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

ONE

Lobon stood tall above the boulder-strewn valley, his sword sheathed, his leather cape thrown back, looking down coldly upon the waste of lifeless stone. The valley, just as he remembered it from childhood, looked as if a giant hand had ripped and shattered the stone, splitting it into grotesque and tumbled shapes across the dry scar of sand; and the whole valley itself was dwarfed by the shouldering mountains far to his right and the sheer black cliff that towered close on his left. Above that cliff, he could see the icy white apron of the glacier Eken-dep thrust against the dropping sun.

Behind him in the south, beyond the wild mountains and beyond a line of smoking volcanoes, lay the civilized nations of Ere. He had never seen them except in Seer’s visions, sharp as reality itself. This valley was his home, where he was born and bred, though it was twelve years since he had looked upon it. Its fierce cruelty had not softened during those years since he was six. He saw it with the same distaste he had known then, and with the same hatred. The same fury at his father’s death, for that fury had never abated.

Ahead, the valley ended abruptly at the edge of a gaping abyss, a chasm so immense that a man entering it would feel as small as a dew-ant. Fire ran at the bottom of the abyss in bloodied rivers bursting forth from fractured stone. The air down there was smoke-dulled and tinted sullen red. You could travel down there if you knew well the way. Or the pit could take your life. The width of the fissure was so great that the far jagged edge was lost in smoky mist. The black cliff that blocked the western end of the abyss pushed down into it like an obsidian blade, cutting off the land beyond. He turned his gaze away from that cliff to search among the boulders ahead for his companions. When he spoke at last, his voice seemed no more than a whisper against the awful silence. “Crieba? Feldyn?”

The dog wolves moved into the open and paused, then looked back at him, black Feldyn like a shadow against the dark shadows cast by the falling sun, Crieba’s silver coat caught in a last streak of light. The sun would soon be gone behind the glacier.

“Shorren?”

The white bitch wolf appeared from behind a boulder and smiled up at him, her eyes golden jewels.

“Can you find a place in this abysmal pile of stone where I can lay my head? Is there game?”

Feldyn spoke silently. We scent rock hare, Lobon. A deer passed through some hours back, but is gone. You will eat rock hare again. He and Crieba leaped ahead to find shelter, losing themselves quickly among jagged boulders. Shorren waited for Lobon and pushed her nose against him, her warm white muzzle nudging his arm. She was increasingly uncomfortable at the fury that filled him, tried with female stubbornness to gentle him. She could not endure his anger without pain to herself and would never cease to try to soothe him.

Man and wolf worked their way down between boulders, across the jagged valley toward the lip of the abyss. Soon they stood at the rim, bathed in the hot breath of the abyss, and in the feel of evil that rose from it. Lobon knew no words to describe his contempt for the master of that pit.

Here on the edge of the pit he had stood as a child of six, watching Ramad die, and now once more his mind and heart filled with the scene, come sharp to Seer’s senses. Shorren’s golden eyes censured him for his self-inflicted pain, but she remained silent in her mind and let him be. Feldyn joined them, tasted the heat from the pit, then looked eastward, raising his black muzzle. He keened suddenly with eerie voice, challenging the master of Urdd. Lobon’s silent challenge joined him, his black eyes searching the pit, his mottled red hair flaming in the last light like a burning blaze.

When Lobon spoke again, his voice was like scuffed silk against the valley’s silence. “He will die. Dracvadrig will die at my hand.”

The bitch wolf snarled softly. Lobon ignored her censure. He stared down at her and willed her to listen. “I will kill him, Shorren! And I will sink this pit of fire back into the center of Ere from which it gapes, and that will be Dracvadrig’s grave.”

Shorren’s thought came softly, but as steady as stone. You are too arrogant, young whelp. You are too filled with the lust for revenge. That lust can blind you. The dog wolves echoed her, Crieba slipping silently to Lobon’s side; but Lobon turned from all three and closed his mind to their words. He pulled from his tunic a deerskin pouch, dark with age and brittle, and spilled out into his palm two long green shards of jade and five small, amber stones. The smaller stones had, generations before, been cut from a similar shard.

The fourth shard was hidden inside the belly of the bronze bitch wolf that he took from his tunic, a rearing wolf with a bell suspended in her mouth. He lifted the bell, and it toned lightly, making the three wolves moan with its magic and stare up at him with rising light in their eyes.

Four shards of the runestone, Lobon held. The fifth, there below him in the pit, he meant to take from Dracvadrig very soon.

He followed Shorren and the two dog wolves to a rude tumble of boulders under which they might shelter from the creatures of the night sky: from the black flying lizards big as horses, and from the little blood-drinking night-stingers that hovered near the heat of the abyss. Twenty paces to his left stood the heaped stone that was the grave of Ramad. Once it had been Ramad’s home, boulders with slabs of stone placed to roof a shelter. It would be dark inside now, sealed, attending the silence of death. Ramad’s bones lay there, and Fawdref s bones. Lobon shivered, wished Ramad would step out of Time to him, move through Time as he had done before, across six generations. He did not understand Time and its limits. Ramad was dead here, in this time. A sickness and revulsion rose in him; he kept his distance from the grave and did not understand his own feelings.

He dropped his blanket and pack inside the smaller, rougher shelter, then turned back to the abyss and stood staring down, wanting to go down at once and pursue Dracvadrig and kill him, but knowing he must learn the abyss through visions first, learn Dracvadrig’s nature better. Yet impatience ate at him and made him edgy. He began to pace. Shorren paced close to him, nuzzling him frequently as a mother would pat an unruly child.

They had been following Dracvadrig for twenty days, sensing the runestone Dracvadrig carried, Lobon drawn by the pull of the stone until he was nearly mad with it. They had climbed the face of Eken-dep following the master of Urdd, had stood halfway up the glacier only to see Dracvadrig transform himself from man to fire ogre and move on over the ice unfeeling of the cold, then at last transform himself into the dragon of fire he was famous for and leap from the glacier on giant wings laughing the laugh of a man. They had watched the creature fly down then into the abyss of fire; and there in the abyss Dracvadrig waited now, and Lobon would kill him there.

He had scant knowledge of Dracvadrig’s nature. He knew only that the firemaster’s skill at shape-changing was rare, and that the firemaster’s cruelty was absolute. Was the creature a man, or a demon? Had Dracvadrig been born of living creatures? Or born of the elements of the abyss itself, born of fire and of sulfurous stone? Or born perhaps as twisted offspring from the seed of the mindless fire ogres?

Lobon cared little what the creature was, he knew only that Dracvadrig must die. If Skeelie were here, she would say, You had better learn quickly Dracvadrig’s nature, learn quickly what you face. He thought of his mother and scowled, could see too plainly her thin, fine-boned face, the dark knot of hair falling over one shoulder. He felt the sense of her strength, in spite of his anger at her. They had parted in fury, not speaking; and later when he was away from her, he had not been able to bring himself to reach out in vision to mend that rift. Nor would he mend it now.

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.

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.