Odnośniki
- Index
- Burroughs, Edgar Rice Tarzan 03 The Beasts of Tarzan
- 061. Roberts Nora Irlandzka wróşka 03 Irlandzki buntownik
- Gordon Lucy Bracia Rinucci 03 Rzymskie wesele (Rzymskie wakacje)
- Hakan Nesser [Inspector Van Veeteren 03] The Return (pdf)
- Diamentowe imperium 03 Sullivan Maxine Zbyt krotki miesiac
- Maxwell Megan Proś Mnie, o co Chcesz 03 Raz jeszcze
- Elaine Viets [Mystery Shopper 03] Dying To Call You (pdf)
- Courtney Breazile [Immortal Council 03] Wet Glamour (pdf)
- Edward D Hoch Computer Investigation Bureau 03 The Fellowship of the HAND
- Chmiel Katarzyna Karina Syn Gondoru 03 Ścieżka Umarłych
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- russ.opx.pl
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
every feather trembling, and he didn't seem to know she was there.
All right. I can work with that. I don't need him to notice me.
Of course not. All she needed was to touch him and open up every shield she had on
herself. But there was no choice, and no hesitation. She sat down beside him, laid one
hand on his arm, and released her shielding walls.
It was worse, much worse, than she had ever dreamed.
After a time, she realized that he was speaking, brokenly. Some of it was in her
tongue, some in his own, but she finally pieced together what he was saying, aided by the
flood of emotions that racked him. He could not weep, of course; it seemed horribly cruel
to her that he did not have that release. If ever anyone needed to be able to weep, it was
T'fyrr.
He had gone to Gradford, on behalf of Harperus, and he had been captured and held
as a demon by agents of the Church. They had bound him, imprisoned him in a cage so
small he could not even spread his wings, which had driven him half mad.
She tried to imagine it, and failed. Take all the worst nightmares, the most terrible of
fears, then make them all come true. The Haspur needed space, freedom, needed these
things the way a human needed air and light. Take those away and then take away air,
and light as well
How did he endure it? Only by descent into madness....
But that had not been enough for them. Then they had starved him which had sent
him past madness altogether, turned him from a thinking being into a being ruled only by
fear, pain and instinct.
As familiar as she was with hawks, she knew only too well what they were like when
they hungered. Their entire being centered on finding prey and eating it and woe betide
anything that got in the way. But T'fyrr had never been so overwhelmed by his own
instincts before; he had not known such a thing could happen. He retained just enough of
his reasoning ability to take advantage of an opportunity to escape provided by the Free
Bards.
He did not have enough left to do more than react instinctively when one of the
Church Guards tried to stop him.
He did not realize what he had done until after after he had killed and eaten a sheep
on the mountainside, and remembered, with a Haspur's extraordinary memory, what had
happened as he escaped. He could not even soften the blow to himself by forgetting....
He killed. He had never killed before, other than the animals that were his food
Certainly he had never even hurt another thinking being before. For all their fearsome
appearance, the Haspur were surprisingly gentle, and they had not engaged in any kind of
conflict for centuries. It was inconceivable for the average Haspur to take a sentient life
with his own talons. Oh, there were Haspur who retained some of the savage nature of
their ancestors, enough that they served as guards to warn off would-be invaders, or
destroy them if they must. But the average Haspur looked on the guards the same way
the average farmer looked on the professional mercenary captain; with a touch of awe, a
touch of queasiness, and the surety that he could not do such a thing.
To discover that he could had undone T'fyrr.
To learn, twice now, that his battle-madness had been no momentary aberration was
just as devastating.
Gradually, he allowed her to hold him, as he shook and rocked back and forth, his
spirit in agony. He had come close, so close, to killing again tonight, that the experience
had reopened all his soul-wounds. The man who had been nearest him had been reaching
for a hand-crossbow at his belt and that was how he had been captured the first time,
with a drugged dart shot by a man who caught him on the ground. The horror of that
experience was such that he would rather die
or kill again
than endure it a second time.
And with her spirit open to his, she endured all the horror of it with him, and the
horror of knowing that he could and would kill as well.
His throat ached and clenched; his breath came in hard-won gasps, harsh and
unmusical, and every muscle in his body was as tight as it could be. If he had been a
human, he would have been sobbing uncontrollably.
He could not so she wept for him.
She understood, with every fiber of her spirit, just how his heart cried out with
revulsion at the simple fact that he had taken a life, that if forced to he would do so again.
There was no room in his vision of the world for self-defense, only for those who killed
and those who did not. She knew, deep inside her bones, why he hated himself for it.
He had not stopped; had not tried to subdue rather than kill. Never mind that he was
mad with fear, pain, hunger. Never mind that the man who had tried to stop his escape
would probably have killed him to prevent it. The man himself was not his enemy; the
man was only doing the job he'd been set. T'fyrr had not even paused for a heartbeat to
consider what he was doing. He had struck to kill and fled with the man's heart-blood on
his talons.
And she told him so, over and over, between her sobs of grief for him, just how and
why she understood. She would have felt the same, precisely the same, even though there
were plenty of people she considered her friends and Clansfolk who would never agree
with her. Her personal rule which she did not impose on anyone else forbade killing.
She knew that she might find herself in the position one day of having to kill or die herself.
She did not know how she would meet that. She tried to make certain to avoid situations
where that was the only way out.
Which was why, of course, she avoided cities. Death was cheap in cities; the more
people, the cheaper it was. At least out in the countryside, life was held at a dearer cost
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]