The Stone of Farewell Read Online Free PDF Page A

when Simon found it very hard to converse with veiled and roundabout Prince Jiriki. How might it be for a straightforward soldier like Haestan, who had not been trained, as Simon had, on the maddening circularities of Doctor Morgenes?
    “Is this where the king of the trolls lives?” he asked aloud.
    “And the queen of the trolls, as well,” Jiriki nodded. “Although they are not really called a king and queen in the Qanuc language. It would be closer to say the Herder and Huntress.”
    “Kings, queens, princes, and none of them are what they are called,” Simon grumbled. He was tired and sore and cold. “Why is the cave so big?”
    The Sitha laughed quietly. His pale lavender hair fluttered in the sharp wind. “Because if the cave were smaller, young Seoman, they would doubtless have found another place to be their House of the Ancestor instead. Now we should go inside—and not only so that you can escape the cold.”
    Jiriki led them between two of the centermost statues, toward flickering yellow light. As they passed between pillarlike legs, Simon looked up to the eyeless faces beyond the polished bulges of the statues’ great stone bellies. He was reminded again of the philosophies of Doctor Morgenes.
    The Doctor used to say that no one ever knows what will come to them—“don’t build on expectation,” he said that all the time. Who would ever have thought someday I would see such things as this, have such adventures? No one knows what will come to them....
    He felt a twinge of pain along his face, then a needle of cold in his gut. The Doctor, as was so often the case, had spoken nothing but the truth.
     
    Inside, the great cavern was full of trolls and dense with the sweetly sour odors of oil and fat. A thousand yellow lights blazed.
    All around the craggy, high-ceilinged stone room, in wall-niches and in the very floor, pools of oil bloomed with fire. Hundreds of such lamps, each with its floating wick like a slender white worm, gave the cavern a light that far outshone the gray day outside. Hide-jacketed Qanuc filled the room, an ocean of black-haired heads. Small children sat pickaback, like seagulls floating placidly atop the waves.
    At the room’s center an island of rock protruded above the sea of troll folk. There, on a raised stone platform hewn from the very stuff of the cavern floor, two smallish figures sat in a pool of fire.
    It was not exactly a pool of pure flame, Simon saw a moment later, but a slender moat cut into the gray rock all the way around, filled with the same burning oil that fueled the lamps. The two figures at the center of the ring of flames reclined side by side in a sort of hammock of ornately-figured hide bounded by thongs to a frame of ivory. The pair nested unmoving in the mound of white and reddish furs. Their eyes were bright in their round, placid faces.
    “She is Nunuuika and he is Uammannaq,” Jiriki said quietly, “—they are the masters of the Qanuc ...”
    Even as he spoke, one of the two small figures gestured briefly with a hooked staff. The vast, packed horde of troll folk drew back to either side, pressing themselves even closer together, forming an aisle that stretched from the stone platform to the place where Simon and his companions stood. Several hundred small, expectant faces turned toward them. There was much whispering. Simon stared down the open length of cavern floor, abashed.
    “Seems clear enough,” Haestan growled, giving him a soft shove. “Go on, then, lad. ”
    “All of us,” Jiriki said. He made one of his oddly-articulated gestures to indicate that Simon should lead the way.
    Both the echoing whispers and the scent of cured hides seemed to increase as Simon made his way toward the king and queen...
    —Or the Herdsman and Huntress, he reminded himself. Or whatever.
    The air in the cavern suddenly seemed stiflingly thick. As he struggled to get a deep breath he stumbled and would have fallen had not Haestan caught at the back of his