I glanced at Mandor, shrugged, and followed her. He came along.
We mounted toward a jagged screen of rock. She reached it first and made her way onto a lopsided ledge which ran partway along it. She traversed this until she came to a place where the rock wall had broken down into a wide V-shaped gap. She stood there with her back to us then, the light from the green sky doing strange things to her hair.
I came up beside her and followed the direction of her gaze. On a distant plain, far below us and to the left, a large black funnel spun like a top. It seemed the source of the roaring sound we had been hearing. The ground appeared to be cracked beneath it. I stared for several minutes, but it did not change in form or position. Finally, I cleared my throat.
“Looks like a big tornado,” I said, “not going anyplace.”
“That’s why I want you to walk the new Pattern,” she’ told me. “I think it’s going to get us unless we get it first.”
Chapter 3
If you had a choice between the ability to detect falsehood and the ability to discover truth, which one would you take? There was a time when I thought they were different ways of saying the same thing, but I no longer believe that. Most of my relatives, for example, are almost as good at seeing through subterfuge as they are at perpetrating it. I’m not at all sure, though, that they care much about truth. On the other hand, I’d always felt there was something noble, special, and honorable about seeking truth — a thing I’d attempted with Ghostwheel. Mandor had made me wonder, though. Had this made me a sucker for truth’s opposite?
Of course, it’s not as cut and dried as all that. I know that it is not a pure either/or situation with the middle excluded, but is rather a statement of attitude. Still, I was suddenly willing to concede that I might have gone to an extreme — to the point of foolhardiness — and that I had let certain of my critical faculties doze for far too long.