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

“If Burgdeeth is a place of slavery, Gravan, why have your people remained so close to it, on these pastures? Doesn’t the Landmaster try to rule you?”

“We trade with the Landmaster, lady, but we keep an upper hand in that matter. And only here will the Herebian raiders not come, for fear of the old city of the gods.” Gravan leaned back and grinned, showing a missing tooth. “If the landmaster becomes difficult, we disappear among the mountains for a time, and Burgdeeth is without goat meat and hides.” Skeelie caught from his mind a clear picture of a hidden valley rich with grass, and at its center a lake of molten fire. A hidden place; but a place of meaning beyond anything Gravan imagined it to have. A place that she knew, instantly, she must touch. That lake—liquid fire, red as blood, reflecting a sullen sky. Reflecting more. Hinting of images she knew she must hold in her mind and examine. Gravan prattled on comfortably, but she hardly heard him. There was a message there, in that place. Perhaps a way to Ram there.

Torc raised her head to look at Gravan. The wolf held in her mind sharply the image both she and Skeelie had taken from his thoughts, the lake of flame hidden among rising hills in a valley flanked round by sharp black peaks. Yes, there was something in that place, something they must seek, something that held as vital a meaning for Torc as it held for Skeelie.

We will go there, sister.

Yes, Torc, we’ll go there. But she was afraid, though she was eager to see what that place held. Would it tell her news of Ram that she could not bear to hear? She studied Gravan, hardly able to form the question she must ask, yet knowing she could not rest until she had. She watched the shadows around the fire, watched the dark red embers of painon wood pulsing with their heat, then looked back at the old man. “When—when the battle of Macmen was ended, Gravan, what do the tales tell happened to Ramad? Do they—do they tell that Ramad died there battling by Macmen’s side?”

“Oh no, lady, they do not tell that.” Gravan peered at her, puzzling at her interest. Why couldn’t she learn to hide her feelings more carefully? “The tales tell, lady, that after the battle, Ramad stood by the side of Macmen with the great wolves around them and that—that the next minute Macmen stood alone on the silent battlefield, Ramad and the wolves gone as if the wind itself had swallowed them.”

Skeelie slept that night beside Gravan’s fire with her hand couched on Torc’s flank, replete with roast deer meat and Gravan’s mawzee bread, and perhaps more wine than was necessary. In the early dawn, while the old herder rounded up his bucks and their does to go down into the village, she made a quiet departure, wishing him well, and headed up between black peaks in the direction his thoughts had shown her, toward the lake of fire. Torc shadowed her unseen, hunting, returning now and again or speaking to her from a distance. A silent journey back .into the wild mountains.

When Torc returned from her hunt at midmorning, she lay waiting for Skeelie stretched out in a patch of sunlight between black, angled boulders, licking blood from her muzzle. Two fat rock hares lay by her side. For your noon meal, sister. In the sharp daylight, Skeelie could see plainly that Torc had recently nursed cubs. Torc raised her head. My cubs are dead. They were small and helpless. I had gone to hunt.

Skeelie looked back at her, could only offer the silent sympathy that welled in her at the bitch wolf’s pain.

I will follow the creature that killed them until I destroy it.

“What is it, that creature?”

It is a dark, unnatural shadow dwelling within the body of a dead man. Or, a man made mindless, as good as dead. When I returned from hunting and found my cubs, found the creature crouching over them, it vanished. Disappeared, sister. I could feel it later somewhere in the caves.

Then, I could feel it following you. And so I followed it. I could feel it, sister, stepping into the whirling of Time as you stepped. It follows you, but I do not know why. And I will follow it, and kill it.

A litany of hatred and suffering. Of promise by a great wolf that both frightened and heartened Skeelie. She felt the sense of the formless dark thing. It was this she had sensed in the caves and across the river. “I cannot sense it now, Torc. Not near to us.”

No, sister. But it will return. I think it follows you as mindlessly as a skabeetle seeking prey.

“But why?”

I do not know. It came into those deep caves blindly, seeking something there, sensing something it seemed to need. I do not know what. It was confused and weak and fit only for killing cubs. But there are powers hidden within that creature, sister. Powers that can grow. After it disappeared from my den, I felt you come. I felt it begin to follow you. As if you, sister, held about you that which it sought. It came here seeking you, but now it is gone again. What do you bear, Skeelie of Carriol, that such a dark shadow yearns after? What weapon, what magic or what skill? Or, perhaps, what knowledge?

Skeelie gazed into the wolf’s golden eyes and did not know how to answer. Had that creature followed her because of Ram, thinking she would lead it to Ram? But why? Yet well she knew that evil was attracted to Ram because of the power of the runestones, that evil coveted those stones perhaps beyond all else. Torc’s thoughts had plunged into an abyss half of wild emotion and half of conscious thought; and Skeelie plunged down with them through blackness to where the sense of the shadowy creature, and of its dark, latent powers, came cold around her.

She shook herself free of the vision at last, stared at Torc, touched the wolf’s shaggy face with need and tenderness. And suddenly the thought of the tree man came into her mind, his words echoing . . . One of the few born to weave a new pattern into the fabric of the world. Those so born are not anchored to a single point in Time.

“What did Cadach mean? Why do I think of those words now?” She knelt and laid her head against Torc’s shoulder, drew strength from her. She began to feel, with Torc, the incomprehensible patterns that formed life as together they reached to touch that web, needing to trace some new strand of meaning into their own fragile existence.

At last Skeelie rose, took up the rock hares and cleaned them, and tied them to her belt. They started on up between black cliffs, pushing deep into the mountains as the afternoon sunlight thinned behind them, sending long shadows up the lifting peaks of the Ring of Fire.

THREE

Jagged peaks surrounded them. The afternoon sky grew gray and chill. The way was narrow between black cliffs, then sometimes only a ledge above a sheer drop, so Skeelie’s fear of height held her tense, and she must force herself on with stubborn will. Once as they rounded a narrow bend, Torc’s interest quickened, but was masked at once, leaving Skeelie uneasy. Torc stopped and turned to look at her. I do not hide anything, sister. I try only to calm my hatred. The shadow is there in that place, come there before us. I will kill it there. She let Skeelie feel the wild fury that drove her. Skeelie drew back, chastened, and followed Torc in silence.

They came on the valley without warning. One minute they were squeezing between black rock walls, and the next they stood staring down past their feet to a valley cupped out of the cliffs, far below. Its edge was brilliant green where grass pushed against the cliffs, but it was bare and rocky at the center, and there lay the lake of fire, a pool red as blood seeping up out of the rock, like a wound upon the land. Skeelie remembered too vividly the burning lava river inside Tala-charen, where a wolf had nearly died, remembered lava belching from mountains down over the fields to burn beasts and men alike. What kept this lava from rising continuously out of the earth to spill over its banks? The flow seemed to her to have halted only temporarily, as if it must soon rise strongly again and drown the valley.