Free A Sword for a Dragon by Christopher Rowley Page A

the person making contact. Fi-ice marveled, there were but thirteen of the Great, and only ten who still served in Cunfshon. Who might it be? Sausun of the golden hair? Or Irene of Alaf, the great orator with ultimate powers of voice and control with voice? Whoever it was, she had fantastic strength in the astral powers.
    An orange flash swept the mirror. The three women tensed. Then they saw tentacles of orange-yellow going away from them, heading on toward the traveler. An errant predator of the subworld, a small one, had sensed the oncoming traveler and swept in to investigate. It had missed the mirror.
    They glimpsed for a moment a tumbling, tigerish thing the size of a sperm whale, with the texture of a storm cloud bolt past and on toward the traveler. Then it was gone, reduced to a dot in the distance.
    From the distance there came a bright flash of scarlet, and a moment later the predatory thing came hurtling back, crumpled, crushed, virtually flattened.
    Fi-ice drew a tiny breath and tried to concentrate on simply keeping the mirror open. The power in that flash had been enormous. As she’d suspected, the traveler was one of the most powerful of the Great.
    But the flash of energy would not go unnoticed in the near regions of chaos. Like blood in the ocean, it would quickly attract much greater predators.
    There began a faint, distant flickering of purple energies, far away, behind the traveler. Soon it looked like lightning flashes beneath a distant storm cloud.
    “Hurry, Traveler, you are sourced by a Thing-weight,” called Fi-ice with her astral voice.
    Besita had tears running down her cheeks while she trembled and shook. The Abbess Plesenta was bracing herself, wide-eyed. This service at the mirror was getting to be too frequent. Only a year or so before they’d almost lost Lessis here.
    The traveler accelerated and could be seen now, a tiny black dot hurtling across the spasm of chaos. But the faraway purple energies and the colossus that hung above them were coming much faster. Already the gross exterior shapes of the Thingweight were becoming clear, and the flashes from the energetic section were enormous, painful on the eyes.
    White-hot spats of energy were now leaping from the surface of the mirror like silver salmon breaking from black water.
    Outrigger tentacles, like hairs at this distance, were twitching forward. If one of them found the mirror, it would take them all in a moment and form a feeding siphon here. If undiscovered and not destroyed, it would suck the entire city into its maw through gross mental suggestion. They would go as helplessly as moths to a candle, sucked down one by one into the obscene palpations of the darkness, where their life force would be burnt in brief flashes of euphoria on the receptor surfaces of the Thingweight.
    Besita was close to breaking point.
    The onrushing monster was the size of a large mountain, perhaps more. The palps were thrashing with excitement, blips of white heat were spattering from the mirror’s surface like water on molten steel. Besita started to scream and tried to wrench her hand free of Plesenta’s, who held on with a grunt of effort.
    Suddenly a tall woman of angular appearance wearing a black cloak stepped out of the mirror and stood on the dais.
    With a gasp, Plesenta let go and Besita jumped back, snapping the triune. The mirror closed with a final explosive crack of energies.
    The three stood there for a moment, dripping perspiration and shivering from stark, unalloyed terror. The newcomer stared at them wordlessly. She was immaculate, her black velvet cloak and boots spotless, not a single black hair out of place.
    Fi-ice went forward to greet the traveler. She knew at once who it was. There was no mistaking the black velvet garb nor the motif of silver mouse skulls on her hems and rings and even on the ends of the skewers that held her long black hair pinned back. It was Ribela of Defwode, the oldest of the old, the Hidden One, the