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legs while I tried to get myself wrapped again. I was shaking beyond all hope
of control. It couldn't be long before the cold caused irreversible damage.
Fourteen zoomed past, bumblebee wings humming. "Grab your ass, Slick." He
giggled. The bottom fell out.
My mount had run off the end of something again. Its huge wings extended,
beat the flake-filled air. The cold breeze roared past, not quite as chilly
now. I started to worry about frostbite but soon had trouble keeping a sharp
edge on my thoughts.
Fourteen buzzed around running his mouth till even my ride got fed up and
tried to take a bite out of him as he zipped past. A couple of cherub feathers
whipped past me. Fourteen squealed and headed for Cat, plopping down into her
lap.
Another one of those incredibly bright points of light popped over the north
side of TunFaire. There was too much snow to tell anything else about it. I
was trapped in a cold bubble in a sea of milk.
That flash made the flying horses whinny in dismay. They redoubled their
efforts to gain altitude. Fourteen started cussing. Cat asked him what was
going on. The horses turned directly away from the flash. Cat's mount drifted
away from mine.
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Curious. But I didn't have much hope of finding out what was going on.
Everybody was giving me the mushroom treatment, keeping me in the dark and
feeding me horse manure.
It all had to do with the feud going on back there, of course.
Something came down from the north and passed between my mount and Cat's. It
went by too fast to see, arriving with a hiss, then leaving a baby thunderclap
to mark its passing.
The horses yelped and tried desperately to get going faster.
Did my honey shout an explanation across, just in case it would help me stay
alive? Sure she did. Right after she told me the guaranteed-to-win numbers I
ought to bet in the Imperial Games.
I discovered that our course was southward because we arose above thinning
clouds. I made out what had to be the Haiden Light atGreatCape , downriver
thirty miles, south of town. We were way up high now, moving fast and finding
warmer air quickly, thanks to no gods. A little thumbnail clipping of a moon
lay upon the eastern horizon, smiling or smirking.
I looked over my shoulder. TunFaire lay under an inverted bowl of clouds that
flickered and glowed. Serpents of mist writhed upon the surface of the bowl
and gradually sank toward the epicenter beneath.
The Goddamn Parrot got active suddenly. He wriggled till he got his ugly
little head out into the wind. "Garrett. A dram of information. Shinrise the
Destroyer turns out to be . . . "
"ALambarCoast war god? Hangs around with cherubs and winged horses?"
"How did you know?" Next thing to a whine there, Old Bones.
"I remembered." Under stress some guys just can't shut up. Back when I was in
the Corps we had had us one of those for a while, a kid from theLambarCoast .
He had called on Shinrise whenever the going got tough.
One of those awful pinpoint flashes occurred on the far side of the city
again. Ectoplasmic light expanded around it. For just an instant a point of
darkness existed within that globe. Then cloud serpents began to spill down
and twist into the lightning-laced mass below.
Lightning popped to our right front, close and over-poweringly intense. Cat
and the horses screamed. Fourteen went on a cussing jag. Because I was still
looking back to the north, I didn't suffer the blinding worst of it, but a
brick wall of wind did smack me and almost bust me loose for one long and
thrilling downward walk in the chill night air. I clutched mane hair and
turned to see what had happened.
As I turned I thought I saw something cross the fragment of a moon. If I had
not known that such things were mythical, the imaginings of men who hadn't
ever seen an actual flying thunder lizard, I might have believed it was a
dragon.
I faced front as that insane light's intensity dwindled to where it did not
hurt the eye anymore. It was the same phenomenon again, only this time so
close we got hit by the expanding ectoplasmic sphere. It smashed past me. My
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mount staggered. Blinded by the flash, he tried desperately to stay level
while he recovered.
There was a hole in the night where the pop had taken place. It was a
darkness deeper than that inside a coffin buried in an underground tomb on the
dark side of a world without a sun. Then, just for an instant, something
reached through that hole, something that was darker still, something so dark
that it glistened in the light. Rainbows slithered over it like an oil film on
water. It came my way, but I don't think it was after me.
The Goddamn Parrot went berserk inside my shirt. Either he wanted to get away
bad or he had decided to snack on my guts.
Fourteen squealed like somebody had set his toes on fire.
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