Into the Void

"You're a wizard, too, aren't you?" Teldin remarked. "You've got to be to pilot a ship, don't you? Unless you're a priest…"

Ria

Teldin didn't hesitate. Since their first meeting in the officers' saloon, he'd taken the time to work up a good background story and the answers to the questions Ria

"Yes, he told me. Why an arcane? What do you need with one of them?"

Again Teldin had an answer ready. "That's what I've been hired to do," he said. "My principal-the one who's paying me-needs me to pass a message on to one of the arcane, and that's what I'm going to do."

Ria

As the two had spoken, the Probe had slipped lower into the atmosphere. The world below had changed, u

With breathtaking sudde

There was no farmland, he noticed with some surprise. Did that mean that all the food necessary to support a city was shipped in from elsewhere? It wasn't that the region was barren; in fact, it seemed like it would make excellent farmland. Everywhere was lush and green, like the tended private parkland of a noble-except that this private park stretched from horizon to horizon. There were regions of uninterrupted greenery that could only be woods. At one point a thin line of green meandered through grasslands to reach the sea-a river lined with trees; it could be nothing else. The land was beautiful here, Teldin thought. There were much worse places for a man to settle down and make his living. Perhaps after this business with the cloak was finally concluded, he could buy himself some land here and be happy. Of course, where would he get the money? Ah, well, he told himself with a grin, burn those bridges when you come to them.

Ria

He turned to Ria

She laughed in reply. "If they want to compete in my business, I'm getting out of it."

The ship continued its slow spiral, dropping lower and lower with each turn. Teldin found himself looking at the coastline again, but now he was close enough to the ground to see the narrow white-sand beaches that lined the ocean. From here it looked as though the parkland came within a hundred feet or less of the water, then there was a low cliff-it was difficult to tell how high, because of the foreshortening effect of the ship's altitude-dropping down to a narrow strand, then the ocean. From this angle it wasn't the pure blue he'd seen from higher up; it had taken on a deep, almost metallic green and had gentle wrinkles like the marks of hammer blows on the forged steel of a plow blade. He could make out here and there the white froth of waves breaking on the sand.

Ria

There was the city, Rauthaven, a walled port town built around the circumference of a small bay that made for a perfectly sheltered harbor. Breakwaters extended from both sides of the bay's mouth, closing the entry into the harbor down to a narrow passage. There were watch towers at the extreme ends of the breakwaters, and Teldin imagined that in time of war chains could be drawn across the passage. The harbor itself looked packed with ships; vessels ranging from tiny fishing boats to coasters to ships-of-the-line swung at anchor, seemingly at random.

The city itself rose up the sides of the low hills that surrounded the bay. Once more altitude made it difficult to estimate sizes, but Teldin thought that the buildings were generally small and the streets wide and spacious. The larger of those streets radiated outward and uphill from the harbor like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Narrower streets followed generally concentric curves around the harbor. Around the city's walls, however, this sense of order broke down. The harbor was roughly circular, but the outlying regions of the city were much more irregular. For example, the city extended farther along the coast to the northwest, which put the harbor nearer the southeast end of the town. The buildings got larger as you headed northwest, until the largest of all were atop the low hill-with, no doubt, a spectacular view down into the harbor. Those would have to be the homes of the noble families, or whoever it was who governed the city, plus the richest of the merchants, Teldin thought.

In his travels, Teldin had seen a few cities, but nothing to rival Rauthaven in beauty. Kry