The Swan Riders Read Online Free PDF

equalized: muscly, twisted ropes of shining and stretched membranes of dimming air. Radiating out from the ruin of Calgary, filling a quarter of the sky, they spread out behind Talis like huge wings. “Relax, FX. What’s safer than the middle of nowhere?”
    The middle of nowhere. The middle of Saskatchewan. The middle of my country.
    This was my country.
    I had been the heir to the crown of the Pan Polar Confederacy. Calgary was—had been—a PanPol city, an edge-of-the-empire garrison, and an important inland port with a small spaceport and a large zeppelin depot. There were even royal apartments near there, in the ancient, wild luxury of Banff. I had been to those apartments, slept there. Walked those streets. The people in Calgary were my people.
    There were fifty thousand of them.
    And they were gone.
    My face was numb and strange where Talis had touched it. At the edges of my electronic mind I could feel the brush of the weapons platforms, the surveillance satellites, speaking to me in a language I could not yet understand. In my fingertips I could feel the charged particles raining down from the ruined sky. It was—I was—
    I was crying.
    Talis frowned at me and made a little flourish with his hand, like a magician conjuring flowers. Very like that, because when he opened his hand there was something cupped in his palm: three little pills. A small enough thing to practice sleight of hand with, but it was impeccably done—certainly I hadn’t seen him do anything so mundane as reach into a pocket.
    â€œHow did you do that?”
    â€œI’m a trickster god.” He nudged the pills toward me across his palm, naming them one by one. “Muscle relaxant. Neurosheath repair agent. And a sleep aid. Take them. Tomorrow we need to ride.”
    â€œThank you,” I said. “But I think my mind is altered enough.”
    Sri made a noise that was not quite a snort—not with a dead city glowing on the horizon.
    â€œIt’s not a request.” Talis flashed his teeth. “And it’s not in your interest to slow us down.”
    There was too much in me, too much whirl in my mind, and yet there was a numb spot, somewhere in the middle of it. But Talis was right. If cities were being destroyed, we needed—Francis Xavier had said “refuge.”
    I needed refuge. So I flashed my teeth in my turn, and I took the drugs.
    The Swan Riders were both murderers. But that was nothing to what Talis was.

2
HOW TO SMILE WHILE ON FIRE
    I slept.
    Drugged sleep, chemical sleep, full of acidic dreams.
    So many. I dreamt of Calgary. Stepping off the lift at the zeppelin spire, my mother’s hand on my shoulder, the ground crew bowing . . .
    I dreamt the Precepture, my books and my narrow bed, the ropes that held my mattress creaking under me, and Xie—
    I dreamt my books and my narrow bed, and Xie, and the knock at the door that was the torturer coming to fetch me.
    I dreamt the queen my mother, who had let me be tortured, for her country, for my country, for Calgary. We were stepping off the lift with the zeppelin spire above us, her hand on my shoulder, the ground crew gathering, the light of the orbital weapon striking in slow motion, pouring down over us. With my new eyes I could see everything. I saw us skeleton.
    I dreamt I saw Xie.
    She was wrapped in red and yellow silk and crowned in a hundred draped strands of turquoise and red cinnabar and white bone beads. Xie, Li Da-Xia, arrayed for her throne. There was a rattle of rain on a glass ceiling, the scent of apples. The scent of a girl. Xie reached up and undid one of the looped beads of her headdress. The strand of turquoise swung loose like a braid and the beads spilled from it and dropped one by one to the floor. She undid another strand and it too fell free, and red and silver splashed around her, bead after bead falling free. Her headdress was undoing itself now, silver and cinnabar and coin, her dark