“P-SS N-T PR-S-NT-D. -C-SS D-N--D. PL--S- L-C-T- TH- V-S-T-R C-NT-R T- -BT--N PR-P-R CR-D-NT--LS.”
The boar was a sizzling lump of meat, its bristly hair smoldering, twin smoking craters bored through its side, long before this sentence was finished. The metal thing cocked its head as if studying this scene and then, after a moment, returned to a standing position. It leaned against the canyon wall, eye-covers sliding shut, and its skeletal shoulders slumped.
“TH-NK Y-- F-R V-S-T-NG,” it said, and then it was silent, as it sometimes went for months or years between encounters of this type.
At a safe distance, yellow-green eyes took all of this in. The sacred circle remained unspoiled. The boar had passed into the arc of death and had paid the price which all that trod upon the ground there must pay. Everything was as it had ever been, since first the watch had begun.
Above the metal thing, past the canyon, the wind wailed its banshee’s dirge. A tiny bug came to the edge of the metal thing’s domain and stopped, sensing the polluted soil in front of it. Turning around, it trundled off the way it had come, and so was spared the boar’s fate, and the fate of all those whose bones littered that tainted ground.
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The Children of the Sun Page 47