Free Master of Crows by Grace Draven

stems; don’t drop the fruit.”
    Or what?   She was tempted to ask in a rare moment of rebellion.
    Silhara kept walking.  “Or I’ll add a special twist to tomorrow’s incantation lesson, apprentice.”
    Her fallen clippers almost pinned her foot to the earth.
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER SEVEN

     
    A crow landed on the window ledge and eyed Silhara as he dressed for the morning.  The light streaming into the room silhouetted the bird in shadow, creating a spot of darkness against the backdrop of orange trees and summer sky.
    He ignored his visitor and scrubbed away blood and the last vestiges of sleep.  The light hurt his eyes but kept him from falling back to the bed in the hope of catching a few hours of nightmare-free slumber.  Corruption had tortured him through the night with sinister dreams of a world burdened by the god’s dominance.  In those visions, he lived a life of decadent privilege.  Wealth untold, armies to do his bidding, women to fulfill any carnal whim, every luxury and desire satisfied with a snap of his fingers.  All possible for the price of his humanity.  Most tempting of all was limitless magic.  The ability to move mountains, divert rivers, attain a near immortal life—this was the greatest gift the god offered, and it poured a tantalizing stream of such power into the sleeping mage.
    A taste, Avatar, of what I can give you if you yield to me.
    The voice waned, replaced by a new dream—a nightmare that still made Silhara shudder.  He stood on an endless beach made of ash instead of sand.  Above him, a night sky devoid of stars and moon bled into an equally black ocean.  Only the dull light of Corruption’s star provided any illumination, and its reflection danced across the rolling water in nacreous paths.  A steady wind, smelling not of spindrift or fish, but of burnt bone, fluttered his hair, sent the ash swirling softly over his feet, a caress of cool, dead fingers across his toes.
    Before him, the ocean stretched into a limitless horizon.  No gulls flew overhead; no fish leapt from the water; no ships sailed the waves.  He knew, with the certainty of all dreams that, if he stepped off the beach and into the water, there would be no bottom to touch, only a vast well of liquid blackness into which he’d drown.
    The waves pitched and receded, unceasing in their hollow lullaby.  Their music was broken abruptly by a curve of darkness rising out of the depths.  The shape sank beneath the water only to rise again.  Whales didn’t swim these lifeless seas.  He knew what rode the waves and stalked these dead shores.  A leviathan, immortal and pitiless, with a gaping maw that swallowed souls.  The steady break of the waves kept time to the wind’s rhythms as the creature swam closer.
    Terror rooted him to the spot, and he waited.  Waited on a beach whose ash was the cremated remains of creatures that traversed a once-living world.  Waited for the monster to surface, stretch wide a black mouth and suck him down into an eternal nothingness.
    Corruption whispered in his dreams once more.
    A taste if you do not .
    He’d had awakened to a bloodied pillow and hands that tingled from the god’s touch.  He’d been tempted to stumble down to the kitchen and filch some of Gurn’s Dragon Piss.  Only the thought of his servant’s expression and his apprentice’s watchful gaze kept him from it.  He had no wish to explain the blood on his face or why his hands shook so badly he’d be challenged to hold a goblet steady.
    He finished his ablutions and stared at the crow who still watched him.  A large bird.  Larger than those normally nesting in the grove’s shady canopy.
    “Come,” he said, and gestured.  Lightning sizzled down his arm.  The crow’s eyes bulged, and it screeched a final caw before bursting into a scattered pile of smoking feathers and charred bones.
    Cradling his burning hand to his chest, Silhara stared at the smoldering mound on the ledge. Corruption