Implied Spaces Read Online Free PDF

normal position before one of his swords sliced out to separate the bandit’s head from his shoulders.
    The body was wrapped in an old cloak and given to the pool of life, to feed the chthonic spirit believed to dwell in the menhir. The head was stuck on a spear in front of the caravanserai’s gate.
    The head bore a disappointed look. Onos had probably expected more excitement than this.
    “I wonder if his next incarnation will have learned anything,” Aristide asked, as he and Nadeer paused to view the head on its spear.
    Nadeer only snorted at the swordsman’s question.
    “May I have the bandit’s mount?” Aristide asked. “I would be more useful in this adventure if I were mobile.”
    “It’s that barb yonder.”
    The horse was a cream-colored gelding, a little long in the tooth but deep in the chest and strong of spirit. The saddle and tack were serviceable. Aristide took the barb for a brief ride over the desert to get acquainted, then fed the animal and watered him. He sorted through the bandit’s belongings but found nothing of interest.
    He helped himself to another of the sultan’s free meals, then slept in the bandit’s tent for a few hours, until the sound of trumpets, conchs, and ram’s horns told the travelers to ready their mounts and assemble.
    Aristide walked his new horse through the bustle. Dust rose, obscuring the sun, and he drew the tail of his headdress over his mouth and nose. By chance Aristide passed by Ashtra, who was struggling to lift her heavy water bag to its place on her palfrey’s saddle-bow.
    “Permit me, madam,” he said. He performed the task, bowed, and departed, his senses alert in case she called him back.
    She didn’t. He walked on.
    The caravan, big as a small army, didn’t actually get under way for another three turns of the glass. Once it moved, it moved slowly. The guards were mounted on horses, bipedal lizards, or the red six-legged lizards that moved with a side-to-side motion, like giant snakes. The lizards were cold-blooded, but in the high desert, beneath an unmoving sun, that scarcely mattered.
    The others in the caravan rode horses or Bactrian camels, mules or asses. There was one forest elephant. Their carts and wagons were drawn by oxen, horses, or ridge-backed dinosaurs. No small number proceeded on foot, sometimes accompanied by a dog pulling a travois.
    Aristide had his own difficulties, in that his new horse was afraid of his cat, snorting and backing away whenever Bitsy approached. It was an unfortunate fact that many animals disliked Bitsy—perhaps she didn’t smell right—and in the end Aristide had to hide her, making her a nest on the saddle blanket behind the high cantle of his saddle, where the horse couldn’t see her. The horse still scented her from time to time, snorted and gave a nervous look backward, but these alarms only increased its desire to move faster along the trail.
    Nadeer and the other leaders worked in a desperate fury to get the huge convoy ordered, and to move them at a steady pace. A huge cloud of dust rose above the column and turned the sun red.
    “The bandits will see this for fifty leagues,” Grax said, as he and Aristide rode ahead of the column. “We may as well have let the spy live.”
    “He won’t be able to tell them how we’re organized.”
    Grax showed tombstone teeth. “We’re organized?”
    The caravan only made five leagues before Nadeer called a halt, but at least the day had been useful as a training exercise. The guards had got used to working with one another, and had developed a system for scouting ahead. As the caravan laagered, as guards were posted, the last of the dust drifted away on the wind, and the curses of the drovers and the captains and one large, green ogre echoed through the camp, Aristide thought that perhaps the little army had done better than Nadeer knew.
    The glasses turned sixteen times before the trumpets blared again, and the vast column heaved itself onto its feet and