Stained Glass Monsters Read Online Free PDF Page A

buildings were shredded by fragments of the
houses that were closest to the White Lady, only a few remaining
upright. Pieces of wood flew well beyond the village's circle,
spearing into the ground after crossing more than half the distance
to the cordon. The first wave of destruction passed in a moment,
but among the buildings which hadn't been completely destroyed
there followed a series of sliding crashes, as walls collapsed and
settled.
    "Stronger than the last," said Captain
Faille, as if he watched homes being shattered every day.
    "Yes." Lady Weston shaded her eyes to
peer through the night, ignoring the cries of astonishment and
dismay all around. "Danress, prepare the same divination at its
edge please."
    "Yes, M'Lady." Lieutenant Danress took
two of the outriders and headed into the edges of Falk's ruin as
both the Troop Captain and Mayor Dorstan approached the Grand
Magister's carriage.
    "Captain Vesan, I will perform some
further divinations here before heading into Sark. One of the
Queen's Hands will reach here from Asentyr by morning, and will
take charge." Lady Weston nodded at the militia-man, then turned a
softer look on Mayor Dorstan. "I'm sorry for your loss, Sir. I wish
I had been able to prevent this."
    Mayor Dorstan was a ghost of himself,
hollow and without his usual force. He touched his hand to his
forehead, and muttered something, then added: "We're all whole,
M'Lady. That's as much as any man can hope for, when such a thing's
visited on him. It will – you say it will keep expanding? Could you
reckon how far? There's some who are fixing to set themselves up in
Morebly, and I mislike uprooting them twice."
    "The size will depend on the quality of
the caster. The first Grand Summoning, that of Queen Solace, formed
the basin of Lake Surclere. I would not depend on Morebly."
    The Mayor took a step backward, then
bowed and faded into the twilight. Kendall didn't know how big Lake
Surclere was, but she did know that there used to be a town there,
one which had had thousands of people living in it. And three
hundred years ago the Black Queen had cast the Grand Summoning,
trying to increase her power. The spell had let all kind of
monsters loose on Tyrland and, the stories said, the town and all
the countryside around it had been sucked down into a pit, into the
Hells outside the world where the Life Stealers lived.
    Examining this idea, Kendall followed
Lady Weston and Captain Faille to the new edge of the heaviness,
where Lieutenant Danress had cleared and compressed a section of
dirt, and marked out a circle of magic writing among the ruins of
Falk. It was easy to tell where the heaviness started, because that
was where the ground began to slope downward. The gleaming white
figure was now about three feet below them, in the centre of a
rubble-strewn cone sunk into the earth.
    "Guess we should have slit her throat
while we had the chance," Kendall said to Lieutenant Danress, as
Lady Weston once again began to cast. "Could we have stopped her
from finishing her spell if we'd understood sooner? And why did she
decide to do her spell in the middle of Falk instead of somewhere
people didn't live?"
    "It's a little complicated." Danress
glanced at the shadowy stillness which was her senior officer, then
moved a few feet away. "Before the expansion, Lady Weston
thoroughly examined the White Lady and found little in the way of a
physical element, for all she appears to be directly in front of
us. That may be what the caster looks like, but she isn't really
here. The apparition is a distortion out of the Eferum, and no
weapon would have been able to even scratch her."
    "She's in the Hells?"
    "If you want to call it that. The proper
name for the world surrounding this one is the Eferum. While Efera
flows from there to here constantly, like water through a sieve,
magi risk their lives to enter the Eferum to Summon their focus
stones, to increase the amount of power they can call upon. It's
only possible to stay there