The Lion of Senet Read Online Free PDF

message,” he added sternly.
    “But her disasters affect everyone, the ones who follow her and those who don’t. Why doesn’t she just do something to the sinners and leave the rest of us alone?”
    Ateway glared at Dirk for a moment then shook his head. “You should ask a Shadowdancer that sort of question.”
    “Haven’t you ever asked them?”
    “Of course not!”
    “Why not?”
    Ateway was saved from having to reply by the shout of one of the soldiers who had gone on ahead to inspect the tangled debris caught in the felled trees bordering the farmland. Dirk temporarily abandoned his quest for spiritual enlightenment and hurried toward the soldier who was ripping away the branches and shattered planks from the wreckage to uncover the body beneath. Dirk dropped to his knees and placed his ear to the man’s chest.
    “He’s dead,” he announced, looking up at Ateway. “And as cold as a fish. If someone was alive down here, it wasn’t this man.”
    “There’ll be more of them around,” Ateway agreed with a nod. “We should get help to bury them.”
    “Let’s find the survivor first,” Dirk suggested.
    They worked through the morning to uncover the victims of the shipwreck. They found eighteen bodies before Ateway gave a shout to indicate that he had discovered one still breathing. The soldiers laid the dead men out in a row along the black sand as they uncovered them. They were barefoot and roughly dressed, but nothing they wore gave any hint as to the identity of their unnamed ship. They were thin, too, as if they had been at sea for some time, or perhaps they were just generally undernourished. Their injuries ranged from multiple shattered bones to one young boy no older than Dirk, who didn’t have a mark on him. They were Baenlanders, he guessed. He’d heard it was a struggle to survive in the Baenlands. It was the reason so many of them took to piracy.
    “Goddess, I can’t believe this one’s not dead!”
    Dirk hurried over to where Ateway was kneeling over the body of a dark-haired man whose left leg was twisted at an unnatural angle. His arms were broken, his face was covered in blood from a savage gash over his left eye and his left shoulder appeared to be dislocated. But his chest rose and fell with surprising regularity. He was unconscious, and would no doubt awake to unbearable agony, but unless his wounds turned septic, or he was suffering from internal injuries, Dirk judged that he would probably live.
    “We’ll need splints,” he told the Senetians. “And a stretcher. And something for the pain. When he wakes up, it’s going to be pretty horrible.”
    Ateway nodded and ordered one of the soldiers to head back to the levee wall for help. Dirk gingerly turned his attention back to his patient and examined him more closely.
    He was not a particularly big man, but he was well muscled, tanned and obviously fit from a life spent on the deck of a ship. His dark hair was flecked with gray at the temples, and Dirk guessed the sailor was well into middle age. Dirk was not skilled enough to tell if he had more serious injuries. For that reason, he hesitated to move him, afraid that he might make things worse. He’d seen that happen last year, when one of the grooms had been thrown hard from a horse to the cobbled stones of the Keep’s courtyard. His friends had rushed to help him up and now the poor boy couldn’t feel a thing below his armpits.
    Dirk was suddenly very sorry he’d volunteered to come along. This man needed Master Helgin’s skills, not his own rudimentary knowledge of healing.
    He sat back on his heels and stared down at the man. “I wonder who he is?”
    Ateway laughed humorlessly. “The luckiest sod on Ranadon, that’s who he is.”
    Dirk didn’t reply. With a dislocated shoulder, at least three broken bones that he could see, a nasty head wound, and the Goddess alone knew how many internal injuries,
lucky
was a very relative term.
    Tovin Rill arranged for a wagon to