The Road Home by Joel Rosenberg PDF EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Joel Rosenberg
- Language: English
- Genre: Fantasy
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PROLOGUE
THE ROAD FROM EHVENOR
The truth is that the beginning of anything and its end are
alike touching.
— Yoshida Kenko
A hero’s work is never done, which is one of the minor
reasons I don’t recommend the profession.
— Walter Slovotsky
Below, in the dark, in the city with the gleaming building at its heart,
the flickering had stopped. But the killing hadn’t.
He was supposed to feel a sense of satisfaction, Jason Cullinane
thought. But he didn’t. Whatever good he and the rest had done, they had
also loosed more violence upon the world.
Shit. Like there wasn’t enough already.
And the cost… worst of all, it had cost them Tennetty. But he would not
cry over Tennetty. Never. She was just his father’s tame killer, that’s all she
had been, that’s all she ever had been. She hadn’t been his friend, not at all.
It was just that she had latched onto him as the closest available substitute
for Karl Cullinane.
But I’m not Karl Cullinane, he thought. I’m just Jason Cullinane, I’m
just eighteen years old, and I can’t carry it all. He realized that he had been
unconsciously tightening, then loosening the shoulder muscles beneath his
leather tunic. Mainly tightening. He felt like a lute string, wound too tight,
ready to break at the slightest pluck.
He would not allow himself to break. That would not be permitted.
He almost jumped out of his skin when the dwarf patted him on the
shoulder.
“It’ll be okay,” Ahira said. His face, broader than any human’s could
possibly be, was split in a grin that spoke more of relief than reassurance,
although only his expression and the way sweat had slicked his hair down
betrayed the exhaustion that the dwarf must have felt.
But he looked strange. Jason still hadn’t gotten used to looking down at
Ahira. Ahira had shrunk over the years in Jason’s mind, if not in reality.
Jason had known the dwarf for all of his life, and remembered looking up to
him and wondering why all the grownups made short jokes about him,
jokes that Ahira took not just with good grace, but with good humor, most
of the time with a broad smile on his lips, all the time — at least in Jason’s
memory — with at least a trace of a grin.
In Jason’s mind, the dwarf would still always tower over him, the way
Ahira had when Jason was a baby, the way Ahira had loomed above him
when Jason had taken his first steps toward those thick, hairy arms, toward
the utter safety of those broad, strong hands. His father was gone too much
of the time; Ahira had always been there. That smile had always been there.
“It’ll all be okay. Trust me,” the dwarf said, with just that trace of a
smile.
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