Beneath an Opal Moon by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online

is, is Omojiru’s murderer.”
    â€œYes, but that leaves us with the question of what happened to him.”
    Moichi looked around once more; they had searched in every conceivable nook and cranny and found nothing. Nothing but blood. “Well, the answer is obviously not here.”
    They found the boy outside, throwing pebbles at passing carts. He danced a little jig at each hit. The rain had turned into a light mist while they had been inside The Screaming Monkey .
    â€œThe horses,” Moichi said to the boy, and he nodded, leading them down the street.
    â€œJust a moment.” Moichi halted them as they were passing the dank black alley to the side of the tavern. There seemed to be a lot o£ movement in the denseness, small chitterings, sibilant rustlings.
    Moichi went in and the others followed him into the shadows.
    Refuse and garbage, excrement and—a humped shape.
    Moichi bent down and hissed sharply, a quick exhalation. Squeals of the rats, scattering angrily before his looming presence.
    â€œThere is something here,” he said. “Something new to cause such activity in these normally nocturnal creatures.” His hand reached out, fingers moving rapidly, found stiff cloth, a hard and irregular configuration beneath it. Blood stench and a sudden geyser of fetid gas. Death. He choked.
    â€œGods, it is a man!”
    Together, he and Aerent dragged it into the light of day.
    The boy turned away and vomited, retching violently without letup.
    The eyes were gone and, of course, the nose. They had been busy through the night, those creatures; he could not have been there any longer than that.
    They were both crouching over the corpse. Moichi glanced up, saw the curtains blowing in the room they had just come from. A neat drop, he thought. Tidy. Let the scavengers of the city dispose of the body.
    Aerent was staring at the corpse. His eyes widened. “By the Pole Star, Moichi, look at this!”
    But Moichi had turned his head, knowing what the other had found, and was watching the boy who, terrified yet unable to leave, had turned back. He noted the boy’s paleness of skin under the yellow tinge, the pinched look around the corners of his mouth, the slight wildness of the eyes. Everyone in Sha’angh’sei is inured to death, Moichi thought. Even the young. Just another fact of life here. What would cause such a violent reaction in him? It was a terrible death, yes. But was that the sum of it?
    â€œMoichi, who could have—?” He grasped the navigator’s arm, appalled. “Have you seen this—abomination? Death has been by my side for many long seasons, until I think of it now as a kind of constant companion; we have an understanding. But this—Never have I seen its like. Not on the battlefield; not in the military prisons. Nowhere.
    Moichi nodded, holding onto the boy now. He looked again. The chest was a gaping maw, all white and black, crawling with tiny things. But there was nothing terrible about that; it was nature. The creatures of the world were due their right. The truly monstrous thing was that all the blood was gone. Only man could do that.
    Because something had been done to this man’s heart. Something perverse and evil, slowly and calculatedly, before he died, and Moichi still felt the chills reverberating through him, making the short hairs at the back of his neck stand up, a vestigial reflex from the time when man still swung through the trees, walking with his knuckles scraping the earth. Someone had worked on this man with a cunning more than human and with an obvious dispassion that was quite a bit less than human. Not the quick flashing death of Omojiru for this man.
    Moichi tightened his grip on the boy’s arm. “Who is he?”
    The boy shook his head.
    â€œTell me.” Then, more sharply like the crack of a whip. “Tell me!”
    The boy flinched, closing his eyes, but still he was silent. Tears stood out at