Read The Night of the Swarm (Chathrand Voyage 4) for Free Online Page B

Angungra cut through the crater wall and swept away, into a deepening gorge. A mist hung over that gorge, and beyond it there were mountains, lower than the cold peaks they had passed through, but
tight and forbidding all the same. And endless, too: if they somehow escaped this Forest they would have little choice but to brave those mountains – with no guide who had ever set foot
there, no notion of what lay beyond.
    Or almost none.
    There is hope downriver
,
between the mountains and the sea.
The strange message from Vasparhaven, the Spider Temple, came back to her with sudden irony. Hope. Maybe it was out
there, somewhere, hidden in this great arbitrary maze of a world. But what of it? The notion seemed cruel, like showing a coin to a beggar, then tossing it away into a field.
    Carefully, she turned to face the north. The snow-capped range through which they had come loomed dark and massive. Astonishing to think that a footpath snaked through those peaks, and down
again, to the city where they’d left their ship, their one real hope of any life save the life of castaways. To say nothing of kinfolk, clan brothers and sisters, her grandfather . . . and
Taliktrum.
    He was back there in Masalym. The only ixchel in that vast city of dlömu. Her lover, exiled by his own choosing. And by the impossible, the suffocating neediness of their clan.
    I should be with you. I should have sought you out.
    Nonsense, of course. Taliktrum had spurned her, called her
an entertainment.
If Myett had abandoned both the ship and this expedition, if she somehow found him in that huge dark hive of a
city, Taliktrum would only have called her a fool. And been right in doing so. Myett was done with foolishness: she too had made decisions, chosen sides. It was a strange fate, to be fighting
alongside giants, sworn enemies, for an abstraction called the world. But Myett knew what she and Ensyl could give them, how ixchel skills might help them all survive, and that certainty of being
needed was what one felt in a clan.
    It was not passion, not ‘starlight in the blood’ as the poets had it, not the bliss she had felt when Taliktrum was at his best, when he managed to be loving and kind. But it was
good, they were good; even Hercól had forgiven and embraced her. She looked down, mapping out her descent.
    Then her brow furrowed. What was blocking the sun?
    Instinct came too late. Myett’s hand flew to her knife, but the hawk was already on her, grey wings filling her vision, shrill cry rending the air. Talons longer than her arm bit into her
flesh.
    She was crushed, barely able to breathe. But as the hawk wheeled away from the tower she managed to pass the knife from her half-pinned arm to her teeth. Her thoughts exploding. She would fall.
She would die. She would work the arm free, stab the bird, master it, make it land. No quitting. No quitting. The talons moved. Her arm slid free.
    At once she buried the knife in the bird’s leg. Its reaction was swift and violent, a sharp jerking stall, and Myett was thrown, whirling, falling, falling to her death. The sun whirled,
the earth flashed in circles around her, the tower wall surged by faster and faster, she was dead, she was surely dead, a life of lust and bitterness and rage—
    The hawk snatched her from the air. Myett felt its black beak tighten as it pulled out of the fall, straining, the tug of the earth so strong she thought her ears must be bleeding. Then they
rose above the top leaf-layer and shot away to the south, and the hawk passed her back into his claw, slick now with the blood she had drawn. One eye, coral-red and brilliant, fixed upon her.
    ‘If you fight me,’ said the hawk distinctly, ‘I will pinch that arm until it dies.’

 
     
     
     
2
Flesh, Stone and Spirit

     
     
     
     
    11 Modobrin 941
    240th day from Etherhorde
    The mighty are beggars, child. They rattle silver cups by the roadside, pleading for love.
    Dlömic folk song
     
    Sandor Ott paced the