Gathering Storm (The Salvation of Tempestria Book 2) - Gary Stringer (read e book TXT) 📗

Justaria for her hand in events that had led to her close bond with Dreya the Dark. The chance to see the person behind the mask, the woman beneath the black velvet robes. The opportunity to come to know and understand Dreya in ways no-one else did.

Dreya had visited many of the known disappearance sites herself, but she understood Catriona well enough by now to be completely unsurprised when the druidess declared her intention to investigate this one personally.

*****

A red-banded falcon alighted in Justaria’s garden. It wasn’t large, but it was well maintained. Flowering plants were blooming in a wide border between the fence and the lawn on the right-hand side as she faced the white cottage at the end of the gently meandering path. Over to the left, the Red robe leader had gone for a different approach, with a blanket of buttercups and daisies encircling a sycamore tree.

Catriona reverted to her natural form and breathed deeply. She could immediately sense the signature of higher planar energy that had got everybody so worked up. But there was something else not quite right about this place. A spell of wizards had been all over Justaria’s garden, probing with their magic and in their wizardly wisdom, turned up absolutely nothing.

“Wizards!” the druidess muttered to herself. “Can’t see past their own spellbooks.”

She sent a sympathic apology to Dreya, with whom she was linked.

‘Not wrong,’ came her reply.

Barring a few footprints where wizards had trodden carelessly, the garden was beautiful, but not immaculate. It didn’t look like a professional job to Cat. More of a constant labour of love. Clearly, Justaria spent a lot of her free time planting, pottering and pruning, tinkering and tidying her garden. So why were the daisies bent over? If they had just been stepped on, why was it just the daisies and not the buttercups? And why all in one direction, towards the tree? Cat stepped lightly around to the far side of the tree where the trunk was in shadow. On the ground was a trowel with a sharp metal point, which had obviously been used to carve words into the bark:

RHYNAS

DESERT

The druidess wasn’t sure where that was, apart from being somewhere overseas, but by concentrating hard, she was able to project an image of the words to Dreya, sympathically. In return, Dreya sent ‘Meeting’ and ‘Map,’ which Cat took to mean she would meet up with her and show her on a map.

Looking around Justaria’s garden once more, there was no other evidence that Catriona could detect. It was a wonder the sorceress had found time to do as much as she did. She could almost picture the scene: whoever had come for Justaria, she had found out where they were taking her and delayed them long enough to leave clues.

At her Conclave, Cat had seen Justaria use delicate magic to make a pen inscribe words on a page with barely a glance. In principle, using a floating trowel to scratch words into a tree was no different. As for the daisies, they were just more evidence of Justaria’s deft touch with magic. Still, it would have taken time, which told Cat something else: unless Justaria’s case was different from all the others, wizards were not being kidnapped as everyone assumed. If it were a simple grab and teleport job, there was no way Justaria could have done what she did. She must have kept them talking, and if they were talking, it wasn’t kidnapping, it was persuasion. Recruitment. That said, given the lack of reports of wizards saying ‘no’ to this recruitment, it was likely the sales pitch boiled down to ‘join or die,’ but still, recruitment for what?

As she was puzzling over that one, someone arrived who had the answer.

The wind suddenly picked up, and Cat was instantly alert. Storms didn’t just start like that. Not natural ones, anyway. There was a flash of equally unnatural lightning, creating an outline of a member of the big cat family: a tiger.

Cat shifted to her tawny owl form, quieter through the air than the falcon, approaching the new arrival stealthily from behind. She changed in midair and stood on one of her Windy Steps.

“Daelen StormTiger,” she said, scowling indignantly, arms folded. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Chapter 2

It all began on another world.

Daelen StormTiger woke, suddenly, coming face to face with an unexpected visitor.

Actually, gentle reader, though I say, ‘face to face,’ he couldn’t actually see her face. Overall, she seemed to defy analysis, protected from even his powers of detection, save for a vague impression of a female figure with a white aura. This was Aunt Mandalee in her role as White Guardian of Time and Magic, conducting a completely legal and necessary Time Intervention to correct an anomaly. In terms of her personal Timestream, this was several months before she made herself complicit in my illegal plan to bring Daelen to me here.

“Oh, you’re up, at last, I see,” his visitor observed, then when Daelen got out of bed, failing to catch the bedsheets in time, she quickly turned away with a small scream, adding, “And now I’ve seen far more of you than I ever wanted to. Put some clothes on, for pity’s sake!”

“Who are you, and what are you doing in my home?” Daelen demanded, though he did comply with her clothing request.

“Can’t tell you that, not the first part, anyway,” Mandalee answered, apologetically. “You haven’t even met me yet. It would probably blow a hole in the cosmos the size of the Black Tower, which might not seem that big in comparison to the size of the cosmos, but it would be big enough to let some pretty important stuff fall out. Well, the Black Tower, for a start, I suppose. That would cause all kinds of anomalies. Look, are you dressed yet?”

“Yes,” Daelen assured her.

She turned around, although Daelen wasn’t sure how he could tell that, given that she seemed to shimmer in much the same way, whichever