A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist by Ron Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

torment was not enough! Nay! Thou hast to try and corrupt their immortal souls as well! Thou, thou demoness, with thine lascivious displays and carnal temptations! Musrum Himself has condemned thee! He has blasted thine evil company from the earth with one mighty smite of His hand. He has left us thee, to deal with ourselves, as a test of our continued faith. How else to prove to Him that thou hast not bedeviled our souls than to faithfully and unquestioningly follow His example?”
    “Are you out of your mind?” shrieked Rykkla. “You feeble old fool! I’m no devil, damn you! I’m an acrobat, a performer, a gymnast, a dancer from Londeac!”
    “Aha! The very antechamber of Hell itself! Thou art indeed a wanton slut! A harlot of the Weedking himself! Sent to pervert us from the True Faith!”
    “You’re a filthy-minded old cat fart! You can’t stand a little decent arousal without feeling guilty, can you? You get a hard-on and you think it’s my fault! I don’t believe it! You’re the one who sees sex and filth wherever you look and you think that I’m the pervert! You must pray for an hour and beat yourself senseless every time you pee, just because you had to touch yourself. You probably haven’t wiped in fifty years. Or do you get the altarboys to do it for you?”
    “Thine own tongue condemns thee!” the old priest screeched in a piercing falsetto. “Cleanse her! Cleanse the very air she has befouled!”
    With a cry of relief, the impatient crowd surged forward and a dozen torches flew in sparkling arcs through the air, landing on the pyre where the dessicated wood caught the flames hungrily. Rykkla felt a rush of heat quite un-like the sodden torridity of her prison; this was a dry, searing heat like that radiating from an open furnace or kiln. The base of the bonfire had caught first and a broad circle of flame rose around her, its highest tongues not five feet from her face, as though she were surrounded by a chorus line of lambent cobras. Encouraged by the breeze, the fire advanced quickly, eating into the pile of dry timber as though it were made of magician’s flash paper. Rykkla’s heavy woolen pantaloons protected her legs, but her face and arms were being scorched; the sheet of light fabric that enwrapped her was already smoldering. Within seconds a wall of flame blocked her view of the crowd; its crackling roar drowning their cheers and taunts, which was something to be thankful for, anyway, and she could feel the air being greedily sucked from her lungs. She coughed and choked on the billows of hot, acrid smoke that swirled around her face. She closed her watering eyes to await the final suffocation, which she fervently hoped would separate her from, anesthetise her against the pain of immolation.
    There was a sudden, searing explosion of agony down the full length of her body, as though it had burst into flame all at once, like a Saint Wladimir’s Day firework, and she had a bitter moment to curse the luck that had kept her conscious too long before she realized that it wasn’t fire at all that had stung her, but instead a drenching of icy water.

CHAPTER FOUR
    THE METEOR
    There were fireworks on the evening after the great pyrotechnic tower was capped by the dome-shaped life compartment; the assembly of the space vehicle was complete. Bronwyn watched the fiery celebration with her usual gloomy foreboding, thinking that the spectacularly-erupting rockets were perhaps in fact doleful harbingers of a coming catastrophe, the disastrous nature of which would be all too obviously personal. Lit from all sides by the flashing, multicolored explosions, the hundred-foot-tall hexagonal prism looked translucent, like a looming crystal of quartz, too massive and monumental to ever be capable of leaving the earth, at the same time too ethereal to be dangerous. Yet, she knew all too well that the rocket was more than capable, were all of its tubes to explode simultaneously (something she had been assured