Creatures fashioned out of nightmare sat in a large circle around a fire, or something more or less like a fire, because while it burned and gave off light and heat, it wasn’t the familiar yellow-white of a bonfire, but an alien silver-red with flickering flashes of blue. Jim had only seen the wolf-riders at dusk, but now he saw them illuminated by this fey fire, and the sight was unnerving, even for a man who considered himself immune to any surprise.
The creatures looked like humans in form, having a head, arms, and legs, but they lacked features and, from what Jim could see, clothing. Their surface seemed to be an ever-changing, rippling fabric or fluid, but nothing that could rightly be called “skin,”
and as he had seen before, a faint wisp of smoke or steam would coil up from the surface now and again. And the creatures they rode, the “wolves” hunkered down at their side, tongues lolling, were also otherworldly. Their eyes visibly glowed, and Jim knew from the first encounter he had had with them that this wasn’t the result of reflected firelight. They were eating something, though from this distance Jim couldn’t tell what it was. Then one of them tossed something in an arc above the fire to a companion and Jim felt his gorge rise as he recognized what could only be an arm. The arm of a human, elf, or goblin, he couldn’t tell what, but it was not the limb of an animal.
Jim judged the size of the camp and tried to calculate a way around it. There were huts at a distance from the fire, fashioned 1 2 9
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from something as alien to him as was everything else he associated with these beings. They were round, with flat tops, and looked as if they had been made from massive discs of some featureless stone rather than from cloth, leather, or wood. There were no doors or windows he could see, but from time to time a figure would emerge directly though a wall or vanish into one.
The most disturbing thing about the entire tableau was the silence. There was no talking, no laughing, not even the sound of heavy breathing. He knew they were capable of sound, for he had heard their shrieks or battle cries earlier that day, but now there was only an unnatural silence. However they communicated, it wasn’t through what Jim thought of as normal speech.
Jim peered around trying to find the flying creatures the elves called “void-darters.” If they were flying around the area, he wanted to know before he tried to skirt the village.
As quietly as he could he edged around the encampment, trying to keep sight of any movement that might betray an un-suspected trap or an unexpected encounter. After he was nearly opposite the position at which he had begun, he saw what could only be a cage, fashioned from what appeared to be the same material as the huts. Inside it, movement revealed the whereabouts of the flying creatures. He felt a small surge of relief. These alien creatures were either supremely confident or stupid, for there was nothing like a sentry or any defenses posted. If he knew what would kill them, Jim could have engineered an assault that would have them all destroyed within minutes.
He continued to edge his way around the camp until he reached a rise above it, then he hurried along the trail toward what he hoped was a pass through the peaks and down to the anchored ships.
The sky to the east was visibly lightening and Jim knew that dawn was less than an hour away. He felt a sense of relief for he had been hunkered down on the east side of the peaks unsure of which way to descend. The path he followed had cut through a gap at the ridge, but on the eastern slope had quickly narrowed until he was faced with the certain knowledge that he risked fall-1 3 0
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ing to his death until he could see better. He was barely above the tree line so when he looked down all he could make out in the low light from the setting moons was a sea of treetops. He knew that somewhere down there must be a way to the shoreline, but at this point it was foolhardy to move without better light.
Patience was a learned skill for Jim Dasher, who by nature tended to the impetuous and rash, but over the years he had harnessed those qualities and directed them. Now he was decisive and quick to act, without thoughtlessness. And right now he needed to think.
The inheritor of a legacy of service to the Crown and to the common people of Krondor, he had discovered early in life that one doesn’t often get choices as to when difficult decisions must be made. Life was rarely convenient.
James Dasher Jamison was hardly a reflective man, but there were moments when he did consider his role in a larger scheme and wondered if he would every truly realize what it was he was fated to accomplish. A boy of great promise, he was the grandson of Lord James, Duke of Rillanon, the King’s most trusted advisor. He was also the grandnephew of the man in control of the largest shipping enterprise in the Bitter Sea, Dashell Jamison.
Something had occurred between the two brothers: once close, they were estranged by the time Jim was born.
Jim’s father, Dasher Jamison, Lord Carlstone, had been one of the finest administrators in the King’s court, and his mother had been Lady Rowella Montonowksy, a daughter of Roldem’s nobility and a distant cousin to their queen. In all things, Jim should have been a child of privilege and refinement.
Sent to study in Roldem, he had been quickly judged to be one of the most promising students at the university. They had waited for him to blossom as a scholar. Instead he had discovered the streets of Roldem, and the back alleys as well. His instructors at university were defeated, for while he was repeatedly absent without permission, Jim always excelled at his studies. He had a natural ability to hear or read something once and know it perfectly, a gift for logic and problem-solving that made mathematics and the natural sciences easy for him, and an ability for 1 3 1
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abstraction and logic that made even the most obtuse philosophies manageable. In short, he had been the perfect student, when he chose to be around. He was indifferent to the canings he earned for each transgression, considering the welts on his back the cost of doing what he wished. Finally, the monks who were in charge of the university judged their efforts to be futile and had sent the young man back to his family in Rillanon.
His father was determined to harness his son’s reckless nature and to make a courtier out of him, so he gave him a minor position in the King’s court. More often than not Jim was gone from his office, wasting time in gambling halls, inns, and broth-els. He had a flair for gambling which earned him a steady income on top of his family’s allowance, and a taste for women of low estate, which had got him into a fair share of brawls, landing him in the city gaol more than once. His father’s position had freed him every time, though the gaoler had warned Lord Carlstone that he could not protect his wayward son much longer.
Jim’s father had used every means of persuasion at his disposal to curb his son’s appetite for the seedier side of life, including a threat to hand him over to the King’s army for service if he couldn’t stem his impulses for low living, but all to no avail. At last his grandfather had taken a hand and had sent Jim to Krondor to work for his uncle, Jonathan Jamison, son of Dashell, Jim’s great-uncle.
Jim took to his new surroundings as if born to them, and quickly discovered that he had a flair for business. He also soon realized that there was a very questionable relationship between his great-uncle’s many business enterprises and any number of criminal activities in and around Krondor. At first it was smuggling, then sabotage of a competitor’s shipments or a well-timed fire in their warehouse. By the time he was twenty years of age, Jim was running a gang at the docks, the Backwater Boys, and collecting money from various merchants to facilitate the safe arrival of goods that somehow avoided the Royal Customs House.
Then a year later, Jim was dragged out of his home in the dead of night by four men clad in black. He had incapacitated 1 3 2
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two of them before they had clubbed him unconscious, and when he awoke, he had found himself in the dungeon in the Prince’s palace.
After a cold night and long day, he was visited by L
ord Erik von Darkmoor, former Knight-Marshal of the Western Realm and currently retiring Duke of Krondor. The choice given to him had been simple: learn to love a contemplative and solitary life in a very dark and damp cell without any outside windows, or work for the Prince of Krondor as an agent.
Lord Erik made it clear that his relationship to the Duke of Rillanon would not save him from the choice; his grandfather would receive a most sympathetic message from Lord Erik regretfully informing him that his grandson had gone missing, perhaps a victim of foul play. It wasn’t for two more years after he started working for Erik that Jim discovered the entire thing had been his grandfather’s idea and that his great-uncle was also in on the plot.
But by then Jim was fully ensconced in the intrigue and politics of the nation, an agent for the King working in the darkest alleys as well as on the roofs and in the sewers of the cities of the Western Realm. To everyone he met he was either James Dasher Jamison, only son of Lord Carlstone of Rillanon, grandson of the Duke, or he was Jim Dasher, a member of the Mockers, the apparently roughly—but in reality very well—organized criminal underground of the city.
By the time he was taken into the Conclave at the age of twenty-seven, he was a practiced thief, assassin, and spy for the Crown, considered their finest operative and perhaps the most dangerous man not a magician in the Kingdom. Jim cared nothing for his reputation, for the most part being ignorant of it, but he did take pride in doing whatever he did well. For it was here, in the darkest hours of the night when he was alone with himself, that he truly understood himself: he was the great-great-grandson of Jimmy the Hand, the most legendary thief in the history of the Mockers. One-time street urchin, servant to Prince Arutha, advisor to kings and princes, at his death he had been the most powerful duke in the Kingdom. Jim was less clear about his 1 3 3
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own personal ambitions—he had no desire to be a duke; he loved adventure too much to be cooped up in a palace in meetings all day. He enjoyed the intrigue, murder, skulking in shadows, and being faster than the other man, that much luckier than the fellow trying to kill him, more intelligent than his opponent. He relished the constant sense of danger and the incredible sense of accomplishment he got from his missions. At the end of one, he welcomed the hot baths and clean sheets, the company of willing women, the wine and food, but after a few days he wanted nothing more than to be back in the alleys, running silently across rooftops or slogging through the sewers, one hand on his knife hilt, waiting for an attack he was certain was around the next corner.
But there were moments, like the one he was experiencing now, sitting cold and alone in the dark on the top of a distant ridge of mountains, when he judged himself quite mad. To himself he muttered, “No sane man could want this life.”
But he knew he did want it, even needed it. He had made up the Jimmyhand story as a blind, a way to make his relationship with Jimmy the Hand of Krondor a seemingly false claim, thereby heading off any possible suspicion that he was, indeed, that worthy’s great-great-grandson, and therefore the son of nobility.
Too many people still lived who might connect the grandson of Lord James of Rillanon with his own grandfather, the legendary former thief-turned-noble, Lord James of Krondor.
No, he admitted to himself, Jim loved this life, even the bloody-handed work, for he knew he belonged to something larger than himself, and he was certain that every man whose life he had taken had deserved it. That sense of serving something more important than his own petty desires had taken what had been little more than a collection of rash impulses, a self-indul-gent desire for danger and thrills, and turned it into something useful, even noble at times, and in that, Jim had discovered a balance to his life.
Then things had changed and he experienced a set of feelings that were new to him. He had met a woman.
As he sat on top of a peak in a distant land, waiting for the 1 3 4
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sun to rise so that he could find his way safely to ships at anchor in shark-infested waters to carry word to a band of magicians about some creatures from the darkest pit of hell and a band of elves no one had ever heard of, all he could think of was would he ever see Michele again?
The sun had begun to light the eastern sky and the solid mass of darkness below him was now resolving itself into defined shapes. He pushed aside thoughts of his new love, and his constant concern that having someone to care for was perhaps the worst idea he had ever considered, and looked deep into the gloom. At first the still-impenetrable shadows confounded his eye, but after a while he began to discern a way down. What he had at first thought might be a tiny rivulet formed by ice melt or rain looked promising, and he started moving toward it. After reaching the head of the small gully, he decided to venture slowly downward and made a silent prayer to Ban-ath, God of Thieves, who also was considered the God of Misadventures: if there was ever an undertaking worthy of being called that, this was it, thought Jim Dasher.
It was late afternoon by the time he reached the cliffs above the agreed-upon beach. He considered the drop and again wondered how a city-bred lad such as himself could end up considering a descent that would have given a fright to a mountain goat. There was no easy way down, though there certainly was a quick one, he thought dryly.
He traversed the narrow cliff and found nothing useful, then turned and with his eyes retraced his route down to the top of the cliffs. He was likely to spend hours climbing back up to where he thought another way down might be found, and even then there was no guarantee it would provide the right descent. He would probably have to endure another night on the mountainside, and he was now both thirsty and ravenous. He recalled with bitter amusement a confidence trickster he had once encountered in a tavern in Krondor while the man waited to take ship to Elariel in Kesh. He had tried to sell Jim a “magic cloak” which would, he claimed, allow the wearer to leap from 1 3 5
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the tallest building or wall and gently float down to the ground.
A clever enough scam, for if the fool who bought it tried to use it, he’d either be dead or lying abed with too many broken bones to attempt hot pursuit and the trickster would be safely away in Great Kesh. But, oh, how he wished it had been true and he had such a cloak now.
He kept looking for inspiration, for he didn’t relish the climb back to the other route. He decided to make one more traverse of the cliff top before he started hiking. He moved northward until he reached an outcropping of rocks that prevented further progress, glanced down and saw waves crashing into the rocks a hundred feet below him. Not a bad dive, he thought, if the water was deep enough and there weren’t rocks everywhere.
He traveled back southward, occasionally glancing out to where the three ships waited, wishing he could somehow communicate to them that he was up here. Not that it would prove any more beneficial, unless someone on the crew had developed the ability to fly and could come fetch him to the ship, or at least fly up here with a rope.
A rope? He glanced around. If he had a rope, where would he tie it off? He walked over to a sturdy tree that had been the victim of cliff erosion. It had started leaning forward from the edge of the cliff and had then died as its roots were exposed. But the dried-out trunk was still firmly planted in the rocky soil and when he pushed hard against it he found it unyielding. It would support his weight. If only he had a rope.
He looked down and saw that the tree overhung a gap in the cliff with a ledge about twenty feet below and that the ledge also contained a small growth of trees. He wished he could gauge how high those trees were from his current vantage point. He sprinted along the cliff face, looking back several times, and finally found a bend in the cliff where he could get a good perspective.
He could see the trees closest to the edge on that little ledge were in fact about thirty feet below the cliff on which he stood. He rapidly did the mathematics. He could lower himself down until he overhung the trees, and his feet should be not much mo
re than twenty feet above the ledge and only ten feet above the trees.
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Gods, he silently mused, what is desperation driving me to?
He realized that once down on the ledge, the chances of climbing back up to where he stood now were practically nil but he blocked it from his mind: he needed to be on that ship as soon as possible. He moved rapidly to where he could climb out on the dead tree, and gauged the most likely looking tree below to try for. They were all scrubby-looking things, pines or firs of some sort—he really didn’t know or care what they were—and he needed something big enough to grab on to, or at least sturdy enough to slow his fall. He didn’t mind cuts and bruises, but broken bones would consign him to a slow and painful death.
He scrambled around until he was hanging directly over the chosen tree, then he let go. The fall was less than a dozen feet, but it felt like a hundred as he crashed into the top branches. As he expected, he was cut by several of the branches as they broke, but he grabbed hard on to a larger one and his fall was broken.
He paused to catch his breath, then climbed down.
Once he stood at the rim of the little ledge, he wondered what madness had overtaken him. It was another thirty or more feet down, to what appeared to be mostly sand, but there were enough rocks poking through it that he couldn’t be sure how deep any of it was. He looked down for anything remotely like a handhold and felt his stomach sink; the face of the cliff here was eroded by the tide and now he was on an overhang. He considered his choices and realized he had none: he had to get down from here, no matter the risk.
He wished he had a rope. Then he corrected himself and decided if he was going to waste a wish, he’d wish to already be in Krondor—in the apartment he used as James Jamison rather than the hovel he used in his role as Jim Dasher, Mocker—bathed, rested, dressed, and entertaining Lady Michele de Frachette, daughter of the Earl of Montagren and, he hoped, someday the mother of his children.