Ширли Мерфи - The Castle Оf Hape. Caves Оf Fire Аnd Ice. The Joining Оf Тhe Stone

The great wolf moved close to Ram, pressing his shoulder against him, laid his head against Ram’s arm. He is gone, Ramad.

And though Ram searched the wood, there was no sign of Anchorstar or the dun stallion. Gone. Gone into Time. Why had Anchorstar come here, why had he fought here?

Jerthon’s troops stormed the castle, searching for stragglers they might have missed, holding back in secret rooms; and he and Ram came at last to the cellars. Jerthon turned BroogArl’s body over with his toe, thought of burying it, shook his head. “BroogArl can end in flame like his castle. Let’s get out of here, the smell of him makes me choke.”

“Jerthon, did we kill them all?”

Jerthon gave him a long look, touched unthinking the place in his tunic where the runestone had ridden, glanced down, his face dark with its loss. “Kill them all, Ram? What do you feel?”

They stood silently then, sensing out into Pelli, into all of Ere for that feel of dark that had ridden so long with them. After some moments their faces began slowly to lighten; they looked into each other’s eyes with hope flickering, then with a rising sense of victory. There was no trace of the evil now, no sense of BroogArl’s retinue, or of the cloying dark that had been the Hape. A sense of scattered, dark Seers, yes, drawn together at this time in their hatred of the light; but Seers separated by their own selfish ways, their own despotic little hierarchies, and as opposed to one another as quarreling snakes. There was no sense, with BroogArl and the Hape gone, of unity among those who were left.

“Kill them all, Ram?” Jerthon’s fatigue had left him. He lifted his head in triumph. “I hope perhaps we have. Killed all the power that resided here.”

Ram’s hope had lifted to wing outward as he examined the cool absence of massed evil. He wanted to shout suddenly, he embraced Jerthon with wild joy. “And the runestone—we will dive for it!”

Jerthon looked chagrined. “Dive, Ram? The sea in this place is deeper than any man can think to go. We were deeper than I would have thought possible. The stone . . . but perhaps we will think of a way.”

Ram gripped Jerthon’s shoulder. “The stone is gone, but we are not! We have won, man! We’ve destroyed the Pellian monsters!” And yet, as he tried to cheer Jerthon at the loss of the stone, beneath his own bravado lay a heaviness that would not subside. For the loss of the stone, yes. But the real pain there, like a dull knife wound, was for the loss of Telien.

Jerthon, seeing his pain, cuffed him and grinned. “Come, then, Ramad of wolves. Let’s make an end to this den of Hape. Come, watch the roasting while we bury the monsters in flame!”

They went up the dark stairways and into the dim hall, where Jerthon’s men were throwing the furniture into a great heap, stacking on logs from the castle’s firewood, building a tall pyre. In the upper rooms, the shutters were flung open to act as a chimney.

Jerthon took up a torch from those stacked beside the castle door, struck flint, and when the torch flared he lighted the pyre. Timbers and furnishings caught at once and began to burn hot and quick, the flame leaping upward in the draft from the windows above, the main hall soon so hot it drove them out through the wide double doors.

They stood in the murky wood watching as the Castle of Hape was consumed in flame. The winged ones crowded close to the soldiers, not liking fire, glancing again and again toward the sky as the flames leaped higher.

At last the castle’s stone walls began to crumble. The wolves pushed closer together, and Fawdref came to Ram. Ram stood abstracted, his hand on the dogwolf’s head, watching the burning of the castle until the old wolf began to nudge and push at him. No sensible wolf lingered near a fire in forest land. And no sensible man, either, Fawdref let him know. Ram knelt before the great wolf, but Fawdref drew back his lips at the rising flame and nudged Ram until he rose and backed away from the fire. And then, as if they could bear the fire no longer, the winged ones stirred and leaped suddenly skyward like hawking birds and were away toward the dark mountains.

The wolves pushed together in a great band to crowd around Ram, eager, too, to be away. Ram pulled Fawdref to him, reached to touch Rhymannie, was loathe to let them go, imagined with a sense of loss the great wolves streaking silently away up through Ere’s forests toward the Ring of Fire.

And suddenly, clearly, Ram knew that he must go with them. Must return to the cave where Telien had been. Must seek her first in that place. And were there secret runes in the old caves there that would tell him how to span Time? How to take himself into the spinning center of Time where Telien had gone?

TEN

Telien, swept like a chip in Time’s leaping river, could not stop herself. Her mind reeled with a hundred places tumbling one atop another, with cities, with voices and faces and smells jumbled. And then suddenly she sensed that someone was with her, reaching out to her. A girl, someone close, someone caring—someone who seemed like a sister. She had never had a sister. She felt tears come in her eyes at the sudden touch of warmth, this sense of someone young and caring reaching out to push away the terrifying loneliness, to push back the vast reaches of Time. For Skeelie had reached out to her, and Telien clung to that sense of strength with terrible desperation.

Skeelie had been resting after battle, exhausted, dirty, starved, when she began to think strongly of Telien.

All across Ere troops had battled the forces of the dark Seers, forces boiling out of the hills, small dark bands riding fast out of isolated camps to wield destruction across Carriol, just as Jerthon laced destruction down upon the Castle of Hape. That had been Jerthon’s secret. She had Seen at last, and known. And Ram had known. She and Berd and Erould and the men of Blackcob had joined Carriol forces in mid-battle up the Somat Cul, pursuing stolen horses, cutting down dark raiders. And, as in Pelli BroogArl had died, and then as the Hape’s body had died, the forces that Skeelie’s band battled had diminished. Without the dark powers to force them back, Carriol’s troops had begun to slaughter the Herebian in a wholly satisfying manner, had driven them out until not a raider remained on Carriol soil alive. And the dark blocking had pulled back, and Skeelie had Seen, not only the battle in Pelli but the battles that flared up across other parts of Carriol, battles being won now by Carriol’s troops.

Yes, she thought bitterly, Jerthon had shielded his knowledge of that attack on Pelli from her. He had kept it secret—in order to shield the knowledge from Ram. In order to give Ram his moments with Telien, undisturbed. She bit her lip with fury, with pity for Telien, with emotions she could not sort out. Had Jerthon known that Telien’s time was so short?

Skeelie and old Berd, his white beard flying, and Erould with blood running down his dark hair, had fought shoulder to shoulder the dark Herebians high in the loess hills until those still able to ride had fled from them.

Now the men, sensing no new attack, sensing with growing eagerness the feel of victory in Pelli, had gone downriver to rest and to care for their mounts. Skeelie, alone in an isolated bend of the river, stripped to the buff and washed away the white loess dust, the sweat and blood of battle, had rinsed out her clothes and sat now shivering as they dried over a hastily built fire. Her cuts burned. One sword wound along her arm was deeper. She laced it with birdmoss from the riverbank, to soak away the poison. She bet she was a pretty sight, all scarred. But who was to see? Who would care? She could hear the men’s voices downstream, and the voices of the women farther upstream.