The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [169]
Laz, of course, had no need of the Dwrgi Folk’s bridge. In his hunt for Faharn and his men, he flew over the Dwrvawr a good many miles to the north of the village, where the river ran through a high plateau of tumbled boulders in dry gullies, expanses of patchy brush and dry grass, bordered by hills so sharply ridged that it seemed they’d been cut with knives. An incessant wind blew down from the north, bringing a chill with it at night.
The wind caused him a great deal of trouble. After some days of flying, Laz had gained control of his blunted wings under normal circumstances. As long as he flew with steady strokes straight ahead, or glided on a rising thermal, he could control his motion as well as he always had. Landing, however, or making tight turns presented difficulties. Those maneuvers required a perfect camber that, with damaged wing tips, he couldn’t always achieve. He would just manage to get the right angle to land or turn when a gust of wind would tumble him, squawking, from the sky. When he attempted to land, a wind gust would fling him backward. At times he even dropped his sack of belongings, which generally came untied during its fall. He would have to land as best he could, transform back to man-shape, and laboriously pick everything up and repack it with his damaged hands.
After some days of this aggravation he decided to risk the tunnel working. Half spell, half ritual, Laz had pieced it together on his own from hints that he’d found in the ill-fated Hazdrubal’s teachings and the Pseudo-Iamblichos Scroll. At first he’d had no particular goal in mind, other than his usual curiosity about what would happen if he tried such-and-such a bit of dweomer. In human form, he’d gotten no results worth speaking of. In raven form, when he existed on the etheric as much as on the physical plane, he’d opened a long tunnel to and through the astral to—somewhere. At first he’d not recognized the strange roads he’d opened, misty tracks that led him through landscapes that seemed real but that changed at whim. In the library of the temple of Bel in Trev Hael he’d found a copy of the Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid and at last understood the treasure he’d unearthed by accident.
The mother roads, the fabled mother roads that could take a man or a raven anywhere he wanted to go—they were a prize worth running risks for, Laz had decided. He’d used them to travel to the ruins of Rinbaladelan, then back to the temple of Bel up north of Cengarn. The summer just past, the working had nearly killed him. He’d opened a tunnel above the temple and used it to rejoin his men in the forest. Just as he’d come free, the tunnel had closed behind him with a snap like the jaws of some great beast.
Thinking about his narrow escape still made him shudder. He had no idea why the tunnel had closed so suddenly, very nearly leaving him on the astral. Had he not escaped, he would have died. Worse yet, he might have been trapped on the astral with no hope of rebirth. As he perched on a dead tree, out in the Northlands barrens, remembering the risk gave him pause. He knew now how deadly a dweomer working could turn, when the sorcerer understood only some of its properties.
Yet, in the end Laz decided that the rewards of the mother roads outweighed the risk. They had a peculiar property that made them useful for more than one reason. Since they were driven by thought, they responded to thought. On a sunny morning, once the Dwrvawr and its water veil lay well behind him, Laz opened a tunnel through the higher worlds. He knew that he had only a few moments to travel before his physical body began to dissolve into a stringy mass of etheric forces, so he flapped hard, flew fast, faster, panting for breath, his wings aching, until he saw at last a pale brown meadow,