The Steward and the Sorcerer, James Peart [novels to read in english .txt] 📗

not set out to accomplish what he had come here to do.  He would not be taking a life so much as giving this young man a chance to start over in a fresh environment.  Other considerations, such as why this man should be taken against his will from everything he knew or would have known and what effect this would have on a mind that was already likely very delicate, were brushed from the Druid’s thoughts as he acted on his decision.  He could sense that other, closer than ever now.  Summoning the green fire, he reached out with one hand, directing it at the man, the flame issuing- no, streaming- toward him.

The second person to emerge from the building was a young man also.  Of the two, he presented more of a threat.  He came running out of his dwelling, not crying out as the old woman did but intending to place himself between his friend and the Druid.  He had a similar build to ‘Christopher,’ tall and stick-thin, yet there was a lively animation to his face that went deeper than the predicament he was in allowed for.  Daaynan read determination on his features and a lack of hesitation he could have admired in another situation.  The man ran straight into the flame without thought of what could happen to him, yet he was too late to save his friend.  The fire swallowed them both, the Druid turning the magic back toward him at the last moment to include himself in its summoning.  Seconds later all three were gone.

8.

Simon felt pulled back through a blazing corona of verdant light.  It shone everywhere he looked, consuming everything, including the beach he had been standing on- running on- just a moment ago.  His legs continued to drive forward and back yet they couldn’t seem to find purchase on soil, water or land.  He was held, he decided, inside some manifestation of the purest kind of light.  In an odd kind of way, he seemed acquainted with it, as if it provided the cloak of familiar surroundings of early childhood.  He bathed in it as would a stranded sailor in the flash of a rescue light of an oncoming vessel.  He turned in the beam and found he could see both Christopher and the man dressed in black.  They were adrift of him by some distance, revolving in a featherlike orbit, unreachable in their spin.

Then the light altered, became white at first, then a number of separate white shapes.  When his normal vision returned he could see the shapes were vast beams of light that stretched high as far as he could see and numbered more than he could count.  He felt drowsy, beyond ordinary thought.  He could probably move, he thought, yet his will to act had momentarily deserted him.  Ahead of him lay Christopher, slumped against one of the beams, locked in an equal paralysis.  The man in the black robe was standing, however, watching them and past them, perhaps at a fourth party to join this merry trip.  He said something, the Reaper (Simon found it easy to think of him as such- where were they after all but in some version of an afterlife?) but filtered through the haze of his diminished senses he couldn’t quite catch it.  ‘Need to move now...he’s almost upon us,’ was what he thought he heard but he wasn’t quite sure.  An instant later the Reaper was at his side, wrenching his arm to get him to stand.  He held Christopher’s arm with his other hand, pulling them both forward and toward one of those impossibly tall beams, entering it somehow, merging with the light.  An instant later they were falling again, tumbling through the brightness, Simon’s head growing dizzy in the spin.  He turned back, watching for that fourth party the Reaper seemed worried about, but could see nothing in the spill of light.

When the light finally died, Simon found himself in a place he had never encountered before.  He didn’t seem to be standing up, sitting or lying down.  It felt comfortable all the same, though there was an utter lack of silence that at first unnerved him.  There was literally no sound whatsoever, at least none coming from his surroundings. He turned to the Reaper, who had released them both and was looking around him as they were.  A soft humming in his ears began, a gentle susurrus at first but it increased in pitch and intensity.  He cast around for the source of the noise before he realised it was the sound of his own blood thrumming through his veins.

“Are we inside or outside?” he thought, starting in surprise when the Reaper answered his question.

“I don’t think that question applies to a place like this.  At least he hasn’t followed us in.”  The Reaper seemed deep in contemplation, his answer half directed to himself.  A thin frown line grooved his forehead, running from one temple to the other like a loping scar.  There were actual scars on his face, Simon noticed, long, rending tears moving along one cheek and the side of his neck that had been bright red and orange at one point but now looked diminished in this opaque light.

“Is this the afterlife?”

The other seemed to break from his contemplation- of what Simon could only guess- and study him as if for the first time.  “It is probably the opposite, like no life I have ever before encountered.”

“Who are you?  What do you want with Christopher?”

The Reaper turned to the object of his question, who had drifted from them both, gazing listlessly at a fixed point in space, the expression on his face that Simon had been used to seeing- one carrying an air of sweet yet faint hopelessness- overlaid with childlike curiosity.  “Your dead friend is needed in another time and place,” he told Simon in a voice so chillingly cold that a prickle crawled up and down his spine.

“What do you