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

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.