The Great Wheel Read Online Free Page A

faint red light of the Magulf sky and rats and caroni birds fought over something in the mud and the pulse of light and music faded.
    He turned on his bicycle’s front light, kicked in the standby motor, and rode slowly uphill. He could remember harvest carnivals back in Hemhill when he was a child, the great painted wagons, the good smell of the corn in the church beforehand, the Sunday perfume of the women, the beery breath of the men. And he remembered laughing and wrestling with Hal in the churchyard grass when the service ended, the two of them tumbling down the hill towards bright canopies, clangorous carnival engines, all the sweet discord of the fair. Thinking of vast European grainfields, the smell of dust, the hum of the compound in the valley that signified the end of summer, John dismounted from his bicycle in a dank Magulf square.
    It was steeply enclosed on all sides, and in the center was the mouth of a communal sewer. His ears still rang from the carnival, but that only increased the sense of silence. Could everyone have possibly gone out tonight? Surely there had to be people other than the ill, the infirm, and the odd European priest who didn’t want to participate.
    He climbed the sagging steps and found the right door. It was open. Inside, he had to rely on touch. There was a passageway—a left turn?—definitely another set of stairs. He stumbled on through the darkness. The silence around him was no longer absolute. There were the creaks and stirrings that came from the flexing of the jelt floor and walls—also from the disturbance his passage was causing to the old building’s many nonhuman inhabitants. He paused. Normally, there would be lights, kids in the corridors, music blaring…
    But for the glow of his gloves—now pale red at the tips—and the faint light that came from the small personal monitoring screen of the watch set into the flesh just above his left wrist, the darkness was absolute. A few more steps, and he had to stop. Perhaps he should go back. He’d visit old Banori on the way to the clinic tomorrow morning. After all, the difference was only one night…But then he heard a sound, a low moaning that could have come from the livestock that the Borderers sometimes kept in their homes, but could just as easily have been human. He took another step forward. His right foot banged something, and he reached out to grab a wobbly stair rail. He began to climb.
    The landing was illuminated in the glow of a chemlight from the one open door, and he saw the dim shapes of waste barrels and of the water butts that in times of rain were fed from the roof by an elaborate system of pipes; otherwise they were filled laboriously by bucket from the pump in the yard. Such arrangements were always the subject of much local argument. It sometimes struck him that this was almost their primary purpose, especially as the things regularly broke through the weak floors to either comic or disastrous effect.
    The open door was the one he wanted. He crossed the landing towards the light and entered.
    He saw instantly that he’d come too late. Banori’s corpse sat facing him from the old high-backed chair, its eyes already sunken and lifeless in the chemlight’s dying radiance. The room was in an odd kind of mess, but John had picked his way around the furniture towards the body before the truth dawned. Even in the soupy atmosphere of a Borderer tenement, the place was filled with the bland, salty reek of blood. Black sprays of it garlanded the walls. They were still wet, scrawled by a strong, sweeping hand into hieroglyphs whose meaning he couldn’t even guess at.
    He looked around. He crossed himself. Whatever else it was that witchwomen did for the death rite, they generally left the place looking like an abattoir—although, as far as he could tell without undertaking a pointless analysis, the blood hadn’t been the old man’s. Not that it mattered now. In death, Banori smiled. He was wearing his