Sorcery Rising Read Online Free

food, in a stream of white. Once out of the shelter of the icewall, the chop of the waves made the boat roll alarmingly. The cat, splashed with freezing seawater, mewed piteously. Virelai missed his stroke; cursed, shipped his oars and after a certain amount of fiddling around, managed to put up the sail. For some moments the sail hung as slack as a turkey’s wattle. Then, a little breeze bellied the fabric and began to drive the sloop slowly, inexorably, back to shore, until the prow, its painted eye staring blindly ahead, bumped the ice of its home, and the seabirds shrieked their derision. Virelai put his head in his hands. He was a fool, a fool, a fool: he could not even sail a tiny boat.
Idiot
, his inner voice chided him.
Use the magic!
A wind spell: it was a simple thing, but even so his memory had deserted him. Digging in his bag he pulled out a small notebook and riffled through its pages. Then he unbound the cat’s head from the swaddling, and made a short incantation. Bëte fixed him with an unforgiving eye, then made a choking cough. The sail went slack, then swelled on its opposite side. The terns, caught unawares by the sudden change in wind direction, banked to correct their coverts. The sloop sailed smoothly out into the ocean.
    Virelai shaded his vision against the rising sun and watched as it delineated the deceptive curves and rises of the place he had regarded all his life as his home. To the untutored eye, it might have been no more than the usual vast jumble of ice you would expect to find in such an arctic region: great blocks and floes that had been piled one atop the other by a thousand ocean storms, ice that had been carved into bizarre and unlikely shapes by wicked seawinds; all bleak and wild and uninhabitable by any except the seabirds and narwhal. But to the mage’s apprentice Sanctuary revealed itself in all its sorcerous glory. Where a shady cornice met a cliff of ice, Virelai, narrowing his eyes, saw how the curving wall of the great hall met the stern face of the eastern tower; where higgledy-piggledy blocks lay as if scattered by the hand of a god, he noted how elegant stairways twined up from the statuettes and balustrades of a formal garden that to another might offer nothing but the unrelieved whiteness of an untouched snowfield. Spires and pillars, columns and masonry, all perfectly proportioned and crafted; cold white surfaces now limned in dawn-golds and pinks by the romantic sun.
    The Master had brought his exacting eye to bear on every detail of his ice-realm. Nothing here was natural: nothing occurred by chance. Virelai wondered if he had viewed it from this very point, perhaps even from this very boat, when he had conceived Sanctuary’s form.
    How it or he had come to be here, and for what purpose, Virelai had no idea: but he meant to find out. Turning away from the island of ice, he set a course south, to where the world began.

PART
    ONE

One
    Sacrilege
    K atla Aransen stared out across the prow of the
Fulmar’s Gift
as it ploughed through the grey waves, the foam from the ship’s passage spraying back into her face and wetting her long red hair, but Katla did not care. It was her first long voyage and they had been at sea these past two weeks, but she was nineteen years old and hungry for the world: she could not bear to miss a moment of it.
    Behind her, she could hear the great greased-wool sail cracking and roaring in the stiff wind, the wind that carried away her father’s voice as he shouted orders to the crew. Many of them, she knew, would be hunkered down amidships amongst the cargo and sea-chests, trying to stay warm around the tub-fire. A sudden hissing signalled the start of preparations for the evening meal: they stored their meat in leather buckets full of seawater till it tasted more of brine than anything else, and cooking it by putting it directly onto the embers was the only way to make it palatable.
    A warm hand on her shoulder. She spun around, to find her