Sparrowhawk said only, “To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place.” With that Arren tried to comfort himself; but he did not find it very comforting.
Next morning when they awoke, the air was grey and the water was grey. Over the mast the sky brightened to the blue of an opal, for the fog lay low. To Northern men such as Arren of Enlad and Sparrowhawk of Gont, the fog was welcome, like an old friend. Softly it enclosed the boat so that they could not see far, and it was to them like being in a familiar room after many weeks of bright and barren space and the wind blowing. They were coming back into their own climate, and were now perhaps at the latitude of Roke.
Some seven hundred miles east of those fog-clad waters where Lookfar sailed, clear sunlight shone on the leaves of the trees of the Immanent Grove, on the green crown of Roke Knoll, and on the high slate roofs of the Great House.
In a room in the south tower, a magicians’ workroom cluttered with retorts and alembics and great-bellied, crook-necked bottles, thick-walled furnaces and tiny heating-lamps, tongs, bellows, stands, pliers, pipes, a thousand boxes and vials and stoppered jugs marked with Hardic or more secret runes, and all such paraphernalia of alchemy, glass-blowing, metal-refining, and the arts of healing, in that room among the much-encumbered tables and benches stood the Master Changer and the Master Summoner of Roke.
In his hands the grey-haired Changer held a great stone like a diamond uncarved. It was a rock-crystal, colored faintly deep within with amethyst and rose, but clear as water. Yet as the eye looked into that clarity, it found unclarity, and neither reflection nor image of what was real round about, but only planes and depths ever farther, ever deeper, until it was led quite into dream and found no way out. This was the Stone of Shelieth. It had long been kept by the princes of Way, sometimes as a mere bauble of their treasury, sometimes as a charm for sleep, sometimes for a more baneful purpose: for those who looked too long and without understanding into that endless depth of crystal might go mad. The Archmage Gensher of Way, coming to Roke, had brought with him the Stone of Shelieth, for in the hands of a mage it held the truth.
Yet the truth varies with the man.
Therefore the Changer, holding the stone and looking through its bossed, uneven surface into the infinite, palecolored, shimmering depths, spoke aloud to tell what he saw. “I see the earth, even as though I stood on Mount Orm in the center of the world and beheld all beneath my feet, even to the farthest isle of the farthest Reaches, and beyond. And all is clear. I see ships in the lanes of Ilien, and the hearthfires of Torheven, and the roofs of this tower where we stand now. But past Roke, nothing. In the south, no lands. In the west, no lands. I cannot see Wathort where it should be, nor any isle of the West Reach, even so close as Pendor. And Osskil and Ebosskil, where are they? There is a mist on Enlad, a greyness, like a spider’s web. Each time I look, more islands are gone and the sea where they were is empty and unbroken, even as it was before the Making-“ and his voice stumbled on the last word as if it came with difficulty to his lips.
He set the stone down on its ivory stand and stood away from it. His kindly face looked drawn. He said, “Tell me what you see.”
The Master Summoner took up the crystal in his hands and turned it slowly as if seeking on its rough, glassy surface an entrance of vision. A long time he handled it, his face intent. At last he set it down and said, “Changer, I see little. Fragments, glimpses, making no whole.”
The grey-haired Master clenched his hands. “Is that not strange in itself?”
“How so?”
“Are your eyes often blind?” the Changer cried, as if enraged. “Do you not see that there is…” and he stammered several times before he could speak, “Do you not see that there is a hand upon your eyes, even as there is a hand over my mouth?”