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  “So we said good-bye and off to Crydee we went. This you know.

  “You also know about as much as I do about when the trouble came, as I was already gone from Crydee carrying cargo north. A murderous dog named Render and his crew raided Crydee, and bloody work that was. Render was as evil a bastard as I’ve ever known, Pug, and I’ve known more than my share.

  “There’s all that business going back to the Great Uprising, with the Pantathians, and somehow it’s all linked. I know when to ask and when not to. Anyway, where was I?

  “While Render was hitting Crydee, another band of murderers attacked the new outpost at Barran, and only because my crew was there and the Eagle was heavily armed did we manage to come out of that fight in good order.

  “When I returned, I found Duchess Briana was dead, Duke Martin broken up and in bed unable to do much but sleep and heal, and his daughter and her best friend abducted by Render along with all the other prisoners from the Far Coast.

  “We gathered our wits, and you came and healed Nicky’s foot so he could follow after his cousin and her friends. Nicky pulled rank on everyone, and rather than run home to Krondor, he set out to make things right. That’s when I knew despite everything else, Nicky was Arutha’s son. And when you used magic to finally fix that foot of his, that’s when I began to believe the boy might actually come into his own, and we might recover the abducted children.

  “By then Calis had arrived from Elvandar, but instead of heading back to the elven forest, he enlisted on his first voyage to Novindus. Hard to imagine how intimate he’d get with that place in years to come.

  “We disguised The Royal Eagle as a scruffy-looking pirate ship, renamed her The Raptor, and set out after Render, heading to the Sunset Islands. We didn’t know what to expect, as nothing I knew of the islands could support a raid of this size.

  “We reached Freeport, where I met an old friend, Patrick, now sheriff of Freeport, and he showed me how much had changed. Once a collection of hovels and shacks, Freeport had become a prosperous little town, with proper homes and businesses, almost legitimate since last I visited.

  “It was there we found Render, now one of the seven “governors” of the island. I knew all of them, but only one from my youth, William Swallow.

  “We figured out Render was working for someone else. It took a bit of trickery, but we got the other captains to understand what a dog Render was, and we negotiated a deal. Rather, Nicky did, clever lad he was, in exchange for our freedom to pursue the captives.

  “Render called out Nicholas and Nicky killed him in a duel, then we found everyone associated with the raid started dying in a hurry. So Render’s masters betrayed him and everyone else to cover their tracks.

  “We discovered the captives had been put aboard a massive black ship bound for the Southwest. I’d seen some maps that Arutha had—I think a few he got from you—so I knew there were lands down across the sea, but no captain I’d ever met could claim to have sailed there. But we set out, taking with us that little girl, Brisa, the source of our information on the black ship, the one that Harry ended up married to.

  “So we sailed down to Novindus, and finally found that damn black ship. For three days we chased her. Those clever bastards led us into a channel and knew the way and we didn’t. They had some magic user aboard who rolled up a storm and drove us into the rocks.

  A COPY OF A GOVERNMENTAL MAP commissioned by Baron Harry, the King’s Governor in the Sunset Isles, given to me by Prince Nicholas.

  “So only thirty-four of us got to shore, below the massive escarpment. Calis was a wonder and managed to climb to the top with ropes, and after a great deal of effort we got everyone to the top of that plateau.

  “It was arid but Calis led us to the river. Along the way we encountered what was left of a raided caravan and a sole surviving driver who led us to Shingazi’s Landing, something of neutral territory on the Serpent River, a big trading post.

  “We learned a bit about the place there, this Novindus, about city-states and warring clans and things that you’d best ask Calis about—he went down there again.

  “Anyway, we got down to the City of the Serpent River and found the girls. There was this Overlord, his magic user Dahakon, who according to Nakor wasn’t really alive, and there was this woman, Lady Clovis, who Nakor said was the one really running everything, including the raid on Crydee. Turns out Nakor was once married to her, but in a different body, if I have that right. She was working for the Pantathians.

  “I’m getting tired, Pug. I’m old and need to put paid to this tale. We located the girls, saved them, and found the reason for the raid. The Pantathians made simulacrums of those they kidnapped. If the two real girls hadn’t been standing on the deck next to me, I would have sworn the two we had locked up in the hole were the real thing. I don’t know magic, but I know evil, and this was as evil as it could be. These were Pantathians, young ones, changed by dark arts to look exactly like the youngsters who were abducted, sound like them, be them in every way. They would have come back to the Kingdom. And they would have brought as evil a plague as you could imagine. They would have certainly arranged to have Nicky infected before he returned to Krondor. This plague could have destroyed the entire Western Realm. We hoisted them all in a cargo net and dropped them into the middle of the sea. It was no easy thing to watch, as they looked human.”

  Amos Trask Sails the Raptor into Freeport

  Amos finished with a few personal remarks and bid me good night. The old admiral, onetime Dagger of the Sea, died within a few years after this interview, and while Nicholas turned into a great admiral of the King’s Navy in his own right, there was only one Amos Trask.

  Entry, the Thirteenth

  MANY YEARS HAVE PASSED AND MUCH HAS TRANSPIRED since my last entry, more than I can recount briefly, so I may undertake another narrative someday to address everything that has occurred. The short of it is, the Academy has become all I feared it would, another iteration of the Assembly of Magicians, with its politics and secret orders. Only Nakor’s influence, creating the Blue Riders, has mitigated it.

  So I devoted myself to creating a small, more selective school at the villa. I made public my intention to never again visit Stardock, but I kept my quarters intact, so I could find refuge when I needed it and be left untroubled.

  All the subterfuge was to protect family and friends from the Pantathians. I could care for myself, but if they didn’t know where I was, they couldn’t extort me by threatening others. There is a little known period between Nicholas’s first voyage to Novindus and my next narrative that needs to be explained. As I write this, King Lyam is dead and Borric now rules, and his son Patrick, a lad in his teens, is Prince in Krondor since Arutha’s death, with Erland as regent.

  I have finally come to realize there were larger forces behind the Pantathians. I and others had been routinely dealing with demons over the years, and the link between demons and Pantathians was now clearly established, but toward what end was not clear. More, whatever agencies stood behind that alliance were also unclear.

  I believed the Enemy, as the combined life force of the Dragon Lords was called, to be firmly confined within the Lifestone, so while the Pantathians might still be blindly working to recall their lost mistress, the Valheru Alma-Lodaka, I was certain there was far more to this than they knew. There must be other agencies hidden behind the visible actors.

  A MAP OF NOVINDUS recovered from the Hall of the Clan Lords in the City of the Serpent River.

  This was a time when several groups were working ignorant of each other, even at cross-purposes at times. I was conducting my own investigations, Miranda had begun to take a hand in Novindus, and then there was Calis.

  Calis is unique, the product of an elf mother and a human father changed by Valheru magic. His birth should have been impossible, yet there he was. Calis realized on his journey with Nicholas how little he had understood his human heritage growing up in Elvandar. He also felt committed to opp
ose the evil he had encountered in Novindus.

  Arutha gave Calis a commission as captain in the army, and he formed a special company, the Crimson Eagles, a small band of volunteers. First among them was Robert de Loungville, known as Bobby, who quickly rose to be Calis’s second in command, gaining the rank of sergeant.

  By the time we come to the story of the invasion of the Bitter Sea by the armies of the Emerald Queen, Calis had been operating down in Novindus for years.

  I had laid false trails and traps for anyone pursuing me, which in hindsight may not have been my wisest choice, as I was late in discovering what Calis and Miranda already knew about the situation in Novindus.

  It was the journey before the one in which I became involved I should note. I was still in hiding, Calis and Miranda had not yet met, and the situation back in the Kingdom was unstable. King Borric had one son, Patrick, a headstrong teenage boy. Prince Arutha was elderly at the time of Calis and Nicholas’s last voyage together.

  Before Arutha’s death, Nicholas again commanded one of the redressed Kingdom ships, the Freeport Ranger, and set off for Novindus. He and Calis had been slowly exploring this continent, exploring it and learning its politics.

  On the voyage previous to the one I’m about to discuss, much of the events, such as Nicholas’s sea battle with two ships of the fleet belonging to the Emerald Queen, a running battle down the Vedra River, and the loss of nearly four hundred men under Calis’s command—all these events and more were never chronicled as I understand it. I can only speculate that a tragic sense of failure accompanied this expedition, leaving Calis, and Nicholas, both eager to put things behind.

  Just prior to Arutha’s death, Calis began to reorganize his command. Understanding just how dire a situation he faced in Novindus, he decided on a different course of action.

  Duke James had retired as Duke of Rillanon, King Borric’s first adviser, and had returned to Krondor, to take the reins under Arutha during the Prince’s last days. James’s two daughters were married off and his son, named Arutha after the Prince, had just himself been named Court Baron to the King. James’s first grandsons, the twins James and Dashel, were on their way to young manhood—taking after their famous grandfather more than even James liked to admit.

  With so much in flux in the Kingdom, and my choice to be absent from public scrutiny, it’s no wonder Calis felt isolated from support until he at last got the opportunity to sit down with Duke James and discuss what he had encountered in Novindus.

  A decade before, a woman calling herself the Emerald Queen had appeared with a small force of hired mercenaries in the Westlands of Novindus beginning a methodical conquest. No nations exist on that continent, so organized resistance to her came late and was ineffectual.

  She started by sacking a dozen small towns and ports near the city of Point Punt, below the western foothills of the Ratn’gary Mountains. Her tactics were simple but effective. Once a town was taken, survivors were given the choice: serve or die. Men of fighting age were given weapons even if they had not been soldiers before, and the women and children were left to fend for themselves. Some stayed behind to farm or fish as best they could; others became camp followers to stay with their husbands.

  I’ve inserted a much later map detailing the line of march and conquests by the Emerald Queen as she subdued all of Novindus. —Magnus of Sorcerer’s Isle

  By the time Calis became aware of her activities, the Emerald Queen had already solidified her hold on the Westlands up to the foothills of the Sothu Mountains and was working her way down through the Riverlands, having conquered the largest city in the north, Hamsa. That war had lasted five years, as the King of Hamsa imported mercenaries from as far away as the City of the Serpent River, but at last, the single biggest obstacle to the Emerald Queen’s onslaught fell. Almost a dozen years after beginning her campaign, she had conquered more land than anyone in the history of Novindus. Her army got larger with every conquest, and the rate of her advance was accelerating.

  She was moving against the city of Kilbar, when Calis had brought up his Crimson Eagles in a combined force under a man named Haji; they were almost overwhelmed on three occasions and endured over two hundred and fifty days of siege in the city.

  This was Calis’s first occasion of dealing with magic being openly used in warfare, and only because the King of Hamsa had competent magicians did the conflict endure as long as it did. It is also where Calis met Miranda, who was helping to thwart the Emerald Queen’s magic.

  When the city surrendered, those mercenaries who were not native to Hamsa were allowed one day’s head start to flee. Calis, Bobby de Loungville, and what was left of the Crimson Eagles departed. Rather than escape down the river and be overtaken, Calis fled to the east, striking for the Great Steppes and allies who protected their retreat. Of over five hundred soldiers, Calis returned with sixty.

  He returned to Krondor while Miranda kept track of the Emerald Queen.

  Calis and James decided the next voyage for information would be completed by a small company of what came to be known as “desperate men,” who had nothing to lose.

  Entry, the Fourteenth

  IT HAS TAKEN ME LONGER TO RETURN to this narrative than I had planned, but life has a habit of providing you what it will, no matter what you had planned, I have come to learn. The war has come to the Kingdom from Novindus, and I have played my part, and much is left unfinished.

  Still, as all of what I write about is in the past, it is of no interest to you, the reader, if I recount events from days ago or decades. Where I stopped before was in the matter of Calis’s decision to return to Novindus, leading a group of men who had nothing to lose.

  Then Arutha died.

  There were few alive who remember Krondor before he took the throne. For more than forty years he ruled the Western Realm with efficiency, justice, mercy, and a concern for the complete well-being of all the King’s subjects, not just the privileged few. His understanding of the Great Freedom, the foundation of every law in the Kingdom, was that every citizen of the nation, no matter how low a station in life, has rights guaranteed by law, not the whim of a ruler.

  Two of the important players in the events to come, barely more than boys at the time but destined to become men of importance, arrived in Krondor at the time of Arutha’s funeral.

  They were named Erik von Darkmoor and Rupert Avery, known as Roo to everyone. Two young men from the town of Ravensburg, north of the city of Darkmoor, Erik had apprenticed to a drunken smith who had never registered him with the guild and Roo was a street boy halfway to being a full-time thief and confidence trickster. I will comment on their home later, for their vital role in the future of the Kingdom began when they arrived in Krondor.

  Erik was the bastard son of Baron Otto von Darkmoor and had killed his half brother Stephan in a moment of anger, and now he and his childhood friend Roo were fugitives.

  They fled Darkmoor, thinking to find their way to Krondor and take ship to a foreign port, thereby escaping justice for their crime; it had been a provoked fight, but Erik had killed a noble son, and Roo had been an accomplice, so their choice was understandable, if not the choice of innocent men.

  It was years later I discovered Miranda had taken a hand with these two, sheltering them from those in pursuit, disguising herself as an old crone named Meg. She never outright has told me, but I suspect it was a message from the Oracle of Aal that led her to the boys.

  Indeed, as my father suspected, such was the case. As I now know, the Oracle was a key figure, far more important than we knew, my parents and I suspected, who was the true conduit for controlling most of us opposing forces of Darkness.

  Much of what I relate here came to me from a variety of sources. I had introduced King Lyam to the Oracle, and every royal knew of her existence, so immediately after Arutha’s death, a message reached Prince Nicholas in Krondor as he waited for his brother, King Borric, to arrive for their father’s funeral. The message contained two warnings:
first, that forces were moving that would eventually bring harm to the Kingdom; and, second, that the Oracle was entering a period of dormancy.

  Nicholas assumed the office of Prince of Krondor while waiting for Prince Patrick to arrive with his father for Arutha’s funeral. Once Patrick was of age, Nicholas would happily return to his post as admiral of the King’s Fleet in the Bitter Sea and Sunset Isles as Patrick assumed the office of Prince of Krondor with his uncle, Prince Erland, staying on as his chief adviser.

  The function of Calis’s group was to travel to Novindus, under false colors as a mercenary band, to put in at the City of the Serpent River, where Calis had already established alliances with the various clans who ruled the city, then strike out to measure the advances of the Emerald Queen. What few in the Kingdom knew was that once this woman secured control of Novindus, it was a near certainty she would turn her attention to the two nations of Triagia, the Kingdom of the Isles and the Empire of Great Kesh.

  From a casual appraisal of the situation, attacking the Empire’s west coast seemed a more logical choice, for the Empire had fewer cities spread out over wider areas, with no easy way to mobilize forces to answer any assault. But because the royal family of the Kingdom knew of the existence of the Lifestone, they were certain that any assault in Triagia against the Kingdom meant the ultimate goal was Sethanon.

  Twice now there had been assaults directed at Sethanon: the Great Uprising, and an abortive sortie by the Dark Brotherhood spurred on by the rumor that Murmandamus was alive and being held prisoner there. Lord James, when he was still serving in Arutha’s court, Squire Locklear, and a young magician named Owen Belforte had helped the Kingdom defend the Lifestone a second time.

  So why not a third attempt?