The Legend of Broken Read Online Free PDF Page B

Baster-kin.”
    “Ban-chindo …” Arnem strides deliberately up and down the thick stone wall. “It is now past the Moonrise: the middle of the night. Do you know the master of the Merchants’ Council, by chance?”
    “He is a legendary patriot!” Ban-chindo snaps his spear again.
    “You’ll bruise yourself, boy,” Arnem says, “if you can’t bridle your enthusiasm. Yes, Lord Baster-kin is indeed a patriot.” The sentek has an unusual respect for Broken’s Merchant Lord, despite the tensions and rivalries that have ever existed between the Merchants’ Council and the leaders of Broken’s army. Yet he knows, as well, that Baster-kin is a short-tempered man, and he shares this fact with Pallin Ban-chindo: “But his lordship is also given to working all hours of the night, and he does not suffer trivial concerns lightly. Now, shall I barge into his residence, where he is doubtless poring over ledgers and accounts, and start slapping my own spear about like some dog-bitten lunatic, † saying, ‘Excuse me, my lord, but Pallin Ban-chindo has seen several torches moving toward your plain, and believes that something must be done right away—even though your Personal Guard
do
patrol the area’?”
    The pallin lets the spear drift, staring at the stone walkway. “No …”
    “How’s that?”
    Ban-chindo straightens. “No, Sentek,” he replies. “It’s only—”
    “It’s only the boredom, Ban-chindo. Nothing more.”
    The young soldier looks Arnem in the eye. “You know …?”
    Arnem nods slowly, looking first to his left and the nearest turreted guard tower, then to his right, at a similar squat stone structure some fifty feet away. Near each of these, a young man much like Pallin Ban-chindo stands vigilant. Arnem lets out a leaden sigh. “We’ve been a long time at peace, Ban-chindo. Eight years since the end of the Torganian war. And now …” The sentek leans against the rough parapet. “Now our best hope of action is to fight a tribe of scavengers half our size, in a cursed forest that only a dwarf could master and a fool would attack.” He hammers a fist gently on the surface of the parapet. “Yes, Ban-chindo. I understand your boredom …”
    And only wish I truly shared it,
Arnem muses silently. He reminds himself again that there is no reason for the commander of the Talons to be standing guard duty, and concentrates his attention on the area in the distance where those terribly small lights danced so briefly, hoping they will reappear, and that some warlike crisis will arise to keep his mind from the troubling personal thoughts that have gnawed at him for days. But the lights are gone, and the sentek turns in disappointment to look out over the city that stretches away before him.
    Broken lies largely asleep, waiting for the day of feverish trading that will begin with the dawn. From this vantage, Arnem has an unobstructed view of the marketplaces and merchants’ houses of the Second and Third Districts, the largest sections of the city, at this hour all dim and serene. Farther to the north, in the wealthy First District, such respite is unknown: six-foot-high oil and coal braziers burn perpetually outside the High Temple of Kafra, fed day and night by diligent acolytes. Arnem’s soul is thrown into deeper turmoil at the sight of it, and he seeks solace in the Fourth District, where the main force of the army of Broken is quartered, and then in his own Fifth District, its nighttime peace riven by those who have failed in the fierce competition of the marketplaces and can find solace only in drink.
    The distant roar of a crowd erupts, and Arnem looks northward again, to the city Stadium, which stands just beyond the Temple and, for more years than the sentek can remember, has been ordered open and active day and night. Arnem has often been assured that the development of physical prowess and beauty so essential to the worship of Kafra is facilitated by sporting competitions; while