World's End Read Online Free PDF Page A

screaming and each one went still.
    In the perfect silence that followed the war mages were picked up in their hundreds. They spun through the air in a wide circle around Shâ’s body. The curling wave of them went still, leaving all of them suspended motionless in the air. With each passing second they resumed motion, went still, resumed, went still.
    Eric and Aziel ran. Both were all but mindless for that sprint while the great unclean beast loomed mountainous behind them, distracted by its new playthings. And yet only naked air was between it and them – it had only to turn its head and notice two small shapes fleeing across the bare stone floor. The distant collection of buildings they headed for seemed to get no closer. Neither of them paused to look back, but they heard the dragon’s thumping footsteps, felt the stone shivering, and they could not tell whether it merely moved among its captured things or whether it pursued them. Eric was a child again, caught in a nightmare free of reason’s limits, unable to wake. They both wept in helplessness as they ran. Now and then came more exclamations in Shâ’s terrible voice. Eric caught only portions of each outburst’s mocking meaning, but what little he understood was far too much.
    It was surely just minutes but it seemed far longer, the time of running until the first of the structures they’d seen from afar came within reach. It had appeared they got no closer up until the moment their breath ran out and their run became an exhausted stagger. Then they were cowering behind a column made of the same stone as the cavern floor, shoulder toshoulder, their hands pressed against its wide cool surface, coughing as they tried to catch their breath. Fine dust coated the cold stone floor they pressed their bellies upon. The stone still shivered from Shâ’s footsteps.

3
THE MAYOR OF YINFEL
    Like storms which had skirted its land to strike elsewhere, Yinfel City was untroubled by the latest outbreaks of war. Its people had spent the days since Elvury’s fall, and since the Wall’s destruction, as if nothing much had happened at all, besides a dramatic rise and fall on the markets of various metals, crops, cloth, enchanted goods, potions, and so on. In fact, times were good. The city was flushed with Elvury’s cash. Many merchants – some who’d prepared for Elvury’s fall with uncanny anticipation – grew rich enough to begin eyeing off not just the nicer homes in the Third Section, but the smaller dwellings within Yincastle itself.
    Refugees from Elvury kept trickling in steadily from the north. Most were allowed within Yinfel’s gates to resettle, and charged a hefty one-off tax to pay for extra slum housing in the ghetto near Shield One. Failing the tax – and many did fail, having abandoned their wealth in the rush to flee – they were turned away, sent to fend for themselves in the outskirt farming villages. Once-wealthy hands were now required to dig through dirt for their keep.
    The city itself was larger and grander to behold than ElvuryCity; without the natural defence of mountains, its walls were by necessity very tall, made from slabs of enchanted black stone, guarded over by four enormous Shield Towers, two per gate. Yincastle, the massive crown in the city’s middle, was inaccessible to all but the wealthiest, and money alone was not enough to live there. One had to have an insider’s mind and morals too, and the ability to keep one’s mouth shut on seeing something that would disturb the citizens below, should rumour escape. A few bloodline families – and those they now and then plucked from the civilian areas of the city – had kept the place to themselves for millennia, throughout all the wars no matter who won or lost. They’d held Yincastle for themselves long before Vous was conceived.
    The city’s two worlds were shut off from one another. The inner world