Chapter one
“You will deal with the Shanks, Dray Prescot.” The rustling voice, like dead leaves blown scraping over gravel, spoke menacingly. “Before that you will answer for your disobedience.”
I opened my mouth to shout in baffled rage that this cretin of a scorpion couldn’t understand, and, then, I understood. Disobedience was the issue here. The blue radiance grew about me. I looked up to see the gigantic form of the phantom blue Scorpion hovering. Chill smote me. In an icy blueness I swept away into blackness.
Blackness and blueness swirling all about me... Headlong tumbling with the breath knocked from my lungs... The freezing grip of icy chains lapping my limbs... Oh, yes, I knew all about these sensations. The high and mighty Everoinye, the Star Lords, were summoning me to their presence — and this time they were going to discipline me for what they considered disobedience.
Streaks of lambent blue fire shot through the blackness. My body felt black and blue too, by Vox. Instead of having Queen Leone assassinated and then, through the disgusting rites of Kaopan, making sure she could never be reincarnated, I’d saved her and switched in some poor pathetic dead girl to take her place. No one here in Makilorn apart from we plotters would know that. The Star Lords wanted Kirsty as queen, and now she would be.
As I thus hurtled helplessly through a maelstrom of supernatural forces I, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, felt that perhaps all my modulated feelings for the Star Lords had been misplaced. I’d thought we’d been getting onto a better footing where we might understand more of one another’s problems. Now, particularly after they’d sent Caspar the Peaker to assassinate Leone so that Kirsty might be queen, I fancied all my old hatred and contempt would flare up uncontrollably.
That, as I knew to my cost, would be a mistake.
Maybe, just maybe, the Star Lords’ plans could exist within the framework of decency. Perhaps, just perhaps, absolute power had not corrupted them past redemption.
Below me through the swirling mists I saw a patchwork of green.
Peering more closely I realized I was looking down from a great height upon fields and forests and hills.
This amazed me so completely that I stared without believing.
Never before had I seen anything outside the blue outlines of the phantom Scorpion as I was whisked up to meet the Everoinye or to be tumbled headlong, naked and unarmed, into some dismal spot of Kregen to sort out a problem for the Star Lords.
Arms and spirals of blue, like contorting tentacles, waved all about me. I could hear a vast rushing, as of the wind at the end of the world. A blustery gale swu
