Tales of Neveryon Read Online Free PDF Page B

story …? Chills irrupted again, while he searched among the tales he’d been telling himself for any right reason to fear – in the middle of what had every aspect of terror about it, save motivation.
    For some reason he remembered the woman on the docks. Had her fear, in all its irrationality, been anything like this …?
    Five minutes later, he walked into the yard again – as he had already done half a dozen times that day. The boy sat there, still not looking. Gorgik’s own eyes fixed on the thin neck, below ear and black, spiking hair, where the collar had been. In the moonlight, now and again as he neared, with this step and with that, he could almost see the iron against the dirty brown, where a neck ligament was crossed by an irregular vein …
    No, the collar was gone.
    But even absent, it plummeted Gorgik into as much confusion as it had before, so that, as he passed, it was all he could do not flinch away, like the guard before the merchant’s coins, ears blocked by his own loud blood, all speech denied – and he was walking on, to the other side of the yard, down the alley, unable to remember the actual moment he’d passed the boy, who, he was sure, still had not looked up.
    Gorgik was back at the yard with the sunrise.
    The flogged boy was gone.
    But as he wandered about, now glancing into the nearly empty cistern (he could make out nothing among the flashes on the black), now ambling of to examine this corner or that alley entrance, while dawn light slanted thewestern wall, all Gorgik was left with was a kind of hunger, a groping after some tale, some knowledge, some warm and material feeling against his body of what had escaped through silence.
    Soon he returned to his house, where the dock water glittered down between the porch planks.
    Kolhari was home to any and every adventurer – and to any and every adventure they were often so eager to tell. As Gorgik listened to this one and that, now from a tarry-armed sailor packing grain sacks at the docks, now from a heavy young market woman taking a break at the edge of the Spur, now to a tale of lust and loyalty, now to one of love and power, it was as if the ones he heard combined with the hunger left from the ones he’d missed, so that, in a week or a month, when he found himself reviewing them, he was not sure if the stories he had were dreams of his own or of the lives of others. Still, for all the tales, for all the dreaming, an adolescence spent roaming the city’s boisterous back streets, its bustling avenues, taught Gorgik the double lesson that is, finally, all civilization can know:
    The breadth of the world is vasty and wide; nevertheless movement from place to place in it is possible; the ways of humanity are various and complex – but nevertheless negotiable.
    Five weeks before Gorgik turned sixteen, the Child Empress Ynelgo, whose coming was just and generous, seized power. On that blustery afternoon in the month of the Rat, soldiers shouted from every street corner that the city’s name was now, in fact, Kolhari – as every beggar woman and ship’s boy and tavern maid and grain vendor had been calling it time out of memory. (It was no longer Neveryóna – which is what the last, dragon-bred residents of the High Court of Eagles had officially, but ineffectually,renamed it twenty years before.) That night several wealthy importers were assassinated, their homes sacked, their employees murdered – among them Gorgik’s father. The employees’ families were taken as slaves.
    While in another room his mother’s sobbing turned suddenly to a scream, then abruptly ceased, Gorgik was dragged naked into the chilly street. He spent his next five years in a Nevèrÿon obsidian mine thirty miles inland at the foot of the Faltha Mountains.
    Gorgik was tall, strong, big-boned, friendly, and clever. Cleverness and friendliness had kept him from death and arrest on the docks. In the mines, along with the fact that he had been taught enough