(eng) Lawrence Watt-Evans - Annals of the Chosen 03 by The Summer Palace (v5.0)

Author:The Summer Palace (v5.0) [Palace, The Summer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

[ 13 ]

In the end, he decided he did not need a fire yet. His ears returned to normal, and the pans of snow did begin to melt eventually, though only very slowly. He spent hours doing little more than huddling over a candle, thinking.

He ate another half-strip of jerky and sipped a little snowmelt for his supper, and then decided there was nothing more to be accomplished until he could coax a few answers out of the ler. He stripped off his clothes and curled up on the mattress under a stack of blankets.

He did not fall asleep quickly; he couldn’t decide whether that was entirely a bad thing or not, given his vague memory that an early sign of freezing to death was sleepiness. He found himself thinking too much, and worrying too much, to doze off easily, and the very question of why he was not falling asleep merely added to those concerns.

He was unsure whether he had enough food, or enough fuel, or even enough water, to survive the winter—what if there wasn’t enough snow? Gathering and melting it required so much time, effort, and heat that he could not easily build up a reserve, and water evaporates.

How would he ever actually get at the Wizard Lord? Artil was cautious, and constantly guarded.

What did the ler want? Why had they spoken to him in his dreams, but then refused to answer questions when he was awake? Why had they demanded he remove his protective hides and feathers if they did not have something specific in mind that they wanted of him? He lay awake for what seemed like hours, worrying about all these questions.

And there was a thin thread of fear, as well—what if the ler answered all his questions in his dreams, and he didn’t like the answers? What if his dreams were to be nightmares?

In the end, though, he did finally sleep.

And in time, dreams came.

At first it seemed to him that they were just ordinary dreams—not pleasant ones, but the sort he would expect after a day such as the one he had had. He dreamed he was running through endless corridors as ice formed on the walls and snow drifted from nowhere onto the carpeted floor; he dreamed he was digging up snow with his bare hands, desperate to find something buried beneath the white powder, but more snow appeared as quickly as he could move it; he dreamed he was walking across the Uplands of late autumn searching for water, and a sparkling stream glittered in the morning sun ahead of him, but no matter how fast he walked, it came no closer, and when he began to run, it slid away even faster, receding into the distance.

And then he saw the Leader and the Scholar standing on the far side of the stream, calling a warning to him that he could not understand, and then the stream was not water but blood, spilling from the mangled corpses of the Seer

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