The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

nothing had told Yaakke the moment Baamin died.
    The shock of the old man’s death had dropped him out of the void and the spell, leaving Jaylor alone, without an anchor to his corporeal body.
    Yaakke was stranded in the void now, body and all. He needed to find a familiar life and follow it out. He didn’t care where he landed as long as it was out of this sensation-robbing blackness.
    Dozens of life forces coiled around his body and tightened. Suffocation squeezed his mind to blankness. Desperately he clawed at the life-lines, seeking an exit. One shimmering white thread clung persistently. He grasped it to pluck it away from his heart. New images filled his head.
    A girl with moon-bright hair braided in a foreign style fell to her knees crying. She clutched a tubular pillow to her skinny chest. Wooden spindles dangled from the pillow by slender threads. An older man with similar features and hair ripped the clumsy bundle from her arms. Her father? One of the wooden spindles broke free of the pillow and fell back into the girl’s lap. She covered it with a fold of her dark skirt to hide it from the man. The well-dressed father then thrust the bundle into the greedy grasp of a tall, dark-eyed merchant. Money changed hands and the father grabbed the girl by the arm and dragged her away. She continued to clutch the hidden spindle.
    Yaakke dropped that life-thread as if it were hot, sensing danger to himself in the vision. Shame heated his mind as if he were responsible for the girl’s distress. Who was she? He was sure he’d never met her, never seen a woman with two four-strand brands that joined into one halfway down her back. Why was her life wrapped around his as if they were soul mates?
    He resisted the pull to view more of the girl’s life. One more vision of her might answer his questions and quiet the longing that surrounded his heart. No time. He had to get out of the void.
    Somewhere there was an exit. But where? Blackness and the coils of lives stretched on toward infinity.

Chapter 6
     
    ‘Where can the boy be?” Jaylor paced the flat roof atop the central keep of the last monastery dedicated to the priests of the Stargods. Its remote solitude had, so far, left it untouched by the purges of all enclaves of magicians. He feared their safety was only temporary. When the extremists ran out of targets for their venom, they would remember that a man must first be a magician before he became a priest. Temples and monasteries might lose their sacred protection.
    Jaylor glared at a long telescope mounted atop the crenellated wall as if the arcane instrument could provide answers. His concern for his missing apprentice demanded more immediate answers than his worry over political purges and the omens his study of the heavens offered.
    Master Fraandalor, known as Slippy within the intimate enclave of the Commune of Magicians, shrugged his shoulders in reply and positioned his eye to look through his own priceless equipment. “A quest is by necessity a solitary endeavor,” he said, still squinting through the lens toward the northeastern sky.
    “But he left the capital alone, before Brevelan and I did. He didn’t collect any drageen to buy supplies or wait for special instructions. I haven’t been able to find him in the glass for weeks and I’m worried about him.” Jaylor ran his left hand through his unrestrained hair, then finger-combed his beard. “He didn’t have the benefit of the trial by Tambootie smoke.”
    “We couldn’t put him through that, Jaylor.” Slippy made a notation on a piece of parchment without lifting his eyes from the telescope. “He hasn’t reached puberty yet. He wouldn’t have survived the ordeal.”
    “What happens when his body does make the change and his magic runs as wild as his emotions?” Jaylor resisted the urge to slam his fist into the long black tube that had been bequeathed to the first magicians of Coronnan by the Stargods.
    “I don’t know what will happen to Yaakke, Jaylor. The ritual of the Tambootie smoke is older than communal magic. If there were any records of what happens when a magic talent runs wild at puberty—especially a talent as strong as Yaakke’s—those records were destroyed. We lost so much knowledge by suppressing solitary magic.” Slippy shook his head in regret and returned to stargazing, the time-honored duty of all men of talent: magicians, healers, and priests of the Stargods.
    The knowledge gained by observation of the