Sorcery Rising Read Online Free PDF Page A

great cat on a silver chain. Falla the Merciful – that’s what they called her: a misnomer if ever there was one, since in her name the southerners burned unbelievers and wrongdoers by the thousand, sacrifices to appease her and hold at bay the molten heart of the world.
    Sur’s Castle. Her fingers began to itch. She’d go and look at it first thing the next morning: there would surely be a route by which she could climb to the top. Fighting and jewellery and monster-skins –
and
a new rock to climb: truly the Allfair was a wondrous event, to encompass such diversity.
    She lay there, smiling at this thought, until she became drowsy. When at last she closed her eyes, she dreamed that she could feel the pull of the great rock deep inside her, as if it was somehow a part of the Navigator’s Star and she nothing but a lodestone, drawn to it through a dark sea.
    At first light the next morning, Katla kicked off the sealskin and crept away from the camp like a fox from the coop. In this area of the shoreline, no one else stirred. Up the shore she went, as fast as she could, the loose black ashy ground loud beneath her feet. In the shadow of Sur’s Castle, she stared up. The great rock reared over her, enveloping her in its chill shadow, seeming higher, suddenly, from here – and steeper, too – than her first assessment of it from the beach. Dark clouds had gathered above it, promising rain: she’d have to be quick. Her stomach fluttered and her heart gave a little thump: a familiar reaction before she attempted a climb, but a useful one, she’d found: anxiety tended to sharpen her concentration. Above her stretched a vertical chock-filled fissure – the most obvious line of ascent as far as she could see. It looked wide enough in places to jam a knee for balance, narrowing down to a crack that should accommodate a fist above the halfway mark. On either side of the line, little rugosities could clearly be seen where the crystals in them caught the early light:
useful footholds
, Katla thought. She reached up and found her first handhold: a jagged flake just inside the crack. It felt cold and a hole damp beneath her fingers: sharp, too, but solid. As she took hold of it, a line of energy ran through her hand and jolted up her arm. For Katia, this had become a familiar sensation: this magical connection with rock and stone and the minerals they bore. She waited until the burst of energy had charged through her chest and up into her head, waited for the disorientating buzz to die away, and then gave herself to the rock. Letting the hold take her weight, she swung a foot up into the crack.
    The move off the ground was always the hardest. Once established in the fissure, she readjusted her balance and went easily upward, hand over hand, methodical and careful, occasionally stepping outside the crack for better stability when the angle became too steep. The texture of the stuff reminded her of the sea-eaten cliffs back home: all pitted and sharp-edged from the corrosive appetite of the waves, and as painful on the skin as barnacles. She could feel it biting into the soles of her feet even through the leather. Sur knew what her hands would look like by the top, even though she’d been placing them with more consideration than usual. It was not that she was a vain girl – far from it: but there would be awkward questions to answer if she came back covered with cuts and scrapes.
    The sheer pleasure of the climb soon erased any sense of worry: past the halfway mark it started to rain; but the angle of the rock eased so that she was able to stand in balance and look around, taking in the brightly-coloured tents of the other Fair-goers, their wax-treated surfaces repelling the drops of water that pattered down upon them. She had never before seen such vibrant shades: in the islands the only eye-catching dye you could produce was a rather putrid yellow that appeared to have been obtained by soaking your clothes in pig’s urine