The Naming The Riddle The Crow The singing

The Riddle: The Second Book of Pellinor

Excerpt

MAERAD was a being of the upper regions of air, bodiless and free, without self or memory or name. She gazed at the landscape beneath her, fascinated. For a long time she didn’t even recognize it as a landscape; it looked like a strange and awesome painting. For as far as she could see, there stretched a huge red expanse covered with ripples, like sand under water, but these ripples, she began to understand, must be enormous. She was very high up and she could see very far, and there were no clouds at all, only a tiny shadow moving over the earth, which she realized after a while was her own. She seemed to be flying with some purpose in a particular direction, although she couldn’t remember what the purpose was. After a while, the land changed: the red ripples ran up against a ridge of purple rock and stopped, and she was passing over mountains whose shadows stretched long and sharp behind them. On the other side of the range ran tracks like rivers, lighter veins spreading in delicate fans, but she could see no water in them. The colors of the earth changed to subtle purples and dull greens that signaled vegetation. In the far distance she could see a whiteness that seemed to gather light to itself: it looked like a lake. But a lake of salt, she thought with surprise, not water...

Then everything shifted. She was no longer in the sky, but standing on what seemed to be the spine of a high ridge of bare rock that dropped sheer before her. She looked over a wide plain that stretched to the horizon. The soil was still a strange red orange, but this land was nothing like the one she had flown over: it seemed blasted, poisoned, although she could not say how. As far as she could see, there were rows and rows of tents, interspersed with large open spaces where masses of figures performed some kind of drill. Ared sun sent low, level rays over the plain, casting black shadows back from the tents. Somehow the figures didn’t seem human: they marched with a strange unchanging rhythm that cast a chill over her heart.