Everran's Bane Read Online Free PDF Page B

charred thatch, smoldering timber, carrion, and half-burnt flesh.
    Inyx looked at the king. “Ah,” he said.
    Beryx glanced round. Behind the helmet nasal his brows almost met. “Volunteers?” he said. “Scout?”
    The first squadron’s surge carried along my horse. Beryx said swiftly, “Asc, you’ve a good eye, Errith, Iphas, Thrim—Harran?”
    â€œWhen my horse volunteers, lord,” I said, “I can hardly retreat.”
    Asc and Errith laughed. Beryx gave me one glance cut razor-edged down between mirth and irritation and said, “Go on.”
    Berating my idiocy, I walked my horse forward with the rest. We could all see the smoke now. It was rising from just over the ridge, a thin, languid coil of black upon seraphic horizon sky.
    The soldiers fanned out. Asc growled, “Come behind me, harper. Cover you with this bladder-bag,” and brought his sarissa to the port. Errith rose in his stirrups. Over Asc’s massive shoulder I saw a winged black cloud whirl up, heard a raucous, indignant yark, and then Thrim’s growl in his throat. “Morvallin. The black sods.”
    It was an ordinary upland farm: a stone-gabled house, byres and barns forming three sides of a square whose fourth side opened to the road. Something had struck the house—
    No. “Struck,” is not the word. From central door to gable, the wall was gone. The king-beam had snapped. The gable itself was a heap of tumbled stone. A fire had been burning inside. Wisps of smoke still rose amid the blackened remnants of wall-timber, furniture, family possessions, and charred stems of fallen thatch.
    â€œAh,” said Asc, deep in his throat. He checked his horse, and sat looking round in the eerie, unnatural quiet.
    The white-washed barn door was open, an ox-cart propped in a corner of the yard. Trampled flesh-red soil brought up the gray-green foliage of helliens rustling beyond the house. At the yard’s center was a cattle trough, a hollowed tree-trunk that held a glitter of white. Beyond lay a bundle of discarded sacks. They were red-stained. A white bone was sticking out...
    â€œBest get off, harper.” Errith gripped my arm without looking round. “Don’t mind us. First time, most throw up.”
    As I straightened, he spoke to Asc. “Feeding cattle. That’s salt.”
    â€œAh,” Asc repeated, that subterranean rumble quite expressionless.
    Thrim put in, “Cattle rushed. See t’fence?” It was a post and rail: two posts leant drunkenly, rails hanging from their mortises in splintered stubs. “Went out there.”
    All the heads turned, in that slow, hair-trigger scrutiny, to the slope behind the barn.
    The cattle had run uphill, scattering as they went. The first was a young red heifer. On her back, all four legs straight up, belly torn open from udder to dewlap, intestines strewn around. Asc spat with a disgusted hawk. Next was a calf. Its head had been torn off. Then a cow, ribs stove into the bloated trunk. The next was a bull.
    â€œFour,” said Errith under his breath. He had no need to finish, we were all thinking it: what sort of claw can rip out ribs and gouge the spine from a full-grown bull as a falcon does with a mouse?
    â€œBest go back,” Thrim said in that wooden voice. The horses were snorting, beginning to crouch and sidle; soon they would be out of hand.
    â€œAh,” said Asc again, eyes on the slope.
    Silently we looked with him at a thirty-foot black swathe of grass burnt off at the roots. Then with a speed that nearly shot my heart through my teeth, he swung off and thrust his reins at Iphas. “Hold that.”
    No one spoke as he came back. He was walking slowly, head bowed, cradling his burden with incongruous tenderness for such a big, burly man. “Back,” he said, walking past without a look at us. “Report.”
    â€œPlaying up hill, I reckon,” Errith commented in that