I turned my back on him, and faced the open spaces where the wind blew clean and strong. I walked away from the priests, then crouched down and removed my boots. I touched my palms to the earth; then lay full length across it. I could feel nothing. Not daunted yet, I stood up and walked slowly across the stones, slipping sometimes in the ice, my feet frozen and numb. For a long time I walked, my eyes closed beneath the black cloth. My whole mind and body were aware of the earth around, conscious of the wind and rock and hidden inner forces. I felt a strange liquid running through my bones, and realised, with wonder, that I crossed an underground stream. I walked on slowly, calm now, sure in my purpose. There were no firestones.

I lay down full-length on the ground, my forehead pressed into the dust, my arms spread out, my hands flat against the earth. In my mind I became a shadow of myself, an echo, a shaft of energy racing deep within the rock, seeking, knowing, alive to all that lay below. I saw gold glimmering, and primeval bones. Darkness was everywhere: the shifting, living dark of rock and crystal and ancient seeds. There were no firestones.

I walked for hours, feeling out valleys, hills, and plains of tussock grass. I climbed outcrops of jagged rock, scaled a craggy ridge, and negotiated freezing streams. Again and again I walked and lay down, and again and again I found no firestone power. I began to tire, physically and mentally. I thirsted, and my body was in pain with the cold. I could no longer feel my feet, let alone the earth-force under them. I began to despair. Never before had it taken me so long to divine. Never before had there been such a total absence of firestone power. There was not even a remote humming of the power from seams far too deep to be mined; there was no shadow of firestone ash, or the remains of long-ago fires. Nothing. Nothing under the earth or on the surface of it. Nothing but hostile priests waiting.

Priests. I could still feel them, sense their malice, their dangerous animosity. And there was something else, something dark and slippery that ran along the edges of their hate, and caused new fear in me.