Adiamante by L. E. Modesitt Jr. Read Free Book Online Page A

Crucelle pulsed back, “but, since you will be here then, I will leave such a happy event to you. K’gaio estimates that we’ll have the area clean the day after tomorrow.”
    â€œThat will wipe out a lot of back comptime.”
    â€œOne of the few benefits,” came back over the net, with the hint of a grin. “Oh … the Coordinator’s office has been cleaned and refurbished for you. Your name is already on the door—in heavy metal letters.”
    I repressed my own sigh. The last thing I had wanted was to be the Coordinator.

    â€œI heard that.”
    As I left the net, I refocused my eyes on the falling snow. A raven sat on the dead pine near the west end of the clearing. With a shake of wings and a spray of snow, he was gone.
    With a last sip from the green mug, I stood, then walked toward the wide doors on the west side of the house.
    The snow kept swirling out of the north as I pulled on the wool jacket and the cap knitted by Morgen’s mother. She’d only died a year before Morgen, and I had more physical keepsakes from her than from my soulmate.
    After stretching on the stones of the porch, under the overhang of the roof, I pulled on my gloves, fastened the knife in place, and glanced out into the flakes. Swift-Fall-Hunter was nowhere in sight, and the raven that often perched on the piñons when he was absent had not returned.
    I turned and looked into the clouds that shrouded the Breaks. It was a long run up the canyon, especially carrying weapons, spectacular as the Breaks were. But the upper canyon was the home for both vorpals and kalirams, and I never felt totally safe relying just on internal defenses against either. Sometimes the vorpals hunted in packs—not that a lone one ever hesitated to take on anything that provided meat, from injured kalirams to unprepared humans, but the vorpals formed up in packs more when they raided the prairie dog towns.
    I turned back to the west where a thin carpet of snow covered the open spots between the piñons and cedars, but the ground was dark under their branches.
    Soul-song fragments cascaded through the silence, the notes within my brain, unheard by even the sharpest of owls on the stillest of frozen nights.

    â€œMy songs for you alone will flow;
at my death none but you will know

cold coals on black stove’s grate, ash-white,
faintest glimmers for winter’s night.
This moment is my last time to sing … .”

    With her words and voice echoing in my thoughts, I stepped into the ankle-deep powder and began to run. Despite the heavy boots, my feet still slipped on the slopes.
    I ran to the northwest, down the long slope from the hill crest out into the valley flats, past the creek and out into the meleysen trees, where the warmer ground still melted the small flakes and slowly built a ground fog that circled up and around the meleysen trunks like the white mists of spring and fall.
    A jumble of white lay under the outer reaches of the meleysen trees’ intertwined outer branches, black-barked beams that formed a thin canopy over the soft and hot-leaved soil even in winter.
    No mist rose from the white lines, as would have with any snow that reached the ground unmelted. I refocused, straining slightly, and nodded to myself as I slowed.
    The twisted white bones under the cold-fluttered meleysen leaves might have belonged to a sambur, or some form of ruisine, perhaps a white-tail, but no ruisine healthy enough to breed true. The link-strength of the meleysens’ orangish spice scent had been enough, and the scent-trapped sambur had either eaten some of the thin leaves in desperation, and died quickly—or starved.
    The genetically flawed animals were few now, and I’d only seen a handful trapped by the trees’ power—mostly jackrabbits, and those might have been natural off-sports. The back net-records contained images of meleysen groves strewn with white. I shivered, thinking that