Read Online The First Stone by Mark Anthony - Free Book Online

strength.”
    “That would be maximum,” she said, returning his grin. However, her smile vanished as she caught Travis’s troubled gray eyes. He moved forward and laid a hand on her shoulder.
    “Thank you for coming.”
    “I’ll always come when you call, no matter how long it’s been or how far away you are. But what’s going on? And why couldn’t you tell me over the phone?”
    He stepped aside. The first thing she noticed was the broadsword hanging above the sofa; that had to be Beltan’s. Then her gaze moved down, and she saw the woman sitting there. The woman stood, stretching limbs clad in supple black leather.
    “Oh,” Deirdre said, and would have fallen to the floor if not for Beltan’s strong hands.
    They set her on the sofa, propped her up with a pillow, and pressed a glass of porter into her hand. A few sips of beer revived her enough that she was able to tell them she was fine, though she wasn’t certain that was really the case.
    For the last three years, Deirdre had done her best not to think about them. The Seekers had officially closed the Wilder-Beckett case. The gate to the world AU-3—to Eldh—had been destroyed, and Duratek Corporation had been destroyed as well. The company had been dismantled by the governments of Earth; its executives were in jail or, in many cases, dead. There would be other investigations, maybe even other worlds. But the door to this one had been shut. It was over.
    At least, that was what she had told herself. But deep within, Deirdre had known it wasn’t over, not truly. They had all of them been waiting, that was all. Waiting for a day when two worlds would draw closer. Waiting for a time they would be called again.
    “All right,” Deirdre said, setting the empty glass on the coffee table. “Who’s going to tell me why I’m here?”
    Vani and Beltan both cast glances at Travis. He sat down on the sofa next to her and took her hand in his.
    “I supposed I always let myself believe it was just a story, that there was nothing behind it.” His gray eyes were solemn. “I thought it would never come. Only now it finally has.”
    Deirdre shook her head. “I don’t understand. What’s come?”
    “Fate,” Travis said.
    Before Deirdre could ask what he was talking about, Vani spoke, and for the next several minutes Deirdre listened as the
T’gol
explained how and why she had come to Earth, and of her last three years fleeing from the Scirathi. Vani’s words were terrible and fascinating, but Deirdre found it hard to focus on them. A droning noise filled her skull; there was something she needed to tell them, but what was it?
    She stared at the
T’gol
. Vani’s face was sharper than before, but still lovely, even delicate. Tattoos like vines accentuated the exquisite lines of her neck; thirteen gold rings glittered in her left ear. However, Deirdre knew it would be a mistake to let that beauty lull her. Vani was an assassin, trained since girlhood in the arts of stealth, infiltration, and killing in swift silence.
    There was much Vani alluded to that Deirdre already knew, things she had learned when she first met the
T’gol
and which Deirdre had included in her reports to the Seekers: how Vani’s people believed Travis Wilder was the one destined to raise Morindu the Dark from the sands that had swallowed it long ago, and how the gold-masked sorcerers, the Scirathi, hoped to reach it first, to steal the magics entombed within for their own purposes.
    “Only what exactly is buried in Morindu?” Deirdre said as she rubbed her temples, voicing her thought without meaning to.
    “Good question,” Beltan rumbled. The big man sat on the floor, making steady progress through an enormous bowl of popcorn.
    “My people cannot say for certain,” the
T’gol
said, prowling back and forth before the curtained window. “No records survive from the last days of the War of the Sorcerers. We have only what our storytellers have passed down. Nor were any of the