The assignments had been designed to frustrate Sumner, to open his weakened etheric field. And when this happened, Bonescrolls had channeled psynergy into him by becoming in his mind the animals and objects around Sumner. As a snake, he had tasted Sumner's fatigue and had projected serpent awareness. That night, in a dream, Kagan had seen the desert alive, glittering with pieces of light. The next day Bonescrolls had become the pinnacle rock where Sumner waited out the noonfire. The magnetic calmness that the magnar had radi-ated soothed Sumner's longing for the familiarities of his life with the Rangers. The effects were subtle, but over the weeks of Sumner's questing, his bodylight breathed brighter and stronger.Bonescrolls, however, had become weaker. The long effort of shapeshifting and focusing psynergy had loosened his own bodylight. All day after Sumner had left for Miramol, the magnar had been depressed. A deathvision had floated about him like hair, sometimes getting in his eyes with glimpses of a tall, wild man with a scar-cleaved face and one eye the color of bruised blood. Fear had wrung hard in him today, and he was glad that he had sent Sumner back to the Mothers.A small cranny-room glowed like a flower at the end of a maze of narrow, unlit corridors. Pink tallow tapers burned in the three corners of the cell below mousehole airducts. The cubicle was crowded with pelts, amulets, folded tapestries, icons, and wicker boxes—five hundred years of offerings from the surrounding tribes.He threw back a coverlet of ocelot skin from a large ironwood box inlaid with sardonyx. He thumbed a secret release in the ornate fretwork, and a small panel slid aside, revealing a compartment stuffed with suede cloth. Bonescrolls gently removed the cloth and sat down cross-legged. After calming himself, he unwrapped the crinkled suede and blinked into the soft, luminiferous light of a brood jewel.That instant in Miramol, several of the Mothers stirred restlessly in their sleep. For them, dreaming had abruptly become the single-focus clarity of trance. The magnar stood in the shadow of the world, looking a little different for each of them.Shay, he said, his voice half-burning with the fear that had haunted him earlier. My ward is returning to Miramol. He has served me well in the desert, and his bodylight is stronger. But he still lives inside his days, far from his spirit. Please, young sisters, teach him to mount his life's power. Show him how to lure the psynergy up his spine. Without your help, he will never be all that he is.The Mothers' trance slipped back into dreaming as the magnar moved his consciousness away.Bonescrolls hovered above the Barrow, charmed as usual by the astral view of the skyfires and the sharpness of the snow-blue stars, until he felt himself being seen. A dog stood, tailtucked, beneath a magnolia tree, watching him with glarestruck eyes. Beside it, soaked in darkness, was an old blind woman—one of the Mothers. Jesda, her name rose up in him as she stood and swayed in his direction."I see you there, shadow-of-no-one," the crone called, edging closer. Her hands were on her face, and her fingers were in the sockets of her skull. "These plundered eyes see through the world, ghost. Absence is presence. You know that! Absence is!"Jesda walked out into the bright moon-air, and her hands fell away from a riven face. Bonescrolls was gripped by the intensity of feeling in those broken features—eyepits dark as wine—and, as sometimes happened when he was shadow-shooting, he spun into the feelings of what he was seeing.Laughter jerked hard in him, and his mindark rayed with musical colors. An estranged feeling—a terrifying falling away from everything—tightened through him like nausea. Jesda's madness. Yet even though he knew what he was feeling, he couldn't break it.The smell of burned flesh pierced him, and like a needle stuck in his brain, a momentary reality opened: He saw the eth, Ardent Fang, and Drift squatting in the flagrant light of a bonfire—a pyre, a temple of flames with a corpse sitting up on the altar, clots of black flesh falling away from his features— his face!Bonescrolls twisted away from the brood jewel, the stro-phe of a scream loud in his throat. A heartshuddering mo-ment passed before he breathed again.No more shadowshooting, he swore, gazing gratefully into the blue plasma of a tallow flame. The voor gem was icy in his hand, and he wrapped it in the suede without looking at it.Shakily, he put the brood jewel back into its secret compartment and shrouded the ironwood box with the ocelot pelt. He walked down the black corridor to a natural balcony, where the cold night air held him more securely in his body. Now that the Mothers had custody of the eth, he could rest and fortify his psynergy.He sucked the frosty air in through his teeth, and his whole body shivered with alertness. Above a horizon burning with green skyfires, the moon floated, red and long, the shape of a serpent's heart.The Mother wore a black shift and ancient amulets, bright pieces of metal covered with the script of the kro. She was cataract-blind, and her movements were slow and pur-poseful, communicating her awareness of the world around her. Sumner sat opposite her in a room darkened with cur-tains made of human hair. He was naked but for a blue loincloth, and his flesh looked like well-oiled wood, sheened from the four days he had spent in a steam shed. Florets of gum acacia crowded the corners, scenting the room with the odor of mountains.The Mother listened with her head bowed forward as Sumner whispered the sacred names of the jungle animals and plants. The names themselves were unimportant. They were merely an acoustic technique for achieving the proper mindstate. Occasionally, when she felt his attention waver, she made him repeat the odd sounds until his mind focused.The Mothers were well pleased with Sumner. He had performed better than expected in the breeding stables, and most of the women he had mated with had conceived. To express their appreciation, the Mothers had begun to teach him the way of the hunter. For many days he had fasted and steamed the poisons out of his flesh. Then he had sat alone among burial hills the color of rain and listened, as he had been instructed, for the deep calling.He had felt stupid and vulnerable, sitting cross-legged in the open, his mind directed inward. But he had been quick to overcome his anxiety, and the Mothers were surprised at how readily his bodylight responded to their guidance. One Mother, a half-blind priestess who had worked for many years with young males, was selected to teach him the sacred names and to supervise his awareness of the deep calling.Sumner obeyed the Mothers strictly out of devotion to Bonescrolls. Their teachings seemed crude and arbitrary to him, and he counted the weeks left to his thrall. Sitting in the open with his mind indrawn, he sensed nothing but the splanchnic rhythms of his body. Several weeks later he was still spending most of every day listening to the roll of his heart and the flutterings of his digestive tract.Late one torpid afternoon he heard a whine—a tiny distant screaming, wringing from deep down in his bowels. His sudden alertness squelched it, and it was several days before he heard it again—a warbling thin sound wavering in the small bones of his head. This time he fixed himself solidly in selfscan, and he listened to it whistling higher than the pitch of his blood—but faint, deep as his marrow. Slowly understanding narrowed back to its center, and he realized what impossible and faraway sound it was: the tension in his genitals—the sound of his desires. He wanted a real woman.That's it!Sumner thrashed alert. The blind Mother was crouched beside him, her crystal white eyes lidded with satisfaction. You have to listen deep, but a man can hear his woman-hunger, the old woman's voice rasped in his mind. Focus on that. You 're ready to begin the Rising.Listening to the whine of blood pooling in his genitals, Sumner learned how to gather that tension into a tight packet between his anus and scrotum. The muscles there were deli-cate and very difficult to control, but with the Mother guid-ing him he was soon able to move the tension past his anus to the base of his spine without clenching his sphincter muscle.