Beyond The Shadows Read Online Free PDF

protect their slaves and artisans and merchants until all the semicircles of different
     stone had connected to shield the whole of the city.
    There was only one hill, a narrow granite ridge up which the main road snaked in switchbacks designed to encumber siege weapons.
     At the top of the ridge the Gate Keep sat like a toad on a stump. And just on the other side of the rusty iron portcullis’s
     teeth lay Dorian’s first great challenge.
    “You four, go,” Rugger said.
    Dorian was third of four eunuchs, and all shivered as they approached the precipice. Luxbridge was one of the wonders of the
     world, and in all his travels, Dorian had never seen magic to rival it. Without arches, without pillars, the bridge hung like
     a spider’s anchor line for four hundred paces between the Gate Keep and the Citadel of Mount Thrall.
    The last time he’d crossed Luxbridge, Dorian had only noticed the brilliance of the magic, sparkling, springy underfoot, coruscating
     in a thousand colors at every step. Now, he saw nothing but the building blocks to which the magic was anchored. Luxbridge’s
     mundane materials were not stone, metal, or wood; it was paved with human skulls in a path wide enough for three horses to
     pass abreast. New heads had been added to whatever holes had formed over the years. Any Vürdmeister, as masters of the vir
     were called after they passed the tenth shu’ra, could dispel the entire bridge with a word. Dorian even knew the spell, for
     all the good it did him. What made his stomach knot was that the magic of Luxbridge had been crafted so that magi, who used
     the Talent rather than the foul vir that meisters and Vürdmeisters used, would automatically be dropped.
    As perhaps the only person in Midcyru who had been trained as both meister and magus, Dorian thought he had a better chance
     of making the crossing than any other magus. He’d bought new shoes last night and fitted a lead plate inside each sole. He
     thought he’d eliminated all traces of southern magic that might cling to him. Unfortunately, there was only one way to find
     out.
    Heart thudding, Dorian followed the eunuchs onto Luxbridge. At his first step, the bridge flared weirdly green and Dorian
     felt his feet tingling as vir reached up around his shoes. An instant later it stopped, and no one had seen it. Dorian had
     done it. Luxbridge felt that he was Talented, but Dorian’s ancestors had been smart enough to know that not every Talented
     person was a mage. The rest of Dorian’s steps, shuffling like the other nervous eunuchs’, brought sparks out of the magic
     that made the embedded skulls seem to yawn and shift as they stared hatefully at those who passed overhead. But they didn’t
     give way.
    If Dorian felt some pride at the genius of Luxbridge, the sight of Mount Thrall brought only dread. He’d been born in the
     bowels of that damned rock, been starved in its dungeons, fought in its pits, and committed murder in its bedchambers and
     kitchens and halls.
    Within that mountain, Dorian would find his vürd, his destiny, his doom, his completion. He would also find the woman who would become his wife. And, he feared, he would find
     out why he had cast aside his gift of prophecy. What was so terrible that he wanted to throw away his foreknowledge of it?
    Mount Thrall was unnatural: an enormous four-sided black pyramid twice as tall as it was wide and extending deep below the
     earth. From Luxbridge, Dorian looked down and saw clouds obscuring whatever depths lay below. Thirty generations of slaves,
     both Khalidoran and captured in war, had been sent into those depths, mining until they gasped out their last breaths in the
     putrid fumes and added their own bones to the ore.
    The pyramid of the mountain had been sheared straight down one edge and flattened, leaving a plateau in front of a great triangular
     dagger of mountain. The Citadel sat on that plateau. It was dwarfed by the mountain, but as one approached, it