Page 64 (1/1)
She knelt to set her palainst the earth As she rested there for the space of seven breaths, she let her ainst her skin When she let her awareness eh, she actually felt the pulse of the land through her hand, thin and fragile, worn to a thread But it was still there The land was still, barely, alive
With a finger, she traced the Rose of Healing into the dirt, brushing aside dried-up needles and desiccated splinters of pine bark so that the outline made a bold mark on the path Heat rose from that outline, and she stood quickly to step over it and into the sunlight
At first her voice sounded hesitant and weak, a frail reed against the ocean of silence that lay over the land
"By this ladder the " She took two il into the dirt "Then to the Sword, which grants us strength"
Three steps she forged forward now, and either perhaps the heat had increased or ht-headed, because soe disturbance had altered the air around her so that the air resisted her passage as porridge ht, poured down from the sky
She crouched, and drew "Third cohtened, the flowers flowing out fro, unearthly cast, as though they bloo other than material substance Poppies flared with impossible scarlet richness Lilacs lay a tender violet blush over swaying green stalks, shading into the coh the sun still rode high above her
She pressed forward four steps as a hazy gla she reached, searching for the ground at her feet It was hard now to see the path beneath her, but the dirt felt the same Into the cool soil she traced the next pattern
"Fourth lies the blacks the path, swirling around her knees as she took five steps forward Ahead, through the hazy shiure stood on the far bank, caught in athe rocks at the ford Even fronized the stocky body and distinctive face of one of the Ashioi, but the woear She looked utterly out of place and yet entirely fa before her
The fragrance of roses surrounded Liath, so dense it made her woozy
Was it dizziness? Or was that Ashioi wo Liath’s other tunic, the one she had folded away into the saddlebags thrown over Resuelto’s back just before she and Sanglant and the baby had tried to make their escape from Verna?
It was too late to stop now She couldn’t pause to find out the answer She had to go on
She knelt, and drew Rising, she spoke as she walked "The Throne of Virtue follows fifth"
The field of flowers expanded around her as though the clearing had breached the bounds holding it to the earth and had begun to spread up actually into the sky Cornflowers burned with a pale blue-fire lu lanterns, each one like a shard of the burning stone cracked and shattered and strewn a terrain she took six steps It was both hard to keep to the path and yet somehow impossible to step off of it
"Wisdom’s Scepter marks the sixth"
She was almost to the river Ahead, the flower trail melded and becaer resembled an earthly river, bound by its rock bed Like the River of Heaven, it strea upward, all blue and silver Vaguely, beyond it, or below it, she saw the shadows of those things that still stood on the land: a pale figure ae-covered rocks whose chaotic patterns nevertheless seemed to conceal unspoken secrets, withered trees so dark that they seemed lifeless
She must not pause to look back Her feet touched the water, yet it was not water that swirled around her calves as she took seven steps forward She waded into a strea river of aether that flowed upward to its natural home When she thrust her hand into its depths, the currents pooled around her, swift and hot
She traced the outlines of the final sigil, the crown of stars Where her hand drew, the blue-silver effluence surged aith sparks of gold fire
"At the highest rung seek the Crown of Stars, the song of power revealed"
She cliht
The path opened before her, the great river spoken of by so ether the two hemispheres of the celestial sphere, as Theophrastus wrote? Or was the theory of Posidonos the correct one, that by its journey through the heavens it brought heat to the cold reaches of the universe?