“The sea’s voice.”
“But it speaks a word.”
Sparrowhawk listened; he glanced at Arren and back at the cave. “How do you hear it?”
“As saying the sound ahm.”
“In the Old Speech that signifies the beginning, or long ago. But I hear it as ohb, which is a way of saying the end. Look ahead there!” he ended abruptly, even as Arren warned him, “Shoal water!” And, though Lookfar picked her way like a cat among the dangers, they were busy with the steering for some while, and slowly the cave forever thundering out its enigmatic word fell behind them.
Now the water deepened, and they came out from among the phantasmagoria of the rocks. Ahead of them loomed an island like a tower. Its cliffs were black and made up of many cylinders or great pillars pressed together, with straight edges and plane surfaces, rising three hundred feet sheer from the water.
“That is the Keep of Kalessin,” said the mage. “So the dragons named it to me, when I was here long ago.”
“Who is Kalessin?”
“The eldest…”
“Did he build this place?”
“I do not know. I don’t know if it was built. Nor how old he is. I say ‘he,’ but I do not even know that… To Kalessin, Orm Embar is like a yearling kid. And you and I are like mayflies.” He scanned the terrific palisades, and Arren looked up at them uneasily, thinking how a dragon might drop from that far, black rim and be upon them almost with its shadow. But no dragon came. They passed slowly through the still waters in the lee of the rock, hearing nothing but the whisper and clap of shadowed waves on the columns of basalt. The water here was deep, without reef or rock; Arren handled the boat, and Sparrowhawk stood up in the prow, searching the cliffs and the bright sky ahead.
The boat passed out at last from the shadow of the Keep of Kalessin into the sunlight of late afternoon. They were across the Dragons’ Run. The mage lifted his head, like one who sees what he had looked to see, and across that great space of gold before them came on golden wings the dragon Orm Embar.
Arren heard Sparrowhawk’s cry to him: Aro Kalessin? He guessed the meaning of that, but could make no sense of what the dragon answered. Yet hearing the Old Speech he felt always that he was on the point of understanding, almost understanding: as if it were a language he had forgotten, not one he had never known. In speaking it the mage’s voice was much clearer than when he spoke Hardic, and seemed to make a kind of silence about it, as does the softest touch on a great bell. But the dragon’s voice was like a gong, both deep and shrill, or the hissing thrum of cymbals.
Arren watched his companion stand there in the narrow prow, speaking with the monstrous creature that hovered above him filling half the sky; and a kind of rejoicing pride came into the boy’s heart, to see how small a thing a man is, how frail and how terrible. For the dragon could have torn the man’s head from his shoulders with one stroke of his taloned foot, he could have crushed and sunk the boat as a stone sinks a floating leaf, if it were only size that mattered. But Sparrowhawk was as dangerous as Orm Embar, and the dragon knew it.
The mage turned his head. “Lebannen,” he said, and the boy got up and came forward, though he wanted to go not one step closer to those fifteen-foot jaws and the long, slit-pupilled, yellow-green eyes that burned upon him from the air.
Sparrowhawk said nothing to him, but put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke again to the dragon, briefly.
“Lebannen,” said the vast voice with no passion in it. “Agni Lebannen!”
He looked up; the pressure of the mage’s hand reminded him, and he avoided the gaze of the greengold eyes.
He could not speak the Old Speech, but he was not dumb. “I greet thee, Orm Embar, Lord Dragon,” he said clearly, as one prince greets another.