Lens of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

heard my breathing only, and the alarming percussion of my heart. A drop of sweat fell from my hair to the flags, impossibly loud. I held my breath, but my heart only beat louder and more erratically. It seemed to me that my body was making such noise I would not be able to hear it if my enemy ran full tilt over me, swishing  
    his agricultural implement in the air. I felt self-betrayal and a touch of panic. I would run for the entrance hall at any moment, not knowing at all in which direction to find it.
    While my brain was giving way in this manner, my long-trained body
remained in a posture of defense, and so when the foppish madman whispered “Here I am,
Nazhuret. In front of you. Engage me,” my rapier began the deed just as I had been  
    commanded. But halfway in the motion I remembered that this was a naked blade, noble-sharp and without cork or button, and that my enemy was no enemy at all but some mere mad burgher in a frock coat with a tool that could not touch me at my fighting distance. My attack, which began lustily, ended as no more than a tentative, chiding prick.
    Which met nothing. “Misplaced condescension, lad. Or are you merely inept?” The words seemed to come from my left. The stinging, flat-bladed blow across my face came from a different direction. I spun toward the source of the attack and lunged.
    This time he took my impetuous sword against his hedger, and I felt
the weight of his body as we came hilt to hilt “Better,” he whispered, and he kicked my
leg out from under me.
    I fell in a clattering pile and bounced up again. My useless eyes were open so wide I felt my eyelashes brush against my eyebrows—sir, this is the sort of thing one does remember—and I felt around me with my rapier as a blind man does with his stick. He cleared his throat most graciously behind me so I would know his position. “Are you blind as well as crazy?” I shouted, “that you can see in the dark?”
    “I am not as blind as you,” he answered. “Nor half so mad.”
    And he laughed at me. Sir, I did go mad with that laugh, on top of all my terror. I lunged for blood—to kill. I would have run him through again and again had I had my way, though the man had countered my attacks defensively and done me no more affront than to slap me across the face with a garden tool.
    Again my blade met only metal and we engaged, rapier to hedger, but this time he dropped his blade to the fourth quadrant and took the slim rapier into the hook at the guard of his weapon and it broke. I heard the point of my blade skitter across the floor, and I thought inconsequentially that this was the sort of blade one gives an untried noble’s son to wear with his signet belt: not a meaningful blade, no great loss.
    And Nazhuret: not a meaningful young man, no great loss. My last thought.
    The heel of a boot took me across the jaw and my head hit the flagstones and I felt cold opening my throat.
     
    I was above, hanging in the black dome, looking down at my body and at the man who had killed me. The darkness was no obstacle.
    The killer indeed had a bald spot beginning on the back of his head; from above this was very noticeable, especially as he was bending over the small, shrunken body with the yellow hair. He went away and I was left with nothing to see but the dead boy with one smear of blood across his face. His eyes were closed, as in sleep. He looked very young and hopeless. I felt a distant pity, not too sharp. Then the killer came back, dragging a bench, upon which he sat and leaned over his victim. His patch of pink scalp gleamed.
    The importance of this scene was soon exhausted, and it began to recede and grow smaller. It became nothing but a spot of light in the middle of an emptiness that expanded without limit.
    Decide, was said to me. Grab on to this that is passing, or let it go. Madness or death.
    This was not a comforting choice, and with it came no instruction or clue. But all comfort was past anyway, along with