Holder of Lightning by S. L. Farrell

could have knelt side by side at the bottom, only one standing person could walk down the corridor at a time. Once, the walls must have been decorated—there were flecks of colored pigment clinging to the plaster and her touch caused more of the ancient paintings to crumble and fall away. Here and there were larger patches where she could see traces of what, centuries ago, must have been a mural. Jenna was glad to finally reach the relative spaciousness of the burial chamber. She glanced back: through the passage, she could see the dolmen awash in the brilliant fireworks of the mage-lights.
    The burial chamber itself had been constructed with five huge stones, forming the sides and roof. The air was musty and stale, and the room dim, touched only by the reflec tions of the lights, the cloch na thintrí’s illumination. At the center of the room was a large, chiseled block of granite, and set there was a pottery urn, glazed with the same swirls and curved lines carved on the lintel stones. Around the urn were beads and pieces of jewelry, torcs of gold and braided silver that glistened in the moving radiance. Clothing had once lain here as well; she could see moldering scraps of brightly-dyed cloth. These had been funeral gifts, obviously, and the urn undoubtedly held the ashes and bones of Riata. But his specter had vanished.
    “Hello?” she called.
    Air moved, her hair lifting, and she felt a touch on her shoulder. Jenna cried out, frightened, and the sound rang in the chamber, reverberating. She dropped the cloch na thintrí, and as she started to reach for it, the pebble rose from the floor, picked up by a hand that was barely visible in the stone’s glow.
    “Aye,” Riata’s voice said in her head, full of satisfaction, the tones dark and low. “ ’Tis true. This was once mine.” Pale light stroked the lines of his spectral face, sparking in the deep hollows where the eyes should have been. His voice seemed more ominous, touched with hostility. “Or more truthfully, I once belonged to it. Until it was stolen from me and found its way to another.”
    “I didn’t steal it,” Jenna protested, shrinking back against the wall as the shadowy form of Riata seemed to loom larger in front of her. “I found it on the hill near my home, the first time the mage-lights came. I didn’t know it was yours; I never even knew of you. Besides, it’s only a little stone. It can’t be very powerful.”
    Cold laughter rippled the dead air of the tomb, and the stench of death wafted over Jenna, making her wrinkle her nose and turn her face away. “I don’t accuse you of stealing it,” Riata’s voice boomed. “This cloch na thintrí has owned many in its time and will own many more. Dávali had it before me, and Óengus before him, and so on, back into the eldest times. And it may be little, but of all the clochs na thintrí, it is the most powerful.”
    “It can’t be,” Jenna protested. “Tiarna Mac Ard . . . he would have said . . .” Or he didn’t know, she suddenly realized. She wondered if he would have handed it back to her, if he had.
    “Then this tiarna knows nothing. This cloch even has a name it calls itself: Lámh Shábhála, the Safekeeping. The cloch was placed here when I died, on the offering stone you see in front of you. And it was taken over a thousand long years ago—I felt its loss even in death, though I didn’t have strength then to rise. For hands upon hands upon hands of years I slumbered. Once, centuries ago, the lights came again to wake me and I could feel that Lámh Sháb hála was alive with the mage-lights once more. I called out to Lámh Shábhála and its holder, but no one answered or they were too far away to hear me. With the mage-light’s strength, I was able to rise and walk here among the tombs when the mage-lights filled the sky, but few came to this place, and though they were Bunús Muintir, they appeared to be poor and savage, and seemed frightened of me. None of them knew