A Whisper of Southern Lights Read Free Page A

fighting Temple, he had learned the art of invisibility. Not true invisibility—that was something he had never seen, though he had witnessed many strange things—but rather the talent of not being noticed. He could walk through a packed room in a manner that ensured he would not be remembered. If he used public transport, he sat in the middle of the carriage or bus, not at the front or back. He wore old, nondescript clothes, changing his fashions according to time and place. He was never too clean and manicured nor too scruffy. And most of all, he only let the wisdom gathered through centuries of wandering show through when it was most needed. For a man with one eye and the scarred skin of an old shark, this was a talent indeed.
    Now the lines were drawing closer together with every explosion and death cry. This battle was heading toward its inevitable conclusion, and while this meant that confusion would reign, it also meant that people would be more on their guard than ever. The fighting men on both sides were tired, exhausted and battle worn. He would have to take care.

    He found a small dinghy washed onto the shore, scarred with bullet holes. It seeped only a little water and still carried its oars, so Gabriel decided to take it across to Singapore. He had considered changing into a dead man’s uniform and giving himself up as a prisoner, but that was not the way. For now, he still needed his freedom.
    As he shoved the boat back into the water, an incredible weariness pressed down upon him. He groaned and sank beneath its weight, kneeling in the boat’s shallow puddles and raising his face to the clouds of battle.
    I’m so old,
he thought.
Please, let me be.
But he was still unsure to whom he prayed. God was always there for Gabriel, but He was not someone to reason with. Gabriel had not spoken to Him for a long time.
    He knelt there for a while, feeling the gravity of his years haul him down. He would be under the ground one day, buried and dead and forgotten, and sometimes, he yearned for that death. But his pursuit of Temple overrode all thoughts of rest. It was not merely vengeance, though the memory of his murdered wife and children always filled Gabriel with brutal rage. It was the task he had been given. The man in the woods had chosen Gabriel for some mystical purpose, and Temple was at the end of every one of Gabriel’s thoughts.
    Sometimes, he thought they were visions.
    He shoved the boat away from shore with one of the oars, sat down and started rowing. The noise around him was devastating, yet for a while, he was contained in his own bubble of calm. The rhythm of the oars, the movement of the boat, the shushing sound of water flowing against the wood, all merged into a soporific spell that lulled Gabriel into peace. He stretched and pulled, and his eyes drooped as the boat made its way toward Singapore.
    He said so little but told me so much,
he thought, remembering the man with the snake in his eye.
Appeared to me while my family was being killed, disappeared when I returned from finding their bodies. “Feed your hate,” he told me. And I’ve done that. For centuries, I’ve done that, and every time I meet Temple, it’s a feast. I’ve tasted that demon’s blood, and he tastes of human. I’ve seen his body rent by wounds, but like the carvings in those trees, his wounds seem able to control themselves.
    He rowed, guns spat, bombs fell.
    And now something else talks to me. The world is tearing itself apart, and the land tells me a name, and a place, and a reason I have to find this man.
    Gabriel had always felt used. In every dark corner he saw the man with the snake in his eye, some perverted grinning monk, a twisted holy man grimacing with mirth while Gabriel suffered not only his own extended life but the memory of the lives of his family cut so short.
    His little girl’s eyes had been pecked out by a crow.
    “Leave me alone,” Gabriel said. Something splashed in the water nearby and