To Green Angel Tower, Volume 1 Read Online Free PDF Page B

obviously had once been a settlement of rare and subtle beauty lay a strange tiled plateau. It was now largely covered with impertinent grass, but even by moonlight it still showed some trace of its original lushly intricate design. Geloë called this central place the Fire Garden. Simon, comfortably familiar only with the workings of human habitations, would have guessed it to be a marketplace.
    Beyond the Fire Garden, on the other side of the Leavetaking House, stood a motionless wavefront of pale conical shapes—the tents of Josua’s company, grown now to a sizable swell by the newcomers who had been trickling in for weeks. There was precious little room left, even on the broad tabletop summit of the Stone of Farewell; many of the most recent arrivals had made themselves homes in the warren of tunnels that ran beneath the hill’s stony skin.
    Simon sat staring at the flicker of the distant campfires until he began to feel lonely. The moon seemed very far away, her face cold and unconcerned.
     
    He did not know how long he had been staring into empty blackness. For a moment he thought he had fallen asleep and was now dreaming, but surely this queer feeling of suspension was something real—real and frightening. He struggled, but his limbs were remote and nerveless. Nothing of Simon’s body seemed to remain but his two eyes. His thoughts seemed to burn as brightly as the stars he had seen in the sky—when there had been a sky, and stars; when there had been something besides this unending blackness. Terror coursed through him.
    Usires save me, has the Storm King come? Will it be black forever? God, please bring back the light!
    And as if in answer to his prayer, lights began to kindle in the great dark. They were not stars, as they first seemed, but torches—tiny pinpoints of light that grew ever so slowly larger, as though approaching from a great distance away. The cloud of firefly glimmers became a stream, the stream became a line, looping and looping in slow spirals. It was a procession, scores of torches climbing uphill the way Simon himself had climbed up Sesuad‘ra’s curving path when he had first come here from Jao é- Tinukai’i.
    Simon could now see the cloaked and hooded figures who made up the column, a silent host moving with ritual precision.
    I’m on the Dream Road, he realized suddenly. Amerasu said that I was closer to it than other folk.
    But what was he watching?
    The line of torchbearers reached a level place and spread out in a sparkling fan, so that their lights were carried far out on either side of the hilltop. It was Sesuad‘ra they had climbed, but a Sesuad’ra that even by torchlight was plainly different than the place Simon knew. The ruins that had surrounded him were ruins no longer. Every pillar and wall stood unbroken. Was this the past, the Stone of Farewell as it once had been, or was it some strange future version that would someday be rebuilt—perhaps when the Storm King had subjugated all Osten Ard?
    The great company surged forward onto a flat place Simon recognized as the Fire Garden. There the cloaked figures set their torches down into niches between the tiles, or placed them atop stone pedestals, so that a garden of fire indeed bloomed there, a field of flickering, rippling light. Fanned by the wind, the flames danced; sparks seemed to outnumber the very stars.
    Now Simon found himself suddenly pulled forward with the surging crowd and down toward the Leavetaking House. He plummeted through the glittering night, passing swiftly through the stone walls and into the bright-lit hall as though he were without substance. There was no sound but a continuous rushing in his ears. Seen closely, the images before him seemed to shift and blur along their edges, as though the world had been twisted ever so slightly out of its natural shape. Unsettled, he tried to close his eyes, but found that his dream-self could not shut out these visions: he could only watch, a helpless