Asunder: A Gathering of Chaos by Cameron Hopkin (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

and then, though, families had more care than sense, and some hapless child survived to adulthood – but usually not for very long. Kindness in an unkind world is its own kind of cruelty.

If Megda has wasted my time on some thickwit farmgirl, I’ll have her head. She would do no such thing, of course, but it was a nice thought. Simple enough to discover if she’s a dimwit. Then I’ll leave her for the Watch to deal with. Such things aren’t worthy of a Hand’s time. “Did you kill them?” she asked sharply. That got the girl to look up. Her eyes shone with hurt and anger, then faded to sadness and the faint shimmer of tears. Not an idiot, then. Too bad. I haven’t had dinner.

“I did kill one of them, but I… I’m pretty sure she wanted me to.” The girl spoke quietly, and her voice was steady despite the wash of unshed tears in her eyes. There was a kind of dignity about her, but Renna was not about to acknowledge it. Instead, she scoffed loudly.

“Someone wanted you to kill them?” She barked out a laugh. “And then everyone else just dropped dead out of surprise, I suppose? I’m not far from it myself.”

The child thinned her lips, unfazed by her chlorophyll stare. “It wasn’t like that. Didn’t they tell you?”

Renna waved her hand lazily, dismissing her words. “They told me as much as I need for a nobody like you.” It was never wise to let someone think they had more knowledge than you. “You sail in with no papers, everyone else is dead, and somehow you manage to destroy the docks – which I personally had a hand in growing, I’ll have you know, and you could work for ten lifetimes and not repay the expense. That’s enough for me. If you’re lucky the Governor will have you drawn and quartered before the crowds, and if you’re not they’ll give you to the slavers. I hear that the girls that get sold to the Beast Riders get used twenty times a day, and that the Bonded let their animals take turns, too. You’d better hope you don’t end up with one of the Rhino men.” The girl blanched, her nails digging into her palms. That’s better.

“It wasn’t me,” grated the girl. “It was the Pure Light!”

Ahhh. So that was the heresy. I guess she merits my attention after all. The High Council of Mothers had gone to great lengths to stamp out Pure Light worship, and they’d had substantial success. No one had publicly preached for the Light in more than fifty years on the Mainland. They still had public Pure Light hangings every few years or so, but more often than not over the last couple of decades the Hands had been forced to fabricate the evidence for those crimes. It was a shame, of course, but the public had to be reminded of the danger of false gods no matter the cost.

Those old cults had been hideous – women forced to breed year after year just so they could have as many bodies as possible to be sent out to search all over the land for shafts of Pure Light that lanced down at random times and places. Usually, the deadly rays simply incinerated any living thing they touched, but not always. Occasionally sea creatures washed ashore that had been caught in the Light, and they were invariably so horrible that even those nasty Crawlers – Weaver arthropod researchers, the worst of the hated Insectae orders – had a hard time keeping their lunch down. Once in a great while, instead of simply burning, the Pure Light wreaked havoc on living things, changing them in random ways at the most basic level, even when filtered through meters of water or the screening of a forest canopy. Renna had seen a fish with human hands growing from its eye sockets, each finger with a perfect little fish eye in place of a fingernail, and once she heard the others talking of a baby faun with two heads and its stomach growing outside its body. Such monstrosities were always nailed up in the public square wherever they were found as another reminder of the dangers of the Pure Light and its worship.

And now this little whelp looked her, one of Gaia’s Hands, in the eye and spoke openly of such evil? I take it back; she is an idiot. I should nail her up here and now. The thought of handing her over to the local Mother gave her pause, though. That evil old hag Megda would crow to the skies that she had discovered the heresy herself and rooted out a dangerous cell of sectarians. I’ll go to rot and ruin before I give her a leg up. She’s a climber, that Megda. No, I’ll take care of this myself. “You’re a stupid one, aren’t you? You know what gets done to Pure Light worshippers.” The girl gave her a blank stare. “Don’t you?”

The girl’s mouth twisted. “Lady, I lived my whole life in one village –”

“Mistress.”

The girl paused. “What?”

“I am a Hand of Gaia, Third Class. You may call me Mistress or Your Honor.” Renna was not about to suffer rudeness from this dirty little creature.

The girl blinked. “Right. I… well. Your Honor. I come from a tiny place that can go a whole year without seeing strangers. Nobody much cared if someone preached about the Light. Most people did it. Well, not preaching, maybe, but believing. Not me. I thought it was all garbage.”

“Garbage, was it?” Renna’s mouth quirked. She must have touched a nerve; the girl was suddenly talkative.

“Yes! It’s light; it just comes down. There’s nothing – it’s not a thing, something that thinks or chooses. It’s not!” The girl was strangely adamant. “It just shines and makes things die, is what I thought. That’s not a god. That’s not something you worship. Madra and Da, they… well. Bunch