The Castle Of Hape. Caves Of Fire And Ice. The Joining Of The Stone

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.