Read Angel Isle for Free Online

Rocky. He looked like a completely useless old nag when he started tagging along after me. Nobody could possibly have wanted him for anything. But there had to be a horse for me to put the wings onto, so there he was, and here we are, the four of us, setting out together at the start of another stupid story. We’re going to find the Ropemaker, wherever he is, so that he can seal the Valley off for another twenty generations, and I expect there’ll be all sorts of adventures on the way for you to enjoy.”
    “I…I don’t think I’ll be very good at that sort of thing.”
    Ribek laughed aloud.
    “Do you imagine I do? Or Rocky? I don’t know about Saranja—she’s obviously made for it. You know the story, don’t you? Do you imagine Tilja thought she’d be good at that sort of thing when she set out with the others to find Faheel? But in the end they couldn’t have done it without her. No, kid, you’d better face it. You’re going to have to dare and adventure with the rest of us, and Rocky’s going to take us wherever we’re supposed to be, and that’s all any of us knows, and Rocky doesn’t even know that. He’ll just find himself doing it.”
    “Oh.”

CHAPTER
2

    A t the top of a long mountain meadow, with the morning sun full in their faces, sat a man and a boy. Between them on a boulder crouched a squat blue and yellow lizard about the size of the man’s shoe. A huge old cedar rose close behind them, and below, scattered across the bright upland turf, a small flock of sheep grazed, watched by a neat black-and-white sheepdog.
    The man was talking to the lizard.
    “I think we may have made a breakthrough—or rather Benayu may have.”
    “I didn’t do it on purpose,” said the boy. “I just thought I’d give it a go, running my spell backward through the screen—not exactly backward, more inside out, if you see what I mean.”
    “What he did, in effect, was to set up an exact counter-resonance to the active resonances of the spell so that on reaching the screen they canceled each other out. He was lucky, of course, in that the spell was ideally suited to the treatment, but all the same it was a whole level more powerful than anything we’ve managed to screen before.”
    The lizard’s voice answered in both their minds. If granite could speak it would do so in such a voice.
    “Yes, it will not always be so easy. Each screen must be custom-made to what it screens. But the principle…Wait. A thing of power is coming. You may have brought it here. Hide yourselves.”
    Man and boy rose and stood for a moment, staring north, and saw a dark fleck in the pale blue sky above a massive snow-streaked ridge. Tension swept up the hillside. It was as if the placid turf had been the nape of a giant neck, every grass-blade prickling with sudden apprehension. Quietly they walked toward the cedar, laid a hand on its bark and disappeared.
    By now the stone where the lizard had been was mottled with blue and yellow lichen, and the place was empty apart from the sheep and the dog, and the small creatures that clicked and chirruped in the sun-warmed turf. The tension remained, electric.
     
    Rocky circled down toward the mountain meadow, apparently empty apart from a flock of sheep and a sheepdog.
    “I think this may be where we’re going,” called Saranja over her shoulder. “To start with, anyway. I didn’t ask him to land, and he can’t be hungry yet. There’s got to be a shepherd somewhere around. Perhaps he’ll tell us what happens next.”
    The dog below yapped a warning. The sheep started to scatter and the dog raced to round them up as Rocky swung in a full circle and glided in toward the slope, closer and closer, and with a sudden bell-like booming of wings landed some twenty paces below the cedar.
    All three riders climbed stiffly down. Rocky folded his wings and started to nose discontentedly at the sheep-nibbled turf, too short to be much use to him. The dog streaked toward them, snarling, only