Beneath an Opal Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

inward while Moichi waited without, patiently thinking his own thoughts. Aerent felt the soft wind that sprang up, drying the sweat on his back, which had caused his green silk shirt to cling clammily to his skin. Then the sun had dimmed behind him as the quick-forming summer thunderheads built up on the southwest quarter, racing hastily inland as if late for some important assignation. He sniffed once: the incipience of rain. It recalled to him, like a flash of lightning, that sleeting morning, racing across the battlefield before the yellow stone citadel of Kamado, his sleek stallion thundering under him with such coordinated power—and the fusillade he avoided by a mere hairsbreadth by rolling from his saddle. But the ground was treacherous, made slippery by the blood and gore of many, so that the earth itself was hidden by the grisly mattress of the piled bodies. His mount had stumbled and panicked and, as it had swerved hysterically, his booted foot caught the edge of the metal stirrup, twisted sideways, an inescapable trap. He had been dragged across the humped ground, over bodies and fallen weapons, a hideous and lethal gauntlet. Armor had protected most of his torso and arms; at the very end, something had sheared away half his helmet so that he had mercifully passed into unconsciousness.
    But there was nothing any physician could do about his legs. The nerves were gone and in any case the damage to flesh and muscle was so extensive that they had had no choice. They had left it to Tuolin’s physician to tell him.
    Still, he did not despair for he had no room in his bright soul for that bleak, immobilizing emotion. There is something good in everything that happens, Aerent had thought, or, at the very least, something important to be learned. His body had been tested and he had come through. Now his mind was being put to the task. Here he would either survive or perish emotionally.
    The physicians being useless to him once they had cut the dead flesh away, he called for the engineers, dismissing at once those who could not keep from smiling and who averted their eyes or who seemed bewildered by his summons, for those were invariably the ones who told him that nothing could be done.
    Aerent did not believe this and, at length, he found a man who was both unafraid and who knew what would be required. “They should, I feel, be more than functional,” were the first words out of his mouth, and Aerent had been satisfied. “Do it,” he had said.
    Money was no problem, of course. Aerent was a hero of the Kai-feng and already a ground-swell movement was forming for his appointment as first Regent of Sha’angh’sei. The city, in effect, had taken his legs from him; thus the city would restore them to him no matter the cost.
    The engineer—he was the same man who had drawn up the plans for the Seifu-ke—had worked ceaselessly for a full season, abandoning all other projects, and, at last, he came to Aerent with a long thin package perhaps a meter long wrapped in dark cloth.
    â€œIt is done,” he said, laying open the contents.
    They were fashioned after the human skeletal leg structure, the arcing bones carved from a ruby-like substance that had all the tensile strength of the gem but also had the required flexibility. The joints were masterpieces of construction, gimbals and sockets of onyx and solid brass brushed with a dry lubricant which also protected the metal from moisture and day-to-day wear.
    It took half a day to fit the legs but, then, Aerent would never have to take them off. As he worked on the last adjustments, the engineer had said, “Of course we have many substances to mold over these ‘bones’ so that the legs will seem almost real. But”—he tightened the last screw and stood up, admiring his handiwork—“to be quite frank I prefer them as they are. It is what I would do if I were wearing them.”
    Aerent had gazed at them for a long