Ram died too soon. He died with the stone still asunder.
These four shards that I hold are Lobon’s legacy. If Ram’s life meant anything, then these stones must be used one day to turn the fate of Ere away from darkness. One shard more lies drowned in the sea. One lies hidden in darkness, lost by Telien I know not where. And there are two shards to which I have no clue. Dracvadrig carries his shard in a metal casket around his neck, the chain dangling past his waist when he is a man, and pulling tight across his scaly throat when he takes the dragon form. Nine shards of jade. Nine shards of power that must somehow be joined again, and our son heir to the skills and to the nature of that joining.
Meanwhile, dark eats upon the land, flaunting the runestone’s broken, weakened powers. And Lobon frightens me; his violent nature, so filled with cold fury at Ram’s death, frightens me. If such anger does not abate, his powers as a Seer cannot grow. I must learn to temper that anger; I must learn to strengthen the man in him. I must learn to do for Lobon what Ramad would have known to do. When I take up sword again, to teach him its skills, I must train his spirit as well. And when I teach him the Seeing powers, I must teach him patience and wisdom—just as skillfully as Gredillon the white-haired once taught the child Ramad, in a time long dead.
Where we will go from this place, I have no idea. It is enough just now to rest and try to ease the wound of Ram’s death, I am filled with tears, and I cannot weep. I know deep within that I will survive the pain, but my spirit does not believe that. I know I must mend, for Lobon, but I have not the heart to mend.
If no eyes but mine see this journal, still it helps to set forth my thoughts; it eases something in me. The time of Lobon’s manhood will come too soon, and there is a cold fear in me of that time that I cannot put aside.
ONE
Lobon stood tall above the boulder-strewn valley, his sword sheathed, his leather cape thrown back, looking down coldly upon the waste of lifeless stone. The valley, just as he remembered it from childhood, looked as if a giant hand had ripped and shattered the stone, splitting it into grotesque and tumbled shapes across the dry scar of sand; and the whole valley itself was dwarfed by the shouldering mountains far to his right and the sheer black cliff that towered close on his left. Above that cliff, he could see the icy white apron of the glacier Eken-dep thrust against the dropping sun.
Behind him in the south, beyond the wild mountains and beyond a line of smoking volcanoes, lay the civilized nations of Ere. He had never seen them except in Seer’s visions, sharp as reality itself. This valley was his home, where he was born and bred, though it was twelve years since he had looked upon it. Its fierce cruelty had not softened during those years since he was six. He saw it with the same distaste he had known then, and with the same hatred. The same fury at his father’s death, for that fury had never abated.
Ahead, the valley ended abruptly at the edge of a gaping abyss, a chasm so immense that a man entering it would feel as small as a dew-ant. Fire ran at the bottom of the abyss in bloodied rivers bursting forth from fractured stone. The air down there was smoke-dulled and tinted sullen red. You could travel down there if you knew well the way. Or the pit could take your life. The width of the fissure was so great that the far jagged edge was lost in smoky mist. The black cliff that blocked the western end of the abyss pushed down into it like an obsidian blade, cutting off the land beyond. He turned his gaze away from that cliff to search among the boulders ahead for his companions. When he spoke at last, his voice seemed no more than a whisper against the awful silence. “Crieba? Feldyn?”
The dog wolves moved into the open and paused, then looked back at him, black Feldyn like a shadow against the dark shadows cast by the falling sun, Crieba’s silver coat caught in a last streak of light. The sun would soon be gone behind the glacier.
“Shorren?”
The white bitch wolf appeared from behind a boulder and smiled up at him, her eyes golden jewels.
“Can you find a place in this abysmal pile of stone where I can lay my head? Is there game?”
Feldyn spoke silently. We scent rock hare, Lobon. A deer passed through some hours back, but is gone. You will eat rock hare again. He and Crieba leaped ahead to find shelter, losing themselves quickly among jagged boulders. Shorren waited for Lobon and pushed her nose against him, her warm white muzzle nudging his arm. She was increasingly uncomfortable at the fury that filled him, tried with female stubbornness to gentle him. She could not endure his anger without pain to herself and would never cease to try to soothe him.
Man and wolf worked their way down between boulders, across the jagged valley toward the lip of the abyss. Soon they stood at the rim, bathed in the hot breath of the abyss, and in the feel of evil that rose from it. Lobon knew no words to describe his contempt for the master of that pit.
Here on the edge of the pit he had stood as a child of six, watching Ramad die, and now once more his mind and heart filled with the scene, come sharp to Seer’s senses. Shorren’s golden eyes censured him for his self-inflicted pain, but she remained silent in her mind and let him be. Feldyn joined them, tasted the heat from the pit, then looked eastward, raising his black muzzle. He keened suddenly with eerie voice, challenging the master of Urdd. Lobon’s silent challenge joined him, his black eyes searching the pit, his mottled red hair flaming in the last light like a burning blaze.
When Lobon spoke again, his voice was like scuffed silk against the valley’s silence. “He will die. Dracvadrig will die at my hand.”
The bitch wolf snarled softly. Lobon ignored her censure. He stared down at her and willed her to listen. “I will kill him, Shorren! And I will sink this pit of fire back into the center of Ere from which it gapes, and that will be Dracvadrig’s grave.”
Shorren’s thought came softly, but as steady as stone. You are too arrogant, young whelp. You are too filled with the lust for revenge. That lust can blind you. The dog wolves echoed her, Crieba slipping silently to Lobon’s side; but Lobon turned from all three and closed his mind to their words. He pulled from his tunic a deerskin pouch, dark with age and brittle, and spilled out into his palm two long green shards of jade and five small, amber stones. The smaller stones had, generations before, been cut from a similar shard.
The fourth shard was hidden inside the belly of the bronze bitch wolf that he took from his tunic, a rearing wolf with a bell suspended in her mouth. He lifted the bell, and it toned lightly, making the three wolves moan with its magic and stare up at him with rising light in their eyes.
Four shards of the runestone, Lobon held. The fifth, there below him in the pit, he meant to take from Dracvadrig very soon.
He followed Shorren and the two dog wolves to a rude tumble of boulders under which they might shelter from the creatures of the night sky: from the black flying lizards big as horses, and from the little blood-drinking night-stingers that hovered near the heat of the abyss. Twenty paces to his left stood the heaped stone that was the grave of Ramad. Once it had been Ramad’s home, boulders with slabs of stone placed to roof a shelter. It would be dark inside now, sealed, attending the silence of death. Ramad’s bones lay there, and Fawdref s bones. Lobon shivered, wished Ramad would step out of Time to him, move through Time as he had done before, across six generations. He did not understand Time and its limits. Ramad was dead here, in this time. A sickness and revulsion rose in him; he kept his distance from the grave and did not understand his own feelings.