his hands over his face)—Ambrosius, the pause was a brief one. He put his thumb, second finger, and forefinger around the focus and let an image form in his mind. The image formed also in the focus. A lesser maker would have had to see the focus to know that the image was forming: to concentrate on the details, execute the lines. But he was who he was. The image formed; he knew it; that knowledge was simply a recognition of his own strength.
When the image had fully formed in the crystalline focus, he exerted his will through the focus and the image appeared in the mist above. It was an image of the two dragons, coiled and writhing in midair, mirror-perfect reflections of Vild Kharum and Saijok Mahr.
The mechanism of the spell perceived its objects and wrapped itself around the images, leaving the real dragons free. For a moment he wished he had Gryregaest in his hands again: this would have been a battle to equal that night on Tunglskin!
Vild fell on him, breathing fire. The voices behind him called out, “Merlin, you are twice a traitor—”
The memories became too tormenting to bear. Morlock shook free of them, shouting that it was a lie: he was no Ambrosius, no traitor, no Merlin. It was only when the echoes of his own voice returned to him, as he lay in the ruined house, that he realized he’d been a fool. Soon afterward, he heard the speech of dragons.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Maijarra
One day it occurred to Deor that Morlock was dead. The thought came to him suddenly. It was too quick to be painful. He was polishing one of his gems. It was new work . . . and poor stuff. But better than he had grown before. He remembered that Morlock promised to help him with his gems, but never had the chance. Ah, well, he thought, the promise is at peace. The phrase was a ritual formula, referring to unkept obligations of the dead.
It surprised him a little that the idea did not surprise him. Yes, Morlock was almost certainly dead. The thought had a dense black finality to it, but no pain, not yet.
He finished polishing the stone and looked at it. Yes, it was bad. The color was not what he had wanted, and light passed through it milkily. He fell to thinking of the gems Morlock had grown: how fine they were, how large and full of light. Morlock had been incredibly gifted at that kind of making. Clever at it. It was a game. Once he had grown a gem with Deor’s name in it, written in runic letters. It hadn’t looked well—they both admitted that—but who else could have done it at all? Then there was that night he had blown up the work chambers, making the freakish flawed gem that Tyr still wore as a pendant. Deor laughed about that whenever he thought of it, and he laughed a little now.
There was some pain, now, though. Once Morlock, before he had reached his full growth, had burst into Deor’s workroom. “I need air!” he shouted. Deor dropped his tools and, an hour or so later, found himself following Morlock out of the unglazed window in the Eldest’s audience chamber. They crossed the ice lake atop Thrymhaiam, went through the Firehills and on to the Broken Coast, where the Whitethorns ran into the northern ocean.
They didn’t return for more than a year, because Eldest Tyr sent a message after them, commanding them to work at the trading house the clans had set up on the Broken Coast, to deal with the ships that came north from Westhold. Perhaps it was a kind of punishment, an exile, and perhaps it was something else. Perhaps the Eldest had already realized what Deor and Morlock himself learned more slowly: that Morlock would never be at peace under Thrymhaiam.
Now it would never be like that again. No one would ever stand outside his door at midnight shouting, “Air! Air!” It would never be the same. Or rather: it would always be the same now. Morlock had been a brief flash of light in Thrymhaiam’s caverns. Inevitably he had flickered and gone out.
“I need air,” muttered Deor, in a kind of rebellion. But it wasn’t true. The greatest part of him was content, even in grief, in the niche that the countless ages of Thrymhaiam’s history had provided him. For a time, though, he had shared the senseless painful freedom of