Swords: 08 - The Fifth Book Of Lost Swords - Coinspinner’s Story Read Online Free PDF

crescent, though otherwise looking identical to the familiar companion of Earth.
           There were many viewpoints of the subject that might possibly be taken. Looking at the matter one way, the City of Wizards could scarcely be called a city at all—or, if the phenomenon was looked at in another way, it consisted of portions of several cities, and of portions of the rural world as well, normally separated in space and time, but here blended by conflicting and persistent magics into a confusing juxtaposition.
           Generally, folk devoid of the skills of wizardry found it impossible to discover an entrance to the City at all—or to enter it even if they should manage to locate a threshold. People unskilled in magic might have journeyed all the continents of the mundane earth from north to south and east to west in search of the City and never have seen its gates. But to the skilled and properly initiated, many ports of entry were available.
           Wizards of vastly different character and varying classes of ability came here to the City. So had they come from time immemorial, sometimes only to amuse themselves, sometimes to duel, sometimes to train their more promising apprentices. And here in the City, by the general agreement of their guilds, the more responsible among the workers in enchantment carried on many of their more dangerous experiments, researches that might otherwise do damage to some portion of the generally habitable world.
           Sections and shards of the outside world, samples from a number of real cities and countrysides, had all been incorporated into the City from time to time. Houses and temples of every kind, even whole fortifications, had sometimes drifted or been hurled here, places wrenched out of their proper space-time locations by the contending or experimental forces of magic. Surprisingly, at least to Adrian, there had even been a substantial amount of original construction in the City over the centuries of its known existence, some of it carried out by human hands to the designs of human architects. But most of this deliberate building was badly designed. Much of it was never completed, and little of it endured for long.
           As the Teacher had explained, both things and people judged unendurable by normal society were sometimes banished from the normal world, to end up here. Among the human inhabitants were the mad, the desperate, the fugitives, the utter outcasts of the world.
           And also among the inhabitants were many who were not, and never had been, human.
     
     

 
    Chapter Three
     
           West of the city of Sarykam the sky grew clear before midday, and then promptly began to cloud again with a speed that suggested the possibility of some cause beyond mere nature. The sun had moved well past the zenith, and into a fresh onrush of gray scud lower than the nearby peaks, when the Culmian Crown Prince, now riding near the rear of his fast-moving cavalcade, halted his riding-beast and turned in his saddle to look back. From this position he was able to observe a great deal of the landscape, mostly a no-man’s-land of barren mountains with which his small force was surrounded. The domain of Tasavalta was physically small and narrow, and the border in this area was ill-defined. But the leader of the fleeing Culmians felt confident that he had already left it behind him.
           Four or five of Crown Prince Murat’s comrades in arms, all of those who had been riding near him, now stopped as well, glad of the chance of at least a brief rest for their mounts. Farther inland, the bulk of the small Culmian force had already vanished behind jagged hills. At the moment, somewhere in that direction, another trusted officer was carrying the Sword of Love steadily toward Culm.
           Another Sword, Coinspinner, that Murat had secretly brought with him to Tasavalta rode openly now at his belt. And up to this point, in the