The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

have to leave the city before the Council guesses that you’ve been here.”
    “The Council of Provinces couldn’t keep me away. I’ve awaited this day since I was twelve and you were fourteen.” Jaylor’s smile lit his eyes with merriment.
    “The day I ran away from home to join your band of renegade boys. The best day of my life, even if it lasted only a few hours.” Darville returned the grin. Much of the pain drained from his face with the memory.
    Yaakke burned with jealousy. He’d never had a friend. Never had a family to run away from.
    “I’ve got to go.” Darville broke the hand clasp and took a decisive step toward his personal guard. “Jaylor.” He stopped his progress. “I miss your counsel. I’m working hard to rescind the banishment of magicians.”
    “I know, old friend. I’m working hard at it, too.”
    “How? You’re supposed to be in exile.”
    “Sometimes it takes an exile to find an exile.”
    “Shayla! You’ve got to find her.” The king winced as his left arm brushed against Fred.
    “I guess I have to send Yaakke on that mission.”
    “Everything will be fine, Your Grace, once I return with the dragons,” Yaakke burst forth. He had his quest. Jaylor had forgiven his earlier shortcomings and given him his quest!
     
    Dragons take them all! Almost we reached open water. Almost, we sailed free of Coronnan. Darville’s men followed in a fast galley. They overtook us and shot burning arrows into the sails. Then they boarded my ship with unsheathed weapons. My captain and his crew fought valiantly for our freedom. When all was lost, I planted the idea of suicide into their feeble minds. Better they all die than betray my spell of invisibility. Darville must never know ’twas I who stole Lord Krej.
    I can no longer flee to SeLenicca with my treasure. Where can I hide? Right under their noses, where they are least likely to look.
     
    Black mists chilled Yaakke to the bone. Utter blackness that had never known light. All of his senses stopped. He’d shiver with fright if he had a body to respond to his mind.
    All of his previous trips through the void had been brief—darting in and out in the middle of the transport spell. Familiarity didn’t make a transport spell any easier or less frightening. If he slipped in his concentration for even as long as a blink of the eye (presuming he still had eyes), he could end up permanently lost in this black nothingness.
    Yaakke fixed an image of Brevelan’s clearing in his mind. He saw the one-room thatched hut in the center, with a new lean-to affixed to the back: The coop where the flusterhens laid their eggs and the goat munched on her hay. A new weed in the kitchen garden and the layers of mulch Jaylor had laid on the big field to protect the last of the yampion roots. The closest thing to home Yaakke knew.
    Brevelan wasn’t there to open and close the barrier around the clearing. He’d have to shape-change into a wild animal to slip through. Remembering to change back into his human form afterward was the hard part of that little trick. He hoped Brevelan never learned he’d found a way in and out of her protected home.
    The blackness faded just a little. He pulled the image of the clearing into sharper focus and aimed his spell for the open space before the hut.
    Pulsing colored lines crisscrossed the lightest patch of nothingness. Could that be a door out of the void and back to reality? He reinforced the image of the clearing. The web of lines brightened. A sensation of speed propelled him toward the colors and he braced himself for contact with solid ground.
    He bounced against something soft. At least he thought that was the sensation. The only softness in the clearing might be the upper branches of a tree, or the thatched roof. But he hadn’t visualized either as his landing place.
    Carefully he scanned his surroundings with every sense available to him. Wild tangles of throbbing umbilicals, in every hue imaginable, wrapped around and around him like the tentacles of a giant sea monster. Between and behind the colored symbols of life forces the void continued, on and on. Nothing between here and eternity.
    He pushed a few cords away from what should be his face. Memory struck him. The time he’d entered the void with Jaylor to search for Queen Rossemikka’s life force when Krej had kidnapped her, these threads of life had encircled them both. During that spell, the sight of a magician’s blue umbilical fading to