Elenium The Diamond Throne the Ruby Knight the Sapphire Rose

CHAPTER ONE It was raining. A soft, silvery drizzle sifted down out of the night sky and wreathed around the blocky watchtowers of the city of Cimmura, hissing in the torches on each side of the broad gate and making the stones of the road leading up to the city shiny and black. A lone rider approached the city. He was wrapped in a dark, heavy traveller's cloak and rode a tall, shaggy roan horse with a long nose and flat, vicious eyes. The traveller was a big man, a bigness of large, heavy bone and ropy tendon rather than of flesh. His hair was coarse and black, and at some time his nose had been broken. He rode easily, but with the peculiar alertness of the trained warrior. His name was Sparhawk, a man at least ten years older than he looked, who carried the erosion of his years not so much on his battered face as in a half-dozen or so minor infirmities and discomforts and in the several wide purple scars upon his body which always ached in damp weather. Tonight, however, he felt his age and he wished only for a warm bed in the obscure inn which was his goal. Sparhawk was coming home at last after a decade of being someone else with a different name in a country where it almost never rainedwhere the sun was a hammer pounding down on a bleached white anvil of sand and rock and hard-baked clay, where the walls of the buildings were thick and white to ward off the blows of the sun, and where graceful women went to the wells in the silvery light of early morning with large clay vessels balanced on their shoulders and black veils across their faces. The big roan horse shuddered absently, shaking the rain out of his shaggy coat, and approached the city gate, stopping in the ruddy circle of torchlight before the gatehouse. An unshaven gate guard in a rust-splotched breastplate and helmet, and with a patched green cloak negligently hanging from one shoulder, came unsteadily out of the gatehouse and stood swaying in Sparhawk's path. "I'll need your name," he said in a voice thick with drink. Sparhawk gave him a long stare, then opened his cloak to show the heavy silver amulet hanging on a chain about his neck. The half-drunk gate guard's eyes widened slightly, and he stepped back a pace. "Oh," he said, "sorry, my Lord. Go ahead." Another guard poked his head out of the gatehouse. "Who is he, Raf?" he demanded. "A Pandion Knight," the first guard replied nervously. "What's his business in Cimmura?" "I don't question the Pandions, Bral," the man named Raf answered. He smiled ingratiatingly up at Sparhawk. "New man," he said apologetically, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder at his comrade. "He'll learn in time, my Lord. Can we serve you in any way?" "No," Sparhawk replied, "thanks all the same. You'd better get in out of the rain, neighbor. You'll catch cold out here." He handed a small coin to the green-cloaked guard and rode on into the city, passing up the narrow, cobbled street beyond the gate with the slow clatter of the big roan's steel-shod hooves echoing back from the buildings. The district near the gate was poor, with shabby, run-down houses standing tightly packed beside each other with their second floors projecting out over the wet, littered street. Crude signs swung creaking on rusty hooks in the night wind, identifying this or that tightly shuttered shop on the street-level floors. A wet, miserable-looking cur slunk across the street with his ratlike tail between his legs. Otherwise, the street was dark and empty. A torch burned fitfully at an intersection where another street crossed the one upon whicEddings, David is the author of 'Elenium The Diamond Throne the Ruby Knight the Sapphire Rose', published 2007 under ISBN 9780345500939 and ISBN 0345500938.