Shadow's Son by Shirley Meier, S.M. Stirling and Karen Wehrstein ...

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Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html glittering… Shkai'ra slipped the shield-thong off her arm, twisting her body as she flung, the shield spinning like a giant discus. It struck his throat; he pitched back to lie against the wall, biting for air as his crushed windpipe refused to pass the air his chest heaved to draw. The crossbow twanged, the bolt knocking a chip out of the stone wall across the room. Shkai'ra turned, staggered.No more. Over . Except for the one with no left arm to free his pinned right arm with; quiet now, he stared up at her. She wrenched the sword loose, finished him. Grey edged the corners of her vision, a grey-red mist that faded in across the icy clarity of the battlemind; the hysterical strength that had worn her like a cloak vanished. She toppled forward like a cut tree and lay, gasping and straining not to faint, tears and mucus streaming across her face as pain hit. The boy. Silence had fallen, the strangled man passed out and soon to die; the hanging lamp over the card table swinging was the only motion, though by making every shadow sway and shift it filled the whole room with false motion.I did come here and do this all for the zteafakazboy. Where did he go ? She moaned, forcing her hands underneath herself and levering her torso up. A ragged breath, and she rolled onto one side.Damn . The cut along her ribs—when did I get that?—was shallow, but too deep to clot, making a sheet of red down her side. Blood was flowing from the leg-wound, mixed with oily yellow matter. She ripped off the remains of her tunic and clamped it against the cut with an elbow, and crawled sidewinder fashion with one elbow and one knee over to the table, which still bore tall clay tumblers and an opened bottle; she hooked an elbow over the table edge and came to a knee, grabbed the bottle and poured half a dozen swallows down her throat. It was wine, cut with brandy, cloying sweet and strong. The grey receded a little and she half-fell into one of the chairs. Bending over, snarling at the pain, she managed to rip off enough of a dead man's shirt to bind the bandage crudely to her ribs. She glared around. "He couldn't have gotten out the door," she said; her voice startled her for a moment, a breathy rasp. She drank more of the wine. "Trapdoor to the cellar's closed. Door to the other room's still closed." Most of the first floor was this single large dining hall. "Upstairs, then." There was a spiral stair at one end of the room, curling around a post of carved and inlaid oak; the stairs were beautifully inlaid parquetry. She heaved herself to her feet; the room swayed, then steadied. "Lixand!" The name sounded strange in her ears.Shit, what language am I talking ? The bad leg nearly turned under her, unable to bear any but the slightest weight; she swore long and savagely in the ripping, clicking gutturals of Kommanzanu. There seemed to be a plate of Arkan-glass between her brain and her tongue, as if she was moving it like a puppet through a glove. "Lixand, it's—" She stopped.He's not likely to think of me as his mother . "Lixand, I've come from Megan, to take you home."Come down those stairs, you little shit . No answer. She switched the sword to her left hand, to use as a crutch; a terrible thing to do to a good weapon, but devils drove. Thump-drag-wheeze, over to the base of the stairs. Prop the point against the lowest one. "Lixand! Come out, boy!"Thump , up a step. She gasped through clenched teeth, leaned panting on the stair-rail. Another step. Another. Faster, and the black square of the opening to the upper floor was just above her. She stopped just below it, bellows-panting.Maybe he got out one of the doors and I didn't notice ! she thought.Better take a look here. City boy, he won't go far in the dark outside anyway . Shkai'ra put the point of the sword on the next step, inched her head up through the opening. A whistle of cloven air warned her; but she was slow, slow. Too slow to do more than begin to drop,
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html before the icy sensation of the blow struck the back of her skull. There was one more, she thought, in the moment before her body went boneless.Forgive me, Megan. I failed . The witch-demon's head flopped back, lax, and dropped away out of the rectangle of light; he saw the gray eyes, clenching shut, falling through a shaft of lamplight, the too-muscular-for-a-woman body with the purple spider-wound on one leg tumbled limply, thumpthump thump down the stairs, turn over, lie still. The almost painful tingling in his hands gripping the oaken chair-leg, that he'd quietly unscrewed from a cob-webbed dining-room chair, seemed to linger. I never thought I could kill a witch-demon, Rasas thought. XXII Redfurherdmareleadernononononono! Megan sat bolt upright in the dark of the tent, claws out, rags of sleep tearing away to leave the echoes of Hotblood's thought-scream. She opened her mind up as far as she could, like spreading open a clenched fist, till the fingers and the webs between them burned with stretching, wide open, wider. HOTBLOOD! Through him, again, somehow, came Shkai'ra's sensations.Knife-edge clear, fighting, the leg-pain so bad now Megan heard a whimper slip through her own teeth. The blow,blast of ice-needle pain through the back of my head there was one more Megan kh'eeredo … The last thought, etched with weakening anguish, as the power to think sank into darkness:Forgive me, Megan. I failed . SHHHKKKKAAAAAIIIRRRRRAAAAA! Megan curled into a ball on her bed, hands clasped to her head, points of pain where her claws dug, unnoticed, into her scalp, her whole body shaking with the force of the thought-scream. Nothing. Redfurherdmareleaderdeadmoanwhimperwhimper… HOTBLOOD! She sent the call out so hard she reeled sitting. Nothing. Again, again, almost to passing out. No thought-answer came.Without her , she thought dully,nothing, not even annoyance, binds him to me . She huddled on the bed, curled around nothing, absolutely still. The thought came dully.She thought "I'm dead," before, when it wasn't certain —idly, just out of fear. She would never, unless it were certain, unless sheknewshe'd drawn her last breath, think: "I failed ."
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people around for camouflage, and t
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Und now I vind dose two—Celestial
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wounded only in the carts on march,
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