Ram pulled himself back from his tumbled thoughts. “I remember him. A horse I would have sold my soul to have.”
Anchorstar bent to put flint to the fire. When the blaze had flared, then settled and begun to burn steadily, he produced from his saddlebags a tin kettle, tammi tea, hard mawzee biscuits, mountain meat.
Skeelie hunkered down by the fire, hardly tasting the food she ate, so caught was she in Ram’s rising hope, his need to push on, to reach out to Telien; and then in his beginning uncertainty that perhaps Anchorstar would try but could not lead him to Telien; and then his growing depression, his returning desolation at the horror of Telien’s possession.
“We will sleep here until dawn,” Anchorstar said, ignoring Ram’s depression, “and then we will push on. We are in a time out of Time, Ramad. We are now in the time of the Cutter of Stones.”
Ram stared at him. “How can you move with purpose through Time when I cannot? I could not follow Telien. 1 have only been buffeted through Time with never any reason until—until it was too late. I could not touch her soon enough, reach far enough back into Time to save her from NilokEm. There is no reason to how I have moved.”
“There was reason, Ramad, when you fought to help Macmen, then to help Hermeth.” Anchorstar stared into the fire, and Ram did not speak again. Anchorstar said at last, “I do not move us through Time, nor do I pretend to know the intricate patterns that touch such movement. Though I know that I lead you, now, to the Cutter of Stones, lead you by his will. And that through him you can seek the wraith, seek Telien.”
“Why do you help me? Why do you care if I find Telien, or if I can save her and destroy the wraith?”
“I am linked to the wraith, even as are you. I do not know why. Perhaps it has to do with my own time. I feel that this is so. I feel certain I must return to my own time, and soon. Something there calls to me, and perhaps the wraith has to do with that in some way I do not yet comprehend.”
*
The wind changed in the night to blow icy, down from the mountains. Skeelie woke once to see Anchorstar building up the fire, then slept again. Dawn came too soon, and she woke huddled in her blanket, to watch Ram saddle the horses while Anchorstar came from out the shadowed wood carrying the tin kettle. He gave her a rare smile. “There is a spring there in the wood if you care to wash.”
She sat up, pulling the blanket around her. The sky was hardly light. The wood lay in blackness. Ahead, the dark smear of sharp peaks rose against a gray horizon, peaks with a shock of snow at the top. To her left, the hill dropped steeply to the valley far below. She could sense, but not yet see, that a river ran there at the bottom like a thin silver thread. Wild land, and huge, rising up to peaks that must surely be a part of the Ring of Fire.
She rose and went barefoot into the shadowed wood where dawn had not yet come, found the stream twisting cold between the roots of ancient trees, washed herself, shivering, kneeling in shallow rapids. When she came out, dawn was beginning to filter into the wood, and the wolves were there among the trees. She pulled the blanket around her, embarrassed at her nakedness, and rubbed herself dry. Only when the wolves had gone, Fawdref dragging the carcass of a deer over his shoulder, did she remove the blanket to pull on her shift. She could sense Ram finishing with the horses, could feel his mood like a dark pall, knew he had waked with the sense of Telien’s captive spirit gripping him. When she returned to the camp, he was surly and rude.
Anchorstar had cooked thin slices of the deer meat on a stick. Ram ate hunched over, not speaking, gulping his food. The morning was bright, the air cold and clear. Skeelie reached out to the aliveness, the wholeness of the rising morning, needing this, needing to put away from her the sense of death and depression Ram carried. Deliberately, she savored the tender deer meat, the tea and warmed bread. But though she tried, she could not rid herself of Ram’s misery. She supposed he knew she shared it. Perhaps that made him surlier still. He tossed down his eating tin finally and rose, glowering at her before he went to untie the horses.
She gazed up at the far peaks, crowned with white, feeling miserable herself suddenly, angry at Ram for making her so, and angrier at herself for letting him. Anchorstar laid a hand on her knee in friendship and understanding. She stared into his strange golden eyes, felt his sympathy. His voice was soft. He glanced once to where Ram had already mounted, then looked ahead to the mountains. “This is strange, wrinkled land. There lies ahead a mountain still hidden, we will come on it as we top the next hills. That is our destination, Esh-nen, a mountain capped with ice but with fires deep in its belly, with a lake like a steaming bath. Well, but you will see.”
When they set out, Ram’s thoughts still ran through Skeelie’s mind and would not be stilled. If the wraith was growing stronger so rapidly that it could now suck out a man’s life, could they hope to defeat it before it destroyed them? It carried Hermeth’s spirit within it now, which made it infinitely stronger; Skeelie remembered its hoarse whisper, there in Gredillon’s house, You will come into me our way, as the others have come Could they, even through the Cutter of Stones, follow and destroy that creature of death? The sense of the wraith closed in around her as they started over a rise of boulders, the horses humping in a lurching gallop against the steepness; and then suddenly, coupled with her worry over the wraith and somehow a part of it, she began to feel Anchorstar’s restlessness, his growing need to return to his own time. She thought that he could sense something amiss there but not discern its shape; she felt a darkness touching him too painful to bring to view.
At midday the riders came over the last of a series of rises and were facing quite suddenly a great white mountain that sprawled just above the hills like an immense reclining animal. “That is Esh-nen,” Anchorstar said. “The white shoulder.” The west wind blew the mountain’s cold breath down to them. “There in Esh-nen the Cutter of Stones dwells in a place out of Time, a place impervious to Time.”
They built a fire for their noon meal and set the meat to cook. Ram stripped the horses to let them graze, then hunched down beside the fire and drew the leather pouch from his tunic. He fished out the three starfires and held them in his palm. They caught the firelight, flashing. He looked up at Anchorstar with taut impatience. “Tell me about the Cutter of Stones. Tell me where he came by the stone from which he cut these, and what he intended for them.”
“The Cutter of Stones himself will tell you what he wishes you to know of the starfires, Ramad.” Anchorstar shrugged, dismissing the subject. Then he looked at Ram and seemed to soften, adding, ‘There were five. I carry one still. And Telien carries the other.”
“And that one has not helped Telien. Perhaps they are cursed stones.”
“I do not think that,” Anchorstar said, then grew silent. When at last he spoke again, his words were harder, clipped, as if he in turn had lost patience. “Where is the runestone, Ramad, that Telien brought out of Tala-charen?”
“I do not know. When I held her close to me there in the wood, I caught a sense of it, quick and fleeting. A sense of it in darkness. Lost. As if Telien herself did not remember where.”
“And if you were made to choose between the search for Telien and the search for the shards of the runestone—which you vowed once, Ramad, that you would join together again—which path would you choose?”
Ram stared at him for so long it seemed he did not mean to answer. At last he rose, still silent, and walked away from them. When he turned back, his scowl was more lonely than angry; and still for a long moment he did not speak. Then he said only, “You know as well as I, what I would do. What I must do. But it does not help to contemplate that pain before—unless—I must.”