Mickey Zucker Reichert - By Chaos Cursed by By Chaos Cursed (v1.0) Read Free Book Online

understand that if it bested him, he would lose whatever identity he still clung to, the snatches of memory Silme had just shared in dream. But to destroy his own life aura, the stuff of life itself, could bring only death.
    Silme had dedicated her life to helping the innocent. Sleep stole logic and caution in the same manner as drink. The oddity of their link obscured any recognition of the man, and Silme’s dream-state did not leave room for suspicion or questioning. Concerned for this stranger, Silme did not know him as Bolverkr, a sorcerer more than two centuries old, the man who had ordered her friends and husband killed and nearly succeeded at both. She did not identify the Dragonrank mage who had declared vengeance against Larson and promised to share reams of Chaos with Silme through a contact she had created in ignorance. She saw only a creature in agony, trapped and aching from a battle with a Chaos it did not yet recognize as self. And she tended him like a mother with an injured child.
    Silme reached out to help, certain she would meet a physical or mental barrier. But her words slipped effortlessly through the contact. Gently, she reassured him that the Chaos was a part of himself, that he should welcome it without fighting and let it serve him as a life aura must. She felt him soften at her words. The fiery rage within him died, and the Chaos, too, gave up its struggles, settling within him, gradually poisoning Bolverkr’s last vestiges of self with its presence. Complacency seeped through the contact, drawing Silme deeper into her slumber. At first, she followed it, every muscle falling into perfect laxity, a comfort beyond any she had ever known. Then, a more primitive portion of her mind kicked in, warning of imminent danger. Suddenly fully awake, Silme sprang to her feet, bashing her head on the shelves above the headboard.
    An avalanche of books and fruit thundered to the floor. A bowl shattered, and shards of pottery skittered across the wood.
    Startled from his sickbed, Al Larson dove beneath the frame in a tangle of blankets. “Incoming!” he screamed.
    Then the room fell silent.
    Silme reoriented quickly. She sat on a straw-ticked mattress mounted on a metal frame. A half dozen books lay scattered at her feet amid bruised fruit that had once sat in a bowl whose pieces decorated the floorboards in colored triangles. Across the room and nearer the door, Astryd slept despite the noise, alone in the bed she normally shared with Taziar. Propped against the footboard leaned the familiar dragonstaff that identified Astryd as garnet-rank, a smoothly-sanded pole tipped with a faceted, red stone clamped between four black-nailed, wooden claws. Between her and Silme, the room’s single window stood ajar. Autumn breezes stirred the gauzy blue curtains. Beneath it, a dresser held their belongings.
    Larson’s angular, elf face peered from beneath his bed. His pale eyes swept the room, and he seemed to take time to get his bearing.
    “I’m sorry,” Silme said, her voice loud in the silence.
    Astryd continued to sleep.
    Larson hauled himself from beneath the bed. “What happened?”
    “Bad dream.” It sounded like understatement to Silme, so she qualified. “ Very bad dream.”
    Larson frowned, apparently thinking about the nightmares that had beset him since Freyr had dragged him to a Norway centuries before his birth and into the guise of an elf. It had turned out his were not dreams at all but sorcerers and gods entering his thoughts through the openings left by his lack of mind barriers. But they both knew no one could penetrate Silme’s mental barriers.
    Or could they? Doubt trickled through Silme’s thoughts. I opened my mind barriers to Bolverkr’s Chaos before. Could he have manipulated that weakness? Silme grimaced. She had walled off that contact with defenses Chaos should not have been able to breach. Yet, it seemed to have done so with an ease that could only come of an invitation. As if some