Dawn

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SOARING HIGH ABOVE Noreela, it was easy to believe that the world had ended again.

The evidence of scared, scattered communities lay spread out below, all of them illuminated against a darkness that should not be. Ten thousand faces would be searching for the sun but seeing only this unnatural dusk, and Lenora wondered what they would think were they to spy the hawk. Would they know? Would they have any inkling of what they were looking at?

She thought not. But soon that would change.

For most of the night, Lenora had been trying to avoid the Mages’ attention. She sat motionless and silent, as far back on the hawk’s tail as she could go, two short swords buried in the creature’s hide to provide precious handholds. She watched her masters with a sense of fear the likes of which she had never felt before. The Mages had changed so much. They were strangers to her now.

For the past three hundred years, Angel and S’Hivez had existed bitter and angry, given to lengthy musings on revenge. Lenora had served them and listened-their trusted lieutenant-and over time they had become shadows of themselves: mad old things who showed only occasional flashes of their former brilliance and brutality. Ensconced in their volcano retreat on Dana’Man, they had been fading away, though they had still retained a certain power. Things that once ruled a land could never lose that. But their glories had been vanishing into history, and the more time passed, the more Lenora’s impressions of them had been dictated by memory. The Mages’ power had become a self-perpetuating myth in her own mind.

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