Free The Stone of Farewell by Tad Williams

alone in facing danger; the task of the herdsmen was just as perilous, since there were many large predators that had to be kept from the precious sheep. Binabik had once told him that the wolves and leopards, although a threat, were scarcely comparable to the huge snow bears, the biggest of them heavy as two dozen trolls. Many a Qanuc herder, Binabik had said, met a swift and unpleasant end beneath the claws and teeth of a white bear.
    Simon repressed a reflexive tremor of unease at this thought. Hadn’t he stood before the dragon Igjarjuk, grander and deadlier by far than any ordinary animal?
    He sat as late morning passed into afternoon, watching the life of Mintahoq as it lay spread before him, as simultaneously hectic yet organized as a beehive. The elders, their years of hunting and herding past, gossiped from porch to porch or crouched in the sun, carving bone and horn, cutting and sewing cured hide into all manner of things. Children too big to be carried off to the hunt by their mothers played games up and down the mountain under the old folks’ bemused supervision, shinnying up the slender ladders or swinging and tumbling on the swaying thong bridges, heedless of the fatal distances that stretched beneath them. Simon found it more than a little difficult to watch these dangerous amusements, but through all the long afternoon not a single troll child came to harm. Though the details were alien and unfamiliar, he could sense the order here. The measured beat of life seemed as strong and stable as the mountain itself.
     
    That night Simon dreamed once more of the great wheel.
    This time, as in a cruel parody of the passion of Usires the Son of God, Simon was bound helplessly to the wheel, a limb at each quarter of the heavy rim. It turned him not only topside-down, as Lord Usires had suffered upon the Tree, but spun him around and around in an earthless void of black sky. The stars’ bleak radiance blurred before him like the tails of comets. Something else—some shadowy, icy thing whose laugh was the empty buzzing of flies—danced just beyond his sight, mocking him.
    He called out, as he often did in such terrible dreams, but no sound came forth. He struggled, but his limbs were without strength. Where was God, who the priests said saw every act? Why should He leave Simon in the grasp of such dreadful darknesses?
    Something seemed to form slowly out of the pale, attenuated stars; his heart filled with awful anticipation. But what emerged from the spinning void was not the expected red-eyed horror, but a small, solemn face: the little dark-haired girl he had seen in other dreams.
    She opened her mouth. The madly revolving sky seemed to slow.
    She spoke his name.
    It came to him as down a long corridor, and he realized he had seen her somewhere. He knew that face—but who ... where... ?
    “Simon,” she said again, somehow clearer now. Her voice was filled with urgency. But something else was reaching out for him, too—something closer to hand. Something quite near...
    He awoke.

    Someone was looking for him. Simon sat up on his pallet, breathless, alert for any sound. But for the endless sighing of the mountain winds and the faint snoring of Haestan, wrapped in his heavy cloak near the coals of the evening’s fire, the cavern was still.
    Jiriki was absent. Could the Sitha have called to him from outside the cave? Or was it only the residue of dream? Simon shivered and considered pulling the fur coverlet back over his head once more. His breath was a dim cloud in the ember-light.
    No, somebody was waiting outside. He did not know how he knew, but he was sure: he felt tuned like a harp string, trembling. The night seemed tight-stretched.
    What if someone did wait for him? Perhaps it was someone—some thing—from which it would be better to hide?
    Such thoughts made little difference. He had gotten it into his head that he must go out. Now the need tugged at him, impossible to ignore.
    My cheek aches terribly,