KATHARINE KERR
THE SPIRIT STONE
Book Five of The Dragon Mage
COPYRIGHT
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2007
Copyright © Katharine Kerr 2007
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover illustration by Andrew Davis
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
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007128730
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007371167
Version: 2020-03-02
DEDICATION
For all my readers without whom this series would not have existed
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: The Northlands Summer, 1159
Part I: Dun Deverry and The Westlands Spring, 983
Part II: The Westlands 1159
Keep Reading
Authors Note
Glossary
Appendices
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
The Northlands Summer, 1159
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.
Sunlights the best thing for the bruises, Kov told him. Or thats what the healers told me, anyway.
Garin muttered a brief oath, then continued blinking and scowling at the brilliant summer light. Hes 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 suns supposed to help strengthen your blood.
Doubtless, Garin said. Im out here, arent 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.
Whats that noise? Garin said. Sounds like shouting.
Kov rose to his feet and listened. Its the guards. He shaded his eyes with his hand and gazed across to the wall. Strangers coming.