Sorcery Rising Read Online Free Page B

for washing, but she wouldn’t say so.
    ‘A foreign land . . .’ she whispered, awed.
    ‘Aye, and a load of bastard Istrians,’ Fent said under his breath.
    ‘To the south, sweet and fair
    They lie, slumbering and fat
    Ripe meat for the wolf.’
    He didn’t need a knotted string for that one. Yet how his father could be so blithe at the sight of the old enemy’s land, he could not understand. He turned to make further comment, but Aran was already calling for the rowers as he ran back along the deck, nimbly skirting the boxes of cargo, the cook-fire, the startled crew. With a dark look at Katla, Fent followed his father and took up his oar-place with the others.
    Katla watched as the great striped sail was taken down and furled as they came into the shallower waters. All over the ship, men leapt to their tasks. She saw her father take his customary position at the steerboard to guide them in through the reefs and the long, grey breakers and turned her face back to the new land.
    The Moonfell Plain.
    A place from legend.
    It had taken hours, it seemed, to make camp. By the time they had unshipped the two skiffs and put in to shore, the Navigator’s Star was shining brightly in the sky. Lying on the strangely still ground, tired to the bone, Katla had been unable to sleep for the sheer novelty of it all. She’d heard about the Allfair for as long as she could remember – all the lads’ tales of horse-fights and boulder-throwing and swordplay; the gossip, the trading stories, the marriage-makings, the lists of extravagant-sounding names and internecine political allegiances. And she’d seen with her own eyes the intricate silver jewellery her father brought back for her mother when trading had gone well for him: and the monstrous, shaggy yeka-hides that covered their beds at home in the winter months – but this was her first Allfair and she could not wait for it to begin.
    Wrapped in a sealskin with the pelt turned to the inside for warmth, she peered over the snoring bodies towards the distant campfires of the fairground and gazed again in awe at the great rock that rose steeply from the plain, illuminated by the flickering light.
That was what she had felt, all those miles out at sea
, she knew it now, twisting around to stare at its massive presence. It must be, she realised with a little thrill of excitement, Sur’s Castle: hallowed ground. It was here – according to her folk, the Eyrans, the people of the north – where their god Sur had first taken his rest (having fallen from the Moon onto the surface of Elda) and surveyed his new domain. And having contemplated the whole great vista and found it sadly wanting, he had waded into the sea, thinking that by following the track of the moonbeams on the waves he might somehow find his way back home.
The Moon-path
, Katla thought, remembering Fent’s verse.
Poor Sur, lost and lonely in an empty land
. The god had marched right across the northern ocean, skimming stones on his way to take his mind off the numbing cold (and of such great size were the stones that he cast about him that they formed the islands and skerries of Eyra) until at last he had disappeared into the fogs at the edge of the world of Elda. There, resigned to the fact that he would never find his way back home, he had raised a great stronghold beneath the waves, deep down on the ocean bed. This, the Eyrans called ‘the Great Howe’, or sometimes ‘the Great Hall’. Lost sailors shared the long table there with Sur, it was said: and once one member of your clan had drowned and gone to the Howe, it was well known others would soon follow.
    Katla had heard that the Istrians had a different tale to tell. They had no love of the sea, and did not believe even in the existence of Sur, an appalling heresy in itself. Instead, they prayed to some fire-deity, a creature – a woman – rumoured to have come walking naked out of a volcano in the Golden Mountains, unscathed by the lava, leading a