Master of the Cauldron Read Online Free Page A

that had drowned King Carus and brought the Old Kingdom down.
    The Kingdom of the Isles today was only a shadow of the magnificence that had shattered a thousand years ago, the crudely rejoined fragments of the little that had survived the Collapse. Except for the help and direction Tenoctris had given Garric and the others who were trying to prevent it, a second, final Collapse would have destroyed what remained.
    And that Collapse could still occur. The forces that wizards tapped with their art waxed every thousand years, and they were swiftly rising to their peak again. Wizards who in the past could only wither a tree with great effort were now able to blast whole forests—and might easily do so by accident, because an increase in power didn’t bring with it greater learning and wisdom.
    â€œI thought I must be mistaken about the skeins of force I felt here,” Tenoctris continued, gesturing toward the ruin-speckled western slope of Volita. “I was right, though. Something really terrible must have happened, but—”
    She grinned.
    â€œâ€”it was after I left my own age. Or I’d have been aware of it, even if there hadn’t been time for human messengers to bring word.”
    The wizard shifted her feet in preparation to rise. Sharina stiffened to help, either by lifting or just to provide a fulcrum on which the old woman could lever herself upright.
    After a moment’s consideration, Tenoctris relaxed where she was. “Not quite yet,” she murmured, mostly to herself.
    When Sharina was a child who’d never met a wizard, she’d imagined that wizardry involved muttering a few words and having all manner of wonders appear from the thin air. Now she’d seen wizards of many different types and abilities. The one thing they all had in common was the bone-deep exhaustion that they felt at the conclusion of a spell.
    A powerful wizard could do things that a lesser one couldn’t even attempt, just as Cashel could lift a stone that wouldn’t tremble if Sharina strained against it. That didn’t mean lifting a heavy stone wasn’t work for Cashel, though: just that it was work within his very considerable capacity.
    Tenoctris was a little old woman with limited physical strength and similarly slight ability to influence through her art the forces she saw so clearly. Even minor spells were an effort for her. At need, she could function on sheer willpower for long enough in every case that Sharina’d had occasion to observe; but there was no need for Tenoctris to do anything just then except to sit on the deck as sailors completed berthing arrangements.
    Volita lay in the Bay of Shelter. This western shore faced the mainland of Sandrakkan and the city of Erdin, the capital of the Earls of Sandrakkan from the founding of the Old Kingdom two millennia before. The surrounding water buffered the climate. Volita was close to one of the most vibrant cities of the realm, so during the Old Kingdom it’d become a summer resort for wealthy folk from the length and breadth of the Isles.
    Today the remains of those homes lined the island’s western shore and, as Sharina had seen as the fleet approached, the eastern side as well. Most’d had a slip for the owner’s yacht, but the waves of a thousand stormy years had crumbled the pilings and stonework. They wouldn’t have been large enough to berth warships two and three hundred feet long anyway.
    But not all Volita’s ruins were those of time and weather, though…
    â€œRecords of the Collapse aren’t good,” Sharina said. It seemed odd to be explaining what had happened a thousand years ago to a person who’d been alive then, but Sharina knew from her own experience that the person who lives an event often doesn’t know more than a tiny shard of it. “Of course. But there’s an account written in the monastery on Bridge Island, the Healing Brethren of Lady Erd. Nobody