Triumph of the Darksword Read Online Free PDF Page B

was in the Sorcerer’s crude town in the Outland. Andon, their elderly, gentle leader, was with him as was a
Theldara—
a healer—and a catalyst who had been sent to the Sorcerers’s village by Prince Garald himself. Mosiah begged to know the fate of his friends, but none in the secluded village could—or would—tell him.
    The following weeks were ones of pain when he was awake and terrible dreams when he sank into the magically induced sleep. Then he heard, in a whispered conversation not intended for his ears, what had happened to Joram and Father Saryon. He heard about the catalyst’s tragic sacrifice, about Joram’s voluntary walk into Beyond.
    Mosiah himself drew near death. The
Theldara
tried everything but told Andon that the young man’s magical Life was not working to save him. Mosiah didn’t care. Dying was easier than living with the pain.
    One day Andon told him he had visitors, two people who had been brought to the village by orders of Prince Garald.
    Mosiah couldn’t imagine who they could be and he didn’t much care. And then his mother’s arms were around him, her tears bathing his wounds. His father’s voice was in his ears. Gently, tenderly, his parents’ rough, work-worn hands led their son back to life.
    The memories of his pain and his despair overwhelmed Mosiah and he felt as though the Corridor were smothering him. Fortunately, the journey was short. The feeling of panic subsided as the Corridor gaped open. But the terror was replaced by feelings more profound yet no less painful—feelingsof sorrow and of grief. Stepping from the Corridor, Mosiah gritted his teeth, nerving himself. Although he had never visited the Borderlands, he had familiarized himself with them and he knew what to expect.
    A shoreline of fine white sand, dotted here and there with patches of tall grass that eventually, near the shifting mists of gray leading to Beyond, died out completely, leaving a beachline as stark and bare as a picked bone. Upon this beach would stand the Watchers and here, as well, would be Saryon—his flesh transformed to stone.
    “The sight is not dreadful as you might expect,” Mosiah had heard Prince Garald tell a group gathered around him during a party one evening not long ago. “There is a look of peace on the man’s stone face that makes one almost envious of him, for it is a peace that no living man can know.”
    Mosiah was skeptical. He hoped it was true, he hoped Saryon had found the faith the priest had lost, but he didn’t believe it. Radisovik had said Garald had one fault—he gloried in warfare. That was true, and if he had another it was that he tended to see in people and events what he wanted to see, not necessarily what was there.
    Saryon’s stone form would be staring perpetually into Beyond, the shifting, ever-changing mists of the magical Border that turned in upon themselves in endless swirls and whorls.
    “It is a calm and peaceful place, the Borderland,” Garald told the crowd in a grim voice. “To look at it, no one would ever suspect the tragedies that take place upon that Shore of Death.”
    Calm….
    Peaceful….
    Stepping from the Corridor onto the sand, Mosiah was knocked off his feet by a tremendous gust of wind.
    He couldn’t see. Sand stung his face and made it nearly impossible to open his eyes. The force of the wind was unbelievable, like nothing he had ever seen before in his life and he had once experienced a thunderstorm conjured up by two warring groups of
Sif-Hanar.
He struggled to stand, but it was a losing battle and he would have been tossed along the beach like the uprooted plants that were flying past, entanglingthemselves in his legs, had not a strong hand reached out and grasped his own.
    Knowing he wouldn’t be able to endure much more of this, Mosiah quickly activated a magical bubble that surrounded him and the person who had saved him. Instantly, the protective shell enveloped both of them, shutting out the wind, encasing them in