Moreover, the sword gives him absolute power. If he is not able to master it, the sword will master him, turning him into one who lives only to kill. As the one who awakened the sword, Princess Orianna of the Seven Families must attend Cormac in his quest. Coming from the courts of Rivershome, she finds herself mortified to wait on a rustic nobody. Now she must deal with her control over him.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

As rapidly as the light of early dawn would allow, Apprentice Storyteller Cormac walked along the broad beach, parallel to the surf, midway between the waves and the cliff. Remnants of the storm littered the sand. Bulbous strands of kelp. Broken sand dollars. Fragments of crab claws and backs. Pieces of mussel shell.

He sensed to his left, somewhere beyond the surf, a hunting pack of gerlach searching for anything small enough or defenseless enough to kill.

Even though the storm had at last broken, wind gusts still tore at his cloak. He held it tightly with both hands.

He looked up at the small cave high on the face of the sandstone cliff. Twenty-seven handholds led up to it. Someone else, in some forgotten time, had started digging them. He had finished the job. The year before, using a cracked axe head tossed aside by his foster father, he had dug them out and added drainage slots. At the top, weeks of work had turned a minor indentation on the ledge into a small cave. The floor sloped downward so the rainwater quickly drained. Now he came to the cave to practice the observing skills expected of an Apprentice Storyteller.

Swiftly he climbed up to it. After spreading his cloak Cormac twisted as he entered, turning to face the ocean. Composing himself he assumed the cross-legged, meditative pose he had learned, early in his apprenticeship, from Eyloff the Old. He worked through the serenity rubrics which were the prologue to passive observation. Satisfied finally, he waited for a moment. Although he could not see it, he sensed, just above the horizon and beyond the storm clouds, the setting full moon. With the proper ritual gestures, he saluted it, waited an appropriate interval and then opened himself to observe the scene before him.

So immediate, so intense came the psychic cry that it nearly broke through his defenses. Fear and fatigue . . . outrage . . . concern for another . . . all these in complex and shifting flickers crashed into him, slamming his head back against the cave wall, leaving him for a moment stunned, disoriented. Then, almost as an observer of his own consciousness, he realized that out beyond the surf, in the featureless ocean chop, someone fought to stay alive. Forcing back his excitement, Cormac closed his eyes and repeated the serenity rubric, working with deliberate speed, paying attention to each detail of the entire ritual.

Again, he opened himself to the scene before him.

“A woman,” he muttered to himself. “Definitely a woman.” In vain he fought to organize and make sense of the welter of impressions. Then a second psychic stream became barely perceptible. With a start, Cormac finally understood. Somewhere beyond the surf line two people floated. A woman and a man. An old man. Of the same family, so their sendings sounded so similar. He had a wound. She sustained him on what was left of part of a ship. By some power Cormac could not comprehend the woman forced the raft to move steadily north, holding it parallel to the line of the cliffs. He sat, awe-struck at the fierce tangle of sensations. Suddenly he realized the raft had gone too far. For miles in either direction Iron Creek gave the only opening through the pounding surf. Already the raft had passed its mouth.

“No!” he cried. “Too far.”

To his astonishment an answer came.

“Whither?” asked the mind from the raft.

In the tumble of his excitement the contact broke off. Silence replaced the call for help. Three times he tried to repeat the serenity ritual. He couldn’t remember how it began. Then he realized that, in his agitation, he repeated the opening of the memory ritual useful for retaining what he saw.

Grinding his teeth, he tried to calm himself. To focus on the moment. To observe it, but not be part of it. I am Cormac, he thought grimly. I am an Apprentice Storyteller.

Sweat stood out on his forehead. He felt it, cold in the keening wind. He looked at his hands, at his left thumbnail still black where he had caught it in the cellar door. Raising his eyes slightly, he concentrated on the cave floor. The channels he had carefully crafted to drain rainwater. Small pebbles embedded in the stone. The faint traces of his axe head.

Now he heard it again.

I can not answer her, he thought. I can not do it. Apprentice Storytellers can not do that. All Eyloff has let me learn are the rubrics for passive seeing. I’m still learning how to see the world. I don’t know anything about far-sending.

Carefully he looked outward. Below him the beach, littered with the remains of the storm, swept down to the shining line of the surf. To his left on either side of the creek outlet the waves lifted high, their spume carried like incense on the wind, crashing down on the sand, sweeping upward in arcs of foam. The creek alone offered an avenue of relative calm and even there, though the waves were shorter and more chaotic, they still carried fierce power. In that narrow channel alone lay hope. Any other place and the storm driven waves would destroy the raft.

Reluctantly he looked beyond the surf, beyond the point where the waves began to rear as they caught the sea bottom. The voice in his mind echoed fear. Squinting, he located the raft. A forlorn chip bobbing up and down, now lifted by a wave, now dropping out of sight in a trough until lifted again. Sticking up from it he saw what looked like the stump of a mast.

The raft, beyond the outflow of the creek, lay dead in the water as if waiting for him to command it.

The wailing echoed in his mind.

The storm clouds parted.

Dimming in the growing dawn, the full moon nearly touched the horizon. The raft lay directly in line with it. Unexpectedly Cormac felt a calm wash over him. His fears remained. His doubts as well. But they seemed contained, somehow held stable by the moon’s serene detachment.

Without haste he assumed the upright, meditative position—legs crossed, eyes closed, aware fully for the moment that all things gathered into an orderly pattern.

Opening his eyes, he observed.

Between him and the moon he saw three wide bands—the sand, the surf and the open sea. In them only three things were important. The raft, now awash. Nearer to him, and to his left, the line through the surf made by the outfalling creek. Directly between him and the raft, arrayed in ragged order just beyond the surf, the hunting pack of gerlach.

He knew they, too, had sensed the raft.

They waited now for the inexorable sea to bring them food.

Cormac focused his attention on the raft. “Too far north,” he said in his mind. “Come south. Stand off the point of the cliff with the dead snag on it. Come directly in through the surf.”

No answer came.

He expected none.

He knew he had been heard.

He waited. After several moments, the forlorn bit of wreckage once again began to move, this time south.

The ragged line of gerlach again caught his attention. As the raft moved south, the pack did as well. With a shock, Cormac realized they would be waiting when the raft came through the surf.

Turning quickly, resting his stomach on the lip of the cave, he wiggled out and began descending the face of the cliff. Wildly he went down, slipping the last dozen feet and skinning the palms of both hands.

He ran toward the mouth of the creek, angling across the beach, first fighting the softer sand and then able to go faster once he reached the high tide line where the waves had packed it solid. Now level with the surf, he could no longer see the raft. Still, he could sense it. The fierceness of her determination shown like a beacon. They would get through. The old one would not die.

“Uncle.” That was how she thought of him. “Uncle.”

Between the raft and the beach, spread like a malignant net across the channel, the gerlach waited. Intent on the incoming raft, they had no thought of anything behind them.

Nearing the creek Cormac paused long enough to slip off his boots. Then he loosened his belt, ridding himself of both the buckle and his knife. Metal would too soon warn them. His only weapon would have to be the power of the killing spell in his hands.

He waded knee deep into the water. Now and again, as the waves on either side rose up, he could see the shiny brown backs of the gerlach. They had arranged themselves as he had expected, with the three dominant ones together in the middle of the stream. The lesser members of the pack fanned out on the far side.

If only he could make contact with the three before they became aware of him. Without the focusing intent of the leaders, the rest would scatter. But so long as the three remained together they fused simple and random maliciousness into one evil purpose.

Cormac now stood almost hip deep in the water. Heavier swells threatened to lift him clear of the gravel streambed. Fifteen paces. Ten....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 28.2.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• ISBN-10: 1-5439-2550-2 / 1543925502
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5439-2550-0 / 9781543925500