Read Online The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin - Free Book Online Page A

looked at it and Sparrowhawk and Arren, with jerky movements of his head. “Wait,” he stammered. As soon as the situation changed he lost his grip of it and now groped miserably after what he wanted to say. “Tonight,” he said at last. “Wait. Tonight. I have hazia.”
    “I don’t need it.”
    “To show you—To show you the way. Tonight. I’ll take you. I’ll show you. You can get there, because you . . . you’re . . .” He groped for the word until Sparrowhawk said, “I am a wizard.”
    “Yes! So we can—we can get there. To the way. When I dream. In the dream. See? I’ll take you. You’ll go with me, to the . . . to the way.”
    Sparrowhawk stood, solid and pondering, in the middle of the dim room. “Maybe,” he said at last. “If we come, we’ll be here by dark.” Then he turned to Arren, who opened the door at once, eager to be gone.
    The dank, overshadowed street seemed bright as a garden after Hare’s room. They struck out for the upper city by the shortest way, a steep stairway of stone between ivy-grown house walls. Arren breathed in and out like a sea lion—“Ugh!—Are you going back there?”
    “Well, I will, if I can’t get the same information from a less risky source. He’s likely to set an ambush for us.”
    “But aren’t you defended against thieves and so on?”
    “Defended?” said Sparrowhawk. “What do you mean? D’you think I go about wrapped up in spells like an old woman afraid of the rheumatism? I haven’t the time for it. I hide my face to hide our quest; that’s all. We can look out for each other. But the fact is we’re not going to be able to keep out of danger on this journey.”
    “Of course not,” Arren said stiffly, angry, angered in his pride. “I did not seek to do so.”
    “That’s just as well,” the mage said, inflexible, and yet with a kind of good humor that appeased Arren’s temper. Indeed he was startled by his own anger; he had never thought to speak thus tothe Archmage. But then, this was and was not the Archmage, this Hawk with the snubbed nose and square, ill-shaven cheeks, whose voice was sometimes one man’s voice and sometimes another’s: a stranger, unreliable.
    “Does it make sense, what he told you?” Arren asked, for he did not look forward to going back to that dim room above the stinking river. “All that fiddle-faddle about being alive and dead and coming back with his head cut off?”
    “I don’t know if it makes sense. I wanted to talk with a wizard who had lost his power. He says that he hasn’t lost it but given it—traded it. For what? Life for life, he said. Power for power. No, I don’t understand him, but he is worth listening to.”
    Sparrowhawk’s steady reasonableness shamed Arren further. He felt himself petulant and nervous, like a child. Hare had fascinated him, but now that the fascination was broken he felt a sick disgust, as if he had eaten something vile. He resolved not to speak again until he had controlled his temper. Next moment he missed his step on the worn, slick stairs, slipped, and recovered himself, scraping his hands on the stones. “Oh curse this filthy town!” he broke out in rage. And the mage replied dryly, “No need to, I think.”
    There was indeed something wrong about Hort Town, wrong in the very air, so that one might think seriously that it lay under a curse; and yet this was not a presence of any quality, but rather an absence, a weakening of all qualities, like a sickness that sooninfected the spirit of any visitor. Even the warmth of the afternoon sun was sickly, too heavy a heat for March. The squares and streets bustled with activity and business, but there was neither order nor prosperity. Goods were poor, prices high, and the markets were unsafe for vendors and buyers alike, being full of thieves and roaming gangs. Not many women were on the streets, and the few there were appeared mostly in groups. It was a city without law or governance. Talking with people,