The Blood Debt Read Online Free PDF Page A

you don’t already know — and I’m certain you asked — then I will not break her confidence.’

    ‘Tell me,’ Skender insisted, leaning over the table to confront his father nose to nose. ‘I’m not leaving this room until you do.’

    ‘And if I do tell you? What then?’

    Skender was startled by the alarm in his father’s voice, but he didn’t let that deter him. ‘You know what I’ll do. And I know you want her back as badly as I do. So let’s just get it over with. If we’re both wrong and she turns up safe and sound tomorrow, I’ll never let on.’

    The Mage had capitulated then, looking older than Skender had ever seen him. He also was trapped, pressured by law and custom and plain good sense to abandon his wife to her fate, yet hating the thought of it as much as Skender.

    ‘A city called Laure.’

    ‘Where?’

    ‘On the Divide.’

    His stomach clenched. ‘Don’t tell me! She wouldn’t be so stupid. Would she?’

    His father neither nodded nor shook his head. ‘Your mother may be many things, Skender, but stupid isn’t one of them. She claimed to know what she was doing. All I could do was believe her.’

    Skender couldn’t credit what he was hearing. Many dangerous things had walked the Earth since the Cataclysm and the early days of the Change. Most of them came from — or had been herded into — the Divide, a vast crack across the landscape separating the underground desert cities of the Interior from the coastal villages of the Strand. Deeper and wider than an ordinary canyon, the Divide had been made centuries ago for purposes unknown. Many people had died in the attempt to plumb its mysteries. Their ghosts, legends said, wailed in despair from the cliff faces, echoing from one side to the other. Trapped forever.

    He tore his mind from the image of his mother caught in such a trap and found himself standing in the middle of his father’s chambers with his hands hanging limply at his sides. He felt as though he had woken in the middle of sleepwalking.

    His father’s hand came down on his shoulder. He looked up into the Mage’s face, for once not resentful of the fact that their heights weren’t equal. It felt good to be towered over. He longed to be held, as though that alone would solve everything.

    ‘You’ll need these,’ his father said, pressing something cold and sharp-edged into his hand.

    He looked down at a ring of keys. ‘The buggy?’

    ‘I can’t give you anything else. The Synod won’t support a rescue mission; I’ve tried to make them, and they won’t listen.’

    ‘But —’

    ‘Go now. Forget about your homework. Some things are simply more important.’

    More important than homework? That the idea had ever occurred to his father, let alone issued from his mouth, impressed on Skender just how serious the situation was. He hurried to his room, threw everything he thought he might need into a satchel, and ran to where the buggy rested in its makeshift garage. It was fully fuelled and provisioned for a long journey. The smell of fresh oil was testimony to the fact that it had recently been serviced.

    As he swung himself into the seat and started the engine, he realised that his father had been thinking of going himself.

    ‘I’ll bring her home,’ he whispered over the roaring of the motor. ‘Don’t worry.’

    That promise had kept him going for two thousand kilometres, across desert and ancient hills, to where Laure crouched like a child playing hide-and-seek in a corner of the Divide, with only the tips of its tarnished towers peeking into view.

    * * * *

    ‘So you followed her trail to where the porters left her,’ Chu said over the lip of a tiny, porcelain cup. Coffee as black and potent as any Skender had tasted left black grains on her teeth. Around them, the walled New City bustled and blustered its way through the day. Robed traders hurried back and forth along constricted alleyways, their heads wrapped in white cloth. Animals