The Lost Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

either a pirate or a pirate-hunter?” she asked lightly.
    For a second or two Harry appeared tobe genuinely surprised by the question.
    “How did you know?” he asked.
    An effervescent sensation whispered across her senses. Her pulse kicked up a little. She cleared her throat and tried to calm her dancing energies.
    “It just seemed obvious that whatever made Harry a successful pirate—and by all accounts he was
very
successful—would also have made him very good at catching other pirates. Same skill set, so to speak. It’s a matter of harmonic balance.”
    “Yeah?” Harry looked intrigued.
    “Well, sure. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”
    He moved one hand in a dismissive gesture. “Not to everyone. Very few people outside my family understand—Never mind. To return to my tale, Harry and Nick North quit the business, promoted the story that they had both died on Rainshadow, and slipped quietly back into normal life, or maybe I should say what passed for normal in the first years after the Era of Discord.”
    “I suppose it wouldn’t have been hard for two clever men to make themselves disappear,” Rachel mused. “According to the history books, things were chaotic for a while after the battles in the catacombs ended. I suspect a lot of folks took advantage of the confusion and the lack of a paper trail to make major career changes.”
    “My great-grandfather got married, started a family and what proved to be a profitable corporation. He kept a low profile but he made sure that the family business claimed most of Rainshadow under the old Exploration Laws and later he establishedthe Rainshadow Preserve Foundation to manage things here.”
    “All that to protect what he and North had buried inside the Preserve?”
    “Yes,” Harry said.
    “What happened to Nicholas North?”
    “Unfortunately, he did not do as well as Harry One. Started a number of businesses but they all failed. Eventually he disappeared altogether. My great-grandfather died several years ago but he told me once that he thinks North may have come back to Rainshadow to try to recover the treasure and that he didn’t make it off the island that second time.”
    “How do you know North didn’t find the treasure and vanish with it?”
    “Because as of eighteen months ago, it was still here, right where it was supposed to be,” Harry said.
    “Wow. You actually saw it?”
    “I’ve checked up on it several times over the years.”
    “What is it?” she asked eagerly. “There has been speculation for decades. Rare amber or gems? Alien artifacts?”
    “None of the above. It’s not very exciting, just three chunks of murky gray crystal that my family brought with them from the Old World when they came through the Curtain.”
    “They brought three rocks all the way from Earth?” She was floored. “Good grief, those stones must have had some value to warrant space on one of the colonial ships.”
    “There’s no record of the stones having any monetary value, but according to what little weknow about them, they may have had some paranormal properties. My great-grandfather considered them to be extremely dangerous but he did not want to get rid of them altogether by dropping them into a deep ocean trench. His theory was that someday they might prove to be very valuable. But he said that modern technology wasn’t sufficiently advanced to control the energy in the stones, let alone find a profitable way to use them.”
    “So he hid them here on Rainshadow and left his descendants with instructions to protect them.”
    “That’s pretty much the whole story,” Harry said. “You said you know where they’re hidden.”
    “Harry One left an old psi-code map in the family archives. I was able to use it to locate the cave where Harry and Nick hid the stones. It’s just a short distance inside the energy fence, not deep in the heart of the Preserve. My great-grandfather told me that he and North were afraid that if they went in too