Under A Colder Sun (Khale the Wanderer Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

were also a routine she could not break away from. Her father, the Sisters, and the servants of the castle—none of them would let her vary the pace and rhythm of her life in the slightest, and no-one would say why this was so.
    There had been a boy, not long after her sixteenth winter, who came to clean her chamber. He looked at her in a strange way, and she didn’t know what to make of it, until the day he tried to kiss her. She felt the hardness of his devil-bone against her. The Sisters seized him, and Milanda begged them not to hurt him.
    She never saw him again. She asked her father about him, off and on, but he had nothing to say. Whispers reached Milanda’s ears: a skull smaller than the rest mounted on the spikes atop the bailey’s gate. But she was sure the whispers were false. Father could not be so cruel as that, surely. But she never left the castle, nor did she cross the outer yard to the bailey’s gate, so she did not know for certain.
    And the boy’s face found its way into her dreams, where it spoke the language of maggots and worms. His eyes had been eaten by crows, and his skull was a nest for worse things. When she thought of him, she felt cold inside and the food she ate tasted like dead moths and ashes in her mouth. She tried not to think about him, but there was so little to do that she could not help but hear his voice, see his face, and think of his eyes. They had been kind eyes—before the crows took them.
    “Why so morbid tonight, Milanda?” she asked herself, and went back to her reading. 
     
    *
     
    Khale moved through the corridors of the castle, unseen. He only relaxed in the shelter of its richly tapestried rooms where he listened to the pounding of feet outside and the raw shouts of Leste Alen. This was all a distraction, really. It was something to do. He was ancient and would see Colm and Neprokhodymh come to dust in the fullness of time, and their people would expire too. The kingdoms of Barneth and Farness would fall as well.
    Nothing lasts forever.
    He would still be walking the earth when new empires arose, fell, and fractured into feuding city-states such as this once again. He might well undertake such a quest as this again. There was so much to be done in the world, but so much of it was the same as had been done before, countless times over.
    Time was a straight river for many, and most of them drowned as they travelled its course, but for Khale, time was a very different thing; it was a cycle of living and re-living the same moments. It was a great wheel upon which he saw the world being broken again and again. These kings, queens, warlords and sorcerers who saw themselves as so unique were all much of a muchness: dismal creatures dressed in their costumes and masks. They were distractions also, and they would pass him by.
    I am forever, he thought, these people are not.
    They think themselves above me, and yet the day will come when I will crush their dust and bones beneath my feet. All I have to do is wait. I do not need to raise my sword against them. They think life is a game of gold, adultery, and struggling for power.
    It is not.
    Life is but a game of bones, and everyone loses in the end.
    He went out onto a balcony and looked over Colm as the first threads of dawn began to weave themselves through the horizon. He heard a voice—light and feminine—coming from not so far away. He turned to see a girl standing on an adjoining balcony. She was a fair enough creature. The light caught in the curled autumnal fall of her hair. Her figure was soft and slender beneath the rumpled looseness of her nightclothes.
    He knew who she was: the Lady Milanda, Alosse’s daughter.
    Leste came out onto the balcony to speak to her.
    Khale saw Milanda’s eyes were sea-blue opals which, moments later, began to stream with crystal tears.
    He returned to the shadows of the castle. Guards who were not dozing at their posts merely peered at him and wiped their eyes. He knew they saw him