But even that could not prepare him for the next sight, and when the bird passed another of the islands, Badden noted a familiar-looking design well under construction. Even here, they had come! Even in this most holy of Samhaist locations, the Abellican heretics had ventured and now seemed as if they meant to stay.
So shocked was Badden that he lost connection to the bird, and he staggered so badly that he nearly toppled from the edge of the glacier.
“This cannot stand,” he muttered over and over again.
His mind was already whirling, calculating, searching for how he might cleanse Mithranidoon of this awful infection. All thoughts of enlisting the barbarians on the lake dissipated from him. They were all unclean. They all had to die.
“This will not stand,” Ancient Badden declared, and in all his many years as leader of the Samhaists he had never once made such a declaration without seeing it to fruition.
PART ONE
IN THE SHADOW OF THE STORKI knew my course. How could I not? I had escaped my infirmities partly through use of the Abellican gemstone known as the hematite or soul stone, but even with that item of focus most of my liberation had come as a result of the training I had received by reading the book penned by my father. The Book of Jhest, the body of knowledge of the Jhesta Tu mystics, an order to which my mother belonged in the southern land known as Behr. If there was more freedom to be found from my affliction, I would find it there.
The road was obvious. All my hopes to free myself from the gemstone and the shadow of the Stork resided in one place to be sure.
That place lay to the south and east, through the port city of Ethelbert dos Entel, around the arm of the mountains and into the desert land of Behr. There I would find the Walk of Clouds and the Jhesta Tu mystics; there I would strengthen my understanding of the ways of Jhest to the point, it was my hope, where I would be free of the Stork.