Jimmy the Hand by Raymond E. Feist & Steve Stirling

Author:Raymond E. Feist & Steve Stirling
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0002247224
Publisher: Voyager
Published: 2008-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN - Discovery

Lorrie awoke with a start.

There were the usual morning sounds; cockerels crowing, birds singing, but the smell was wrong; dusty emptiness around her, and under that too much smoke and too much dung and nothing green. And the floor beneath her was hard board, not the straw-stuffed tick she slept on.

Where—? she thought.

It crashed in on her, dazing, like a horse’s kick in the gut: I’m in Land’s End. I’m here looking for Rip. Mother and Father are dead.

It was late morning, by the look of the yellow light that filtered in through the shuttered window, a column full of dancing motes of dust. She was alone, alone enough to lie still for a moment with the tears leaking down her cheeks.

Mother! she thought. I need you, Mother!

But she would never see her mother again, and their last words had been a quarrel. Never again would she see her father coming in from the fields to smile and rumple her hair, or sit by the hearth on winter evenings and tell the old stories in his slow deep voice.

She felt like crying, but tears wouldn’t come. Instead there was a dull, aching void. She sat, scrubbing at her face. Rip is alive, she scolded herself. She had to concentrate on that. And I will find him!

But when she concentrated, she sensed something else: that Rip was no longer in Land’s End. She flung aside the cloth she’d been using for a blanket, jammed her shoes on her feet, then rose and went to the window.

She couldn’t see anyone below and though there were windows in the surrounding warehouses she couldn’t see anyone moving behind them. She’d just have to take the chance that they wouldn’t see her either. She gave one glance at the rumpled cloth she’d meant to rewind onto the bolt and shook her head regretfully. There wasn’t time to do that. Rip came first. She put one leg on the window-sill, turned and felt for the roof behind her with her free leg. The window was offset the shed roof below. She remembered Jimmy cautioning her to reach up with her left hand while using her right to steady herself on the wall, the swing to the left a little, and pull up. She determined to reverse the procedure and get to the shed roof. From there it was a short leap to the alley below.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing!’

The man’s shout seemed to come from directly behind her. Lorrie gasped and almost lost her grip. She slipped down and grabbed hard on the window-sill. For a long moment, she held motionless, her chin barely above the still, clutching the window, for her life in fact, because there was nothing below her but hard cobbles, twenty feet down. Glancing fearfully over her shoulder she saw no one. No one was looking out of one of the windows opposite either.

‘What do ye mean?’

The voices came from the main street, just beyond where the alley below joined it.

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.