Lords of Rainbow Read Online Free

about herself.
    Most likely, she was a madwoman, or at least someone on the fine edge between clarity and disturbance.
    In the capital City, Tronaelend-Lis—the place, it is said, of boundless dreams—she had done business countless times. Tronaelend-Lis was chaotic as any big city is bound to be, always in need of one or more of her talents, filled with gems and rabble, seething with motion like a boiling kettle of fragrant soup. Opportunities surfaced like bubbles in that soup, and it was there that Ranhé absentmindedly made her way now, finding, as abruptly as always, her purse light as a dream.
    Now, a curiosity about that purse. Despite being adequately paid for her work, she remained vagabond-poor.
    Ranhé was not a spendthrift like some others, who would squander their earnings on urban pleasures. She was not known to drink spirits that distorted the mind, or gamble, or even purchase erotene favors.
    But after a good earning, she was often seen passing out easy gifts, allowing dull metal coins to leave her hands as quickly as they came. And ultimately finding herself without means every time, Ranhé only laughed.
    “ I can be rich any time,” she spoke flippantly. “I could have an estate, a house in the City, all illuminated with white light, finer than any of the great villas in Dirvan . And maybe I will. Or maybe, I won’t. Maybe”—she would let her eyes turn strange—“I would rather have the silver moon.”
    But now, moon or no, her purse was light again, and she, moved by an inborn restlessness, was on her way to Tronaelend-Lis, and opportunities.
    She was now but a day’s ride away from the City. At the last settlement she passed the other day, the local woodsmen suggested she follow the small trail northwest to shorten her way, and that a lodging place would be reached by evening of this day.
    They had spoken in uncomplicated ways, the locals, with nothing beyond the ordinary in the pale silver faces. Their clothing was drab; their skin had been turned dull and coarse in the gray sun-glare, and at the corners of their eyes it crinkled like rice paper. They were merely weather-beaten, like all the others who lived at the edges of the wilderness and were attuned only to its natural rhythms. And unlike them she sensed other things in the air, brewing—subtle things that swept past their awareness. Things they would never know to tell her.
    There was a crispness, a sense of change in the wind, and it required a sixth sense to feel its encroach.
    And death . . . But no, don’t think. . . .
    Merely a deepening of twilight.
     
    * * *
     
    T he philosopher, sitting in one of the lightly shaded groves of the Outer Dirvan, watched two ebony swans float upon the mirror surface of a small pool. He was not too different from the numerous other philosophers in the City—of some learning, yet not particularly literate; introspective, yet easily distracted by outer beauty (such as now—oh, the swans!); hungry for revelation about the nature of truth, yet somehow afraid that revelation might really come, and what would he do then? And, like most of his peers, he pondered the phenomenon of Rainbow.
    There existed a common set of thought regarding that unfathomable event of about four hundred years ago—if indeed it did happen. Belief was customized, altered according to one’s nature. Yet essentially, the postulates were twelve in number.
    And so the philosopher recited them one by one in his mind, like mantras, at the moment without new insight, yet hoping that the concepts might flower suddenly within him.
     
    * * *
     
    Postulate One: Rainbow is Fulfillment.
     
    * * *
     
    D eileala Grelias, the Regentrix of Tronaelend-Lis, brushed a cool finger along the lower back and buttocks of the naked young man lying prone before her on the great silken bed. Shafts of silver sunlight from the window fell in curving patterns that defined the shape of his body. In response to her touch, she watched a tensing of