was to mark his sword with a death-pledge demanding the death of Elkor Alish.
Hearst drank, and listened:
Now Hearst, his fambles held a spear,
And stepped he forward he;
He strove his arm to forward throw
To pierce the draugon ee.
A bellow did the draugon make,
A roar he made it he,
And glymmar from his gan outforth
As threshed and struggled he.
Morgan Hearst was on his feet. The shadows roared around him, red, purple, black. Knives sang inside his skull. Faces split to white alarm as steel flared in his hand.
'Lies!' he shouted. 'It's all lies!'
Bones moved in the shadows. A cold moon shaped itself to a skull. He saw Gorn, blood on his lips, death in the sockets of his eyes.
'Lies!' he shouted.
Chips of wood flew as his sword splintered something that was thrusting for his face. He wheeled. The fire billowed up, out, open: he stood on the top of a cliff looking out across a thousand years of flame. Knives sang inside the fire. Men were swarming out of the flames toward his strongpoint. They were the legions of the dead.
'Come for me then,' whispered Hearst. 'Come for me.'
And he lept to meet the first, steel making steel scream, and there was blood in the scream. The blood darkened the world. There was a door in the darkness. Hearst plunged through the door. He was in a street, with buildings towering up around him, limitless pinnacles reaching for the sky.
He knew where he was: in the city of Chi'ash-lan. The night watch was making for him. In the darkness, their honour-pennants flared orange. His sword cut free in a wild arc. Blood opened green to the darkness.
Clouds underfoot as he ran, flight foot feathering the ground away. Thunder crashed underground. He screamed, answering a challenge with the echo of a forgotten voice: 'Ahyak Rovac!'
Then the visions were gone, and he was down on his face in the mud, down in the cold, with something huge murnering and slurping as it ludged toward him, lopsloss, yes, it had to be a lopsloss – But it was only a sow in a pig-pen.
Shortly before sunrise, the others found Hearst in a farmyard on the outskirts of Skua. They bundled him into the green bottle and were off and away, as fast as they could go.
Whatever drug, poison or ergot had been in the drink that had been served to them in Skua, it had turned Morgan Hearst wild and mad for half the night: all of Skua was sheltering behind barred doors after seventeen men had been wounded trying to disarm him.
By the time Skua recovered its courage and ventured outdoors, the travellers had gone, leaving no tracks behind them. Shortly a new song joined the local repertoire: 'The Ballad of the Four Mad Ghosts from the Desolate East'.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Ohio, Hearst and Miphon sat on the banks of the Hollern River while Blackwood talked with half a dozen Melski on a solitary raft.
Since reaching Estar, they had already met with a leper, a bedraggled deserter, and a one-legged man on crutches who had refused to give an account of himself. It seemed that Estar lay desolate, its people dead or dispersed.
Already they knew that there was no hope of Blackwood finding Mystrel in Lorford – the ruins were abandoned – and little chance of them encountering anyone elsewhere who might know if she had survived. If the Melski could not say where she might be, then Blackwood had no hope of finding her.
The talk went this way and that for a long time. Eventually, Blackwood, looking heavy-hearted, rejoined the others. Miphon and Ohio were asleep in the weak spring sunlight.
'What do they say?' said Hearst.
Ohio and Miphon woke easily, without surprise. Only those who live safe within four walls can indulge in the deep unresponsive sleep which mimics opium stupor; those who follow the trails of the wild learn to be responsive even when dreaming, making the transition of wakeful alertness instantly, without so much as a yawn or a murmur.
'They say all through last summer none could venture within leagues of Castle Vaunting, for there was madness there.'
'And now?'
'They cannot say. No Melski will chance going 352 further downriver than this. They have lost too many people to the madness.'
T always understood,' said Miphon, 'that the madness only affected humans.'
'Then you, perhaps, will have to broaden your notions of humanity,' said Blackwood.
'Have there been any convoys on the Salt Road?' said Hearst.
'The Melski have seen none, which means certainly none have travelled down the Hollern River.' 'What else did they say?' said Hearst. 'Nothing.'
'You were talking a long time to say very little,' said Hearst.
'They are a formal people,' said Blackwood. 'Besides, I had some… some history to narrate to them.'
'Was that wise?' said Hearst.
'They had a right to know.'
'Yes, but was it wise to tell them?'
'There is a wisdom which concerns survival of the self,' said Blackwood. 'And there is a greater wisdom which is concerned with survival of things greater than the self.'
Hearst and Ohio exchanged glances. Hearst shrugged; Ohio grimaced.
'Come on then,' said Hearst. 'Let's be moving. There's not much daylight left.'
Walking through riverside forest, Blackwood remembered coming this way on other days in other years. Overhead the sky was blue:
Sky, blue sky, the colour of my lover's eyes; Leaf, young leaf, her hands no softer.
He remembered leading wizards and Rovac warriors 353 through the forest to where Heenmor had worked his magic. At the time, thinking these affairs had nothing to do with him, he had agreed to do the job simply to secure his release from Prince Comedo's dungeons.
But now, he, too, was committed to this quest. Blackwood remembered the butchery on the Fleuve River: Elkor Alish had done that. Now Alish was loose in the world with the death-stone. He must not be allowed to use it!
Many battlefields commanded by a hero's sword had seen carnage the stars might weep at, but the death- stone was a weapon more terrible than any forged from steel because it killed everything. After such violence, only silence and desolation remained: no voice of bird, no blade of grass, no spinneret spider to span space with instinctive architecture, no earth-sure badger, no mesh-wing honey bee.
It could not be allowed.
Blackwood, cursed with double knowledge, with an acute empathy for both the hunter and the prey, suffered more than any of the others at the thought of what the death-stone could do.
