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

Yet it was Skeelie, thin and strong and torn apart inside, who had stood beside him here twelve years ago and seen Ramad die. Her suffering was as much a part of him as was his own.

Even so, he could not reach out. Her words when he left her had struck him like firebrands. “You are too driven by fury! It is madness to try alone! You need other Seers, there are those who would help you. You have only to reach out to them. Your pride is too great, your anger too sharp; you warp your judgement by such wrath. No matter that Canoldir feels he must let you go; you court failure, Lobon, to go alone in such violence of mind!” They had stood staring at one another locked in the burning torment born of love and of pain. Then he had turned and left her, left the home of Canoldir, left the ice mountains, and gone out of that land of Timelessness into a land where Time ran forward as men know it, the three wolves leaping down over ice cliffs leaving the rest of the pack to join him. And, once again in common time, he had begun to search out Dracvadrig by the sense of the runestone he carried, feeling the stone pull at him and not asking himself why it did.

After Dracvadrig flew away from the ice mountain, it had taken Lobon and the wolves three days to make their way back down the glacier and another day to reach the valley, across land so desolate it might never have known water or growing seed. Now, at the brink of the abyss, Lobon began to feel clearly the desire with which Dracvadrig coveted his own four stones. He knew the firemaster would kill for them, and the knowledge infuriated him. “You are as good as dead!” Lobon said softly. “You are as dead as if the blood were already draining from your body,”

But a voice rose thundering from the abyss, the shock of it like a sword slash. “You are insolent, son of Ramad! You are untried and ignorant and weak!” Cold sweat touched Lobon. “What makes you dream, son of a bastard, that you can take my life!”

Slowly Lobon stepped down to a lower, jutting lip along the precipice. Shorren moved with him and tried to press him back. Far below, a flaming river ran. Smoke drifted across broken rock. Shapes were lost in heat-warped air. There was no movement except drifting smoke. He tried to sense the direction of the voice, but Dracvadrig’s laughter echoed, directionless. “Do you imagine, child of a bastard, that you can see me when I do not choose to show myself? Do you imagine that you can kill me?”

“I will snuff your life, master of Urdd,” Lobon shouted, “as surely as a wolf can snuff a rock hare! And I will own the runestone to which you have no claim!”

“Ah, and you are heir to its joining!” Dracvadrig mocked, his laughter cold. “Think you to join that stone, bastard’s child? You? When the powers of seven generations have prevented that joining? The dark powers will prevent it, bastard’s whelp, perhaps until Time ceases. The stone will never be joined until the dark itself chooses to join it for its own use!”

“What care I for any such joining! I care only for the pleasure of seeing you die!”

“You are a fool, son of Ramad. And I take pleasure in that !” The firemaster’s voice echoed harshly, then the abyss was silent. The weight of the towering black cliff seemed to bear down like lead toward Lobon. Silence spanned to eternity, and the firemaster did not speak again.

Only when Lobon moved back from the rim at last did Shorren ease her weight against him. He took the scruff of her neck in his hands, and she turned and locked her teeth on his arm, gentle as the fluttering of moths. Once the wolves had gone to hunt, Lobon gathered greasebrush and animal droppings and built a small fire in the lee of the rock shelter they had found, then sat warming himself, looking across the abyss toward the deepening sky and the line of mountains beyond, where no man he knew of had ever ventured: not Ramad, not even the man who lived outside of Time who was his mother’s lover. When the sun dropped behind the white face of Eken-dep, the rock-strewn valley changed from a place of sharp, humping shadows to one of flat, subdued light. The tumbled boulders seemed to recede and to shrink in size.

The evening turned chill. The emptiness of the land was overpowering. He leaned close to the fire, stricken with the idea suddenly that he might be the last man alive in all of Ere, alone at the edge of unknown spaces, unknown realities. Did death seep out of the abyss to give him such thoughts? He tried to put his unease aside, but the sense of Dracvadrig pushed around him to chill his mind until he felt heavy and inept.

Then at last he felt Dracvadrig drawing away from him, as if the firemaster was distracted or had turned his attention toward another. It seemed to him the firemaster was reaching out in another direction, touching a consciousness far distant. Lobon’s mind quickened with interest, and he reached out toward that same vision, tried to immerse himself in the image that Dracvadrig’s mind seemed to conjure so sharply and in the rush of voices that accompanied it, disjointed and confused. All shifted senselessly, though Dracvadrig was mingling with the scenes comfortably enough, as if he had done this before. Where? Where were these Seers he conjured? Surely these were Seers, whose minds Dracvadrig touched so deftly. How could they remain unaware of the firemaster?

The creature had blocking skills, powerful skills. He felt Dracvadrig begin to beguile one mind in particular, and to turn and shape its thoughts as if he were shaping clay. A girl. Young. Lobon could see her face, fine-boned, thin; dark hair falling across her shoulders loose and tangled as if from sleep. And her eyes were startling, huge and lavender like the wings of the mabin bird. Her skin was lightly tanned, but a streak of white shone where her hair parted behind one ear. Her cheeks were ruddy, the whole essence of her as brilliant in coloring as was the mabin bird. She was unaware of Lobon’s scrutiny, and seemed aware of Dracvadrig only vaguely; though she was disturbed by him and by the darkness he drew around her, for she shuddered as if from a brutal touch. Yet there was an emptiness within her, too, something soft and malleable that made Dracvadrig easily welcome in spite of her revulsion. Lobon sensed people around her, the activity of a town. He could hear the sea crashing close by. He tried to touch the lower, dreaming levels of the girl’s mind, tried to seek as Dracvadrig sought; but he could not touch her. Why did the dragon seek her out? What did she have that Dracvadrig wanted? Then suddenly the vision vanished, the sense of Dracvadrig faded. Lobon was alone, shivering in the cold darkness.

The fire had burned to embers. The wolves were pushing at him, returned from the hunt. Four rock hare lay at his feet. He looked at them muzzily, then knelt to build up the fire so he could see to skin out his supper.

Late in the night, long after he had gone to sleep, something awakened him so violently he jerked upright, scraping his arm against a boulder. He swore with the pain, was wide awake and sitting up staring into a path of moonlight that held two images: dry sand and stone outside the den, and the vision-image of a pale stone room. The girl was lying asleep on a narrow cot, and through the room’s window, Ere’s twin moons hung thin as crystal above the sea.

He could sense Dracvadrig touching the girl’s mind with fingers like flame. He felt her confusion as she woke, watched her rise from her bed and cross the room to stare out at the moonlit sea. He felt her mindless compulsion, watched her turn at last and begin to dress, then pull on a dark cloak, all the time trying to free herself from Dracvadrig’s possession, but yet needing terribly to obey him.

He watched her leave the room and climb a flight of twisting stone steps to a huge, cavernous grotto washed with moonlight. He could hear the sea far below. In the center of the room stood a round stone table, and above it hung a stone on a long gold thread, a deep green stone, catching moonlight: a shard of the runestone of Eresu. This must be Carriol, then. This must be Carriol’s runestone.