To Conquer Chaos Read Online Free PDF

distinguished strangers to see the wise men,” he declared. “They come from the south, more distant than Hawgley!”
    A murmur went through the crowd. Waygan pursed his lips and looked at Yanderman, who said curtly, “I’m Jervis Yanderman of Esberg, trusted agent of the Grand Duke Paul, and these are my men.”
    Waygan studied them. What he saw impressed him. He bowed and rubbed his horny hands together. “Welcome to Lagwich, distinguished sir!” he purred. “I trust you’ve not had a false impression of our town from this no-good boy, whose mind is as grimy as his clothes. Come, I’ll escort you myself to our wise men—it’ll be a pleasure.”
    “I was taking them there!” Conrad objected. Waygan rounded on him.
    “You!” he snapped. “It was an ill chance that put you in their way, wasn’t it? Do you think fine visitors like these care to keep company with you, stinking of smoke and rancid grease? Get back to your soap-vats! You waste enough of the day in idling as it is!”
    “But—!”
    Conrad appealed with his eyes to the newcomers, but they did not respond; this was no concern of theirs. Several people in the crowd laughed mockingly. He scuffed in the dust with his foot.
    “Come!” Waygan said pompously, and fell in at Yanderman’s side where Conrad had been. When Conrad glanced back a few minutes later, on his lonely and miserable way back to his vats, they were going up the slope to the lowered drawbridge over the town’s ditches, and to his jaundiced eye it seemed that Waygan had grown twice as tall with inflating self-importance.

V

    “Stuck-up—” Conrad drew and scattered the fire from under his largest vat.
    “Conceited—” He tilted the vat on its foundation of round stones, using a wooden bar as a lever, so that the contents poured down the channels to the setting-pans.
    “ Blockhead !” he finished bitterly, and picked up the sack in which he was going to carry back a load of the unusually fine white soap he had boiled up yesterday. With his knife he divided the hard slabs into convenient handful-sized chunks and threw them in the sack as they were cut. He was on the point of turning away when something on the ground caught his eye. Why, it was the carving he had been making when the strangers appeared.
    Some grains of dirt had got embedded in it, but he could remedy that easily enough. He put down the sack, drew his knife again, and did so. Then he turned it over in his hands.
    There was something distinctly odd about it. It would pass for an attempted likeness of Idris, certainly, even though her cheeks were plumper than that and her lips not so fine. Yet, as he raised the knife to widen the lips a little, he found himself hesitating.
    In some unaccountable fashion, it was correct as it was. Not because it looked like Idris, but because it looked like—
    He was suddenly shivering, as though a cold gale of recognition had blown out of memory. This carving looked like one of the people who inhabited his mysterious visions of another and happier world.
    With determination he poised the knife afresh. It wasn’t meant to depict anyone out of a dream. It was meant to depict Idris, who was kind to him, and it was about time he stopped giving in to his impulses to drift off into a fantasy existence. No matter how hard and dull his life was, it was his life, and if he took refuge in imagination every time it got him down he would never be able to tell the Waygans of Lagwich what they could do with their horn—
    Horn!
    He had been so completely absorbed in his musing that he had paid no attention to the thunderous bellow of the sunset horn from the town’s gate when it sounded a few minutes ago. He hadn’t noticed how late it was getting; why, here it was practically full dark!
    He stuffed the carving inside his shirt and fled for the protection of the town, his sack of soap bumping on his back.
    He was just in time. He came panting out of the dusk as Waygan finished sounding the