Runestone of Eresu

by Murphy, Shirley Rousseau

  They stared at one another. Slowly, frowning, she began to pull knowledge out of the deeper reaches of her mind, reaches touched by Anchorstar. Slowly a vision began to unfold, the vision Anchorstar had given her: a green valley and the crystal dome. A white-haired child. And, as if she had forgotten half the vision, a sense of power now couched beneath the crystal dome: power that could be only one thing.

  “A stone lies there,” she whispered.

  “Yes.” He Saw the vision as clearly as she. The wolves Saw it. A shard of the runestone beneath a crystal dome in the center of a bright green valley.

  “Kish sees it, too,” Meatha said.

  “She means to follow. She means to see us find the stone, and then . . . then . . .”

  She reddened, swallowed. “Then see our child born. Take the stones and our child.” She felt a stab of pain as if, indeed, there were a child, tender and helpless child so very vital to Ere. And now she felt pain and shame at having taken the stones from Carriol, pain at her self-deception. And she saw in Lobon’s eyes the knowledge of his own self-deception. She felt his shame at having so long ignored the truth of what he must do, and what his life must mean.

  She touched his shoulder. He put his arms around her, rested his brow against her hair, and they knew as one the blind, twisted paths they had both followed, so willful, so dangerous for Ere. Something of their spirits joined in that moment that could never again be parted.

  Something much dearer, much stronger than Kish could ever create with her spells.

  At last they stepped apart without speaking.

  Crieba had gone to hunt. Feldyn watched them drowsily as they gathered sticks for firewood among the sparse, low bushes. The winged ones were scattered across the rounded butt of mountain, grazing the thick grass greedily. There were no trees for shelter here, only stunted bush. The mountain was ancient, long ago worn nearly flat—though still it rose higher than the surrounding peaks. Only two peaks, to the south, were higher. Eken-dep with her glacier, and the peak that both were sure was Tala-charen, for still a power like a voice reached out to them from that cone-like mountain.

  When the fire was burning well, Meatha went to stand alone where the mountain dropped off into space.

  How were they to find the crystal dome? In what place lay the green valley? She had had no sense of its direction. And if they found it, could they avoid leading the warrior queen there?

  And how were they to get the six stones that Kish herself possessed?

  Quietly, with all the strength she could muster, she reached out to Tala-charen and tried to draw its power into herself. But no strength touched her; she could not make herself feel stronger. In desperation she reached beyond Tala-charen to Carriol, for she needed Anchorstar now; he must speak to her.

  But she could get no sense of him. She stood vainly trying for some minutes, then suddenly, sharply, she Saw the white-haired child. Jaspen. Her name was Jaspen. She Saw the stone itself then. A long shard of jade lying in the child’s curled hand.

  But where? Where was the crystal dome? Where dwelt Jaspen?

  When nothing more came, she turned away, swallowing. Never once had there been a sense of Anchorstar. Only the disembodied vision. She went slowly back to the fire and sat down close to Feldyn, seeking the wolf’s strength, seeking comfort. Feldyn laid his head in her lap. She leaned over him, stroked his cheek, then leaned her forehead against his, trying not to cry. The stone in the vision seemed so close. But where? Where?

  TEN

  Lobon woke to bright moonlight and to the howl of wolves. He sat up, could see Feldyn and Crieba beyond the camp, silhouetted against moon-silvered clouds, gazing off toward the southeast. He tried to sense what they sensed and could not. They raised their muzzles again in wails that shattered the night. Meatha woke and came closer to the fire. The winged ones stirred, lifted their heads in alarm, spread their wings ready for flight; then at the wolves’ reassurance, they settled down once more. Lobon scowled. What was this all about? But already the two wolves were returning. Feldyn nuzzled him and took his arm between sharp teeth as he was wont to do when he was in high spirits. Our brothers speak to us, Lobon, our brothers descended from Fawdref. We feel more than their strength now, we hear their voices clearly. Feldyn stretched and gazed again toward Carriol. They battle the Kubalese now alongside Carriol’s warriors, to defend the border of Carriol. The wolf’s golden eyes were filled with intense and mysterious promise. Wolves of our pack battle the dark, Lobon. And they speak to Crieba and me. They know the crystal dome, where lies a shard of the runestone. They know the vision Meatha carries.

  Meatha caught her breath. “Can they show us?” But already she, like Lobon, was being pulled into the vision of the small green valley with its crystal dome; but now they Saw it from a wider vantage. Saw it was surrounded by dunes and by vast reaches of sand. “The high desert,” Meatha breathed. And behind the valley on one side rose a line of mountains, and higher peaks behind these with five sharp peaks marching just beyond a vast sweep of granite, pale in the moonlight. And far behind these, another peak towered higher still, a peak shaped like Tala-charen, though different in some way that Meatha could not make out.

  “Different because it’s the other side, I think,” Lobon said. “As if the crystal dome lies on the far side of Tala-charen, to the north of it—there where the desert must sweep around the end of the Ring of Fire.” He raised his eyes to her. “If that is so, then the valley lies far up in the unknown lands.”

  “But we can find it now, we—”

  “We have only to move across the skies above Tala-charen until we see that great slab of granite.” He rose, pulled on his boots. He did not mean to wait until morning.

  “Kish will follow us,” she said.

  “I hope so. She carries the stones—I don’t want her far away.” Though he felt naked without a weapon, though he would have sold his soul for sword or bow.

  They made ready at once. Lobon lifted the wolves onto the backs of two winged mares; Meatha mounted, then Lobon; and they were leaping skyward into the moon-silvered night, flying light and fast across a cold, quick wind. To their left rose Eken-dep, its white glacier touched by moonlight; then suddenly against that mass of white a small, dark silhouette appeared in the sky, moving fast toward them. Kish? All of them startled.

  But Kish would not come alone now that she had lizards to fight beside her.

  Then they saw it was not a lizard but a winged one coming on fast and riderless, flying free. Michennann, cutting the wind in great sweeps of her wings, coming at last to join them.

  But now behind Michennann, peppering the sky, the lizards appeared beating across the face of the glacier. The sense of Kish came predatory and cold. The winged horses needed no urging, they fled above the wild peaks; and the lizards followed, settling into a steady pace, but never drawing closer. Michennann winged near to the white mare who carried Meatha. How scarred she was from battling the lizards. There was a welt across her neck and down her side, and her silver coat was torn with deep scratches. But the sense of her spirit was warm and close, and all enmity between them was now gone and only sympathy remained.

  When at last they drew near to Tala-charen, Meatha could feel its power—and feel Lobon’s quickening interest. The dark stallion Lannthenn, who carried him, swept close to the peak and the others followed, hovering so close for a few moments that wingtips nearly touched the cave entrance, and they could see into the cave where Ramad had stood. Meatha shuddered with the power of the place. Here the runestone had split; here Seers had come suddenly out of Time to receive the broken shards.

  The cave floor was translucent green like the sea. They all thought how that floor had split, the very mountain split to swallow the bones of the gantroed, then had closed up once more. They thought of Ram and Skeelie there, two young children caught in a clashing of powers that shook all of Ere—that changed all of Ere—and that had brought them here this night on a quest to undo that splitting. It was
impossible not to think of the Luff’Eresi, impossible not to think of them as gods, and wonder as men had wondered for generations whether it had been they who had placed the stone in this cave; and whether their powers had touched the stone the night of the splitting.

  Then the winged ones banked and swept away, leaving Tala-charen behind.

  Beyond Tala-charen they began to hear rumbles from the land below, and twice they saw explosions of fire in the mountains far to the north. They were flying over mountains still, but now the desert lay ahead, a white smear against the sky; and soon they saw the foot of the peaks had begun to curve northward skirting the vast white dunes. It was not long afterward that they saw the pale granite cliff tilting to the sky. Then they were over the white dunes, gleaming like snow below them. They began to stare downward between the horses’ beating wings, searching among the closer dunes for the small green valley. Behind them, the lizards paced them, never varying their distance; and Kish watched them.

  To the north among the mountains, red smoke rose into the moon-pale clouds. Flame belched from a far peak, then was still. They could hear earthshocks, some of them faint as a whisper. All eyes searched the dunes below, searched the black half-moons of shadow deep between dunes, for the valley and for the gleam of the crystal dome. And they could feel and sense more than earthshocks around them: other powers were gathering, too, those awakened by the dark Seers, and those nurtured by the light. Both were alerted and building, clashing crosswise against one another, drawing strength from that very clashing. Drawing strength from the rising need of the Seers and the desire to control the fate of the stones. For the stones were like a magnet now to all the forces that rose across Ere. The forces of good swelled and drew in around the little flying band, and the powers of dark drew around the warrior queen, whose evil was older than Time. And the powers, by drawing close, strengthened yet again—just as, below the flying bands, the powers of the earth itself broke into new fissures as the earth cracked, and so built to crescendo.

  Along the coastal countries, shocks came so harsh they brought down houses and outbuildings. Fissures opened across the fields, and terrified animals stampeded. A ewe with a lamb ran blindly into a crack opening a hundred feet deep. The river Urobb flooded its banks just above Sangur and drowned a small village in its sweeping tide. The bloodthirsty Herebians, many of them wounded and beaten by Carriol, backed off from warring and thought of returning home—but only to wait for the holocaust that seemed imminent and that would give them sure victory. For well they remembered past upheavals. Always, the Herebians had risen first and strongest after the wild heaving of the land. Always, the Herebians had taken the spoils as other men cowered in fear before volcanoes they thought were the gods’ wrath.

  Kearb-Mattus gathered his scattered forces. He did not let them draw away to wait out the holocaust as they wished, but sent them riding hard toward Carriol’s border, for what better time to destroy Carriol than when accompanied by the violence of the land itself. And while his main band rode toward Carriol, Kearb-Mattus himself with fifty troops rode hard for Farr, where his scouts told him Kish’s cults marched, led by the adolescent Carriolinian upstarts. So they thought to help defend the border of Carriol! He had not known until an hour before that they had had the nerve to fetter those among them who held to the ways of Kubal and to Kish, and to lock them into the old villa at Dal and bar the portals with stone and mortar. Brash, snivelling . . . Kearb-Mattus smiled and thought with heat of killing the two young Seers who led that crew. He knew them. Oh, how he would pleasure himself by their deaths, those two that had so defied him—fracking brats—before he took Burgdeeth two years ago. Those two that had destroyed the training of the Children of Ynell there in the drug-caves of Kubal. They would die now, and painfully.

  *

  Lobon saw the emerald valley first, hidden in a moon-shaped crease between dunes, visible only because the crystal dome reflected moonlight. They could not have missed it in any case, however, for a sense of power had begun to draw them, the sense of the runestone there. They feared for that runestone now, for Kish was close behind. Lobon turned to look back at her. Her lizards were massing close around her, as if for attack. But still she kept her distance. Lobon leaned between the dark stallion’s wings as he swept down over the valley, a shadowed niche now between the silvered dunes. The dome glinted, then lost itself as their angle of descent steepened, then gleamed again; once it reflected Ere’s moons just before they came to earth.

  They came down onto heavy grass. The winged ones folded their wings along their backs and stood facing the crystal dome. Behind and above them, Kish’s band drew close, sweeping over and back. Lobon could feel power strong now from the stone that dwelt beneath the dome. How had it come here? How had the dome come here? And who was the white-haired child? He did not dismount from Lannthenn’s back, nor did Meatha dismount. She looked across at him in silence. Her fear and her exhilaration shook him. They could feel the powers gathered around them, could feel the earth’s trembling, could feel the intolerable weight of Ere’s very existence balanced in this moment.

  Inside the crystal dome, the white-haired child paused, then came slowly to the crystal door and pushed it open.

  She came up to Lannthenn’s side, carrying a sheathed sword, the sight of which made Lobon start. She wore a second sword. And she held her right fist clenched against her chest. She was tiny, surely no more than seven. Her hair was snow white in the moonlight, her thin shift hardly enough to keep off the cold, though she was not shivering. Her eyes looked, in the moonlight, as golden as a wolf’s eyes. As golden as Anchorstar’s eyes, Meatha told him. With effort the child lifted the sword. Lobon stared again at the hilt, felt weak and strange, took it from her and unsheathed it, sat holding Skeelie’s sword. How had it gotten here? “Where is she?” he whispered, glancing past the child into the dome, but he could see no figure there, caught no sense of her.

  “Skeelie, your mother, bids you take her sword,” was all the child would say. “The silver sword that Ramad forged for her.” Then she held up her partly closed fist to him and without another word, without any hesitation, she laid the heavy jade in his hand.

  It was surely the largest of all the shards; a heavy, thick dagger of jade nearly as long as his palm, carved with the runes that were its own fragment of the whole rune:

  power end life

  Lobon held it for a moment then slipped it into the inner lining of his tunic beside the wolf bell. He watched the two wolves leap clear of the winged horses that had carried them. They went directly to the child and stood head-high beside her, facing toward the warrior queen sweeping and wheeling in the sky above.

  Lobon knew he must carry the stone into battle. They all knew, as if the child had told them, that Kish could not take the runestone from the crystal dome; that this stone was the true lure to draw Kish, and so retrieve the six stones she carried—the bait on which the fate of all eight stones waited.

  The child unbuckled the second sword and handed it to Meatha. Then Lobon turned Lannthenn skyward with a thought, the stallion as eager as he to do battle. The white mare wheeled next to him, Meatha taut with nerves, and all the winged ones following, mind meeting mind as they formed a rhythm of attack. Ahead, the winged lizards swarmed, hissing. Kish swept out ahead of the pack, her sword drawn, her power in the stones she carried like a sword itself. The sky had begun to go milky with the coming dawn. Kish’s lizards slithered beneath heavy wings in a close-flying swarm as Kish swept down toward Lobon.

  *

  And across Ere, Kearb-Mattus came in silence down along the Owdneet. He followed Zephy and Thorn and the cultists, formed now into a nearly respectable fighting band.

  Zephy and Thorn knew he followed, though the sense of him was garbled, often lost, as if Seers rode with him. Pellian street rabble, and untrained. Their own band moved slowly, for half their troops marched, only half rode, the horses in short supply. All the winged ones were gone, to fight in Carriol.
Zephy and Thorn and their companions were exhausted from battling small bands of fighters. They knew they must rest soon, if for only an hour. “Then we must take what troops we can and ride for Carriol,” Thorn said, for the battling was desperate there.

  No cultists among them now were dissident, for those dissident had already been sealed into the villa at Dal. It had been a battle hardly worth remarking, the awakened cultists seeing at last the true nature of their warrior queen, simply overpowering those who still clung to the ways of Kish, tying them, marching them through Dal to the villa that already Carriolinian soldiers had turned into an outlying prison, and sealing them in with scrap rubble from the sacking of the city that Kearb-Mattus had earlier begun and the heaving of the earth completed.

  They had ridden then toward Carriol, through two areas in Farr held still by Carriolinian soldiers, skirted several Kubalese bands in their haste, then across farmland torn by the heaving ground and desolate with wounded and dead, from which the Kubalese had already departed.

  *

  Kearb-Mattus attacked the young Carriolinians as they slept; he was shielded by a mind-blocking held somehow steady by three rude street-Seers, came over a rise onto the handful of mounted men who guarded the camp, and saw the pitiful heap of soldiers beyond sleeping in the open.

  Zephy leaped up at the sound of fighting, hardly awake, frightened. Thorn was mounted, shouting at her. She grabbed the bridle of the horse he had brought her and was mounted; all were mounted, weapons ready, the attacking troops everywhere among them so they were hard put not to panic. She lost sight of Thorn, thrust her sword against the belly of a huge Kubalese bearing down on her, ducked beneath his blow to strike again, heard the screams of horses, of men, took a blow across her shoulder, spun her horse around to strike; all was confusion, a melee in the near-dark. She wanted to cry out for Thorn and daren’t, felt another blow like fire across her neck, was jerked from her horse, fell, was caught and her arms pulled behind her, then hit again, and she went dizzy and sick.