"David Freer - The Forlorn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Freer Dave)

waved his sword ineffectually at it, as one might a hazel switch, and shouted, "Go on! Shoo!"

The sweeping horn caught him, sheer weight and power punching it through his rib cage, like a spear
through wet tissue paper. His bubbling scream was cut off as he was tossed and flung with
bone-smashing force to crack against the wall. He bounced off it, to fall beneath the angry hooves.

The guardsman called Sill grabbed Keilin's arm, and pulled the boy across his body, holding him as a
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human shield. Such a shield was, of course, meaningless to the three-ton beast that was pawing the
rag-doll remnants of the guardsman's former companion.

Then Keilin heard a high-pitched thin whine. He knew what came next. It had happened three times
before. The guardsmen didn't appear to be able to hear it . . . or didn't know what it meant. With frantic
strength the boy lunged forward and bit his captor's lower bicep with all his might. Sill grunted with pain
and jerked the boy away; Keilin desperately threw himself downward. The guard's chest, and a tardy
lock of Keilin's hair vaporized. So did half the wall behind them, and the door beyond that.

Keilin didn't wait for them to have a second shot at him. He was off, bolting through the new-made way
out of the dead end. His one glance backward showed that the Guard-Captain had made his escape
through the same hole. The man seemed to have no intention of following him, though. Kemp was just
running in blind panic.

Keilin slipped into a narrow multibranched alley, and waited hidden behind a lip of brickwork. No
footsteps followed. After a few minutes of swallowed panting and gradually slowing heartbeat, the boy
slipped quietly away in a different direction. Finally, as the sky was beginning to pale, and the first sounds
of stirring of the city's dayside began, he dropped over a wall, and then shimmied up a drainpipe. This
gave access to a narrow ledge surrounding the building at third-floor level. He edged along the dark line
of crumbling bricks, and around the corner to a small window.

It wasn't barred . . . most unusual for Port Tinarana. In fact it only appeared to be closed. A fingernail
under the edge of the rusty steel and it opened silently, or should have, after the amount of stolen oil that
Keilin had lavished on it. Instead, it opened quietly a little way and then . . . stuck. Keilin was standing on
a four-inch-wide ledge, trying to apply outward leverage. He cursed in a whisper, using language no
fourteen-year-old ought to know: not just because it was obscene, but because it was obscene in an
extinct language. Perhaps as a response, the obdurate window flew open abruptly, nearly tumbling him
down for perhaps the twentieth time. Hehad fallen once, and the memory of the fear in those
stretched-out moments was still with him. He was shaking as he pulled himself into the musty darkness.

His eyes adjusted to the dimness as he closed the window behind him. Relief washed through him as he
looked at the familiar cracked washstand from his perch on the toilet cistern. This was one of the port's
original buildings, and here, unusually, the plumbing still worked. In most public places the fittings had
long since been looted, to become nonfunctioning ornaments in some wealthy merchant's house, or
perhaps cut and fitted to the normal bucket and seat arrangement. But here . . . this place was largely
forgotten. Those who did remember its existence treated it with superstitious awe. This is the fate of
libraries in largely illiterate societies.