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

savior, leader, teacher a sweeping view of Her demesne and the Defile, but the marble floor was original to the University. Once it had been smooth, close-fitted, and the cool blocks were still so tight one could not slip a card between them. But the stone had been worn in intervening centuries, and therewere little hollows and valleys that showed where feet had trod those hundreds of years away.
    She sat in Her habitual chair—no ostentatious throne but the functional work station of mesh and padding she used when she was not afoot on two crutches, or in Her hover chair—and stared over Her city. Selene knew that She was waiting for Selene to regain control, to find her center.
    She was gracious.
    Finally, She lifted a hand and beckoned. She wore two thick mismatched sweaters over Her red-brown scholar’s robes, the gray and taupe cuffs rolled up around Her bony wrists. She’d let Her hood fall onto Her shoulders, revealing Her cropped gray hair, and the pinched marks of Her spectacles remained on the bridge of Her nose.
    Selene stepped forward, tail still twisting, and bowed before Her chair. Her hackles bristled, her fur damp from the drizzle but standing all on end under the farmed leather straps and ceramic plates of her body armor, but she forced herself to calmness as she extended the package in her hand. It was long, bound with wire over a stiff cloth wrapping, and it left a chill, buzzing sensation climbing the bones of Selene’s forearm.
    She groped for one of Her crutches, rose from Her chair with an effort, and came before Selene. “Good girl,” She said, softly, slipping the bundle from Selene’s clawed hand and tucking it under Her arm for safekeeping. Selene kept her talons sheathed in the soft flesh of her fingertips throughout, breathing deeply, her whiskers smoothed flat against her muzzle and her toenails pressing slight scratches into the hard marble floor when she couldn’t quite manage to gentle
them
.
    Selene smelled old woman’s flesh, acrid electronics, andconstancy, and it helped drive the dangerous musk from her nostrils. She stroked Selene’s ears with a palsied hand and stepped back, but not before Her touch and scent had soothed the moreau.
    “Why so upset, Selene?”
    “I smelled something,” Selene reported. “Something in the dark under the Well. Musky. Hunting.”
    “A rogue?” She asked sharply.
    She was not angry with Selene. She never raised Her voice to Her unmans. She never had to: the moreaux were perfectly obedient to Her will, and they would die before they failed. Since She Herself had constructed them, the only blame for their occasional shortcomings fell on the wizard Herself.
    She was a just and a forgiving creator-god.
    But sometimes—rarely—a moreau would grow strange, go feral, fail to return. Rogues were dangerous to unmans, trumans, halfmans, and nearmans. She did not tolerate them, and Selene would not tolerate them on Her behalf.
    Selene was very skilled at her tasks.
    “I do not think it was a rogue,” she said, carefully. Her words came sweetly despite needle-sharp teeth, rolling trippingly from a rasp-sharp tongue. “A . . . predator. It smelled not like one of us, though I saw nothing when I met Fasoltsen.”
    “And you did not touch the weapon?” She lifted the slender bundle in Her hand. It was long, long as Selene’s leg from hip to ankle, long as her lashing tail.
    Selene rocked her head side to side, an awkward counterfeit of a human shake. “The wrappings were intact.”
    “Excellent,” She said, and spared Selene a smile full of an old woman’s crooked yellow teeth. “Go, pretty girl. Rest until morning. You have pleased me.”
    Selene could not smile. She hadn’t the muscles for it. But, turning to go, she felt the warmth of Her approval run down her spine like the stroke of a velvet glove, and stood straighter under her weapons and armor as she strode away.
     
    M uire stood in the ruined square and wiped her hands on her cloak,