Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2019-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

26

Secrets of the Swamp

The first thing I saw, when consciousness returned to me, was Kiera’s face. It is testament to my situation that even this failed to cheer me. I felt as though every part of me had been kicked by every Warden on the Island. It took several minutes for the preceding events to filter back into place. Before then, all I knew was that I hurt.

Kiera had a bruise over one temple and a black eye. She seemed to have come out of the whole business better than I had.

“I’m alive,” I said fatuously. “You’re alive. Right.” I had to keep collecting my thoughts, or they would fragment and drift apart like the broken ice around the spires. I tried to sit up, and the resulting pain in my head was so thunderous I fell back instantly.

“Is Peter all right?”

Peter’s own voice came to me, complaining, “I smacked my knee something wicked. There must have been a rock or something in the water. Hurts like hell.”

It was obvious from the tone that he was well enough to complain. Kiera’s silence was making me worried, though, and there was an undercurrent to Peter’s voice I disliked. I picked over my memories of the incident and went suddenly cold.

“Thelwel! What about Thelwel?” I got out. I saw Kiera glance unhappily at something, and Peter said, “Thelwel is… fine.”

Despite the pain I forced myself into a sitting position, clutching my head. I saw Peter sitting beyond Kiera, one trouser leg slit to mid-thigh. We were all sprawled across a tangle of mud and roots that passed for solid ground here in the swamp. I looked in the direction that they were unwilling to.

It took me some time to accept and understand what I was seeing: it was such a grotesque sight it quite escaped me at first. Thelwel was sitting, away from the three of us. His prison greys were torn to shreds, and I could see a faintly curving line of livid puncture-marks across his bared chest. His arm had taken the worst of it, though. It looked like one of the anatomy sketches I had seen in textbooks, and all the more so because Thelwel was methodically laying out all the various torn and damaged ends. With his left hand he was arranging the components of his right arm: the bone, the sheets of muscle, tendons and ligaments, blood vessels and serrated flaps of skin, all with the same careful patience that hung about him when he was repairing any moderately complex machine. I watched silently as he smoothed two ends of muscle together, and they knitted and joined under his practised touch. Some of the skin had already healed up, leaving bruised red-purple scar lines that looked weeks old. There was a lot of blood staining his skin and clothes, but no more forthcoming.

He looked up at me with an expression I had not previously seen on his face. Peter and Kiera he did not know, but I was a friend as much as anyone was anybody’s friend on the Island.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.