The Silver Door Read Online Free PDF

on their helmets bobbing. To one side, a small, plump figure in a plumed hat sat stiffly on a bored-looking black horse laden with red and gold trappings.
    Rye fidgeted. He knew that if he had seen this fine spectacle a few days ago, when he first came to the Keep, he would have found it very impressive. He would have gazed at it in awe, as the citizens ringing the courtyard were doing at this moment.
    But his time beyond the Wall had changed him, it seemed. All he felt now was a vague distaste. From above, the scene was almost comical. The soldiers looked like wind-up toys. The Warden looked like a doll stuffed with straw—a doll in a silly hat.
    â€˜I had forgotten,’ Dirk muttered, his eyes hard as he stared down. ‘I saw this ceremony when I first came here. The soldiers train for it, I was told, every morning six days a week. By the Wall, why do they bother? They might as well be folk dancing for all the good it does for Weld.’
    Rye glanced over his shoulder at Annocki. She was frowning, but whether this was because she resented Dirk’s criticism or because she agreed with it, he could not tell.
    Turning back to the window, he raised his eyes and looked over the courtyard to the city beyond. The view was strangely pale, as if it had been painted with inks that were too watery. Stubby trees dotted the edges of flat, straight roads. Squat little houses lined the roads as far as the eye could see, with frequent sad gaps, like missing teeth, where skimmers had struck.
    Rye suddenly understood how Sonia could have once mistaken a goat shelter for a house in the land beyond the golden Door. Looking down from this high tower, everything looked hunched, dull and small.
    Everything except the Wall. A towering, brooding presence, the Wall rose into the hazy sky, dwarfing everything within it, spreading like giant wings from both sides of the Keep and disappearing into the distance. Close beside it, raw and ugly, ran the trench from which the clay for new bricks was dug.
    Workers wearing bright yellow harnesses swarmed over the lower half of the Wall. The safety ropes netting the sheer clay surface trailed one minute and tightened the next as the men went about their work, mending and replacing, thickening and smoothing, busy and diligent as bees.
    Rye saw Faene rub the pane in front of her with her sleeve. She could not understand why everythinglooked so dim. She thought the window was clouded. Dirk was glancing at her uneasily. Perhaps he, too, was seeing his home with new eyes, and wondering if Faene of Fleet would ever be truly happy shut away inside the Wall.
    Very unsettled, Rye turned away. And it was then he realised that Sonia and Annocki were whispering furiously at one another behind his back.
    â€˜Sonia, you ask too much!’ he heard Annocki hiss. ‘You cannot expect me to—’
    â€˜Do not fuss, Nocki!’
    â€˜Fuss?
Sonia, you are impossible! Can you not consider my feelings for one moment? Put yourself in my position!’
    And abruptly Rye remembered just what that position was. The Warden had promised his daughter’s hand in marriage to any volunteer who succeeded in saving Weld. Annocki was to have no choice in the matter. She was just part of the prize.
    How she must have loathed seeing the volunteers streaming into the Keep when the Warden’s notices about the quest first went up all over the city. How she must have cringed to think that one of these men was to be her husband whether she liked it or not—and even if he did not want her.
    She was no doubt sickened by the very sight of Rye and Dirk, let alone by the idea of helping them. And as for Faene, the barbarian beauty Dirk so plainly loved …
    â€˜It will not be for long, Nocki!’ Sonia whispered. ‘Rye, Dirk and I will leave again in the morning, and with luck I will be back very soon, to give you the best of news, and the Warden the shock of his life!’
    Annocki shook her head. Her