'What is it?' said Hearst. 'What's wrong?'
The sun slipped sideways. Hearst caught Blackwood as he fell, and lowered him to the ground.
Blackwood lay there, dazed by the power of the sun. All his life he had thought of the sun according to the conventions of his people, who named it as the eye which allows the world to see. But now he knew the true nature of the sun, which is not to see but to give.
The sun gave without stinting, gave with a passion which was neither love nor hate, but which was a profoundly self-involved rapture. And Blackwood saw that, while the nature of the sun is to give, it is profoundly selfish, for it does not care whether its gift helps or harms.
The sun, then – lording the heavens with a passion which would not care if the world entire were to be destroyed by the glory of its own joy in the creation of its gift.
Dizzy with revelation, Blackwood gaped. 'What's wrong?' said Hearst.
Blackwood closed his eyes, then opened them. Morgan Hearst loomed over him. Skin stretched across skull. Mirthless gash of teeth and tongue. A killer. And the eyes – concerned now, but, apart from concern, revealing a bitter loss and loneliness. Grief consoling itself with the – 'Blackwood? What's wrong?'
'Nothing,' said Blackwood, struggling to his feet. Hearst helped him. A dribble of smoke spilt from Blackwood's lips, fell to the ground, coiled, writhed, dispersed in the sunlight.
'Can you walk?' said Hearst. i think so,' said Blackwood.
The throbbing in his blood vessels was diminishing; the beat of his heart was slowing from its frenzy.
'Here are the others,' said Hearst.
They were approaching, moving quickly now they saw the dragon was dead. When they drew closer, Alish said to Hearst: i salute you.'
His voice was stiff and formal.
'Thank you,' said Hearst. 'Now let's be moving. There's carrion birds gathering overhead, showing our position to everything and everyone for leagues in every direction.'
'Are you sure you're fit to travel? You're bleeding.'
'A scratch, no more,' said Hearst. 'I've got legs, still, and I can use them.'
And Blackwood, listening, knew this brusque warrior-style efficiency of speech was being used to repress a passionate outcry. He could not say whether the words left unspoken were words of love or hate, but he did know that this Rovac warrior, Morgan Hearst, was not the simple unsplicer of flesh that he pretended to be.
'We can't go yet,' cried Gorn. 'There may be treasure in the cave. We have to explore!'
'It's the truth,' said Garash, unwisely. 'There may well be treasure.'
And, after that, nothing would do but for Gorn to venture into the cave, where he glutted his greed with gold and diamonds.
Onwards, then. Fumaroles. Bubbling mud. Crinkled rock left by old lava flows. Once, tiers of pink and white terraces, ten times the height of a man, which had been built up by hot springs depositing chemicals for years lengthening to generations.
Gorn staggered along with enough loot to buy out an empire. However, after a day, he conceded defeat, and abandoned all but a king's ransom. After another day, Alish and Hearst managed to bully him out of half of that, which was then flung into a pool of boiling mud. But his pack was still overloaded.
Blackwood had no lust for dragon gold. He had other things to think about. He realised the cure for his illness had indeed… changed him.
To Blackwood, each new vista, the moment after he had first glimpsed it, seemed as familiar as if he had known it all his life. It seemed to him that he knew this shattered landscape as well as he knew the lands of Estar: given this instant empathy with every landscape, he would now call no particular place home, for he would be at home in all places.
Some sheltered city dweller might have been terrified by this change, but to Blackwood it did not seem unnatural. Living for years in the wild, he had developed his powers of observation so he could interpret the weather-signs by a single glance at the sky; after a moment's consideration, he could judge the age of track-signs and much of the nature of the animal which had made them; navigating without maps and sleeping in the open had taught him a keen appreciation of the landscape he moved through.
In the days when he had dared the unfamiliar territory of the Penvash Peninsular, he had been able, without conscious effort, to look at a range of hills and identify the slopes that would give the easiest approach to the main ridge line, and those gullies and ravines where water was most likely to be found.
Heightened powers of empathy with the landscape did not trouble Blackwood, but he was disturbed by similarly heightened perceptions of people – particularly when he saw the hackiron hatred with which Elkor Alish regarded Morgan Hearst.
Yet if Alish was disfigured by hatred, he was nevertheless amazing to watch for he brought such physical grace to everything he did. Training with a sword in the evening, an ardent spirit matching total concentration and total commitment to perfect economy of effort, he revealed a matchless capacity for joy in performance.
Watching him, Blackwood sensed how Alish felt in those moments of perfection: like a god, buoyed up by limitless possibilities. Yet dedication was not matched by wisdom, for this mastery of the potentials of flesh and steel was entirely self-involved; the discipline served to preserve the warrior's inner being, denying change, allowing a fanatic hatred to survive for years without nourishment.
This was a man who denied himself change. Matchless energies, essentially joyful and godlike, were warped to the service of narrow disciplines which preserved an earthbound hatred. Blackwood saw this, and also saw that there was no way for an outsider to change the man without destroying him, for his hatred was not an expendable excrescence like a wart – it was part of the complexities of the inner fabric of the man.
Yet if, one day, Elkor Alish were to find a way to choose to change, then perhaps he might become a perfect manifestation of something which Blackwood soon came to think of as the flame of life. To varying degrees, he saw this flame in each of them: Hearst, Alish, Gorn and Garash. What he saw was the beauty of the vitality which graces every human life.
Blackwood was no mystic; he had no desire to see visions. He repeatedly told himself that it was all delusion, that the dragon's blood was working on him as liquor works on a drunkard, distorting the way in which the world is seen.
Yet in the end he had to admit that he saw something which was really there to be seen. For he could remember a day – long ago now – when he and Mystrel had walked together in Looming Forest, in spring:
Sky, blue sky, the colour of my lover's eyes; Leaf, young leaf, her hands no softer.
Blackwood had been in love that day, not only with Mystrel but with all the world. It had only been for a day, or perhaps only for a single morning, but in that time he had seen the flame of life which is in all things. Now he saw it from moment to moment, day after day.
One may survive occasional visions. From old memories inherited from the wizard Phyphor, Blackwood knew the poet Saba Yavendar had spoken of such visions. But Saba Yavendar had seen them only now and then: he had been able to make his peace with the world in which he lived, as evidenced by his ability to write a paean of praise for bloody slaughter, the song of the Victory of the Prince of the Favoured Blood, which Hearst had recited in the High Castle in Trest.
How could Blackwood live constantly with such visions? He knew that if he ever had to raise his hand against another man, he would be unable to do it. How could he bear to take a blade and destroy that flame of life? Yet if he could not defend himself when the need arose, sooner or later he would meet his death, and probably sooner rather than later.
A saint might, perhaps, have welcomed such visions – but Blackwood was no saint. In a hard and often bitter life, Blackwood had, by suffering, learnt to live with the realities of the world. Now, for him, the realities had changed, and it seemed he must go through all that suffering again.
After marching across leagues of monotonous flat lava country, in which there was no drinkable water, they passed between the blue lakes. The water, heavily contaminated with sulphuric acid, was a deep, unnatural blue, and Blackwood cautioned against drinking it.
North of the blue lakes, the volcanic nature of the terrain was less pronounced; the going became easier. They
