PROLOGUE (144 page)

"Silence!" cried Liath. Softly, she added, "I beg your pardon. You are welcome to argue all you like once I am gone, but I ask you to listen while I am still here. I came back, Uncle, only to tell you that I must return to Earth." She turned to regard Sanglant's mother.” I beg you, if you bear any love for your son and your granddaughter, tell me now if there is anything I should know before I walk the crossroads and return to the ones waiting for me. I

do not know how long ago you came from there, or how long it has been since I left this place to walk the spheres. I do not know how many months or years have passed on Earth since I left. I do not know how long I have until the Seven Sleepers will bind their power to cast a great working. Nor do I understand how they mean to raise so much power that they can hope to create a spell strong enough to cast an entire land as vast as this one back again into the aether."

Eldest Uncle bpwed his head, burdened by memory.” We only suffered. We never fully understood what magic they wove against us."

"I should have listened to Cat Mask," muttered his daughter.” The humans can never be trusted. Maybe he's the one I should be talking to now." She began to walk away but paused to face Liath.” My son is no better than an exile in his own country. He turned his back on his father when Henri would not listen either to him or to me, and walked away to find some means to fight the sorcerers on his own. That is how I left him and the child. You would know better than I if he can succeed."

"You left him to face the Seven Sleepers? Alone? Your own son?"

"You left him," echoed the other woman, "to face your enemies? Alone? With what weapon do you stab me, Sister? Surely only with the one that impales yourself. I almost died giving birth to him. Did he greet me with any warmth when I saved his life and that of his daughter? Nay, he treated me as a stranger, despite our kinship. I will not shed any more blood or tears on that field." Hoisting her staff, she walked haughtily away, heading back through the pine woods toward the old watchtower.

"She has no heart," murmured Eldest Uncle sadly when she had vanished down the trail.” She sacrificed it to the gods long ago when she walked the path of the spheres."

"Did she walk the seven spheres as I did, and return?"

"That she ascended the path cannot be doubted. That she returned alive you see by her presence. What she sacrificed on her journey none know except her. I can only guess." He sighed.” My child, you have changed. What did the fire daimones tell you?"

"I am their child," she said softly, humbled by the knowledge. Had her own mother given less than Sanglant's? She had given her life and her substance to bring a child into the world. She had given her very soul.” I am more, and less, than what I thought I was. But at least I am free of the chains that bound me and the veils that hid the truth. Tell me truly, Uncle. Do your people hate mine? Is there any hope for peace?"

"Mustn't there always be hope for peace? We must believe there is because I know that the other side of peace brings the worst kind of grief. I lost those most dear to me. I am not alone in the tears I have wept many a night remembering those who are gone before their time." He smiled, a wry twist of his mouth. His face was so old, lines and wrinkles everywhere, creases made equally by frowns and by smiles, by laughter and by tears. He extended a hand, hesitated, and touched her gently on the arm.” Hate is a fire fanned easily into a storm that burns everything in its path." Tears welled up in his eyes even as he blinked them away. It was hard to see the resemblance between him and Sanglant except for the color of his skin and the dark splendor of his hair, still glossy and thick despite his great age.” I beg you, my child. Save us. Do not let the descendants of the sorcerers of old destroy us utterly as they attempted to do when I was a youth."

"I will not," she promised him, then she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. He flushed mightily, hard to see on that copper complexion but easy to make out by the spark of emotion, the slight narrowing, in his sharp old eyes.” I will see you again, Uncle. Be looking for me." "Fare you well, Daughter."

The flower meadow waited, silent, barely stirring in the soft breeze. Heat drowned her as she walked forward into sunlight, into the haze of bright color, pale bells of columbine, lush peonies, banks of poppies, and a rich cloud of lavender. She stayed on the path, careful to mark each patch of ground before she set her foot down. The thought of all those serpents made her queasy. She gathered up all her things, dressed properly, and girded on belt, sword, and quiver, pouch, knife, and cloak. The gold torque she stowed in her pouch.

The trail led her through the chestnut woods, and she crossed the river, which ran even more shallow than before. The glade where she had first seen and met the old sorcerer lay empty except for the flat stone on which he often sat to twist flax into rope. A few dried stalks lay scattered on the ground around the rock. A breeze rustled through desiccated leaves. Not even a fly buzzed. Silence drowned her like a heavy veil.

The land was dying. It would die, unless it returned to the place it belonged. Just as she had to return to the place she belonged.

She had a long way to go to get back to them, and a longer path yet to map out once she reached their side. Reaching into the heart of fire, she called the burning stone. It flared up in the center of the clearing, blue fire racing up and down its length. Grasping her bow more tightly, she stepped through into the crossroads between the worlds, where the river of fire ran as aether through the spheres, its many tributaries linking past and future, present and infinity. Through the endless twisting halls she searched for the gateway that would take her back to Earth. Infinite doorways offered glimpses into other worlds, other times, other places, present and past, half seen and swiftly vanished.

A boy sleeps with six companions, their beds made of precious treasure, shining baubles and golden armbands, silver vessels and ivory chests, scarlet beads and ropes made of pearls.

A winter storm swirls snow around a monastery where a large encampment of soldiers shelters, some in outbuildings, others in tents. Hanna, in the company of Lions, chops wood. Her face is taut, her body tense, but each time she strikes ax into wood and splits a log she swears, as though she's trying to chop rage and grief out of herself.

A woman clothed in the robes of a nun meets a sandy-haired, slender young man at the edge of a birch forest. Waves of wind ripple light through silver leaves. To him she gives the leashes of a half-dozen huge black hounds in exchange for a tiny swaddled figure, an infant girl sleeping softly as she is handed over from one grim-faced guardian to the other.

An army marches in good order through the grassy plains of the eastern frontier. Poplars line the banks of creeks and shallow rivers, giving way to hawthorn and dogwood and at last to the broad expanse of feather grass and knapweed. Spring flowers carpet the open lands with white-and-yellow blooms, as numerous as the stars. Is that Sanglant marching at the head of the army, a glorious red cape streaming back from his shoulders and a gold torque winking at his neck? Is that Blessing, grown impossibly old, looking like a well-grown girl of five or six? At the confluence of two rivers, a king waits to receive the army in peace. His banner flies the double-headed eagle of the Ungrian kingdom. Strange that the first gift Sanglant offers to him, as they meet and clasp hands and give each other the kiss of peace, is a wine barrel.

A woman, aged and arthritic, sits in her tower room, writing laboriously. A map lies open on the table beside her, a crude representation ofSalia, held down by stones at each curling corner, but the figures on the wax tablet interest Liath more: a horoscope written for a day yet to come, or a day long past, when cataclysm racked the Earth. The elderly cleric lifts her head to call for an attendant. The woman who comes is the same woman who gave the hounds and took the child, although here she looks much older as she offers her mistress a soothing posset.

"What news, Clothilde?" asks the first woman in the tone of a noblewoman born to command. Is this Biscop Tallia, Taillefer's favorite child? Her voice is already smoky from the growth in her neck that will kill her.

"It is done, Your Grace," says the other woman, "just as we planned. The girl is pregnant. The child she bears will be related to the emperor through both parents."

Shadows ripped a gap through the image. Other sights shuddered into existence only to be torn away, as though at the heart of the crossroads the very worlds, were becoming unstable, echoes of ancient troubles and troubles yet to come.

Hunched and misshapen creatures crawl among tunnels, hauling baskets of ore on their backs. An egg cracks where it is hidden underneath an expanse of silver sand, and a claw pokes through. A lion with the face of a woman and the wings of an eagle paces majestically along the sands; turning, she meets Liath's astonished gaze.

A centaur woman parts the reeds at the shore of a shallow lake. Her coat has the dense shimmer of the night sky, and her black hair falls past her waist. A coarse pale mane, the only contrast to her black coat, runs down her spine; it is braided, like her hair, twined with beads and the bones of mice.” Look!" she cries.” See what we wrought!" She looses an arrow.
The burning course of its flight drove Liath backward through

the crossroads of the worlds, far into the past, when the land was riven asunder.

A vast spell has splintered and split the land. Rivers run backward. Coastal towns along the shore of the middle sea are swallowed beneath rising waters, while skin coracles beached on the strands of the northern sea are left high and dry as the sea sucks away to leave long stretches of sea bottom exposed to sunlight and fish drowning in cold air.

Along a spine of hills far to the south, mountains smoke with fire, and liquid red rock slides downslope, burning everything in its path.

In the north, a dragon plunges to earth and in that eyeblink is ossified into a stone ridge.

Liath sees the spell now, seven stone looms woven with light drawn down from the stars. She can barely see the heavens themselves because the light of the spell obscures them, but her sight remains keen: the position of the stars in the sky this night matches the horoscope drawn by Biscop Tallia.

The spell like a coruscating knife cuts a line through the Earth itself. The power of its weaving slices along a chalk path worn into the ground to demarcate the old northern frontier of the land taken generations before by the Ashioi. It cuts right through the middle of a huge city overlooking the sea. It cuts through the waves themselves, like successive bolts of lighting tracing an impossibly vast border around the land where the Ashioi have made their home. The seven sorcerers weaving that spell in each of the seven looms die immediately as the spell's full force rebounds upon them.

The land where Eldest Uncle's people made their home is ripped right up by the roots, like a tree wrenched out of its soil by the hand of a giant, and flung into the sky. All the Ashioi walking beyond the limits of their land are dragged outward in its wake, drowned in its eddy, but they cannot follow it into the aether. They get yanked into the interstices between Earth and the Other Side, caught forever betwixt and between as shades who can neither walk fully on Earth nor yet leave it behind.

But they are not the only ones who suffer.

The cataclysm strikes innocent and guilty alike, old and young, animals and thinking creatures, guivres and mice, human children and masked warriors, Ashioi children and human soldiers armed with weapons crafted of stone. The Earth itself buckles and strains under the potency of the spell. Did the sorcerers themselves understand what they were doing? Did they know how far the effects of their spell would reach ? Did they mean to decimate their people in order to save their people?

Impossible to know, and she can never ask them: they are long dead, never to be woken.

Blue winked within the lightning radiance of the spell. All at once, she saw Alain on his knees on a low hill, with a hound on either side of him. The hounds tugged desperately at him, trying to drag him back from the edge of a blazing circle of stones. Alain clawed helplessly at the body of the girl who lay crumpled on the ground. Wasn't it the same antlered girl who had met her in the realm of Mok? Who had seen with such keen sight into Liath's own heart before even Liath had been able to fathom those depths? The girl was so unbearably young, younger even than Liath, maybe not more than seventeen, but she was quite dead. In an instant more, when the spell's last storm-surge struck back at the looms in which it had been woven into life, Alain would be dead, too.

Liath unfurled her wings. She reached into the past, caught hold of him and his hounds, and dragged them with her back to the world they had left behind months, or even years, before.

THE
queen with the knife-edged smile, called Arrow Bright, is long dead yet strong enough still to see with the heart and eyes of the woman who at dawn leads the remnants of her people through what remains of the forest. They emerge at last from the shelter of charred and blistered trees, most of the children crying, a few horribly silent, and every surviving adult injured in some way. Standing here at the edge of the cultivated fields, they numbly survey the ruin of their village.