Taltos Read Online Free PDF Page A

the nameless copilot, and the pale, straw-colored young driver who was always on duty at this hour, the one who rarely ever spoke.
    “You’re sure you want to make this trip, tonight, sir?” asked Jacob.
    “Is nobody flying?” he asked. He stopped, eyebrows raised, hand on the door. Warm air came from the inside of the car.
    “No, sir, there are people flying.”
    “Then we’re going to fly, Jacob. If you’re frightened, you don’t have to come.”
    “Where you go, I go, sir.”
    “Thank you, Jacob. You once assured me that we fly safely above the weather now, and with far greater security than a commercial jet.”
    “Yes, I did do that, sir, didn’t I?”
    He sat back on the black leather seat and stretched out his long legs, planting his feet on the seat opposite, which no man of normal height could have done in this long stretch limousine. The driver was comfortably shut away behind glass, and the others followed in the car behind him. His bodyguards were in the car ahead.
    The big limousine rushed up the ramp, taking the curbs with perilous but exciting speed, and then out the gaping mouth of the garage into the enchanting white storm. Thank God the beggars had been rescued from the streets. But he had forgotten to ask about the beggars. Surely some of them had been brought into his lobby and given warm drink and cots upon which to sleep.
    They crossed Fifth Avenue and sped towards the river. The storm was a soundless torrent of lovely tiny flakes. They melted as they struck the dark windows and the wet sidewalks. They came down through the dark faceless buildings as if into a deep mountain pass.
    Taltos
.
    For a moment the joy went out of his world—the joy of his accomplishments, and his dreams. In his mind’s eye he saw the pretty young woman, the dollmaker from California, in her crushed violet silk dress. He saw her in his mind dead on a bed, with blood all around her, making her dress dark.
    Of course it wouldn’t happen. He never let it happen anymore, hadn’t in so long he could scarce remember what it was like to wrap his arms around a soft female body, scarce remember the taste of the milk from a mother’s breast.
    But he thought of the bed, and the blood, and the girl dead and cold, and her eyelids turning blue, as well as the flesh beneath her fingernails, and finally even her face. He pictured this because if he didn’t, he would picture too many other things. The sting of this kept him chastened, kept him within bounds.
    “Oh, what does it matter? Male. And dead.”
    Only now did he realize that he would see Samuel! He and Samuel would be together. Now that was somethingthat flooded him with happiness, or would if he let it. And he had become a master of letting the floods of happiness come when they would.
    He hadn’t seen Samuel in five years, or was it more? He had to think. Of course they had talked on the phone. As the wires and phones themselves improved, they had talked often. But he hadn’t actually seen Samuel.
    In those days there had only been a little white in his hair. God, was it growing so fast? But of course Samuel had seen the few white hairs and remarked on it. And Ash had said, “It will go away.”
    For one moment the veil lifted, the great protective shield which so often saved him from unendurable pain.
    He saw the glen, the smoke rising; he heard the awful ring and clatter of swords, saw the figures rushing towards the forest. Smoke rising from the brochs and from the wheel houses … Impossible that it could have happened!
    The weapons changed; the rules changed. But massacres were otherwise the same. He had lived on this continent now some seventy-five years, returning to it always within a month or two of leaving, for many reasons, and no small part of it was that he did not want to be near the flames, the smoke, the agony and terrible rain of war.
    The memory of the glen wasn’t leaving him. Other memories were connected—of green fields, wildflowers,