The Swords of Corium Read Online Free PDF Page B

her ear. Her hair smelled of dust. “We don’t know who these people are.”
    Nadja stopped struggling, but when he caught sight of her face, he saw she was glaring at him. He removed his hand from her face.
    “I almost bit you,” she said. “You don’t want me to bite you, Gruum.”
    “Sorry, but I—”
    “I know who they are,” Nadja said. “I’ve been here often. The priestesses are here, working on their great project.”
    Gruum eased her back onto her feet. “Sorry. Just the priestesses, you say? Not the carts or the walking dead?”
    Nadja grinned. There was a dark delight that danced in her eyes. “Oh no, there are dead, and there are carts. They bring their loads here to this spot. And there is one other. Someone special. Come, I will show you!”
    She trotted off again, giggling. Gruum chewed his lower lip, gazing after her. He really didn’t want to see anything new. He’d seen enough, and he hadn’t liked any of it. But he had accepted Therian’s assignment, so he felt he must see it through to the finish. He’d said he would find her, and would a father not want to know what his daughter had been up to? With a heavy heart, he followed the child toward the mausoleum.
    The outer part of the great structure was white marble. Open columns held up a slab of thicker marble. The huge slab formed a roof, a single piece of stone, mottled-gray and unimaginably heavy. Gruum was reminded of an acropolis.
    The priestesses were surprised to see him. There were dozens here, bustling about. They dragged pallets full of oddments. Strips of what looked like tanned leather. Mounds of thick dishes—or were they seashells? Stacked shafts of thick… Gruum stopped and stared.
    “Are those bones?” he asked a passing priestess.
    She flicked her eyes to him, then to Nadja. “You do not belong here. Leave us to our work, for the good of Corium.”
    “I am the King’s man, on the King’s business,” Gruum said.
    “Long live the King,” muttered the priestess. She pressed past them and kept going toward the central chamber. Behind her, she dragged a pallet of what had to be fifty gray-white shafts.
    “Of course they are bones, silly,” Nadja said. “And the leather strips are carved from the backs of the dead. Only their backs have long enough single pieces without folds or creases that weaken the leather.”
    “And those seashell things?” Gruum asked numbly.
    Nadja tapped herself on the top of the head. “They are skull caps.”
    Gruum nodded. They were indeed harvesting the dead. But for what strange purpose? He dared to stop another passing woman. She dragged behind her a mass of hair. It was uniformly long, straight and black. Perhaps fifty scalps had been scraped clean to create such a mound of hair.
    “Milady, excuse me,” Gruum said. “I am on the King’s—”
    “We know who you are.”
    “Well then, please direct me to your mistress.”
    She stared at him, glanced at the girl, then pointed a long finger toward a side chamber. Gruum turned and headed that way. He did not watch to see if Nadja followed. He knew now where she liked to play. He could find her again if she vanished.
    Inside the chamber, Gruum found an ancient crone. White hair hung down to drag upon the marble floors. Her bare feet shuffled from spot to spot as she walked around the chamber, touching various idols and gleaming instruments.
    “Priestess of Anduin,” Gruum began.
    She whirled on him, eyes wide and bulbous. He recoiled from her ancient, half-mad face. “You’ve gotten what you came for,” she said. “Leave us to our work.”
    “I serve King Therian. I would ask, in his name, for some description of your work which I might take back to him.”
    “Don’t you know by now? Or are you as thick as you appear?”
    “I believe you are harvesting the dead that wander here,” Gruum said. “I believe you are doing so to fashion a weapon for the defense of Corium.”
    The crone nodded. “Not as thick as I first