[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Now it was his turn to gasp as his urgency increased. He drew his own hands
down from her breasts, down to her hips, to cup her buttocks and pull her
against him still harder. As he did so, she let her knees bend and folded
herself backward, down to the ground. He followed her, and as he bent down on
top of her she spread her legs and let him into her. Again she gasped, and her
legs bent again, rising and locking around his back as he drove deep into her,
at first as gently as he could, then with ever increasing force and speed as
his control slipped. But her passion mounted to match his, and in the end his
wild spurting into her and her twisting and moaning were almost at the same
moment. He rolled off her after a little while, then pulled her gently against
him again, as he would have done with a kitten or a child.
After a while her eyes, closed during her climax, fluttered open, and her
weather-chapped lips crinkled faintly in a smile.
"I you are not a Dragon Master, I know now. They if they see a woman they
want, they " She could not go on. Blade nodded and held her again. Gradually,
the relaxation of tension and the new trust in him that their lovemaking had
brought to her loosened her tongue, and bit by bit, still halting, she told
him of herself, her village, and what had happened to it.
Rena's village she knew it as East Pass Town had been one of the northernmost
villages of the
Treduki the "Coldlanders" as opposed to the Graduki the "Warmlanders," who
lived in the warmer, temperate regions of this world, rather than farther
north, nearer the glaciers. The glaciers had been advancing south for many
generations, grinding out of existence one Treduk community after another, and
driving the people farther and farther south. Some had, over the centuries,
given up and tried to flee all the way to the cities of the Graduki. But these
despised the Treduki as barbarians. Those who fled were usually killed
outright or enslaved; at times they might be allowed to live free but confined
to menial tasks and poor areas. In the end this discouraged refugees.
But the Treduki in their turn saw how physically feeble the Graduki seemed as
a result of their reliance on machines, and in turn came to despise them.
Blade could understand why the Treduki might despise a more mechanized people,
if Rena's endurance, muscles, and genuine skill in unarmed combat were typical
of her people.
But neither the glaciers nor the undeclared war between the two peoples was
the greatest danger any more. In the past few years the Ice Dragons had come,
monstrous creatures that swarmed out of the night to fall on Treduk villages.
The Dragons smashed and slaughtered with their stamping feet and their lashing
tails and their terrible jaws. And the men who rode and controlled them, the
Dragon Masters, added to the horrors by orgies of looting and raping, and by
capturing with the sticky webs scores of younger men and women, to carry them
away to the north and an unknown and unthinkable fate. Rena had at first
feared Blade was a Dragon Master returned to visit the scene of the raid of
the previous night.
Rena and perhaps a few others had escaped by simply running into the forest at
the first sound of the
Page 11
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Dragons crashing into the town's walls. But most of the people had either
failed to run, or decided to stay and actively fight with their
weapons spears, axes, swords, pikes, bows, and what Blade recognized from
Rena's description as crude but workable black-powder guns.
The Ice Dragons particularly intrigued Blade. It took him many patient
questions and much soothing of Rena's trembling and shivering at the memory of
seeing them looming out of the night, to get anything like a coherent
description of them out of her. They were apparently enormous Blade realized
that his guess about dinosaur-sized creatures had been right incredibly
savage, and apparently invulnerable to any weapons the Treduki possessed. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]