Free A Sword for a Dragon by Christopher Rowley

nearby. Men in Marneri blue and red were on the scene and, with a weird shriek of insane joy, the man ran at them and died on their swords.
    Lagdalen knelt beside Lessis, who was unconscious. There was a pink froth on her lips, death seemed imminent. Lagdalen felt her chest constrict and her mind go black with panic, horror, and a vast wave of sorrow.
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    Word of the disaster was sent at once to Cunfshon on the clipper
Stormwind
. Even with every scrap of sail clapped on and favorable winds across the Bright Sea, the passage would take a week. In the meantime the witches on the scene in Marneri did their best to keep Lessis alive.
    She was rushed to the hospital in the Temple and examined by the high surgeon himself. One lung was found collapsed and a major blood vessel cut. This had to be repaired manually, a task close to the limits of surgical skill in the Empire of the Rose.
    As the high surgeon worked with needle and fine thread, the witches of Marneri struggled to build a strong spell that would keep Lessis’s spirit within her body and prevent any further weakening of her hold on life. It was difficult. Lessis had lost a lot of blood and was very close to death. After eight hours of chanting and spell work the witches ceased. Lessis survived in a state approaching that of hibernation. She could be fed through a straw, and she continued to breathe, slowly.
    Ten days after the
Stormwind
cleared the harbor bar, a white herring gull flew into the city and made its way to the roof of the Temple in mid-evening. There, it set down and raised an outcry of gull squall until the Mistress of Animals, Fi-ice, climbed to the high roof and spoke with it. The message she received electrified her.
    At once, she sent couriers to the Abbess Plesenta and the Princess Besita. They were to join her in the chamber of the Black Mirror. A response was coming from Cunfshon. A Great Witch was coming in person.
    At the bell announcing the fall of night, the three met by the mirror and formed the circle.
    Princess Besita, soon to be queen, was terrified. Helplessly she had protested to Fi-ice that since she was to be crowned in a matter of days, surely she should not be risked at the Black Mirror?
    Alas, replied Fi-ice, there was a shortage of witches or priestesses who were experienced in the opening of the mirror. Three were needed, and only Fi-ice, Plesenta, and Besita in all of Marneri at that moment were privy to the knowledge required. In this could be seen the malice of old Sanker, who had forced Besita to take this service, in the often remarked hope that something would snatch the “dollop of bastardy” in the dark and feast on it. And so Besita had more experience with the mirror than even Fi-ice, who was a Witch of Standing and who, one day, might even be one of the Great.
    In the high chamber in the Tower of Guard, they joined hands, created the spell, and opened the Black Mirror. It came with a hot, terrifying hiss, like a stream of oil striking red hot metal.
    Set into a slab of black stone there was now a window blown through the fabric of the world, gazing into the hotly energetic subworld of chaos.
    There was a background of grey emptiness, the chaotic ether. Here slid tumbling, whirling shapes of clouds and tentacles. Here ruled the monstrous Thing-weights, dread horrors of the dark.
    Wherever mortal humans opened such mirrors or entered the subworld for the advantages of swift travel between places in higher worlds, they risked a fearsome death. Priestesses had been snatched from before the mirror, taken in the wink of an eye by a Thingweight’s tentacle flashing through into the high world of Ryetelth.
    From the hot ether of chaos came a continual roaring sound, the surf noise of an ocean of molten lead that lapped on sands of iron. Hot red sparks snapped and popped from the mirror’s surface. Suddenly Fi-ice sensed the traveler. She came a long way, and she came quickly. There was a tremendous power in