Holder of Lightning

Seancoim didn’t answer, only nodded sleepily. The eastern sky was lightening, though the sun was still behind the hills. The clouds were painted with rose and gold. "If I fail at Thall Coill," Jenna said, "I want you to take Lamh Shabhala."

Seancoim laughed at that. "Me? An old, blind man? A Bunus Muintir?" He laughed again, setting his pack behind his head as a pillow. "No," he answered. "It’s not a burden I want. Not now. If you fall, I’m certain that Lamh Shabhala will find itself another Holder, all on its own-one that it wants." He turned on his side, facing the fire. "And if you don’t let me rest these old bones, we’ll never get there and you won’t have to worry about it at all."

The mountains curved away east to their end at the long bay that jutted deep into Inish Thuaidh. Here, they were taller and stonier than their green-cloaked brothers and sisters to the south, thrusting jagged peak

into a steel-gray sky, piercing the clouds so that they bled rain and oozed a mist that cloaked the summits and sometimes fell heavily into the valleys

below. This was wild land, and if there were Daoine here at all, Jenna saw no sign of them. "The only towns of your people are well off to the south in the farmlands away from the coast," Seancoim told her, Denmark' sitting on his shoulder. He pointed away with his walking stick to the hazy triple lines of ridges, one atop another, receding into the mist, and gestured to the ramparts yet to the north of them, a wall of stone. "Past there is the peninsula of Thall Coill."

"Do you know the way through? Have you been here before?"

"No," Seancoim answered. "But we'll be shown the way, I'm sure."

"What do you mean?"

"Be patient," he told her.

They rested there that day, and Seancoim roused Jenna before sunset. They broke camp and trudged northward, toiling steadily upward be-tween walls of gray rock spotted with lichens and garlanded with slick green mosses. To Jenna, it seemed that Seancoim wandered, moving left or right at random, their progress erratic. He said nothing, but seemed to be waiting. As they trudged on, walking in deepening twilight while the peaks above them were still touched with the last rays of the sun, Jenna had the sense of being watched, though she saw nothing and no one. The feeling persisted; it was so strong that she touched Lamh Shabhala and opened it slightly, letting the cloch's energy be her vision. She could sense life around them, but she recognized none of the patterns it made in the cloch-vision. Somewhere, near the edge of the cloch's sight, though, there were pinpricks of radiance less bright than a Cloch Mor: some of the clochmion, the minor stones. She started to mention it to Seancoim, but he simply grunted and shook his head at her, and she subsided into si-lence.

They walked on, and the feeling of being watched persisted and strengthened as the sun vanished and the sky above darkened to ultrama-rine, then black. The crescent moon had yet to rise, but the constellation of the Oxcart wheeled ahead of them. The birds had settled into their roosts and Denmark was nearly unseen as he moved from rock to rock ahead of them.

Suddenly Denmark gave a caw of alarm and

hopped quickly into the air. The mound of rocks on which he perched seemed to shiver and lift and change, until. .

… the mound shifted like molten glass and solidified again, taking on the shape of a bulky, humanlike form standing shorter than Jenna o

Seancoim, nearly as wide as it was tall. It raised its arms, then cracked them together again with a sound like two boulders smashing. A few seconds later, there was an echoing clamor to their right, and two other rock piles began to move, flowing slowly into similar forms. In the dark-ness, their exact shape was difficult to see, but there was a scraping sound as they walked forward with a rolling, side to side gait. They wore no clothing, their bodies a light brown-gray color like slate yet with a glossy sheen like fired pottery, their limbs thick and muscular. They stopped a few yards from Jenna and Seancoim as Jenna reached for Lamh Shabhala, ready to use the cloch at need. Thick eye ridges curled downward on the lead creature’s face; its rough-hewn features frowned. Again, it clashed hands together, and this time Jenna saw sparks jump as the hands came together.

Seancoim answered with a like gesture, the sound of his handclap al-most comically soft in contrast. The creature uttered a low, warbling tone and seemed to nod, its head inclining slowly first to Seancoim then Jenna. It stretched a thick-fingered hand out to Jenna, beckoning once.

"Seancoim?"

"They are Creneach," he answered. "Have you never heard of them?" Jenna shook her head. "If you’d been brought up here, you would have," he continued. "They belong to yet another one of the old tales: the Clay People who live in their mountain fastnesses. The Hewers of Rock, the Eaters of Stone, the Dwellers In Darkness, the Boulder-folk. There were a dozen names for them in my childhood."