Stardeep by Bruce R. Cordell Read Free Book Online Page B

cover the price, barely, and besides, he’d soon find work on the road.
    The Leaping Ogre Taproom was a bustle of activity. Raidon quickly learned that all new work was assigned at dawn outside, in front of the tavern. In the meantime, would he like a tankard of mead?
    Raidon demurred, and instead spent the remainder of his coin on a room for the evening, a private room. He didn’t
    want to find any more lodge mates strung up and dismembered. Tomorrow, if he landed a position with an outgoing trader, he’d be sharing living space with other hired hands soon enough.
    He pulled out the cedar box where he kept his mother’s forget-me-not. He hadn’t gazed at the shining blue stone for some tendays. He’d been too busy as his plans for infiltrating the Nine Golden Swords moved toward culmination.
    Raidon considered. Was his attachment to the old amulet a childish behavior he should leave behind with his departure from his home? It looked valuable; he could probably sell it for a reasonable sum. But his sentimental attachment to the object was forged over a decade of ownership. Raidon believed that as long as the stone shone, his mother, wherever she had gone, kept him in her thoughts. Selling it was out of the question.
    He opened the box—
    —and saw in an instant that the blue field around the tree was obscured in darkness.
    Raidon’s eyes lost focus and he blinked tapidly. His stomach clenched. What was he seeing? He couldn’t understand. He looked in the pack for the real cedar box—this couldn’t be it…
    But it was. The amulet had, before this moment, shown a white tree silhouetted in brilliant cerulean. Now the treelike symbol seemed shrunken, as if the encroaching darkness clenched it with savage pressure.
    He couldn’t imagine what had caused the change—his actions? Had leaving Telflamm caused this?
    Growing up, he often gazed into the stone aftet his mother’s departure. He always imagined the treelike symbol was emblematic of an ancient grove of trees his mother sometimes described.
    A place she had called “Yuirwood.”
    Conviction crystallized. He would seek this place, this Yuirwood. What other reason did the amulet have fot changing color, if not a sign declaring his destination?

CHAPTER Five_
    City of Laothkund, Shadow Tongue Lair
    Gage passed into an expansive, obsidian-tiled chamber. It was wide like a temple, similarly solemn, and equally quiet. Ahead, two broad stone pillars framed his path in the direction of the chamber’s far wall. Each square column bore a blazing, smokeless torch, lending bright, if uneven light to the front of the room. The columns blocked the torchlight from finding the chamber’s rear, which was lost in depthless shadow. Except for the blue glimmer that lured Gage.
    He passed into the shadowed end of the chamber and moved to the rear wall. His eyes adjusted, and he saw a fortune to rival a dragon’s horde.
    Boxes of rare perfumes that never arrived at the Nobles’ Quarter.
    A wide gold vessel filled with depthless liquid whose smell hinted at an ocean without bounds.
    Paintings of dead masters, bricks of gold, rings of platinum, casks of vintages a hundred years old—the vault held treasures so tempting Gage was nearly overwhelmed. But none compared with the value of the singular magical sword
    that was his objective. He gained the far side of the chamber; he found that which he sought.
    The blade, still in its scabbard, leaned vertically on its tip within a glass cabinet. Blue fire flickered on the pommel and limned the entire scabbard. The blade wanted to be noticed.
    He took the time to carefully search the floor around the cabinet, the seams between the glass panels, the wall behind the cabinet, and the ceiling above. He smiled—no dastardly traps waited to pait life from body of an offending thief.
    Gage flipped the case open with his right hand and grabbed the pommel of the blade with his left.
    His demon-gloved left. The instant he gripped the pommel, the eye