gasping of his lungs. He was sweating under all his layers. ‘Tell Kelloman to find stone and touch it. Quickly.’
Marmion relayed the message. An answer came immediately, direct from the mage.
What are you thinking, boy? There’s a fine spur of rhyolite near here, hut it’s out of our way.
Just get there and do it — quickly !
Of all the impertinence! Whatever’s going on, it had better be important.
Skender bit back a flash of irritation. What could be more important than saving everyone’s lives? I need to Take from you. You’re too far away to touch, but I can reach you this way. Please — we-don’t have long .
He hadn’t fully recovered from the exertions of the flight up the mountains. That small effort wore him out. Fortunately, Kelloman didn’t waste time continuing the conversation. Skender waited impatiently, gripping the cold stone with his fingers until finally he felt an echo of the mage in the bedrock of the world. It was like hearing a sound underwater: muffled and hard to pin down but definitely there. He reached for it, felt Kelloman reach out to him in return, and connected.
Potential, refined and strong, flooded through him. The mage gave him everything he could spare, keeping only enough to maintain the link between his host body and the one lying far away in the Interior. The exchange was swift and total, leaving Skender feeling full of light, as though his bones were glowing.
‘Brilliant,’ he said, looking up from his kneeling position to the entrance of the cave. His scalp tingled. He wondered if his hair was standing on end. It certainly felt that way. ‘Now, I’ll have to time this right.’
Down the slope they had followed, he could see the village and its three piers. The surface of the lake roiled like the surface of a saucepan of water on a stove. A mist had risen up over the water, hiding the tops of the towers from view. Strange shapes danced in the mist; inhuman figures came and went.
The twins stiffened. Their odd double gaze was fixed on the village. Breath hissed out of them like steam.
A moment later, Skender saw what they had spotted. Something black and fluid wound along the narrow streets, snake-like but as tall as a human. Skender couldn’t tell if it was made of water or smoke; it possessed a little of both in its translucency and flexibility — yet the shape of it was fixed in cross-section along its length. It progressed in the same way that a drop of water trickled down a window pane, growing longer at its leading edge rather than wriggling like a snake.
The tip of another tentacle appeared, sliding soundlessly along a second street. Its path curved to intersect with a house, which it passed right through as though the wooden walls weren’t even there. Behind it, Skender glimpsed a dark mass bulging out of the restless water — the source of the black tentacles, he was sure — and imagined it sniffing out life in the town. Drawn by their movement, perhaps, or by subtle disturbances in the flow of the Change, this strange limb of the creature living in the lake had been woken and sent forth to investigate.
And to feed.
Skender roused himself. He had been frozen with horror for far too long. Chu and the others would surely not have reached cover yet, and he didn’t dare doubt that another such deadly limb would be rising to devour them. What happened when the tentacles touched something living, he didn’t know for certain, but he wasn’t going to wait to find out. A village full of dead people suggested it wasn’t anything good.
A distraction. That was what he needed. The back of his mind had been riffling through the many charms he had glimpsed once and never forgotten. Charms to turn solid stone into liquid and liquid stone into solid; charms to create bizarre metal alloys and extract impurities from mixed samples; charms to make fire burn cold or to make it invisible; charms, in particular, to focus sunlight into brightly
Marmion relayed the message. An answer came immediately, direct from the mage.
What are you thinking, boy? There’s a fine spur of rhyolite near here, hut it’s out of our way.
Just get there and do it — quickly !
Of all the impertinence! Whatever’s going on, it had better be important.
Skender bit back a flash of irritation. What could be more important than saving everyone’s lives? I need to Take from you. You’re too far away to touch, but I can reach you this way. Please — we-don’t have long .
He hadn’t fully recovered from the exertions of the flight up the mountains. That small effort wore him out. Fortunately, Kelloman didn’t waste time continuing the conversation. Skender waited impatiently, gripping the cold stone with his fingers until finally he felt an echo of the mage in the bedrock of the world. It was like hearing a sound underwater: muffled and hard to pin down but definitely there. He reached for it, felt Kelloman reach out to him in return, and connected.
Potential, refined and strong, flooded through him. The mage gave him everything he could spare, keeping only enough to maintain the link between his host body and the one lying far away in the Interior. The exchange was swift and total, leaving Skender feeling full of light, as though his bones were glowing.
‘Brilliant,’ he said, looking up from his kneeling position to the entrance of the cave. His scalp tingled. He wondered if his hair was standing on end. It certainly felt that way. ‘Now, I’ll have to time this right.’
Down the slope they had followed, he could see the village and its three piers. The surface of the lake roiled like the surface of a saucepan of water on a stove. A mist had risen up over the water, hiding the tops of the towers from view. Strange shapes danced in the mist; inhuman figures came and went.
The twins stiffened. Their odd double gaze was fixed on the village. Breath hissed out of them like steam.
A moment later, Skender saw what they had spotted. Something black and fluid wound along the narrow streets, snake-like but as tall as a human. Skender couldn’t tell if it was made of water or smoke; it possessed a little of both in its translucency and flexibility — yet the shape of it was fixed in cross-section along its length. It progressed in the same way that a drop of water trickled down a window pane, growing longer at its leading edge rather than wriggling like a snake.
The tip of another tentacle appeared, sliding soundlessly along a second street. Its path curved to intersect with a house, which it passed right through as though the wooden walls weren’t even there. Behind it, Skender glimpsed a dark mass bulging out of the restless water — the source of the black tentacles, he was sure — and imagined it sniffing out life in the town. Drawn by their movement, perhaps, or by subtle disturbances in the flow of the Change, this strange limb of the creature living in the lake had been woken and sent forth to investigate.
And to feed.
Skender roused himself. He had been frozen with horror for far too long. Chu and the others would surely not have reached cover yet, and he didn’t dare doubt that another such deadly limb would be rising to devour them. What happened when the tentacles touched something living, he didn’t know for certain, but he wasn’t going to wait to find out. A village full of dead people suggested it wasn’t anything good.
A distraction. That was what he needed. The back of his mind had been riffling through the many charms he had glimpsed once and never forgotten. Charms to turn solid stone into liquid and liquid stone into solid; charms to create bizarre metal alloys and extract impurities from mixed samples; charms to make fire burn cold or to make it invisible; charms, in particular, to focus sunlight into brightly
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