Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) Read Online Free PDF

and resonant voice.
    Sow the seed in flesh to reap the future. Sow the future in the earth to be made whole.
    Leon leaned forward in his wheelchair and took the sheet out of his hand. “What does that mean, made whole?”
    “It means,” said Henry after a long pause, “that whoever sent this knows too goddamn much about you. Come with me out to the workshop, I think you need to see something.”
    I’d always liked Henry’s property. The house sat well back from the narrow country road that ran past it, and was surrounded by trees and low grass as far as you could see. Now, in early fall, you could hear the restless susurrus of the wind that pushed through the red and gold leaves above us and the sharp crunch of the fallen ones under your feet.
    It was only a few dozen yards to the shed, but halfway there you had to pass the spot where Leon’s best friend Carlos had died, neck crushed by a creature that Piotr had sent to kill us. The ground there looked no different, but a sadness clung to it, a bitter reminder every time I took this path.
    Inside the shed, we gathered around one of the tables while Henry hunted through storage boxes that filled the shelves on one wall. He eventually came back with a metal lockbox, the kind of thing you’d use to hold money at a garage sale.
    Inside was a battered journal with a pale leather cover, bulging with extra pieces of paper stuck between its worn pages and held closed with a rubber band that was clearly much newer than the journal itself. Next to it was a familiar looking sheet of pale leather.
    Henry pulled the leather out of the box and unfolded it on the table, smoothing it out with his hands. It was larger than the one Leon had been given, and the creases in it showed that it had once been wrapped around something square on the bottom and round on the top. The journal was the right size to match the square creases, but it wasn’t clear what had made the round impression.
    We crowded close to read the words burned into it.
    The messenger grants sight. The altar grants voice. Sacrifice grants justice.
    Henry took the journal out of the box and opened it gently. The pages were crammed with spidery looking symbols that seemed to writhe on the page everywhere except where you were looking. Between the pages were loose sheets of note paper covered in Polish handwriting.
    “This is the book that taught Piotr to construct his blood ritual. I believe it came with some sort of translator that allowed him to read it, and that both items were wrapped up in this sheet of leather, just like our mysterious seed.”
    At the mention of a translator, I remembered the grotesque hemispherical creature that Piotr had ripped from his chest moments before he died. I could easily imagine that thing crouched on the top of the book, patiently waiting inside its leather shroud.
    Henry spread the new leather sheet out next to the old and placed the seed on top of it. The handwriting, if you could call it that, was identical.
    “So. Here we have two similar packages, each bearing unnatural contents, each delivered to a specific person, and each, based on the testing I did on the first one, wrapped in human skin.” He looked directly at Leon. “And the last person who used a package like this nearly destroyed the world.”
    “Because,” said Leon, “that’s what he wanted. He wanted to get revenge on the world that had taken his family from him, so that’s what he got. I want something else, and maybe that’s what I got. It’s a seed, which last time I checked, was all about new beginnings and growing things, not tearing them down.”
    “This isn’t about granting wishes, boy. These gifts are being sent for a reason, and probably not one that you’re going to like.”
    “Bullshit. You have no idea why Piotr got the package he did, or what it was even supposed to do. We only know what he chose to do with it. For all we know, it took him so long to perform the ritual because he was