Rivers of Fire (Atherton, Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

mind," said Lord Phineus. "Yellow lines and ladders that are mine alone. They are hopelessly out of your reach."
    Though his master was beginning to sound unstable again, Sir Emerik was strangely mesmerized by the voice as he felt blood dripping down his chin. It occurred to him that the world's radical change was a prophetic sign that it was time for him to seize power, and as long as he had water and no Cleaners
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    could get into the House of Power, his world would be better than it ever had been before.
    Lord Phineus stepped back, releasing Sir Emerik. He casually put the blade back in his boot and scratched his leg once more, as if the encounter had never occurred.
    "You will come with me," Lord Phineus said at length. "And do as I say." Sir Emerik nodded in agreement as he held back the blood dripping from his chin.
    Lord Phineus took hold of the statue that stood in the main chamber. Mead's Head. He turned the stone head right, left, and right again. Hearing the familiar click on the floor behind him, he turned and faced Sir Emerik with a grave and weary look on his face.
    "I've lost control of the water," said Lord Phineus. "And you must help me get it back."
    ***
    While Lord Phineus and Sir Emerik disappeared into Mead's Hollow in the dead of night there were two others who discovered that the Highlands were descending into the center of Atherton. Until then, only Samuel and Isabel had known for sure. But that was about to change.
    "What do you smell?" asked Horace.
    "I'm not sure what I smell," answered his companion, whose name was Gill. "Something ... different."
    Gill was a wiry man, quick and stealthy on his feet. He had the unusual habit of sniffing the air around him in order to gain any insight he could, especially at night.
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    [Image: Statue: MEAD.]
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    His larger than average nose raised into the air as his long neck bobbed rhythmically from side to side. Gill had the look of an animal that had smelled something unexpected but could not see it. If he o had ever experienced it for himself, he would have said the air smelled like a dirt road after a hard rain. But there had been no rain on Atherton--not ever--and he tried his best to place the smell somewhere simpler in his mind.
    "Something is wet," he whispered into the night.
    Horace moved forward cautiously with Gill close behind, and with each step the smell grew heavier around them. When they came to the very place where the Highlands had once risen into the sky, Gill knelt down and felt the moist new edge of Tabletop. He held the gritty mud on his fingers to his nose.
    For a moment he thought they'd stumbled into a place where the two lands hadn't met flat against each other, but his mind was quickly changed. The Highlands had moved down inside of Atherton about the length of a man's arm, and putting his fingers at the seam on the bottom, Horace felt it ever so slowly grinding. He gazed to his left--across the deep grey of night--and could see a dark line of land running long and crooked.
    Horace stood, feeling his lungs swell with the knowledge of a changing world.
    "I must go to the House of Power and reason with them," he said. "We can't stay in the Highlands any longer. This place must be forsaken."
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    It was a rather gloomy way of putting things, and Gill shuddered as he stood.
    "But what about those creatures--the Cleaners? This could be a good development. It could separate us from them."
    Horace was unmoved. Staying within the sinking Highlands seemed to him the worse of two approaching evils. What would become of a people trapped in a sinking world with cliffs rising all around? There was something altogether wrong about the idea of being trapped, of descending into inescapable darkness. And there was something else, something deeper in his awakening soul. He felt a bottomless guilt at the very thought of leaving those in Tabletop alone to battle a coming enemy they could never defeat alone. The Highlands had to be left behind, because if