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blind.
    Then came a second sound, a soft thump, different from the first. It was from the opposite direction. Damn. There were two of them. Their positions were like an army trying to catch the enemy in a pincer movement.
    Where was Daretor?
    She had thought to make a run for the door, but now she changed her mind. The second intruder stood between her and escape.
    Soft footfalls.
    They’re closing in.
    Jelindel felt a moment of lurching fear. She was trapped, at their mercy. They could see and she could not. There was only one way this could end. Unless she could …
    Remove their advantage.
    ‘Now what kind of dream is that?’ complained Cimone, knitting her brow.
    ‘Actually, it wasn’t a dream.’
    Cimone stared at her. ‘You mean there were people trying to kill you?’
    ‘Three of them. Assassins.’
    ‘You said two.’
    ‘There was another outside.’
    ‘What did you do?’
    ‘I slew those inside and wounded the other.’
    Cimone’s eyes went wide. ‘But how, if you couldn’t see nuthin’?’
    ‘I used a blinding spell. It’s a brilliant flash of light.’
    Cimone continued to stare at Jelindel for a moment, then sat back and broke into peals of laughter, slapping her thigh as before.
    ‘Missy, you got guts, that’s all I can say. You’re a mage then? I sensed it but didn’t like to pry. A blinding spell! Well, I never! And them as clumsy and noisy as a herd of oxen afterwards, I’ll wager.’
    ‘They lost their advantage,’ said Jelindel. In the light of day it all sounded simpler than it had been, and less scary. Her sight had not returned till daylight broke the spell and she had sat shivering in the room for hours, emotionally drained, aware of bodies tumbled on the floor about her, and the metallic smell of blood.
    ‘Is there any more you can tell me?’ Jelindel asked.
    ‘The thing you were looking for, that you were scared you’d lost …’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘That’s the thing-hard-to-find. I think it’s in the place of light and darkness.’
    Jelindel looked unhappy. She remembered the awful urgency.
    Cimone patted her hand. ‘The task that’s before you, and the thing-hard-to-find, they’re tied up with one another, that I can tell you.’
    ‘But what is it I’ve lost?’
    Cimone eyed her. ‘Yourself, dearie. It’s your self you’ve lost. Mage at eighteen, whoever heard of that? You’ve growed up too fast.’
    Jelindel left Cimone’s stall in the D’loomian marketplace, her mind in turmoil. She wandered past the spice sellers and the merchants hawking exotic cloths just in from the many ships swaying at anchor not two hundred yards off. It was a bright sunny morning, and she needed the sun’s warmth to disperse memories of fears felt in darkness.
    In the four years since her family had died, she had tried not to think of them, indeed had never wanted to. So much fear and anger was bound into that appalling night, the night she was forced to grow up. It was an anger she could not control, so she shut it out, but nothing could stop the nightmares. She remembered watching the sun set beyond the harbour that evening, but it was not a child who saw it rise the next morning.
    Amid the terrors between dusk and dawn, something had been lost. The road to its retrieval, if Cimone were to be believed, would begin in Sezel.

Chapter 3

    Paraworld Killers

    R umours of death came to Sezel on a late spring day in 2133. By mid-morning of the next day the rumours had grown to encompass daemons, ogres and other such monsters with razor-sharp teeth, lightning speed and ravenous appetites. Two things gave these rumours more credibility than the usual wild imaginings of bored people trying to impress their bored friends, however. One was a consistent reference to the attackers from the sky. The other was the large amount of blood and shredded flesh splattered about at the scene of each attack. Whatever the nature of the attacker, it was a messy eater.
    The help of the young but learned mage