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

The dogwolf looked at him a moment, licking blood from his lips before he answered. He came out of the wood, and fought beside us, Ramad. He is fierce as a wolf himself. He came out of a time you are yet to touch, moves driven by the winds of Time in a way he can seldom control. He is a lonely man. Lonely.

Ram stared at the wolf’s knowing eyes and felt his spirit lift suddenly with hope. Hope for Telien; for if Anchorstar moved on the winds of Time, then Anchorstar moved in the realms where she had been swept, and perhaps he could touch her there. “I will speak with him, I will summon him!” Ram cried, wild with his sudden need.

The great wolf moved close to Ram, pressing his shoulder against him, laid his head against Ram’s arm. He is gone, Ramad.

And though Ram searched the wood, there was no sign of Anchorstar or the dun stallion. Gone. Gone into Time. Why had Anchorstar come here, why had he fought here?

Jerthon’s troops stormed the castle, searching for stragglers they might have missed, holding back in secret rooms; and he and Ram came at last to the cellars. Jerthon turned BroogArl’s body over with his toe, thought of burying it, shook his head. “BroogArl can end in flame like his castle. Let’s get out of here, the smell of him makes me choke.”

“Jerthon, did we kill them all?”

Jerthon gave him a long look, touched unthinking the place in his tunic where the runestone had ridden, glanced down, his face dark with its loss. “Kill them all, Ram? What do you feel?”

They stood silently then, sensing out into Pelli, into all of Ere for that feel of dark that had ridden so long with them. After some moments their faces began slowly to lighten; they looked into each other’s eyes with hope flickering, then with a rising sense of victory. There was no trace of the evil now, no sense of BroogArl’s retinue, or of the cloying dark that had been the Hape. A sense of scattered, dark Seers, yes, drawn together at this time in their hatred of the light; but Seers separated by their own selfish ways, their own despotic little hierarchies, and as opposed to one another as quarreling snakes. There was no sense, with BroogArl and the Hape gone, of unity among those who were left.

“Kill them all, Ram?” Jerthon’s fatigue had left him. He lifted his head in triumph. “I hope perhaps we have. Killed all the power that resided here.”

Ram’s hope had lifted to wing outward as he examined the cool absence of massed evil. He wanted to shout suddenly, he embraced Jerthon with wild joy. “And the runestone—we will dive for it!”

Jerthon looked chagrined. “Dive, Ram? The sea in this place is deeper than any man can think to go. We were deeper than I would have thought possible. The stone . . . but perhaps we will think of a way.”

Ram gripped Jerthon’s shoulder. “The stone is gone, but we are not! We have won, man! We’ve destroyed the Pellian monsters!” And yet, as he tried to cheer Jerthon at the loss of the stone, beneath his own bravado lay a heaviness that would not subside. For the loss of the stone, yes. But the real pain there, like a dull knife wound, was for the loss of Telien.

Jerthon, seeing his pain, cuffed him and grinned. “Come, then, Ramad of wolves. Let’s make an end to this den of Hape. Come, watch the roasting while we bury the monsters in flame!”

They went up the dark stairways and into the dim hall, where Jerthon’s men were throwing the furniture into a great heap, stacking on logs from the castle’s firewood, building a tall pyre. In the upper rooms, the shutters were flung open to act as a chimney.

Jerthon took up a torch from those stacked beside the castle door, struck flint, and when the torch flared he lighted the pyre. Timbers and furnishings caught at once and began to burn hot and quick, the flame leaping upward in the draft from the windows above, the main hall soon so hot it drove them out through the wide double doors.

They stood in the murky wood watching as the Castle of Hape was consumed in flame. The winged ones crowded close to the soldiers, not liking fire, glancing again and again toward the sky as the flames leaped higher.

At last the castle’s stone walls began to crumble. The wolves pushed closer together, and Fawdref came to Ram. Ram stood abstracted, his hand on the dogwolf’s head, watching the burning of the castle until the old wolf began to nudge and push at him. No sensible wolf lingered near a fire in forest land. And no sensible man, either, Fawdref let him know. Ram knelt before the great wolf, but Fawdref drew back his lips at the rising flame and nudged Ram until he rose and backed away from the fire. And then, as if they could bear the fire no longer, the winged ones stirred and leaped suddenly skyward like hawking birds and were away toward the dark mountains.