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The shimmering dots made Torak giddy, but he couldn't look away. The power of
the thing filled his mind, like the silent boom after thunder. Wolf felt it too, and set
back his ears. Even the reeds leaned away, fearing to touch. Torak remembered that
he still had Renn's swansfoot pouch, with his medicine horn inside and the strand of
her hair. What would she have done? The mark of the hand. Maybe that would
help.
The ochre in the horn was clogged with damp, and he had to spit in it to make it
runny; nothing would have made him use Lake water. Pouring the red liquid into
his palm, he daubed the mark on his cheek. He tried to do the same for Wolf--on
his forehead, so he couldn't lick it off--but only managed a crude smear. As he
finished, the humming in his head grew worse. Someone didn't like him using
earthblood.
Holding his breath, he edged past the post. Wolf followed, hackles raised. As they
passed it, the reeds stirred angrily, and the humming grew stronger. Torak reached
a turn in the walkway--and there, 125 guarded by club-headed reeds,
stoodthreeposts, their white eyes staring from mouthless faces of green clay.
Something slithered across his cheek. He dashed it away, and the walkway rocked
wildly. Too late, he saw that its far end had been untied and was floating free. He
lurched--righted himself---and backed into Wolf, who yelped and nearly fell in.
Trembling, they stood together, while around them the reeds rustled.
"What do you want?" cried Torak.
The reeds fell silent. That was worse. He shouldn't have shouted.
He made to go on--and caught his breath.
The posts were gone.
The reeds were different too. Those surrounding the posts had had brown club
heads, but these were a feathery purple.
With a shiver, Torak realized what this meant. It wasn't the posts that had moved, it
was the walkway. While he'd been fighting for balance, someone had rearranged
the logs.
For the first time since entering the reed-bed, it occurred to him to turn back. But
he couldn't, and that frightened him more than anything. His thoughts were no
longer his own. The mist had seeped inside his head. Here, in this nebulous half-
world which was neither land nor lake, he was losing his very self. 126
Wolf nose-nudged his thigh and gave an anxious whine. Torak glanced down--and
frowned. Wolf was trying to tell him something, but he couldn't understand. He,
Torak, who had learned wolf talk as a baby-he couldn't understand.
He stumbled on, with Wolf padding after him.
They hadn't gone far when the walkway forked. Each way was marked by a post.
The left-hand post had been beheaded; the right-hand one bore a green clay head,
but the eyes had been plucked out, leaving blind hollows. Tied around the brow
was a viper's shed skin. Skewered to it by a bone needle was a tiny, shriveled heart.
Seshru the Viper Mage.
Torak wiped icy sweat from his face.
Behind him he caught a flash of movement vanishing into the reeds. There, among
the leaves. White eyes.
"Who's there?" he said.
The eyes blinked--then reappeared on the other side of the walkway: blue-white,
flickering like flame.
"Who's there?" Torak whispered.
Eyes glowed all around him. The humming rose to an earsplitting whine.
Whimpering, Torak ran for the nearest walkway, the one with the viper skin. The
log shuddered-- tipped--and threw him off. The murky waters of the 127
Lake closed over his head.
Down he went, groping for reeds, walkway, anything. Couldn't find it, couldn't tell
up from down.
A splash and a flurry of bubbles as Wolf leaped in after him. Desperately Torak
swam for the flailing paws--but Wolf had disappeared.
Wolf! he screamed in his mind. But his pack-brother was gone. Frantically he swam
through a slippery mass of reeds. Suddenly there were no more reeds and the water
was freezing and he was swimming over bottomless dark. 128
FIFTEEN
Torak was woken by something slithering over his face. With a shudder he started
up--and glimpsed a scaly tail vanishing into the undergrowth.
He was lying on a pile of rotting pine-needles at the edge of a silent forest. Below
him, a beach of charcoal-colored pebbles sloped down to the flinty waters of the
Lake.
How had he got here? He couldn't remember.
The east wind whistled over the stones, making him shiver. His clothes felt gritty
and damp, and there was a humming in his ears. He was hungry and he missed 129
Wolf, but he didn't dare howl. He wasn't even sure if he could.
The mist had cleared, but an ashen haze robbed the sun of warmth. At the south end
of the beach, the reeds stood sentinel. Below him the Lake stretched to the edge of
sight, opaque and forbidding.
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