Beyond the wall of flame there lay a mist shrouded island and it was to this that the whistling voice in Raven’s head called her. Here, in a part of the ocean that must have been closer to Kharwhan than any boat—wolfboat or Altan man-of-war alike—had ever been permitted to venture.

  Even the air smelled different here, more pungent somehow, as if leather burned beyond that veil of mist, or tar boiled…familiar smells, yet smells that had no business lingering above an expanse of water a thousand kli from the nearest habitable land.

  In Raven’s stomach was a knot of tension that she could not allay. As the vessel tacked and turned to head towards a place where the mist was thinner, she cast an admiring glance at this friend of Gondar Lifebane’s, this rugged seawolf Guayne Targda. Few men, she knew, would have had the courage to take her so close to Kharwhan on nothing but the whim of a dream she’d had.

  The voice in her head was urgent, almost commanding. It was the voice of a nightmare, calling her to her doom on the rocks, or some precipice over which she would plunge, tricked by the deadly signing of the wind. And yet shew knew it was the voice of Kharwhan, the Ghost Isle; the place, it was said, of the Sorcerer Priests whose power was greater than all the power of the lands of the Worldheart combined.

  It had called her, and it had called to her alone. The bird had been her guardian for many days, and then it had gone, dismiss, she felt, by the powers that watched the tiny vessel skip its way across the seas.

  Spellbinder, she knew, had sensed the call as well. There had been a morning, some time after their return from Quwhon, from the war against the God-thing Tanash, a morning that she had awoken and found him gone. Spellbinder knew much that concerned her, was knowledgeable of the powers that guided her, and yet—of a sudden—he had taken his leave, leaving her to obey her instincts. Still cold, despite the lapse of seasons, from the terrifying journey through Quwhon, she had come south, and shipped to Kragg.

  Obey always your instincts when times are troubled or seem hard. Resolution of the irresolvable is in personal resolve, and personal courage.

  Argor’s strange words were fresh in her mind, and had been with her for all the long journey from Kragg. She wished that Argor were here now, her friend, her weapons trainer, a man whose word was as strong as the blade he wielded.

  But she was afraid, there was no denying it. Kharwhan had called her, had summoned her, and that meant trouble; it meant something terrible had occurred, perhaps something unthinkable.

  An island appeared out of the mist as sudden, as stark, as the cliffs of Kragg.

  “Surely not Kharwhan,” said Raven aloud. “Not so easily.”

  “Nay, Lady,” said Targda beside her. He was pointing away, across to the east. “Yonder is the sea of dreams, and the mist shrouded Island of the Priests.”

  Raven saw where he was pointing, and saw the blurred outline of the mountainous lands that were the Ghost Isles.

  She looked back at the steeply rising shore, at the litter of trees and ruins that was this haven in the midst of the ocean.

  “An outflung place, then. A watching point. A redoubt.”

  “Perhaps,” said Targda, and called for his hawk. The man, short and with the dark skin of a Xandronian, but without the bearing of those range kings, clambered upon the figurehead and squinted through the thinning sea fog.

  “Wrack,” said the hawk. “A beach stained green and black all about by the dead stuff of the ocean. Sand beyond, wind-blown like a desert. Plants of some green and purple colouration, their bloom opened to the new day, but venomous in appearance. A stark building of some grey stone, ruined now, with remnants of life still in evidence. A tree, bigger than the other trees; it lies beyond the rise through a narrow gorge, not long, not high. This tree is bigger than any tree I have ever seen, from whatever distance. There are birds in it. I see no sign of movement on the ground, but there is the gleam of steel, perhaps bronze. Perhaps a weapon, or the corroding armour of a fallen warrior.”

  “Enough,” said Targda, and the hawk climbed back to the decks and scurried away among the motionless seawolves. The Captain turned to Raven. “Do we beach?”

  “Aye,” said Raven. “At speed, I think and spill onto the beach before we can change our minds.”

  The sail was furled and oars slotted out through the strakes and into the cold waters. To the rapid beating of the Yr hide drum the ship was brought about and raced towards the shore. Raven ran swiftly below decks and fetched her sword, kissed the gleaming blade before she slung it about her waist and darted back to stand, full-braced against the jarring impact of beaching, on the foredeck.

  As the hull crushed through wrack and sand and ploughed a deep furrow through the island, Raven was already splashing quickly through the breakers, running towards the top of the rise, her sword now carried ready for action.

  She braced herself at the top of the beach and stared out across the tiny island, at the narrow gorge and the gigantic tree that grew beyond it. She saw that same sparkle of metal that the hawk had seen, and she recognised it as armour.

  Turning, she waved to Targda. “There is no sigh of anything alive,” she called. The seawolf had already jumped from the boat and was waving instructions with his bright-bladed scimitar. He came after Raven now, struggling up the steep rise of land, supporting himself by thrusting his sword into the ground and leaning on it. This lack of respect for the cutting edge of his sword made Raven grimace and she turned away.

  And froze!

  Something was coming through the gorge, something huge and formless, shimmering white, spectral. It seemed to flex and twist, to writhe in the contortions of agony; it flowed towards her, sending sand and plantlife scattering about it; a focus of weird energy. Raven instinctively drew a star from her belt and dropped to a crouch.

  Tragda’s voice was hollow, distant, as he called out to her, demanding what scared her.

  A moment later the shapeless thing was upon her, undisturbed by the wide arc of her blade as she swept it about defensively; the wind was huge, blowing her cloak away from her body, and blinding her with her own golden hair. And yet she was unmoved bodily by that gale. It was gone as quickly as it had come, an when she turned she saw the silent wind blowing Targda over and over, like a child on a sandhill, bowled back to the ship to fetch up short and sudden against its beached hull.

  There he sat, stunned and shocked, staring at Raven through the wall of spectral wind, and though his men tried valiantly to breach it in the minutes that followed, to come to Raven’s side, they were blown backwards, separated from her.

  Grimly, Raven turned back to the gorge and began to walk .The island seemed deserted, and though tiny animals moved about the rock walls as she walked between them, nothing big and nothing predatory attacked her. As she emerged through the shallow groove in the rock, she found herself lookout out across a rolling green land, scattered with trees and the empty shelters of some long vanished people. The air smelled sweet, the smell of a forest: heady, fragrant. She reached out to touch a seed, fluttering down on the wind; the last child of one of the great trees that stood before her, perhaps from the tallest tree of all. It was a small, wide-winged seed, hard and red where the secrets of its life were contained. She held it tight, and sensed the presence of that great towering trunk, and the wide arms of its branches.

  It was about that tree that the scattered warriors lay, their dulled armour nonetheless bright enough to shine in the sun.

  She came among them, not in the shadow of the tree, but still beneath its branches. The dead men were sprawled across the roots, some propped against the trunk, some half-concealed in earth, the tangle of grass growing upon the very flesh of their corpses. Tall men they had been, slender, yet strong. Each clasped his sword in skeletal hands. Their armour was blue, and ridged all about like the horny skin of a reptile. Their helms were simple, all concealing, with slanted sockets for eyes; blinding one of these metal skulls watched Raven as she reached to draw aside the concealing armour, and gaze upon the face of the dead.

  She stepped backwards in shock as she tugged the helmet from the dead man. Her breath caught hard in her throat, her heart racing with the sudden fear she felt.

  No men, these, who lay dismembered and lifeless about her. Despite the horrific masks of death they wore, their faces were hideously unmanlike—wide-eyed, slit nosed, with mouths that opened slackly like empty gashes across the face; row upon row of vicious pointed teeth lay within those putrefying cavities, like fish, like the man-eating fishes of the eastern lakes.

  The dead eyes that watched her were not dulled and lifeless as a man’s would have been, but shone bright, crystalline. When Raven touched one with the point of her sword the eye cracked and shattered with a think tinkling sound; no ichor dripped from the broken orb, but a thin stream of silvery dust trickled down the sallow, grey skinned cheeks.

  A voice in her skull said, “Sit against the tree, Raven. Fear not these dead things, nor that they represent an evil. Sit against the tree and place your hands to the ground beside you.”

  “What place is this?” she called defiantly, afraid to place herself in a position where she would be hard put to defend herself. “Not Kharwhan, I think…”

  “This is the isle of Rigghazelt, in the Ocean of Illusions, in the Sea of Far Seeing, in the outlying mists of Kharwhan. Lean against me, Raven; trust me, trust your body and your sight to Rigghazelt. No harm will come to you, but a task, a sense of fear, and a step towards the understanding of this place you rule and yet do not rule.”

  Suddenly calmed, Raven turned her back to the great tree and leaned against it, slowly sinking to a tense crouch against the gnarled and windbeaten bark. She allowed her hands to touch the soil beside her body, and after a moment let her head lean back against the tree; her legs, at first drawn up in anticipation of a swift exit, gradually relaxed, spread before her so that they came more fully into the warming sun.

  She closed her eyes.

  At once she felt the roots of the tree, and the cool earth below her body, shift about her, rise up to enclose her. Her fingers seemed to extend down into the turf, deeper, deeper until it seemed she touched the hard rock, a man’s height below the surface. Tendrils of the tree wrapped about her legs, snaked upwards, coiling about her, squeezing through the tight bindings of her clothing to enter the secret places of her body so that she gasped, startled by the intimacy of that touch, and stirred by the pleasure of it.

  Her hair she felt tugged, drawn into the bark, and she let her head go backwards, felt the pungent wood close about her, draw her up as the sap is drawn from root to vein of leaf.

  She sensed herself rising, and spreading. She opened her eyes and was startled; she was above the ground, peering out across the world through the shimmering, rustling foliage of the giant tree. Her limbs were extended along the limbs of the tree, so that a million fingers touched and toyed with the rising air beyond the leaves; her legs sank down into the world, her toes, a thousand of them, felt the ragged contours of the bedrock, her eyes became the eyes of the tree and she saw for miles, saw beyond the horizon to where clouds swept across the jagged cliffs of a place that might have been Kragg.

  Far below she saw the tiny wolf boat, its crew in bustling ant-like activity.

  “I am higher than the top of the tree,” she said.

  “You are going higher yet,” came the whispered voice of Rigghazelt. “Your eyes are our eyes, and our eyes are those of the seeds we cast about the world. Wherever the seeds are carried, so are the eyes of the tree. Where the seeds fall, there are we limited. See the Worldheart as we see it, Raven, and know the lands where your sword, your skill, and your destiny are so important.”

  And as she watched she saw the eastern lands of the Worldheart, the sprawling port of Lym, even now playing host to a fleet of the Altan M’rystal’s war vessels. Then, as she soared like some bird, she saw the deserts of Lorn, and the winding river of the Nachta; she was across the fertile lands of the Altanate, watching the tiny sprawled cities down below, the clustered houses and narrow streets of Balim and Gath and Kyal. Up then, to where the ice river flowed so low, so cold, and the frost-capped mountains where she had known, and lost, the strange traveler Moonshadow as he followed his bizarre destiny. She saw, with the seeds, the dead coastlines of Quwhon, the tiny settlements of the miners, who hacked out ore from the land for their precious steel; a wolfship was there, perhaps Lifebane himself; further set off shore as if terrified to even approach the coastal waters, there were two ships from the City State of Sara—what misdeed was in their mind, Raven wondered, that they should feel it necessary to bargain for Quwhon steel?

  Abruptly she was high above the Dark Island that stood off from the tribal lands of the northwest, watching the sea break hard against the cliffs. Where the shore line was more gentle there were fleets of tiny ships even now drawing in their nets from the warm waters of the Echo Bay. She saw the tribal lands, and their clustered villages, the great sprawling stone forts, and high earth ramparts. There were the stark watchtowers of the tribes, and the sacred grounds with the earth itself carved into the faces of the Gods. She saw riders and warriors, small skirmishes, and large bands of men moving through forests or gorges.

  These lands were always at war, but the tribal wars were cyclical and never broke beyond the borders or the rivers that contained these violent and noble peoples.

  Beyond these lands was only mist, and the half glimpsed peaks of mountains that Raven knew were at the World’s End itself.

  And yet her vision remained upon those unknown hills, and the Lost Lands beyond the haze of distance.

  “There has been a breaching of the Wall of the Rim,” said the voice of the island. “Dark forces from beyond the World’s End are now within the lands of the Worldheart. They have come through these mountains and are at present in the hostile lands of the tribes, hidden from us, gathering strength in a way we do not know.”

  “The Wall of the Rim?” said Raven, puzzled and intrigued. “What wall is that?”

  “The Wall contains the whole of the world; an invisible barrier against the unknown, a wall of mental energy erected in the distant past to protect us until our distant future. What lies beyond is unknown and unknowable, and yet something has come through, some force of Order, some bestial energy that seeks to engulf the lands of the Worldheart, the whole of the world. These creatures that lie dead below you were the guardians of the wall, and by their armour and their bodies, we can tell that they come from the east, from beyond the lands of the Sorvim. It is the old way that when the wall is threatened the guardians, as they fall in their defence of the Worldheart, are brought to this place. The wall is forever broken, Raven. You must join with Spellbinder and seek the cause of the breach, and the nature of the darkness that has come through.”

  Spellbinder! Raven’s heart surged at the whispered sound of his name. Where was he, she wondered, where was her enigmatic warrior lover?

  The World’s End mountains seemed to shimmer and fade, some heat haze, perhaps, or the rising veil of a dust storm. A shadow had passed across the lands of the northern tribes, and across the coastal waters and the forested lands of Ishkar, as far north as the ice wastes along the river called Frostwater, and even further, into the still mysterious wastes of Quwhon—that far did the shadow of fear spread, a shadow caused by no light, no sun, but an imaginary shadow cast by the invisible presence of something evil.

  The voice of Rigghazelt, the voice—she was sure—of Kharwhan, had not finished with her, but reminded her now of that which she so often put from her mind.

  “You are Raven, Chaosbringer. Remember the words, Raven, remember the words you heard when you were yet Su’uan, a slavegirl, still pained from the shackles of slavery, still heart-lost with the death of your parents…remember Raven: you are the axis of this world, and upon you depends the flow of things. The world is a river, a watershed, and you, Raven stand astride it. The waters curl about you, shaped by you, as the future is shaped by your existence. These things confuse you and this is as it should be. You were marked apart from the rest of man even before you were born; you are blessed, Raven, and you are cursed, for you are the infinitely small that controls the infinitely large. You are the balance of the Worldheart, but now that balance is threatened in a way that has confounded us, and forced us to call you here to this place that you believe, rightly or wrongly, to be the place that speaks to you in dreams.

  “Raven, you may go where we may only see, and you may go beyond, far beyond. There are things that we would have preferred kept from you. Perhaps we shall again take them from you. Out of weakness comes strength, but a strong heart does not always support a strong hand. Be guided by those that have always guided you—the mage, the bird, but most important be guided by your instinct. In the lands of the tribes there exists a Tower, made all of obsidian, that contains a forbidden knowledge. There is one in the tribal lands who can take you there, and it is to him you must go now to meet. The knowledge of the Tower is imperative.”

  There was no more. It seemed to Raven that the oceans grew dark, that a storm tossed her about as she stood rooted to the ground, her arms outstretched, her hair entwined on the wind.

  Then she was falling. The shoreline was below here, and the tiny wolfship and its ant-like crew seemed to rush upwards to meet her. Her stomach turned over with a moment’s panic; there was a second of blindness, and when she could see again she found herself standing before the astonished form of Guayne Targda.

  She laughed at his surprise and shock, then slapped him on the shoulder.

  “North eastwards,” she said. “And then I shall release you back to your plundering ways.”

  Targda nodded in dumb agreement.

  Two

  My love is far colder than frosted steel

  My heart beats only for war

 

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