Return - Book III of the Five Worlds Trilogy Read Online Free

knock again, as his eyes widened in terror and he shrank back toward the doorway.
    “I only meant to imply—” Pynthas began.
    “I will imply, and I will command!” Comelian shouted.
    “Yes, High Leader! I—”
    “You are nothing! You know nothing! What would you think if I told you that your precious Olympus Mons and all of its wretched counterparts may be blasted to dust in less than eight months?
    “Say nothing!”
    “Yes, High Leader!” Pynthas squeaked, moving halfway out the door.
    “And why do you tell me that Earth has been neutralized? Are you that great a fool? As we speak, Dalin Shar becomes a threat! Dalin Shar! The boy king! I can hardly believe it myself! In a matter of months he has managed to undo everything I worked for on that waste of a planet. And now they are a threat to me again!”
    The High Leader charged at Pynthas Rei, and the toady, squeaking out apologies, backed all the way out of the room; as the door closed, Prime Comelian took pleasure in hearing Pynthas fall and exclaim loudly on the other side, before, no doubt, rising to scamper away.
    No matter, Cornelian told himself. None of it matters.
    He would deal with Earth when the time was right. Nothing Dalin Shar, or his ridiculous friend Shatz Abel, could do could make one iota of difference in the High Leader’s plans. Nothing anyone could do would interfere the tiniest bit with his goals. The comets would be dealt with. Dalin Shar would be dealt with. Everyone who stood in his way would be dealt with—
    For a brief moment the tiniest bit of doubt entered his mind. This was the same feeling he had had since the very beginning of his enterprise, the nagging, bothersome itch in the back of his mind that there was something he had overlooked. Something else that he did not see, or should be paying attention to. These thoughts had bedeviled him, but he had never been able to discover why.
    What am I forgetting?
    What am I overlooking?
    As always, he came up blank.
    “Bah,” he said, and turned with a sudden thought to the Screen: there was something he had forgotten to discuss with Sam-Sei.
    The girl.
    Tabrel Kris … .
    Lost in thoughts of excitement, he suddenly realized that he had destroyed the room’s Screen, which lay in shards below the spot where it had been mounted.
    “Pynthas!” he screamed.
    After a moment he noted with knowing pleasure the return of the toady’s scuttling gait, before the tentative, fearful knock came on the door.
     

Chapter 4
     
    E arth had never looked so good to Dalin Shar. Granted, these were the Lost Lands, by far the ugliest area on any of the Five Worlds. The ground, the air, the water, even the clouds were filled with mutant creatures and poisonous substances. Food had to be tested; crops couldn’t be trusted; water had to be purified and filtered; oxygen, in some places, wasn’t oxygen at all but a mixture of deadly gases that would kill any man or woman stumbling into the poisonous pocket.
    And then there were the animals and insects: horrid things, many of them abhorrent to the eye and even worse to the touch. Sentries sometimes disappeared, never to be seen again, swallowed by something in the earth or carried off by something in the air. Dalin himself had seen a cloud descend, as a fog, over a lookout stationed on a far hill, and when the cloud lifted, the man, save for his smoking boots, was gone. Trees were not always trees; harmless looking beasts, looking all cucidlesome???cuddlesome fur, turned all teeth and claws on closer approach. Nothing was as it seemed.
    And yet …
    And yet …
    Dalin felt at home.
    The sky overhead was not always blue, as he had been accustomed to when residing in his grand palace. The sky here was often roiling yellow, sickly red, or sometimes brown or pea green. The roses he remembered from his palace gardens had been red; those in the Lost Lands never were. He had seen brown roses, and others that were limpidly translucent.
    And yet … this was still