Free Tides of Darkness by Judith Tarr Page A

the truth, or as much of it as he could know. “Do it,” she said. “Do it now.”
    He bent his head. She was prepared this time for the swiftness with which he acted. He had no deliberation; he knew no rituals. He simply gathered his magic and flung it forth. It was inelegant, but she had to admit that it was effective.
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    They flew on wings of bronze over a dark and tossing sea. What he followed was as subtle as a scent, as faint as a glimmer in the corner of an eye. She could find it only through him.
    That piqued her. He was royal kin, but she was royal line.
    He was her hunting hound. She let him draw her onward through the swirl of worlds. They clustered near the edge of the shadow, gleaming like foam on a dim and stony shore.
    She who was a living Gate, had never seen nor imagined such a thing as this. There was no worldroad, no simple skein of worlds. It was a much greater, much more complex thing, too great for mortal comprehension.

    He rode these shifting airs as if born to them. She, earthbound, could only cling to him and be drawn wherever he went.
    He circled a cluster of worlds far down that grey shore. The tide lapped but did not quite overwhelm them. They gleamed like pearls, or like sea-glass.
    He had begun to descend. Broad wings beat and hovered. His eyes were intent, fixed on the worlds below.
    Without warning the sea rose up and clawed the sky. It seized the tiny thing circling in it, struck it, smote it down.
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    They whirled through darkness. Winds buffeted them. His wings were gone. He clung as tightly to her as she to him, rolling and tumbling through infinite space.
    She flung out a lifeline, a thread of pure desperation. It caught something, pulling them up short, dangling in the maelstrom of wind and shadow. Hand over hand she climbed up the line, with his dead weight dragging at her until he gripped the line below her. She hesitated, dreading that he would let go and fall, but he was climbing steadily, if slowly.
    Light glimmered above them. Wind buffeted them, striving to pluck them free. Her fingers cramped; her arms ached unbearably. She set her teeth and kept on.
    The thread began to rise as if drawn from above. The wind howled, raking flesh from bone and body from spirit.
    The Heart of the World hung below her. She reached for it with the tatters of her magic, seeking the power that had sustained her and every Gate-mage since the dawn of the world.
    Just as she touched it, the darkness struck. It had been waiting like a great raptor poised above its prey. It roared down with power incalculable.
    There were wards, walls, structures of magic so strong and so ancient that they had been reckoned impregnable. They melted as if they had
been no more than a wish and a dream. All the woven elegance of spells and workings, remembrances of mages eons dead, great edifices of art and power, crumbled and fell into nothingness.
    The Heart of the World was gone. It had whirled away below her, drowned in darkness. The place where it had been, woven in the core of her magery, was echoing, empty.
    This could not be. The Heart of the World was not a place, nor a world. It was a living incarnation of magic.
    The dark had devoured it, swallowed it, consumed it. It was rendered into nothingness, just as the worlds had been beyond the lost Gates.
    Shocked, shattered, stunned almost out of her wits, she fell into light. A grunt and a gasp marked Daros’ fall beside her. She was far too comfortable on real and living ground to move or speak. That was cool stone under her, or—tiles?
    Tiles indeed. She knew them well. Painfully she lifted her head. The two of them lay in a heap in the innermost shrine of the Temple of the Sun in Starios. The light about them was pure clean sunlight flooding through the dome of the roof. For a long blissful moment she basked in it, sighing as pain and fear melted away. Her whole being was a hymn of thanks to the god who had freed her soul from the black