The Carnelian Throne Read Online Free PDF

somewhere along the Isanisa, lost when he had fallen, rolling heedless down the bank with the screams of the opening Spirit Gate in his ears.
    The speaker raised his weapon away from his body. The woman stared at him levelly, through eyes the color of smelting copper. In the shadows, they shone bright, like the night-stalking eyes of the ptaiss. The male spoke sharply to her. She retreated slowly toward the fire. No mortal womb had spawned, those eyes, nor skin that glowed like marsh gas.
    Only then did he notice the dark one, hovering behind his male companion. By the sheathing of his blade, the movement of his form through the night as he turned away to purposefully approach the fire and the slaughtered ptaiss, was Deilcrit suddenly conscious of his retreating presence.
    “No!” It came out of him an inarticulate sob, tremulous and hoarse. Leaping wide of the lighter man, he sprinted toward the ptaiss.
    He heard them shouting in his own language as he bounded the hillock. Cutting through the edges of his fire itself, he cursed his slowness, his cowardice. His feet, among the live coals, blistered through his rude boots.
    But he reached her before her defiler. Aama, of the silvery, softest fur, whose breath smelled of new morning and whose black-tufted ears had always been the first to hear him. She would hear no more. How vulnerable is the desolated body in death. How empty he felt, kneeling beside her. Her eyes reproached him. Did they follow? He touched her muzzle, lifted her head in his arms. Then he saw, holding the inert weight against his chest, the extent of her wounds. Above him, far off, he heard their footsteps. Their shadows crowded out the firelight. He buried his face in the ptaiss’ fur, to smell one last time of her. The hair, loosed in death, came away under his hands. She was still warm. Once more he conjured up life in her. Then he laid her head back gently upon the ground. His hands, surely his face, were covered with blood and fur. He tried to close her eyes. She would not allow it, but stared mournfully.
    The intruders were talking. He heard it as the buzzing of insects, far off. By the ptaiss’ belly lay the knife the dark one had used to loosen her hide from her flesh. He snatched it up, fingers clumsy on its hilt. Then, taking a deep breath, he straddled her swollen belly, leaning down.
    If it could be, he would ask nothing else, as long as he lived.
    As he cut her, deep, he prayed that they would not obstruct him. Then he totally forgot them. He was with Parpis. It was not he, but Parpis who made the incision, sure and true, who endured the gush of blood and fluid from her ravaged belly, and the smell of preborn life. His eyes watched his hands, sunk up to the elbows inside her; but it was his fingers which saw. What he touched in that hot, yielding darkness, moved. He recited the laws beneath his breath, but he did not know it. He knew bone sliding in its membranous sac; then the beslimed head, then the forequarters—and the cord. The cord, once grasped, must be held firmly between the fingers, whispered the shade of Parpis in his ear. But alone, he had not enough hands, not for keeping the head down and the cord pressed and ... A third hand reached, beside his, attending the umbilical. Both his own hands freed, he pulled forth the slippery form. He knew that the other cut the bond between dead and living, even as the hindquarters and tail appeared.
    With his fingers and his lips and tongue, he cleared the mucus from the ptaissling’s eyes and nostrils. As he did so, it mewled. Other hands were upon it. He paid them no mind. He stroked its matted fur with handfuls of grass. It kicked a leg weakly. Its black muzzle sniffed, coughed, began a blind searching. He lifted its quaking warmth in his arms, pulled it across his kneeling body. He pressed its head against Aama’s cooling teat, aware of the futility in what he did. He turned, then, to see if the miracle could be repeated.
    The lighter of