The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) Read Online Free PDF

surprise me to find an order of beings that were to us as we to you, and so on. And perhaps, above us all, there is one. And perhaps that one caring and omnipotent, rather than uncaring, manipulative, and predatory.” He shrugged. “May I share a hard truth?”
    “Do you do anything else?” the captain snapped back.
    “All practitioners of the art—of whatever race—reach a point of practice where they ask:
what is real?
” He looked around. Mag shrugged, as if the question was unimportant, and Gabriel flinched.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “If you can manipulate the
aethereal
by the power of your will alone, and shape it to the image you hold only in your head,” Master Smythe said softly, “then it behooves all of us to ask what the act of belief actually contains. Does it not?”
    Sauce shook that remark off the way she’d shake off an opponent’s inept blow. “But you don’t know, yerself,” she said. “One way or another.”
    Gabriel suddenly had the same almost feral look of understanding that Sauce had worn when she understood that the Muriens family now controlled the whole length of the wall. “You mean that—my whole life”—he took a breath as if it hurt—“is not by God’s will or his curse, but by an interference pattern of your kind creating my
fate
?”
    “Ah!” said Master Smythe. “That is, in fact, exactly what I mean.” He paused. “But not just my kind, children of men. All kinds. Your reality is the very result of the interference pattern of an infinite maze of wills. What else could it be?” He smiled, the smile of the cat about to eat the mouse. “Your kind twist the skein of fate, too. You yourself, ser knight. Mag, here. Tom Lachlan. Sauce. Alcaeus. All of you.”
    Gabriel drained all the ale in his cup.
    “Fuck you all, then,” he muttered.
    Mag glanced at him. “I have a question, too,” she said quietly.
    Master Smythe’s eyes rested on her. She met his squarely. And smiled. He had beautiful eyes, she thought.
    “The Patriarch,” she began.
    “A very worthy man,” Master Smythe said.
    “He suggested—mm—that living on the frontier—with the Wild—had some effect on our powers.” Once she began to speak, it appeared that Mag wasn’t sure what she was asking.
    Master Smythe pursed his lips. “An astute observation to which I will add one of my own. When two cultures face off in a war, do you know what the most common result is?”
    Mag swallowed. “One is destroyed?” she asked, her voice suddenly husky.
    Master Smythe shook his head as if she was an inept student. “No, no,” he said. “That scarcely ever happens. They come to resemble one another. War does that.”
    “So you’re sayin’—” Mag paused. “That we are coming to resemble the Wild?”
    “Mag, the Wild is a term of art used by men to describe all of us who are
not
men.” Master Smythe smiled wickedly. “Women might do well to join us, but I digress.” He seemed to find himself very funny, and he gasped silently for a moment. When no one joined him, he sighed. “The Wild is not a conspiracy. It’s a way of life. But the longer you are in contact with us, the more like us you’ll become. In fact—” He shrugged. “In fact, those with the long view would say that men—and women—are more adaptable than any of the other interlopers here, and are learning the Wild all too well.” Master Smythe spread his fingers on the table and looked at them with real curiosity. “You know that all the other races fear you. And that you are the—is there a nice way of putting this? The favourite tools of all the Powers. Inventive, endlessly violent, not terribly bright.” He smiled to take away the sting.
    “Weapons?” Gabriel asked, his head coming up. “Tools?” He thought for a moment. “Defenders?”
    “Goodness, ser knight, you don’t imagine you are
from here
, do you?” asked the dragon.
    “Stop!” Bad Tom said. He got to his feet. “Stop. I’ve had eno’. Ma’ head