Veil of a Thousand Tears

1 Breach Riane and Giyan were alone in the Library of the Abbey of Warm Current. It was midnight. A cold wind sighed through thorned sysal trees, and rhythmic pulses rippled through the dense bedrock beneath the abbey, where the power bourns wove themselves like strands of the Great Goddess Miina's ruddy hair. The Library, columned, marble-clad, lay dreaming like a castle keep in the fastness of the fortresslike complex. The Ramahan abbey had been abandoned for many years before Riane and her friendsthe Kundalan sorceress Giyan, the V'ornn Rhynnnon Rekkk Hacilar, the Kundalan Resistance leader Eleana, the Rappa named Thigpenhad made it their sanctuary some weeks before. Khagggun packs roamed the countryside searching for them. Once, they had swept through the abbey, and it was only Giyan's sorcery that had saved them. She had roused them from sleep and, gathering up all evidence of their stay, they had fled into the nearby forest, there to wait in stony silence for the enemy to depart. The abbey itself, sacked decades before by the V'ornn invaders, was half-burned and crumbling when they had first come upon it. Gimnopedes nested in untidy eaves. Spiders turned shadowy corners into delicately veined cities. A beautiful sysal tree had, for decades, grown up through thick plaza paving to split the lintel of the east-facing temple. The hoary knuckles of its basal roots displaced the artful pattern of the stone, an ironic comment on how life reclaims the void and transforms it. The Library, alone, remained intact, having been protected by a powerful spell that Giyan had counteracted in order to gain entry. Riane looked at Giyan, tall, slim, beautiful, golden, radiant, save for the blackened crusts of the sorcerous chrysalides that covered her hands and forearms. Even now, she could scarcely believe that they had been reunited. Giyan's presence gave her a sense of profound dislocation. She was not simply Riane, a sixteen-year-old orphaned Kundalan girl who could not remember her parents or where she came from. She was also the V'ornn Annon Ashera, eldest son of Eleusis Ashera, Eleusis had been regent of Kundala until a ruthless coup by his archenemy, Prime Factor Wennn Stogggul, and the head of Eleusis' own elite bodyguard, Kinnnus Morcha. Riane's searching gaze caught Giyan's whistleflower-blue eyes. "Every time you look at me I see surprise on your face." Giyan's heart ached, for she heard the sentiment behind the formal words, the fragile sentence Riane could not bear to speak: Do you still love me? "It is a marvelous moment, to be here with you, alone, in private. To be able to call you Teyjattt." Teyj were the beautiful multicolored four-winged birds the Gyrgonthe V'ornn technomage castebred and took with them wherever they went. "Little Teyj. You loved calling me that when Annon was a child." A sudden fear, a stab in Giyan's heart. "And Annon did not?" A moment's pause. "Annon did not, I think, appreciate your love. He did not know what to do with it." "It is odd the way you phrase it." "I am no longer Annon." Riane spread her hands. "Annon is dead. All Kundala knows it." "And we? What do we know?" Riane looked up at the magnificent dome of the Library, encrusted with a mosaic of Kundala and the sinuous star constellations surrounding it. Composed of millions of tiny colored glass tiles, fitted cunningly together as only the Kundalan artisans could, the dome produced an ethereal glow like a perpetual sunrise or sunset. Beneath this sheltering sky she felt safe from both Annon's enemiesLustbader, Eric is the author of 'Veil of a Thousand Tears', published 2003 under ISBN 9780812572346 and ISBN 0812572343.