Shannivar Read Online Free Page B

on his feet, one lurching step after another. Now they had no hope of disguising their flight. He must be leaving a path of blood that even a blind man could follow. Once or twice, he came close to fainting.
    Eventually Zevaron realized he was no longer staggering across cobbled paving stones or hard-packed dirt, but over planks of wood. River-tang filled his head. He heard the creak of timbers, of ropes stretching against their moorings. Before him, in the shadowed dark, lay a boat. He heard a distant wail, the sound of pain too great to bear.
    â€œ. . . we’ve got to . . . right now, do you hear me . . .” Danar pleaded.
    Zevaron shook his head and stared at the flat, clumsy outlines of a river-barge. He did not know the man who stood before Danar, anger and fear in his every gesture.
    There was more discussion in hushed and urgent voices. Then hands slipped beneath his armpits and lifted him as if he were a baby. He felt a bed under him, a thin straw pallet, and then the rocking movement of a vessel over water. Paddles splashed. A voice called out orders. The boat settled as the current took it.
    Light soared and swooped above him, an osprey hovering over its prey. It stung his eyes.
    â€œSeen somewhat like this before,” a man said with quiet authority. Zevaron felt a touch on his side, over the center of red pain. “Sword musta slipped between the ribs, maybe nicked a rib, I can’t say.”
    â€œBut what do we do for him? There must be something.” Danar’s voice was laced with desperation. “He can hardly breathe.”
    â€œNothin’ to be done. If the fever don’t get him, if the wound don’t go bad, then he’ll mend.”
    Movement, a stir of the air, and then he was alone. And not alone.
    Voices spoke to him, at times a woman’s—his mother’s?
No, she was lost forever, dead!
Laid over her words like a ghostly echo, he heard the deep bass of a man’s.
    â€œGelon is not the enemy,”
Tsorreh whispered.
“Qr . . . and its progenitor . . . Forgive me, I did not have enough time to prepare you . . .”
    Qr? Gelon?
What was she talking about? The fever must have affected his brain. Yet as he heard the word
progenitor
, another phrase resonated through his thoughts:
“Shadows that cast themselves upon the souls of men . . .”
    The words hung before him, as if written in fire. He had read them a hundred times in the
te-Ketav
, the holy book of his people. He could trace every line and loop of the letters that formed them. Almost, he could feel the texture of the age-worn pages between his fingers.
    Shadows. And darkness, and fire. Fire and Ice.
    Khored and his brothers and the magical Shield, the Shield of seven crystals . . .
    â€œRivers boiled, mountains crumbled . . . fields became peaks of hardened ash.”
    Swords sang beneath a sky torn with light and thunder.
“And it came to pass that Khored and his brothers defeated Fire and Ice and exiled it to the mountains of the north.”
    Once again, he sat with his mother in Jaxar’s laboratory and climbed the ladder to the tower observatory. In hushed, urgent tones, she spoke of a comet sweeping through the northern sky. He stood alone now on a platform, surrounded on every side with night. Above stretched a band of stars. The air was cold, the points of brilliance edged in ice.
    â€œThere,”
Tsorreh whispered,
“look there.”
And he lifted his eyes.
    At first, he saw only a smudge of dimness, a thread stretching to the north. As he watched, it grew brighter and larger. Its light shimmered, an iridescent corona that filled the heavens. Moment by moment, it drew him. He soared with it, higher and faster than any bird, than any arrow.
    Around him and through him, the firmament glowed, cold and burning like moonlight on ice-clouds. Its music sang in his veins.
    High and wide,