Echoes in the Dark. Robin D. Owens

rock and incense came to his nostrils, the mists of prophecies became full, iridescent wraiths, tempting him to look and study. The Songs of them increased from whispers to a steady hum. His skin itched. How did the Singer stand it? How had she stood it for over a hundred years? Did it diminish or grow stronger or was it her own strength and control that grew? If so, he was a fool to set himself against such a being.

      Concentrating on her, he held off most of the visions.

      But not all.

      Dark encroached. His mouth dried. The light dimmed, his field of vision narrowed. He set his jaw. The Dark had encroached into Lladrana for centuries, particularly in his lifetime, especially in the past decade.

      He drew his gauntlets from where they were folded over his belt and put them on so he could trail his hand against the cavern wall.

      Four steps down the corridor his solid steps wavered, the mist pushed around him as if it knew he had the Power of Sight. Wisps curled in his nostrils and he couldn’t help breathing them.

      Six steps and the heat was vicious—like that of an active volcano. The Dark’s Nest.

      Seven steps and a horrendous explosion occurred, the heat searing his eyes, but not before he saw a mountain island explode flinging bodies into the sky—volaran and human.

      One of the bodies wore white leathers like his.

      Again his legs gave way and he gasped, fell to the floor, knees bruising.

      Endured the horrendous noise of a dying Dark, the screams of volarans and the Exotiques echoing in his brain as they died, too.

      Then nothingness.

      For a long moment he lay and ached…body, mind, soul.

      He rose once more and wiped his arm across his forehead, glad these were his regular white leathers and not dreeth skin that wouldn’t absorb his perspiration. Panting, he staggered through the dank mists and discovered he was humming. The realization jerked him to a stop. Bracing himself on the wall, he converted the hum to a Song and immediately felt better, his vision cleared. The tendrils of mist still lurked, but he’d developed a shield against them. He thought of the words he chanted—“I am fine. I can handle this. Not all visions are true.” Rough words, not harmonious to the ear. But he’d Sing them until he could craft a potent poem.

      He was still working on the wording when he saw an ancient door and beyond the door he felt a great cavern where the Singer and some of her Friends waited—Friends who didn’t have any prophetic Power, as she did. As he did.

      He heard the murmur of real human voices and the last fading note of crystal bowls. He realized that though it had seemed like a trip of hours, it had been less than five minutes. Nevertheless, his skin was bathed in sweat. He hoped his undergarments were releasing a pleasant scent as they were supposed to. The Singer had a nose as sensitive as her hearing.

      When he opened the door the ghosts of prophecy faded. He let out a breath of relief and stepped into the large, rough cavern. The circle of Friends, some behind small tables holding bowls, some with cymbals, the best Singers with no instrument at all, circled a flaming blue-energy-lined pentacle. The Singer, a tiny woman especially for a Lladranan, looked down at a figure.

      Then the Singer looked at him, her pointed brows rising high, and pitched her voice so it sounded next to his ear. “You made it all the way to the Summoning Cavern.”

      He couldn’t tell whether she was impressed or dismayed or both. Then a slight, secret smile lifted the corners of her mouth. He didn’t ask what she knew. He didn’t want to know. “I was not mistaken in you,” she said loudly.

      Luthan looked her straight in the eyes. “I was in you.”

      Striding to the outside rim of the circle, he stared down. As expected by all, the Summoned Exotique was a woman. A lovely woman, beautiful more in the manner of his own people than that of Exotique Terre: long, dark hair flowing around her torso, old ivory and gold complexion, lush lips. He swallowed hard and waited for his innate revulsion for Exotiques to hit.

      Marshalls’ Castle, the same time

      Raine Lindley found her feet carrying her to the great round temple in the Marshalls’ Castle. Again.

      There’d been something in the air of her small purple home office that wouldn’t let her settle. Time and again she’d erased the line of the ship’s prow she was designing. When she looked out the window, rainbows seemed to dance on the air and somehow she caught a scent of incense and the reverberation of a gong.

      So she’d mounted her flying horse, her volaran, for the short two-mile trip to the Castle and the temple, accompanied by her companion, a young magical shape-shifting being called a feycoocu. This compulsion was more than was natural or healthy.

      Because look what happened when she last followed a compulsion. At home in Connecticut she’d been so obsessed with her grandmother’s mirror that she’d stare at it for hours, think about stepping through it, and how strange was that?

      Then she’d thought that giving the mirror away to one of her brothers—newly engaged—was the right thing to do. To top off all this foolishness, instead of driving around the inlet, she’d packed the mirror and taken it onto the open sea in a new boat she’d built. In the winter. It was a mild day and the water was calm, but the action had been unwise beyond belief.

      Thunder, lightning…storm from nowhere. The quilts and ropes around the mirror falling away magically. The glass blazing white like nothing she’d seen. The boat breaking up under her, the wind whipping her into the mirror, then landing her in the cold sea of here—an alternate dimension or universe or whatever. Lladrana.

      She’d been Summoned by the Seamasters, who’d done it on the cheap. They hadn’t even known they’d succeeded. Just called a person from Earth and when she didn’t seem to show, they wandered back to a market gathering.

      That forced Raine to fend for herself in a strange land where she knew nothing, and, in fact, got sick if she were more than a couple of miles from the sea.

      Of course the worse had happened. One of those Lladranans who had an instinctive, irrational repulsion for people from Earth—Exotiques—had found her, been in a position of power over her. Tormented her. She’d lived like that six months before she could escape.

      A winged horse had found her, brought a nobleman—Faucon Creusse—to her, and then she’d been tuned to this world and the sickness had gone away. Maybe that was why she was here, in the temple. The ritual to tune her had been here, in this large round building separated into sections by fancy screens.

      Now the feycoocu was playing in the pool as a baby seal. Raine glanced at her, then stared at the crystal chimes that had run through her body last month, plucking inner chords she didn’t know she had, and shivered.

      There were seven chimes, and her friend Bri Masif, another Exotique, a healer, said they corresponded in sound and color to the chakras. The chimes sat on a large marble altar carved with symbols of the four elements, one on each side. Raine’s, like Bri’s, was water, which was the only thing that really made sense. Because she was a shipbuilder and would create a vessel that would carry an invasion force to fight the Dark.

      One fast ship that might escape notice, loaded with the best fighters in Lladrana, and the Exotiques to Sing and trigger a weapon knot that would probably explode the whole damn island.

      Raine peeked inside the chimes. She was sure that during her ordeal these had been lit somehow, but there was no candle wax inside. They were probably storage crystals like the ones embedded in the beams above her. She cleared her throat. She was learning all about Power—magic—and how it manifested in music. She hummed, true C. The red chime sounded the same note and lit, staying bright. Raine ran the chakra scale and grinned when all the chimes lit.

      Then she stared at the silver gong, nine feet in diameter. Naturally it was suspended in the frame with Power, didn’t have holes in it. She narrowed her eyes. Did it have an aura? Probably from all the magic in the temple, all