Read Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series for Free Online Page B

mercy, good and evil. But they haven’t. They view the universe in terms of competing opposites, called enons. In the physical universe enons are observed in the form of matter and antimatter. Creation and chaos. Enons appear to do battle, but their forces remain equal. That is the way I feel about the Blade Kin. I and they are enons. I battle them, hack them down. Always they come at me again, as if freshly created only to bloody my sword.
    “Anyway,” Phylomon added, “to work. For over three hundred years, I have kept some armaments hidden. But now I must unearth them. I wanted you to be here with me, to see where the cache is. That way, if I die, you will know what is available to you.”
    Phylomon walked into the brush and set his hand on a huge boulder; then Phylomon had Darrissea and Fava place their hands beside his, and he asked each woman to speak her name.
    Last of all Phylomon spoke his name.
    The boulder collapsed into dust, and a great stone box appeared. The mammoth, only a few yards away, trumpeted in fear, and Darrissea fell back in surprise. Fava felt her own stomach fluttering.
    Phylomon spoke to the box in English, saying “Open,” and the lid slid away to reveal odd devices—rods, medallions, strange guns. The box emitted a rotten odor, like some long-unused pantry. Fava stepped back a dozen yards, terrified.
    For a long time Phylomon studied the great box, and then he pulled out a tiny black cube and swallowed it.
    “What is that?” Darrissea asked.
    “A weapon that will remain hidden in my stomach until I call upon it,” Phylomon said.
    He pulled out eight white rods and one blue one, like long pipes, and he gave three each to Fava and Darrissea. “These were not made as weapons,” he said softly. “Originally, when our forefathers terraformed Anee, the planet was very unstable. Situated as it is, the largest moon circling a gas giant, it undergoes phenomenal gravitational stress, causing volcanoes and earthquakes and tremendous tides. Those stresses were necessary for the planet to build an atmosphere, but they are also inconvenient. So we used harmonic resonance rods”—he held out the sticks—“to trigger earthquakes and relieve the tectonic plates so that we could build our cities.”
    Phylomon looked at the two women and must have realized that neither of them could understand him. “When we get to Bashevgo, we may need to breach the walls to the city. To do so, you must plant the rods in the wall and twist. Plant all eight white ones first, and the blue one last. Within a few minutes the walls will shatter.”
    “These start earthquakes?” Fava asked, her eyes widening in a mix of wonder and fear.
    Phylomon nodded gravely. “Bashevgo is fairly stable. I don’t know exactly how much damage we could cause. But in some other cities—down in Greenstone where they are closer to the fault lines—we could level the entire countryside.”
    Fava set her rods on the ground, gingerly, as if afraid of them.
    Phylomon reached into the box and pulled out other objects—five guns, exactly half of those in the box. “So little left,” he mused, and he held them out to Fava.
    She would not touch them. “Those are evil weapons,” Fava said. “They are not friendly to me, I can tell.”
    “I offer you portable laser cannons, and you decline? What will you do, fight the Blade Kin with spears and swords?”
    “If I must,” Fava said, but Darrissea took the guns, carrying them like an armload of firewood.
    Phylomon studied Fava a moment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. Perhaps I can find some friendly weapons for you.”
    He pulled out a shining bow of silver with two knobs on each end. “That looks friendly,” Fava said.
    “No, we would need an allosaur to use this. It’s a tamer, used to control such beasts. It attaches to the allosaur’s brain, and when you speak commands, it translates them into impulses that the allosaur can react upon. When I was young, we