Forest Mage. Robin Hobb

not?’ I asked her.

      She came a step closer to me, cocked her head slightly and looked at me as if she had thought I was someone she knew. She smiled as she said jestingly, ‘The old people say it’s dangerous to touch the Spindle. You’ll be caught in the twine and carried—’

      My fingers brushed the spinning stuff. It was mist, said my fingers; but then the gritty stone surface swept against my hand. I was snatched out of my skin and borne aloft.

      I have watched women spinning. I had seen the hanks of wool caught and drawn out into a fine thread on a spinning wheel. That was what happened to me. I did not keep my man’s shape. Instead, something was pulled out of me, some spirit or essence, and was drawn as fine as yarn and wrapped around the immense Spindle. It twisted me as it pulled me into a taut line. Thin as string I was and I spiralled around it like thread. My awareness was immersed in the magic of the Spindle. And in that immersion, I awoke to my other self.

      He knew the purpose of the Spindle. It pulled the widely scattered threads of magic out of the world and gathered them into yarn. The Spindle concentrated the magic. And he knew the spire’s purpose. It gave access to the gathered magic. From here, a plainsman of power, a stone mage, would work wonders. This spinning spindle was the heart of plains magic. I’d found it. This was the well that not only the Kidona but all the plainspeople drew from. The suppressed other self inside me suddenly surged to the fore. I felt him seize the magic and glory in the richness of it. Some, he took into himself, but there was only so much this body could hold. As for the rest, well, now that he knew the source, no plainsman would ever unleash this magic against the Specks of the mountains again. I’d see to that. All their harvested magic was at the tips of my fingers. I laughed aloud, triumphant. I would destroy—

      I strained, striving to grip what I could not see. It was too strong. I was abruptly flung back into my body with a jolt as shocking as if I’d been flung to my back on paving stones.

      ‘… to the edges of complete power. It is not a journey for the unprepared.’ The plainswoman finished her sentence. She was smiling, sharing a silly old superstition with me.

      I swayed and then folded onto my knees. I saved some of my dignity by collapsing back onto my heels rather than falling on my face. My hands, I saw, rested on faded patterns carved into the stone. She frowned at me and then asked, more in alarm than concern, ‘Are you ill?’

      ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. I took a deep steadying breath and became aware of a voice lecturing. It was coming closer. I was dizzy and I did not want to turn my head, but I did. The guide advanced slowly up the steps. He had donned a straw hat that gave him a comical dignity. Behind him came a gaggle of sightseers, the hardy ones who had made the climb. One woman held her parasol overhead. Two others fanned themselves against the day’s warmth. There were only two men in the party, and they seemed to be escorting the young ladies rather than here by their own inclination. A dozen boys and girls traipsed along behind the adults. The girls were trying to imitate the ladies but the lads were exhibiting the universal signs of bored boys, nudging one another, scuffling to be first onto the platform, and parodying the guide’s posture and remarks behind his back.

      ‘I beg of you all to be most careful and to stay well away from the edge. The wall is not sound. And, to answer your question, miss, the spire has four hundred and thirty-two steps. Now, please lift your eyes to the Spindle itself. Here you will experience the clearest view of it. You can now see that the illusion of motion is created by the use of the striated rock. At this distance, of course, the illusion ceases and one can see that the Spindle is fixed in place.’

      Without standing up, I turned my eyes to the Spindle again. ‘It spins,’ I said quietly, and heard, aghast, the distance in my own voice. ‘For me, it spins.’ Despite my effort to clear my voice, I sounded like Epiny, when she spoke through her medium’s trance. That other self inside me struggled for ascendance. I suppressed him with difficulty.

      ‘You are not well, sir.’ The plainswoman stated this with emphasis. I sensed that she spoke to inform the others of my situation. ‘You should leave here.’

      I stared at her. I had expected her to urge me to rest or offer me water. Instead, her grey gaze was narrow with distrust. I closed my eyes for a moment.

      ‘I don’t know if I can,’ I said. I had been about to do something, something of vast importance. I could not get my bearings. My pulse beat in my ears. I staggered to my feet and then blinked at the scene around me. Only a moment had seemed to pass for me, but the tourists were not as I had last glimpsed them. The guide had concluded his lecture and was pointing out over the valley, answering questions for an earnest young man. The other sightseers likewise stood beside him looking out across the wide vista. Two of the women had opened sketchbooks. The parasol woman was working from an easel her male companion had carried for her, her watercolour already sketched and half-painted. He stood behind her shoulder, admiring her skill. An older woman had gathered the girls round her and was repeating the key points of their tour. One dutiful boy held a sheet of paper against a block of stone as a stout older woman made a charcoal rubbing of the bas-relief etched there. The guide turned away from his party and started towards me.

      The plainswoman had remained beside me. ‘What’s happening to me?’ I asked her. She knit her brows and shrugged at me. She stood by me, almost as if I were in her custody.

      The guide approached me with a sanctimonious smile. ‘Well? And have you satisfied your curiosity, sir? I am sure you must be very impressed with the winds that managed to sculpt these wondrous carvings.’

      His sarcasm was justified. Possibly that was why it angered me. ‘I’m leaving,’ I announced. I heaved myself to my feet. I was turning away when I felt a sudden wave of queasiness. The earth seemed to rock under my feet. ‘Is it an earthquake?’ I asked frantically, although I suspected that the unrest was within my own body. I lifted my hands to my temples and stared bleakly at the guide and the plainswoman. They regarded me with alarm.

      A terrible whine like an ungreased axle shrieked through my ears. I turned my head in search of the source of it. To my horror, three of the boys had gathered at the centre of the platform. Two acted as support to hold a third aloft. Thus lifted, the middle boy could reach the stone of the Spindle. He had taken out a sheath knife and set the blade to the stone. As I watched, he tried to scratch a line into the ancient monument. The self that the Tree Woman had tutored stabbed me with fear. There was danger, vast danger, in suddenly loosing that magic.

      ‘Stop!’ I shouted the warning. Against all common sense, I expected to see the young fool snatched up and away by the momentum of the Spindle. ‘Don’t do that! Stop that immediately!’ The iron was tearing the magic free of the Spindle in wild, flapping sheets. It could go anywhere, do anything. I was deafened and dizzied by its buffeting but the others apparently felt nothing.

      The boy stopped, glared at me and said scornfully, ‘You’re not my father. Mind your own business.’

      The moment he had lifted his knife from the stone, the screeching had stopped. Now as he deliberately set his blade to the monument again, it began again. As he bore down on the iron blade, the sound soared in volume and pitch. I clapped my hands over my ears against the harsh shriek. A ghostly smoke rose from the point at which blade met stone. He seemed oblivious to all of it.

      ‘Stop!’ I roared at him. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, you idiot!’

      Now every member of the touring party had turned to stare at me. For myself, I did not know how they could be immune to the shrieking of the Spindle as the cold iron bore into it. Wave after wave of vertigo washed through me. The humming of the Spindle, a constant that had been so uniform I had scarcely been aware of it, now warbled as the blade’s contact slowed its turning. ‘Make him stop!’ I shouted at them. ‘Can’t you see what he’s doing? Can’t you sense what he’s destroying?’ My hidden self warned me of magic unravelling around me. I felt the tattered threads of it score my skin as it dispersed into the empty air. It felt like tiny swift cuts with a razor-sharp knife. It threatened me; it threatened to strip from me all the magic I had so painstakingly stored away.