1633880583 (F) Read Online Free PDF

me Askelad. Nan has told me of the Choosers of the Slain, who swoop down from divine Vindheim and carry off the spirits of the valiant dead. Though I thought that was just a story. Are you one of them?” He looked this way and that, as an uneasy thought came to him. “Am I dead?”
    Cairn laughed. The sound seemed to reverberate off the unseen headlands of present time. “Do you think yourself valiant, Askelad?”
    He laughed too. “The Sage Emperor has said that a superior man should avoid violence and heedlessness, that he be sincere, and that he be polite. Would a Chooser of the Slain pick such a one?”
    “You never know.”
    “So you are a Chooser?”
    “The All-Father has said that a rash tongue sings mischief, O Askelad, if that’s what you want to call yourself. I would like to keep my nature to myself for now. What you should know is that I have been waiting for you. You have the power to explore the Straits of Tid. There are certain sites in Kantenjord where the energies of the sleeping dragons distort space and time. Fractures in the fabric of reality, rent in the days when the arkendrakes fought one another. In those places it’s possible to send one’s dream-form into other realms. Or, with sufficient power, to go there bodily. The Pickled Rat is built upon one such site.”
    “Do Freidar and Nan know of this?”
    “They suspect. They know many things they haven’t told you of.”
    “What do you want from me?”
    “Learn—and beware!”
    She gestured with her spear, and it was as though a gale rose up. He was washed upon the waves through clouds and snow, then rain and sun, speeding across the seas.
    They seemed now to float above rugged day-lit straits, where two jutting headlands lofted above a small, barren island. A titanic metal chain wrapped around each promontory, linking them to the island in the straits’ midst, itself enmeshed in the links. Runes the size of horses glowed upon the links.
    “What is it?” Innocence asked.
    “Behold the Great Chain of Unbeing. Forged by the Vindir, great lords now thought of as gods, it drains the energies of the arkendrakes, keeping them docile, unable to resume their ancient conflict. A third length of the Chain plunges into unseen depths, sending excess power deep into the Earthe. The Chain has an intelligence of its own, and from time to time it claims a champion. This time it has chosen your friend, A-Girl-Is-A-Joy. She bears the mark of the Chain upon her hand.”
    Innocence looked across the seas, past an archipelago of thousands of craggy islands and skerries, out to the East.
    “You are thinking of another mighty construct,” said Cairn. “The Heavenwalls of Qiangguo. They too draw power from dragons. They too chose a champion—you.”
    “I have never understood why. I’m no son of Qiangguo. By accident I was raised as one, but the blood of that land doesn’t flow in my veins. I’m much closer to the folk of Kantenjord! And why did this Chain choose Joy? She is a daughter of Qiangguo! It makes no sense.”
    “You are right to wonder, Innocence. Humans have wrought these mighty works to empower themselves. But they did not anticipate that those tools would conspire with each other.”
    “Conspire? How? Why?”
    Cairn laughed and raised her spear.
    The sun vanished again, and reappeared, many times, throwing the ocean into light and casting it into darkness. And now land—green coast, misty forest, looming mountains, and forest again, and pale-green grass stretching forever.
    Below him lay an astonishing sight. At the southern edge of a great influx of the sea, upon the snow-covered grasses of the steppe, there stood thousands of tents and tens of thousands of men, nearly that number in horses, a hundred ships on wheels, and scores of balloons ready for flight.
    He drifted down toward the horde, and suddenly a falcon crossed his vision, the same that had stalked him weeks earlier. Somehow it picked out a single individual on the ground