when the banefire failed.
It shocked her servants when she broke the wall. They had taken it, she guessed, as an act of despair. They thought, clearly, that it pleased her to make her final stand against the ancient horror at such a place.
In a way, of course, they were right. Things might end that way. But she did not feel they would. There was something else in the air. It went with the storm, with the clean cold winds the storm brought, with the sudden shocking light of thunderbolts in the snow.
The snow now covered the crooked black hill like a veil. As she waited for dawn in the storm, she wondered at the mysterious beauty of the hated hill in the rising light. The storm broke just before dawn, when there was still a dark blue brightness to the clearing sky.
In dawn’s light Tunglskin was more beautiful yet: a crooked white outline against the straight high peaks beyond. For long moments the Arbiter simply looked at it, then had to look away.
Not long after dawn the watchers’ horns began to sound. The first one sounded not twenty paces from her. Looking to the top of the hill, she saw that a figure was indeed making its way down the slope. She raised her own horn and sounded it, silencing the watchers. She sounded it again with a different call, telling her servants to stay at their posts at the base of the hill. Then she picked five to accompany her and began to climb toward the descending figure.
It was Morlock. They met about halfway up the hill. His face was like a muddy footprint in a field of snow.
He clearly had been through a mortal combat. There were black blisters and deepening bruises on his face. But beyond these he had a lost tormented look. The Arbiter heard her servants muttering ominously at her back, and not without cause; she had seen corpses dead from banefire that looked less damaged than Morlock did now. Nevertheless she was tolerably sure this was the man himself, not merely a new avatar for the Dead Cor. He carried the shield of Ambrose on his arm—and who but Morlock would look so dismayed at a legendary victory?
“Thain Morlock,” she said, “what’s wrong?”
He stared at her blankly, and when he answered it seemed no answer. “It’s dark,” he muttered. “Broken and dark.”
“But it’s not dark now,” she said. “The sun has risen. Look! All around. Light.”
He looked at her in astonishment and shook his head.
“How fares the Dead Cor?” she asked.
He laughed, and for a moment she looked away. But she found she must look back; his unhappiness fascinated her.
“Regin and Fafnir were brothers!” He shouted it in her face and rushed by.
She nodded to herself. She remembered Morlock crying this aloud in trance some days ago. Whatever it meant (and she had no idea; the names were gibberish to her, perhaps some wormhugger thing), this was surely the other side of Morlock’s vision.
Some of her servants would have gone after Morlock, but she stopped them. If he had destroyed the Dead Cor, he would make short work of them, or so she guessed. And, if he hadn’t, she would need them here.
At the summit they found the Dead Cor’s grave still open to the sky, as if it were midnight instead of newest day. The veil of snow was humped in strange shapes within the grave, and the Arbiter forbid her people to enter there, lest they be snared by some lingering spell. She commanded them to sweep the rest of the area clear, hoping to find the remains of the Dead Cor.
Not long afterward one of her servants called her to the Broken Altar.
“He left the sword,” the servant told her.
“Gryregaest?” she said. “I wonder why.” She looked down on the sword-scepter, glittering like graven ice on the dark stone surface of the altar. The blade’s surface was bright, but there was none of that inner light the songs spoke of. There was no trace of snow on stone or sword.
“It’s broken,” the servant answered. “Look!”
With courage too reckless to be called commendable, he reached down and pressed the edge of the blade with his thumb. Then she saw that what she had thought to be a design engraved on the crystalline sword was in fact a pattern of fracture lines. The sword had been shattered, then the pieces put together like a puzzle. The sword was useless; it wasn’t even a