All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) Read Online Free PDF Page A

hanging long over the man’s shoulder. His eyes seemed light under graying brows, his left ear pierced at the lobe by a heavy, twisted ring in the old style. His clothes were invisible under a cloak he wore, clasped with heavy silver brooches at the right shoulder.
    And he was looking directly at Cathoair, as boldly as if he did not expect to be seen.
    Cathoair had never been one to back down from a challenge. He dropped the damp towel back in Astrid’s hand and lifted his chin, staring the old man directly in the eyes. He wasn’t expecting the watcher to meet him with a close-lipped smile and a shrug that disarrayed his cloak only slightly, or thetoast of a drinking bowl carved from what looked like horn, but couldn’t be: nobody would bring a precious antique to a public bar where it could be broken or stolen.
    “Star, do you know that guy?” Cathoair asked, ducking his head to whisper in Astrid’s ear. She was a big girl, rangy, heavy-boned and heavy-muscled, but he topped her by half a head.
    She turned and kissed him a quick peck, so as not to spoil his chances with the clientele later, and said, “Guy?”
    “At table twenty.”
    She glanced over her shoulder as if checking the ring, and shrugged. “Nobody there now.”
    Cathoair lifted his head and blinked. The table was empty, the horn bowl gone along with the silver-brindled occupant. All that remained was the candlefaux and a crumpled note trapped under it, ten kroner in the Technomancer’s scrip by the color. “Huh,” Cathoair said. “I wonder where he went.”
    “He’ll be back if he’s interested,” Astrid said. She dabbed at a bruise on Cathoair’s sweaty shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get you into the sauna and cleaned up so you can mingle.”
     
    B lood would have been easier.
    If the cobbles had been sticky under Muire’s boots, if the blood had runneled between stones and flooded the rain-damp dead-end square between Ark and the Well, it would have been simple. She would have dropped a knee beside the man slumped along the blind, truncated stair that had once led to the university, and she would have tried to breathe for him as long as his heart fought to help her, and when his heart stammered and failed, she would have stood in her blood-daubed armor and made her own way home.
    But there was no blood upon the stones. And the man was still breathing. Faintly, shallowly, not a mark on him, surrounded by the lingering traces of bitter, predatory musk.
    Muire knelt. Her ancient sword hung heavy between her shoulders and her ceramic armor clicked against the stone steps. Cowled in a cloak of midnight-blue, she bent over the dying man. And there could be no question that he was dying: his last few breaths came shallow, and his lids fluttered over closed and sunken eyes.
    There was not a mark on him.
    Muire touched his cheek with a gauntleted hand, and closed her eyes, knowing the chill that radiated from his skin before she ever properly felt it. She bent over and breathed for him, knowing it was useless, making the gesture all the same.
    He was expensively dressed, too much so for the Well and neither like a student nor a lecturer, which meant that he must have come from the Ark—the Arcologies, the hermetically sealed habitations immediately east of the Broken Stair. He was unarmed and he had rings on his fingers, and he didn’t look like much of a warrior with his neatly trimmed hair and his clerk’s embroidered robes, his comm clipped, silenced, to his belt along with the other paraphernalia of a white-collar job—a palmtop parser, an audiovid privacy headset folded into compact form and beaded with droplets that had to be rain. He lay close enough to the falls to hear them, but not within the drift of their poisoned mist. His skin was unspotted by radiation or disease, and he showed not so much as a bruise. But a scent hung on him like cold moss on stone, and his skin felt chill. And he was dying, without any good reason for it, despite