Free C. Dale Brittain by Voima Page A

granite with a deceptively warm light.
    Here she had to go very carefully, testing each step before she shifted her weight.   Several times as she started to pull herself up a piece of rock broke loose and plummeted back toward the valley, sending the birds whirling dismayed out of their nests.   If she fell, she thought grimly, Valmar would have trouble finding enough of her body to make it worth carrying the pieces back down to her father.
    Her heart was beating so hard it shook her whole body as she reached up again and again in search of a solid grip, forcing her battered feet to follow.   But then suddenly she realized that the slope against which she pressed was less steep, that she was crawling more than climbing.   She raised her head.   The air was darkening, though the sky above was still light, and she had reached the top.
    If there was a Wanderer here, she certainly did not see him.   She scrabbled away from the edge and stretched out in the minimal wind protection a large stone provided, sucking at a deep scratch on one wrist.   The cool air quickly dried her sweat.
    “Are you an outcast?” came a quiet voice behind her.
     
    She spun around, wrapping her arms around herself and keeping her knees together, suddenly deeply ashamed to be found undressed.
    But the Wanderer—if it was a Wanderer—gave no sign that he had noticed.   He sat on a stone a short distance away, his face hidden by a wide-brimmed hat, seeming to look northward toward the sea.
    Karin stared at him as though paralyzed.   She had been so glad to reach the top of the hill alive that she had forgotten that she would have anything else to fear.   But if the Mirror-seer was right, this was one of the immortal lords of voima who controlled mortal destinies, whose power over earth and sky, life and death, was limitless.
    Somehow she had expected him to look more impressive.
    Then she found her voice, forcing herself to speak without trembling.   “I seek information.   I regret that I have climbed up here nearly naked, with nothing to offer you, but I have come because I am trying to find Roric No-man’s son.”
    As she spoke she wondered wildly if he might be right, that she really was an outcast.   She had been taken out of the only home she had known for ten years, to be returned to the home that had sent her away.
    The man chuckled.   “Then you and I seek the same thing.”
    She took a moment to analyze this.   “You do not know where Roric is?   But he left to go with the Wanderers!”
    “When you say he left,” said the man a little sharply, “what exactly do you mean?”
    Karin frowned.   Wherever Roric was, this person ought to know it.   “I mean that a being came and summoned him away from home, and no one has seen him since.”   The twilight was rapidly hastening toward dark.   Either a late-flying bird or a bat darted past her head.   “Those who saw it, said the being had no back.”
    The man in the wide hat, sitting half turned away from her, certainly had a back.   But as she finished recovering her breath, trying unsuccessfully to see his face—if he even had one—the chill that gripped her went far deeper than the touch on her skin of the evening air.
    He did not answer for a moment.   “Then I fear we will not be able to use him,” he said at last, with what sounded like a sigh.   “We do not force mortals against their will, and he has made his choice.”   Something about his voice sounded, not aged or creaky, but still extremely old.
    “But where is he?” Karin cried.
    “You, on the other hand,” he said, not answering her question but turning fully toward her for the first time, “might be useful to us.   It is a rare person who has the strength and the will to climb this high, seeking someone who might be nothing more than a shadow.”
    She thought she felt his eyes on her, but she was now too angry and too disappointed to feel shame.   “I do not intend to become