The Raven's Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page A

he was caught in the crushing grip of asphyxia, then his chest heaved in a breath. Another, and the clutching panic retreated, the pulse pounding in his ears began to slow. Weak with relief, he slumped on the pallet and sucked in lungful after lungful of the arid air as if it was as sweet and cold as Leahn spring-water.
    Dear Goddess in heaven, he felt as if he’d been flung down a flight of stairs. His hip and thigh ached; so did the back of his head, and his right side was throbbing. He put a hand to it and found he was shirtless, his ribs snugly bandaged. Someone had taken care of him, but he had only the vaguest recollection of recent events. Flames, and falling, then nothing but bad dreams.
    Propping himself carefully on his elbows, he looked around. The light was too dim to make out much more than vague, blocky shapes stacked waist high. There was a sense of space above him, a suggestion of beams in the shadows overhead, and a dusty, dry-wood scent to the air. From somewhere out of his line of sight he heard a susurrus that might have been voices, and soft scuffling sounds, like mice behind a wainscot.
    Memory returned in broken pieces. Silver blades and yellow sashes. A flight of sparrows. The skirling, surging power of the Song turned to sawtoothed discord, and then flames.
    There’d been flames inside his head, too, and they’d left his thoughts raw and tender as burns. He rubbed his eyes wearily. Even they ached.
    ‘So you live,’ said a woman’s voice from above him.
    He looked up. A young Gimraeli woman in a stained and soot-dappled barouk sat cross-legged on a pile of grain sacks next to his pallet, her kaif looped carelessly around her neck. Her name was Tierce, he remembered. She was eating a peach, levering pieces off the stone with the blade of her knife; between slices, she flicked the dripping knife through her fingers as if she was unable to sit entirely still.
    ‘After a fashion,’ Gair said, twisting around on the pallet so he could lean back against the wall, too tired and sore to hold himself up any more. ‘What is this place?’
    ‘We are not far from the Lion Gate. This warehouse belongs to a friend of ours. You can shelter here for a few hours, then travel on at dusk.’ She bit into a piece of peach. Back and forth went the knife, sticky blade gleaming.
    ‘Thank you.’
    She shrugged. ‘Consider it payment for all the Cultists you gave us to kill.’ Holding out a tin plate of cheese and fruit, she added, ‘The sisters say you must eat. When your wound opened it cost you some blood. You need red meat to make more, but this is all we have.’
    He took the plate but had no appetite for the cheese, and contented himself with a handful of grapes. Their juice soothed his dry throat.
    ‘Where are the others? Are they meeting us here?’
    The desertwoman refused to meet his gaze, focusing instead on the peach in her hand. As she pried another slice off the stone, her barouk sleeve fell back, revealing a bandage on her forearm. A sudden unease prickled down Gair’s spine.
    ‘Tierce?’
    ‘My brother sent me to fetch the rest of our cadre to help retrieve those books that your friend was so wedded to,’ she said shortly. ‘When we returned, the Daughterhouse was lost.’
    For a heartbeat it didn’t register in his smoke-fogged brain. ‘Lost?’
    ‘Lost!’ Her voice rose in pitch. ‘Taken! In flames! How many ways do you want me to say it?’
    More memories. A column of smoke in a blue sky, and a woman’s voice, low, afraid. They may have escaped . Tierce jabbed words at him like spears, and his mind flinched from them even as his imagination showed him the street door hacked to pieces, the burning lean-to that had fired the stables and the Cultist torches that had fired the rest. Roofs and floors, the carved vaulting in the chapel, all gone; only blackened stone remained. Of Alderan and her brother Canon there had been no sign.
    Her hand began to tremble around the hilt of her knife.