The Viper's Fangs (Book 2) by Robert P. Hansen Read Free Book Online Page B

it wasn’t friendly .
    His lungs expanded, and the cold air entered into him again.
Why was he breathing? How was he breathing? Another breath. It was not
as sharp, not as demanding. Another….
    His hands moved, pulling his arms behind them. They pressed
upward, pushing him up to his knees. Then his legs moved, levering him clumsily
to his feet, as if they were unaccustomed to supporting his weight. He stumbled
forward, the staff forgotten behind him.
    But Fanzool wasn’t thinking about the staff. He wasn’t even
thinking about walking, about how to put one foot closer to Wyrmwood, then the
other. He wasn’t thinking about anything. He had already fallen into a deep,
unrelenting sleep, one he should never have woken up from.
    But he would wake up.
    Sardach would make sure of it. It was what Argyle wanted….

 
    4
    Angus approached Ortis with trepidation. His companion was
roughly the same size as he was, and his clothing was fairly normal for a
woodsman: gray-green tunic and breeches, heavy brown winter cloak, and leather
boots. He had set the cloak carefully on the ground and put his bow and quiver
of arrows on it. These weren’t what troubled Angus; it was the leather harness
he held in his hand. It looked stable enough, but he didn’t feel at all
comfortable trusting it with his life. Still, there was something more to it
than that, something that had been bothering him since they had first met half
a year ago. It was his eyes. They were catlike, orange-tinted things that held
a strange cast, a kind of stoic, violent wisdom—and something else he could
never place. A sense of mystery? Secrecy? They were guarded, silent, intense
eyes that missed very little of what happened around him.
    Angus glanced at Ortis’s other two constituents and frowned.
One was near Hobart, who was kneeling by the winch mechanism, and the other was
tending to the horses. They looked identical to the one he approached, but he
knew they weren’t triplets—at least not in the sense of human triplets.
His milky-white skin and cat-like eyes could never be mistaken for human. But
what was he? He said he was a Triad and that there weren’t many of his kind
left, but Angus wasn’t sure if he believed him. Are you of the plains folk? Angus
wondered again as he came to a stop and dropped his gaze to the harness. A
survivor of that long-ago massacre?
    Ortis held out the harness and bent down so Angus could step
into the loops for his legs. As he straightened up, he guided those loops past
Angus’s knees and said, “Remember, the trick is not to let go.” Angus nodded
and wiggled around in the loops, trying to find a comfortable position. But
there was no comfort here; the loops were too tight for that! He might have
felt better—and warmer!—in his robe, but the harness had not been made for
wizards. It did fit over the form-fitting black breeches fairly easily, but not
over his thighs. The harness was clearly made for someone smaller, like Giorge.
At least the straps around his chest and waist were adjustable.
    “I thought the trick was not to look down,” Hobart offered
from where he knelt by the winch. The winch was attached to a tree trunk, and
he said it would belay the ropes easily and, if needed, arrest a fall. It had a
brake, and there was a crank on one side that could be used to reel the ropes
in if needed. The ropes were coiled up in two large piles, one on either side
of Hobart, waiting to be fed through the winch mechanism. Angus eyed the ropes
suspiciously; they had been spliced together and he would have preferred to
have tied the knots himself. They said they knew what there were doing….
    “What’s wrong with the view?” Giorge asked as he once more
walked over to the precipice and leaned dangerously forward. “All this open
space is exhilarating!”
    Hobart’s armor clattered softly as he shrugged and fed the
slack end of one of the ropes through a hole in the side of the winch and
wrapped it around the spool.