Free The Hammer of the Sun by Michael Scott Rohan Page A

weapon, upon the fixing of its cutting edge, he had sung that song. And he had sung it again over the instrument of his love.
    A new flood of fury filled her, overflowed in tears. "And the risk! How could you? What if those anklets had closed, other than on me? What then? And if they were ever opened again… You who broke Louhi's fetters on me, how I loved you for that! And then you, you sought to fetter me within myself!"
    Now Elof wept also, as he had not even in childhood, tears of shame and rage and scalding self-disgust. His own vast folly billowed up before him like a banner of blackness, and blindly he reached out to her through its enveloping folds. "Kara… I see now… I…" If he could reach her, hold her, tell her how much he had been at fault, then she might still forgive him.
    His hand clutched at her arm, closed around metal over warm skin. " Don't touch me !" she screamed, and with that astonishing strength she jerked away her arm. The metal caught in his desperate fingers, he felt it bend and break. Then the darkness seemed blasted from his eyes, and he was staring at her and she at him, wide-eyed with shock, unsteady on her feet. She was holding her arm as if injured. On the dark grass between them a shard of gold gleamed, a curved, distorted shape; and from between her fingers a broken end gleamed. The serpentine arm-ring of gold, Elof s first great work, his first gift to her and sign of hope between them, had broken in two.
    She stumbled back a pace, and even as he reached out to her once again she threw back her head and screamed aloud, a terrible shriek of grief and despair that echoed out around hill and water like the feelings that haunted them given fearful voice. All in that camp or aboard the ships, awake or sleeping, it brought instantly to their feet, hearts pounding, ridden by fear beyond thought and reason. Before those who had seen them the empty wastes of Taoune'la opened out once more, the Withered Lands; so the winds might cry there, with the voice of the imprisoned dead. So they might have stirred the cloak about her, so billowed it forth to reveal its inner blackness. Shadow enveloped her, she sprang and vanished. Wings of shadow beat upward into the night.
    With a cry of horror Elof snatched the Tarnhelm from his belt and clapped it on his head. The cry changed in mid-breath to the scream of an eagle, and into the heights he soared in her pursuit. There was starlight enough over the ocean for his keen eyes to pick out the black swan flying seaward, high and straight, never wheeling, never turning. After her he sped, feeling his wings bite into the wind, his keen head crest it like a speeding swimmer. Yet she flew fast, that strange creature, and even in seconds she had a lead of him he would find hard to break. And time was on her side…
    Far into the night they flew, till the land was no more than a streak of shadow far behind. Elof had looked back once, and dare do so no more, for the distance it had cost him; he was no nearer now than at the first. And already he could feel himself tiring, his masked form yearning for the lineaments of a man once more. Never once did he see her neck turn; did she even know she was being followed? So fast, so straight she flew, it made little difference. He had no voice to call her, and the call of his heart was emptiness. He had betrayed her, and brought about what he had most dreaded. What more could he do for her now but fly in her path till he reached its limits, or those of his failing strength? One way or another, he would find an end.
    How far he flew he never remembered, or for how long; but at some point some shred of sanity must have asserted itself. For his friends of the fleet found him at last, in the small hours of the morning, sprawled face down and soaking upon the tidal sands of Ancarvadoen. They feared him dead at first, but he breathed; and in one hand the Tarnhelm was clutched, with a grip they could not break.
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