The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (13 inch ebook reader .TXT) 📗

forehead. Blood splashed into my eye. In the end I was hurled up against a megalith, and I came to a stop—but not to a rest.

I was battered and bleeding, the pain was starting to throb, but the pounding roar above me told me I had no time for a tuneup just now. Snow and debris were flying into the gorge from up the mountain. The air was so dense with rubble, it darkened the sky. Whole trees, roots and all, were hurled into space above me. My jump had given me enough of a head start downhill that I did have a chance to beat it, but only if I kept moving.

I struggled to get up and set my skis—still dragging from my ankles by their loose safety thongs—beside my feet as fast as possible. I snapped into my step-locks and started to skate off down the couloir of ice and snow, threading swiftly between the rocks, just as Wolfgang Hauser caught up with me, breathing hard.

“Christ, Ariel, you’re a mess,” he said between gasps.

“I’m alive, and nothing’s broken,” I told him as we raced side by side to avoid the coming onslaught that was drowning our voices. “How about you?”

“I’m fine,” he yelled back. “But thank God you jumped. The entire bowl collapsed. Once you ran out of woods, you’d have been trapped between two avalanches with nothing to stop them.”

“Holy shit!” I said, glancing at Wolfgang.

He laughed and shook his head. “My sentiments precisely.”

At the far end of the gorge was another sheer cliff rising above us. But a curved ramp of snow-covered rock led to it, which we herringbone-stepped our way up, on our skis. Halfway up this ramp, Wolfgang stopped and looked back toward the end of the gorge we’d just come from. As I came up, he laid his gloved hand on my shoulder in silence, and nodded in that direction. I was already a little giddy from loss of blood, but when I followed his gaze, I felt my stomach heave. I hunkered down and wrapped my arms around the ankles of my boots.

The entire valley had disappeared. The sea of black stones we’d just ribboned through had completely vanished. What had been a gorge was now stuffed nearly to the brim with dirty white rubble, roots and branches sticking up clawing the sky. The only landmark left was that lip of cliff we’d jumped from, protruding less than six feet above what was now the valley floor.

I felt Wolfgang’s hand stroking my hair as I quivered in horror. We watched a last dusting of snow sift from the cliff and saw the raw, dark earth of the open slope beyond, raped of its white cover, where a few pebbles still tumbled down the hill. It was total devastation, all in less than ten minutes. I started to cry. Wolfgang pulled me to my feet without speaking and put his arms around me, stroking me until my sobs subsided. Then, pulling me away, he wiped the blood and tears from my face with his glove and brushed my forehead with his lips as if healing a frightened child.

“We’d better get you cleaned up and mended. You’re a valuable creature,” he told me with a gentle smile. But the next words of the beautiful Dr. Hauser, though just as tender and solicitous, terrified me.

“And more than valuable,” he said. “You’re quite amazing, my dear—to outski an avalanche without once losing hold of that manuscript in your backpack.” When I looked at him in genuine horror, he added, “Oh, I don’t have to see it to know what it is. I followed you to the mountain to be certain you wouldn’t hide it or lose it. If that’s the rune manuscript you have there, as I believe it is, then it belongs to me. I sent it to you myself.”

THE MATRIX

matrix(Latin=the womb) … that which encloses anything or gives origin to anything. A source, origin, or cause. From Greek=meter, mother.

—

The Century Dictionary

In tragedy the tragic myth is reborn from the matrix of music. It inspires the most extravagant hopes, and promises oblivion of the bitterest pain.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

All that openeth the matrix is mine.

—Exodus 34:19

Anyone can make a mistake, but this was a humdinger. And mea culpa, mea culpa, the conclusions I’d leapt to were all mine.

Sam had said nothing about runes, or even that what he’d sent me was a manuscript—only that it was the size of a few reams of paper. In a single day I’d nearly run over my landlord, fled across two states, and almost gotten run over myself, by an avalanche, while dallying with a gorgeous Austrian scientist. And all for the wrong parcel. I promised the gods I’d stop batting so many strikes if fate would stop throwing those curve balls. But that didn’t help solve my new crisis: the real package from Sam was still missing. And now, thanks to my overreaction, maybe Sam was, too.

As I made my battered and bleeding way down the mountain, Wolfgang tried to fill me in about the rune manuscript he’d sent me—not an easy task on skis, especially since we were both anxious to reach the base camp clinic where I could get patched up. He did manage to explain en route that when he’d come to Idaho to start me on this project he’d intended to give me the manuscript first thing, but he found I was still off at Sam’s funeral. When I stayed away so long and his other professional commitments called him out of town, he put the runes in the mail so I’d get them when I returned. Then this morning when the Pod sent Olivier to look for me, Wolfgang took a drive by the post office himself. When he saw me take off in panic like that, he decided to round me up on his own.

When Wolfgang and I got down the mountain, I asked him what the