Morgon did not realize he had moved until he felt the sudden pain over his heart. His hand reached out toward the wizard. “What is it?” he pleaded. “I can’t see!” The cold metal forced him back. His need spat in fire out of the stars in the sword hilt, jolting the shape-changer’s hold. The sword clanged to the floor, lay smoldering. He tried to rise. The shape-changer twisted the throat of his tunic, his burned hand poised to strike. Morgon, staring into his expressionless eyes, sent a blaze of power like a cry into his mind. The cry was lost in a cold, heaving sea. The shape-changer’s hand dropped. He pulled Morgon to his feet, left him standing free and bewildered by both the power and the restraint. He flung a last, desperate tendril of thought into the wizard’s mind and heard only the echo of the sea.
The battle burst through the ruined walls. Shape-changers pushed traders, exhausted warriors, the Morgol’s guards into the hall. Their blades of bone and iron from lost ships thrashed mercilessly through the chaos. Morgon saw two of the guards slain before he could even move. He reached for his sword, the breath pushing hard through his chest. The shape-changer’s knee slammed into his heart as he bent. He sagged to his hands and knees, whimpering for one scrap of air. The room grew very quiet around him; he saw only the rubble under his fingers. The silence eddied dizzily about him, whirling to a center. As from a dream he heard at its core the clear, fragile sound of a single harp note. The battle noises rolled over him again. He heard his voice, dragging harshly at the air. He lifted his head, looking for the sword, and saw Lyra dodging between traders in the doorway. Something stung back of his throat. He wanted to call out, stop the battle until she left, but he had no strength. She worked her way closer to him. Her face was worn, drawn; there were half-circles like bruises under her eyes. There was dried blood on her tunic, in her hair. Scanning the battlefield, she saw him suddenly. The spear spun in her hand; she flung it toward him. He watched it come without moving, without breathing. It whistled past him, struck the shape-changer and dragged him away from Morgon’s side. He grasped the sword and got to his feet unsteadily. Lyra bent, swept up the spear beneath one of the fallen guards. She balanced it, turning in a single swift, clean movement, and threw it.
It soared above the struggle, arched downward, ripping the air with a silver wake in a path to the Founder’s heart. His eyes, the color of mist over the sea, could not even blink as he watched it come. Morgon’s thoughts flew faster than its shadow. He saw Lyra’s expression change into a stunned, weary horror as she realized the wizard was bound, helpless against her; there was no skill, no honor, not even choice in her death-giving. Morgon wanted to shout, snapping the spear with his voice to rescue a dream of truth hidden behind a child’s eye, a wizard’s eye. His hands moved instead, pulling the harp at his back out of the air. He played it as he shaped it: the last low string whose reverberations set his own sword belling in anguish and shattered every other weapon inside and out of the hall.
Silence settled like old dust over the room. Ymris warriors were staring in disbelief at the odd bits of metal in their hands. Lyra was still watching the air where the spear had splintered apart, two feet from Ghisteslwchlohm. She turned slowly, making the only movement in the hall. Morgon met her eyes; she seemed suddenly so tired she could barely stand. The handful of guard left alive were looking at Morgon, their faces haunted, desperate. The shape-changers were very still. Their shapes seemed uncertain, suddenly, as if at his next movement they would flow into a tide of nothingness. Even the woman he knew as Eriel was still, watching him, waiting.
He caught a glimpse then of the fearsome power they saw in him, lying in some misty region beyond his awareness. The depths of his ignorance appalled him. He turned the harp aimlessly in his hands, holding the shape-changers trapped and having absolutely no idea what to do with them. At the slight uncertain movement, the expression in Eriel’s eyes turned to simple amazement.
She moved forward quickly; to take the harp, to kill him with his own sword, to turn his mind, like Ghisteslwchlohm’s, vague as the sea, he could only guess. He picked up the sword and stepped back. A hand touched his shoulder, stopped him.
Raederle stood beside him. Her face was pure white within her fiery hair, as if it had been shaped, like the Earth-Masters’ children, out of stone. She held him lightly, but she was not seeing him. She said softly to Eriel, “You will not touch him.”
The dark eyes held hers curiously. “Ylon’s child. Have you made your choice?” She moved again, and Morgon felt the vast, leashed power in Raederle’s mind strain free. For one moment, he saw the shape that Eriel had taken begin to fray away from her, reveal something incredibly ancient, wild, like the dark heart of earth or fire. He stood gripped in wonder, his face ashen, knowing he could not move even if the thing Raederle was forcing into shape was his own death.
Then a shout slapped across his mind, jarred him out of his fascination. He stared dizzily across the room. The ancient wizard he had seen at the gates of the city caught his eyes, held them with his own strange light-seared gaze.
The silent shout snapped through him again: Run! He did not move. He would not leave Raederle, but he could not help her; he felt incapable even of thought. Then a power gripped his exhausted mind, wrenched him out of shape. He cried out, a fierce, piercing, hawk’s protest. The power held him, flung him like a dark, wild wind out of the burning School of Wizards, out of the embattled city into the vast, pathless wasteland of the night.
9
The shape-changers pursued him across the backlands. The first night, he bolted across the sky in hawk-shape, the fiery city behind him growing smaller and smaller in the darkness. He flew northward instinctively, away from the kingdoms, marking his path by the smell of water beneath him. By dawn he felt safe. He dropped downward toward the lake shore. Birds drifting to the gentle morning tide swarmed up at his approach. He felt strands of their minds like a network. He broke through it, arching back up in midair. They drove him across the lake into the trees, where he dropped again suddenly, plummeting through air and light like a dark fist, until he touched the ground and vanished. Miles away to the north, he appeared again, kneeling beside the channel of water between two lakes, retching with exhaustion. He sagged down on the bank beside the water. After a while he moved again, dropped his face in the current and drank.
They found him again at dusk. He had caught fish and eaten for the first time in two days. The changeless afternoon light, the river’s monotonous voice had lulled him to sleep. He woke abruptly at a squirrel’s chattering, and saw high in the blue-grey air a great flock of wheeling birds. Rolling into the water, he changed shape. The current flung him from one relentless sluice of water to another, spun him back downstream into still pools, where hungry water birds dove at him. He fought his way upstream, seeing nothing but a constant, darkening blur that shrugged him from side to side and roared whenever he broke the surface. Finally he foundered into still water. It deepened as he swam. He dove toward the bottom to rest, but the water grew dark and still, so deep he had to come up to breathe before he found the bottom. He swam slowly near the surface, watching moths flutter in the moonlight. He drifted until the lake bottom angled upward, and he found weeds to hide in. He did not move until morning.
Then a tiny fish dove into the sunlight near him, snapped at an insect. Rings of water broke above him. He rose out of the weeds; the water burned around him with the morning sun as he changed shape. He waded out of the lake, stood listening to the silence. It seemed to roar soundlessly out of lands beyond the known world. The soft morning wind seemed alien, speaking a language he had never learned. He remembered the wild, ancient voices of Wind Plain that had echoed across Ymris with a thousand names and memories. But the voices of the backlands seemed even older, a rootwork of winds that held nothing he could comprehend except their emptiness. He stood for a long time, breathing their loneliness until he felt them begin to hollow him into something as nameless as themselves.