The Silver Lake Read Online Free PDF

retreat. Seeing Brax and Spar was always good for a laugh, he thought, especially on a dark and grubby day like today. Fishing through his pockets, he pulled out a bag of dried figs, popping one into his mouth, before turning to his companion.
    “I guess they remember last autumn,” he said with a wicked chuckle, tossing a fig into the air. It was snatched up by a passing gull and he tipped his head in acknowledgment of its skill. “I wonder if their abayos does,” he wondered idly.
    Beside him, Drove snickered. “Him? Not likely, he could hardly see straight, he was so drunk.”
    “He could hardly even see crooked,” Graize added. “He was facedown in the dust.” He snickered at the memory. The sight of Cindar lying, snoring, on the street had been too good an opportunity to ignore. Brax and Spar had come running a few moments later but not before he and Drove had striped the man of his purse, his belt, and his knife. They’d have had his sandals off as well if a troop of garrison guards hadn’t appeared around the corner, forcing them to make a run for it. Brax had sworn he’d get even with them, but Graize had just laughed at him from the safety of a winding close. Brax was no threat to either of them and Spar was only a child.
    He began to laugh again, his gray eyes paling until the pupils stood out like jet-black dots, giving him an unfocused, otherworldly gaze as he remembered the look on Brax’s face just now. A passing butcher’s delinkos whistled appreciatively at him and he smiled back at her with an easy grace, used to the attention. Light brown hair was unusual among the Anavatanon, gray eyes even more so. The priests of Oristo who’d raised him until he’d run away at the age of eight had believed he had Volinski blood and had treated him kindly but distantly. The leader of the pack of young lifters he’d made a place for himself in had believed Incasa was sending him visions that were slowly leaching the color from his eyes, and had treated him like a respected seer.
    Graize didn’t care which, if either, were true. He believed in himself and his ability to get whatever he wanted from people. If their beliefs helped him to do that, then they could think whatever they liked. He knew he would be rich one day. And powerful. He’d seen it. He’d dreamed it, and he always got what he wanted in his dreams.
    He bared his teeth in the direction Brax and Spar had retreated. What he wanted from most people was their shine, but what he wanted from Spar was the acknowledgment that he was the stronger seer; from Brax ... he paused. He wasn’t sure what he wanted from Brax, submission certainly—the cocky little bastard always acted as if he were better than everyone else—but whether he wanted submission in friendship or in enmity he was never quite sure. The conflict confused him and confusion made him angry, so he usually chose enmity. He knew that Brax and he would make a powerful team; he’d dreamed that, too. He’d even told the ungrateful little jerk that last summer when Spar lay dying from an infected injury and Cindar was too drunk to do anything about it, but Brax had been too scared to leave them. If Spar had died, he might have pried him away, but Spar had recovered and Brax had turned his back on Graize’s offer. He thought he didn’t need him, but that was going to change soon enough; Graize could feel it.
    Maybe, he thought spitefully, he should change it for him. If he knifed Cindar the next time the drunken old fart fell down in the street, Brax would have no choice but to come crawling to him. And he needed him to come, crawling or not. Brax was key, somehow, to either his own prosperity or his obscurity. Graize hated to admit it, but he’d dreamed that as well. Brax was key.
    Something flickered past his vision and he glanced about suspiciously, but when nothing untoward presented itself, he shook it off. Probably nothing more than a passing harbinger of rain, he decided.
    Or a