City of Illusions Read Online Free PDF Page B

Over snout and tusk and bristle, little bright eyes looked up at Falk.
    "Aah, aah, aah, man, aah," the creature said, snuffling.
    Falk's tense muscles jumped, and his hand tightened on the grip of his laser-pistol. He did not shoot. A wounded boar was hideously quick and dangerous. He crouched there absolutely still.
    "Man, man," said the wild pig, the voice thick and flat from the scarred snout, "think to me. Think to me. Words are hard for me."
    Falk's hand on the pistol shook now. Suddenly he spoke aloud: "Don't speak, then. I will not mindspeak. Go on, go your pig's way."
    "Aah, aah, man, bespeak me!"
    "Go or I will shoot." Falk stood up, his gun pointing steadily. The little bright hog-eyes watched the gun.
    "It is wrong to take life," said the pig.
    Falk had got his wits back and this time made no answer, sure that the beast understood no words. He moved the gun a little, recentered its aim, and said, "Go!" The boar dropped its head, hesitated. Then with incredible swiftness, as if released by a cord breaking, it turned and ran the way it had come.
    Falk stood still a while, and when he turned and went on he kept his gun ready in his hand. His hand shook again, a little. There were old tales of beasts that spoke, but the people of Zove's House had thought them only tales. He felt a brief nausea and an equally brief wish to laugh out loud. "Parth," he whispered, for he had to talk to somebody, "I just had a lesson in ethics from a wild pig…Oh, Parth, will I ever get out of the forest? Does it ever end?"
    He worked his way on up the steepening, brushy slopes of the ridge. At the top the woods thinned out and through the trees he saw sunlight and the sky. A few paces more and he was out from under the branches, on the rim of a green slope that dropped down to a sweep of orchards and plow-lands and at last to a wide, clear river. On the far side of the river a herd of fifty or more cattle grazed in a long fenced meadow, above which hayfields and orchards rose steepening towards the tree-rimmed western ridge. A short way south of where Falk stood the river turned a little around a low knoll, over the shoulder of which, gilt by the low, late sun, rose the red chimneys of a house.
    It looked like a piece of some other, golden age caught in that valley and overlooked by the passing centuries, preserved from the great wild disorder of the desolate forest. Haven, companionship, and above all, order: the work of man. A kind of weakness of relief filled Falk, at the sight of a wisp of smoke rising from those red chimneys. A hearthfire…He ran down the long hillside and through the lowest orchard to a path that wandered along beside the riverbank among scrub alder and golden willows. No living thing was to be seen except the red-brown cattle grazing across the water. The silence of peace filled the wintry, sunlit valley. Slowing his pace, he walked between kitchen-gardens to the nearest door of the house. As he came around the knoll the place rose up before him, walls of ruddy brick and stone reflecting in the quickened water where the river curved. He stopped, a little daunted, thinking he had best hail the house aloud before he went any farther. A movement in an open window just above the deep doorway caught his eye.В As he stood half hesitant, looking up, he felt a sudden deep, thin pain sear through his chest just below the breastbone: he staggered and then dropped, doubling up like a swatted spider.
    The pain had been only for an instant. He did not lose consciousness, but he could not move or speak.
    People were around him; he could see them, dimly, through waves of non-seeing, but could not hear any voices. It was as if he had gone deaf, and his body was entirely numb. He struggled to think through this deprivation of the senses. He was being carried somewhere and could not feel the hands that carried him; a horrible giddiness overwhelmed him, and when it passed he had lost all control of his thoughts, which raced and