Mindbond Read Online Free PDF Page B

with fur, broad as two shields. He stood spraddle-legged and scowling.
    â€œGet down,” he said.
    I made no move to dismount. “We want but to pass,” I said evenly.
    â€œSomething about you two displeases me. I smell enmity. Get down.”
    Kor shrugged and swung down from Sora. More reluctantly, I slid off of Talu. The blue giant scanned us.
    â€œYou.” He pointed at Kor. “I challenge you. Fight.”
    Kor’s mouth came open, more in astonishment than in fear, though the prospect of single combat with a Cragsman was fearsome enough. “But that is absurd!” he protested. “I am of the Seal Kindred! We deal fairly with all. How can you call me your enemy?”
    â€œYou wear my people’s bane at your belt. Both of you do. Made of my ancestors’ bones and of their blood. I see it, I smell it. I will kill one of you, and then I will kill the other. Fight.”
    The Cragsman emphasized the challenge with a lift of his knobby club. I got hold of the horses by their bridles, one in each hand, as they reared, lifting me off the ground—my weight constrained them to stay with us yet awhile. Kor sprang back from the Cragsman’s blow, not yet drawing his sword.
    â€œI have never done anything to you or your people! Nor do I wish to begin now.”
    The Cragsman gave forth a roar that seemed to bend the sky and quake the distant peaks. “Take him, Kor!” I shouted at the same moment. “And do not hold back—strike to kill! Nothing less stops these louts.”
    His sword sprang into his hand. The red stone on the pommel blazed like fire.
    â€œI will pulp you with a single blow!” the Cragsman bellowed, swinging—the club was nearly as long as Kor was tall. But Kor stepped deftly under the stroke. A canny fighter, Kor. He had learned to fight with wit when he was a stripling facing far larger challengers in combat, challengers for his kingship. Still, I trembled as I watched. It was as the Cragsman had said: if he landed but a single blow on Korridun, he could kill him.
    Kor did not wait for that mischance. He struck even as the club swung. With all his might, with speed beyond any I had ever seen in him, in anyone, he struck, and the weight of the downswinging club, the might of the Cragsman’s blow, only aided him. Even as I blinked he had severed the huge hand that wielded the club, and the Cragsman roared again, a terrible roar of agony.
    Kor’s sword rose again, faster than I could follow, this time to strike at the giant’s throat. Almost before the riven hand had struck the ground the blade swished again. But the Cragsman had fallen backward from the shock of that first stroke, and I had been wrong when I had said that nothing less than death would stop these louts of stone. This one scrambled and staggered away, gulping and roaring, “The bane—the bane—my people’s bones and blood.…”
    Kor stood where he was, staring down at the abandoned hand at his feet, and I came up to stand beside him. A thick, sluggish, yellow-green flow was creeping from the veins of the wrist, and as we watched the stuff changed color, growing at the same time darker and more bright, and hardened into a shining shape as of puddled water. I stooped and picked it up—it flashed in the sun as did our swords, but with a brownsheen glint. Still, it was of the same strange stuff, very smooth, hard and chill—what had Tass called it? Metal. I had never seen such a thing before, or known that the swordstuff came from the Cragsmen. The few times my people had managed to kill one, it had been by sending a rockslide down atop him.
    Kor stood woodenly beside me, and, glancing up at him, I saw that he was troubled, though not by the lump of strange stuff in my hand. He seemed scarcely to see it, and I laid it down and stood to peer at him.
    â€œIt wasn’t me,” he said.
    â€œWhat wasn’t