The Other Wind Read Online Free PDF

said nothing for a while after he was done. Then the Summoner asked, “Have you thought what it means to cross that wall?”
    “I know I could not come back.”
    “Only mages can cross the wall living, and only at utmost need. The Herbal may go with a sufferer all the way to that wall, but if the sick man crosses it, he does not follow.”
    The Summoner was so tall and broad-bodied and dark that, looking at him, Alder thought of a bear.
    “My art of Summoning empowers us to call the dead back across the wall for a brief time, a moment, if there is need to do so. I myself question if any need could justify so great a breach in the law and balance of the world. I have never made that spell. Nor have I crossed the wall. The Archmage did, and the King with him, to heal the wound in the world the wizard called Cob made.”
    “And when the Archmage did not return, Thorion, who was our Summoner then, went down into the dry land to seek him,” the Herbal said. “He came back, but changed.”
    “There is no need to speak of that,” the big man said.
    “Maybe there is,” said the Herbal. “Maybe Alder needs to know it. Thorion trusted his strength too far, I think. He stayed there too long. He thought he could summon himself back into life, but what came back was only his skill, his power, his ambition—the will to live that gives no life. Yet we trusted him, because we had loved him. So he devoured us. Until Irian destroyed him.”
    Far from Roke, on the Isle of Gont, Alder’s listener interrupted him—“What name was that?” Sparrowhawk asked.
    “Irian, he said.”
    “Do you know that name?”
    “No, my lord.”
    “Nor I.” After a pause Sparrowhawk went on softly, as if unwillingly. “But I saw Thorion, there. In the dry land, where he had risked going to seek me. It grieved me to see him there. I said to him he might go back across the wall.” His face went dark and grim. “That was ill spoken. All is spoken ill between the living and the dead. But I had loved him too.”
    They sat in silence. Sparrowhawk got up abruptly to stretch his arms and rub his thighs. They both moved about a bit. Alder got a drink of water from the well. Sparrowhawk fetched out a garden spade and the new handle to fit to it, and set to work smoothing the oaken shaft and tapering the end that would go in the socket.
    He said, “Go on, Alder,” and Alder went on with his story.
    The two masters had been silent for a while after the Herbal spoke about Thorion. Alder got up the courage to ask them about a matter that had been much on his mind: how those who died came to the wall, and how the mages came there.
    The Summoner answered promptly: “It is a spirit journey.”
    The old healer was more hesitant. “It’s not in the body that we cross the wall, since the body of one who dies stays here. And if a mage goes there in vision, his sleeping body is still here, alive. And so we call that voyager . . . we call what makes that journey from the body, the soul, the spirit.”
    “But my wife took my hand,” Alder said. He could not say again to them that she had kissed his mouth. “I felt her touch.”
    “So it seemed to you,” the Summoner said.
    “If they touched bodily, if a link was made,” the Herbal said to the Summoner, “might that not be why the other dead can come to him, call to him, even touch him?”
    “That is why he must resist them,” said the Summoner, with a glance at Alder. His eyes were small, fiery.
    Alder felt it as an accusation, and not a fair one. He said, “I try to resist them, my lord. I have tried. But there are so many of them— and she’s with them—and they’re suffering, crying out to me.”
    “They cannot suffer,” the Summoner said. “Death ends all suffering.”
    “Maybe the shadow of pain is pain,” said the Herbal. “There are mountains in that land, and they are called Pain.”
    The Doorkeeper had scarcely spoken until now. He said in his quiet, easy voice, “Alder is a