City of Illusions by Ursula K. LeGuin Read Free Book Online

long pause. Falk stook in the darkness just inside the door, Argerd, motionless, just outside it. A boy came running down the grassy slope visible from the door, tossed Falk's pack down and disappeared.
    "Pick it up," Argerd ordered; Falk came out into the light and obeyed. "Now get going."
    "Wait," Falk muttered, kneeling and looking hastily through the disarrayed, unstrapped pack. "Where's my book?
    "Book?"
    "The Old Canon. A handbook, not electronic—"
    "You think we'd let you leave here with that?"
    Falk stared. "Don't you people recognize the Canons of Man when you see them? What did you take it for?"
    "You don't know and won't find out what we know, and if you don't get going I'll burn your hands off. Get up and go on, go straight on, get moving!" The shrieking note was in Argerd's voice again, and Falk realized he had nearly driven him too far. As he saw the look of hate and fear in Argerd's heavy, intelligent face the contagion of it caught him, and hastily he closed and shouldered his pack, walked past the big man and started up the grassy rise from the door of the cellars. The light was that of evening, a little past sunset. He walked towards it. A fine elastic strip of pure suspense seemed to connect the back of his head to the nose of the laserpistol Argerd held, stretching out, stretching out as he walked on. Across a weedy lawn, across a bridge of loose planks over the river, up a path between the pastures and then between orchards. He reached the top of the ridge. There he glanced back for one moment, seeing the hidden valley as he had first seen it, full of a golden evening light, sweet and peaceful, high chimneys over the sky-reflecting river. He hastened on into the gloom of the forest, where it was already night.
    Thirsty and hungry, sore and downhearted, Falk saw his aimless journey through the Eastern Forest stretching on ahead of him with no vague hope, now, of a friendly hearth somewhere along the way to break the hard, wild monotony. He must not seek a road but avoid all roads, and hide from men and their dwellingplaces like any wild beast. Only one thing cheered him up a bit, besides a creek to drink from and some travel-ration from his pack, and that was the thought that though he had brought his trouble on himself, he had not knuckled under. He had bluffed the moral boar and the brutal man on their own ground, and got away with it. That did hearten him; for he knew himself so little that all his acts were also acts of self-discovery, like those of a boy, and knowing that he lacked so much he was glad to learn that at least he was not without courage.
    After drinking and eating and drinking again he went on, in a broken moonlight that sufficed his eyes, till he had put a mile or so of broken country between himself and the house of Fear, as he thought of the place. Then, worn out, he lay down to sleep at the edge of a little glade, building no fire or shelter, lying gazing up at the moon-washed winter sky. Nothing broke the silence but now and again the soft query of a hunting owl. And this desolation seemed to him restful and blessed after the scurrying, voice-haunted, lightless prison-cellar of the house of Fear.
    As he pushed on westward through the trees and the days, he kept no more count of one than of the other. Time went on; and he went on.
    The book was not the only thing he had lost; they had kept Metock's silver water-flask, and a little box, also of silver, of disinfectant salve. They could only have kept the book because they wanted it badly, or because they took it for some kind of code or mystery. There was a period when the loss of it weighed unreasonably on him, for it seemed to him it had been his one true link with the people he had loved and trusted, and once he told himself, sitting by his fire, that next day he would turn back and find the house of Fear again and get his book. But he went on, next day. He was able to go west, with compass and sun for guides, but could never have