Another thought came to him. Hesitantly, he projected a thin sliver of light into the crystal itself.

White and blue and lavender reflections blossomed forth around him like the three-dimensional tail of a celestial peacock. He shied back, shielding his eyes from that bursting fountain of light, then dimmed it, working awkwardly with the few light-spells he had been taught, like an artist's child with his first crayons. He suffused the crystal with a dim light and leaned over again to look inside, to the glittering bed of coloured rock salts that lay at the bottom of their crystal cylinder.

A toy? A trip-light? An enchanted kaleidoscope?

Or the magic tool to further magics?

Staring down into those bright depths, he relaxed his mind, slowly emptying his soul of all concerns for the Dark, for Ingold, for Aide, and for the answer to this riddle itself. He let the soft, bright glitter of the gems below have its way with him, to do whatever it did.

For a time the images confused him. He did not understand what they were -incoherent scenes of blowing sand, rock hills on which nothing grew, rolling seas of brown grass invisible in the overcast night. He sensed rather than saw a dark place take shape, roofed with clouds and drifted deep in snow, walled in by high cliffs of black rock crowned with twisted pines. Beyond the black clouds he sensed gorge-riven peaks, knife-edged heights, and the endless miles of glaciers where the ice

winds skated, screaming... Sarda Pass ? he wondered. Tomorrow's road? The images grew clearer ragged foothills and then an endless brown plain, with tawny grasses waving under the lash of the wind. A black sky was sheeted with cloud. A pale thread of road stretched out of sight into pitiless distance.

Frozen and bitter vastness swallowed his soul.

And, as if the images moved with his heart, he saw the soft glow of reflected candlelight and the starred embroidery on the changeable colours of a silken quilt. The colours shifted, aqua to teal to river-reed green, as they were shaken by the sobbing of the woman who lay there, her black hair thrown about her like scattered silk.