Read Online Quintessence Sky by David Walton - Free Book Online

world, were the least affected. So when a
star had disappeared from Gemini, a gap that seemed to suck the
light from the surrounding stars, they took notice. It had been a
curiosity, although a spectacular one, one of thousands of
unexplained mysteries they had encountered since coming to Horizon.
Remembering it now, however, the timing of its appearance with the
salt shortage didn't seem like a coincidence. Perhaps it was more
important than they had realized.
    A bubbling noise drew their attention back to
Matthew's experiment at their feet. The water in the flask was
aglow and boiling furiously. The opteryx scales on the outside were
a bright violet edging toward white. The white color became
brighter and clearer, the violet less prominent, until it was such
a pure white it was hard to look at. The flask rattled violently,
and then the scales burst into flame.
     

     
    AFTER tying her hands and legs, the
manticores wrapped Catherine in a net made of vines, like a hammock
rolled around her body. Her limbs were no longer petrified, but she
was wrapped so tightly she could barely move.
    She could just barely feel a warm glow in the
center of her body that meant her quintessence connections were
coming back. The manticores had taken her salt pouch, but even
without it, she should be able to break out and escape, given a
little more time to get her strength back.
    "Where are you taking me?" she said.
    Rinchirith sat on top of her and leaned into
her face, his breath nearly choking her. His eyes burned with
hatred. "Only where you deserve," he said.
    He shoved a pincered hand into her mouth and
forced her jaw open. She screamed and struggled, but the sharp ends
of his pincers dug into the soft flesh of her gums. Another
manticore approached with a the hollow, cylindrical stalk of a
plant. He bit open the top and poured it into her mouth.
    She choked as the thick, metallic liquid
filled her mouth. Mercury. She tried to spit it out, but Rinchirith
clapped her mouth closed, and she swallowed painfully. She couldn't
breathe. She writhed back and forth until he released her, and she
lay on her face in the dirt, gasping and coughing.
    Her quintessence connections were gone.
Mercury acted in the opposite way from salt, scouring her clean of
quintessence instead of increasing the flow. She was completely in
their power, and as long as they kept forcing mercury down her
throat, she would stay that way.
    Two manticores lifted the ends of her vine
hammock and leaped up into the trees, carrying her between them.
She was jostled and yanked back and forth as they effortlessly
climbed through the branches, sometimes facing the sky, sometimes
spinning around to face the ground. After a while, the skink tears
wore off as well, and she couldn’t even see them.
    She was terrified, but after an hour of this
kind of travel, she just felt battered and exhausted. She couldn't
imagine what they planned to do with her. They could hold her as a
hostage to force the humans to some concessions. They could cut her
up piece by piece and send the pieces to the colony until they
agreed to his terms. Only, Rinchirith didn't seem to her like the
bargaining type.
    What did he want? Catherine realized that
they had never understood the manticores, not even the ones who
claimed to be their friends. The humans were the trespassers on
this island, a place where a hundred generations of manticores had
lived and died without knowledge of humanity. Maybe it was
arrogance to think the manticores should welcome them with grateful
respect. Maybe humans didn't belong here at all.
    And now, what would happen to her? She tried
to distract herself from fear by thinking about the blight. She had
found it in a swamp, a low-lying area compared to the higher ground
around it. It was almost as if the blight had been spreading like a
flood, seeping up from the ground and filling up the low areas.
Would she have been safe from it if she had climbed a tree? There
had been flying