Night Winds by Karl Edward Wagner Read Free Book Online

captain as he dazedly rose to his knees.
    He cast a calculating eye toward the fallen sword. Too far.
    "Leave her alone, sorcerer!" rasped Mavrsal. "She's guilty of no crime but that of hating you and loving me! Kill me now and be done, but you'll never change her spirit!"
    "And I suppose you love her, too," said Kane in a tortured voice. "You fool. Do you know how many others I've killed--other fools who thought they would save Dessylyn from the sorcerer's evil embrace? It's a game she often plays. Ever since the first fool... only a game. It amuses her to taunt me with her infidelities, with her schemes to leave with another man. Since it amuses her, I indulge her. But she doesn't love you."
    "Then why did she bury my steel in your back?" Despair made Mavrsal reckless. "She hates you, sorcerer--and she loves me! Keep your lies to console you in your madness! Your sorcery can't alter Dessylyn's feelings toward you--nor can it alter the truth you're forced to see! So kill me and be damned--you can't escape the reality of your pitiful clutching for something you'll never hold!"
    Kane's voice was strange, and his face was a mirror of tormented despair. "Get out of my sight!" he rasped. "Get out of here, both of you!
    "Dessylyn, I give you your freedom. Mavrsal, I give you Dessylyn's love. Take your bounty, and go from Carsultyal! I trust you'll have little cause to thank me!"
    As they stumbled for the secret door, Mavrsal ripped the emerald-set collar from Dessylyn's neck and flung it at Kane's slumping figure. "Keep your slave collar!" he growled. "It's enough that you leave her with your scars about her threat!"
    "You fool," said Kane in a low voice.
    "How far are we from Carsultyal?" whispered Dessylyn.
    "Several leagues--we've barely gotten underway," Mavrsal told the shivering girl beside him.
    "I'm frightened."
    "Hush. You're done with Kane and all his sorcery. Soon it will be dawn, and soon we'll be far beyond Carsultyal and all the evil you've known there."
    "Hold me tighter then, my love. I feel so cold."
    "The sea wind is cold, but it's clean," he told her. "It's carrying us together to a new life."
    "I'm frightened."
    "Hold me closer, then."
    "I seem to remember now...
    But the exhausted sea captain had fallen asleep. A deep sleep--the last unblighted slumber he would ever know.
    For at dawn he awoke in the embrace of a corpse--the mouldering corpse of a long-dead girl, who had hanged herself in despair over the death of her barbarian lover.
TWO SUNS SETTING
I: Alone with the Night Winds
    Sullen red disk, the sun was burying itself beneath a monotonous horizon of rolling gravel waste that stretched behind him miles uncounted--and possibly untrod save by his horse's hooves. Long before the sunlight failed, its warmth was snuffed out in the empty lifelessness of the desert, so that in its last hour the sun shone cheerless as the rising moon. Crimson as it climbed, the full moon seemed a false dawn to mock the dying sun, arriving prematurely, disrespectful as a greedy heir pacing in eager impatience before the master's deathbed. For a space the limitless skies of twilight displayed two rubrous globes low on either horizon, so that Kane mused as to whether his long journey across the desert might not have led him to some strange dusk world where two ancient suns smouldered in the heavens. The region seemed unearthly in its chill desolation, and certainly an aura of unguessable antiquity hung as a grey shadow over each tumbled bit of stone.
    Kane had left Carsultyal with no particular destination or goal other than to ride far beyond that city's influence. There were those who said that Kane was driven from Carsultyal, his power there broken at last by fellow sorcerers jealous of his long-held prestige--and alarmed by the bizarrely alien direction his studies had taken in recent years. Kane himself considered his departure more or less voluntary, albeit precipitous, arguing privately that had he really wanted to, he could