The Lodestone Trilogy (Limited Edition) (The Lodestone Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

had changed her life and ultimately become her mentor. What will be the future for this one, she reflected, this “other me ”?
    She reached into the canvas sack at her waist and tossed the mother a flatbread and a skin of water, registering the surprised look on the woman’s face. Without waiting for response, Keris turned away from the image of her past and began running to meet the escort where the path to her future lay. Behind her she heard a woman’s voice.
    “Blessings of the Three to you, Lady! May Ail-Gan guide your steps…”
    Keris resisted the temptation to laugh.
    ~
    Running into open country, Keris leaped upward and flared her cloak, feeling for the pressure from any latent lodestone in the rocky landscape. A deposit to her left. She pivoted in the air, fully retracting the bronze shield in her cloak and exposing the upper layer of tempered lodestone. The repulsive force pushed Keris higher and to the right. As she flew, she sought to feel pressure from any other naturally occurring source. Finding none, she allowed her flight to bring her down to earth in a low trajectory arc. She hit the ground and continued at a loping pace.
    Sensing a deposit ahead of her, she angled towards it until she felt it passing under her, and then leaped and flared once more.
    The landscape was rough and uneven, as if a giant hand had grasped it at one end and shaken it like a sheet. Boulders were strewn about beneath her like the giant’s discarded playthings. Here and there, a stunted tree or a tangled bush clung stubbornly to a patch of miserly soil. The sky was bright, with all three suns shining forth, broken only by a few wisps of cloud. Keris began to feel hot from her exertions. She landed gracefully on a shelf of red-brown sandstone and reached for a sip of water.
    The ground was starting to rise upward to meet the plateau on which Chalimar stood. Far behind her now, the road she had left disappeared into the narrow rift which would convey the tributes and their escort to higher ground. She only needed to bear a little to the right, and negotiate the escarpment to reach the place where the road widened out onto flat terrain. She moved off again, blipping her neck control and scanning for the nearest deposit that would allow her to take to the air once more.
    A short while later she stood atop the escarpment. A sudden breeze had sprung up, causing her flying cloak to flutter restlessly, and stirring her long raven hair. She brushed her hair back from her eyes. There seemed to be no sign of the escort. A pair of mylar birds wheeled lazily overhead, searching out rising thermals. Ail-Gan was near to Ail-Mazzoth, washing out its colour to a pale red. Ail-Kar was well above the western horizon.
    Running forward once again, she leaped, adjusting her shoulder control until she felt the familiar repulsive push of a lodestone deposit, and then opened up her cloak, as she sailed through the light gravity on a wide arc. She angled toward a low rise in the barren terrain, letting herself descend to the ground gracefully, and walked the few steps to the crest.
    Keris could see the road now, only a few hundred feet away, but there was still no sign of the escort. Finally, after looking around, she glimpsed them some distance ahead. But there was something very wrong. The escort was not moving, the soldiers standing in a knot before it. Then all of a sudden, Keris saw a movement out of the corner of her eye to her right–a darker shape moving erratically away across the landscape. One of the tributes had made a break for it. Why were the soldiers not in pursuit ? Then, another movement from near where the carts stood. A small shape arced up and through the air towards the running figure. She watched, transfixed, as the projectile followed its trajectory and then impacted noiselessly. The figure dropped and lay motionless.
    Keris was running now, down the other slope and towards where the fallen figure lay. She flared her cloak