The Stars Asunder: A New Novel of the Mageworlds Read Online Free

altar stood in front of a freestanding memorial on tripod legs. The candle holders were empty—whoever had last tended the memorial had scraped them clean when the rite was done—and a spray of white flowers, long since dried, lay on the altar between them.
    “This is an end and a breaking,” Garrod said. With that he picked up the memorial and flung it out through one of the high, west-looking windows in the center of the long wall. The window glass gave way in a jagged, shivering peal, and the memorial went crashing down onto the gravel drive outside.
    “Wait!” Yuvaen cried over the noise. “Hasn’t there been enough broken already?”
    Garrod put his hands against the wooden altar and shoved it toward the broken window. “No,” he said. “Not enough by half. Before I am done, I will break our very universe.”
    The altar smashed against the low sill and tumbled over it to the ground below. Rain poured in through the gap in the window, driven slantwise by the rising wind.
    “Your ancestors will curse you,” Yuvaen said.
    “My ancestors mean nothing to me,” Garrod said, “and I mean nothing to them.” He pulled another of the tablets from the wall, and the dried wood splintered in his hands. He threw the tablet out onto the gravel with the other wreckage. “I am the last of my line, and what follows after will follow the older days.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “The sundering of the galaxy is not just a parable, or an allegory suitable for children and scholars,” Garrod said. He was pulling tablet after tablet away from the plastered walls, working now with a fierce, unstoppable intensity. “It is nothing less than the truth. And I intend to bring together that which was split apart.”
    Yuvaen shook his head. “You’re right not to fear your ancestors. It’s the gods themselves that you should fear.”
    Garrod fished in his pocket and pulled out an incendiary, of the kind used by workers in the metal and construction trades. He pulled the igniter and tossed the incendiary down onto the tangle of broken wood on the gravel drive. A brilliant white light blossomed up, mixed shortly after with red as the wood caught fire. The western windows glowed with the color.
    Garrod heaved another wooden tablet out of the broken window and into the flames. “I don’t have time to fear the gods, Yuva—you’ll have to do it for me. Come, help me clean out this space, for here will be our workroom.”
    “May the gods forgive me, then,” Yuvaen said. “Because I’m with you.”
    The two men embraced, then fell to stripping the walls of their memorials, and clearing the floor of its altars.

2:
     
    Year 1116 E. R.
     

    ERAASI: WESTERN FISHING GROUNDS
SYN-GREVI ESTATE, NORTHERN TERRITORIES
ILDAON: ILDAON STARPORT
     

    T he deep-water fleets from Amisket, Demnag, and Ridkil Point had been having a bad summer. Like most of the coastal settlements in the Veredden Archipelago, the three towns depended for a livelihood on their commercial fisheries, and a poor haul meant a lean year to come. In autumn, the fish migrated to spawning grounds near the equator—too great a distance for the Veredden ships to follow, even if biological changes during the spawn didn’t turn the fish sour and spongy—and winter in the northern latitudes was too stormy for surface craft to ply the waters at all. Winter was for spending the long nights snug in harbor, making repairs and hoping that the money from last summer’s catch would last until spring.
    As First of the Amisket Circle, Narin Iyal took the season’s lack of good fishing harder than most, and most were taking it hard. It was her Circle’s place to provide fish-luck and weather-luck, and to tell the captains of the fleet where the silver was running. But all she could tell the captains now was that the fish had abandoned their usual grounds, and she had no idea where they might be.
    The nets of the deep-sea trawler Dance-and-be-Joyful trailed astern, and the