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

The girl shook her head, stared at the runestone, wanting it, coveting it. She tried to push Dracvadrig’s dark compulsion away. Yet she needed to reach for the stone, needed desperately to touch it.

Still something held her back. She turned away at last, shaken, and made her way out and down the stairs.

Lobon sat puzzling. Why had Dracvadrig’s power receded?

Surely the tower had been in Carriol, surely it was the tower at the ruins of Carriol, and this was Carriol’s runestone, the only other stone in Ere now held and used by Seers. It had drawn Dracvadrig’s covetous lust. But why had he let the girl go away without taking it? And why, when Lobon carried four shards, would the firemaster bother about Carriol’s stone? Was he, then, so afraid of Lobon as to seek the power of a runestone elsewhere, to add to the power of the one he carried?

Was Dracvadrig not powerful enough to better him? Elated with the thought, Lobon burned to confront the firemaster.

He did not pause to think of the subtlety of the stones’ powers, or that those powers could vary with forces that lay beyond them: with the strengths of those who wielded them, and with strengths far greater still, as yet only vaguely understood. He did not care to remember Skeelie’s words or Canoldir’s explaining the casual balances of those forces beyond the stones, beyond men, forces as mindless and natural as the erupting of Ere’s heaving volcanoes. He thought only of his own power in the stones he carried, and of the foe he sought.

He set himself to studying with heated urgency the sense of the uncharted land deep in the abyss, the directions the fiery rivers took, the power of the land’s upheavals. He studied the sense of Dracvadrig, turning at last from the girl and from Carriol’s runestone, knew that the firemaster would return his mind-powers there. Then he felt Dracvadrig moving below in the abyss, slow and ponderous, waiting for him.

TWO

Meatha woke to find herself standing in her moonlit room fully dressed, her cloak dragging from one shoulder. She was shaken and upset and did not know why, or where she had been. She was sure she had just come through the door, that she had been out in the chill halls of the tower. Her hands were cold, her cheeks numb with cold. She stood with her fist pressed to her lips, trying to make the image that clung in her mind come clear, something half-forgotten and upsetting; but it blew away like smoke. Where had she been? It was the middle of the night, the moons outside her window hung low above the sea, and she was fully dressed. Why? She had been walking, she was sure she had. She knelt to feel her boots and found them dry. Then an image of the shadowed citadel touched her mind, an image of the runestone, deep green, catching moonlight. Why had she been in the citadel?

Why? Why would she go there in the middle of the night, and then not remember? She shivered, stood staring absently at her rumpled cot.

She remembered going to bed, remembered snuffing the lamp. What could have waked her, made her dress and go from her room unknowing? Made her go to the citadel, then not remember going? A darkness clung within her mind as cold and repugnant as death.

Slowly, slowly she began to pull memory out of nothing, until she knew at last that she had indeed stood pressing against the stone table staring at the suspended runestone, wanting to lift it down, her thoughts confused and frightened and at the same time wildly elated.

She had come away at last, she thought, against her own wishes. And why were her thoughts of the runestone afire with guilt? Surely she could go to look at the runestone if she wished; she herself had helped to bring it secretly to Carriol.

She left her room at last, too confused, too full of questions to sleep, and made her way down the inner stone stairway to a side door and out onto the moonlit ruins, her mind filled with thoughts that remained vague and shapeless and threatening. She walked slowly, head down, hardly seeing the broken stone rubble of the ruins, washed white with moonlight, stone that had once been towers, dwelling places. Behind her the great tower loomed, white and tall. She was on a high, narrow hump of land that separated Carriol from the sea. To her right and below lay the town. To her left, below jagged cliffs, the sea swung and pounded and flung moon-washed foam to break against the cliff. She stood staring down, caught in the sea’s mindless rhythm, unable to escape her half-formed fears.

This was not the first time she had been somewhere she could not afterward remember, not the first time she had felt the brushing of cold shadow across her mind and not been able to capture the form of it. For days she had been edgy and uncertain, done badly at weapons practice, had been distracted in her work with Tra. Hoppa. And yesterday she had been so short-tempered and irritable with her young teaching charges that she had cut the class short. One could not teach Seers’ skills with a mind as bristling as a sprika-shell. And she had been mean and bad-tempered with Zephy at a time when Zephy did not need that kind of distraction.

Now when she thought of Zephy’s journey, even it made her uneasy; her fear rose suddenly and inexplicably as if chill hands had again touched her. She clenched her fist, frowning, trying to puzzle out what disturbed her.

This journey of Zephy and Thorn’s must not be touched with darkness. This journey would be like none Carriol had sent out before, and if there was some terrible threat to it, she must see it. She tried, willing steadiness in her mind, willing herself to reach out.

She could see nothing. Only this unformed fear. Maybe it was nothing, then, maybe just her own unsettled state of mind.

Zephy and Thorn’s journey would not be a fighting force sent out to help defend another nation against Kubal, nor even a trading party gathering intelligence. This journey would be a mission of friendship and dramatic showmanship designed to win the confidence of the new and puzzling cults that had risen so quickly across Ere; cults that no one, yet, understood, but that made all Carriol uneasy. She stood letting her mind wander, hardly aware of her own thoughts, until she noticed suddenly that the twin moons had dropped nearly to the horizon. She huddled into her cloak and watched the first touch of dawn begin to lighten the sky.

Soon a rosy light began to touch the cliff below her and to wash the fallen stones of the ruins where she stood. It reached down to the town below, fingering across the highest thatched rooftops, then down the stone buildings and across the second-floor shutters where folk still slept. Then sunlight touched the faces of the first-floor shops and the cobbled lanes. A bedroom shutter was pushed open, and a woman in a nightdress leaned out. Below, a door opened, and a leather-clad man set a bucket by the stoop. A boy came around a corner leading three fat ewes. Another door opened, shutters were flung back. Pretty soon folk were on the lanes, most of them heading toward the green before the baker’s and brewer’s shops, arriving to stand in little clusters, staring skyward. Soldiers were due this morning. Other soldiers would be departing. A small flight of winged horses was already rising into the sky down below Waterpole, but only Meatha from her height could see it.

On the green now, six young soldiers had gathered to inspect the bundles laid out on the long tables. Meatha could feel their tension as if it were her own. The breeze quickened. She glanced skyward with a sense of excitement, but the first group of winged had gone, and she saw nothing else, only the deep gray clouds over the eastern hills, still empty of life. When she turned, sunlight caught across her cheek so the bones of her face showed sharp and clean, the baby softness of two years earlier gone now, traded on the training fields and the battlefields for a taut, quick boyishness that Zephy said only heightened what she called Meatha’s maddening beauty. Meatha pushed back her dark hair absently.