Master Of The Planes (Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

lips.  “You’re learning, Kimbolt and I’m sorry, I’m doing this all wrong.  Everything is in the wrong order.  We know each other so well and yet not at all.”  She let go his hand and pressed her own hands against her mouth exhaling a misty cloud of breath before admitting, “I don’t know what I want.”
    He waited.
    “But I didn’t want there to be a silence between us.  I didn’t want to pretend nothing at all had changed, even if I don’t really know how it has changed.  I don’t want it to be difficult.”
    He took her hand and raised it to his lips for the lightest of kisses.  Her cheeks coloured at his touch while he assured her, “Niarmit you are my queen and I am Kimbolt, I am your captain, your seneschal, I am anything you want me to be.”
    She looked back at him, a green eyed gaze of unsettling steadiness.  “But what do you want to be, Kimbolt? What do you want us to be?”
    There was a cough behind him, from someone just out of sight beyond the corner of a high hedge.  Kimbolt quickly got to his feet and let go the queen’s hand. A second or two later, Lady Giseanne slipped into view, her expression quite inscrutable.
    “I am sorry for intruding your Majesty,” she said.  “But Mistress Elise has been to see me.”
    “Hepdida?”
    Giseanne smiled away the queen’s alarm.  “The princess is well, but moreover Elise thinks she is well enough to be told the news. I agree with Elise that she will not thank us for any further delay.”
    Niarmit sighed.  “I wish there was an end to the bad news I must give her.”
    “I can do it, if you wish.” Giseanne touched the great sapphire ring she wore.  “I felt his passing too.”
    “Together.  We tell her together.  We are her only family now.”

***
    The air was stale in the great subterranean chamber that was Maelgrum’s audience hall.  Magical light of unparalleled power still failed to penetrate into the dark recesses of its vaulted ceiling or the dim alcoves and passageways to left and right.  The fetid atmosphere was rich with the scent of fear and despair sweated out by the living, and the soon to be not living, visitors to the undead lord in the weeks since his return to his old abode.
    When Quintala had first ventured into the huge space seventeen and a half years earlier, there had been a dusty dread to the place, a malevolent shadow that had been superimposed on the darkness.  Now, though, the evil was alive, a tangible sense of something worse than hatred.  This was a place which did not loath the living, it was simply indifferent to them.  No life was of any value, save the service it could offer when bent to the Dark Lord’s will.
    In truth, there were a few individuals who, in foiling Maelgrum’s ambitions, might have incited in him a thirst for the cruellest vengeance his mind could devise.  But for the vast majority, be they orc or human, warrior or wizard, the lich’s interest went no further than the advantage they could offer him in life, or the amusement they might provide in the drawn out suffering of their deaths.  
    For seventeen years she had been through the dizzying daily ritual of communicating with her distant master.  The groping fingers of Maelgrum’s consciousness had intruded on her mind, while in turn her own awareness had leached into the dark bubbling cavern of Maelgrum’s malice.  Treachery had been exhausting, his direction demanding and autocratic.  In turn her attempts to steer her straying into her master’s conscience had been clumsily unyielding.  Between the deep vertiginous ravines of his unthinking cruelty, were filaments of memory she longed to pursue, to probe into his history and answer questions about her own past and her future.  But in seventeen years she had discovered nothing of consequence.
    If Maelgrum had been aware of her determination to pry he had never let it show.  In truth she suspected it would merely have amused him, shutting off another