id="u9efc7c3c-eaeb-5a09-bbbc-38e30bee7d7e">
KATHARINE KERR
THE SPIRIT STONE
Book Five of The Dragon Mage
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2007
Copyright © Katharine Kerr 2007
Katharine Kerr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007128730
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007371167
Version: 2017-05-02
For all my readers without whom this series would not have existed
CONTENTS
Prologue: The Northlands Summer, 1159
Part I: Dun Deverry and The Westlands Spring, 983
In some sense, every magician is a weaver, merely one who works with invisible strands of the hidden light. With it we weave our various forms, just as a weaver produces cloth, and then stitch them into the images we desire, just as a tailor sews cloth into a tunic or robe. If we be journeymen in our craft, forces will come to inhabit our forms, just as a person will come to buy the tunic and place it over his body. But if we have plumbed the secret recesses of our art, if we are masters of our craft, then we can both weave the forms and place our own bodies within them.
The Pseudo-Iamblichos Scroll
Two men of the Mountain Folk sat on a ledge halfway up a cliff and took the sun. Below them, at the foot of a cascade of stone steps, a grassy park land spread out on either side of a river that emerged from the base of the cliff. Just behind them, a stone landing led to a pair of massive steel-bound doors, open at the moment to let the fresh summer air into the rock-cut city of Lin Serr. Kov, son of Kovolla, was attending upon Chief Envoy Garin, son of Garinna, while this important personage nursed a case of bad bruises and a swollen ankle. A few days previously Garin had been talking to a friend as they hurried down these same steps; a careless engrossment in the conversation had sent him tumbling down two full flights.
‘Sunlight’s the best thing for the bruises,’ Kov told him. ‘Or that’s what the healers told me, anyway.’
Garin muttered a brief oath, then continued blinking and scowling at the brilliant summer light. He’s getting old, Kov thought, ready to stay in the deep city forever, like all the old people do. At a mere eighty-four years, Kov was young for one of the Mountain Folk and still drawn by life above ground.
‘Well,’ Kov continued, ‘the sun’s supposed to help strengthen your blood.’
‘Doubtless,’ Garin said. ‘I’m out here, aren’t I?’
Kov let the matter drop. From where they sat, Kov could look across the park land and watch the workmen raising stone blocks into position on the new wall. The city sat in the precise middle of a horseshoe of high cliffs, dug out from the earth and shaped by dwarven labour. Eventually the wall would run from one end of the horseshoe across to the high watchtower at the other, enclosing the park land. Until then, armed guards stood on watch night and day. Everyone in Lin Serr knew that the Horsekin had been raiding farms on the Deverry border. Although no Horsekin had been sighted up on the Roof of the World in forty-some years, the Mountain Folk always prefer safe to sorry.
‘What’s that noise?’ Garin said. ‘Sounds like shouting.’
Kov rose to his feet and listened. ‘It’s the guards.’ He shaded his eyes with his hand and gazed across to the wall. ‘Strangers coming.’
A cluster of guards surrounded the strangers and led them across – four human men, leading riding horses and a packhorse. As they drew near, Kov recognized the sun blazons of Cengarn. One of the humans, a dark-haired fellow, shorter than his escorts, with the