Lords of the Seventh Swarm by David Farland Read Free Book Online

enormous—all carved from rose-colored sandstone on three sides of a mountain. The palace gleamed like a moon, for all along the base of it, thousands of brilliant lights shone, illuminating even the dusty skies above. The walls of the palace rose perhaps a thousand meters high, and it was impossible to imagine how thick they might be. The walls weren’t perpendicular, for stone piled so high could not have supported the structure; instead the walls climbed at a steep slope, and every fifty meters would be a small road or trail carved along the exterior of the castle.
    An ornate fence made of stone pillars bordered each road. On the walls above each road, gargoyles and angels were carved in bas-relief, engaging in scenes hellish and heavenly. Water cascaded over the walls in dozens of places—from a pot held by a gaggle of demons, from a cloud that served as a stool for a thoughtful angel. The water was captured and reused hundreds of times to utterly astonishing effect, for as the lights shone on the palace, the falling waters cloaked the stone in shimmering wonder.
    The beast handler next to her, Dooring, had been talking almost nonstop until a few moments earlier. She almost thought of him as some artificial intelligence, its processors broken, verbally spewing out everything it knew. Maggie realized he had quit speaking so she wouldn’t be distracted by his voice on first sight of Felph’s palace. Now he stood, gesticulating wildly at the pillars and verandas, the glorious towers and the glittering stained windows.
    “Look at that! They’ve got the lights on for you—and even the waterfalls. What a treat! Have you ever seen anything like it? Look at that statue! Incredible!”
    “How many people live in the palace?” Maggie asked.
    She imagined that this palace could easily house a million souls.
    “Six,” Dooring shouted. “And a handful of us servants. Felph hardly ever sleeps in the same room twice! Oh, would you just look at that! And here comes Brightstar over the mountains behind it. Incredible!” He slapped his forehead, continuing his monologue.
    Indeed, Ruin’s small dark sun was setting, and its twin star, which the locals called Brightstar, was rising gloriously over the hills.
    At the base of the mountain Maggie spotted a cloud of dust. Golden worker droids shone among the dust like beetles, scurrying about. Maggie counted hundreds of droids that must have been carving these rocks for centuries.
    Dooring the beast handler kicked the creature with his heels, just above its huge central eye. The florafeem thundered down. A single vaulted opening at the base of the mountain provided an entrance hundreds of meters high and at least three hundred wide.
    There, in the sky, flapping his wings, was Felph’s handsome son Herm, who had come personally to Maggie’s camp to invite them to dinner, giving vague hints of a possible offer of employment. He hadn’t said what the job would consist of. Apparently to discuss such matters prematurely would flout local customs.
    Herm flew just ahead of the florafeem, a brilliant glow globe in hand, and led them through the air.
    Maggie felt … annoyed. All this ostentation. All this waste. On the two dozen worlds she’d visited, Maggie had never seen anything like it.
    Felph was obviously vain, possibly mad. Dooring had told Maggie that Felph relied almost solely on droids for servants. Though Dooring worked for the old man, he hadn’t personally seen Felph in a dozen years. Instead, Felph’s passions in life seemed to be the study of history, and engineering his own genetically upgraded children.
    If Herm, with his wings, was an example of Felph’s handiwork, she wondered at his purposes. Herm, a painfully thin man, had hair of darkest brown that framed a handsome face, and his eyes were like twin pieces of palest green ice. But most curious about him was the enormous wings, sweeping up from his back, all feathered in beer brown with splotches of white. He