Forest Mage. Робин Хобб
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it of the optical illusion and tried to focus my mind on the real puzzle: What kept it in place? Given its mass and how it leaned, why hadn’t it fallen ages ago?
I had been certain that a closer view would reveal the trick of it. But now, standing as close to the base as I could get without tumbling into its well, I was as puzzled as ever. A lone tower edged with winding steps spiralled up to almost reach the lower side of the tilted Spindle’s topmost tip. I resolved that I would hike to the standing tower and climb the stairs. It looked as if the tower came so close to the Spindle’s tip that I could actually put my hands on it, to prove to myself that it could not be rotating. All thoughts of keeping this side trip to a brief detour had vanished from my mind. I would satisfy my curiosity at all costs. I lifted my eyes to pick out the best route over the broken land and immediately saw a faint footpath across the stony earth. Obviously, I was not the first gawker to have such an ambition. Confident that Sirlofty could mind himself, I left him standing and followed the track.
When my path led me directly beneath the Spindle and through its shadow, I went with trepidation. At the heart of the shadow, the day seemed to dim. I could swear I felt a distant chill wind, manufactured of the Spindle’s turning, brush my cheek. I felt in my chest rather than heard the deep rumbling of the Spindle’s eternal motion. The ghost wind seemed to slide a hand across the top of my head, stirring an uncomfortable memory of how the Tree Woman had caressed me. I was glad to step out of that shadow and away from those strange fancies, even though the day now seemed brighter and the sun too hot on my skull.
My path was not straight, but wandered through the broken walls and sunken roads of the fallen city that intersected my route. The stubs of the walls gave witness to the half-breed guide’s claim that the Spindle was a man-made wonder, for some were built of the same reddish stone as the Spindle and still bore odd patterns, an alternation of checkering and spirals, at once foreign and familiar. I walked more slowly, and began to see the suggestions of sly faces eroding from leaning slabs of wall. Hollow mouths fanged with now dulled teeth, carved hands reduced by time to blunt paws, and voluptuous women whittled by the wind to become sexless boys teased my eyes.
I climbed up on one corner of wall and looked around me. From that vantage point I could almost make sense of the tumbled walls and collapsed roofs. I jumped down and once more began to thread my way through … what? A temple town? A village? A graveyard of ancient tombs? Whatever it was, it had fallen, leaving the Spindle and its tower to lord it over the time-gnawed remains. How could a folk with tools of stone, bone and bronze have shaped such a vast creation? I even considered giving the guide a hector on my return, to see if he had a believable answer to the question.
When I reached the base of the tower, I discovered two things. The first was that it was in much poorer condition than it had seemed from a distance. The second was that it was not a proper building at all. It consisted only of a spiralling stair that wound up and around a solid inner core. You could not enter the tower at all; you could only ascend to its peak by the outer stair. A crude barrier of ropes and poles had been thrown up in front of the tower’s first step, as if to warn people off. I paid no heed to it. The lips of the stairs were rounded. The centre of each step dipped, tribute to the passage of both feet and years. The walls of the stair’s core had once been tiled with mosaics. Glimpses of them remained: an eye and a pair of leering lips, a paw with claws outstretched, the fat-cheeked face of a little child with eyes closed in bliss. Round and round I climbed, ever ascending. I felt a giddy familiarity yet could recall no similar experience in my life. Here, in the mosaic, the head of a red and black croaker bird gaped its beak open wide. Then, a tree, arms reaching up to the sun with its face turned to its rays. I had passed it by a dozen steps before it came to me that a tree should have neither arms nor a face. There was 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 centre 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 near by.
‘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 spiralled 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 knew the source, no plainsman would ever unleash this magic against the Specks of the mountains again. I’d see to that. All their harvested magic was at the tips of my fingers. I laughed aloud, triumphant. I would destroy—
I strained, striving to grip what I could not see. It was too strong. I was abruptly flung back into my body with a jolt as shocking as if I’d been flung to my back on paving stones.
‘… to the edges of complete power. It is not a journey for the unprepared.’ The plainswoman finished her sentence. She was smiling, sharing a silly old superstition with me.
I swayed and then folded onto my knees. I saved some of my dignity by collapsing back onto my heels rather than falling on my face. My hands, I saw, rested on faded patterns carved