Changer of Days Read Online Free PDF Page A

had the strength to try and lift it again; and had blacked out for a while. When she came back to some sort of lucidity, it was to the sensation of lying on the ground upon the same cloak, or a similar one, impregnated with the same smells and textures. She sensed movement around her: moving shadows, an occasional groan of what might have been pain.
    “…I tell you, definitely being followed…”
    “…split up, and leave them chasing ghosts…”
    “…with the fastest one? They would expect that she…”
    “…really think that there’s only three of them…”
    “…a back door. They cannot guard every postern gate at Miranei…”
    “…time we were moving. Look to her, someone. Where’s the tamman? ”
    Hills…steep slopes full of sweet mountain grass…hooves on rock…once, a meadow sprinkled with bright flowers which nodded at Anghara as she tried to focus her bleary vision on them. Another day, and then yet another…another night…a golden sunset…and then, abruptly, high walls where there had been wide-open spaces; flickering torches instead of daylight; the still, stale fug of a place which had not seen the sun since the day it had been wrought, instead of crisp, cool mountain air.
    This time there was nothing fuzzy about the memory when it came—this was the place she had seen when al’Jezraal had invoked dungeons in the Catacombs of Al’haria. This was the real thing; the knowledge cut at her, sharper than any thought since she had left the stables in Calabra. Her escort left her, alone at last, and somewhere above in the quiet darkness of the dungeons of Miranei, Anghara distinctly heard, as she had in her vision, the dull, ominous thud of a distant door closing with a finality that was absolute. They were gone, and she was in darkness, alone.
    The tamman had brought Anghara to the point where this realization meant nothing more than that they were leaving her in the blessed dark, to curl up without being bounced on the back of a galloping horse, to finally try to sleep. It didn’t matter that her bed would be a hank of filthy straw on the flagged stone floor, or that the air in her tiny cell entered through an open grille in the stout oak door—a grille that looked as though it could easily be shut. She craved sleep—a long, wholesome sleep lacking the pain, the numbness, the gray fuzziness and the constant nausea that had been her companions for long days and nights on the road. And, without tamman, she did finally sleep—the last innocent sleep she would have for a long time, had she but known it, untainted with the horror of knowing what she would wake to in the morning.
    When she did wake, it was to a weakness which made it next to impossible to perform the simple act of sitting up, and unabated nausea which was, if anything, worse than before. But queasy and shaken as she was, she was lucid, for the first time in days, perhaps weeks—she suddenly realized she had no idea how much time had passed since she had paid for the bay mare in the Calabra stable. She moaned, pressing her fingers to her temples; her head felt like a wayside smithy where a battalion’s horses were being shod. She tried to get up and take the few steps toward the hole in the floor that served as a latrine. Her legs wouldn’t hold her; eventually she crawled there on hands and knees, and was violently sick.
    She seemed to feel better, as though she had thrown up some poison which had been slowly killing her. There was a half-full pottery jug of water on the floor by her bed; she reached for it, rinsed her mouth, and then swallowed a few gulps. It was stale, with an odd taste, as though things she would be better off not knowing about had leached into it during its long standing—but it was clean. Anghara wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and only now turned to make a closer inspection of her surroundings.
    She was in a solitary cell, only just long enough for her to stretch out on the straw that was her