He sat up. The air seemed suddenly thin, fiery; he found it hard to breathe. “The shape-changers…” The blade of dryness was back in his throat. He raised his hands to his eyes, gathering darkness to stare into. Voices whispered out of his memory, out of the stones around him: The war is not finished, only silenced for the regathering… Those from the sea. Edolen. Sec. They destroyed us so we could not live on earth any more; we could not master it… The voices of the Earth-Masters’ dead, the children. His hands dropped heavily on the stone floor, but still the darkness pushed against his eyes. He saw the child turn from the leaf it touched in its dreaming, look across a plain, its body tense, waiting. “They could touch a leaf, a mountain, a seed, and know it, become it. That’s what Raederle saw, the power in them she loved. Yet they killed each other, buried their children beneath a mountain to die. They knew all the languages of the earth, all the laws of its shapes and movement. What happened to them? Did they stumble into the shape of something that had no law but power?” His voice was whispering away from him as if out of a dream. “What shape?”
He fell silent abruptly. He was shivering, yet sweating. The smell of water pulled at him mercilessly. He reached out to it again, his throat tormented with thirst His hands halted before they broke the surface. Raederle’s face, dreamlike in its beauty, looked back at him from the still water between his hands. Her long hair flowed away from her face like the sun’s fire. He forgot his thirst. He knelt motionlessly for a long time, gazing down at it, not knowing if it was real or if he had fashioned it out of longing, and not caring. Then a hand struck at it, shattering the image, sending rings of movement shivering to the far edges of the lake.
A murderous, uncontrollable fury swept Morgon to his feet. He wanted to kill Ghisteslwchlohm with his hands, but he could not even see the wizard. A power battered him away again and again. He scarcely felt pain; shapes were reeling faster than language in his mind. He discarded them, searching for the one shape powerful enough to contain his rage. He felt his body fray into shapelessness; a sound filled his mind, deep, harsh, wild, the voices out of the farthest reaches of the backlands. But they were no longer empty. Something shuddered through him, flinging off a light snapping through the air. He felt thoughts groping into his mind, but his own thoughts held no language except a sound like a vibrant, untuned harp string. He felt the fury in him expand, shape itself to all the hollows and forms of the stone chamber. He flung the wizard across the cavern, held him like a leaf before the wind, splayed against the stones.
Then he realized what shape he had taken.
He fell back into his own shape, the wild energy in him suddenly gone. He knelt on the stones, trembling, half-sobbing in fear and amazement. He heard the wizard stumble away from the wall, breathing haltingly, as if his ribs were cracked. As he moved across the cavern, Morgon heard voices all around him, speaking various complex languages of the earth.
He heard the whispering of fire, the shiver of leaves, the howl of a wolf in the lonely, moonlit backlands, the dry riddling of corn leaves. Then, far away, he heard a sound, as if the mountain itself had sighed. He felt the stone shift slightly under him. A sea bird cried harshly. Someone with a hand of tree bark and light flung Morgon onto his back.
He whispered bitterly, feeling the starred sword wrenched from his side, “One riddle and one door.”
But, though he waited in the eye of darkness for the sword to fall, nothing touched him. He was caught suddenly, breathless, in their tension of waiting. Then Raederle’s voice, raised in a Great Shout, shook stones loose from the ceiling and jarred him out of his waiting. “Morgon!”
The sword hummed wildly with the aftermath of the shout. Morgon heard it bounce against the stones. He shouted Raederle’s name involuntarily, in horror, and the floor lurched under him again, shrugging him toward the lake. The sword slid after him. It was still vibrating, a strange high note that stilled as Morgon caught it and sheathed it. There was a sound as if a crystal in one of the walls had cracked.
It sang as it broke: a low, tuned note that shattered its own core. Other crystals began to hum; the ground floor of the mountain rumbled. The great slabs of ceiling stone ground themselves together. Dust and rubble hissed down; half-formed crystals snapped and pounded to pieces on the floor. Languages of bats, dolphins, bees brushed through the chamber. A tension snaked through the air, and Morgon heard Raederle scream. Sobbing a curse, he pulled himself to his feet. The floor grumbled beneath him, then roared. One side of it lifted, fell ponderously onto the other. It flung him into the lake. The whole lake basin, a huge, round bowl carved into solid stone, began to tilt.
He was buried for a few moments in a wave of black water. When he surfaced again, he heard a sound as if the mountain itself, torn apart at its roots, had groaned.
A wind blasted into the stone chamber. It blinded Morgon, drove his own cry back into his throat. It whirled the lake into a black vortex that dragged him down into it. He heard, before he was engulfed, something that was either the ring of blood in his ears or a note like a fine-tuned string at the core of the deep wind’s voice.
The water spat him back up. The basin had tilted farther, pouring him out with the water toward the sheer wall at the far side. He snatched a breath, dove under water, trying to swim against the wave. But it hurled him back, heaved him at solid stone. As he sensed the wall blur up before him, it split open. The wave poured through the crack, dragging him with it. Through the thunder of water, he heard the final reverberations of the mountain burying its own heart.
The lake water dragged him through the jagged split, poured over a lip of stone into a roiling stream. He tried to pull himself out, catching at ledges, at walls rough with jewels, but the wind was still with him, pushing him back into the water, driving the water before it. The stream flooded into another; a whirlpool dragged him under a ledge of stone into another river. The river cast him finally out of the mountain, dragged him down foaming rapids, and threw him, half-drowned, his veins full of bitter water, into the Ose.
He pulled himself ashore finally, lay hugging the sunlit ground. The wild winds still pounded at him; the great pines were groaning as they bent. He coughed up the bitter water he had swallowed. When he moved finally to drink the sweet waters of the Ose, the wind nearly flung him back in. He raised his head, looked at the mountain. A portion of its side had been sucked in; trees lay uprooted, splintered in the shift of stone and earth. All down the pass, as far as he could see, the wind raged, bending trees to their breaking point.
He tried to stand, but he had no strength left. The wind seemed to be hounding him out of his own shape. He reached out; his hands closed on huge roots. He felt, as the tree shivered in his hold, the core of its great strength.
Clinging to it, he pulled himself up by its knots and boles. Then he stepped away from it and lifted his arms as if to enclose the wind.
Branches grew from his hands, his hair. His thoughts tangled like roots in the ground. He strained upward. Pitch ran like tears down his bark. His name formed his core; ring upon ring of silence built around it. His face rose high above the forests. Gripped to earth, bending to the wind’s fury, he disappeared within himself, behind the hard, wind-scrolled shield of his experiences.