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

But the light showed nothing. There were no walls. He was not inside the cabin though the doorframe pressed hard and real against his arm. Anchorstar touched his shoulder, Ram felt the man’s fear. They faced not the homely cabin room but a void: inside the door vast space yawned, swallowing Ram’s light so the taper’s glow was only a useless pool lost at once in the emptiness. They had come through Klingen’s door, where Ram had come a hundred times—Ram knew a cot should stand just there, a cookfire there with a pot at the back—but he stood instead on the brink of empty blackness and felt Anchorstar draw his breath in fear. Incredible space loomed inside that door, empty space filled with a monstrous cold as if the world ended at their feet.

A voice whispered out, barely discernible yet echoing, a cold voice calling to Ram from no direction and from all directions, and it did not speak in words but soothed him and enticed him; the emptiness soothed and reached around him, holding him as a woman would, so his pain and hunger were gone and he was warm and incredibly comforted. He forgot Anchorstar. He just had to step forward, be soothed—he froze suddenly with the sense of BroogArl all around him, the sense of HarThass himself risen from death to haunt him with the bones of living skeletons from his childhood agonies. Drawn forward against his will, he clung to the doorframe sick and shaken as BroogArl reached, enticed—BroogArl would fling him into the endless dark, and Ram could not resist . . . He spun away from the door, jerked back into the rain, stumbled terrified into the welcome drenching.

He stood shaken and weak, clinging to Anchorstar, and felt hands on his shoulders then guiding him into the hut where a welcome fire blazed.

Anchorstar pushed him into a chair, and old Klingen held his arm as though he might fall. The kettle was boiling, the hut warm and homey. Klingen stared at him puzzled, his brown seamed face and brown hair hardly distinguishable from the rough wood walls of the hut, as if part of the hut itself had come alive to produce the old man, brown wrinkled skin, brown rough nightshirt like bark, even his voice creaking like too-dry wood.

“Iee, Ram, you give me a scare! What was you two doing standing there staring in at me like you’d seen a living ghost and me having to ask you five times to come in before you ever so much as heard me! Come, off with those clothes, both of you, and get yourselves up to the fire.” Klingen turned and began to stir up a pot hanging at the side of the fire, then reached an earthen jug from the shelf and poured out generous lacings into mugs, poured in hot water from the kettle. “Here, you two, this’ll take the chill off’n ya.”

Ram drank the hot liquor so greedily it burned all the way down.

“There, lad, take off the bandages too—I’ll rout out some clean rags.” Then, staring as Ram undid the bandages, “Sure you took one right in the liver near, didn’t you.” Ram was relieved to see that all the wetness was no more than rain, that no blood oozed. Anchorstar sat quietly at the table wrapped in something shapeless of Klingen’s, watching them both with a puzzled look; a tall thin man he was, with hair white as loess dust and eyes—Ram stared. He had never seen yellow eyes in a man. In a goat, perhaps, in a wild creature. The wolves had yellow eyes. But never yellow eyes in a man, eyes completely strange under that shock of white hair. And in spite of his quiet repose, he seemed ill at ease in a way, as if this world of log hut and friendly fire were almost foreign to him.

As Klingen stirred the pot, a fine aroma filled the hut, and soon enough the old man set bowls of steaming stew before them rich with gravy, and new bread, and refilled their mugs with the strong honeyrot and hot water, very little of the latter so that soon a fine maze filled Ram’s mind and, with full stomach, he wanted only sleep. But the two older men had set to talking, and Ram could not close his eyes for the strangeness of the conversation as Klingen tried to winnow out Anchorstar’s identity as a mouse would winnow out grain from sealed stores. Where had Anchorstar come from, and why? Anchorstar, at first reluctant, began at last to speak of the far mountains and of lands where none of Ere had ever ventured, to speak of the old mythical animals that still existed there, of the triebuck and the great dragoncats; and of the gantroed, which Ram knew well from the time on Tala-charen. He spoke of wonders Ram had only dreamed, but he did not speak of when he had gone into the far lands, of how many years ago, or from whence he came. When he rose at last to open his pack, he took from it a small leather pouch and spilled out across the table a cluster of shimmering jewels. Ram and Klingen stared. Never had Ram seen such, stones, deep amber, filled with light. Ram held one before the fire and its colors flashed as if it had absorbed the fire, and from its center a gleaming star shone out.