The Burning City Read Online Free PDF Page B

scrawny alien scrub grew along the edges of black water a quarter of a mile on a side, and nobody lived there at all. He’d heard tales of shadowy monsters here. All he saw were pools that gleamed like water, darker than any water he’d ever seen.
    A palisade fence surrounded the Pit, more a message than a barrier. A graveled wagon road led into it through a gate that Whandall was sure he could open. The fence was regular, flawless, too fine even for kinless work. Kinless working under the eyes of Lords might make such a thing.
    Such offensive perfection made it a target. Whandall wondered why Lordkin hadn’t torn it down. And why did Lords want people kept away? He saw no monsters, but he sensed a malevolent power here.
    The distant harbor drew him more powerfully yet. He saw a ship topped by a forest of masts. That was escape, that was the way to better places, if he could learn of a way past the Water Devils.
    Ahead and to the right was a wall taller than any man. Houses two and three stories tall showed above the wall. Palaces! They were larger than he’d dreamed.
    The street went past an open gate where two armed men stood guarding a barrier pole. They looked strange. Their clothing was good but drab and they were dressed nearly alike. They wore daggers with polished handles. Helmets hid their ears. Spears with dark shafts and gleaming bronze spearheads hung on brackets near where they stood. Were they armed kinless? But they might be Lordkin.
    A wagon came up from the harbor and went to the gate. The horses seemed different, taller and more slender than the ponies he saw in Tep’s Town. When it reached the gate, the guards spoke to the driver, then lifted the barrier to let the wagon in. Whandall couldn’t hear what they said to each other.
    If the guards were kinless, they wouldn’t try to stop a Lordkin. Would they? He couldn’t tell what they were. They acted relaxed. One drank from a stone jar and passed it to the other. They watched Whandall without much curiosity.
    The gate was near a corner of the wall. Whandall became worried when he saw the guards were looking at him. There was a path that led along the wall and around the corner out of sight of the guards, and he went alongthat, shuffling as boys do. The guards stopped watching him when he turned away from the gate, and soon he was out of sight around the corner.
    The wall was too high to climb. The path wasn’t much used, and Whandall had to be careful to avoid the weeds and thorns. He followed the path until it led between the wall and a big tree.
    When he climbed into the tree he was glad he hadn’t tried to get over the wall. There were sharp things, thorns and broken glass, embedded in its top. One bough of the tree not only grew over the wall but was low enough that it had scraped the top smooth. That must have taken a long time, and no one had bothered to fix it.
    Mother’s Mother had told him that kinless believed in a place they called Gift of the King, a place across the sea where they never had to work and no Lordkin could gather from them. The other side of the wall looked like that. There were gardens and big houses. Just over the wall was a pool of water. A big stone fish stood above the pool. Water poured from the fish’s mouth into the pool and flowed out of the pool into a stream that fed a series of smaller pools. Green plants grew in those pools. There were both vegetable and flower gardens alongside the stream. They were arranged in neat little patterns, square for the vegetable gardens, complex curved shapes along curved paths for the flower beds. The house was nearly a hundred yards from the wall, two stories tall, square and low with thick adobe walls, as large as the Placehold. The Gift of the King, but this was no myth. The Lords lived better than Whandall could have imagined.
    It was late afternoon, and the sun was hot. There was no one around. Whandall had brought a dried crabapple to