The Demon Horsemen Read Free Page A

imagination. ‘You are a Dragonlord,’ he said. ‘What you will to be will be.’ He taught her how to search minds while they were interrogating a captured Kerwyn soldier. If I can search a mind, then I can search for a mind , she reasoned now. She carefully checked that she was alone, then closed her eyes, cleared her mind and began scouting the city.
    The first thoughts she encountered startled her. They were alien: simple images of darkness and grass and water and warmth. And then she opened her eyes and smiled. Rabbits. She was encountering the minds of rabbits. She had to be more specific in her search, more refined. She closed her eyes again and concentrated.
    She found a collection of human thoughts and flitted through them: thoughts of food, a sharp edge on a knife, anger, amusement—and then fear and pain. She homed in. The thoughts were scattered—images of a soldier with a raised fist, immense pain floodingthrough, a fleeting glimpse of a black bush rat, a boy, a girl, the soldier again. Swift was alive.
    Meg pulled back from the depth of Swift’s mind to establish a direction, moving her feet to align with the thought impulses. When she opened her eyes she was facing south-east, towards the old temple ruin near the river.
    She started to walk but even at her quickest pace it would take some time to reach the ruin and time wasn’t Swift’s ally. She needed a quicker way. A portal would be instantaneous, but she had no visual cue of the temple or its immediate area because she had never been there. If only she could fly…
    ‘It brings back memories.’ Remembering A Ahmud Ki’s admission ignited another possibility. He had tried to teach her how to take the shape of a bird, but circumstances intervened and the lessons were never completed. He used words to cast his spell, but she didn’t need words. She simply had to imagine what she wanted to be. I was going to take the shape of a kookaburra , she remembered.
    She formed the image of a kookaburra in her mind now and imagined the shape as her own. Her spine tingled, and then it was as if her legs were ripped from under her—the ground raced up to meet her and she fell face…no, beak forward. The revelation stunned her. She stumbled, disoriented by the sudden change in perspective and the unusual appendages. She had become a bird—a real bird! She staggered a few steps and felt her tail touch the dust—her tail ! She stopped moving to focus on what she could feel. Wings. She stretched them as she would stretch her arms and, turning her head, saw the flecked brown and white feathers spread away from her body. The air rippled them. I am a bird , she thought with elation, a kookaburra .
    She tipped back her head, seeing the line of her kingfisher beak pointing skyward, and tried to warble, but what escaped her beak was a gasp followed by a cough and a strange strangled squawk. She caught her breath and lowered her beak. I can’t laugh like a kookaburra , she realised. Why? But the answer formed as soon as the question. Because I’ve never been a kookaburra . Panic set in. I’ve never flown before, either .
    She searched her memory for A Ahmud Ki’s account of his experience of changing form. When she had asked what happened, he had replied teasingly, ‘Oh, you have to do it to find that out.’
    Now she understood: he had discovered that being a bird was only achieved by being that bird. I’ve never flown. How can I know what to do now ? She sighed and focussed on her energy source. The rush and change of shape as she readjusted to her human form made her dizzy again. She took a few moments to steady herself, then started for the old temple ruin. ‘Walk it is then,’ she muttered.
    Meg counted thirty-two Kerwyn soldiers. Four stood over Swift, whose bloodied form was tied by her wrists to a low wooden bar straddling a pair of collapsed pillars. The girl’s agony enraged Meg. She recalled a time when she had seen men tied to stakes on a hillside,