'Come on,' said Blackwood. 'Let's be moving.' i i
League after league slipped away beneath their boots, until gradually the sky began to lighten. It needed close j observation to tell that night was drawing to a close, but after so long in the darkness, they were sensitive to the ' slightest variation in the sky.
They had some darkness left still, but Hearst began to scan the shoreline for a place to stop. There was little variation in the dark line of dunes, but soon they crossed water: one of the streams, scarcely deeper than the thin slick of mirage, that seeped out from the dunes to run down the beach to the sea.
'Halt,' said Hearst. 'We stop here.'
They walked up the beach, treading in water all the way; the waterflow would wash away their footprints before sunrise. i
'They're ready,' said Miphon.
Hearst, opening his eyes, sat up to join the others at their meal, which was some triangular shellfish Miphon had recovered from sands near the low tide mark. The travellers had eaten several shellfish meals since they set out along the Chameleon's Tongue. It had been seven days now.
T think we're better than halfway to the Elbow,' said Hearst.
'We'd better get there soon,' said Blackwood. 'Before we die of sheer monotony. I'm dreaming sand, you know.'
'You're lucky,' said Hearst. 'I'm eating it.' And he spat out some grit which had infiltrated his meal.
'We could use the time,' said Miphon. i never did 498 finish my little lecture on free will. Where did we get to? Quantifying the stochastic and the deterministic, I believe.'
'Perhaps a certain wizard had better determine to leave his lectures to another time,' said Hearst. 'Or a certain wizard might find himself making a personal investigation of some possibly purely stochastic but definitely very cold and vigorous wave-forms.'
'Oh,' said Miphon.
But that was as close as they came to a quarrel. i'** Ten days down the Chameleon's Tongue, Hearst lay dreaming of a struggle on the battlements of Castle Vaunting. In his dream, Phyphor directed a blaze of fire at Collosnon invaders. Then there was a fading glow, like an afterimage, as red-hot Collosnon armour cooled rapidly in the night air.
A survivor, half-cooked, screamed.
The dream shifted to… a dragon's mouth, filled with fire… Looming Forest… Rovac, and then… Ep Pass… and… the Harvest Plains, where Farfalla…
'They're ready,' said Miphon.
Hearst let food distract him from his dreams. Without surprise, he found that today's shellfish tasted much like yesterday's. The grit, perhaps, was a trifle finer today.
Having eaten, he lay back and closed his eyes. Through closed eyelids, a blood-red sun. Endless, endless, the sounds of the surf: the thunder of breakers beaching themselves on nearby sands, the moaning surf-dirge of distant waves churning into foam.
Blood-red sun.
Farfalla… yes, Farfalla… a tent on the Harvest Plains… the sun hot through the skin of the tent… hot shadows, breathing whispers… taste of the sun… hot-skin shadows… red sun… Farfalla, yes, Farfalla had taught him much… including how to use a sword, how to fight with a precision which did not come naturally to him.
Farfalla had even taught him how to train when there was no opportunity to exercise his muscles. Now, lying in the sun in a place on the Tongue, hundreds of leagues from Selzirk, Hearst made use of that teaching.
Time and again, Hearst reviewed techniques. He imagined drawing his sword… at first slowly, getting every angle precisely right, then faster and faster, till his blade was a blur scarcely slower than thought. Time and again he imagined facing Elkor Alish, remembering exactly how Alish moved: fluid, fluent, supple as a cat, lithe as water, his blade attacking with perfect mastery of speed and timing.
Timing,' said Farfalla.
He remembered her voice, low, relaxed, persistent, working its way into his mind.
'The greatest mysteries lie in the simplest things,' said Farfalla. 'Timing and speed are the halves of one whole. What is that whole? Language lacks a word for it. That alone should tell you how much we have to learn. There are other mysteries Other mysteries. Yes…
But think of the training, think of…
Timing…
In the end he had said to her: 'This watching, breathing, listening, timing, it's all yery well, but sooner or later there has to be a moment when you're committed – when there's no reserve, and the only chance is to carry through the attack.'
And she had said: 'I haven't tried to teach you things you already know.'
Sunlight through his eyelids. Blood red. A sword slants through space and time. From moon-bright steel to banner-red blood. Again. Again…
Someone was snoring. Opening his eyes, Hearst saw Miphon had gone to sleep; Blackwood was nodding. He noted a flicker of movement: a lizard was daring the sunlight. It was darkish green, with bluish spots on top; patterns reminiscent of gills stippled its sides. It breathed in quick puffs though a toothless mouth; its neck swelled out with every inbreath. Slowly the lizard approached the empty shells left from the travellers' meal, where a few flies savoured shellfish remnants.
A quick tongue flicked out, snatching one of the flies for the lizard's maw. Speed and timing. Perfection. The lizard watched Hearst with beady eyes; he wondered if he would be fast enough to grab it.
He would welcome a change of diet.
Behind them lay three hundred leagues of open beaches, clean and white under the blue dome of the heavens; they had travelled all the way to the Elbow.
In any other geography, the Elbow would have been unremarkable, unless one cared to comment on the way the strata had tilted so they ran diagonally and in places almost vertically. The Elbow was simply a conical rise of rock, no more than a hundred and fifty paces high, upthrust from the sea and connected to the rest of the land by a low spine of rock over which a child could have scrambled.
This piece of rock had been dignified by its own name and marked on maps because it was a major landmark, interrupting the sweep of the sands of the Chameleon's Tongue, and marking the point where the coastline turned north.
The three travellers could see that the Elbow finished in a point deep in the water, but to follow the cliff-edge out to that point would have meant wading waist-deep in water.
'Let's climb to the top,' said Hearst.
So up they went, forcing a way through tough, scrawny vegetation, avoiding those parts that were armed with thorns and spines. From the top, they had an extensive view. To the west and north, the sands of the Chameleon's Tongue stretched away to the horizons. Inland, the ground rose to the heights of the Lizard Crest Rises. Out to sea lay the Teardrop Islands.
'That's where we're going,' said Hearst, pointing north.
It was much the same as the landscape they had already traversed; near the Elbow were small cliffs, some with veins of red ore running through them, but further north the cliffs declined and sand dunes ran alongside the beach again.
'We can get down to the point from here,' said Miphon. 'Those rocks might give us good fishing.'
They climbed down, taking care when easing past a sheer drop to the water. On reaching the point, they saw a
