a little bag around his neck), it had only looked like someone polishing something: a pegasus someone, lying down, balancing the shining atom between his folded-under knees, polishing away with a series of cloths in his feather-hands, his pinions trailing (carefully) through the grass or on the floor under his belly. Until he decided it was finished, and let her look at it.
She was lying wrong: whatever was in the little bag around Ebon’s neck at present was digging into her back. She sat up to shift it.
Sorry, he said. But—oh. I wanted to show you. He bowed his head, and rubbed the ribbon that held the bag off over his head with his feather-hands, and then carefully spilled its contents on the ground. There were several of what Sylvi recognised as the polishing cloths—and one tiny gleaming stone. He picked this up. This one turned out really well. It almost . . . um. It’s pretty good for an apprentice. I wanted you to see it.
He held it out to her and she accepted it on her palm. It was darkest red, almost black, and the pinprick of its centre seemed to glow like the heart of a fire. This is some kind of—magic, she said. It was a soft sort of magic though, she thought. Soft not itchy.
Ebon frowned—ears halfback, head turned slightly to one side—I don’t think so. Well . . . there are words you say while you’re doing it. Different words for different cloths. He picked one up, and then another one, and handed them to her, and Sylvi could feel—faintly, subtly—that the two cloths had different textures. It’s a . . . it’s a . . . I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a little like learning stories or histories. You kind of go to a different place in your head. You go to a different different place from the lesson-learning different place to say the words while you’re polishing. And it was a shaman—several shamans—who made up the words originally, but that was thousands of years ago. Some of the words don’t exist any more, except in these chants.
Sylvi, fascinated, said, Could you tell me one of the chants?
Ebon looked surprised (drawing back of head, raising nose, slight rustle of feathers at the shoulders). Probably. We’ll have to stand up.
Usually we do it like this, and he put his feather-hands to her temples. This is the first one, the simplest one. These words are all normal. And then he began to make one of the funny almost-humming noises again, and Sylvi heard the words he was saying in her mind, as she usually heard Ebon, but they sounded strangely far away and slightly echoing, as if she were listening to her father addressing an audience in the Outer Court and she was at the back, next to the Inner Great Court wall.
And as she thought that, another picture began to cohere as if it were being built by the clean shining words Ebon was saying, and she closed her eyes to see it better. It bloomed from the blackness as if she had been walking in a dark place and had now stepped into light. Candlelight, firelight, light flickering off the glossy black flank of the pegasus standing just in front of her, polishing, polishing, polishing some curve—some complex series of curves—on the wall in front of him; the flame-light made those curves flicker with movement, with life: a human woman stood, holding a sword....
With the sky we make this thing
With the earth we make this thing
With the fire we make this thing
With the water we make this thing
Here is sky
Here is earth
Here is fire
Here is water
Here is our making
Here
Here
Here
Here
He stopped humming. He took his hands away from her temples, but patted her face as he did so. Syl?
Oh, she said. Oh, I . . . oh . . .
Golden summer sunrise and blue winter sunset, he said, don’t tell me you had a vision.
Well . . . yes. I think so. Perhaps she had imagined it; she knew that this was to do with Ebon’s desire to be a sculptor, and the pegasus Caves—it was an obvious thing for her to imagine. But the black pegasus was bigger even than Ebon—and a human woman with a sword? She suddenly and powerfully did not want to tell him what she had seen.
Golden, he said wonderingly. Gold and blue. Well. That doesn’t happen all that often. It happened to me. It’s a