Riverkeep Read Free Page B

his guts throwing the rest of his senses aroundin confusion. As the mormorach drove him through the freezing dark and the pressure began to pound his skull into unconsciousness, he reached down instinctively, touched scales and bone, and his hands filled with a warm, slippery mess.
    Just before Emory’s heart stopped beating, he had time to understand that he was holding his own guts—that the creature had bitten him open.
    And, unbidden, from a flash of light in his brain, the word
intestine
came. . . . Then he was a young man again, holding hands with his wife in the Rydberg Woods and kissing her for the first time.

3
The Keep
    Ursa: literally, “running death.” A large, houndlike, nocturnal carnivoran (they will hunt only once the moon has left the sky), the ursa can grow up to sixteen feet in height (when reared on hindquarters) and can reach great speeds on its short, thick legs. Equally at home in water or on land, it can outpace both a seula and a horse with ease, and its six unretractile claws help it climb with unexpected dexterity. This dexterity is crudely mechanical, even allowing for the opening of doors or windows. Completely hairless, it has a dense layer of blubber beneath its brilliant white skin. This insulates the animal perfectly, regulating blood temperature in even the harshest conditions as well as providing protection from attack
—
even from the bullets of the most powerful rifle. Ursa hides, teeth, and bones are highly valued by traders, but the animals’ strength, ferocity, and resistance to gunfire make them rare game, and their habit of eating fermented sunberries(the ingestion of which fuels aggression) means even well-armed huntsmen shy from their pursuit.
    â€”
Encyclopedia Grandalia,
University of Oracco Print House
    Â 
    The boards were foot-slipping glass, slicked with invisible slime from the kiss of dew and the frozen moisture in the air. Around him the snow swallowed nature’s sounds, and the world was still and calm, the midafternoon sun white and heatless behind the clouds. The fog of the day had mixed with tendrils of smog from the far-off city, and through it the bäta’s painted eyes, heavy and staring, watched Wull at his task.
    He drove his boot edge into the slats and heaved again at the ice rod. But the force of his strength, though it brought pain into his neck and spots to his vision, set only the bäta to rocking, the rod unyielding in the crag of white that covered its bottom half. He cursed himself for leaving it so long—and for letting the lantern burn out. Without the flame to warm the iron, the ice climbed freely and choked
the river an’ the traffic an’ the creatures what lives in it
.
    Wull heard Pappa’s voice in his memory, and pulled his hat tighter about his ears.
    One winter they had found a body stuck headfirst in thefrozen ground beside a burned-out lantern. The ice had covered it to the waist so that the torso and head were preserved as though the man was holding his breath; but he had been picked clean from hip to toe by the insects and the birds and the elements, so his skeleton was shining and bare. When they’d lifted him, the legs had collapsed, all the connectiveness taken by the mouths of hungry things.
    That was why the lanterns were lit, Wull knew: so water flowed and the fallen stood a chance.
    And he had let lantern one extinguish. Of the remaining twenty-one there would be more gone cold, their wicks frozen into black stumps and their rods locked into immovable, glistening rock.
    His second day as Riverkeep, and already the threads of it had slipped from his grasp, pulled away like weeds in the current. He stilled his movements and felt the surge of the river beneath him, its constancy and strength pushing against his fumbled knots; never waiting, never resting, the splintered ice—shot through with scattered-seed bubbles—closing round the bäta like a fist.
    What had