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went ugly with rage. "Leave me!"
"But why?" Taen searched his face, her light eyes suddenly flooded with
tears. "What could make you turn against the Stormwarden who once protected
you? Did you believe the Constable, that he murdered the folk of Tierl Enneth?
Emien, Anskiere was innocent.I can show you."
Confident of his trust, Taen gathered her skills, assembled dream images to
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prove to her brother how her gift had enabled her to know beyond question that
Anskiere had not caused the drowning of helpless people. She touched her
brother's mind with truth, utterly unprepared for the fact that her message
brought him nothing but guilt.
Emien's voice split into a raw scream of denial. "No!" Condemned beyond
pardon by the vision she wove, he lashed back, set the poisoned dregs of his
own warped reason against his sister in attempt to restore the dignity he had
lost when he first accepted Tathagres as mistress.
The dream link reversed itself. Caught in the meshes of her brother's
passion, Taen felt herself tossed headlong into clouded skies and the savage,
storm-whipped seas of a gale. To the battered, emotionally torn mind of her
brother, this tempest seemed more than a natural contest of elements. A squall
had taken the life of his father. Hammered by thunderous, foam-laced
swells,Crow had foundered, and above the demented howl of the gusts Emien
heard once again the screams of drown-ing slaves and the cries of his lost
sister; and with the pinnace's tiller clenched once more in his blistered
hands, he watched, helpless, as the seas stripped the lives of the survivors
with passionless cruelty. Soon scarcely a handful remained. Always the sea
lurked at his back, a tireless, insatiable enemy. Humbled over and over again
by its might, and by the powers of the sorcerer who controlled it, Emien wept
in frustration.
Inflamed by the need to retaliate, he raced down a rocky beach on the isle of
Cliffhaven. Drawn along by the dream link, Taen felt the icy air ache in his
lungs with each breath, through his ears heard the crash as the breakers
creamed white against the shore and the shrill calling of gulls. Ahead, cliffs
rose like a wall against the sky, lofty stone tiers encased in crystalline
sheets of ice. The raw cold of a sorcerer's enchant-ment reddened Emien's
skin, but he felt no discomfort; beyond that bastion of frost lay his enemy,
and his obsession for ven-geance permitted no rest. He would pierce Anskiere's
defenses though he broke his hands trying, and with a separate thrill of
horror, Taen realized the glassy abutments of ice imprisoned the Stormwarden
who once had protected her from harm.
She tried to break free, to wrest control of the dream from her brother's
maddened grasp. She had to know more con-cerning the Stormwarden's fate. But
Emien's hatred was too strong to resist, and her presence itself threatened
his existence. Even as Taen reached to manipulate the fabric of his image, her
brother drew the sword from the sheath at his side and lifted it high
overhead, point poised for a killing blow.
"No!" Taen fell back, spreadeagled against the ice, unable to believe he
would strike. "Would you murder your own sister? Emien!"
But the words failed to deter him. Emien seemed not to see her at all, and
with a pang of awful horror Taen realized the fury which drove him was
directed solely at the Stormwarden of Elrinfaer. Emien would drive the sword
home, and never notice she stood in his path.
Just as his wrist tensed to engage the downstroke, a shout rang out down the
beach. Hooves thundered like war drums over the sand. Emien whirled and saw
one of the Kielmark's mounted patrols bearing down on him at a gallop. Steel
sang through the air as he twisted, white-faced and frightened. But before he
could ready himself for defense, a force like white-hot magma closed over him,
and he felt himself ripped into transfer by the powers of Tathagres' neckband.
The dream link carried Taen along with him. Even with her senses overwhelmed
by the rush of strange forces, she heard her brother scream aloud in terror,
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for the memory of his trans-fer from Cliffhaven to the palace of Kisburn's
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