The Wide World's End Read Online Free PDF Page B

striking out at Naevros and the second Khnauront with equal hostility. Did he have good reason? Or was he deranged?
    Naevros swung his sword so that the Khnauront still impaled on it was between Naevros and the other enemy. Then he kicked the impaled Khnauront on the chest with his right foot, and kept up the pressure with his foot until his sword was free from the closed mouth of the wound.
    The weaponless Khnauront danced with frantic hate, spinning around and around with his arms and one leg extended, striking with equal fervor at Naevros and his fellow Khnauront.
    The second Khnauront kept his tube or staff or whatever it was directed at the first Khnauront.
    The dry white lips of the Khnauront’s wound opened in his neck again and emitted a whistling hiss. He dropped to his bulbous skeletal knees. His head fell askew, nearly severed anew by the wound Naevros had made, which had so spectacularly healed and was now spectacularly unhealing.
    That was what the tube was for. It fed off life, the tal of the wounded or dying, and the Khnauronts were as prone to devour each other as anyone else.
    He threw the forked blade like a spear, straight into the slack, gaping mouth of the second Khnauront. The Khnauront flailed a bit and then ran straight at him, keeping the tube directed at his dying comrade.
    Naevros deflected the forked blade with his own and grabbed at the tube.
    The second Khnauront began a freakish dance much like the first had, only it had a weapon to stab with. But Naevros parried the forked blade with his own and kept his grip on the tube and spun against the Khnauront at every turn. Between the two of them, they soon snapped the Khnauront’s wrist and Naevros snatched the tube free in triumph.
    He turned the tube on the second Khnauront.
    Naevros didn’t expect anything to happen. Obviously, whatever the tube was, it didn’t take great intelligence to operate. These beasts (he could no longer think of them as even approximately human) clearly had none to spare. But he expected that they were in rapport with the instruments, somehow, that one couldn’t just pick up one and use it.
    But, as it turned out, he was wrong about that.
    The shock of new life rushing into him was almost more than he could stand. All of a sudden he was many people, many voices. He saw their lives and deaths. He could do all that they could do; he knew all that they knew.
    And then he was the master and they were all and forever part of him. He knew the Khnauront kneeling before him had been a farmboy until extreme poverty forced the farmer to fire all his workers. The ex-farmboy had returned in the middle of the night, using his knowledge of the house, and stolen one of the children. He ate it with great satisfaction over the next few days. Then, as there was no other place for him in the world, he had joined the Khnauronts.
    Then all the other voices, all their knowledge and their suffering and joys were gone. He could not get in contact with them any more than he could get in contact with his liver: they were that ineluctably a part of him. But their strength was now his.
    He turned away from the fallen Khnauronts, both dead now, and went to Morlock’s side of the hill.
    There is no time in a match with the sword; that was one of the things Naevros loved about fighting. Each moment is an eternity leading to another.
    But the night was darker, significantly darker, than it had been. He guessed his duel against the Khnauronts had taken some time. He was interested to see that Morlock had not killed even one of his opponents yet.
    Naevros usually preferred sex with women, as often as he could get it, but he considered himself a connoisseur of male beauty. As such, he usually had little regard for Morlock, a man without commanding height or any other particular charm in his appearance or manner.
    But what Morlock could make that misshapen body do was indeed remarkable. The strength he could command! The grace with