Description: Tides of Darkness ONE T HE HEIR TO THE PRINCEDOM OF HAN-GILEN, HIGH LORD IN THE Hundred Realms, child and grandchild and great-grandchild of mages, noble and royal prince of a line of princes, was drunk. Royally, imperially, divinely drunk. But not, he was happy to observe, therefore incapable of pleasing the three delightful creatures who tumbled squealing with him into a vague blur of bedclothes and curtains. They were not his bedclothes or his curtains. He had better taste. But they were adequate, and the three ladies were considerably more than that. The dark one could sing. The golden one could dance. The sweet brown one had hands of surpassing skill, and lips ... He drifted in a sea of wine. He sang with the dark woman; he watched the golden one dance. The brown woman stroked and teased him, holding him just short of release. He groaned aloud; she laughed.He seized her and tumbled with her in a cloud of scented silk. Oh, this was a very fine brothel indeed. The wine was wearing off. Pleasure, even at the hands of so skilled an artisan, could not last forever. He had the mage''s curse: he could not fall into oblivion after. His mind was bitterly, brilliantly clear; and there was no wine in the jar beside the bed. Not even a drop to lift him out of himself again. But he was no simple man, to be discommoded by a want of wine. He could send one of the women to fetch a new jar, or he could call for a servant. Or he could reach into the heart of him, where the magic was, and open the door that was there, and leap joyously into a world in which wine bubbled in fountains. His three companions shrieked as the Worldgate cast them from lamplight into the full glare of the sun. It was a somewhat softer sun than they could have known before, but bright enough, and warm. The garden about them was full of strange sweet scents. Wine poured into the bowl of a stone fountain, rich red wine of a purer vintage than their own world could offer. The brown woman and the gold were creatures of the moment; they drank till their lips were stained as if with blood. But the dark woman said, "I hear it''s death to open Gates, unless you are a Gate-mage and consecrated in the temple." He laughed. He had not drunk the wine, but he was dizzy with magic and with the sweetness of doing a thing so sternly and strictly forbidden. "No one will know," he said with sublime confidence. "Nobody knows what I can do. I''m the scapegrace, the fool, the pretty boy who knows nothing but the simplest magics. But I have Gates in me. Look, can you see? See them in my eyes." She would not look. She was afraid. She gulped wine, choking on it. He was still laughing, because he would not have any of them think he cared for a whore''s timidity. He whirled on the greensward that was not quite grass, among the flowers that had no kin in the world in which he was born. The Gates inside him spun into a blur of light. The light winked out. He gasped. He was still on the greensward, but within him, in his magic''s eye, he saw another vision altogether. There was a world--he had visited it, maybe, when he wandered alone through the halls of his magic. It had been beautiful, a world of sea and spume and sky. Now it was all ashen. Gaunt black birds flapped over a barren l bones tossed in the dead sea. The stench emptied his stomach; he retched into the grass. None of his companions came to comfort him. They were light women, toys to be used and cast away. They cared nothing for him, only for the gold he brought and the wine he gave them, and maybe a little for such pleasure as their kind could take. There was a sour taste in his mouth and a bitterness in his heart. He gathered the women and flung them back through the Gate--back to the world from which they had come. The fountains bubbled mindlessly into their basins. Somewhere, something trilled, that was perhaps a bird, and perhaps not. Out of sheer contrariness, he turned the largest fountain to ice, and its wine to water. He should not have done that. Opening Gates, that was direly forbidden. Changing the worlds beyond Gates, unless one were a Gate-mage or one consecrated by them, was so deeply banned that he did not even know the penalty for it. Death, he supposed. Or worse, if such a thing could be. Gates never betrayed him. He was part of them. But guardians watching over Gates could find the tracks that he had so unwisely left and follow them to their end. If the guards had been women, he might have charmed them into mercy. These were men, and not young, with a look about them of people who had never in their lives known a moment''s levity. They seized him in a grip that he did not try to break, which was half of magic and half of human strength. They lifted him and carried him through Gates, not swiftly or easily as he could do, but by the long way, through the emptiness between worlds. He made no effort to tell them how theyshould do it. Mages never listened. They knew only what they knew, and that was all there was to know. "Indaros." The voice was much sweeter than its tone. It was a beautiful voice, and its owner more beautiful still, with an extravagance of hot-gold hair imperfectly contained in a fillet, and a face carved in ivory, and wide-set golden eyes. He raised himself in the windowless cell into which his captors had cast him, and stared frankly at her. "You don''t look a day over seventeen," he said. She had twice those years at least, and no more care for his frivolity than the guardians who had brought him here. "Indaros," she said again. "Get up." He had intended to rise in any case. He unfolded himself, stretching till his bones creaked, and yawning vastly. "I feel vile," he said. "Is there a bath to be had? Or at least a change of clothes?" She looked up at him; he was much taller than she. Nevertheless she managed to make it clear that he was far beneath her. And so he was, being a mere prince-heir, albeit of a great princedom, and she heir to an empire--and, some said, to all the worlds beyond the Gates. "No bath," he said regretfully. "Well then, you''ll just have to stand the stink of me. Though I''d rather die clean, if you don''t terribly mind." "You won''t die," she said. "You''ll only wish you had." He laughed. His mirth was honest, if a little wild. "Oh, do kill me. It''s no trouble." She frowned slightly, looked him up and down, and walked completely round him. He hoped that she was edified. He had, before sleep and pleasure and prison cell, been dressed in the perfect height of fashion. It was sadly wilted and stained now, but there still was no denying that his coat was distinctively cut and slashed, with dags and ribbons fluttering at carefully random intervals; or that it was a particularly striking shade of green. Or that the trousers had one leg green and oneleg nearly as bright a coppery sheen as his hair; or that his shoes were thickly sewn with copper bells. They chimed gently as he shifted his feet. "It would be a pleasure to kill you," she said as she came round to his front again, "but it will be an even greater pleasure to cure you of this ... whatever afflicts you. Are you color-blind?" He blinked at her. "You''re sparing my life because you think I have bad taste? Oh, my wounded heart!" "You have a heart to wound?" She dismissed him with the flick of a glance. "Enough. You''ve been judged. Be ready when your escort arrives." "Escort?" he asked, arching a brow. She was already gone. There was no lock on the door, he noticed. The seal she had laid on it was wrought of magic, and it was stronger than he could break. That cracked his composure beyond retrieving. He was the most insouciant of princes; he had made it his life''s work. But this quiet woman with her maiden''s face and her Sun''s fire of magery had got beneath his skin. "Judged?" he demanded of her absence. His voice rose. "Judged? Where is my trial? My defender? My noble judges? I''m a lord of rank. The law grants me a fair trial. I demand it. I insist on it!" The echoes of his bellow died. There was no answer, only a lingering scent of her scorn. He could not bear that, either. He flung himself against the door. He was not a small man, nor for all his infamous indolence was he weak, but the locks were made of magic. They never even shifted. He was lying on his face when the escort came. He was not asleep. A mute and mind-shielded servant had brought clothing not long before, and a basin with it, and water enough for a bit of bath. He was fresher, cleaner, but notably less fashionable now; the paint was scrubbed from his face and hands, and his lovely soiled garments had left with the servant. The coat and trousers and boots he wore fit him well but were distressingly plain, without even a bit of embroidery to enliven theirdullness. They were riding clothes, he could hardly have failed to notice. But he had not been given a weapon, even a knife for cutting meat. The belt was bare of anything but the grimly unornamented buckle. He was cold inside, and empty. Transgressions had consequences, his father had taught him well enough. But one had to care for those consequences, which he never had. Still he had never broken two of the strictest laws of mages in swift succession--or worse, been caught at it. He heard the door open and felt the mage-wards go down. If he had been inclined, he could have burst through the space where they had been, flung open a Gate, and vanished from the world. But he

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