Firstworld Read online

  PAUL E. HORSMAN

  FIRSTWORLD

  BOOK 1

  BROOMRIDERS IN SPACE

  © 2018 - Paul E. Horsman

  Red Rune Books, Netherlands

  All rights reserved.

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, peoples, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, peoples, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Book cover designed by Deranged Doctor Design

  For more info: paulhorsman-author.com

  There is a list of names at the back of the book.

  Paul E. Horsman’s books:

  Zilverspoor Uitgeverij (Dutch Editions):

  Rhidauna—Schaduw van de Revenaunt #1

  Zihaen—Schaduw van de Revenaunt #2

  Ordelanden—Schaduw van de Revenaunt #3

  Red Rune Books (Dutch Edition)

  De Shardheld Sage

  Red Rune Books (English Editions):

  The Lioness and the Warlock (Prequel to Wyrms of Pasandir)

  The Road to Kalbakar—Wyrms of Pasandir #1

  The Pirates of Brisa—Wyrms of Pasandir #2

  The Bokkaners of the North—Wyrms of Pasandir #3

  Building a Trade Empire—Wyrms of Pasandir #4

  High Merchant—Wyrms of Pasandir #5

  Trade Magnate—Wyrms of Pasandir #6

  Jinnbane (2018)—Wyrms of Pasandir #7

  Firstworld—Broomriders in Space #1

  Shardfall—The Shardheld Saga #1

  Runemaster—The Shardheld Saga #2

  Shardheld—The Shardheld Saga #3

  The Shardheld Saga, trilogy

  Rhidauna—The Shadow of the Revenaunt #1

  Zihaen—The Shadow of the Revenaunt #2

  Ordelanden—The Shadow of the Revenaunt #3

  Vavaun—The Shadows of the Revenaunt #4

  THE NATIONS

  The Nithalai and Lesser Worlds

  Moi (the first tribe of the Nithalai), gray-skinned, small, identical to the Aari tribes of Firstworld. They are hunters turned farmers and fishers, and the most magical and technologically advanced of them join the Realm of the Moi.

  Cra (the second tribe of the Nithalai), blue-skinned as the Saeill of Firstworld. They, too, are farmers and fishers; a very reactionary people with a distrust of space and the Realm.

  Rhu (the third tribe of the Nithalai), green-skinned as the Qoori of Firstworld. A nation of nomad trading houses, traveling space along fixed routes, trading with the Lesser Worlds.

  Dreghs, a race of pseudo-civilized rats. They murdered the Cuerie, the advanced people who created them, and became robbers and enemies of the Realm.

  Tarrik, a Lesser World, agricultural, with low technology (muskets), furred human people

  Kau’s World, a Lesser World, island waterworld, and bluish-green-skinned hunter-gatherer human people

  Firstworld

  Unwaari (the first tribe of the Aari): Former theocracy; when their goddess destroyed their temple order, the survivors became as the Vanhaari.

  Vanhaari (the second tribe of the Aari): The magician people of Vanhaar, warlocks and mages. They are of small stature and a slate-gray complexion.

  Mathaari (the third tribe of the Aari): The people of the Pasandir Peaks, distinguishable through a faint reddish sheen to their gray complexions. Followers of Bodrus the Father of Gods.

  Qoori: The people of the far northern empire of Qoor; distantly related to the three tribes, but of greenish complexions. The Sashuni are a subsidiary kingdom of some independence.

  Saeill: a militant island kingdom far to the west of the other lands. They are like the Qoori and the three tribes, but of bluish complexions.

  Kells: The tall, bronze-brown people of the Radhaijan Plains in Kell; famed for the fighting prowess of their warriors and the quality of their ordnance.

  Chorwaynies: The coppery-brown coastal people of the Chorwaynie Archipelago. A nation of sharp merchants and sea traders.

  Hizmyrani: The olive brown people of the kingdom of Hizmyr. A rich nation to the north of Nanstalgarod.

  Nanstalgarodians: The tan, bearded people of Nanstalgarod of the desert lands.

  Thali: The dark-brown people of the frozen south; inventors and technicians, who develop wonders like steam engines, airships and other contraptions.

  Garthans (the High Kingdom of Malgarth): A rural people of pale complexions.

  Takkalans: brother people to the Garthans; former jinn slaves; now a kingdom north of Hizmyr.

  For a map of the Realm, visit my website:

  https://www.paulhorsman-author.com/firstworld-starmap.html

  INTRODUCTION

  The saga starts with Lioness of Kell, when the young Lioness Maud, Jurgis the thief of Brisa, the warlock Basil and his lover Yarwan get embroiled in a search for the spellbook of the long vanished Kelwarg the Arrangh Warlock, and end up liberating their homelands from a century-old war.

  Twenty-five years later, in the Wyrms of Pasandir-series, the young one-handed ship’s boy Eskandar discovers his magic powers when horrendous sea monsters attack his ship. Before he knows it, he is up to his neck in a battle against pirates, a lich king and a horde of immensely powerful, man-eating jinn.

  Luckily he gets help from the broomrider Kellani (daughter of Maud and Jurgis), from the mage Naudin (son of Basil and Jurgis with the witch Siolde), and from the mercantile genius of the girl Shaw, who builds him a trade empire while he fights his enemies.

  Now in Broomriders of Space, we are another twenty-five years on, and it is the turn of the twins Kambisha and Kyrus (Eskandar and Kellani’s children) and Odysson (Shaw’s youngest son). Their adventure could well be the biggest of all...

  CHAPTER 1 – THE LOCKED TOWER

  ‘Kalbakaaar!’ Kyrus shouted his battlecry as he rode his broomstick down to the foot of the ancient tower and landed in a whirl of snow. His dark face was flushed with cold and his eyes shone.

  Kambisha grinned at her brother’s exuberance, joining him in a less spectacular fashion. Funny how the same and yet how different they were. Twins, both seventeen, with the brown complexion and the immense strength of their mother’s Kell forebears and the barely six feet height of their father’s Mathaari kin. She prided herself on being calm and serious, a responsible engineer and mathemagician, while Kyrus... Her brother was none of that—kind and bighearted, but lazy and, well, sloppy. And terribly boisterous, and... She sighed.

  ‘Why the yelling?’ She stepped aside to make room for Odysson, who came in behind her. ‘There are no deadly enemies here.’

  Kyrus dismissed his broom. ‘That’s what you say. Nobody knows what’s in that tower.’

  ‘If there is anybody inside, they’ve been asleep for a thousand years or more.’ Kambisha gazed up at the colossal edifice before them. Such a strange building.

  ‘It looks just like all those other towers in the Peaks and Vanhaar,’ her brother said, dismissing the mystery.

  She cast him a quizzing glance. ‘Looks the same, but feels totally different.’

  ‘Hm.’ Ky
rus put his hands to his back and stared at the tower. ‘I don’t feel a thing.’

  Kambisha smiled. ‘You wouldn’t; you are not exactly sensitive, twin.’

  ‘No,’ Kyrus said complacently. ‘That’s why I am a battlemage and not a multispatial mathemagician like my clever engineer sister.’

  Kambisha snorted. ‘You’re just lazy.’

  Something moved in the bottom corner of an eye and she looked into the miles-deep abyss just a few feet away. Then she grinned; it was only an eagle, drifting on silent wings as it hunted mountain hares.

  ‘That bird and us broomriders are the only ones who can reach this tower,’ Kyrus said. ‘They must’ve had a ball, building it in this spot.’

  ‘Kam is right,’ Odysson said. ‘There is great magic here. I feel it in my thumbs.’ He was a gray-skinned Vanhaari and a year the twins’ senior. When he had finished his mage study, everybody expected him to join his mother’s worldwide Pasandir Trading Co. and get rich fast. To the surprise of many, he refused, and set up as a freelance collector of arcane artifacts.

  He wriggled his fingers at the others and walked to the tower door. ‘Closed.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Kambisha said. ‘Your thumbs just discovered why they call this the Locked Tower.’

  Odysson didn’t answer. He stood looking at the door, his whole body rigid.

  Kambisha frowned. ‘Ody?’ When he still didn’t answer, she gripped his shoulders and pulled him away.

  Immediately he relaxed, rubbing his hand. ‘That lock, it’s creepy. It called to me and I had to try to open it. But I couldn’t, of course. I wouldn’t know where to start. So I froze, unable to answer or step aside.’

  Kambisha stared at the door. ‘Our elders had a reason to declare this tower prohibited. Still...’

  ‘That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’ her brother said. ‘The famous unopenable Lock of Tutor’s Bane or whatever you call it. Go ahead; try it. I’ll be right behind you.’

  What do you know; Tutor’s Bane! she thought. Although the lock had stumped Tutor Ulaataq. When I asked him why, he almost told me to try for myself. Let’s see about unopenable!

  Kambisha knelt in the snow and took off her gloves. Her fingers were long, slender and strong. She flexed them a few times and put the tips to the door. It didn’t even look like an ordinary lock. There wasn’t a keyhole; it was simply a circle of ten indentations, spaced so that her fingers could just reach them.

  With her hands in place, Kambisha let her mind flow into the lock. She felt its call, a wordless Open Me that would trap the unwary as it had Odysson. But not her! This device was something she’d been taught to deal with, designed for minds that could manipulate the many dimensions of the Intermedium.

  Carefully, she let her thoughts enter the mechanism, past the invisible border that divided her cosmos from the mother universe that was all around them. The Intermedium was a terrible place without temperature or time; airless, but filled with the raw form of the mana gods and mages used for creation.

  She followed the lock’s treacherous twists that could easily get one lost, and in spite of her self-assurance, she was glad that her brother and Odysson kept watch, ready to pull her away.

  But that would mean failure! This impossible lock was the ultimate test of her abilities. She gritted her teeth. Concentrate, gal... There! A temporal twist! The whole lock shifted imperceptibly, and she went with it, experiencing the eerie feeling of a time discrepancy—a thousand-year gap between the lock’s reality and her own. She felt a burst of joy as she bridged the gap. She could do it! No one else could; not her father or even Ulaataq understood more than a smattering of what she did, manipulating the dimensions to get at the solution of the tower’s lock.

  She worked faster now, running mental fingers through halls of immense thinness, vistas she could sense but not see, through rooms larger than the universe, but the size of an apple, until suddenly...

  The weight of a thousand universes lifted from her shoulders. Solar winds buffeted her, galaxies cartwheeled and novas trumpeted in her ears.

  ‘Ah, you did it,’ Odysson said in an awed voice. ‘I may be pickled if I know what you did, but the lock is gone.’

  Kambisha sighed, rubbed her fingers in the snow and refocusing her eyes.

  ‘Shoo whiz,’ she said faintly. Ody was right, she didn’t sense the lock anymore. ‘I can’t explain how I did it. Nor do I know how to replace it. We will have to use a common mage seal when we leave here.’

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ Kyrus said impatiently. ‘I wanna know what’s it the tower its builders guarded so jealously.’

  ‘Careful!’ Kambisha said automatically, but her brother threw open the door and strode past her into the hall.

  Quickly she followed him. Past the circle of daylight falling through the open door, it was dark. Really, really dark.

  She lifted a hand. ‘I’ll call a light...’ Immediately, several lamps went on along the walls.

  ‘Voice command.’ Kyrus glanced round. ‘We have had that technique twenty years. Surely this place is older?’

  ‘That lock was placed there a thousand years ago,’ Kambisha said. ‘I had to connect it to the here and now. Whatever we find here is at least of the same age.’

  Odysson’s face had taken on an almost holy expression as he looked around at the large stone room, the still sturdy wooden furniture, and the strange apparatuses. ‘A thousand years! This will shut up Ilyan for ever and ever!’

  ‘Why?’ Kambisha didn’t know Ody’s older brother very well; only that he took his position as heir to the enormous PTC business very serious.

  ‘The idiot always makes fun of me, because I’m “only a would-be reclaimer” instead of joining him and the parents in their precious Pasandir Trading Co. Bother the mundane! I want the unique artifacts; the rare and different. This place looks very promising.’ Odysson took a deep breath. ‘I would join the Reclaimed Service if Old Saul’s people were more curious and less glorified gold-diggers.’

  Kambisha nodded. The reclaimers collected magic artifacts from the lost ruins of Nanstalgarod, more to keep them out of the hands of the Wastrel looters that for the knowledge they contained.

  ‘Up here,’ Kyrus shouted from a floor above them. ‘It looks like some sort of teleportal.’

  With Odysson on her heels, Kambisha ran up the stairs to the gallery between the two floors. ‘Don’t touch anything!’

  ‘Course not.’ Her brother studied the contraption in the alcove from a safe distance. ‘Ain’t got your brains, but ah’m not daft, gal.’

  ‘Don’t go peakvalley bumpkin on me,’ Kambisha snapped. ‘You’re clever enough, lazybones.’

  Her brother grinned, but she had already forgotten her irritation.

  ‘Holy Spirit of the Mountains! It is a portal.’

  The apparatus looked much like a smaller version of an antiquated Casterglade teleportal rather than their own modern ones. About one and a half times her height, with a frame of coils and twisting wires, it emitted a faint noise like the whispering of millions of voices.

  ‘Where would it lead to?’ Odysson said.

  She didn’t try to answer the unanswerable and inspected at the portal.

  ‘I wonder if it is active,’ Kyrus said. ‘If it has its own power source...’

  Kambisha looked up. ‘It’s active! I hear it.’ Then she saw him stretch out a hand. Both she and Ody tried to pull him back. ‘Caref...!’

  Dark. Cold. Airless.

  Bump.

  ‘You were right; it was active.’ Kyrus said sheepishly. ‘Rather fine-tuned, too.’ He came to his feet. ‘Where are we?’

  Kambisha didn’t say anything as she studied their surroundings. She sat on the tiled floor of an immense empty hall. The walls were of large yellowstone blocks carved with empty-eyed human masks that could have been Vanhaari.

  Then she noticed the humid heat and the smells of a forest. From somewhere came the complaining call of a bird.

&n
bsp; ‘I’d say we’re in the Greenwall Jungle,’ Odysson said. ‘This place looks like a temple Mother’s explorers found.’

  ‘No doors,’ Kambisha said. ‘No portal either, so that thing in the tower was a one-way transferal.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘There’s only those stairs going up. Guess where we’re going.’

  Odysson glanced around quickly. ‘No exit?’

  ‘Don’t worry; I can still port us home.’ Kambisha strode to the stairs. ‘What did Aunt Shaw’s explorers have to say about that temple?’

  Odysson’s eyes narrowed pensively. ‘I didn’t see the reports, so what I know is sketchy. It was a big building on a river; easily three hundred feet high, with a base four times as wide as the top. There were wall carvings like these, all unbelievably well-preserved and everything was empty as a poor man’s purse.’

  ‘That sounds like this place,’ Kyrus said.

  They reached the top of the stairs and found themselves on a platform covered by a pillared roof and open to the world. Below them was a tropical forest as far as the eye reached.

  ‘No river,’ Kyrus said. ‘So it can’t be the same temple.’

  His sister nodded absently. Something at the center of the platform had caught her eye. A mass of shiny dots shaped like a sort of wheel, and every dot spinning round its axis. As she touched it with her mind, it gave an impression of vastness and swirling energies.

  ‘That is fascinating,’ she said.

  Kyrus turned around. ‘What is it?’

  His sister looked at him. ‘It must be what Mage Rowert the Stargazer is building at Kalbakar. A star map.’

  Kyrus blinked at the moving wheel of dots. ‘Yeah... Poor fellow’ll go out of his mind when he sees this. It doesn’t even look the same.’ He pulled his lower lip. ‘Are there really that many stars?’