Crystal Gryphon by Andre Norton Read Free Book Online

from the parent cliff of which it had been carved.
    I had studied it as we came up, finding it in something vaguely familiar, though what that was I could not say.
    Oddly enough, though we were here surrounded by the work of those who had vanished, I felt free of that watching, as if whatever had been here once was long gone and had left no trace. And my spirits rose as they had not since the storm caught us.
    “Why all these carvings?” I wondered. “The farther we go, the more they are clustered on the walls.”
    Riwal swallowed a mouthful of travel bread in order to answer. “Perhaps we now approach some place of importance; a shrine, even a city. I have gathered and sifted the stories of traders for years, yet I know of none who have come this way, into the foothills of the mountains.”
    That he was excited I could see, and I knew that he anticipated some discovery that would be far greater than any he had made during his years of wandering in the Waste. He did not linger over his food, nor did I, for his enthusiasm grew to be mine also. We did not pause beneath that giant chin for long, but rode on.
    The road continued to weave through the foothills, and the carvings grew more complex. There were no more heads or faces. Now runes ran in complex patterns of lines and circles. Riwal reined in before one.
    “The Great Star!” His awe was plain to see.
    Surveying the complexity of that design, I could at last make out a basic five-point star. But the star was overlaid with a wealth of other curves and bits, so it took careful examination to make it out at all.
    “The Great Star?” I asked.
    Riwal had dismounted and gone to the rock face in which that pattern was so deeply chiseled, running his fingers along the lines as far up as he could reach, as if he wished to assure himself by touch that what his eyes reported was true.
    “It is a way, that much we know, of calling upon one of the highest of the Powers,” he said, “though all save the design has been lost to us. Never before have I seen it in so complex a setting. I must make a drawing of this!”
    Straightway he brought out his horn of ink, tight-capped for journeying; his pen; and a fresh piece of parchment on which he began to copy the design. So lost was he in the task that I grew restless. At last I felt I could no longer just sit and watch his slow stroke upon stroke as he studied each part of the design to set it down.
    “I shall ride on a little,” I told him. He grunted some answer, intent upon his labors.
    Ride on I did, and the road took a last turning—to the end!
    Before me a flat rock face bore no sign of any gateway or door. The pavement ended flush with that cliff. I stared in disbelief at such an abrupt and seemingly meaningless finish to our quest. A road that began nowhere and ended thus—? What had led to its making? What could its purpose have been?
    I dismounted and went to run my fingertips along the surface of the cliff. It was real, solid rock—die road ran to it and ended. I swung first to one side and then to the other, beyond the boundaries of the pavement, seeking some continuation, some reason. There were two pillars standing, one on either hand, as if they guarded some portal. But the portal did not exist!
    I advanced to lay hand upon the left pillar, and, as I did so, at its foot I caught a glimpse of something. It was a faint glimmer, near-buried in the gravel. Straightway I was on my knees, using first my fingers and then the point of my knife, to loosen my find from a crack in which it had been half-buried.
    The gleaming object I had cupped in my hand was astrange find. It was a ball, a small globe of crystal, a substance one might have thought would have been shattered among these harsh rocks long since. Yet it did not even bear a scratch upon its smooth surface.
    Within it was a tiny image, so well-wrought as to be the masterpiece of some gem-cutter's art—the image of a gryphon, the beast that was my own House