The Shadow and Night by Chris Walley Read Free Book Online Page B

minutes later, having carefully crossed the solid ice of the Lannar River on foot and ridden up the sparsely wooded western bank, Merral squinted across at the wastes before him and wondered why he had been so zealous.
    Ahead was a desolate and empty landscape across which a cutting wind whistled hungrily around him. Facing into it, he found that there was little escape even with the glare goggles on and the face baffle of his jacket up round his nose. As he rode on, with Graceful picking her way across the frozen tussocks, he decided that there was little to choose between the west and the north wind. While lacking the polar chill of the wind from the north, the west wind had its own cruel character. Here every turbulent gust that struck carried a reminder that it was drawn across five thousand kilometers of treeless waste, much of it a dry, salty, and sandy desert. At least, he reminded himself, in winter there was still enough moisture to remove the dust. In summer, the dry and baking west wind was filled with dust, silt, and static, and became the scourge of machinery and men’s lungs.
    Merral, trying to keep his face averted from the wind as much as he could, found little compensation in his route. Here only the thinnest skins of frozen soil and turf covered hard black volcanic rock. There were patches of powdery snow and, every so often, dangerous stretches of colorless ice over which dismounting was necessary. The only vegetation was clumps of rough tussocky grass with occasional straggly bushes of hazel and willow. Given the scarcity of the vegetation and the harsh weather, Merral found no surprise in the fact that he saw little life in the wastes. Every so often he put to flight a party of migrating tundra hares, pale in their winter coats, and once he came across a herd of grazing reindeer, which stared at him stupidly before turning away and shuffling off to resume their foraging. Once a pair of great Gyrfalcons circled above him, ghostly below the clouds, then drifted away southward. But that was all he saw.
    Soon he found that he was in a featureless landscape where the gray of the ground faded into the softer grayness of the sky to give an elusive and unchanging horizon. Merral decided that here he could not afford to be lost and set his diary to check the route: a thing he rarely did. So his progress was marked by periodic noises from the diary, a deep long beep for a deviation to the left, a short high one for one to the right, and a bell-like chime for a correct course. Like all Forestry horses Graceful understood the signals enough to steer herself. So together, horse and man progressed slowly over Brigila’s Wastes, the silence broken only by the whistles of the wind, the clip-clop of Graceful’s hooves, and the occasional interruption from the diary.
    For the first half hour or so, Merral was preoccupied by what had happened at Herrandown. He was unsatisfied by what both his uncle and aunt had said this morning. Something odd, alarming, and even wrong had happened yesterday. But what? No hypothesis he could invent would make any sense. In the end, Merral reluctantly decided that Zennia and Barrand must be right: It was some sort of psychological oddity that they had mishandled between them so that it had become completely distorted. After all, human beings were complex. On that basis, Merral pushed the affair out of his mind.
    Yet as he rode on, he felt a strange feeling of disquiet that seemed to have nothing to do with the weather. More than once, he found himself looking around or even over his shoulder, as if some invisible shadow had fallen upon him. But, other than the gently undulating bleak surface under him and the gray billowy sky above, there was nothing to see.
    Eventually, Merral forced himself to concentrate on studying the ground and trying to get a feel for these barren lands. He found himself pondering over the wastes, aware of how widespread this sort of landscape was in