The Summer Palace Read Online Free Page A

inside, but there was no reason to think any food or water had been left there.
    The Uplanders made their own shelter, and reportedly got most of their food from the
ara,
and obviously had some water source, but he had no idea what it was. He had not thought to ask anyone during his previous brief stay at the Summer Palace. He hadn’t even noticed where the palace itself got its water.
    Really, he had accomplished very little as the Wizard Lord’s guest, and in retrospect he thought he knew part of the reason for that. He felt empty, listless, almost hopeless with his link to the
ler
broken. He had not been fully aware of just how debilitating it was during his previous visit, but now he knew. He had simply drifted through those few days before, unable to summon the will to do more.
    He felt the same listlessness now, but if he allowed himself to drift, he knew he would die. This time there was no palace staff to provide him with food and wine hauled laboriously up from Barokan, and he had brought no supplies but his sword and the contents of his pockets. He could already feel the strange thin air weakening him. His throat and eyes felt unnaturally dry, and he had not a drop to drink.
    He knew he could not survive for very long up here alone; he didn’t know enough about the terrain. He would have to find an Uplander tribe and throw himself on their mercy. He would need to find some way to convince them not merely to feed him, or at least teach him how to feed himself, but also to refrain from telling the Wizard Lord where he was.
    And when they went down to Winterhome, he would either have to find some way to survive the infamous Upland winter alone, or convince an Uplander tribe to shelter him in their guesthouse, hidden from the Host People. He had no idea at all how he might manage any of these feats.
    But that was getting ahead of himself. Before he could survive the winter he had to survive the autumn.
    He stretched, got to his feet, stretched again, then began plodding eastward, up the defile and out onto the plateau.
    When he emerged from the canyon, the vast flat land stretched out before him, apparently infinite, and he peered off into the distance, looking for some sign of human life on that immense expanse ofgrass. A few squarish structures were visible, several miles away, each standing completely isolated on empty prairie; he had seen those on his previous visit, and had no idea what they were. Whatever their purpose, there was no sign of life around them, and he doubted they were worth investigating. He looked on.
    It took only a moment more before he spotted a thin trail of smoke winding its way up into the blue, far to the southeast.
    That was the most he could hope for, really; he turned his steps toward it and began walking.
    The ground beneath his boots was flat and even and hard, with little to distinguish one place from another; tufts of grass were spaced widely enough that he had no trouble walking between them, and one patch of plain looked very much like another. His major sign of progress was the lengthening of the Upland terrain visible behind him as he moved steadily away from the cliffs, and the gradual disappearance of the green hills of Barokan.
    The sun crawled upward, across the zenith, and made the long, slow descent toward the western horizon, and still Sword trudged onward, toward that lingering wisp of smoke. He saw no plants he recognized as edible, no open water, just endless grass and occasional unfamiliar weeds struggling up through the hard-packed earth. He sometimes glimpsed motion from the corner of his eye that he was fairly certain was small animals fleeing from him, but he could never locate them afterward. He did spot what appeared to be a rabbit dashing madly away, but then it seemed to vanish utterly in the grass. A moment’s quick exploration turned up no evidence it had ever really been there at all, and he decided against looking further; the Uplanders might