Sorcery Rising Read Online Free PDF

but actually derived from an innocuous-looking lichen, scraped painstakingly and in vast quantity from the granite cliffs that formed the bones of her homeland. (Though it had to be said that even then, you did actually need a bit of urine to fix the colour so that it didn’t bleed down your leg in the first storm. It didn’t smell for too long. Only a week or so.)
    It was among these granite cliffs where Katla had first learned the magic that lay in the veins of the rock. It was there she had started to clamber around in such a casual fashion, barely conscious of the yawning gulf beneath her feet, the sucking maw of the ocean; the bone-shattering consequences of a fall. There, she’d collected gulls’ eggs in late spring; samphire in the summer. She’d fished from precipitous ledges and pulled line after line of iridescent mackerel out of secret zawns. And sometimes she’d just scaled the cliffs for the sheer pleasure of being somewhere no other person had set foot.
    Two more moves and she had her hands on the flat summit: using a sharp incut for her right foot to gain more height, she pushed down hard till her arms could take her whole weight, skipped her feet up the remaining stretch of rock; and suddenly she was on top of Sur’s Castle, on top of the world.
    Sitting there, with her feet dangling over the edge, with the Moonfell Plain stretching away below, a glorious sense of wellbeing descended upon Katla.
    So she was surprised and not a little dismayed when someone started shouting, apparently at her.
    ‘Oi, you there!’ The second shout was in the Old Tongue.
    She looked around.
    At the far western edge of the rock, a couple of elderly gentle men were climbing, haltingly and with great puffs of effort, a line of carefully-chiselled steps. Someone had thoughtfully arranged a pair of taut hemp handrails on either side of the stairs, and the grey-hairs were hanging onto these even as they bellowed at her. They both wore long dark-red robes with elaborately-worked brocade facings; even from her perch seventy yards away, Katla could see the silver thread glinting in the weak light. Rich men, then, she thought. Not Eyrans; at least like none she’d ever seen. The northerners could never afford clothes like that – they’d be worth a ship’s cargo apiece – and even if they could, they’d never climb a rock in them . . .
    ‘Get down from there at once!’
    The first of the old men had reached the top step and, lifting his voluminous skirts, was picking up speed.
    She cupped her hand to her ear and shrugged: the universal gesture for ‘can’t hear a word you’re saying’.
    Infuriated, the grey-hair waved his stick.
    ‘The Council and the Allfair Guard—’
    ‘Of which we are on the ruling committee—’
    ‘Indeed, brother. Of which we are on the ruling committe, have declared Falla’s Rock as sacred ground!’
    Falla’s
rock?
    The second had almost caught up with his fellow. He was shaking his fist at her. ‘You’ll pay for not showing the due observances, young man!’
    Young man? Katla’s mouth fell open in amazement. Young man? He must be blind. She stood up, and with aggressive haste unbound her hair. She always tied it into a tail when she climbed: otherwise it could be a damned nuisance. Unconfined, it fell around her shoulders in tumbling waves. At the same moment, as if to emphasise the point, the sun came out, so that the slanting rain became a shower of silver and Katla’s hair a fiery beacon.
    The second old man cannoned into the first.
    ‘Oh, Great Goddess, Lady of Fire, it’s— a woman!’
    They looked extremely unhappy.
    Katla, deciding not to find out exactly what it was that pained them so badly about the situation, made her excuses and left, reversing with considerable alacrity and no little skill the crack-line she’d just ascended.
    There was a saying that the old women had in the north (they had a saying for everything in Eyra: it was that sort of place): the heedful