Free The Dark Crystal by A. C. H. Smith Page A

completed his work by placing bowls of water here and there, laying out small pebbles with holes in them, and, at intersections, inserting prayer sticks. As the three shadows crept closer to their point of conjunction, at the head of the sand painting, the Scribe finally drew in wavy, fiery lines of energy around the icon of the Great Conjunction. Now the sand painting was a thing alive. The power of conceptual thought that urAc had poured into his work had to be consummated very quickly before it dispersed.

    The three shadows met, touching the icon. UrAc stood erect on his heavy hind legs and uttered a great cry. It was a cry of end and of beginning. As it was echoed by the rest of the urRu, around the valley, urAc obliterated the sand painting with one great sweep of his tail.

    Facing the suns low on the horizon, the urRu set up a full-throated nine-tone diapason. All the rocks and stones of the valley rang to it.

H aving escaped the evil claws of the Garthim, Jen was alone again. Through darkness, through wilderness, he had staggered away from the blazing Observatory until he reached marsh ground, where trees offered a kind of sanctuary from the dangerous world he had entered.

    He wished he were back with the urRu, playing in the waterfalls. He had been at peace, there – one with the valley and with them. Everything had been in its place, harmonious. Now, it seemed as though all that life had been a sleep, a forgetting. Expelled into knowledge of the world, he did not like it much. He feared that all his acts would prove to be widows of the dreams he had once had. He felt himself to be vulnerable, piecemeal.

    It was good to test oneself, and climbing the cliff had been a good test. Never again would he see anything as wonderful as what lay beneath Aughra’s dome. But the dread, the black Garthim, the doubts that Aughra had put into him, all that had fractured the soul he had carried intact within him from the valley.

    He was haunted by what he had seen of the Garthim. It was as though he had known them before, in nightmares. Had Aughra summoned them? he wondered. Certainly she had not wished them to destroy her Observatory, but perhaps she had expected them to attack Jen only. Then there was the question of the shard. Would she have let him take the shard away? And she had been frightened of the Skeksis, from whom, she had said, the Garthim were sent. Should he be frightened of them, too?

    He had so many questions, and no one to offer him answers.

    He had the shard, and no idea what to do with it.

    As the dawn light tinged the sky, one question preoccupied him most. Where should he go from here? If he walked farther into the swamp, he might never get out again. And yet, he dared not turn back. Would the Garthim pursue him forever? Would they drown in the bogs of this swamp? They had been untouched by fire.

    The light of day disclosed a fantastic swamp world to him. Trees trundled through the mud. Mushrooms spread gorgeous wings and whirred into flight. A fluttering butterfly was devoured by a long orange tongue flicked out from a drab stump of cactus. Puddles of liquid with a metallic sheen oozed from hollow to hollow by their own volition. It was like a laboratory in which forms of evolution were permuted. Jen saw hornets made of diamond deliver an appallingly ferocious attack on a serpent with a weasel’s face. They drove it into a hole in the swamp, which snapped shut. He concluded that some buried monster employed the hornets as a hunting pack, but for what commensurate reward? A bunch of flame-colored flowers hid their attractive heads from a bee by plunging themselves into the mire. For a period, shortly after sunrise, the air seemed to be charged with radiation that caused a static, crackling noise. While it lasted, certain creatures basked in it – silver worms, ginger wading-birds, animated thin sheets of something like creamy paper, and a clutch of small, furry, eight-legged animals huddling close