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

TEN

Lobon woke to bright moonlight and to the howl of wolves. He sat up, could see Feldyn and Crieba beyond the camp, silhouetted against moon-silvered clouds, gazing off toward the southeast. He tried to sense what they sensed and could not. They raised their muzzles again in wails that shattered the night. Meatha woke and came closer to the fire. The winged ones stirred, lifted their heads in alarm, spread their wings ready for flight; then at the wolves’ reassurance, they settled down once more. Lobon scowled. What was this all about? But already the two wolves were returning. Feldyn nuzzled him and took his arm between sharp teeth as he was wont to do when he was in high spirits. Our brothers speak to us, Lobon, our brothers descended from Fawdref. We feel more than their strength now, we hear their voices clearly. Feldyn stretched and gazed again toward Carriol. They battle the Kubalese now alongside Carriol’s warriors, to defend the border of Carriol. The wolf’s golden eyes were filled with intense and mysterious promise. Wolves of our pack battle the dark, Lobon. And they speak to Crieba and me. They know the crystal dome, where lies a shard of the runestone. They know the vision Meatha carries.

Meatha caught her breath. “Can they show us?” But already she, like Lobon, was being pulled into the vision of the small green valley with its crystal dome; but now they Saw it from a wider vantage. Saw it was surrounded by dunes and by vast reaches of sand. “The high desert,” Meatha breathed. And behind the valley on one side rose a line of mountains, and higher peaks behind these with five sharp peaks marching just beyond a vast sweep of granite, pale in the moonlight. And far behind these, another peak towered higher still, a peak shaped like Tala-charen, though different in some way that Meatha could not make out.

“Different because it’s the other side, I think,” Lobon said. “As if the crystal dome lies on the far side of Tala-charen, to the north of it—there where the desert must sweep around the end of the Ring of Fire.” He raised his eyes to her. “If that is so, then the valley lies far up in the unknown lands.”

“But we can find it now, we—”

“We have only to move across the skies above Tala-charen until we see that great slab of granite.” He rose, pulled on his boots. He did not mean to wait until morning.

“Kish will follow us,” she said.

“I hope so. She carries the stones—I don’t want her far away.” Though he felt naked without a weapon, though he would have sold his soul for sword or bow.

They made ready at once. Lobon lifted the wolves onto the backs of two winged mares; Meatha mounted, then Lobon; and they were leaping skyward into the moon-silvered night, flying light and fast across a cold, quick wind. To their left rose Eken-dep, its white glacier touched by moonlight; then suddenly against that mass of white a small, dark silhouette appeared in the sky, moving fast toward them. Kish? All of them startled.

But Kish would not come alone now that she had lizards to fight beside her.

Then they saw it was not a lizard but a winged one coming on fast and riderless, flying free. Michennann, cutting the wind in great sweeps of her wings, coming at last to join them.

But now behind Michennann, peppering the sky, the lizards appeared beating across the face of the glacier. The sense of Kish came predatory and cold. The winged horses needed no urging, they fled above the wild peaks; and the lizards followed, settling into a steady pace, but never drawing closer. Michennann winged near to the white mare who carried Meatha. How scarred she was from battling the lizards. There was a welt across her neck and down her side, and her silver coat was torn with deep scratches. But the sense of her spirit was warm and close, and all enmity between them was now gone and only sympathy remained.

When at last they drew near to Tala-charen, Meatha could feel its power—and feel Lobon’s quickening interest. The dark stallion Lannthenn, who carried him, swept close to the peak and the others followed, hovering so close for a few moments that wingtips nearly touched the cave entrance, and they could see into the cave where Ramad had stood. Meatha shuddered with the power of the place. Here the runestone had split; here Seers had come suddenly out of Time to receive the broken shards.

The cave floor was translucent green like the sea. They all thought how that floor had split, the very mountain split to swallow the bones of the gantroed, then had closed up once more. They thought of Ram and Skeelie there, two young children caught in a clashing of powers that shook all of Ere—that changed all of Ere—and that had brought them here this night on a quest to undo that splitting. It was impossible not to think of the Luff’Eresi, impossible not to think of them as gods, and wonder as men had wondered for generations whether it had been they who had placed the stone in this cave; and whether their powers had touched the stone the night of the splitting.

Then the winged ones banked and swept away, leaving Tala-charen behind.

Beyond Tala-charen they began to hear rumbles from the land below, and twice they saw explosions of fire in the mountains far to the north. They were flying over mountains still, but now the desert lay ahead, a white smear against the sky; and soon they saw the foot of the peaks had begun to curve northward skirting the vast white dunes. It was not long afterward that they saw the pale granite cliff tilting to the sky. Then they were over the white dunes, gleaming like snow below them. They began to stare downward between the horses’ beating wings, searching among the closer dunes for the small green valley. Behind them, the lizards paced them, never varying their distance; and Kish watched them.

To the north among the mountains, red smoke rose into the moon-pale clouds. Flame belched from a far peak, then was still. They could hear earthshocks, some of them faint as a whisper. All eyes searched the dunes below, searched the black half-moons of shadow deep between dunes, for the valley and for the gleam of the crystal dome. And they could feel and sense more than earthshocks around them: other powers were gathering, too, those awakened by the dark Seers, and those nurtured by the light. Both were alerted and building, clashing crosswise against one another, drawing strength from that very clashing. Drawing strength from the rising need of the Seers and the desire to control the fate of the stones. For the stones were like a magnet now to all the forces that rose across Ere. The forces of good swelled and drew in around the little flying band, and the powers of dark drew around the warrior queen, whose evil was older than Time. And the powers, by drawing close, strengthened yet again—just as, below the flying bands, the powers of the earth itself broke into new fissures as the earth cracked, and so built to crescendo.

Along the coastal countries, shocks came so harsh they brought down houses and outbuildings. Fissures opened across the fields, and terrified animals stampeded. A ewe with a lamb ran blindly into a crack opening a hundred feet deep. The river Urobb flooded its banks just above Sangur and drowned a small village in its sweeping tide. The bloodthirsty Herebians, many of them wounded and beaten by Carriol, backed off from warring and thought of returning home—but only to wait for the holocaust that seemed imminent and that would give them sure victory. For well they remembered past upheavals. Always, the Herebians had risen first and strongest after the wild heaving of the land. Always, the Herebians had taken the spoils as other men cowered in fear before volcanoes they thought were the gods’ wrath.

Kearb-Mattus gathered his scattered forces. He did not let them draw away to wait out the holocaust as they wished, but sent them riding hard toward Carriol’s border, for what better time to destroy Carriol than when accompanied by the violence of the land itself. And while his main band rode toward Carriol, Kearb-Mattus himself with fifty troops rode hard for Farr, where his scouts told him Kish’s cults marched, led by the adolescent Carriolinian upstarts. So they thought to help defend the border of Carriol! He had not known until an hour before that they had had the nerve to fetter those among them who held to the ways of Kubal and to Kish, and to lock them into the old villa at Dal and bar the portals with stone and mortar. Brash, snivelling . . . Kearb-Mattus smiled and thought with heat of killing the two young Seers who led that crew. He knew them. Oh, how he would pleasure himself by their deaths, those two that had so defied him—fracking brats—before he took Burgdeeth two years ago. Those two that had destroyed the training of the Children of Ynell there in the drug-caves of Kubal. They would die now, and painfully.

*

Lobon saw the emerald valley first, hidden in a moon-shaped crease between dunes, visible only because the crystal dome reflected moonlight. They could not have missed it in any case, however, for a sense of power had begun to draw them, the sense of the runestone there. They feared for that runestone now, for Kish was close behind. Lobon turned to look back at her. Her lizards were massing close around her, as if for attack. But still she kept her distance. Lobon leaned between the dark stallion’s wings as he swept down over the valley, a shadowed niche now between the silvered dunes. The dome glinted, then lost itself as their angle of descent steepened, then gleamed again; once it reflected Ere’s moons just before they came to earth.

They came down onto heavy grass. The winged ones folded their wings along their backs and stood facing the crystal dome. Behind and above them, Kish’s band drew close, sweeping over and back. Lobon could feel power strong now from the stone that dwelt beneath the dome. How had it come here? How had the dome come here? And who was the white-haired child? He did not dismount from Lannthenn’s back, nor did Meatha dismount. She looked across at him in silence. Her fear and her exhilaration shook him. They could feel the powers gathered around them, could feel the earth’s trembling, could feel the intolerable weight of Ere’s very existence balanced in this moment.

Inside the crystal dome, the white-haired child paused, then came slowly to the crystal door and pushed it open.

She came up to Lannthenn’s side, carrying a sheathed sword, the sight of which made Lobon start. She wore a second sword. And she held her right fist clenched against her chest. She was tiny, surely no more than seven. Her hair was snow white in the moonlight, her thin shift hardly enough to keep off the cold, though she was not shivering. Her eyes looked, in the moonlight, as golden as a wolf’s eyes. As golden as Anchorstar’s eyes, Meatha told him. With effort the child lifted the sword. Lobon stared again at the hilt, felt weak and strange, took it from her and unsheathed it, sat holding Skeelie’s sword. How had it gotten here? “Where is she?” he whispered, glancing past the child into the dome, but he could see no figure there, caught no sense of her.

“Skeelie, your mother, bids you take her sword,” was all the child would say. “The silver sword that Ramad forged for her.” Then she held up her partly closed fist to him and without another word, without any hesitation, she laid the heavy jade in his hand.

It was surely the largest of all the shards; a heavy, thick dagger of jade nearly as long as his palm, carved with the runes that were its own fragment of the whole rune:

power end life

Lobon held it for a moment then slipped it into the inner lining of his tunic beside the wolf bell. He watched the two wolves leap clear of the winged horses that had carried them. They went directly to the child and stood head-high beside her, facing toward the warrior queen sweeping and wheeling in the sky above.

Lobon knew he must carry the stone into battle. They all knew, as if the child had told them, that Kish could not take the runestone from the crystal dome; that this stone was the true lure to draw Kish, and so retrieve the six stones she carried—the bait on which the fate of all eight stones waited.

The child unbuckled the second sword and handed it to Meatha. Then Lobon turned Lannthenn skyward with a thought, the stallion as eager as he to do battle. The white mare wheeled next to him, Meatha taut with nerves, and all the winged ones following, mind meeting mind as they formed a rhythm of attack. Ahead, the winged lizards swarmed, hissing. Kish swept out ahead of the pack, her sword drawn, her power in the stones she carried like a sword itself. The sky had begun to go milky with the coming dawn. Kish’s lizards slithered beneath heavy wings in a close-flying swarm as Kish swept down toward Lobon.

*

And across Ere, Kearb-Mattus came in silence down along the Owdneet. He followed Zephy and Thorn and the cultists, formed now into a nearly respectable fighting band.

Zephy and Thorn knew he followed, though the sense of him was garbled, often lost, as if Seers rode with him. Pellian street rabble, and untrained. Their own band moved slowly, for half their troops marched, only half rode, the horses in short supply. All the winged ones were gone, to fight in Carriol. Zephy and Thorn and their companions were exhausted from battling small bands of fighters. They knew they must rest soon, if for only an hour. “Then we must take what troops we can and ride for Carriol,” Thorn said, for the battling was desperate there.

No cultists among them now were dissident, for those dissident had already been sealed into the villa at Dal. It had been a battle hardly worth remarking, the awakened cultists seeing at last the true nature of their warrior queen, simply overpowering those who still clung to the ways of Kish, tying them, marching them through Dal to the villa that already Carriolinian soldiers had turned into an outlying prison, and sealing them in with scrap rubble from the sacking of the city that Kearb-Mattus had earlier begun and the heaving of the earth completed.

They had ridden then toward Carriol, through two areas in Farr held still by Carriolinian soldiers, skirted several Kubalese bands in their haste, then across farmland torn by the heaving ground and desolate with wounded and dead, from which the Kubalese had already departed.

*

Kearb-Mattus attacked the young Carriolinians as they slept; he was shielded by a mind-blocking held somehow steady by three rude street-Seers, came over a rise onto the handful of mounted men who guarded the camp, and saw the pitiful heap of soldiers beyond sleeping in the open.

Zephy leaped up at the sound of fighting, hardly awake, frightened. Thorn was mounted, shouting at her. She grabbed the bridle of the horse he had brought her and was mounted; all were mounted, weapons ready, the attacking troops everywhere among them so they were hard put not to panic. She lost sight of Thorn, thrust her sword against the belly of a huge Kubalese bearing down on her, ducked beneath his blow to strike again, heard the screams of horses, of men, took a blow across her shoulder, spun her horse around to strike; all was confusion, a melee in the near-dark. She wanted to cry out for Thorn and daren’t, felt another blow like fire across her neck, was jerked from her horse, fell, was caught and her arms pulled behind her, then hit again, and she went dizzy and sick.

*

All Carriol knew that Thorn’s band was in trouble—and knew that more Kubalese were on their way toward Carriol’s border. Carriol fought for her life, winged ones carried soldiers or fought free without riders, leaping from the sky to strike; the wolves fought as fiercely as they had fought at the battle of Hape and in the dark wood. Only the master Seers remained behind in Carriol, seated in the citadel with heads lowered in the prayer of concentration, massing their power more surely here to help cripple the Kubalese; for though the stone was gone, still some power clung inside the citadel itself, this place that once had known the power of the Luff’Eresi.

*

In the sky above the crystal dome, the battle was bloody, a winging, whirling melee of winds and confusion. Kish swept her band in again and again to attack the winged ones and Meatha, while Kish herself drove mercilessly at Lobon. And as Kish called on the powers of the creatures of darkness, those spirits reached out to give purpose to the winged lizards: made warring, lethal creatures of them, all claw and teeth and canny in their maneuvering, slashing and twisting away to divert Meatha. The white mare bore streaks of blood across her coat and wings, and Meatha’s arm was torn. Nearby the warrior queen parried and bore down on Lobon. She slashed, cut Lobon’s shoulder, and swept away beneath Lannthenn to come at him from behind with her ready sword. Lannthenn dove and doubled back; Lobon struck, but Kish was away, quick in the air, eluding him. As the forces clashed and the dark strengthened, the earth below shuddered, and the very boulders shifted, ringing out like death music, Along Pelli’s coast a protrusion of land broke loose and fell into the sea, gentle hills rumbled and cracked apart. What power was this, to so shatter the land? All took heed, but no one yet understood except Kish, and those who fought beside her.

In Farr, Kearb-Mattus let some of the cultists escape his troops in order to surround and take captive the young Carriolinian Seers; soon his troops were ushering Zephy and Thorn and five other Seers down from their mounts, to be bound, to be tied one to the other, then to be force-marched off ahead of the horses toward Dal, and toward the villa-turned-cell where they had left earlier captives. For that villa, too, had fallen to Kearb-Mattus’s men and was now a perfect place to give, with slow, increasing torture, the final death rites the Kubalese leader so anticipated.

Neither Thorn nor Zephy looked up as they marched, nor looked at each other, but their minds were locked as one—angry, desperate—seeking a plan of escape.

*

Lobon struck a telling blow across Kish’s face, another strike that drew blood from the lizard. He saw Meatha skewer a lizard then jerk her sword free as the heavy creature fell. Below them now bodies lay, dark splotches across the meadow and dunes, some lizards, some horses of Eresu, sprawled across the pale sand. Kish was on him again. He parried, forced her back; Kish’s lizard clawed air, she gripped its neck, off balance, and he thrust forward quickly—too late Lobon saw her strategy, too late cried out to Lannthenn and felt the stallion take her sword in a mortal spot.

They were falling, the stallion barely able to use his wings, blood gushing from his torn chest; he was like a crippled bird. Lobon’s heart filled with love for him, with sorrow, and with terrible fear for the stones. Lannthenn fell to earth in a twisting, crippled spiral, went to his knees and was down as Lobon leaped free.

From the crystal dome Jaspen watched, Feldyn and Crieba immobile beside her. She made prayer for Lobon, violent, strong prayer; she had done so constantly since the battle began. She was the child of Cadach, the tree man, the youngest child of five, though no two were born in the same generation or in the same place nor, for that, of the same mother; but all choosing to make right again the sins of Cadach. This was her gift, this guarding of the stone that now held all of Ere’s fate in balance.

Soon behind her, come at the force of her prayer, towering figures made of light rose from the stuff of the crystal dome as if that crystal were but air, figures unclear in their dimension, and their wings all woven of light. They watched the battle, watched the great horse Lannthenn fall and die; watched Kish, the warrior queen, descend to the meadow where Lobon stood awaiting her, holding the stone and the wolf bell as bait.

Kish’s eyes burned with hunger for the stone, but she remained mounted. Around her, lizards dropped out of the sky to slither in the grass, circling Lobon. Above, half a dozen lizards drove Meatha and the white mare back, attacking again, again.

Kish’s mount spun around, she jerked it savagely and brought it rearing over Lobon. He stabbed at its belly, ducked her sword, stabbed again; as the creature twisted away, he leaped and hit it, dodging Kish’s blows, forcing his power at her; felt her sword pierce his arm. And he felt a surge of power in himself, as if all the Seers of Carriol sent theirs flooding like a tide. He struck the lizard, struck again as it reared, slashing its trailing wing; as it tried to climb skyward, he struck once more down its side with all his weight on his sword. The lizard fell screaming. Kish beat it but it could not rise. She slid down, left it to die, confronted Lobon from the ground, her face white and twisted with lust for the stones he carried, with a rage that drew the dark fury of evil into a giant maelstrom, a force that continued to shake the earth. All across Ere the land moved and changed; in Carriol the warriors of light were driven back by the heaving earth, by the dark powers incarnate in Kish’s wrath.

From the crystal dome, the child Jaspen watched and held her own force steady. She felt the power of the two wolves who stood beside her, felt Meatha’s strength supporting Lobon, as all together they sought to weaken Kish and drive her back.

Cadach the tree man Saw the battle, felt the earth’s tremors around him and knew their true nature. Trapped inside his ancient tree deep in the caves of Owdneet, he felt the mountain move above him, below him, Saw the warring in Carriol and Carriol’s armies driven back. Then felt the mountain give way beneath him; his tree toppled suddenly into a newly opened fissure, the roots upside down reached up like clawing fingers as it was swept, with all the treasures of the cave, deep into the center of the world. And Cadach at last knew death, crushed inside the shattered tree.

But the spirit of Cadach was not dead, it came truly alive suddenly and watched all of Ere in the holocaust. Cadach, dead at last and his spirit released, watched Lobon’s battle with terrible empathy. What path that spirit would now pursue, on until the end of Time, what strength it would now embrace into itself to drive back the dark, only Cadach could know.

He Saw the crystal dome and knew it stood on the place where once a jade sphere had been mined. He Saw the mining of the jade, Saw that miner-Seer discover the powers of the stone. He Saw its theft by another, the search for it, all in an instant; and Saw finally a procession of Seers carry the stone up into the mountain Tala-charen to safety, to leave it for fate, and for the natural forces beyond their own will, to deal with.

And so had those forces dealt, and were dealing. Cadach went still in his mind as Kish’s sword struck across Lobon’s, struck again. He Saw Kish take a blow and reel, then strike cruelly at Lobon, Saw the battle in the sky above where Meatha fought desperately to join him.

From the crystal dome a woman stood looking out past the white-haired child and the two wolves: Skeelie, come out of Time as silent as wings muffled by cloud; Skeelie, held tense by the force of the battle. Convulsively she moved forward, her hand gripping the heavy, unfamiliar sword at her side, for she carried Canoldir’s sword. She pushed through the dome, touched the clear door, would go to Lobon, would fight beside Lobon. . . .

As she passed the child and the wolves, she slowed; she saw that the warrior queen was weakening and she brought force strong with the others, felt forces strong around Lobon. She did not know she was whispering Ramad’s name, like an incantation. She stood, sword ready but unmoving, as Lobon parried powerfully against Kish, driving her back now, giving her mortal blows in a surge of fury and strength. But Kish rallied, swung her sword stabbing into his chest in a flashing thrust. Metal rang, but her sword glanced away. Lobon staggered, righted himself and drove the warrior queen back. He felt the power of the great wolves join him strong as a beating pulse as all across Ere Seers of light turned from their own battles, held their attackers at bay, their powers joined with him in the stones. The warrior queen lunged and slashed, but in her fury she was losing control; she fought desperately as he drove her back again, again, and then with one lunging blow he thrust his sword home into her chest. She fell.

He stood over her, sword ready. She made no move to rise. He stood quietly, watching her die.

At last Lobon knelt beside her. He stared at her white, reptilian face, shaped with anger even in death. He reached, removed from her tunic the five shards of the runestone of Eresu. Took up the starfires. He wanted to wipe the scent of Kish from them, polish them clean. Instead he rose and reached to place the stones inside his own tunic. It was then he felt the twisted metal there. He pulled the wolf bell forth.

It was smashed and twisted by Kish’s sword. The belly of the bitch-wolf gaped open where the blade had gone in. Inside that cut, gleaming green, lay a shard of the runestone. He turned the wolf bell and spilled the stone into his hand beside the others. At once he was stricken with a force like thunder, felt heat and a white light burst around the stone so bright it blinded him.

When the light died, he remained still, shocked, hypnotized with the force that gripped him.

In his hand lay not the shards of the runestone, but a round jade sphere. The whole stone. No mark or line showed where the shards had joined. The runes were carved around its surface, the whole rune—or nearly whole: for a chasm ran along one side of the stone deep into the center, a rough-edged scar where the missing shard should have been. Inside, he could see the golden heart that had been the starfires. He looked up then, and saw Meatha. Skeelie stood beside her, the look on her face unfathomable, her dark eyes deep with emotions that shook Lobon’s soul, the sense of Ramad so strong between them, the sense of their closeness.

“It is joined,” he said inadequately. He felt heavy and stupid with shock. “How—how could such a thing happen? It is not whole, it is flawed. How . . . ?” He was fighting dizziness, fighting to remain standing.

Skeelie moved to support him, stood tall and strong beside him, holding his shoulders. Her voice shook only slightly. “Perhaps it is flawed just as Ere is flawed. Just so—as men’s lives are flawed.”

“Yes,” he said, staring down at the stone.

“Though,” she added quietly, “that makes their lives no less magnificent.”

He leaned against Skeelie, felt her strength, her gentleness. Then he looked across to Meatha, reached to take her hand.

“It is done,” Meatha said. Above them the sky was empty, the remaining lizards had fled.

“And the wolves?” he said suddenly, looking around him. The white-haired child stood alone, a little way from them.

“The wolves are gone,” Meatha said. “They make for Carriol and their brothers.” He glimpsed them in the shadows of his mind racing across the sand. “They will return to us,” she said. “Maybe with mates by their sides.” She smiled. “Too long alone, those two.” Her warmth and her strength, like Skeelie’s strength, reached out and steadied him; and Skeelie moved away.

He looked long at Meatha. “And—are you too long alone?”

She lowered her eyes, then looked up. “I am not alone,” she said boldly. Kish’s spell had fallen from them. The force that linked them now was their own, woven not of darkness nor of another’s greed. He put his arms around her and found the lack of a spell made little difference in the way he felt. He drew her close, wincing as he pressed her against a sword wound; he felt the pain of all his wounds, as if the numbing strain of battle had worn away and his senses come clear once more; pain, and then dizziness.

*

He woke with strong hands lifting him to a sitting position. He was in a bed, staring dumbly at a steaming mug of something vile. He looked up at Skeelie’s face.

“I can’t drink that. It stinks.”

“Ram always drank it. So can you. It will ease the pain.”

He pushed it away. “I don’t need droughts for pain.” Though pain was nearly crushing him.

He began to remember, and the memory so shook him that it, too, brought pain. He gripped the stone in his hand and dared not look at it.

“Drink!” Skeelie insisted. Scowling, he gulped the hot, bitter brew. Not till it was gone did he lift the stone, and read the runes carved into it;

Eternal quest to those —— power

Some seek dark; they —— end.

Some hold joy: they know eternal life.

Through them all powers will sing.

The child Jaspen stood silently beside the bed—this surely must be her bed, a narrow cot. She said softly, “Eternal quest to those with power. Some seek dark, they mortal end.” The touch of the stone seemed to Lobon like fire, immense, filling the light-washed dome. He remembered the moment of the joining, the white light, the stone joining in his hand just as, six generations gone in Time, it had shattered in Ramad’s hand.

On the floor beside the cot lay the split and battered wolf bell. The bitch-wolf was still grinning.

The drug was beginning to take hold, to make him muzzy. He remembered the battling across Ere, Carriol’s desperate warring against the Kubalese, felt with dulled senses how the powers had struck at them, and the powers of darkness called by Kish with the rage that shook all the land. Sleepily, he realized that the sense of those powers was gone now, that infinite calm lay around him and lay too across Ere. He looked up with hazy vision. Both Meatha and Skeelie were watching him, and the child Jaspen, her thin little face calm beneath that shock of white hair.

“The dark is gone,” Meatha said. “Or—the dark has drawn back,” she corrected herself.

Skeelie touched his cheek. “Perhaps the dark will never be entirely gone. Maybe that is what the flawed stone tells us.”

“As long as we are mortal,” Jaspen said sadly, “the dark will be somewhere close to us, even when we are at peace.”

“The land is quiet now,” Meatha said. “And it is different, Lobon. Can you sense it? The land is split apart. Kish did that. The mountains—” She stopped speaking, and the vision came around them, flowing from one mind to the others. All three had Seen the moment of the splitting, only Lobon unaware as if he stood in the blind eye of a storm. They had Seen the fissure begin as a crack high up inside the Ring of Fire, and run jagged and increasing in size, down through the mountains, to cut back and forth across Cloffi with the terrible force of the dark, and across the river Owdneet, so the river’s waters mixed with lava, sending up blinding steam; and the rift had shouldered south through Aybil, toward Farr and toward the villa of Dal.

*

Zephy and Thorn had sensed the rift, as had the five young Seers locked with them in the villa at Dal, sensed it and felt the earth heave and knew that they could die there. In an agony of terror each for the other, they sought out for help. They dug at the stone, forcing their shoulders and backs against the rubble with which their cell was sealed, staring skyward through the small hole they had made, hoping. . . . They felt the earth shift beneath them, and tore with bloody hands at the wall that imprisoned them.

Zephy saw the winged ones first, high in the sky above them, and cried out. The sky outside was filled with wings. Get back! the silent voices cried. Get back! The winged ones turned their backsides to the wall and kicked, kicked again in wild drumbeats until at last the wall gave way. Rubble fell around their feet. The earth’s heaving increased. The Seers tumbled through, leaped to mount. The horses swept skyward as the rift sucked Dal’s villa into a fiery maw and crushed and toppled it a hundred feet into the earth, then moved on, hungering for the sea.

*

The rift had shattered through Farr and split the coastal shelf and then the sea floor, sending the sea leaping out onto the land. Behind it the eleven countries of Ere, so long joined in isolation from the rest of the primitive globe, were no longer joined. Now to the west lay Moramia and Karra in the high desert, nearly untouched, and clinging to them, Zandour and Aybil and Cloffi. That land lay separated now from the eastern nations. The rift was half a mile wide. In the east lay Carriol and Pelli, Sangur and Kubal, and what had once been Urobb. Farr was an island now, cut off from the land.

In the mountains, the fissure had snaked through the caves of Owdneet, which were already shattered by the earlier quakes. The magnificent grotto where Ramad had met the dark Seer was no more. How many mortals and living creatures had died in the devastation, they couldn’t know. How many families crushed, terrified—generations, whole villages. All the fabric of their civilization torn asunder by Kish, by the dark, and all record of it, all the history of Ere wrought in paintings on the stone ceiling and laid out in parchment scrolls gone, neither present nor past to endure save what fragments future generations could slowly piece together. The fissure’s tail snaked north, to end at last at the foot of Tala-charen. Ere was split in two. Only Tala-charen lay untouched.

“We will start anew,” Meatha said, “We will retrieve what we can of the past, and we will write a new history. Tra. Hoppa will write it.”

Lobon looked at Jaspen. What would happen to the white-haired ones? He knew from Meatha that Anchorstar and Merren Hoppa had no idea that they were brother and sister.

“We know about each other now,” Jaspen said, “We are all the children of Cadach. Anchorstar knows, and Merren. Gredillon, in her own time knows. Our brother Thebon who moves through the unknown lands knows. Cadach has died now,” she said, “and has been released, and so we are released from our vows to atone for him. That won’t change what we are, and what we care about.”

“And what was Cadach’s crime?” Lobon said, not knowing if she would answer.

Skeelie spoke for her. “Cadach, in a time two years gone from this present time, showed the Kubalese how to use the drug MadogWerg—not to ease pain, but to control the minds of the Children of Ynell.” She looked across at Meatha and saw that Meatha had gone pale. “Cadach by so doing,” she said gently, “nearly took the life of his own son, of Anchorstar. Cadach, when he died, then was trapped in the tree.”

“We knew nothing of this until now,” Jaspen said. “I knew only that I guarded the stone. And that I waited, so very long, I waited.”

“But how did you get the stone?” Meatha said. “How . . . ?”

“I was an orphan child,” Jaspen told them. “In Moramia. The slave of a miner. Another child, a slave, was treated cruelly—we all were, but he died from his beatings. It was he who kept the stone secret and hidden. He, Sechen, had been there on Tala-charen.” She looked up at Skeelie. “You were there. You were on Tala-charen beside Ramad.”

Skeelie nodded, a bond of sympathy and pain between them.

“When Sechen died, I took the stone from him, and a power came around me, a sense of—” She stared at them with her golden eyes and could not put to words the sense of the wonder, could only show them. They were caught in the vision of the Luff’Eresi surrounding the child, speaking to the child.

“They told me,” Jaspen said, “that my father had served the dark, and that if I were willing I could atone for him. That if I would return to the source of the stone, then the dark could never touch it. They said that it was very rare for them to guide the way of a human. They showed me where the dome was, and then they were gone; and I was alone in the slave hut with the stone to hide until I could escape.

“The wolves came to me in the night, I was terrified. But they spoke to me, and were so—I put my arms around them and I cried; for no one, except Sechen, had ever loved me.

“I followed them. They led me to the crystal dome, and then they went away. I—” She looked around, forgetting that the wolves had left them. “I missed them when they were gone. But . . .” She looked up now with a new brightness, a wonder they had not before seen. “But my sisters and my brothers will come now. We can be together if we wish.” She took Skeelie’s hand. “If you would wait with me, you could know—the woman who reared Ramad.”

“I almost, once—I almost . . .” Skeelie found to her consternation that she was crying. She turned away and went to stand staring out through the clear dome.

All of Time that she had moved through, all the generations, all her life and Ram’s seemed to culminate here. She felt terrified, lost, and exhilarated. She turned at last to Lobon and Meatha. “The Kubalese are driven back and docile,” she said with certainty. “Kearb-Mattus crawls away beaten—alive, but injured and beaten.” She sighed. “Carriol will rebuild now that which war and the violence of the land has destroyed. All Ere will begin anew now, as it has begun before. You—you will be a part of that building.”

Lobon’s voice caught. “And you, Mamen? You . . .”

But already she had turned toward the crystal door. As she stood with it flung back, a big dark stallion winged down out of the sky and a man, broad of shoulder and bearded, leaped down, taking her into his arms.

She was crying, held tight against Canoldir. At last she turned away from him, took Lobon in a strong embrace, and then Meatha. She kissed the child Jaspen and said, “I will return to see Gredillon.” She called to the mare who waited close beside the dome, a bright russet mare. She mounted, and the mare leaped up through clouds beside Canoldir’s stallion, whether to that place outside of Time or to another destination, no one knew.

Stepping to the crystal door. Meatha slid onto the back of the white mare, and Lobon chose Michennann. Skyborne, they turned to wave down at the little pale figure beside the crystal dome, then looked ahead; soon, from the sweeping sky, they saw below them the two wolves heading south, leaping across dunes like swift shadows. Will you come with us? Lobon asked them. We can carry you. And the winged ones banked upon the winds to await their answer.

But the wolves did not pause. We will take our own way, Lobon of wolves, Feldyn told him. There is time now for us to follow our own wild spirit, and time for you, Lobon, to ride a gentler wind.

Time, now, for a kinder life, guided by the runestone, Meatha said silently. And we, in turn, must stand strong to guard the stone’s power. Was it a warning, when the land shattered? That if we fail to keep the safe the runestone, if we weaken and grow soft and let the dark rule the stone, all will be lost forever?

There will be no turning back again, Lobon agreed. We cannot hope to retrieve, another time, what we would lose through weakness. Forever, now, we must stand strong. He touched Michennann’s sleek neck and the winged ones lifted into the wind; their powerfully beating wings carried them up, ever higher, into the clear, deep sky.

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