Darkvision

Ditto for the man's nearest friend, who had just enough time to scream and try to run, though it did him no good. He sailed, flailing, through the air, and was gone. The other two, seeing their plan going horribly awry, turned to dash back the way they'd come, farther within the tenement. A few quick strides let Warian catch the hindmost. He plucked the man right off his feet. The weight of Warian's quarry was astonishingly little. The man's legs kicked, and he yelled in protest.

As if he held a doll, he bumped the man's head against the ceiling.

The man went limp, and Warian dropped him. Who's next? he wondered.

Fatigue ambushed him. The light in his prosthesis guttered out.

Dullness flooded the crystal, and the world jittered back to its natural timeframe. Warian stumbled and nearly fell flat on his face.

Exhaustion hammered him. He sucked breath like he'd just finished a marathon race. His living arm trembled as he used it to support himself against the wall. Now that he'd returned to normal perception, he understood what the men were yelling. "He's killing us! Gods, he's killing us!" Warian didn't have the strength to protest. Hurting badly, yes. Killing? No. At least, he hadn't tried to kill anyone. He looked at his left arm again. It looked as it always had, save for the dark tendrils at its core. Were they growing? Hard to tell. But one thing was certain-he'd managed to consciously activate the extraordinary new strength his prosthesis harbored. If he could consciously trigger it once, he was confident he could do it again.

But should he? The way nausea struggled against his exhaustion, twice as bad as the first time… If he called on the arm's strength a third time, would the aftermath multiply again? The wall was no longer enough to support him. He slid down to a squat, still leaning on the wall, and studied his feet. They seemed strangely far away. A man appeared from down the i

"What in the name of the Ten Dark Gods are you doing back in town? And why are you killing my men?"

CHAPTER EIGHT

The destrier flitted across moonlit hills, its stone feet pounding out a tempo that mimicked the world's heartbeat. Kiril roused from her dozing trance when Thormud called a halt. Blinking, she gazed around at the monotonous plain, at low hills and rocky ridges silhouetted in the silvery distance. Nothing seemed amiss. "Why are we stopping?" "I am uneasy," Thormud responded. "Another prognostication is in order."

"Really? In the middle of the night? I thought we traveled by night to avoid the heat of the day and unfortunate observation." "The same principle holds for conducting arduous prognostications, Kiril. I prefer to undertake such exertions during night's cool and shrouding darkness." Kiril looked around again. The destrier had stopped atop a low, smooth bluff. "I'll tell you where to put your 'shrouding darkness,' " she murmured as she slipped off the stone destrier's back. The wait while Thormud performed his ritual promised to be excruciatingly boring. Thormud let the elemental mount bend low before he dismounted. As soon as the dwarf's feet touched down, he moved to the center of the bluff and began scrawling in the earth with his rod.

Kiril recognized the preliminary chicken scratches as standard geomancer preparations for "magical surveillance and interrogation of the mineral bones of the world," as the dwarf had once described it.

Bah. Kiril sighed and paced out a perimeter. She always hated waking from trance-her thoughts were too clear and co

The dwarf stumbled and managed a controlled fall into the circle's center. He closed his eyes, not to see darkness, but a vision bequeathed him by the soil. The world was composed of the four primary elements: air, earth, fire, and water. But earth held Thormud's attraction, and earth responded to his fervent attention. And more often than not, earth gave up its secrets to the dwarf. Earth accepted all and tolerated all; earth observed all that occurred on or within its embrace. To those who knew the language of stone, earth poured out its knowledge in a slow, steady stream. Because so few had the patience to bother learning the deliberate arts of geomancy, Thormud often found his solicitations were answered energetically, almost eagerly, as if stone relished its rare opportunity to communicate. The geomancer saw lines of co

Inland from the coast, the ramparts of mountains unfamiliar to the dwarf darkened the sky, but these were not the focus of the insight.

The vision concentrated onto a single, lonely feature close to the shore, like a lone tooth of a predator, a vicious animal's incisor cast in stone. The slender peak towered several miles above the surrounding lands. Thormud's expertise identified the peak as natural, but as the vision narrowed further, bringing him closer and closer, he spied signs of occupation: a narrow road winding up the peak, tailing beds in haphazard order, and pools of murky, tainted water. The peak housed a mine-one that had been in use for years, by the size of the tailing beds… Thormud's vision plunged into the side of the peak. A moment of jagged dislocation suffused him, as if he pierced a void far greater than the mountain could contain. He was overcome by white lights, threads of co