The Stone of Farewell Read Online Free PDF Page A

ram’s horns, and great tusks pushed out between their lips. So worn were they by centuries of harsh weather that their faces were all but featureless. This gave them, to Simon’s startled eye, not a look of antiquity, but rather of unformed newness—as if they were even now creating themselves out of the primordial stone.
    â€œChidsik UbLingit,”a voice said beside him, “—the House of the Ancestor.”
    Simon jumped a little and turned in surprise, but it was not Haestan who had spoken. Jiriki stood beside him, staring up at the blind stone faces.
    â€œHow long have you been standing there?” Simon was shamed to have been so startled. He turned his head back to the entranceway. Who could guess that the tiny trolls would carve such giant door-wardens?
    â€œI came out to meet you,” Jiriki said. “Greetings, Haestan.”
    The guardsman grunted and nodded his head. Simon wondered again what had passed between the Erkynlander and the Sitha during the long days of his illness. There were times 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?
    â€œIs this where the king of the trolls lives?” he asked aloud.
    â€œAnd 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.”
    â€œKings, 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.
    Â 
    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.
    â€œShe is Nunuuika