Colours in the Steel Read Online Free PDF

by river get the smell rather earlier; by way of compensation, they have time to get used to it before they arrive at the bridge gates, whereas sea-travellers get it as an unpleasant shock when they walk off their ship.
    Only one in a hundred native Perimadeians is even aware of the smell; on the contrary, citizens born and raised in it tend not to notice it and complain about the thin, bland air they find when they go abroad. There is no one single flavour to it; rather, it’s a rich and complicated mixture of wood and charcoal smoke, tanneries, refineries, distilleries, glassworks, bakeries, cookshops, perfumeries, brickyards, furnaces, workshops, fish, cattle dung, essence of humanity and rotting seaweed, the like of which is not to be encountered anywhere else in the world.
    Temrai’s caravan had followed the western branch of the river down from the high plains, and accordingly they entered the city across the Drovers’ Bridge and through the Black Gate. Once through the gateway, the road becomes the main thoroughfare of the carpenters’ and machine-makers’ quarter, and the first thing Temrai saw in the City of the Sword was the famous bone-grinding mill that stood beside the gateway on the left-hand side.
    It was an extraordinary sight for a young man newly arrived from the plains. What Temrai saw was a deep pit, out of which rose a huge wooden circle with fins radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel. Someone had cut a hole in the city wall seven feet or so from the bottom of the pit; since this was below the level of the estuary on the outside, water poured through the hole, fell onto the sails and pushed the wooden circle round before being fed back through a smaller hole controlled by some sort of mechanism which allowed the millstream out without letting the river in. The circle itself turned around an axle formed from the bole of an enormous pine tree. On the other end of the axle was a smaller wheel with pegs driven in all round it, which fitted into similar arrangements of pegs driven into yet another wheel standing at right angles to it. In fact there was a whole family of the things, all biting into each other like a pack of wild dogs, which were in turn connected to the grindstone itself. The miracle was that although the axle turned slowly, the millwheel went round much faster, ensuring that the bones fed into the hopper were crushed to fine powder.
    Temrai had never seen so many bones in one place; more even than littered the plain at Skovund, the site of the great battle between the eastern and western clans three generations ago. Two men stood on top of the hopper, shovelling them in from a plank bin. Most of the bones were bits of ox and horse and goat, but mixed in with them were the occasional patently human shin, arm, rib, and skull. The crackly crunching sound as the millwheel rode over them was like horsemen riding over dry twigs and bracken in a forest, but much louder.
    ‘What’s it for?’ he asked the men with shovels.
    They couldn’t hear him; or if they could, they couldn’t understand his accent. But the man who had the copperware stall next to the mill tugged his sleeve and explained; bonemeal, he said, was highly prized by farmers and market gardeners. It made things grow.
    ‘Oh,’ Temrai said, ‘I see. Thank you.’
    ‘You’re a plainsman, aren’t you?’
    Temrai nodded. He could understand the stallholder perfectly well, although he found the man’s sing-song voice rather irritating. He’d been told before he set out that the city people sang rather than spoke; until now, he hadn’t seen how that could be possible.
    ‘In that case,’ said the stallholder, ‘you’ll be wanting to buy a genuine Permadeian copper kettle. And it just so happens—’
    Explaining that he had no money (fortunately the stallholder believed him) Temrai escaped and led his horse up the hill to where he’d been told the city arsenal was to be found. On the way he passed any number of even