Will set about making supper, and Reck resumed her fletchery. Angel breathed ever more shallowly. The girl sat silent in the corner. They remained that way, wordless and wary, until dusk, when Ruin came home.

Chapter 9. THE HEALER

RUIN FELT THE PRESSURE OF UNWYRM'S HATRED LIKE A WIND in his face. He fairly leaned into it, and grimaced at the pain of moving on. Had there been anyone to see him, he would have looked ridiculous, a naked, filthy, ungroomed gebling struggling to move through flat and grassy meadows in bright sunlight, torturing himself to stagger between trees whose branches easily bent out of his way.

But always, whenever Ruin set his face toward Cranning, there was a hurricane of resistance. He was the only gebling of all geblings who could not go home.

It was after two grueling days of this-pushing forward, stopping to rest, pressing on again-that he felt Reck's call to him. That loving touch that seemed to press like gentle fingers on his spine-Ruin had never told her how her call affected him; no other gebling had such power over him. Especially now, after days of Unwyrm's shout of rage: The whisper from Reck was unbearable.

Ruin stumbled to his knees and wept. Wept in anger- furious at Reck for calling him, furious at himself for not having the strength to ignore her call and fight on.

But he could not fight on. And after he lay in the grass by the stream for a few minutes or an hour, he crawled to the water and drank, then arose. For a moment he faced Cranningward; but the thought of another step in that direction was more than he could bear. He turned and went the other way. His feet were light under him. He loped through the woods and meadows, covering in minutes the ground that he had struggled through for hours.

All the while his sister was like a song in his mind, comforting him, calling him back to her.

Calling him, but not calling him home. There was no gebling alive who could call any of their humanlike houses "home." There was only one home for geblings;

The great city in the cliff, the mapless tunnels and delvings that reached a mile deep from the face of Skyfoot.

Cranning, a city with more inhabitants than most nations, peopled with men and dwelfs and gaunts but ruled by geblings, for only geblings held within their minds the indelible, unwritable memory of every turn of every tunnel in the place. Every stone in every cavern was familiar, even to geblings like Ruin, who had never set his foot on the stone, never tasted the cold water that flowed through the tunnels from the glacier above, never slept under the arch of darkness that was infinitely more comforting than the sky. Where Reck was. Ruin could be at peace; but outside Cranning, he could never be at home.

And while Unwyrm lived, how could Ruin ever get there? It was the quandary of his life, ever since he was a child and his mother explained who he was and what he had to do. "You are the most excellent of excellent blood, you and your sister, with the seeds of mastery in your souls. There is nothing you cannot learn, nothing you cannot do, no thought that cannot come into your mind like light out of the storm. You were born to be the best answer of the geblings to the terrible hatred of Unwyrm, our only hope to slay him, the two of you."

"Where do I find him?" asked the child Ruin.

"He lives at the heart of Cranning, where the lifeblood flows. He lives in the very womb of the geblings, the viper in our womb, to devour our babies as they are born."

"Then teach me the way to Cranning, Mother, so I can go and kill him!"

Then Mother wept, her long tongue hanging dejectedly from her mouth, its twin points glistening with her tears.

"How can you, of all geblings, not already know the way? Ah, Ruin and Reck, my son, my daughter, we made you to be the downfall of our enemy, but already he knows you and hides Cranning from you in your own mind."

When Mother died, Ruin and Reck wandered aimlessly in the world for a time. Each of them at once rejected and prepared for the work their mother had taught them they must do. Reck learned the arts of archery and could kill anything that she could see-but she refused to search for Cranning, denying that the place meant anything to her. She mocked Ruin for his endless effort to reach the place. "All dreams and visions," she said, "all foolish prophecies." But still she practiced with the bow in all her spare hours, and studied all the lore of Unwyrm that she could find among the geblings who traveled the river and came to take the hospitality of her house.

Ruin, in turn, would not become a killer. Instead he learned the arts of healing. He wandered in the woods, testing the herbs that grew there, using them to heal the sick and broken animals, the wounds caused by men and other beasts. When an herb was promising, he grew and nurtured it, taught it more of what he wanted it to do, and soon he had herbs that could drive away infections, root powders that could cure disease, berries that took away all pain. And he knew the inward shape of every body just by looking at its outward lines. The lizard and the Lion, the rubin and the grouse, he knew them, could cut them open and set them to rights. He could never have set his knowledge down in books, like humans did.

Poor humans-they lacked the othermind, the secret memory in which geblings hid their great learning even from themselves. If you asked Ruin what was wrong with one of his many patients, he could not tell you, for his manmind, his wordmind-it knew nothing of healing.

His wordmind could only speak, could only remember sights and sounds; he had no use for it. It was his othermind that he trusted, his othermind that he let rule him, and his othermind that held all his greatest gifts.

Except it was also his othermind that Unwyrm had found and forced away from Cranning. Only his weak and hated manmind could drive him forward, again and again, struggling for control of his legs and arms, in the endless vertical climb to meet his enemy. And when I meet him, what will I do? What am I fit for, except to be the first of my people to be devoured?

It was near nightfall and Ruin was bitter with failure when he reached the house he shared with Reck. He knew from the smell that there were humans inside, knew also that it was the old man who was injured and the young woman who most loved and feared for him.

The fat woman was just a pile of sweat; he disregarded her. There was also the smell of Will, but Ruin disregarded him, too. If his sister wished to keep a human instead of an ox, that was her prerogative. Ruin never spoke to Will, and Will returned the favor.

Reck greeted him without a touch or a smile. There had been anger here. Ruin questioned her in Geblic.

"Why do you let them stay, if they offend you?"

"The girl," said Reck. "Tell me you can't feel it, what she does to Unwyrm, being here."

Ruin strode to the boy-dressed girl, sitting on the floor in the corner. Yes, he could feel it too, like prickles on his spine. Near her, Unwyrm was not driving them away at all. He was calling. It was something Ruin had never felt before, though he had heard of it: the Cranning call.

It was unbelievably strong, like the promise of sexual pleasure, like a mother's love for a child. Ruin knelt and put his face close to the girl's face. He ignored her revulsion, ignored the hand that went up to her hair.

The fat woman shouted from by the fire. "Keep that filthy beast away from her or I'll kill him myself!"

"Quiet," murmured the girl. "He has more to fear from me than I from him." Ruin felt her breath on his cheek, and it seemed to be a warm breeze from Cranning, which called him now for the first time in his life.

"A naked gebling coming at a girl like that," gRuinbled me reeking old dunghill. "Time was when goblins knew their place."