Read Online A Mighty Fortress by David Weber - Free Book Online Page B

that. I’m on the very threshold of what Merlin calls “space.”
    No other Safehold- born human being, she knew, had ever been as high before. Not even Cayleb on his journey between Corisande and Charis. She stared down, down, to where the planet itself had become a vast, curved globe. To where the cloud tops so very far below the skimmer were silver and deepest black, drifting across The Anvil, that stormy sweep of water between Chisholm and Hammer Island. She couldn’t make out the surface from this height, not in the dark, not using her own merely mortal eyes. She knew it was there, though, and all she had to do was turn her head and look at the “visual display” to see that vast, wind- ruffled stretch of saltwater in perfect detail. Merlin had shown her how to manipulate the display’s controls, and the skimmer’s computer-driven sensors happily generated daylight- bright, true- color imagery of anything she cared to gaze upon. She could focus closer—“zoom in,” Merlin called it—until even the most distant objects below seemed little more than arm’s-length away, too.
    And yet, as Cayleb had warned her would be the case, that marvel, that God’s eye view, paled beside what her own eye saw when she gazed out through the armorplast.
    It’s because the “imagery” is magic, she thought. Merlin can call it what ever he wants, but it is magic, and my emotions know it, what ever my mind may be trying to tell them. It’s like something out of a child’s tale, something that’s not quite . . . real. But this— the moon, these stars, those clouds—I’m seeing them with my own eyes, and that means they are real. And I’m seeing them from thousands upon thousands upon thousands of feet in the air. I’m actually up here, flying among them, and they’re really, really out there, all above and about and beneath me .
    She drew a deep breath, smiling more than a bit crookedly, as that thought reminded her of the previous evening....

    Sharleyan finished throwing up (she hoped) and wiped her face with the hot, damp towel. Her mouth, she reflected, tasted as bad as she could remember anything’s ever tasting. Her stomach heaved again at the thought, but she suppressed the sensation sternly. Muscles hovered on the brink of revolt for a few precarious seconds, then subsided . . . for the moment, at least.
    “Better?” a voice asked, and she looked up from the basin in her lap with a wan smile.
    Despite both the fire crackling behind her husband and the embedded tile pipes circulating heated water under the bedroom’s tile floor, the air was chilly, to say the least, and the fresh towel he’d just taken from the kettle on the bedroom hearth steamed in his hand. Under the circumstances, it was understandable that the emperor had wrapped a blanket around himself as he stood beside their bed, however unregal he might look at the moment. In fact, Sharleyan was of the opinion that it went beyond unregal to something approaching silly.
    On the other hand, she thought, he did climb out of bed and hand me a towel the instant he heard me throwing up. That’s got to count for something . . . even if the whole thing is his fault .
    “Better... I think,” she said, adding the conditional when her stomach gave another tentative heave.
    “Good.”
    He whisked the towel with which she’d wiped her face—and which had already cooled markedly—out of her hand and replaced it with the one he’d just wrung out. The used towel went back into the kettle, and he carried the basin into the adjacent bathroom. A moment later, she heard the toilet flush. Then he returned, setting the basin carefully on the bedside table beside her before he climbed back into the bed himself and wrapped his arms around her.
    “Ow!” she objected as cold feet wiggled their way under her.
    “Well,” Cayleb Zhan Haarahld Bryahn Ahrmahk, Duke of Ahrmahk, Prince of Tellesberg, Prince Protector of the Realm, King of Charis, and by God’s Grace