Donita K Paul [DragonKeeper Chronicles 03] DragonKnight (pdf)
Amber Kell [Hellbourne] Hellbourne [TEB MM] (pdf)
Ian Morson [William Falconer Mystery 05] Falconer and the Great Beast (pdf)
Denise A Agnew [Daryk World 03] Daryk Craving (pdf)
Ian Morson [William Falconer Mystery 04] A Psalm for Falconer (pdf)
Montgomery Lucy Maud BiaśÂa magia
Jennifer Armintrout Blood Ties 02 Possession
James White SG 04 Ambulance Ship
Edgar Allan Poe Collected Works of Poe Volume 3 The Raven Edition
Wiosna 1941 Ida Fink
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
the lava poured and slipped over the steep edge of an embankment to fall into the blue and placid waters
of a lake. Trees burned before they fell to be consumed utterly. The waters roiled near the shore and the
waves spread out in wide ripples so that the placid surface grew congested and turbulent in a wide and
swiftly growing circle.
Terraces of neat agriculture had been hacked in alternating wide and narrow steps down the flanks of
the low surrounding hills. But the monster of fire poured down over everything, and a village was dying
and a people was being destroyed and, as usual, Dray Prescot was there, naked and disoriented,
expected to select the right person to save.
The girl was burned, but she was still alive and she would live.
I bent to her.
Muruaa! she moaned. Muruaa!
On your feet, girl, and run! Past the slide and into the lake!Move!
She saw my face and she flinched, all burned and naked and in pain. But she staggered to her feet and
ran off. I had taken stock of the situation as I saw it. The village was doomed. But below, down the
steep slope, lay a sizable town, neatly mud walled and wooden roofed, in a cleft between the low,
terraced hills. I could look down and see the peaked roofs of sturm-wood, and the mud-brick walls, the
enclosures, and the little backyard chimneys smoking with preparations for one of the many daytime
meals of Kregen. The suns were rising in the sky, and they blazed through a crown of smoke. The land
lay lit in ghastly orange and lurid vermilion from the fires of the volcano.
The fugitives from the outlying village vanished below. Some staggered, burned; others crawled; but one
or two young men lifted the old folk, and in a bunch they disappeared below the brick-wall of a terrace.
The girl whose clothes I had wrenched off and whose blazing hair I had put out ran with them. I stood
alone.
If I refused to imperil my life? It was the Earth of my birth for me, then, and no mistake.
So, like the puppet I swore I would someday cease from being, I ran. One day, please Zair, I would cut
the strings that held me puppet-slave to the Everoinye.
As I ran I studied the landscape. There is much to be learned from the landscape of a people. Here
there was no wide aa. I know that is the volcanologists term. Also I have walked over the uneven lumpy
lava fields below Etna, which the locals call sciara, and shuddered at what they hide. But here the ground
was fertile and the crops grew lushly, vine and gregarian, paline and many another luxurious plant of
Kregen. So the last eruption must have occurred more than, say, a hundred years ago. These people
might not know what to do or what to try to do.
Down in the town the panic was atrocious. Men and women ran from their houses with bundles
wobbling on their heads. Calsanys were being prodded along with sticks. Babies were crying. Girls were
carrying out cloths with bits of household furniture sticking out, candlesticks, frying pans, grinders,
samphron-oil lamps, anything they had thought to snatch up in their panic.
Sulfur and brimstone choked in the air. The congested rumblings and explosions of the volcano battered
at reason.
I grabbed a young man whose face showed stark fear. He was babbling incoherently, so I kicked him
away and grabbed another man who swung at me, uglily, a stux thrusting forward. He bore a vosk-hide
satchel over his shoulder and nothing else, and I suspected he had seized his chance to loot a neighbor s
house.
Listen, dom, and I will not kill you, I told him.
He reacted stupidly. He tried to stick me with the spear.
I took it away from him and poked the point into his sweating belly.
Who is the chief man of the town, dom? Tell me his name and where I may hope to find him, or your
tripes will spill into the road.
He yelled, but he gabbled out what I wanted to know.
Lart Lykon, the Elten! But he has fled
I shook him.
Toward the jetties a boat for the sake of Kuerden the Merciless!
I threw him from me. Useless to work on these people one at a time. Whatever the Star Lords were up
to here, I scarcely thought it had been the saving of that first girl upon the higher slopes where the lava ran
and would have engulfed her if she had not burned to death first. Everything was happening with
enormous speed. I burst through a packed rabble wailing and clamoring at the jetty. A few boats lay
there, small open double-ended craft, and a number had already pushed off. It was perfectly clear that
the boats could not carry all the people of the town. It was equally and horribly clear that the lava pouring
down so swiftly toward them would fill the narrow valley in which the town huddled, fill the green slot and
cover the houses, rise up the terraced hills, pouring all the time through and over the town and into the
lake. To jump into the water and swim would help only if one could outrace the lava. This is what many
were doing; but soon the water grew too hot for them, so that they boiled.
I found Lart Lykon, the Elten. He was a large, raw-boned man with a hectoring voice, hooded eyes, a
massive beard, and golden rings about his fingers and bracelets upon his arms. He wore only a gray shirt
and a pair of blue trousers. I took him by the shoulder as he pushed a woman aside and went to step into
a boat. He had guards, tough men with stuxes who shouted at me to let the Elten alone, and who thrust at
me. I took the first stux and hit the fellow over the head with it. Ash was now falling, raining down in
white-hot droplets that stung as they hit flesh. People were screaming everywhere. Yet we were penned
into this tiny space of the jetties between the lake-wall and the town.
Elten, I said, shouting into his ear. By all you hold holy, you will not run away. There is a way to
defeat Muruaa!
It cannot be done, he gasped, his eyes rolling. Muruaa will eat us all, burn us alive!
Another guard, panicking, tried to thrust his stux into my back, so that I was forced to turn, my left hand
grasping the Elten by the shoulder, and take the stux away from the guard. He looked a mean,
low-browed fellow well, maybe I do him an injustice but I thrust back hard intending to frighten
him away. But the press of people forced him on to the stux. He writhed like a fish on a harpoon, and
lurched away.
I turned my face on the other guards.
They were relatively primitive people, at least in their relationship with authority. They understood what [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
