The Silver Vortex

Chapter 1
Wardyke's shadow
Urak caused the drum to be sounded deep into the night, her bony hands moving too fast for human sight as she beat the taut hide hour after hour in the oppressive and listening darkness.
The voice of the drum and the voice of its echo mingled and blurred, rumbling and growling until the sky answered. Only then did Urak lift her hands and give the high, thin call that would give the drum rest. When the lightning came it picked out her figure on the top of the mountain, arms wide and high, head tilted to the sky, counting with her heartbeats the pacing of the thunderclaps. Nearer the storm came, and nearer - until the thunder struck at the same time as the lightning.
'Bring me a worthy acolyte...' was the message the rising wind scattered among the mountains, hissed through the branches of the trees, hurled through the narrow ravines.
'Give me a name... a face... someone to call... someone to teach... someone to carry on my work...'
The long cloak she wore flapped around her and cast giant shadows across the valley. For a moment it looked as though she would lift off and beat her wings into the storm.
'I have been tormented by fools...' she howled. 'Send me someone who will learn quickly... who will understand...'
She was an old woman, her skin a mass of folds. The hair that swirled around her was as white as smoke, never cut since the moment of her birth. She had sent away a score of apprentices in her long life, never satisfied, never ready to share her deepest secrets with anyone she did not consider her equal. But who could ever equal her, mighty witch-woman of the mountains, seasoned sorceress of nearly a hundred summers? Lately she had felt time slipping away from her: she could hear death whispering behind her, and she knew she had trained no one fully to follow her.
She tried to hold the rain back for she knew that once the rain burst from the black cloud that pressed so heavily down on the brow of her mountain, the storm-power she needed to use would be defused. With her own will she forced the cloud to hold its burden.
Once again her voice rang out.
Once again the wind carried her message.
In the livid light before the next whip-crack of thunder, she thought she glimpsed another figure on the rock platform beside her.
Her thin body was shaking with the strain of calling the storm and holding it poised. There was almost unbearable pain in every limb - but she knew she must hold on.
The next flash confirmed that she was no longer alone.
A man was before her - his eyes, the eyes of the dead.
She closed her own eyes and saw him still, held as an afterimage, accurate in every detail.
'Your name?' she asked in the language of the dead.
'Wardyke,' he said, his voice crackling like dry kindling in fire. Wardyke! She knew the name from a time when he had been her apprentice... one who had pleased her more than most.
'Wardyke,' she hissed, and felt the first hard hammer-blow of the rain. 'Give me a name! Give me someone worthy to train as my heir, someone who will succeed in destroying the Temple of the Sun where I have failed, someone who will make Guiron wish he had never been conceived in the womb of Time - let alone born to cross my path in this life...'
Wardyke smiled darkly. He too had been the victim of Guiron's power as High Priest of the Temple of the Sun. It was Guiron who had refused him the final prestigious mark of initiation into the priesthood after his long and arduous training at the Temple. It was Guiron who had masterminded the forces that had defeated him on the field of battle. And before that - in another lifetime - there had been another wrong not yet paid for... Wardyke had a great deal of bitterness to share with this wild and fearsome woman of the mountains.