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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: In a land where night brings terrors of the soul, a desperate rider struggles with her own tormented past and discovers, almost too late, that the price of freedom is love.

eBook Publisher: Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust, Published: Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine #42, 1998
Fictionwise Release Date: April 2010

4 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [17 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [39 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [11 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [179 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [12 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [66 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [83 KB] , hiebook (KML) [61 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [49 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [10 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [12 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [47 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [21 KB]
Words: 3630
Reading time: 10-14 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

I lifted my eyes to the sky, as if I could read some comfort there. A blazing glory had swept out from the east, surging away the last of the hill-cleft darkness. The air shifted, restless. I took a deep breath and let it out, shuddering. In all my years of running, I'd never smelled anything as wild and sweet as the wind from the sea.

Shell's eyes flickered to the hellhound bitch, pacing beside us, panting, unbreathing. Silver was a thing of magic, made to run where no hound or mastiff ever could. The mages at Alt Lumina fashioned them of metal and crushed sea-pearls, the bones of stillborn boy-children and things it was forbidden to speak of. Silver had served Ereth, Shell's teacher before her. The hellhounds ran forever, the light from their eyes a beacon in the night.

Some said the mages labored as penance for a spell gone wrong. Some said that was why the ghost-lights first began to condense in the shadowed cut-up lands along the Altian Coast, to grow and strengthen until we runners drained them off and it was safe for ordinary folk to go out after dark. Some said there was a time when sleep was safe. I knew nothing of these things. The darkness only gave shape to what was already there in men's hearts. This I knew too well.

We clicked the horses into a jog. In the hell-light of the run, everything looked different, but the horses always brought us where we needed to be. We trusted their greed. Ahead meant town, and town meant hay and brushdown and rest.