The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume I: Volume I

shook his fist at the last place he saw the bird. Corby didn’t return.
    “Where’s the village?” Lanciar asked. His eyes looked hollow and his cheeks gaunt. He nibbled on a piece of dry meat, but not fast enough to feed his fading reserves of strength. None of the pockets of ley lines seemed to have revived in this area to support the use of magic and restore a body’s reserves.
    And yet a vibration hung in the air, almost like a Song. He listened closer, and the sensation faded like a perfume dissipating in the wind.
    “That’s what I’d like to know.” Jack stomped forward looking for the jagged line of two dozen homes that were here last night. Both he and Lanciar had seen the village during their mystic journey. The bird had revealed the location to him earlier in the day.
    “Villages don’t just up and move overnight,” Lanciar protested.
    “Ley lines don’t either. They’re gone, too.” Jack scratched the dirt with the toe of his worn boot. “We haven’t time to puzzle this out. We need food and shelter. This was once heavy timber country. Where there was one village there ought to be another not far away.” He shifted the pack on his back to a more comfortable position.
    “There’s a river valley.” Lanciar pointed west by northwest. “The harvesters used to float the trees down the rivers to Queen’s City and other ports. Maybe we’ll find something that way.”
    “I prefer that path.” Jack pointed to a different valley farther south. Mistrust of everything Lanciar suggested rose in him like a creeping poison. There weren’t supposed to be any ley lines in SeLenicca. None at all. But a slender one tingling with raw power suddenly sprang up beneath his feet, begging him to tap into it.
    He didn’t trust the line either. It could be an illusion. It could be a dragon-dream. He could be wrong in all his perceptions.
    “The dragon is that way.” Jack stepped toward his chosen path.
    “But we’ll find food to the west. We need to replenish our supplies,” Lanciar protested.
    “Then we’ll hunt.” Jack began walking. Fraank followed silently in his wake, too tired and hungry to make a decision on his own.
    “Hunting takes time and energy.” Lanciar stood firmly in place.
    “So does lying and betrayal. How many of King Simeon’s agents are waiting in that valley, ready to pounce on us and drag us to Queen’s City in chains, or back to the mine?” Jack didn’t bother looking at either of his companions. He expected them to follow; Fraank because he couldn’t do anything else, Lanciar because his mission was incomplete without a magician to turn over to Simeon and the coven.
    “I have to go this way!” Lanciar took a step in the opposite direction.
    “Then you go alone.” Jack turned his back with a hastily erected wall of armor around himself and Fraank.
     
    Katrina knelt before the little side altar in the grand temple. Her hands folded in front of her, and head bowed, she hoped the crowd of petitioners in the main sanctuary believed her lost in prayer. Like so many in the capital.
    Queen Miranda still lay deep in a coma. Her citizens trooped into the temples daily to plead with the Stargods for a return of their monarch’s health.
    Isolated in the factory, with little free time or opportunity to travel outside the industrial district, Katrina hadn’t realized how neglected the temple had become in the last five years.
    The belief that SeLenicca was the land of the Chosen, theirs to exploit, was falling apart as the mines gave out and the timber did not regrow. King Simeon preached that the duty of all true-blood SeLenese was to conquer other lands, grabbing resources as they went and leaving behind everlasting evidence of the supremacy of the winged god, Simurgh.
    Since Simeon’s marriage to Miranda, attendance at the temples and contributions had fallen to mere pittances. Mortar crumbled and mold grew on the walls. The few priests left were ancient. They trembled with cold and nursed painfully swollen joints. Like the bent old man who shuffled behind the altar where Katrina knelt. His hands were so misshapen from the joint disease, he could barely hold his taper steady enough to renew the candles.
    Worship of the Stargods hadn’t been forbidden, but it had definitely fallen into disfavor. Until their beloved queen lay near death and her husband had named himself monarch. Not regent for the young princess, but ruling king.
    Katrina wasn’t the only one who