The runestone shone with the power of the Seers as Tayba held it high, battling the wind and the raging sea, battling the dark with every fiber she possessed. Then as Jerthon came closer, the dark swept down in the form of a huge bird-monster, silently above him, changeable as wind, brother to wind, and clawed, with great beak reaching; he did not sense it; it dropped low over Jerthon’s band and followed them, invisible to them, as the battalion came through the narrow streets in darkness knowing there was danger but blinded to its source, every man’s weapon drawn. The sweating horses cowed in fear as unseen creatures shadowed them and crouched waiting among houses and shops.
Tayba saw Jerthon come, a sudden glimpse, tried to cry out to him and could not, tried to run through the streets to him and couldn’t move, was held as if she were stone, and her voice would not come in her throat.
What was this power come so strong out of Pelli? She pushed at her dark hair with quaking hand as if it would stifle her; her every fiber strained, yet no sound or forward movement could she make, and when she turned she saw Drudd’s fury—did he think she wasn’t trying? Did he think—she stared at Pol, white beneath his freckles, at Skeelie, her thin face drawn with effort; then she turned back and felt the dark descending around Jerthon, and she tore with her very soul at it, with a will close to hysteria against the surging dark.
Part Two: The Gods
There stood in the heart of the Pellian nation a wood of ancient twisted trees so dense the air beneath did not know sun; a wood so old it had seen the first coming of men into Ere; a wood chill of spirit as death is chill. No one ventured there save the Pellian Seers. In the center of the wood rose a black stone wall, and inside this wall the Pellians had wrought a castle, grotesque in design, shaped like the jointed heads of a snake, an eel, and a horned man, their grinning mouths serving as high portals, their eyes leering windows. And a creature lived within the castle, a creature named Hape. This was the castle of Hape.
Below the three grinning heads that formed the upper castle ran three rows of windows narrow and dark, and beneath these again was an arched place whose door was carved with the Hope’s runes and with signs of death and adversity.
At first, three years earlier, the Hape had been no more than a whispering dark reaching from beyond the mountains to summon BroogArl. Heeding its call, BroogArl had sent Seers north into the dark mountains to seek the Hape out, an expedition that traveled past the gods’ city of Owdneet, past the mountain Tala-charen, and past Eresu itself, far, far into the unknown places, led on by the Hope’s soft urging: twelve Seers and apprentice Seers traveling two years, and returning at last to Pelli not alone. The Hape rode with them, rode the winds above them, nurtured on their dark thoughts as they traveled, and grew stronger than ever it had been. It ran beside their shying horses as a great six-legged cat, or it strode beside their cringing mounts as a giant with head of goat and deer’s horns; or it housed itself in the dark of their minds only and rode there. When the Seers arrived in Pelli, it housed itself in the castle they built for it at its own instruction, and BroogArl knew he had captured a creature of evil beyond his wildest dreams. There in the wood, Hape would come out at night in the shape of a horned man or an eel or snake, or in the form of a thousand chittering creatures slithering unseen. This was Hape, potent, feeding on the dark Seers’ minds and nurturing their evil wills, slave to their wills—or was he slave?
Who ruled now? The Seers of Pelli, or Hape?
Perhaps it did not matter who ruled in this coupling of evil.
SIX
Ere’s thin moons lit Ram’s way from Kubal toward the River Urobb; then he rode up along the fast-falling moonlit river, atop a ridge, toward the first jagged peaks of the Ring of Fire; rode, knowing that beneath those cold stone peaks the mountains’ bellies burned with molten fire tenuously contained, boiling rivers fettered now, but always eager to be free. All of Ere lived with this sense of the mountains’ captive fire; it was a part of Ere’s race-memory, the knowledge that the land might suddenly burst forth in rivers of fire. Such knowledge should have made Ere’s people close and kind with one another, but it never had.
As he rode, his vision cleared suddenly without warning in a way he could never understand. What made the dark leaders pull back of a sudden, so that those of light could see? Were their powers amassed elsewhere, and thus weakened for a few moments in the blocking of other Seers’ skills? He Saw the Hape suddenly and clearly, saw what it was and how the Seer BroogArl had brought it into Ere less than a year past, saw the Hape’s dark lust, saw the castle that was built for it. He pulled up his horse, turned, sat staring back through the night toward Pelli, the vision holding him. And he understood at last what the power was they had been battling, remembered Jerthon’s voice in citadel, “Something rides with them, Ram. Something more than the dark we know, something like an impossible weight on your mind so the Seeing is torn from you, your very sanity near torn from you . . .” He remembered his own feelings in battle, his words to Skeelie as she tended his wound, “A power that breathes and moves as one great lusting animal . . .”
It was an animal, this breath of evil that BroogArl had brought out of the unknown lands, a monster not of flesh but formed of hatred and lust.
He went on at last, shaken by the dark vision, afraid of it, and awed.
Toward morning he made camp high up a ridge, dozed over a small fire as his horse grazed, then came awake suddenly with a sharp sense of something amiss and saw the moon had set and in the east the sun was already casting its light across the far sea. What had waked him? He sat staring at his dozing mount and slowly, coldly, he began to sense a heaviness: a peril over Carriol. He felt the dark’s attack then, and in confusion, nothing clear, tried to See in a sharper vision and could not, but was gripped with a terrifying sense of disaster.
When at last the vision went from him, he did not know whether the dark had drawn away from Carriol in defeat, or whether Carriol lay defeated. Should he go back, should he ride for Carriol?
But that would be useless, he could not arrive in time. He strained to use his power against the evil monster and could touch nothing, was as blind. He turned desperately and saddled up; perhaps if he were in Eresu his power would come stronger, so he could help. He rode hard and was soon deep in a zantha wood where the leaves hung down like a woman’s hair, trailing tendrils wet from the night dew, drenching him.
He came out of the wood at long last to ride up along the Urobb until he found a shallow fording with a vein of smooth white stone skirting the other side. He forded here and followed that smooth trail quickly, with growing urgency.
He came at midmorning to a narrow, dark canyon with twisting black boulders rising against its walls, a place immensely silent, where his horse’s hoofbeats fell like blows. The land rose steeply, soon was too abrupt and rocky for any horse. Here Ram unsaddled the gelding and turned him loose, leaned his saddle inside a shallow cave out of the weather, shouldered his pack, and started ahead on foot up beside the fast-falling river.
The way grew narrower and steeper still, and distant rumblings began to speak inside the mountains. The sun was high when he came suddenly around boulders to where the river ended abruptly and he stood facing a barrier, facing the sheer rocky wall of a mountain.
The river vanished beneath the mountain; or rather, came flowing out from beneath it in a clear swirl. The water should have been dark but was not, was washed with light as if light itself flowed out from beneath the stone. The old songs spoke of just such a swirling pool washed with light, of the river’s end lighted from beyond: from Eresu. He began to search the mountain’s face for a way to enter into that fabled valley.