The Fall of Neskaya Read Online Free PDF Page B

over Coryn’s belly. Light glinted on the tip, now whole and needle-sharp, the broken bit filled in with blue glass which glowed eerily from within.
    Coryn glanced around wildly, hoping for something he could use to defend himself. In an instant, he was no longer in his bedchamber. A vast gray emptiness, more barren than anything he could imagine, stretched out endlessly in all directions. He felt neither warmth nor chill, nor any substance beneath him. Overhead stretched an equally formless sky, lighter gray and unchanging as far as he could see. The place was empty except for himself and the gray-robed visitor.
    The tip of the dagger slid into his body with only a pin-prick of pain. He felt it pierce his skin, his muscles, right down to his spinal column and deeper still. In that instant he knew it would not kill him, yet every nerve, every fiber of his body rebelled. With that new ability, he sensed a wrongness beyond words. His vision went white.
    With a twist and a slash, the dagger sliced open his belly. He could not see, but he felt something being placed in his very depths.
    The handkerchief! With my hair—and whose? Why? Why?
    Bits of thought and memory swirled around him, as if he had been caught in a shower of embers from an exploding resin-tree. Something deep within him tore loose from its roots.
    Coryn screamed soundlessly and tried to arch away. Anything, anything to get away, to not feel that terrible wrenching wrongness . He hurled himself this way and that, blind in his desperation.
    A corridor appeared suddenly before him. He bolted down it. The walls folded themselves around him, surrounded him on all sides. A soft gray blanket settled over him, as he became one with the substance of the walls. At last, he was safe. If he could not get out, then no one and nothing could enter. Nothing could reach inside him.
    The next moment, the dagger was gone. Hands pushed the edges of his wound together. Unearthly warmth surged along the cut, fusing the edges. He drew a deep, shuddering breath. There was no pain. For one long moment after another, there was nothing except his own breathing. Silence and numbness bathed him.
    Dimly, distantly, he felt the hands withdraw. In a body which was no longer his, the fiery streams faded into coolness.
    The hooded figure bent near, until a breath whispered on his cheek.
    “You will say nothing of this. Nothing.”
    NOTHING . . . NOTHING . . .
    Then true darkness took him.

3
    B right sun woke Coryn the next day. He opened leaden eyelids and studied the slant of the light. It must be well into midmorning. Why had he slept so late?
    He heaved himself up on one elbow and wondered for a wild moment if he had been abed with lung fever, which he’d had when he was six. Sour cobwebs lined his mouth. He was where he should be, in his own bedroom with the same gray-and-pink smooth-cut stone walls hung with the same ancient tapestries of the legend of Hastur and Cassilda. Ruella, his old nurse, said they were woven by Great-aunt Ysabet, who never married and lived to be ninety-two, enough years to supply a castle twice this size with tapestries.
    He lay in his own familiar bed, with the running stag which was the Leynier emblem carved into the headboard, wearing his own nightshirt. Yet . . . he had no memory of having gotten here.
    Someone had brought in a folding table bearing a platter of fruit and drybread, a bowl with two brown eggs, and a tankard of lukewarm water laced with tonic herbs. He suspected Tessa’s hand in the bitter-tasting water. She’d think it just the kind of wholesome thing to give someone who’d been sick last night—
    Last night!
    Coryn’s hands flew to his abdomen. When he pulled the shirt up, he saw no trace of a scar. He touched only whole, healthy skin. Had it all been a dream? The formless gray plain, the intruder, the dagger —
    He bolted across the room for the dark wooden chest. Throwing himself on his knees, he jerked the lid open. He pulled out