Silvertongue Read Online Free PDF Page B

coincidence, but at that moment there was a noiseless detonation and everything seemed to jump, just an inch or so, and then all was still again.
    “What was that?” said the Young Soldier nervily.
    “Steady,” whispered the Duke, raising his sword.
    Because the rest of the city was so silent, they heard the snow moving before they saw it.
    The Young Soldier looked down at his boots. “Er . . .” he began.
    The Duke reined in his horse, which had skittered sideways.
    “I see it. . . .” he breathed. At their feet all the snow was moving. Because there was no wind, the effect was not of the flakes being blown, but more like them being sucked beneath the bus, toward the Stone. “I see it, but I’m damned if I know what it is.”
    The Old Soldier crouched in the back of the taxi, staring in disbelief at the Stone. From where he was watching he could see that snow was being pulled into it, or more precisely, into a thick black crack that had split the Stone from top to bottom. Blackness emerged like a slow-motion gush of oil, which came out as the snow was sucked across the ground into the crack, as if to take its place. Where the darkness met the ornate iron cage guarding the Stone, it simply dissolved the metal.
    The blackness flowed across the pavement toward the cab. Indeed, by the time the Old Soldier had noticed this, he couldn’t see if there was still time to get out and escape.
    “God ’elp us!” he swore, and started to back out of the cab.
    He looked down before he put his foot on the road, which was lucky. A thickening stripe of blackness, darker than oil, was now moving purposefully across the ground, sucking in all light and reflecting nothing back, like a tear in the fabric of all that is, through which could be seen the outer darkness. It had already flowed beneath the taxi and was moving steadily toward the bus, as if it had a mind of its own.
    Perhaps the Old Soldier already sensed that the darkness flowing beneath him did have something like a mind, because he hesitated an instant before calling to the others.
    “Oi,” he shouted. “Move yourselves. There’s something coming under the bus!”
    “What?” said the Young Soldier. “What kind of something?”
    “Move back now!” ordered the Duke, tugging on his horse’s reins. The horse responded instantly, dropping slightly onto its powerful haunches and beginning to corkscrew around and leap away, when it suddenly jerked to an abrupt halt.
    The Duke kept on going. He slid off the saddle and tumbled down the flank of the horse, into a snowdrift in a very un-ducal jumble of cloak, boots, and flailing sword.
    “Bedamn and blast the blockheaded booby who made me stirrupless!” he exploded, stumbling to his feet with the reins still held tight in his hand.
    The horse shrieked, and the Duke was nearly yanked off his feet as it reared in terror.
    “Steady boy!” he cried, instantly forgetting his own recent indignity as he tried to calm the frightened animal.
    “It’s got him by the hoof!” shouted the Young Soldier, pointing in horror.
    The Duke stepped back, narrowly avoiding a flailing foreleg as the horse attempted to break free from the darkness spiraling up its back legs in fast-moving black tendrils. The tendrils did not wind around the skin of the animal. They seemed to leach into it and replace its very substance, as if the darkness were replacing the metal body and taking its shape, like ink filling a bottle. The Duke stared in a mix of horror and outrage as the clean bronze curves of his horse were devoured from within by a black darker than coal.
    “By God, it shall not have him!” roared the Duke. He leaped to the rear of the animal and slashed his sword at the thickest tendril of darkness reaching out from under the bus, joining the horse to the split in the Stone across the street.
    The sword stuck fast in the darkness with an impact that all but jarred it out of the Duke’s hand, and then a side tendril sprouted from the