Read Dumarest 33 - Child of Earth for Free Online Page A

sound’ that he had heard on another world in another time. And then—
    “You heard!” The woman sobbed with frustration as she fought her injuries and tried to rear upright, her weight sagging against his arms. “Earl! You heard! You must have heard!”
    “Sound,” he agreed. “A rustling—”
    “The Shining Ones!” She was adamant. “They are here! They have come for me! For all of us, perhaps. We are saved! Saved!”
    A woman delirious with hope, mastered by her delusion, dying, hearing what she needed to hear. To do other than bolster her conviction would be cruel.
    “Earl?”
    “I hear them!”
    “Don’t lie to me!”
    “I’m not! I can hear them!” He drew in his breath, concentrating, listening, hearing the soft medley of sounds change, alter in a subtle fashion, to break into segments that gained their own identity. To form words, signals, shouts, ululations.
    The Shining Ones had arrived.
    They came like wisps of smoke, white against white, slithering over the snow, melting, vanishing to appear again, their movements heralded by squeaks, whistles, piping notes, trills. A host dressed in perfect camouflage, shining with a faint nacreous shimmer, coming closer, closer.
    The stuff of legend made real.
    “Earl!” The woman stirred in his arms, struggling to cling to him as he set her down. Rising he faced the drifting shapes, tensing as they drew near, poised for combat, ready to strike, to twist, move, dodge. “No, Earl, don’t! They mean us no harm!”
    A conviction he couldn’t share. These were no ineffable God-like beings glowing with a pure, inner grace, coming to deliver help and healing, safety, comfort and the endless pleasures of legendary Earth, but creatures wearing reflective garments and disguised weapons. Instruments that coughed and sent a swirling nacreous vapor towards himself and the woman. He heard her sigh, and felt the breath clog in his lungs. A numbing gas that froze his mobility and sent him to sprawl in the snow where time ceased to have meaning and order turned into nightmare.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    H e fought a dragon in a frigid sea of ebon chill, feeling the crushing grip of savage jaws, the rend of talons, the pain of wounds and the growing numbness of physical dissolution. Threshing he struggled for awareness, for warmth and light and conscious life. The darkness paled into a nacreous sheen. The crushing embrace of the dragon eased and reality replaced the nightmare.
    One born of associated memories. There was no dragon, no ebon sea of frozen chill, no spouting wounds. They were distortions created from buried fears and hard experience of travelling in the containers designed to carry livestock, doped, frozen and ninety per cent dead. The caskets which offered cheap transport to those men and women willing to risk the fifteen per cent death rate. As yet he had been lucky. Now it seemed his luck had come to an end.
    Lying supine, eyes closed, he recalled the onrush of the silvered shapes, the weapons, the gas, the overwhelming attack. Things belonging to the past now, fragments ofdreams as had been the frigid sea and the dragon. But they had never existed outside his own mind. The beings that had taken him captive had been real.
    He stirred and stretched and touched the surface on which he rested. A warm, soft texture taut over a yielding interior. The air, too was warm, scented with the delicate odor of a summer’s day and small sounds graced the emptiness which he sensed around him. A chamber, he decided. One holding a soft couch. A warm place that could be a haven or a jail.
    Opening his eyes he stared at magic.
    The chamber was vast, the vaulted roof soaring high, the walls distant, the illumination glowing from the floor and walls and the arching roof as if sunlight had been collected and stored and gently released to warm and gild all within view. Water gushed gently from a fountain and glimmering shapes rested on the surface of the surrounding pool. Among them a