With the third stone was buried at the highest tip of the fissure, the Harper began the descent along the opposite edge of the bubbling rift, swinging wide to work around the crevasse that formed the next point of the star. Eventually the crumbled crack tapered to almost nothing. After leaping the dwindling gap, the Harper blindly crisscrossed the plain, stone in hand, searching out the juncture that would make it glow. With each stone, she despaired; it took longer to find the point where all the forces balanced. Just as she was beginning to wonder if she'd missed the mark, the glittering opal lit with its internal fire. Collapsing thankfully to her knees, the Harper buried the stone. Inside, her cracked rib throbbed as fiercely as ever, but her mind was now too dulled to the pain to even notice.
'The glittering orange winter sun, hanging barely over the mountain peaks on the opposite side of the glacier, reminded Martine of the need for haste. Darkness would come quickly as soon as the sun slid behind the peaks, and Martine still had one stone to place and camp to make. There was no hope of getting off the glacier today, so the Harper wanted to dig herself a shelter before darkness fell.
Her chest heaving from the long sprint, Martine reached her last goal, the southernmost tip of the fissure, only a few hundred yards from the glacier's edge. Sweat seeped out from under her parka hood to form ridges of sour frost in her eyebrows. The cloth mask that covered most of her cheeks and mouth was heavy with ice that grew thicker with each passing minute. Cold, fumbling hands shook the last stone from the pouch. The heart of the opal sparkled weakly in the setting sun. Holding it in her cupped hands like a precious child, Martine shuffled zombielike in questing arcs, searching for the stone's resting place. She mumbled curses against the coming nightfall, but the rising evening wind tore away every breath that escaped her lips so that she couldn't hear her own voice. The last of the passing sunlight disappeared before the advancing mountain shadows, taking with it any pretense of warmth the light had promised. The deep-throated roars of the geysers sounded like thunder in the chilling air. High overhead, the soaring spume sparkled in the receding sunlight till the glittering cystals looked like descending stars in the darkness. The wind-whipped frost flew thicker, each flake biting with more sting.
After how much distance she did not know, the stone suddenly swelled with light. Exhausted and cold, the Harper stood dumbly watching it at first, not comprehending the meaning of the blue-white fire she cupped in her hands. Only slowly did it dawn on her that this was it, the end of her task. In moments, she would set the seal and fulfill Jazrac's trust in her. She was sure the wizard was watching no, sensing for some ripple in the cosmic sea that marked the healing of this great wound in the earth.
"I'hank the gods!" she croaked through cracked lips as she knelt and scooped out a nest for the stone with excessive care. With both her thick mittened hands, she gingerly lowered the stone onto its bed. For a moment, she paused to admire how the stone glowed and throbbed in its cradle.
"The cinder," she muttered suddenly. "I must touch it with the cinder!" In her relief and admiration of the stone, she had almost forgotten the last step. Her fingers too rigid to work the strings on the little pouch, she tugged at the cords with her teeth until the neck was wide enough to shake the stone free. To Martine's terror, the cinderlike stone plopped into her palm, hung there precariously, and then fell to smack against the glowing opal with a resounding crack so sharp she was convinced both had shattered. Frantically the Harper tore off her mittens and scooped at the snow to retrieve the fallen key.
Just as she wrapped her fingers about it, the glowing opal swelled with brilliant white fire. Clutching the key, Martine
flung herself away from the flare, her sight dazzled. The blaze from the stone expanded outward like an immense, unshuttered lantern until the Harper, still sprawled in the snow, wrapped an arm over her eyes, but still she could not block out the glare.
Then the shape of the light changed, though not its intensity. The diffuse brightness that burned out all the shadows on the snow drew in on itself, tightening and crimping into, a brilliant ice-blue tendril. As if leaning against the wind, it stretched and strained in an arc that yearned toward the rift and then, with a sizzling roar, the beam lanced like some wizard's fiery missile in an arc that carried it straight for the rift's heart. The crackle echoed-no, was echoed, Martine realized by four other reports. Blue-white streaks like shooting stars returning skyward rose from four other points, each rocketing to a single rendezvous point in the sky. The five radiant arcs clashed over the center of the canyon in a brilliant display of sparks. Martine squawked and rose to run, only to stumble backward, tripping over her booted feet to land sprawled in the snow.
"Damn it, Jazrac, you could have warned me!" the Harper shouted in awe.
Flopping around, she blinked away the dazzling lights that hung on the inside of her eyelids and looked at the canopy strung over the canyon five burning blue beams that glowed as they hung suspended in the air. Pulsing waves of light rippled from the intensely glowing shafts, only to break like waves over the rift. The evening darkness rose and fell with each pulse, and at the moment of brightest glare, Martine could see the canyon center, only minutes before a seething pit, erupt into ever-widening waves. The rounded, hardening forms of the frozen waves reminded her of the iron drops that fell in gelatinous puddles from her father's forge when she was young. She lay there absorbing the light, feeling the magical wonder of it all.
What had Jazrac done to make those five stones, she wondered as the world crackled with the solidifying roar.
As the pulses grew longer, a grinding bass note sundered the calm, and lightning-lit air tingled with the ozone scent of disaster. Fresh tremors, stronger than those Martine had grown accustomed to, quavered through the ice, letting loose a rolling wave of ice-rending shrieks. It was as if in that moment all the ghosts and all the lost souls ever devoured by the frozen waste howled out their torment. The cacophony was accompanied by deep thunder that shook the woman down to her toes. From the rim, fractures fingered across the snow like streaks of lightning, zigzagging little puffs of powder tracing their manic paths.
"Damn you, Jazrac!" Martine howled, no longer amused. With a crack, the rim suddenly broke off and slid into the canyon, throwing up a wall of snow as the air rushed forward to fill the gap caused by the collapse. The fingering fissures raced closer toward Martine, and the ranger didn't wait to see what danger she was in but struggled to her feet and ran.
Behind her, the snapping, ripping cracks fanned out rapidly, lunging closer, as if trying to catch her heels in their frozen jaws. Once, twice, Martine faltered as the fierce pain in her ribs, almost forgotten since the morning, spasmed and locked her muscles and nerves in pain. Her throat no longer burned because it was too parched to breathe, too parched to spit. Fear drove her forward toward the safety of the glacier's edge, where her only plan was to plummet blindly into the dark void beyond.
With no more than a third of the distance crossed, the nipping fissures caught her. The fractures shot between her legs and raced ahead of her, reaching for the glacier wall. The hard ice field became a mosaic that abruptly began to shatter, each fragment tilting, reacting to the glacier's mad rush to reclaim what the rift had stolen. The
tremors that Martine vainly fled punched the ground out from under the Harper, throwing up shards around her. "No, by Tymora, not again!" Martine wailed as the ground slipped backward beneath her feet. Like a sailor washed overboard, she helplessly slid into the seething ice sea and rode down into its rough darkness: "Not twice in one day! It isn't fair!"