Dangerous Offspring Read Online Free PDF

I’ve merely tripped. But I keep falling, feeling nothing under my feet but more thin air.
    Two more desperate beats, and I strained my body upwards in a graceful curve. My wingtips came together in front of my face, then I pushed away and I was no longer falling. I stretched out my legs, lying horizontally.
    The people below saw the soft inside surface of my black sickle wings, the sun shining through their trailing edges. I felt air spilling off every flight feather. Their hard and sharp leading edges rasped louder as I beat harder and gained height. I scraped over the tavern’s ridge, pushed off with my palms and started laughing ecstatically as I flapped over the road, the barrack ring, the curtain wall and out of town.
     

    The Lowespass Road ran straight as a rule. Its cobbled, slightly convex surface was crispy with hoof prints in reddish clay mud. Water filled its drains; since the completion of the dam the whole countryside was like a puddle and pools had begun to appear all over the place.
    From the air, Slake Cross looked like a square grey archery target lying on the contours of the pale green valley side. I looked back to the gatehouse. The gate, twice my height, was crisscrossed with deep iron strips. Shallow troughs scarred between them where Insect mandibles had reached through to scrape the old timber. On my right stretched the Lowespass Road and ahead the reservoir glimmered, flat and silver. I was heading towards the Insects’ Paperlands covering the entire north bank of the river and as far as I could see into the distance, like a white sheet drawn over the land.
    Strong gusts kept me flying low, no more than twenty metres from the ground where I could follow a direct path with the minimum effort. I flew over the crossroads with the smaller Glean Road along which troops arrive from western Awia. The Slake Cross monument, a smooth obelisk, stood there on grass scattered with yellow primroses–fragile blooms transplanted from the river bank before the flooding process began. Ointment made from them is a sovereign salve for wounds, and they had become a symbol of the massacre.
     

    The uncompromising hills were always striding along the horizon, their stony summits rose to mid-sky and framed Lowespass valley. Further east at Miroir there were exposed tracts of moorland covered in peat bogs. Pondskaters V-rippled over black gullies of acidic stagnant water and mosquitoes whined over patches of spongy sphagnum moss among the heather. At this end of the valley the soil was thin. Thistles and ragwort sprouted in the clints and grikes of the limestone pavements. Caves riddled the valley floor. For thousands of years the rainwater has been carving faults in the rock into fathomless potholes and massive chambers, where drops precipitate strange and magnificent formations like the Throne Room columns. The Insects’ own tunnels join the system; it does no good to think about it.
    Slake Cross town itself is built over a resurgence of an underground stream, so it never lacks fresh water. Frost has used dye to investigate the routes of the system. She started messing about with the water table and everyone watched, unnerved, as the level in the deep well rose to its very brim.
     

    The road crossed uneven ground, slicing through the outcrops, and a larger quarry had scarred the side of a big knoll. I glided over its levelled area where carts were parked, completely covered with hardened white lime dust.
    I passed some lime kilns in the side of a cutting; room-sized stone ovens with ragged chimneys, now cold and empty, with charcoal heaps growing damp outside their mouths. Frost had constructed them and employed the stokers; as soon as she knew she had enough cement she had moved them to work on the dam itself. A high wall protected a stand of pine trees, which grew relatively quickly and Frost used for building material.
    On the north side of the road was the first of a series of static catapults called petraries,