It was utterly silent, did not speak into his mind as a god would. As the fog thickened further, it all but vanished, yet the frightened horses plunged and fought him so wildly it was all he could do to keep the frantic mare from pulling away.
The figure darkened again, came clearer. Then it spoke to him. “Ramad! You are Ramad!” Its voice was hollow, void of expression or of kindness. And it spoke aloud, not in a god’s thought-language. He swallowed, waited in silence, clutching his sword and knowing a sword was useless.
“You are Ramad of wolves, are you not! Answer me, Seer!”
Ram did not answer, did not move.
“Afraid to speak, cowardly Seer? Well, hear me then! You pursue an unworthy mission, Ramad of wolves! You ride sniveling like a baby to whimper before gods! Ignorant mortal, would you lay the troubles of men before gods to solve?” Then the creature laughed, a terrifying, rasping thunder that echoed through the fog.
Ram fought it with his mind, tried with Seer’s powers to reduce it to the fog from which it must have formed, fought uselessly, all his skills unable to turn aside the dark being. It swelled larger, and the mist around it seethed, and it screamed at him, “Turn back, Seer! Turn back from your precarious quest lest you destroy the very cause you so covet!”
Suddenly the horses became strangely still. The creature shifted, and Ram felt himself grow dizzy. In spite of the fear that threatened to engulf him, he made his voice thunder in return. “If you give me honest words, show yourself!” Did he see the turn of a horse’s body, a man’s torso rising from its withers? All was so unclear, constantly changing. Was this a god with some enmity he had never imagined a god to have? Yet the sense that emanated from the mist was not godlike, was forbidding and cold. “If you Speak truly,” Ram challenged again, “show yourself to me!”
Its laugh was terrible. But it began to fade until soon its gigantic form was only a wash of dark. The mist thinned and receded. Coppery reeds showed through. And there was, suddenly, nothing before him. Only the river, reflecting Ere’s rising moons. Farther upriver, a heron screamed.
Ram sat staring at the marsh where the thing had risen. His wound throbbed. He felt spent, dead of spirit suddenly. When at last he started on again the horses walked as heavily as if they had already traveled the night’s distance. Ram felt as a child feels after a time of fever—as he had felt when he was small and his mind had been swept away during sleep into the dark Pellian caves by the Seer HarThass, possessed there by HarThass so he had battled for his life, was left so weak and listless afterward he hardly cared for life. Now he felt the same, weak, without volition. Without purpose. Too sharply he remembered HarThass’s lurid mind and inner worlds, which had spun him away from the living so he had been able to cling only tenuously to any strength within himself. Never, since that time, had he known complete freedom from the dark harassment of the Pellian Seers: a curse that, perhaps, had been welded into the fabric of reality generations before his birth, when a dark Seer lay dying in the caves of Zandour, predicting his birth, predicting his destiny.
Well enough he knew, from the teaching of Seers greater than he, from the words of the Luff’Eresi themselves in visions and written on the walls of a far cave among the Ring of Fire, that no man’s destiny was fixed. That no man danced to a pattern like a puppet on an invisible string. How had that long-dead Seer known then, that Ram would be born, that Ram would carry the blood of the cult of wolves? Had that Seer, before he died, been swept ahead on the living warp of Time to touch the fabric of Ram’s birth and life? He must have done; for others had known his words, though he spoke them quite alone in the cave of the wolf cult that would become his tomb:
A bastard child will be born and he will rule the wolves as no Seer before him has done. A bastard child fathered by a Pellian bearing the last blood of the wolf cult. My blood! My blood seeping down generations hence from some bastard I sired and do not even know exists. A child born of a girl with the blood of Seers in her veins. A child that will go among the great wolves of the high mountains where the lakes are made of fire . . .
In the throes of death, had that Seer swung into the fulcrum of Time for his vision, just as Ram and Skeelie had stood in that fulcrum when the runestone of Eresu split?
Always the memory of that prophecy, repeated to him out of the dark mind of the Seer HarThass, left him agape with wonder, weak with a knowledge of the incredible—yet he, too, had ridden the warp of Time, when he stood inside the mountain Tala-charen.
And his own experience had left him restless, with a fierce need that he could never make come clear. As if he were not whole suddenly, as if something had been left behind there in that spinning, thundering, echoing warp of Time; something that was terribly a part of him.
When he came at last out of the marsh where the river foamed over rocks, he was among scattered farms, fields of whitebarley and mawzee, fat grazing animals lifting their heads to watch him pass. A horse nickered, but Ram’s horses did not return the greeting, remained quiet and subdued. The sun had dropped behind hills, leaving a pale orange wash preceding nightfall. The council would be meeting now in the citadel, would sit around the meeting table, the jade runestone gleaming in the center. Outside the portal, the thin moons would rise. The council would lay careful plans for the protection of Carriol—plans perhaps destined to go awry, he thought bitterly. And they would discuss Jerthon’s attack on Kubal. Jerthon, riding out again so soon to battle. Jerthon who was more father to Ram than a real father could have been: Seer, teacher of Seer’s powers, his mentor since the days Ram first turned to him for protection from the dark Pellian.
Jerthon, whom his mother loved but would not marry because of the guilt she carried and refused to put aside.
Ram wished she would come to her senses. She need feel no guilt, she had proven that. He wished she would marry Jerthon and be done with this stupidity. Eresu knew, Jerthon wanted her. It was Jerthon who had drawn forth, from Tayba’s willful spirit, power undreamed; more power even than Ram had imagined his mother possessed. It was Jerthon who had taught her to use that power, who had loved her for the strengths he saw despite her weaknesses.
And he had seen her look at Jerthon. He knew what she felt for him. Yet she wouldn’t marry him, felt she alone was responsible for their partial defeat in Burgdeeth, for having to leave the town in Venniver’s hands; felt now, Ram knew, a burning guilt that a child had burned in Venniver’s fires. Believed that without her near-betrayal, her partial betrayal, Burgdeeth would now stand as a free city, and safe for Seers.
And she was, Ram knew, very likely right. Well, but you could not carry guilt all your life. She had made amends, made a new life; she was a fierce, willing fighter for what Jerthon and all of them stood for. Why in Urdd didn’t she marry Jerthon and give him, and herself, some happiness?
*
The cool light of evening washed the citadel. The sea roared like a large, slow animal, and wind hushed through the portals smelling sharply of salt and kelp. Tayba pulled her red cloak lightly around her shoulders and stared almost transfixed at the runestone: powerful talisman, shard of deep green jade, jagged where it had split away from the whole sphere, smooth and rounded at the large end and marked with incomplete runes. A stone that, if it had not been for her lusting, stupid hungers, might lie here whole now, round, perfect and immensely more powerful—though even this shattered shard could concentrate and strengthen the powers of the Carriolinian Seers. Only . . . not enough. Not enough power to battle the Pellian Seers in their new, incredible force.