The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps Read Online Free PDF Page B

arm’s length, and much too long to ply for eating, hunting, or any use apart from war. Barkeem backed from some long-armed bandit who had two daggers, twin snakes, striking from either hand. Captain, in the act of drawing his sword, took the top off that bandit’s head. Crown and brow slid, widthwise, from cheeks and jowls. Walead and Xho Xho were in straits again. The captain flew to their salvation—not as some crow might, but his robes as black as wings, and covering the ground as swiftly.
    Demane killed the man he fought, and the hot excess of bandit’s blood provoked a vision, a moment of retrospect, or of some life unlived. Bangles, khol’d eyes, ankles chiming tiny bells. The captain’s naked torso, lithe and rippling. His thighs half-clad in gauze of gold, loins in leopard suede. Some history that might have been, or had been: the captain dancing for the Olorumi sovereign or Kidanese empress. When that august hand waved to clear a marble hall, one hot glance said to him:
You, stay
. Demane glimpsed shadows of a world forgone in Captain’s prosecution of the counterattack. Had nimble limbs turned to other purposes, had they cultivated a different grace. Demane saw some brother down.
    Faedou rolled apart from a throttled corpse, the dead man still clutching a knife driven into living flesh. Faedou pried off the futile grip, and plucked the blade from his thigh. On first and second attempt, he couldn’t stand. By the third, Demane had reached him and was kneeling. “Sorcerer . . . , ” Faedou panted shallowly, “ . . .
head up
!”
    Some mother’s son tilted downhill. About thirteen years old, maybe
twelve
, the bandit boy held his spear as mounted men hold a lance. There was time and space enough for Demane to throw his spear, but he didn’t. Even a moment later, his reach being much longer, Demane might have simply angled up his spear. Running headlong, the boy would have impaled himself on the point, like a chunk of meat on a skewer. Instead, Demane dropped his spear and caught the boy’s with one hand, just below the point.
    Though slowed, the boy wasn’t stopped. Faedou howled and curled like a beetle, his leg kicked or trod in the scuffle. Demane’s palm burned as the spearshaft greased down his bloodslick grip. The leverage was all wrong for him, perfect for the boy: on the downhill, speeding weight behind him, a two-handed grip. Demane had thrown his right and stronger hand back, braced to the ground, to keep himself from reeling ass over end. The child bore down, driving with desperate strength. Chapped lips snarling back from whitest teeth.
    This was not the way he’d thought he’d die. But as the spearpoint broke skin on his chest, Demane felt only sublime relief: TSIM. No one else’s son would die by his hands today, or ever again. Then
red gleamed,
sunlight on wet steel. Smitten off, the boy’s head flew, fell, rolled away downhill. Arterial jets from the stump spewed brighter amidst darker dribble. It listed, its knees buckled, and rather than drop the corpse went subsiding down in stages, to bow over and decant headless onto the sands. Captain—

    “No,
wait
!”
    Xho Xho grabbed Demane’s arm, swinging off his feet for a moment like a little monkey on a big branch. “We cain’t go in Mother of Waters like this. We gotta go in through
there.
” Through the great gates puncturing the squat tower on the east, the boy meant, pointing a finger thither. Thick as a man was tall, and painted over with bright murals, adobe ramparts walled only the eastern boundary of the Station. Demane would have led them into town up a shepherds’ path, on the south side.
    “Yeah, I know it’s strange, Sorcerer,” the boy said. “I can see what you mean about the walls. But the fo-so don’t play.” Xho Xho had been born at Mother of Waters—or in a tent outside the Station, anyway. “It’s the
rules
: caravans come in through the gates.”
    Foreign taboos
, Demane decided.
    He sent them on