The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [15]
The worst thing, he decided, was that he could no longer remember why he’d wanted to bring the crystals together. Obviously, it had been a stupid idea, yet he’d felt compelled—the word caught his attention. Compelled. Had some wyrd-dweomer lain inside the pair, waiting for a victim to bring their tips together so they could transport themselves and victim both to this island?
If so, one of them had made the trip safely, though he’d lost the other. He wondered if they might transport him back if he brought them together. They might take him elsewhere, of course, somewhere far less hospitable than Haen Marn, or burn off the rest of his hands even if he did end up back in the Northlands. He sat up and considered his maimed hands. The idea of trusting himself to the crystals again terrified him. Yet curiosity nagged. Where was the white one, anyway?
After Dougie’s strange vision of the other day, he’d had Marnmara remove the pouch with the crystal from around his neck and put it under the clothing in the basket, hidden from curious eyes. When he tried moving his fingers, he found that he could control them, though it hurt whenever they rubbed against one another. He was healing, indeed, and the thought made him almost cheerful. Carefully, slowly, painfully, he managed to tip the basket over, find the pouch, and shake the black crystal out onto his pillow. In the sunlight coming through the tiny window, it gleamed, but sullenly, or so it seemed to him.
“I’ll wager you can tell me where your brother lies,” Laz said.
Laz set the crystal upright and looked down into its tip. He saw nothing at first, then murky images formed—an expanse of brownish gray, a lump of something that might have been wood. Ripples shimmered in the murk. A long narrow head appeared, two tiny eyes, a row of teeth, a neck. The head drew back. A spray of bubbles covered everything. Laz could draw only one conclusion: the white crystal sat at the bottom of the lake, far and forever out of his reach.
“Good! Rot, for all I care!”
Getting the obsidian crystal back into its pouch, and the pouch into the basket, made his hands throb. Throb or no, he decided to put the dragon book somewhere safe rather than leaving it on the floor where Berwynna had placed it. Lifting such a heavy thing— the thought itself pained him. He glanced at the book, then swore aloud.
Just above the cover hovered a thickening in the air. A sprite, perhaps, only half-materialized? Yet the thing had a glow to it that sprites lacked, and an abstract shape. He could discern a disk of some color that lay just beyond the ordinary colors of the world, an icy lavender? No, stranger still. Was it a spirit at all or some odd vortex of force? He lay down on the mattress to consider it at eye level. As if it knew he studied it, the glow sank into the book and was gone.
Once, perhaps, Laz might have called to that spirit and inquired about its nature. Now he was afraid, quite simply afraid, to attempt even the most basic dweomer. What if he failed, what if he learned that the enormous power he’d treasured had deserted him? He’d been wounded by the pair of crystals, he realized, his confidence broken as badly as his hands. He’d done a rash, stupid thing that had resulted in the worst pain he’d ever suffered. Worse yet, though, was thinking that the crystals had somehow compelled him, had gained power over him. A sorcerer, are you? he told himself. A pitiful fool, more like! On a tide of such dark thoughts he eventually fell asleep.
Laz woke long after the dinner hour, when the manor of Haen Marn already lay wrapped in silence for the night. During his convalescence, hunger had deserted him, not that he’d ever eaten much in any given day. When he sat up, he noticed that the dragon