“You have already started.”
Morgon stared at him. He said softly, “You are wrong. I have not even begun to see out of your eyes. What in Hel’s name do you see when you look at me?”
“Morgon, I am the most powerful wizard in this realm. I could fight for you.”
“Something frightened you that day on Trader’s Road. You need me to fight for you. What happened? Did you see the limits of your power in the reflection of a sea-green eye? They want me, and you don’t want to yield me to them. But you are not so sure anymore that you can fight an army of seaweed.”
Ghisteslwchlohm was silent, his face hollowed with a scarlet wash of shadows. “Can you?” he asked softly. “Who will help you? The High One?” Then Morgon felt the sudden stirring of his mind, a wave of thought encompassing the hall, the grounds, seeking out the minds of the wizards, to shape itself to them, bind them once again. Morgon raised the sword; the stars kindled a blade of light in Ghisteslwchlohm’s eyes. He winced away from it, his concentration broken. Then his hands rose, snarling threads of light between his fingers. The light swept back into the stars as if they had sucked it into themselves. Darkness crouched like a live thing within the hall, barring even the moonlight. The sword grew cold in Morgon’s grip. The coldness welled up his hands, into his bones, behind his eyes: a binding numbing his movements, his thoughts. His own awareness of it only strengthened it; struggling to move only bound him still. So he yielded to it, standing motionless in the night, knowing it was illusion, and that the acceptance of it, like the acceptance of the impossible, was the only way beyond it. He became its stillness, its coldness, so that when the vast power that was gathering in some dim world struck him at last, his numb, dark mind blocked it like a lump of iron.
He heard Ghisteslwchlohm’s furious, incredulous curse and shook himself free of the spell. He caught the wizard’s mind an instant before he vanished. A last rake of power across his mind shook his hold a little, and he realized that he was close to the edge of his own endurance. But the wizard was exhausted; even his illusion of darkness was broken. Light blazed out of the stars once more; the broken walls around them were luminous with power. Ghisteslwchlohm raised a hand, as if to work something out of the burning stones, then dropped it wearily. Morgon bound him lightly, and spoke his name.
The name took root in his heart, his thoughts. He absorbed not power, but memories, looking at the world for a few unbroken moments out of Ghisteslwchlohm’s mind.
He saw the great hall around them in all its first beauty, the windows burning as with the fires of wizardry, the newly panelled walls smelling of cedar. A hundred faces gazed at him that day, a thousand years before, as he spoke the nine structures of wizardry. As he spoke, he harvested in secret, even from the mind of the most powerful of them, all knowledge and memory of three stars.
He sat in restless, uneasy power at Erlenstar Mountain. He held the minds of the land-rulers, not to control their actions, but to know them, to study the land-instincts he could never quite master. He watched a land-ruler of Herun riding alone through Isig Pass, coming closer and closer, to ask a riddle of three stars. He twisted the mind of the Morgol’s horse; it reared, screaming, and the Morgol Dhairrhuwyth slid down a rocky cliff, catching desperately at boulders that spoke a deep, terrible warning as they thundered after him.
Long before that, he stood in wonder in the vast throne room at Erlenstar Mountain, where legend so old it had no beginning had placed the High One. It was empty. The raw jewels embedded in the stone walls were dim and weathered. Generations of bats clung to the ceiling. Spiders had woven webs frail as illusion around the throne. He had come to ask a question about a dreamer deep in Isig Mountain. But mere was no one to ask. He brushed cobweb from the throne and sat down to puzzle over the emptiness. And as the grey light faded between the rotting doors, he began to spin illusions…
He stood in another silent, beautiful place in another mountain, his mind taking the shape of a strange white stone. It was dreaming a child’s dream, and he could barely breathe as he watched the fragile images flow through him. A great city stood on a windy plain, a city that sang with winds in the child’s memory. The child saw it from a distance. Its mind was touching leaves, light on tree bark, grass blades; it gazed back at itself from the stolid mind of a toad; its blurred face was refracted in a fish’s eyes; its windblown hair teased the mind of a bird building a nest. A question beat beneath the dreaming, scoring his heart with fire, as the child reached out to absorb the essence of a single leaf. He asked it finally; the child seemed to turn at his voice, its eye dark and pure and vulnerable as a falcon’s eye.
“What destroyed you?”
The sky went grey as stone above the plain; the light faded from the child’s face. It stood tensely, listening. The winds snarled across the plain, roiling the long grass. A sound built, too vast for hearing, unendurable. A stone ripped loose from one of the shining walls in the city, sank deep into the ground. Another cracked against a street. The sound broke, then, a deep, shuddering bass roar that held at the heart of it something he recognized, though he could no longer see nor hear, and the fish floated like a white scar on the water, and the bird had been swept out of the tree…
“What is it?” he whispered, reaching through Ghisteslwchlohm’s mind, through the child’s mind, for the end of the dream. But as he reached, it faded into the wild water, into the dark wind, and the child’s eye turned white as stone. Its face became Ghisteslwchlohm’s, his eyes sunken with weariness, washed with a light pale as foam.
Morgon, struggling, bewildered, to pick up the thread of his probing, saw something flash out of the corner of his eye. His head snapped around. Stars struck his face; reeling, he lost consciousness a moment. He wrestled back into shimmering light and found himself on the rubble, swallowing blood from a cut in his mouth. He raised his head. The blade of his own sword touched his heart.
The shape-changer who stood over him had eyes as white as the child’s. He smiled a greeting and a fine-honed edge of fear rippled the surface of Morgon’s thoughts. Ghisteslwchlohm was staring beyond him. He turned his head and saw a woman standing among the broken stones. Her face, quiet, beautiful, was illumined briefly by a red-gold sky. Morgon heard the battle that raged behind her: of swords and spears, wizardry and weapons made of human bone scoured clean in the depths of the sea.
The woman’s head bowed. “Star-Bearer.” There was no mockery in her voice. “You are beginning to see far too much.”
“I’m still ignorant.” He swallowed again. “What do you want from me? I still need to ask that. My life or my death?”
“Both. Neither.” She looked across the room at Ghisteslwchlohm. “Master Ohm. What shall we do with you? You woke the Star-Bearer to power. The wise man does not forge the blade that will kill him.”
“Who are you?” the Founder whispered. “I killed the embers of a dream of three stars a thousand years ago. Where were you then?”
“Waiting.”
“What are you? You have no true shape, you have no name—”
“We are named.” Her voice was still clear, quiet, but Morgon heard a tone in it that was not human: as if stone or fire had spoken in a soft, rational, ageless voice. The fear stirred through him again, a dead-winter wind, spun of silk and ice. He shaped his fear into a riddle, his own voice sounding numb.
“When — when the High One fled from Erlenstar Mountain, who was it he ran from?”
A flare of power turned half her face liquid gold. She did not answer him. Ghisteslwchlohm’s lips parted; the long draw of his breath sounded clear in the turmoil, like the tide’s withdrawal.
“No.” He took a step back. “No.”