The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

for him. Jaylor spotted the boy’s problem. There were empty chairs, each upholstered in colors appropriate to a magician’s magic. No master dared sit in the chair designated for another magician. Yaakke was only a lowly apprentice, with no status and no definition to his magical colors yet.
    With a blink of Jaylor’s eyes, a high stool appeared beside him—an appropriate seat for a student among his teachers. With an impudent grin, Yaakke perched in his new place.
    “First, we must be physically linked.” Jaylor reached for Yaakke’s hand on his left and Slippy’s on his right. “On my count we will enter a trance together.”
    “Sounds like the way we used to shore up the border.”
    “Similar. Once entranced, Yaakke will boost me into the void. You, as a group, will then push Yaakke after me.”
    “Like acrobats building a pyramid?”
    “Exactly. I don’t think you will be able to follow into the void as a group, but through my eyes you will be able to see what I am doing. Yaakke will monitor my actions and signal for my return, if I run into trouble. You, in turn will lend him your corporate strength.”
    Jaylor looked around the table. Each magician nodded his understanding and assent.
    “On my count. One.” They all inhaled deeply.
    “Two . . .”
    “Not without me, you don’t!” Darville pounded up the stairs.
    The spell collapsed before it had begun. The magicians sank back into their chairs, gasping and shaking their heads clear of the almost-trance.
    “Your Grace, you are mundane. You can’t help.”
    “I’m strong, and I am involved. It is, after all, my wife you seek.”
    “The Council, Roy?” Jaylor brought his eyes back into focus.
    “Dispensed to myriad duties in getting troops on the road. I may be missed. But I feel my place is here.”
    “And the magic infection, Your Grace?” Zolltarn intervened. “What if this triggers a recurrence? The Council would never forgive you, or us.”
    “The infection is cured. Never in recorded history has there been a recurrence or relapse after a cure.” Darville reminded them it was their own books that had led to diagnosis and cure.
    “Why not let the boy join us? Everything else about this adventure is extremely unorthodox. Take Scrawny’s chair, bo . . . Your Grace.” Slippy waved to the one opposite him. The orange and yellow covering was already fading. “And put on the Coraurlia. The magic embedded in it will give us something to link us to you.”
    “You know, Jaylor, if this works, we’re going to have to find you a nickname. Messiah, maybe?” a master in healer’s gray quipped.
    “More like Mount Ohara by the size of him,” Lyman murmured just loudly enough to be heard.
    “Can we get on with this?” Jaylor glared at the magicians.
    Once more they linked hands. At Yaakke’s first touch, Jaylor sensed energy flowing strongly into his veins. “On my count. ONE.” Blood tingled in the back of his neck, and almost hummed with tightly controlled magic.
    “TWO.” The singing flow of blood spread to his toes and fingertips and passed around the circle back into himself.
    “THREE.”
    The void yawned above him, waiting, calling, pulling him up and out of himself, out of Coronnan, out of life. Blacker-than-black emptiness reached on for eternity.
    An almost physical shove launched him into the mind-numbing cold.

    Yaakke paused long enough to catch his breath. The void was more beautiful each time he glimpsed it. Always he had sat on the threshold, uncertain where and how to proceed into the nothingness, unless he was zipping through it in transport. Now, with a strong link back to the Commune to pull him home again, he could afford to linger. He took his first tentative step forward.
    Blackness swallowed him. Panic fought with his heartbeat. The silver umbilical of life that anchored him to the Commune quivered and tugged at him. He longed to follow it back to safety.
    But Jaylor was out there, somewhere, searching for Darville’s wife, the pretty princess who had smiled at him once.
    “Jaylor?” He called with voice and mind and magic.
    Nothing.
    “Master!” His voice cracked.
    Then he saw it, a red and blue braid, very faintly trailing back to him, caught within his own magic web. One hand on the braid, the other reaching out in front, as a blind man’s guide, Yaakke floated forward with jerking irregularity. He had to force the image of his feet walking on solid ground. Moving through nothing sent his