The Carnelian Throne Read Online Free PDF Page B

the two men, arms bloody to the elbows, knelt so close to him that their knees touched. He could hear the smacks of the ptaissling’s lips, suckling Aama’s fast-cooling milk.
    The man, as if Deilcrit’s question had been spoken aloud, shook his head, spreading his arms wide. They were awful in the firelight. He again shook his head, and Deilcrit understood that Aama’s womb held no more miracles.
    Halfheartedly he sluiced the blood and mucus from his own forearms and turned away. The ptaissling pumped Aama, making little frustrated sounds. How much milk can come from a lifeless breast? He did not know, but sense told him; little. He leaned over it, guiding the searching mouth to Aama’s second udder. He blinked back tears. In the firelight, the little one gleamed black. And huge. A young male, overyoung, perhaps too young to survive this untimely introduction into life. He stroked it, not wanting more than its warmth and to feel the life coursing in it.
    He shifted, ripping up more grass with which to dry its matted fur. It shivered. He murmured to it. Was it for this his life had been spared? He crouched down over the shaking form, trying to warm it with his body.
    He did not notice the woman until she was on her hands and knees at his side, holding out the garment she had worn. He was too stunned to even avert his eyes. He took from her the damp, supple leather, and with it rubbed the remaining placenta from the ptaissling. Once more he moved its suckling head, to the third of Aama’s teats.
    It was then that the man’s hand came down upon his shoulder, digging, insistent. Man? Not man. He pushed them from his mind. They had murdered Aama, yet one had helped him save her only child. What, what, what?
    “Who are you?” said the creature, murderer and midwife both. His head, of its own accord, raised up to meet that fearsome, scarred countenance. He wondered what kind of spirit could be so marked, and what adversary might have inflicted those wounds. Then all rational thought stopped for him. His eyes, once in the grasp of the other’s, were entrapped. He could not look away. The power of the being was too great. His hand sought the newborn’s head, rested there.
    “Come into the light,” the man-fleshed spirit ordered, lifting him up with a grip that dug like iron into his arm. The eyes holding him narrowed.
    “The ptaissling,” he pleaded. “Do not kill it. You will not kill it?” He knew that he weaved in the man-spirit’s grip, and that his voice trembled. The bloody hand holding him did not relax. “Please, the ptaissling ...”
    “I will watch it,” said the woman, low, hovering close. Or at least she seemed to say that. Unhanding him, the man-form, with flicks of his gleaming knife, repeated his order. Even as the blade disappeared in its scabbard, Deilcrit, like one in a dream, complied. His feet were uncertain on the hillock’s slope. Weight upon them caused pain, pain caused dizziness, dislocation, disregard of all else. He stumbled through a tuft and found himself leaning upon the other for support.
    Dazzled, this close to the firelight, detached from the blaze of his blistered feet by the cocoon of returning fright, he stopped, blinking, at the other’s command. His eyes strayed to the disembowled ptaiss, to the woman-form, and to the black shadow of the ptaissling.
    “Look at me.”
    With a strangled sob, he did so, turning to his tormentor, submitting once again to that gaze which turned bones to powder, muscle to jelly, mind to prayer. Slowly the man wiped his arms of Aama’s blood. Then he nodded at Deilcrit, and smiled, and indicated that he should sit.
    He collapsed on the ground, as if the other’s will had been all that held him upright. He heard a voice, and knew it his: reciting the laws from rote in the old tongue.
    “Stop,” said the man-form. “I cannot understand that.”
    Deilcrit stared. Cannot? If not from the lawgivers, then whence?
    “Who are you?” demanded his