Free Forest Mage by Hobb Robin Page A

graffiti, too, the ever-present proclamation that someone had been here, or that someone loved someone forever. Some of it was old but most of it was fresh.
    I expected to grow weary with the climb. The day was warm, the sun determined, and I was carrying more flesh than I’d ever had in my life. Yet there was something exhilarating about being up so high with nothing between me and a sheer drop to the rocky ground below the spire. With every step I took, the music of the spinning Spindle grew louder; I could feel the vibration in my bones. I felt the wind of its passage on my face. There was even a peculiar scent that I knew was generated by the stone’s movement, a warm smell, delicious, like singed spices. I stopped watching the stairs and looked up to the Spindle. I could see the striated stone core. It, perhaps, was still. But there was a hazy layer of air or mist that surrounded the Spindle, and it spun. I cannot explain the fascination and delight that this woke in me.
    The top of the tower culminated in a platform the size of a small room. A low stone wall edged it, but on one side a crack had corrupted it and the stone had eroded away to an uneven mound only about the height of my knee. I walked to the center of the platform and then stood, looking straight up at the tip of the Spindle above me. I am a tall man, but its stony heart was still out of my reach. It puzzled me. Why had they built this spire, to bring someone so close to the wondrous monument and still have it be out of reach? It made no sense. The wind of the spinning stuff’s passage was warm on my face and redolent with spice.
    I took a moment and stared out at the view. The ruined city was cupped in the canyon. The sightseers had disembarked from the wagon and stood in a respectful mob around the half-breed. I knew he was speaking to them, but not a sound reached my ears save the soft hum of the turning Spindle. I gazed up at it. I suddenly knew I had come here for a reason. I reached a slow hand up over my head.
    Suddenly, a voice spoke nearby.
    “Don’t touch it.”
    I jumped and looked to see who had spoken. It was the Plainswoman from the guide’s hut, or someone very like her. She must have followed me up the steps. I scowled. I wanted no company. My hand still wavered above my head.
    “Why not?” I asked her.
    She came a step closer to me, cocked her head slightly, and looked at me as if she had thought I was someone she knew. She smiled as she said jestingly, “The old people say it’s dangerous to touch the Spindle. You’ll be caught in the twine and carried—”
    My fingers brushed the spinning stuff. It was mist, said my fingers; but then the gritty stone surface swept against my hand. I was snatched out of my skin and borne aloft.
    I have watched women spinning. I had seen the hanks of wool caught and drawn out into a fine thread on a spinning wheel. That was what happened to me. I did not keep my man’s shape. Instead, something was pulled out of me, some spirit or essence, and was drawn as fine as yarn and wrapped around the immense Spindle. It twisted me as it pulled me into a taut line. Thin as string I was,and I spiraled around it like thread. My awareness was immersed in the magic of the Spindle. And in that immersion, I awoke to my other self.
    He knew the purpose of the Spindle. It pulled the widely scattered threads of magic out of the world and gathered them into yarn. The spindle concentrated the magic. And he knew the spire’s purpose. It gave access to the gathered magic. From here, a Plainsman of power, a stone mage, would work wonders. This spinning spindle was the heart of Plains magic. I’d found it. This was the well that not only the Kidona but all the Plainspeople drew from. The suppressed other self inside me suddenly surged to the fore. I felt him seize the magic and glory in the richness of it. Some he took into himself, but there was only so much this body could hold. As for the rest, well, now that he