Spirit Walker Read Online Free Page B

polite to talk business with a Pwi on an empty stomach, so Tull and Ayuvah sat, staring up at the fat innkeeper with genuine interest.
    The common room was sizzling hot—the sticky heat of late summer made intolerable by the blistering heat of cooking fires. Green bottle flies buzzed in and out the open doorway, glittering like emeralds when shafts of sunlight struck them.
    A bowl of hazelnuts sat on the table. Scandal picked up a couple of nuts, cracked them between his thick fingers. At the sound, two gray squirrels scurried from the kitchen and climbed into his lap, poking their noses over the tables to sniff. Scandal set the nuts on the table and stroked the squirrels between the ears as they crunched the hazelnuts between their teeth.
    A gangly youth brought mugs of dark, warm beer, plates of cabbage smothered in pungent white cheese, and sweet sausages rolled in grape leaves and flavored with curry and anise. Tull and Ayuvah drank deeply from the beer.

    Scandal watched the boys intently, gauging them. Ayuvah was a Neanderthal, strong as an ox, one of the best hunters and guides on the coast. Tull was a young man, almost twenty. He had the broad, forward-thrusting face and dark-red hair of a Neanderthal, with thin eyebrows, each hair as distinct as a small copper nail over deep-set eyes the yellow-green color of dying grass. His hawkish nose was broad and close to the face. His shoulders were wide and muscular. All in all, he looked like a typical Neanderthal, except for a small chin beneath his thin beard—his only physical manifestation of human ancestry.
    Though Tull had the powerful, clumsy hands of a Pwi, he struggled to hold his fork in a human grip, between his thumb and forefinger. Ah, but there’s more to Tull than to most Tcho-Pwi , Scandal reminded himself. You can see it in his eyes .
    It wasn’t polite to talk business till after dinner, so Scandal watched the men for a moment.
    Tull looked up. “Don’t buzzard over me,” he said in English, with a deep nasal accent. “I can’t eat when you’re buzzarding over me.”
    Scandal laughed. He decided that since Tull was only half Pwi, he needed only wait until Tull was half finished with dinner before broaching the topic of business. “By the Starfarer’s hairless blue apricots, let’s get to the point! I want you men to come with me to Seven Ogre River!”
    Scandal pounded his fist on the table like a sailor ordering dinner. The squirrels jumped from Theron’s lap at the noise and sped into the kitchen, shouting their warning cry.
    Scandal kept a large “bird” from Hotland in a cage. The bird had wicked-looking teeth and hung upside-down, grasping the bars of its cage with clawed fingers. It twisted its head, and hissed at the men.
    Tull shook his head violently, his mouth too full to speak.
    Scandal knitted his brows. “Valis, more food!” he called. “Throw a hog in the barbecue pit if you must!” He turned back to Tull and Ayuvah. “Look—I need you! You’ve probably heard that we’ve been down to the hatching grounds and there isn’t a serpent left in these waters. The hatch has been down for three years, but I happen to know that the fall run up at Seven Ogre River was good last year, and I believe that we can go up there and catch some! Why, in Craal, the Slave Lords consider the baby sea serpents to be a delicacy, and they cart them live for hundreds of miles to serve at banquets. So, the idea came to me: Why not sneak in and catch us a hundred serpents, then bring them back and dump them into the sea, re-stock our waters? We’ll handle it just the way Rebamon Strong does his ponds, the way he stocks them with pike every few years!”
    Tull and Ayuvah both stared at Scandal as if he were some madman. “Come now,” Scandal said, “It’s not a bad idea. Why, after the past couple of years, with the bad fish harvests and men leaving town, it only shows the way we’re heading if we don’t do something. I know the plan isn’t