The Skies Discrowned Read Online Free PDF Page B

the dust of the road.
    Frank backed away. Mr. Strand was right, he realized; hardly anybody can really fence. Since guns were rapidly becoming unavailable, the sword was coming back into fashion, but there had not yet been time for fencing strategy to become widely known. Mr. Strand was one of less than five hundred swordsmen in the Dominion who had really made a science of swordplay. Maybe, mused Frank, I was luckier than I knew when I practiced so many hours with Mr. Strand and his son in the academy.
    A breath of wind stirred Frank’s hair. I can’t rest quite yet, he realized. I’ve got to get down to the Malachi, find something to float on and then just relax while the old river carries me into Munson’s antique tangle of canals and alleys.
    He half-climbed, half-slid down the embankment on the south side of the road. His ear had stopped bleeding and only throbbed now, but his scraped knees and legs shot pain at him every time he bent them. Itwas an annoying pain, and it roused in him a powerful anger against the self-righteous Transports who had done this to him. And who killed your father, he reminded himself.
    He swore that if the opportunity ever presented itself, he would take some measure of revenge against the Transport and Duke Costa.
    He soon came to level ground—an expanse of slick clay soil, littered with rocks and thriving shrubs. He crossed this quickly and found himself standing at the top of a forty-foot cliff; below him, through a bed of white sand, flowed the green water of the Malachi. During the summer the river was a leisurely, curling stream, knotted with oxbows, but it was a spring breeze that now plucked at Frank’s tattered clothes, and the river was young and quick.
    The painstaking labor of ten minutes got him to the bottom of the cliff. After diving into the cool water and incautiously drinking a quantity of it, he set about looking for objects on which to float downstream. He found two warped wooden doors dumped behind a clump of bushes and decided to use these, one on top of the other, as a raft. If he sat up on it, he discovered, his raft had a tendency to flip over; but a passenger lying down had no difficulties. He tore a wide frond from one of the dwarf palm trees that abounded and used it to shade his face from the midmorning sun. Soon he was moving along with the current, and when he remembered Howard’s rapier it was too late to turn back to retrieve the weapon. He shrugged at the loss and drifted on, warmed by the sun above him, cooled by the water below, shaded by his palm frond, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion.
    Thus he drifted east, through the Madstone Marshes, under the towering marble spans of the Cromlech Bridge, and through the forests where the Goudy bandits reigned unquestioned. Any eyes that may have spied the makeshift raft felt that neither it nor its passenger looked worth bothering. By mid-afternoon the walls and towers of Munson rose massive ahead.
    At the western boundary of Munson, the Malachi divided in two; the first channel, its natural one, took it under the carved bridges and around the gondola docks, across the sandy delta to the Deptford Sea, sometimes called the Eastern Sea. The other channel, built two centuries previously by Duke Giroud, entered a great arched tunnel and passed underground, beneath the southern section of the city, to facilitate the disposal of sewage. The city had declined since Giroud’s day, and most of the sewers were no longer in use, but the southern branch of the Malachi River, the branch called the Leethee by the citizens, still flowed under Munson’s streets.
    Frank was still asleep when he drifted near the ancient gothic masonry of Munson’s high walls. Two arches loomed before him, foamsplashing between them where the waters parted. The great walls with their flying buttresses dwarfed even the couriers’ carracks that sometimes passed this way, and none of the river scavengers of the west end noticed as an unwieldy