The Asutra Read Online Free PDF

caution and further research; in due course they propose to issue the announcement under their own aegis; I will never be mentioned. This scheme must be thwarted."
    Etzwane, engaged in rueful reflections regarding the quality of Ifness' concern, went to look out into the night. The rain had dwindled to a few dark drops; the lightning flickered far to the east, back over the Mirv. Etzwane listened, but could hear no sound whatever. Ifness also stepped out to look at the night.
    "We might proceed, but I am uncertain in regard to the Keba and the intervening rivers. Kreposkin is exasperating in that he can neither be totally scorned nor totally trusted. Best that we wait for the light. " He stood peering through the dark. "According to Kreposkin, yonder along the beach is the site of Suzerain, a town built by the Shelm Fyrids some six thousand years ago. . . . Caraz, then as now, was savage and vast. No matter how many enemies fell in battle, more always came. One or another warrior tribe laid Suzerain waste; now there is nothing left: only the influences Kreposkin calls esmeric."
    I do not know that word."
    It derives from a dialect of old Caraz and means the association or atmosphere .clinging to a place: the unseen ghosts, the dissipated sounds, the suffused glory, music, tragedy, exultation, grief, and terror, which according to Kreposkin never dissipates."
    Etzwane looked through the dark toward the site of the old city; if esmeric were present, it worked but weakly through the dark. Etzwane returned to the boat and tried to sleep on the narrow starboard berth.
    The morning sky was clear. The blue sun, Etta, swung up near the horizon, producing a false blue dawn, then pink Sasetta slanted sidewise into the sky, then white Zael, and again blue Etta. After a breakfast of tea and dried fruit, and a cursory glance at the site of old Suzerain, Ifness took the boat into the air. Ahead, dull as lead in the light from the east, a great river mouth gaped into the mass of Caraz. Ifness named the river the Usak. At noon they passed the Bobol, and at midafternoon reached the mouth of the Keba, which Ifness identified by the chalk cliffs along the western shore and the trading post Erbol, five miles inland.
    Ifness swung south over the watercourse, here forty miles wide with three sun trails across the brimming surface. The river seemed to curve somewhat to the right, then at the horizon's verge it swept majestically back to the left. Three barges, minuscule from the height, floated on the face of the river, two inching upstream to the force of billowing square sails, another drifting downstream with the current.
    "The charts are of small benefit henceforth," said Ifness. "Kreposkin mentions no settlements along the middle Keba, although he refers to the Sorukh race, a warlike folk who never turn their backs in battle." Etzwane studied Kreposkin's rude maps. "Two thousand miles south along the river, into the Burnoun district: that would take us about here, to the Plain of Blue Flowers."
    Ifness was not interested in Etzwane's opinions. "The maps are only approximations," he said crisply. "We will fly a certain distance, then undertake a local investigation. " He closed the book and turning away became absorbed in his own thoughts.
    Etzwane smiled a trifle grimly. He had become accustomed to Ifness' mannerisms and no longer allowed himself to become wrathful. He went forward and looked out over the tremendous purple forests, the pale-blue distances, the bogs and swamps of mottled green, and, dominating the landscape, the flood of the river Keba. Here was where he had come, to wild Caraz, because he feared staleness and insipidity. What of Ifness? What had urged the fastidious Ifness to such vicissitudes? Etzwane started to ask the question, then held his tongue; Ifness would give a mordant answer, with Etzwane none the better informed.
    Etzwane turned and looked south, into Caraz, where so many mysteries awaited illumination.
    The boat