Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 76

Legends of the animal called dog? Griffon is a dog. As you see, he has
little in common with the yellow yappers that run the plains, though they
are kin. His breed is extinct, like royalty. Opalstone, what do you most
wish for?"
The Prince asked this with shrewd, abrupt geniality, looking into
Falk's face. Tired and confused and bent on speaking truth, Falk answered:
"To go home."
"To go home…" The Prince of Kansas was black as his silhouette or
his shadow, an old, jetblack man seven feet tall with a face like a
swordblade. "To go home…" He had moved away a little to study the long
table near Falk's chair. All the top of the table, Falk now saw, was sunk
several inches into a frame, and contained a network of gold and silver
wires upon which beads were strung, so pierced that they could slip from
wire to wire and, at certain points, from level to level. There were
hundreds of beads, from the size of a baby's fist to the size of an apple
seed, made of clay and rock and wood and metal and bone and plastic and
glass and amethyst, agate, topaz, turquoise, opal, amber, beryl, crystal,
garnet, emerald, diamond. It was a patterning-frame, such as Zove and
Buckeye and others of the House possessed. Thought to have come
originally from the great culture of Davenant, though it was now very
ancient on Earth, the thing was a fortune-teller, a computer, an implement
of mystical discipline, a toy. In Falk's short second life he had not had time
to learn much about patterning-frames. Buckeye had once remarked that it
took forty or fifty years to get handy with one; and hers, handed down
from old in her family, had been only ten inches square, with twenty or
thirty beads…
A crystal prism struck an iron sphere with a clear, tiny clink.
Turquoise shot to the left and a double link of polished bone set with
garnets looped off to the right and down, while a fire-opal blazed for a
moment in the dead center of the frame. Black, lean, strong hands flashed
over the wires, playing with the jewels of life and death. "So," said the
Prince, "you want to go home. But look! Can you read the frame?
Vastness. Ebony and diamond and crystal, all the jewels of fire: and the
Opal-stone among them, going on, going out. Farther than the King's
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