Lord of the Silent Kingdom Read Online Free PDF Page A

Though I’m sorry about Polo’s arm.”
    “No shit. Hold still, goddamnit! Garnier! Arnoul! Get those damned horses under control! Aaron’s Hairy Balls! They’re worse than kids. You have to tell them everything.”
    Piper Hecht burst into laughter.
    “What?”
    “Grade Drocker said the same about you not that long ago.”
    “When? I was always a self-starter.”
    “When we were in the Connec. At Bishop Serifs’s manor, besieging Antieux.”
    “That was different. You didn’t want to stick your neck out around those Brotherhood of War assholes.
    They didn’t care what you did, it was fucked up. You were always wrong just because you didn’t belong to their crazy man club.”
    Pinkus Ghort always had an answer. It might not ring true or make sense, but he had one.
    “The corpse,” Hecht reminded gently.
    “Izzy. Buch ie. Search the dead guy. And don’t pocket anything. It could kill you later.” Softly, he said,
    “They wouldn’t take nothing, no how. They’re all guys from out in the sticks. So superstitious and scared of the Night it’ll be a miracle if they keep it together now long enough to find the kind of priest who’ll pretend to pull the imaginary supernatural leeches off them.”
    Ghort was exaggerating. That was a matter of course. But Hecht had run into people who were that afraid of the hidden world. People who could not draw a breath without praying and calculating how much attention that might draw from the Instrumentalities of the Night.
    Brothe being the Holy Mother City of the Episcopal strain of Chaldareanism, its streets ever boasted floods of religious pilgrims. Many were the sort who held intimate discourse with their deity every waking moment. They wandered in a perpetual daze, babbling constantly.
    God must find them annoying. They suffered more misfortunes than the less devout.
    Ghort helped Polo onto his mount. Sensitive to the Night, the animal grew skittish. Men, forced to walk because their mounts were carrying a dead sorcerer, a wounded ambusher, or had run away, kept Polo’s horse under control.
    Polo was incoherent.
    He needed a healing brother. Soon.
    Pinkus Ghort did not dispute possession of the prisoners. “Just let me have one healthy one, Pipe. A trophy. So I don’t have to listen to Principatè Doneto bark.”
    “Take your pick. Take two if you want.” Hecht was confident that nothing useful could be gained from any of the prisoners. “That’ll ease my budget.” Working for Sublime, even indirectly, included an endless, thankless, continuous scramble for money. The Patriarch had no comprehension of economics. He could not be made to understand that he had to have income if he wanted to spend. He resented any effort to explain by those whose wages had to be paid and whose costs had to be underwritten.
    Sublime was convinced that the Lord would provide. And that hired hands should be happy with what the Lord provided.
    They were crossing the vast limestone sprawl of the Closed Ground, so-called since antiquity because the wings of the Chiaro Palace enfolded it completely. The Palace was three and four stories high, its limestone architecture classically simple. The eastern face, in the direction of the Holy Lands, boasted balconies where the Patriarch and senior Principatès presented themselves on Holy Days. There were always scaffoldings somewhere around the marges of the Closed Ground. The Chiaro Palace was under continuous rehabilitation.
    The Palace was built of stone from the same quarry as the pavements but the coloring did not match. The pavements had been in place for only three centuries. Parts of the Palace went back fifteen centuries.
    They showed the effects of all those years of weather and bad air. The stone was streaked brown, yellow, or pale pink.
    The first foundations of the Chiaro Palace had been laid down before the Old Brothen Empire recognized itself as such.
    Parts of Brothe were older, still. But Hecht was not impressed. His boyhood