The Lord of the Black Land (Unwithering Realm Book 3) by John C. Wright

Author:John C. Wright [Wright, John C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Castalia House
Published: 2018-07-11T22:00:00+00:00

2. A Walk in the Air

Don’t think this shepherd was thin and frail because his hair was white: think of a weightlifter or boxer. When I say his beard and hair were flowing, I mean he looked like he was underwater, and his hair was like a cloud streaming back from his harsh face. Like Charlton Heston playing Moses in a Cecil B. DeMille movie, except dressed more shabbily. He was garbed in a toga or coat of camel hair, and his belt was a hank of rope. His calloused feet were bare.

He gazed down with eyes as hard and cold as outer space, and raised his crook in a gesture like that of a conductor readying the orchestra for the first thunderous opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth. He closed his eyes as if in concentration, and thrust the crosier.

And the soldiers in their gold armor, screaming, were plucked up in midair as neatly as Dorothy’s house in Kansas, and whirled up and up, ten then twenty then thirty feet in the air. The half-score of men spun like a swirl of autumn leaves, shouting hysterically, bouncing off the walls and each other. Their pikes swirled and spun and fell through the air like straw in the wind. But there was no wind.

The effect, whatever it was, was not affecting me. Nakasu climbed heavily to his elephant-feet, and stood blinking. The flow of blood from his mouth was less, just a trickle running down his hip and thigh, and he stood with his arms akimbo, wiping the corner of his mouth. His pectoral muscle flexed as he squinted, but whether he was annoyed or in pain or amazed at our sudden rescue, I could not say.

I used my left arm to push my severed right arm back into its stump (and, no, I had not noticed when it got detached) concentrated a moment to rejoin the limbs, and then used it to point upward at the white-haired Moses wannabe. (My other limbs and organs were not all together at this point. I looked like the Scarecrow of Oz after his battle with flying monkeys.) Nakasu had to lean back to look up, like the Tim Burton version of Batman—one disadvantage of having no head, I suppose.

The shepherd standing in midair spoke like Moses, too. His was a booming voice, ringing with authority, that filled the corridor and echoed off the far wall. It sounded like Hebrew, a language I had studied, but I did not have my lexicon with me.

He was evidently addressing the captain in the peacock-mask helm, who answered with a stream of abuse and insult I understood, but I won’t bother to repeat here. Evidently swearwords in every aeon of the multiverse are pretty much the same: excretion, fornication, blasphemy, you get the picture.

The shepherd guy gestured again with his crook, and the spinning stopped, and the men simply hung in midair, puppets on unseen threads.

The captain gained control of himself. Even though his voice shook with

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