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heirloom beyond price in this unlikely, rough setting, Sulfin Evend peered into the gloom. There, he picked out a supine form, sprawled on a woven blanket.
    The stranger the elder dispatched him to meet was no swarthy offshoot of tribal heritage. This man was pale-skinned. His arched feet were bare. Healed abrasions gleamed white on his ankles. The rest of his frame was obscured by the loose, silk garb of the desert. He did not seem either unsettled or dangerous. Asleep, his slight stature and angular face appeared refined, even strikingly vulnerable.
    The contrary fact that he looked unimposing jarred every natural instinct.
    First the glossy black hair, then the savage old scar, half-twisted the length of his right forearm, cued the uncanny awareness. Sulfin Evend realized he beheld none else but the Master of Shadow: for three decades, the author of unconscionable massacres and the sorcerer whose conniving wiles had once lured an elite band of Hanshire light horse to a nightmarish ruin inside a grim ward.
    Reason fled. Tied wrists notwithstanding, Sulfin Evend surged forward. His graphic memories of lost comrades, undone one by one, and consigned to hideous slaughter, lit his primal urge to retaliate.
    Fierce hands jerked him backwards. Jabbed at the knees, knocked down by brute force, Sulfin Evend was cuffed and pinned flat by the hands of his wrathful escort. The tribesfolk were not a forgiving race. They gagged his mouth, trussed his legs, and rendered him helpless before they abandoned him to his fate. Their matriarch ' s decree left him sprawled at the feet of his liege ' s most merciless enemy: the same wanton criminal he had striven to destroy on Lysaer ' s failed campaign in Daon Ramon.
    The last warrior to leave shed his dusty robe and tossed it over the prostrate outlander. To spare the sight of the one you offend, since our revered eldest has charged us to keep you here! '

 

     
     

    Summer 5671
    Encounter
    Hard-breathing and furious, Sulfin Evend could not thrash off the light cloth draped across him. Its clinging folds masked his prone body and face. Each breath, he inhaled the barbaric musk left ingrained by its owner. The melange of strange herbs, ginger spice, and old wood smoke added a vicious kick to his vertigo. He found no recovery. The chill stone where he lay seemed alive with queer flashes of light, while his ears became overwhelmed by the force of plain silence.
    His effort to curse entangled a tongue that rejected the habit of speech. Such uncanny malaise had to mean the old woman ' s welcoming drink had contained a narcotic infusion. Sulfin Evend regretted his manners, too late. He panted, pressed prostrate by his gravid flesh, while the bounds of his mind came undone, then up-ended, and dissolved his perception into spinning confusion.
    He reeled, unmoored, beyond count of time. The earth did not measure by minutes. Magnified senses marked each indrawn breath, then entwined them with those of another man, sleeping. Identity blurred. The Light ' s Lord Commander lost track of himself. When his enemy shuddered, gripped by black nightmares, Sulfin Evend felt his own heart constrict. Shared dread rode him, roughshod. He quaked with terror. Tormented shadows that he could not see gibbered and wailed, hounding him into a darkness more vast than the deep. No fight availed him. He could not break free. His raced pulse drummed to his shredding fear, while his staked spirit languished, shackled between his locked limbs.
    Far worse than helpless: Sulfin Evend felt as though drawn on unseen wires out of his hapless flesh.
    The throes of rank horror would not release. Without training to harness the gifts of his outbred clan blood-line, Sulfin Evend lacked the self-command to awaken. Suffering entrapped him in vivid distress. Every nerve he possessed felt redrawn in flame, until he lost his grip, crushed to madness. Shattered past recourse, he floundered, unstrung, when a lyranthe note speared through the