Maggie Furey - Harp of Winds

Aurian’s mind refused to accept .the reality of what lay before her. Her sight blurred and darkened as she crumpled, and her spirit fled wailing into the blackness.

He had been dreaming that the mountains had come alive, Anvar groaned, and opened his eyes to utter blackness that even his Mage’s vision could not pierce. What the blazes happened? he thought hazily. One minute he had been heading toward the door of the tower; the next, everything was disintegrating around him ... Memory flooded back, and with a gasp, the Mage sat bolt upright—or tried to. He couldn’t move. He was sprawled, facedown, on a rough, uneven surface that sloped away beneath him so that his head was lower than his heels. His left arm, trapped under his body, was completely numb. Anvar hoped that the lack of feeling was due only to constricted circulation. His right arm was outstretched in front of him, his hand still with its stranglehold around the Staff of Earth.

The Mage took reassurance from the fact that he had not lost the precious Artifact. Extending his will, he summoned the Staffs power, until a faint green glimmer lit his surroundings. Anvar’s breath caught in his throat. For an instant, his mind went blank with shock. All around him was a mass of broken rock that was trapping him with its weight. Eventually common sense penetrated Anvar’s panic, and it occurred to him that far from being crushed, he could feel no pressure at all. Then he remembered. The tower room. The High Priest’s knife hurtling toward him … And his shield. In his haste to destroy his enemy, he had forgotten to lower it again. A wave of giddy relief surged through the Mage. Close to hysteria, he laughed aloud, then shuddered at the narrowness of his escape. If Blacktalon hadn’t thrown that knife . . . Then it occurred to Anvar that his relief was premature. The shield had saved him from being crushed, but he was still trapped beneath the ruined tower, pinned down by solid rock. And his air supply must be running out... With an effort, Anvar forced himself to stay calm. It was ridiculous to panic! With the Staff of Earth, he could easily blast his way out of this predicament. Well, the sooner, the better. Taking a deep breath of the stale, stagnant air, he concentrated his will . . .

“Wizard—wait!”

Anvar blinked, and shook his head. Hearing things? Maybe the air was running out faster than he’d realized. I’d better hurry, he thought. Gathering his scattered wits, he tried again, and the green radiance brightened as power thrummed through the Staff.

“Wait! There is a better way.”

The Mage started violently. Mind-speech was the last thing he had been expecting, but there could be no mistake. The pitch of the voice, though definitely not human, had been distinctly feminine. “Who’s there?” he asked sharply.

“It was no dream, Wizard. See—the mountains do awaken!” The voice, though it was only in his head, seemed somehow to resonate through the rocks all around him. Anvar felt his heart begin to race. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What are you?”

“I am the elemental spirit of this peak.” As the Moldan explained her nature to the Wizard, she felt his growing astonishment, and found it hard to suppress her anger that his people had so quickly forgotten the once proud and mighty race that they had subjugated. Her determination to wrest the Staff away from him hardened.

“Forgive me,” Anvar interrupted her, “I would like to hear the rest of your tale, but first I must get out of this place. Humans need air . . .”

“Of course.” The Moldan gloated. The fool was playing right into her hands! “Perhaps I can assist you,” Using the Old Magic, she could lure him out of the mundane world, in which she had no physical form save slow, constrictive stone, and into another dimension: the Elsewhere of such elemental beings as the Moldan and the Phaerie, Her form was mobile there, and her powers would be unconstrained!

Anvar’s eyes widened with astonishment as a bleak and pallid light began to delineate the narrow space that held his body. The rocks around him were fading, slowly retreating into the cold gray glimmer until they vanished entirely, and the Mage could see nothing around him but a featureless silvery haze.

“You may stand now.”

Stand on what? Anvar thought, looking down with a shudder. There was nothing beneath him but that gray nothingness. With an effort, he pulled himself together. He was obviously lying on something…

“Yes, it will support you.” The Moldan sounded dryly amused.

Incredulous, Anvar scrambled to his feet, badly unnerved by the fact that, despite his shield, she had been able to pick his private thoughts out of his head so easily. For an agonizing moment, he was preoccupied with rubbing the blood back into his stiff and tingling limbs. Then:

“Where are we?” he demanded. “What is this place?”

“Elsewhere,” the Moldan answered softly, in a cold, tight voice that sent prickles sheeting over Anvar’s skin. “No longer in the world you know.”

Anvar tensed, suddenly aware of the threat that lay behind the elemental’s tone. “Why did you bring me here?” He struggled to keep his mental voice level. It would be a grave mistake to let this creature become aware of his fear.

“Can you not guess?” The icy tone took on the sneering sibilance of menace. “In this world, I possess another form, unfettered by the bonds of stone. Here I can move, and kill, and take the Staff of Earth from you!”

The gray blankness vanished. Anvar found himself standing on a slope of long, tawny grass that seemed to shimmer in a rippling pattern, like windblown corn—except that no wind cooled the air against his face. Silence, a thick oppressive absence of sound, hung over the landscape like a pall. There was no sign of the Moldan. The Mage was completely alone. Anvar, braced for a fight that had not materialized, found himself at a loss. Where was the Moldan? What form would it take? From which direction would it come? With an oath, he looked wildly around him. The Mage found himself on the high, sloping side of a mountain meadow, looking down to where a river, its water gleaming with an odd greenish, milky hue, rushed swiftly along the bottom of the vale to vanish over a precipice at the valley mouth to his left. To Anvar’s right, the meadow ended at the feet of a tall, dark pine wood; above the trees was a broken mass of jumbled rocks and crags. Before the Mage, on the opposite side of the vale, was a rough, heather-covered hillside that swept upward to a towering ridge. Behind him towered soaring cliffs with the mountain’s peak looming dizzily above.

There was something unsettlingly odd about the light. Anvar blinked, peering up at the sky and down at the valley again. The cloudless sky was a peculiar shade of gold, flooding the landscape with amber light, as though the Mage were looking through smoked glass.

There was no sun—there were no shadows to lend depth. Instead, the earth itself was suffused with a faint but burnished glow, each stone, each blade of grass, standing out clear and shimmering with its own inner light. All except the pine wood. The huddled trees were a pulsing knot of smoky darkness. Anvar shuddered—yet of all the parts of this weird landscape, the forest, with its broken crags above, was the one place where he could hope to find some cover when the Moldan decided to stop playing with him, and attack.

The thought shattered the dreamlike spell of this eerie land, and galvanized the Mage to action. He had better come up with some kind of a plan—and fast! Grasping the Staff firmly, Anvar straightened his shoulders, and set off up the valley toward the wood. He had not taken half a dozen strides when—