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. He secured the loops to the ends of
the fork on his hoopak, kicked around in the fallen
leaves until he found a few good pebbles, then hurried
on, following where the vesper had been. He went on,
not seeing the strange air-shift again, but keeping to its
original direction.
After a time the forest broke away, and Chess found
himself on a low, broken ridge with a clearing extending
from its base. A great shallow bowl of ground, broken
here and there by groves of trees and grassy knolls, the
clearing extended into distances where herds of animals
grazed. Beyond them, forests rose toward the tumbles
and steeps of the valley's east wall.
Nearer, though, in the bottom of the bowl, was a wide
field of what looked like ice - flat around the edges, but
distorted within by many random shapes and lumps that
seemed to grow from it.
The kender scrambled down the ledge and approached
the field of ice. All around it, the air was cold and silent.
"Old," the silence seemed to say.
"Right," the kender agreed. He knelt at the edge of the
field and rapped at it with his staff. The stuff looked and
sounded like ice, and when a sliver of it broke away he
tasted it. It was ice. "It's ice," he said.
"Fire and ice," the silence seemed to say
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