The Silent Tower by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781453216590
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter XII

THE LOWING OF a cow woke Caris, to the clinging, tepid heat of morning. Last night’s storm had cooled the air enough to permit sleep after the killing exhaustion of the last twenty-four hours; but with the new sun, the rain was evaporating in clammy dampness which made his rough peasant clothes and coarse stockings stick to his body like an evil fairy’s garment of itches.

He lay in the hay for a few moments, looking at his two companions in flight.

He had never expected the girl Joanna to be still with them after four days. What he had seen of her world and what she had told him and Antryg during the first day’s walk to Kymil had made him doubt her abilities to keep up with them. Caris had been raised in the Way of the Sa-senna, and, from what he had seen and heard, hers was a world in which machines, like the cars and computers of which she had spoken, had taken over both the work that strengthened the body and the entertainment that sharpened the wits. She was shy and, he suspected, more used to speaking to these computers than to people; but it had surprised him that she had not panicked yesterday. If asked beforehand, he would have laid money against her having the nerve to pull the trigger.

And, he reflected ruefully, lost it.

Curled up on the hay, she looked thin and even smaller than usual. They had gotten rid of her bloodstained peasant clothing, and she looked like a little boy in her scruffy blue jeans and creased and filthy tank-top, with hay caught in her feathery blond curls. Her arms and shoulders were brown and sunburned, covered with scratches and insect bites. For all her small size, weariness had printed lines on her face that even sleep couldn’t erase, and she looked older than her age, which she had said was twenty-six, and very alone.

A little ways from her, Antryg lay with his head on his rolled-up coat. His cracked spectacles rested in the hay nearby and the strings of cheap glass beads around his throat caught slivers of hurtfully bright gold sunlight that streamed through the cracks in the barn walls. Under the unruly tousle of his hay-flecked hair, the bruises on his face already looked less swollen than they had. They were turning black; Caris had spent the last five years of his life training to be sasennan and had an intimate acquaintance with bruises; he knew they must hurt like the devil. He’d taken a swordcut on the cheek in his first year of training and he remembered that the pain had dogged even his sleep.

And well served, too, he thought bitterly. He sat up and shook as much hay as he could out of his smock. Like the pain of a burn, his anger returned to fuel his strength. For what he has done to my grandfather—for what that disappearance did to all the mages...

Outside, the cow lowed again.

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