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 got no armor, just my knives; I'm crazy to go down there . But she did, at a dead sprint, leaping over hedges and ditches, thinking only:Lixand . Near the cliff-edge was madness; the Alliance had seized thelefaeti , the lifts, and dropped hawsers, whooping, to slide down them like spiders to a helpless prey. Scattered skirmishes were still going on. A unit of Arkans, about fifty, threw down their weapons; the Yeoli commander made them strip, marched them to the cliff-edge, and let his people drive them off. Other Arkans flung themselves over of their own will. She ran to the crowd around the head of one hawser, cutting her way through with vicious elbows. Everyone around her was screaming and laughing, throwing around gouts of wine—how infishguts did they get that onto the battlefield? Koru, shit, I thought we'd be fighting all day, and it's already over, so fast… She couldn't see, for taller people, until she found a fencepost to stand on. Arko. There it lay, like a dream in the haze. A ring of forest, a sickle of lake, houses, houses, row upon row of houses, spreading overchiliois , shining white buildings sprawling, towers, so many towers. A dream, burning. More plumes of smoke grew and billowed upward.No sack, you said. No sack. My thread of hope could be burning in that. And if it does I will never know. Never, ever . She saw a building explode into flames: a sawmill…the whole pit will go up, forest and all . She had to get down, fast. Lady Koru. Chevenga. I trusted you. I didn't kill you, because I trusted you. She pulled her climbing gloves on, hands trembling. The cliff was two hundred naZak-long paces down, maybe a fifth of achiliois . She adjusted the harness; the feel of it, pressure on the shackle at her buckle and over her shoulder was familiar from rope-climbing in F'talezon, as a child. She pushed off with her bootsoles, gently, watched the grey and black mirror rock-face glide up past her, controlled her fall with her hands. It was straight down, as smooth as polishing over centuries could make it, no worse than scaling down a building, unclimbable any other way. Mirror image of herself shining in smooth rock, almost glass-smooth, and black billows darkening ihe sky behind. Longer and longer bounds,if I burn the palms out of my gloves I don't care . At the bottom she pushed off over loose rock, and was down. She undipped; the smoke of houses, sweet wood-fire smell mixed with fouler odors of more precious things burning, blew across her face, making her choke and cough. If Shkai'ra had found Lixand, but not in time to come back to the army, they'd be at one or the other meeting place—now, not tomorrow noon, she knew. Shkai'ra wouldn't wait. The Marble Palace steps began at the head of the Avenue of Statuary, according to the map. There was fighting in the woods, screaming, but not much; a stream of warriors flowed into the city itself, whooping, howling, faces twisted with loot-hunger. She'd memorized the route; past the Arboretum Gate, along Charity Road, right, then left, all the way along the Avenue or Statuary. The fires were thickest to the south; she angled north, out of the trees into underbrush. Trampled dirt with the sickening odor of blood gave way to cobblestones. She dodged a group of Tor Enchians tossing a small girl from one to another, laughing, while a man, her father perhaps, watched, struggling against
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html their blows, shouting, crying, going down on his knees. Another child ran, though no one was chasing her, screaming "Mother! Father!", her formality strange in the chaos.Its always the children who suffer most . Megan knew. For an instant she was five years old again, in the riots in F'talezon, breathing furnace-hot air. The smell was the same; what race the residents were made no difference, it seemed, to that. The smoke was thick enough now to make the streets dark as at dusk. Flames cut the old brick of a wall like knives, only a few houses and yards away; the air singed, full of sparks and burning flakes of ash. She pulled her tunic up over her head, covering her nose and mouth against the rancid smoke, and ran. Someone screamed close by—long, long shrieks one after the other, high over the thunder of fire. An Arkan boy Lixand's age with a toy sword stood in the door of a house, the picture of defiance, with a Yeoli woman in front of him; his stand was useless, the house already on fire from behind. He lunged with both hands, trying to hold the sword straight; the Yeoli stepped aside, hit him in the back of the head with the edge of her shield, kicked him out of the way and stepped into the house. Right, then left—then a blank wall where the street should continue, a building in the way.A bloody building —in more ways than one; smears of grey mixed with the blood, the stink of bile, piss, shit and blood cutting even the smoke; a body lay with blond head broken open in a splatter pattern. She hesitated, thinking she'd got turned around. The fire wasthere , she couldn't go back or get trapped by it.Up. Look from the fikken roof . She yanked out her climbing claws rather than take the gloves off, clambered up the new brick wall, over the circles carved under the eaves and over the edge.My map's out of date, dammit. This was just built, and now it's burning . The tiles were warm through her gloves and she could near them cracking in the neat, the sound like bones in a dog's teeth. She felt the hairs on the inside of her nose crinkle as she breathed. Four or five houses down a roof fell in, loosing whip-tongues of flame to roar up into the sky. No sack, you said, Chevenga. I remember your eyes, so honest. No sack. The house behind her, blazing curtains waving out of broken upper windows, bricks bulging outward, crumbling, ready to fall at any moment. She slid over the peak of the roof to the other side, snatched at the map, the roaring fire-wind trying to tug her off the roof, into the fire, or pull the breath out of her lungs.Stopping to read a map in the middle of the bottom furnace of Halya, shit, shit, shit … The street twisted the other way from what her map showed, but the one beyond looked right. Wind tore the paper almost in half; she grabbed it and flattened against the tiles. There—the Avenue of Statuary. Fishguts. Everyone's here. Of course, where else? This was where the good stuff was. Yeolis and Lakans and Enchians ran back and forth carrying gold-leafed chairs, paintings, bundles of bright satin clothing, jewel boxes. They danced in the fountains with gold chains and baubles and sparkly stones dangling over their grimed oily armor, carried huge glass vases out of the houses just to smash them, made bonfires of books just to see something valuable destroyed,stupid assholes , waving their arms in the air like savages at a fire altar. A crowd of warriors laughed and danced and sang around a cart with a huge cask on it, filling cups from the casks. A dozen Arkans,Aitzas by the few waist-long strands of their hair not hacked off, were harnessed to the cart like horses, with blinders and bits in their mouths even, their faces dead with shock. The cobbles shone red with wine and blood. Statues. A bronze horse being pulled down by a motley group of mercenaries, beating on it just to hear the hollow boom, a marble form hacked off at the ankles, leaving sandalled feet on the plinth amidst
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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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