Banks, Iain - Against a Dark Background by Banks Iain

Author:Banks, Iain
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

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Èh?' said Leeskever. Àh; now that is one of those tangle-teeth I was telling you about.'

`This the beast that has a taste for your companions?' Zefla asked him.

`Might even be the same one, for all I know,' Leeskever said.

They watched the long, striped back of the tangle-tooth as the quadruped padded slowly through the jungled confusion of roots, stalks and long tatters of fallen membrane on the level below.

Sharrow remembered the airship, and the animal Geis had killed. When he'd returned, blooded, to the gondola, he'd presented her and Breyguhn with nothing more nocuous and shocking than the animal's ears.

She had accepted her still-warm gift gracefully. Breyguhn couldn't bear to touch the blood-matted thing. Still, while Sharrow had thrown hers away the day they left the Autumn Palace estates to return to their respective schools, Breyguhn had kept her trophy for years.

Dloan came out of the deep country the following morning, morose and unsuccessful. He'd had to shoot two inept bandits, but apart from that he hadn't seen anybody. There might well be rebels and the like in the deep country, but they'd kept well out of his way.

They set off back to the town that afternoon with the wind soft behind them.

Several troupes of stom flew over them a kilometre up, heading in the same direction. Leeskever nodded wisely.

They paid him at the same inn on the outskirts of the town they'd eaten at the day after they'd first arrived. Miz went into town alone, disguised. Their rooms were still being kept for them; a beggar had asked after them and the innkeeper had given him the note they'd left for him. Nobody else had inquired about them.

'A decent bed and hot water!' Zefla said, marching into her and Sharrow's room. `Fucking luxury!'

She slept well at first, then woke during the depths of the night wondering what was happening, and thought there was something long and cold crawling over her skin at her throat.

She sat up, whimpering and pulling at her nightdress, then felt to the skin at the top of her chest, and with her hands there, looking into the utter darkness, hearing Zefla stir and make a fading, still-asleep huh-ing noise, she realised what was happening.

It was their way of saying they were still in touch, even here. So much for being off-net.

The feeling was like a cold finger drawn across her skin, right round the base of her neck, like an executioner sketching where the axe will fall. Then another line, then another and another, each one further out than the last.

The shape of the Crownstar Addendum was traced out on her skin, to the last strand, the last planet of the system.

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