WEAVING MAN
Prologue
The wind lifted whispering voices
from the Sea of Grass, the great plain that stretched across the hillocks and
shallow valleys of northern Mordania.
Tharan-Tul, Great Shaman of the nomadic Thrun, crouched with his back to a
roaring fire, watching the night sky revolve above Eirdon. His gnarled, large
knuckled hand gripped his wooden staff. The wind tugged at his long hair and
the folds of his heavy, embroidered robe. The fire flared behind him.
He had watched many nights now. As Shaman, he read the sigils and interpreted
the circles that were woven through all life on Eirdon.
Toward the east, two stars rose and began to climb. Then, finally, a third star
equally as bright as the pair crested the horizon and began to ascend the great
dome of the sky into the gathering of stars called The Weaver, glowing with
diamond brilliance against the deep velvet night.
It was the conjunction of three planets, as Tharan-Tul had expected.
He smiled knowingly, and nodded to himself.
“So,” he said to the soft voices whispering from the grass. “So… it has
begun... again.”
Banished
He had many names.
Aylam
Josirus, Lord Stettan, The Surelian Solution, who used his dead mother’s tribal
name - Menders - as his sole identity, stood alone outside the door of the
royal birthing chamber in the Great Palace of Mordania. With the exception of
two guards blending into the shadows cast by flickering gaslights, the only
other person in the corridor was a sharp-faced young woman. She was visibly
sulking.
Menders
ignored her. He had no interest in anyone else’s despair.
Menders
had been commanded to Court that morning when an official summons arrived for
him at the home of Commandant Komroff, headmaster of the Mordanian Military
Academy. He’d returned to the capital city, Erdahn, the previous night from an
in-depth and extremely dangerous covert mission in Surelia.
This
mission had taken him two years to complete and had resulted in the elimination
of a threat to Mordania that had become known as “The Surelian Problem”.
Menders’ success had required the sacrifice of the last years of his
teens and a romance that would have ripened to marriage. He had arrived at
Court expecting to be rewarded with the position of Court Assassin. At the age
of twenty, he was considered the greatest assassin who ever lived.
Instead, he had been made guardian of the Queen’s second child, which she was
laboring to bring forth at that moment. Not even the Heiress, but “the spare”,
whose impending birth had never been announced.
