John Brunner by To Conquer Chaos

Author:To Conquer Chaos
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-08-26T23:11:40+00:00

For the next ten or fifteen minutes, his confidence growing, he picked and chose among the abandoned miscellanea. Scattered baubles which someone might buy in another town. A first-rate steel knife. A helmet in exactly his own size. A pike which would have solved most of his problems if he'd had it handy to spit the thing he had killed. Two good hatchets and some other carpenter's tools. A knapsack belonging apparently to a tailor, full of fine thread and needles of a quality he had never seen in Lagwich.

He was shrugging the knapsack on when he heard the noise.

Dropping everything he carried, he snatched at the sword and whirled. He was approximately in the center of the camp now; there was a large open space, at one side of which a pile of wood-ash smouldered sluggishly, and on the other three sides of which tents had been torn down randomly. The sound had apparently come from one of the largest tents.

Cautiously Conrad approached it, and saw, protruding from under a flap of charred canvas, the leg of a man, stirring slightly.

In that condition he wasn't much of a menace, he reasoned. He pulled the coarse fabric aside and found himself looking at Jervis Yanderman.

There was a large livid bruise on Yanderman's temple, and a sword-cut, not more than a scratch, ran across his right upper arm. Gasping, Conrad bent down to examine him more closely. The deep-set eyes opened briefly, screwed up again, opened a second time and stayed open.

"It's . . . it's the soap-maker," Yanderman said faintly. "Help me up, boy."

Conrad dropped his sword and hastened to obey.

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