The
Lightstone
Part Two: The Silver Sword

Book One of the Ea Cycle

DAVID ZINDELL

COPYRIGHT

This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperVoyager 2001

Copyright © David Zindell 2001

David Zindell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007139965

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007387724

Version: 2016-09-01

DEDICATION

For Justine and Jillian

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

Keep Reading

Appendices

Heraldry

The Gelstei

The Greater Gelstei

Books of the Saganom Elu

The Ages of Ea

The Months of the Year

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Works

About the Publisher

MAPS

1

With a strong wind blowing at our backs, it took us only a day and a night of fast sailing to cross the Dragon Channel to Surrapam. There, the following morning, at Artram, the last of Surrapam’s free ports and therefore crowded with ships coming and going through its bustling harbor, we said goodbye to Captain Kharald and the Snowy Owl. After the horses had been led onto the dock, he stood by us telling of the news that had just been brought to him.

‘King Kaiman,’ he said to us, ‘is making a stand near Azam only forty miles from here. It seems our wheat is needed very badly.’

I watched the lean, hungry-looking Surrapam dockmen unloading the bags of wheat from the Snowy Owl’s holds. From nearby smithies down Artram’s busy streets came the sounds of hammered steel and the clamor of preparations for war.

‘Your swords are needed badly, too,’ he said to us. ‘Would you be willing to raise them against the enemy that you say you oppose?’

I remembered Thaman’s request to the Valari in Duke Rezu’s castle; in the months since then, I thought, it had gone very badly for his people.

‘Oppose the Hesperuk armies with this?’ I asked him, showing him the wooden sword I had carved.

‘Some,’ he said grimly, looking around at the desperate Surrapamers, ‘would fight him with their nails and teeth. But I think you have a better weapon than that piece of wood.’

The day before, when we had first returned to the ship, a chance gust of wind had whipped back my cloak, and Captain Kharald’s quick eyes had fallen on Alkaladur’s jeweled hilt. Since then, I had taken pains to keep it covered.

‘You haven’t told me what occurred on the island, and that’s your business,’ he said to me. ‘But it’s my business to help save the kingdom, if I can.’

Captain Kharald’s new conscience had changed the direction of his efforts but not their vigor: I thought he would pursue his new business with all the cunning and force that he had applied toward making money.

‘We failed to gain the Lightstone,’ I said to him as Kane prowled about the horses, checking their loads. The others stood near me awaiting their turns to say goodbye as well. ‘What more is there to tell?’

‘Only you know that, Sar Valashu.’

Because I hoped it might give him courage, I finally confided in him the story of my receiving the Bright Sword. He looked at me with wonder lighting up his hard, blue eyes. ‘Such a sword and a Valari knight to wield it would be worth a company of men. And with Kane and your friends behind you, a whole regiment.’

I smiled at this flattery, then told him, ‘Even a hundred regiments arrayed against the Red Dragon wouldn’t be enough to bring him down. But the finding of the Lightstone might be.’

‘Then you intend to continue your quest?’

‘Yes, we must.’

‘But where will you go? It won’t be long before the Hesperuk warships close the Channel.’

Kane, stroking the neck of Alphanderry’s white Tervolan, shot me a warning look. Although our journey lay to the east, we hadn’t yet decided its course.

‘We’ll go wherever we must,’ I said to Captain Kharald.

‘Well, go in the One’s light then,’ he told me. ‘I wish you well, Valashu Elahad.’

I wished him well, too, and so did the others. And then, after clasping Captain Kharald’s rough hand, we mounted our horses and rode north through Artram’s narrow streets.

The choice of this direction was Kane’s. Ever alert for enemies and Kallimun spies, he spared no effort in trying to throw potential pursuers off our scent. Artram was a rather small city of stout wooden houses and the inevitable shops of sailmakers, ropemakers and sawyers working up great spars to be used in fitting out the many ships docked in her port. There were many salteries, too, preserving the cargoes of cod and char that the fishing boats brought in from the sea. Most of these shops, however, were now empty, their stores having been requisitioned by King Kaiman’s quartermasters. In truth, there seemed little food left in the city, and little hope for defeating Hesperu’s ravaging armies, either.

Everywhere we went, we saw marks of woe upon the Surrapamers’ gaunt faces. It pained me to see their children eyeing our well-fed horses and full saddlebags. Like Thaman and Captain Kharald, they were mostly red of hair, fair of skin and thick of body – or would have been in better times. Though nearly beaten, they carried themselves bravely and well. I resolved that if I ever returned to Mesh, I would speak out strongly for helping them, if only by taking the field against the Red Dragon.

Maram surprised us all by stopping to pull off his rings one by one and giving them to various beggars who crossed our path. After slipping his third ring into the hand of a one-legged old warrior, Kane chided him for such conspicuous largesse. And Maram chided him, saying, ‘I can always get more rings, but he’ll never get another leg. I regret that I have only ten fingers, with ten rings to give.’

The afternoon found us a few miles outside of the city, in a region of rich black earth and once-prosperous farms. But the King’s quartermasters had come here, too. Smokehouses that should have been stuffed with hanging hams were empty; barns that should have been full of dried barley and corn held only straw. Most of the grown men having been called to war, or already laid low by it, the fields of ripening wheat were tended by women, children and old men. They paused in their labor to watch us pass, obviously wondering that an armed company should ride unchallenged through their land. But there were few knights or men-at-arms left to stop and question us – or to offer us hospitality. I thought that the widows and worried wives who nodded to us would have been willing to share all they had, even if it was only a thin gruel. The Surrapamers were as generous of heart even as they were sometimes greedy, like Captain Kharald. But that day, we didn’t put it to the test: we rode along in silence, exchanging nothing more than a few kind looks with those who watched us.

When we were sure that no one had followed us out of Artram, we turned east toward the mountains. Although the great Crescent Mountains were said to be very tall, we could not see even the tallest of their peaks, even though they lay only sixty miles away. Surrapam, it seemed, was a land of clouds and mists that obscured the sky – and sometimes even the tops of the trees pushing up into it. Master Juwain told us that here the sun shone only rarely. The Surrapamers’ pale, pink skin drank up what little light there was; their thick bodies protected them from the sempiternal coolness clinging like moistened silk to its lush fields. But we were not so fortunate. That day, a thin drizzle sifted slowly down through the air. Although it was full summer, and the height of Marud at that, its chill made me draw my cloak tightly around me.

And yet, despite the gloom, it was a rich, beautiful land of evergreen forests and emerald fields glowing softly beneath the sky’s gentle light. I could see why the Hesperuks might wish to conquer it. The farther we rode across its verdant folds, the more it seemed that we were journeying in the wrong direction. But three times that day I drew Alkaladur, and each time its faint radiance pointed us east. And east we must continue, I thought, even though great battles and the call to arms lay behind us.

We camped that night in a stand of spruce trees beside a swift-running stream. Its waters were clear and sweet, and full of trout, nine of which Alphanderry and Kane managed to catch for our dinner. Maram summoned forth a fire from some moist sticks, while Liljana set to with her pots and pans. It was the first time she had cooked a full meal for us since before Varkall.

We ate our fried fish and cornbread in the silence of those soft woods. We had cheese and blackberries for dessert, for these shiny little fruits grew abundantly in thickets along the roads we had ridden. By the time Master Juwain had brewed up a pot of Sunguran tea purchased in one of Artram’s shops, we were ready to discuss the journey that still lay before us.

‘Well, I had hoped the Lightstone might have come to Artram,’ Maram said as he patted his well-filled belly. ‘Though why I should have expected to find the Cup of Heaven in that sad little city not even the Ieldra know.’

I sat by the fire with my new sword unsheathed. Just to be sure that we had traveled in the right direction, I held it pointing toward Artram to the west. But the only light in its gleaming length came from the fire’s flickering orange flames.

‘No, I’m afraid it still lies east of us,’ Master Juwain said. ‘And I think it’s more than a coincidence that Khaisham lies directly along the line which Val’s sword has shown us.’

It was not the first time he had said this. Ever since the Island of the Swans, when it became clear that our journey might take us as far as Khaisham and the great Library there, he had continually gazed off in its direction with a new excitement in his usually calm, gray eyes.

‘I still don’t see how the Lightstone could be there,’ Maram said. ‘The Library has been searched a hundred times, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, it has,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘But it’s said to be vast, perhaps too vast ever to be searched fully. The number of books it holds is said to be thousands and thousands.’

Kane, sitting by Alphanderry who was tuning his mandolet, smiled gleefully and said, ‘So, I’ve been to the Library once, many years ago. The number of its books is thousands of thousands. Many of them have never even been read.’

A new idea had suddenly come to Master Juwain, who sat rubbing his hands together as if in anticipation of a feast. ‘Then perhaps one of them holds the Lightstone.’

‘You mean, holds knowledge about it, don’t you, sir?’ Maram asked.

‘No, I mean the Cup of Heaven itself. Perhaps one of the books has had its pages hollowed out to fit a small golden cup. And so escaped being discovered in any search.’

‘Now there’s a thought,’ Maram said.

‘It’s as I’ve always told you,’ Master Juwain said to him. ‘When you open a book, you never know what you’ll find there.’

We talked for quite a while about the Library and the great treasures it guarded: not just the books, of course, but the numerous paintings, sculptures, works of jewelry, glittering masks studded with unknown gelstei and other artifacts, many of which dated from the Age of Law – and whose purpose neither the Librarians nor anyone else had been able to fathom. For Master Juwain, a journey to the Library was an opportunity of a lifetime. And the rest of us were eager to view this wonder, too. Even Atara, who had little patience for books, seemed excited at the prospect of beholding so many of them.

‘I think there’s no other choice then,’ she said. ‘We should go to this Library, and see what we see.’

I looked at her as if to ask if she had seen us successfully completing our quest there, but she slowly shook her head.

‘There’s no other choice,’ Master Juwain said. ‘At least none better that I can think of.’

And so, despite Maram’s objections that Khaisham lay five hundred miles away across unknown lands, we decided to journey there unless my sword pointed us elsewhere or we found the Lightstone first.

To firm up our resolve, we broke out the brandy and sat sipping it by the fire. This distillation of grapes ripened in the sun far away warmed us deep inside. Alphanderry began playing, and much to everyone’s surprise, Kane joined him in song. His singing voice, which I had never heard, was much like the brandy itself: rich, dark, fiery and aged to a bittersweet perfection – and quite beautiful in its own way. He sang to the stars far above us which we could not see; he sang to the earth that gave us form and life and would someday take it away. When he had finished, I sat staring at my sword as if I might find my reflection there.

‘What do you see, Val?’ Master Juwain asked.

‘That’s hard to say,’ I told him. ‘It’s all so strange. Here we are drinking this fine brandy – and it’s as if the vintner who made it left the taste of his soul in it. In the air, there’s the sound of battle, even though it’s a quiet night. And the earth upon which we sit: can you feel her heart beating up through the ground? And not just her heart, but everyone’s and everything’s: the nightingale’s and the wood vole’s, and even that of the Lord Librarian in Khaisham half a world away. It beats and beats, and there’s a song there – the same strange song that the stars sing. And truly, it’s a cloudy night, but the stars are always there, in their spirals and sprays of light, like sea foam, like diamonds, like dreams in the mind of a child. And they never cease forming up and delighting: it’s like Flick whirling in the Lokilani’s wood. And it’s all part of one pattern. And we could see the whole of it from any part if only we opened our eyes, if only we knew how to look. Strange, strange.’

Maram staggered over to me, and touched my head to see if I had a fever. He had never heard me speak like this before; neither had I.

‘Ah, my friend, you’re drunk,’ he said, looking down at Alkaladur. ‘Drunk on brandy or drunk on the fire of this sword – it’s all the same.’

Master Juwain looked back and forth between the sword and me. ‘No, I don’t think he’s quite drunk yet. I think he’s just beginning to see.’

He went on to tell us that everyone had three eyes: the eye of the senses; the eye of reason; and the eye of the soul. This third eye did not develop so easily or naturally as the others. Meditation helped open it, and so did the attunement of certain gelstei.

‘All the greater gelstei quicken the other sight,’ he said, ‘but the silver is especially the stone of the soul.’

The silustria, he said, had its most obvious effects on that part of the soul we called the mind. Like a highly polished lens, the silver crystal could reflect and magnify its powers: logic, deduction, calculation, awareness, insight and ordinary memory. In its reflective qualities, the silver gelstei might also be used as a shield against energies: vital, physical and particularly mental. Although not giving power over other minds, it could be used to quicken the working of another’s mind, and was thus a great tool for teaching. A sword made of silustria, he thought, could cut through all things material as the mind cuts through ignorance and darkness, for it was far harder than diamond. In fact, in its fundamental composition, the silver was very much like the gold gelstei, and was one of the two noble stones.

‘But its most sublime power is said to be this seeing of the soul that Val has told of. The way that all things are interconnected.’

Alphanderry, who seemed to have a song ready for any topic or occasion, sang an old one about the making of the heavens and earth. Its words, written down by some ancient minstrel long ago, told of how all of creation was woven of a single tapestry of superluminal jewels, the light of each jewel reflected in every other. Although only the One could ever perceive each of the tapestry’s shimmering emeralds, sapphires and diamonds, a man, through the power of the silver gelstei, might apprehend its unfolding pattern in all its unimaginable magnificence.

‘“For we are the eyes through which the One beholds itself and knows itself divine,”’ Alphanderry quoted.

And by ‘we’, he explained, he meant not only the men and women of Ea, but the Star People, the Elijin, and the great Galadin such as Arwe and Ashtoreth, whose eyes were said to be of purest silustria in place of flesh.

‘What wonders would we behold,’ he asked us, ‘if only we had the eyes to see them?’

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said as he yawned and drank the last of his brandy, ‘I’m afraid my eyes have seen enough of day for one day, if you know what I mean. While I don’t expect anyone’s sympathy, I must tell you that Lailaiu didn’t allow me much sleep. But I’m off to bed to replenish my store of it. And to behold her in my dreams.’

He stood up, yawned again, rubbed his eyes and then patted Alphanderry’s head. ‘And that, my friend, is the only part of this wonderful tapestry of yours I care to see tonight.’

Because we were all quite as tired as he, we lay back against our furs and wrapped ourselves with our cloaks against the chill drizzle – everyone except Kane who had the first watch. I fell asleep to the sight of Flick fluttering about the fire like a blazing butterfly, even as I rested my hand on the hilt of my sword, which I kept at my side. Although I dreaded the dreams the Lord of Lies might send me, I slept well. That night, in my dreams, when I was trapped in a cave as black as death itself, I drew forth Alkaladur. The sword’s fierce white light fell upon the dragon waiting in the darkness there, with its huge, folded wings and iron-black scales. Its radiance allowed me to see the dragon’s only vulnerability: the knotted, red heart which throbbed like a bloody sun. And in seeing my seeing of his weakness, the dragon turned his great, golden eyes away from me in fear. And then, in a thunder of wings and great claws striking sparks against stone, he vanished down a tunnel leading into the bowels of the earth.

The next morning, after a breakfast of porridge and blackberries fortified with some walnuts that Liljana had held in reserve, we set out in good spirits. We rode across fallow fields and little dirt roads, neither seeking out the occasional farmhouses we came across or trying to avoid them. This part of Surrapam, it seemed, was not the most populated. Broad swaths of forest separated the much narrower strips of cultivated land and settlements from each other. Although the roads through the giant, moss-hung trees were good enough, if a little damp, I wondered what it would be like when we reached the mountains, where we might find no roads at all.

Maram, too, brooded about this. As we paused to make a midmorning meal out of the clumps of blackberries growing along the roadside, he pointed ahead of us and said, ‘How are we to take the horses across the mountains if there are no roads for them? The Crescent Mountains, Val?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘we’ll find a way.’

Kane, whose face was so covered with berry juice that he looked as if he had torn apart a deer with his large teeth, grinned at him and said, ‘If we find the mountains impassable, we can always go around them.’

He pointed out that this great mountain chain, which ran in a broad crescent from the southern reaches of the Red Desert up Ea’s west coast through Hesperu and Surrapam, thinned and gave out altogether a hundred and fifty miles to the north of us in Eanna. We could always journey in that direction, he said, before rounding the farthermost point of the mountains and turning back south and east for Khaisham.

‘But that would add another three hundred miles to our journey!’ Maram groaned. ‘Let’s at least try crossing the mountains first.’

At this, Atara laughed and said, ‘Your laziness is giving you courage.’

‘It would give me more if you could see a road through the mountains. Can you?’

But in answer, Atara popped a fat blackberry into her mouth and slowly shook her head.

As we set out again, I wondered at the capriciousness of each of our gifts and the various gelstei that quickened them. Among us, we now had six; only Alphanderry lacked a stone, and so great were our hopes after my gaining Alkaladur that we were sure he would find a purple gelstei somewhere between Surrapam and Khaisham. Although Master Juwain brought forth his varistei with greater and greater frequency, he admitted that drawing upon its deepest healing properties might be the work of a lifetime. Kane, of course, kept his black stone mostly hidden and his doubts about using it secret as well. Liljana’s blue figurine might indeed aid her in mindspeaking, but there were no dolphins or whales to be found in Ea’s interior, and none among us with her talent. As she had promised to look away from the running streams of each of our thoughts unless invited to dip into them, she had little opportunity to gain any sort of mastery of her stone. As for Atara, she gazed into her scryer’s sphere as often as I searched the sky for the sun. What she saw there, however, remained a mystery. I gathered that her visions were as uncertain as blizzards in spring, and blew through her with sometimes blinding fury.

Maram’s talent proved to be the most fickle of any of ours – and the most neglected. Where he should have been growing more adept in using his firestone, he seemed almost to have forgotten that he possessed it. As he had said, his dreams were now of Lailaiu; at any one time, I thought, he was able to pour his passions into one vessel only. At the end of the day, after we had covered a good twenty-five miles through a gradually deepening drizzle, he tried to make a fire for us with his gelstei. But the red crystal brightened not even a little and remained dead in his hands.

‘The wood is too wet,’ he said as he knelt over a pile of it that he had made. ‘There’s too little light coming through these damn clouds.’

‘Hmmph, you’ve gotten a fire out of your crystal before with as little light,’ Atara chided him. ‘I should think the test of it is at times such as these rather than in waiting for perfect conditions.’

‘I didn’t know I was being tested,’ Maram fired back.

‘Our whole journey is a test for all of us,’ Atara told him. ‘And all our lives may someday depend on your firestone.’

Her words cut deep into me and remained in my mind as I fell asleep that night. For I had a sword that I must learn to wield – and not by crossing blades with Kane every night during our fencing practice. Although Alkaladur might indeed be hard enough to slice through the hardest steel, it had more vital powers that I was only beginning to sense. It would take all my will, I thought, all my awareness and concentration of my lifefire to find myself in the silvery substance of the sword and it in me.

Morning brought with it a little sun, which lasted scarcely long enough for us to saddle the horses and break camp. It began to rain again, but much of its sting was taken away by the needles of the towering trees above us. Here were hemlocks and spruce two hundred feet high, and great King Firs perhaps even higher. They formed a vast shield of green protecting against wind and water, and sheltering the many squirrels, foxes and birds that lived here. I might have been content to ride through this lovely forest another month, for its smells of mosses and wildflowers pleased me greatly. Soon, however, the trees gave way to more farmland, cut with numerous streams running down from the mountains. In this more open country, the rain found us easy targets, and pelted us with icy drops that streaked down through the sky like silver arrows. It soaked our garments, making a misery of what should have been an easy ride. By late afternoon, with the ground rising steeply toward the mountains’ foothills, we were all of us considering knocking on the door of some stout farmhouse and asking refuge for the night.

‘But if we do that,’ I said to my friends as we stopped to water the horses by a stream, ‘these poor people will have to feed us, and they’ve nothing to spare.’

‘Perhaps we could feed them,’ Atara suggested. ‘We’ve plenty to spare.’

Liljana cast her a troubled look and said, ‘If travelers came through the Wendrush offering food to their hosts, what would they think?’

‘Ha,’ Kane said, ‘if travelers came through the Wendrush offering food to the Kurmak, they’d likely be put to the sword for the insult of it.’

Although Atara didn’t respond to this remark about her people, her grim face suggested it might be true.

‘I have an idea,’ Maram said. ‘It’s time we began inquiring if anyone hereabouts knows of a road through the mountains. If anyone happens also to offer us shelter and also has enough food, we’ll accept. Otherwise we’ll ride on.’

It was a good plan, I thought, and the others agreed. We spent the next few hours riding from farmhouse to farmhouse, even as the rain grew stronger. But none of the Surrapamers knew of the road we sought. Most of them did offer us lodgings for the night, even though their sunken faces and bony bodies told us that this was an act of pride and politesse they could ill afford. It amazed me that they were willing to succor us at all, for we were strangers from distant lands of which few had heard; we were girt for war and riding across their fields at a time when many of their kinsmen had been taken by war – and many more might soon be. I thanked our stars that all their knights and warriors had ridden off, and so left these brave people little more than goodwill, and faith in our goodwill, with which to face us.

But as the day faded toward a gray, rainy evening, it seemed that I had given my thanks too soon. Just after we had knocked on the door of yet another farmhouse, a company of armed men came thundering down the road from the east and turned onto the farm’s muddy lane. There were twenty of them, and they all wore rusted mail with no surcoat to cover it or identify their domains or houses. Shabby knights they seemed, and yet their lances appeared sharp enough and their swords ready at hand. Although they were quite as gaunt as the rest of their countrymen, they sat straight in their saddles and rode with good discipline.

‘Who are you?’ their leader called out to us as his large war horse kicked up clots of mud and came to a halt ten yards from us. He himself was a large man, with a thick gray beard and braided gray plaits hanging down from beneath his open-faced helmet. ‘What are you doing in our land?’

The door of the house having been shut behind us, I stood by Altaru as he stomped about and eyed this man’s horse ferociously. My companions had already mounted their horses; Atara was fingering her strung bow while Kane cast his black eyes on the men before us.

I gave the knight our names, and asked him his. He presented himself as Toman of Eastdale; he said that he and his men had been riding off to join King Kaiman at Azam.

‘We’d heard there were strange knights about,’ Toman said, studying my surcoat and other accouterments. ‘We were afraid you might be Hesperuk spies.’

‘Do we look like spies?’ I said to him.

‘No, you don’t,’ he admitted graciously. ‘But not everyone is who they seem. The Hesperuks haven’t won half our kingdom through force of arms alone.’

I pulled myself on top of Altaru and patted his neck to steady him. To Toman, I said, ‘We’re not Kallimun priests, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘Perhaps not,’ he said, ‘but that is for the King to decide. I’m afraid you’ll have to lay down your arms and come with us.’

At a nod from him, four of his knights rode up by his side with their lances held ready. Toman looked from Atara to Maram and then back at me. ‘Please give me your sword, Sar Valashu.’

‘I’ll give you mine,’ Kane growled as his eyes flashed and his hand moved quick as a snake’s to draw his sword.

‘Kane!’ I said. With almost miraculous control, Kane caught himself in mid-motion and stared at me. ‘Kane, don’t draw on him!’

But all of Toman’s knights had now drawn their swords. Unlike their armor, they showed no spot of rust.

‘You must understand,’ Toman said to me, ‘that we can’t allow you to go armed about our land – not with the Hesperuks knocking on our doors, too.’

‘Very well,’ I said, ‘but we’ve no desire to go riding about Surrapam at all – only to find a way to leave it.’

I explained that we were journeying to the Library at Khaisham; I told him that we had made vows to seek the Lightstone along with a thousand others in King Kiritan’s hall in Tria.

‘We’ve heard of this quest,’ he said, pulling at his beard. ‘But how do we know that you have truly set out upon it?’

I nudged Altaru forward, then drew forth the medallion that King Kiritan had given me. At the sight of this circle of gold, Toman’s eyes held wonder but no greed. Then, at my bidding, my companions approached to show their medallions as well. Toman’s knights, gathering around us, suddenly put away their swords at his bidding.

‘We must honor the impulse behind this quest, even if we do not believe in it,’ Toman said. ‘If you truly oppose the Crucifier, you’d do better to come to battle with us.’

‘That appears to be the thought of most of your countrymen,’ I said. Then I told him of meeting Thaman at Duke Rezu’s castle in Anjo, and his plea to the Valari.

‘You know Thaman of Bear Lake?’ one of Toman’s men asked in surprise. He was scarcely eighteen years old, and proved to be Toman’s grandson.

‘It seems you do,’ I said to him.

‘He’s my betrothed’s cousin,’ the man said, ‘and a great warrior.’

Our acquaintance with Thaman finally decided Toman. He smiled grimly at us and said, ‘Very well, you’re free to go, then. But please leave our land before you frighten anyone else.’

‘We’d leave it faster if we knew of a road through the mountains.’

Toman pointed off through the rain and dense greenery surrounding the farm and said, ‘There is a road – it’s about ten miles southeast of here. I would show it to you, but we’ve another hour before it’s dark and must ride on. But my other grandson, Jaetan, will take you to it if you tell him of our meeting and my wishes.’

He proceeded to give us directions to his estate. Then he said, ‘Well, we’re off to the assembly at Iram. Are you sure you won’t join us?’

‘Thank you, no – we have our road, and it leads east.’

‘Then farewell, Sar Valashu. Perhaps we’ll meet in better times.’

And with that, he and his men turned their horses and rode off down the road to the west.

Toman’s ‘estate’, when we found it an hour later, proved to be nothing more than a rather large, fortified house overlooking a barn and fields surrounded by a high fence of sharpened wooden poles. As he had promised, his family provided us shelter for the night. Toman’s daughter and two grandsons were all that was left to him, his son having died in the battle of the Maron and two granddaughters taken by fever last winter. Toman’s second grandson, Jaetan, was a freckle-faced redhead about thirteen years old – too young to ride off with his brother to war. And yet, I thought, I had gone to war at that age. It gladdened my heart, even as I filled with not a little pride, that even in the hour of their greatest need, the Surrapamers were not so war-loving as we Valari.

After we had laid our sleeping furs on the dry straw in the barn, Jaetan’s mother, Kandra, insisted on calling us into the house for a meal, even as we had feared. But as they had nothing more than a few eggs, some blackberry jam and flour to be baked into bread, our dinner was a long time in coming. Kane solved the problem of our eating up Toman’s family’s reserves in the most spectacular manner: as he had with Meliadus, he grabbed up his bow and stole off into the darkening woods. A half hour later, he returned with a young buck slung across his broad shoulders. It was a great feat of hunting, Kandra exclaimed, especially so considering that the forest hereabouts had been nearly emptied of deer.

And so we had a feast that night and everyone was happy. Kandra kept the remains of the deer, which more than made up for the bread that she baked us. In the morning, we set out well fed, with Jaetan leading the way on a bony-looking old nag that was a little too big for him.

After a couple of hours of riding up a gradually ascending dirt road, we came to a notch between two hills where the road seemed to disappear into a great, green wall of vegetation. Jaetan pointed into it and told us, ‘This is the old East Road. It’s said to lead into Eanna. But no one really knows because no one goes that way anymore.’

‘Except us,’ Maram muttered nervously.

Jaetan looked at him and told him, ‘The road is good enough, I think. But you should be careful of the bears, Master Maram. It’s said that there are still many bears in the mountains.’

‘Oh, excellent,’ Maram said, staring into the woods. ‘Bears, is it now?’

We thanked Jaetan for his hospitality, and then he turned to Kane and asked, ‘If you ever come back this way, will you teach me to hunt, sir?’

‘That I will,’ Kane promised as he reached out to rumple the boy’s hair. ‘That I will.’

With a few backward glances, Jaetan then rode back toward his grandfather’s house and the warmth of the hearth that awaited him.

‘Well,’ Maram said, ‘if the old maps are right, we’ve sixty miles of mountains to cross before we reach Eanna. I suppose we’d better start out before the bears catch our scent.’

But we saw no sign of bears all that day, nor the next nor even the one following that. The woods about us, though, were thick enough to have hidden a hundred of them. As the hills to either side of us rose and swelled into mountains, the giant trees of western Surrapam gave way to many more silver firs and nobles. These graceful evergreens, while not so tall as their lowland cousins, grew more densely. If not for the road, we would have been hard pressed to fight our way through them. This narrow muddy track had been cut along a snakelike course. And it turned like a snake, now curving south, now north, but always making its way roughly east as it gradually gained elevation. And with every thousand feet higher upon the green, humped earth on which we stood, it seemed that the rain poured down harder and the air fell colder.

Making camp in these misty mountains was very much a misery. The needles of the conifers, the bushes, the mosses and ferns about our soaked sleeping furs – everything the eye and hand fell upon was dripping wet. That Maram failed yet again with his fire dispirited us even more. When the day’s first light fought its way through the almost solid grayness lying over the drenched earth each morning, we were glad to get moving again, if only because our exertions warmed our stiff bodies.

Three times the road failed us, vanishing into a mass of vegetation that seemed to swallow it completely. And three times Maram complained that we were lost and would never see the sun again, let alone Khaisham.

But each time, with an unerring sense, Atara struck off into the forest, leading us through the trees for a half mile or more until we found the road again. It was as if she could see much of the path that lay before us. It made me wonder if her powers of scrying were much greater than she let on.

On the fourth day of our mountain crossing, we had a stroke of luck. The rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the bright sun shone down upon us and warmed the world. The needles of the trees and the bushes’ leaves, still wet with rain, shimmered as if covered with millions of drops of melting diamonds. Two thousand feet above us, the trees were frosted with snow. For the first time, we had a good view of the great peaks around us. Snow and ice covered these spurs of rock, which pushed up into the blue sky to the north and south of us. Our little road led between them; the ground that we still had to cross, as we could see, was not really a gap in the mountains, but only a stretch where they rose less high. Although we had covered a good thirty miles, as the raven flies, we still had heights to climb and as many more miles before us.

We broke then for our midday meal in a sparkling glade by a little lake. Maram, who still had his talent with flint and steel, struck up a fire, which Liljana used to roast a rock goat that Atara had managed to shoot. After some days of cold cheese and battle biscuits, we were all looking forward to this feast. While the meat was cooking, Maram discovered a downed tree-trunk, hollowed and swarming with bees.

‘Ah, honeycomb,’ he said to me as he pointed at the trunk and licked his lips. ‘I can smell the honey in that hive.’

I watched from a safe distance as he built up another fire from wet twigs to smoke the bees out of their home. It took quite some time, and many blows of the axe, but he finally pulled out a huge, sticky mass of waxen comb dripping with golden honey. That he suffered only a dozen stings from his robbery amazed me.

‘You’re brave enough when you want to be,’ I said to him as he handed me a piece of comb. I licked a little honey from it. It was incredibly good, tasting of thousands of sun-drenched blossoms.

‘Ah, I’d take a thousand stings for honey,’ he said before cramming into his mouth a huge chunk of comb. ‘In all the world, there’s nothing sweeter except a woman.’

He rubbed some honey over the stings along his hands and face, and then we returned to the others to share this treasure.

We all gorged on the succulent goat meat and honey, Maram most of all. After he had finished stuffing his belly, he fell asleep on top of the dewed bracken near some thick bushes that Kane called pink spira. The rays of sun playing over his honey-smeared face showed a happy man.

We let him finish his nap while we broke our makeshift camp. After our waterbags had all been filled and the horses packed, we made ready to mount them and ride back to the road. And then, just as Liljana pointed out that it wouldn’t do to leave Maram sleeping, we heard him murmuring behind us as if dreaming: ‘Ah, Lailaiu, so soft, so sweet.’

I turned to go fetch him, but immediately stopped dead in my tracks. For what my eyes beheld then, my mind wouldn’t quite believe: There, across the glade, in a break in the bushes above Maram and bending over him, crouched a large, black she-bear. She had her long, shiny snout pressed down into Maram’s face as she licked his lips and beard with her long, pink tongue. She seemed rather content lapping up the smears of honey that the careless Maram had left clinging there. And all the while, Maram murmured in his half-sleep, ‘Lailaiu, ah, Lailaiu.’

I might have fallen down laughing at my friend’s very mistaken bliss. But bears, after all, were bears. I couldn’t imagine how this one had stolen out of the bushes upon Maram without either Kane or the horses taking notice. As it was midsummer, I feared that she had young cubs nearby.

Slowly and quietly, I reached out to tap on the elbow of Kane, who had his back to the bear as he tightened the cinch of his horse. When he turned to see what I was looking at, his black eyes lit up with many emotions at once: concern, hilarity, contempt, outrage and blood-lust. Quick as a wink, he drew forth his bow, strung it and fit an arrow to its string. This movement alerted the others as to Maram’s peril – and the horses, too. Altaru, facing the wind, finally turned to see the bear; he suddenly reared up as he let loose a tremendous whinny. Liljana’s gelding and Master Juwain’s sorrel, Iolo and Fire – all the horses added their voices to the great chorus of challenge and panic splitting the air. We had all we could do to keep hold of their reins and prevent them from running off. With Kane’s bay stamping about and threatening to split his skull with a flying hoof, he couldn’t get off a shot. And it was good that he didn’t. For just as Maram finally awakened and looked up with wide eyes into the hairy face of his new lover, the bear started at the sudden noise and peered across the glade as if seeing us for the first time. She seemed more astonished than we were. It took her only a moment to gather her legs beneath her and bound off into the bushes.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram called out upon realizing what had happened. He sprang up and raced to the lake’s edge, where he knelt to wash his face. Then he said, ‘Oh, my Lord – I was nearly eaten!’

Atara, keeping an eye out for the bear’s return, walked up to him and poked a finger into his big belly. ‘Hmmph, you’re half a bear yourself. I’ve never seen anyone eat honey the way that you do. But the next time, perhaps you should be more careful how you eat it.’

That day we climbed to the greatest heights of our mountain crossing. This was a broad saddle between two great peaks, where lush meadows alternated with spire-like conifers. Thousands of wildflowers in colors from blazing pink to indigo brightened the sides of the road. Marmots and pikas grazed there, and looked at us as if they had never seen our kind before. But as they fed upon the grasses and seeds they found among the flowers, they kept a close watch for the eagles and ravens who hunted them. We watched them, too. Maram wondered if the Great Beast could seize the souls of these circling birds and turn them into ghuls as he had the bear at the beginning of our journey.

‘Do you think he’s watching us, Val?’ Maram asked me. ‘Do you think he can see us?’

I stopped to draw my sword and watch it glow along the line to the east. Its fire was of a faint white. In the journey from Swan Island, I had noticed that other things beside the Lightstone caused it to shine. In the glint of the stars, its radiance was more silver, while the stillness of my soul seemed to produce a clearer and brighter light.

‘It’s strange,’ I said, ‘but ever since Lady Nimaiu gave me this blade, the Lord of Lies seems unable to see me, even in my dreams.’

I looked up at a great, golden eagle gliding along the mountain wind, and I said, ‘There’s no evil in these creatures, Maram. If they’re watching, it’s only because they’re afraid of us.’

My words seemed to reassure him, and we began our descent through the eastern half of the Crescent Range with good courage. For another three days, beneath the strong mountain sun, we rode on without incident. The road held true, taking us down the folded slopes and around the curve of lesser peaks. As we lost elevation and made our way east, the land grew drier, the forest more open. We crossed broad bands of white oak and ponderosa pine, interspersed with balsamroot and phlox and other smaller plants. Many of the birds and animals who lived here were strange to me. There was a chipmunk with yellow stripes and a bluejay who ate acorns. We saw four more bears, smaller and of a grayish hue to their fur that lent them great dignity. They must have wondered why we hurried through their domain when the glories of the earth in midsummer ripened all around us.

And then, on the first day of Soal, with most of the great Crescent Range at our backs, we came out of a cleft in the foothills to see a vast plain opening to the east. It was like a sea of grass, yellow-green, and colored with deeper green lines where trees grew along the winding watercourses. Another hour’s journey down some slopes of ponderosa pine and rocky ridges would take us down into it.

‘Eanna,’ Kane said, pointing down into this lovely land. ‘At least, this was once part of the ancient kingdom. But we’re far from Imatru, and I doubt if King Hanniban holds any sway here.’

What peoples or lords we might find in the realm below us, he didn’t know. But he admonished us to be wary, for out on the plain we would have no cover, either from men or the wolves and lions who hunted the antelope there.

‘Wolves!’ Maram exclaimed. ‘Lions! – I think I’d rather keep company with the bears.’

But all that first day of our journey across Eanna, neither his fears nor Kane’s took form to bring us harm. We left the road only a couple of miles from the mountains. It turned south, whether toward some lost city in this pretty country or toward nowhere, none of us could say. The Red Desert, Kane told us, lay not so very far in that direction, and its drifting vermilion sands and dunes had swallowed up more than one city over the millennia. We were lucky, he said, that Alkaladur seemed to point us along a path above this endless wasteland, for other than the fierce tribes of the Ravirii, no one could survive the desert’s murderous sun for very long.

As it was, we felt a whiff of its heat even hundreds of miles north of the heart of it. But after the freezing rains of the mountains, we welcomed this sudden warming of the air, for it was dry like the breath of the stars and clean, and did not smother us. It did not last long, either, giving way soon after noon to gentle breezes that swept through the swaying grasses and touched our faces with the scents of strange new plants and flowers. And at night, beneath the constellations that hung in the heavens like a brilliant, blazing tapestry, it fell quite cool – not so much that it chilled our bones, but rather that bracing crispness that sharpens all the senses and invites the marvel of the infinite.

We all slept quite well through that first dark out on the steppe – except during those hours when we were standing watch or simply gazing up at the stars from our beds on top of the long grass. The moon rose over the world like a gleaming half-shield; beneath it, from far out across the luminous earth, wolves howled and lions roared. I dreamed of these animals that night, and of eagles and falcons, and great silver swans that flew so high they caught the fire of the stars. When I awoke in the morning to a sky so blue that it seemed to go on forever, I felt this fire in me, warming my heart and calling me to journey forth toward the completion of our quest.

We rode hard all that day and the next, and the two following that. Although I worried we might press the horses too strenuously, they took great strength from the grass all around us, both in its sweet smell and in the bellyfuls they bit off and ate at midday and night. After many days of picking their way up and down steep mountain tracks studded with sharp rocks, they seemed glad for the feel of soft earth beneath their hooves. It was their pleasure to keep moving across the windy steppe, at a fast walk and sometimes at a canter or even a gallop. I felt my excitement flowing into Altaru and firing up his great heart, and his delight in running unbound across the wild and open steppe passing back into me. Sometimes he raced Iolo or Fire just for the sheer singing joy of it. And at such moments, I realized that our souls were free, and each of us knew this in the surging of our blood and our breaths upon the wind – and in the promises we made to ourselves.

It was hard for me, used to the more circumscribed horizons of mountainous or wooded country, to see just how far we traveled each day. But Atara had a better eye for distances here. She put the tally at a good fifty miles. So it was that we crossed almost the whole length of southern Eanna in very little time. And in all that wide land, dotted with cottonwood trees whose silver-green leaves were nearly as beautiful as astors’, we saw almost no people.

‘I should think someone would live here,’ Liljana said on the fifth morning of our journey across the steppe. ‘This is a fair land – it can’t be the wolves that have scared them away. Nor even the lions.’

Later that day, toward noon, we came across some nomads who solved the mystery of Eanna’s emptiness for us. The head of the thirty members of this band, who lived in tents woven from the hair of the shaggy cattle they tended, boldly presented himself as Jacarun the Elder. He was a whitebeard whose bushy brows overhung his suspicious old eyes. But when he saw that we meant no harm and wanted only to cross his country, he was free with the milk and cheeses that his people got from their cattle – and with advice as well.

‘We are the Telamun,’ he explained to us as we broke from our journey to take a meal with his family. ‘And once we were a great people.’

He told us that only a few generations before, the Telamun in their two great tribes had ruled this land. So great was their prowess at arms that the Kings in Imatru had feared to send their armies here. But then, after a blood-feud brought about by a careless insult, murder and an escalating sequence of revenge killings, the two tribes had gone to war against each other rather than with their common enemies. In the space of only twenty years, they had nearly wiped each other out.

‘A few dozen families like ours, we’re all that’s left,’ Jacarun said as he held up his drover’s staff and swept it out across the plain. ‘Now we’ve given up war – unless you count beating off wolves with sticks as war.’

He went on to say that their days as a free people were almost over, for others were now eyeing his family’s ancient lands and even moving into them.

‘King Hanniban has been having trouble with his barons, it’s said, so hasn’t yet been able to muster the few companies that it would take to conquer us,’ he told us. ‘But some of the Ravirii have come up from the Red Desert – they butchered a family not fifty miles from here. And the Yarkonans, well, in the long run, they’re the real threat, of course. Count Ulanu of Aigul – they call him Ulanu the Handsome – has it in mind to conquer all of Yarkona in the Red Dragon’s name and set himself up as King. If he ever does, he’ll turn his gaze west and send his crucifiers here.’

He called for one of his daughters to bring us some roasted beef. And then, after fixing his weary old eyes on Kane and my other friends, he looked at me and asked, ‘And where are you bound, Sar Valashu?’

‘To Yarkona,’ I said.

‘Aha, I thought so! To the Library at Khaisham, yes?’

‘How did you know?’

‘Well, you’re not the first pilgrims to cross our lands on their way to the Library, though you may be the last.’ He sighed as he lifted his staff toward the sky. ‘There was a time, and not so long ago, when many pilgrims came this way. We always charged them tribute for their safe passage, not much, only a little silver and sometimes a few grains of gold. But those days are past; soon it is we who will have to pay tribute for living here. In any case, no one goes to Yarkona anymore – it’s an accursed land.’

He advised us that, if we insisted on completing our journey, we should avoid Aigul and Count Ulanu’s demesne at all costs.

We ate our roasted beef then, and washed it down with some fermented milk that Jacarun called laas. After visiting with his family and admiring the fatness of their cattle – and restraining Maram from doing likewise with their women – we thanked Jacarun for his hospitality and set out again.

Soon the steppe, which had gradually been drying out as we drew further away from the Crescent Mountains, grew quite sere. The greens of its grasses gave way to yellow and umber and more somber tones. Many new shrubs found root here in the rockier soil: mostly bitterbroom and yusage, as Kane named these tough-looking plants. They gave shelter to lizards, thrashers, rock sparrows and other animals that I had never seen before. As the sun fell down the long arc of the sky behind us in its journey into night, it grew slightly warmer instead of cooler. We put quite a few miles behind us, though not so many as on the four preceding afternoons. The horses, perhaps sensing that they would find less water and food to the east, began moving more slowly as if to conserve their strength. And as we approached the land that Jacarun had warned us against, we turned our gazes inward to look for strength of our own.

And then, just before dusk, with the sun casting its longest rays over a glowing, reddened land, we came to a little trickle of water that Kane called the Parth. From its sandy banks, we looked out on the distant rocky outcroppings of Yarkona. There, I prayed, we would at last find the end of our journey and our hearts’ deepest desire.

2

The moon that night was just past full and tinged a glowing red. It hung low in conjunction with a blazing twist of stars that some called the Snake Constellation and others the Dragon.

‘Blood Moon in the Dragon,’ Master Juwain said. He sat sipping his tea and looking up at the sky. ‘I haven’t seen suchlike in many years.’

He brought out his book then, and sat reading quietly by the firelight, perhaps looking for some passage that would comfort him and turn his attention away from the stars. And then Liljana, who had gone off to wash the dishes in a small stream that led back to the Parth, returned holding some stones in her hand. They were black and shiny like Kane’s gelstei but had more the look of melted glass. Liljana called them Angels’ Tears; she said that wherever they were found, the earth would weep with the sorrow of the heavens. Atara gazed at these three, droplike stones as she might her much clearer crystal. Although her eyes darkened and I felt a great heaviness descend upon her heart like a stormcloud, she, too, sat quietly sipping her tea and saying nothing.

We slept uneasily that night, and Kane didn’t sleep at all. He stood for hours keeping watch, looking for lions in the shadows of the moon-reddened rocks or enemies approaching across the darkling plain. Alphanderry, who couldn’t sleep either, brought out his mandolet and sang to keep him company. And unseen by him, Flick spun only desultorily to his music. He seemed to want to hide from the bloody moon above us.

And so the hours of night passed, and the heavens turned slowly about the rutilant earth. When morning came, we had a better look at this harsher country into which we had ventured. Yarkona, Master Juwain said, meant the ‘Green Land’, but there was little of this hue about it. Neither true steppe nor quite desert, the sparse grass here was burnt brown by a much hotter sun. The yusage had been joined by its even tougher cousins: ursage and spiny sage, whose spiked leaves discouraged the brush voles and deer from browsing upon them. We saw a few of these cautious animals in the early light, framed by some blackish cliffs to the east. These sharp prominences had a charred look about them, as if the sun had set fire to the very stone. But Kane said their color came from the basalt that formed them; the rocks, he told us, were the very bones of the earth, which the hot winds blowing up from the south had laid bare.

He also told us that we had made camp in Sagaram, a domain that some local lord had carved out of this once-great realm perhaps a century before. We looked to him for knowledge that might help us cross it. But as he admitted, he had come this way many years ago, in more peaceful times. Since then, he said, the boundaries of Yarkona’s little baronies and possessions had no doubt shifted like a desert’s sands, perhaps some of them having been blown away by war altogether.

‘Aigul lies some sixty miles from here to the north and east,’ he told us. ‘Unless it has grown since then, and its counts have annexed lands to the south.’

These lands we set out to cross on that dry, windy morning. Sagaram proved to be little more than a thin strip of shrubs and sere grasses running seventy or so miles along the Parth. By early afternoon, we had made our way clear into the next domain, although no river or stone marked the border, and we didn’t realize it at the time. It took some more miles of plodding across the hot, rising plain before we found anyone who could give us directions. This was a goatherd who lived in a little stone house by a well in sight of a rather striking rock formation to the east of us.

‘You’ve come to Karkut,’ he told us as he shared a little cheese and bread with us. He was a short man, neither young nor old, with a great flowing tunic pulled over his spare frame and tied at the waist with a bit of dirty rope. ‘To the north of us lie Hansh and Aigul; to the south is the Nashthalan. That’s mostly desert now, and you’ll want to stay well to the north of it if you’re to come to Khaisham safely.’

While his two young sons watered our horses, he advised us to make our way directly east along the hills above the Nashthalan; after crossing through Sarad, he said, we should turn north along the dip in the White Mountains and so come to Khaisham that way.

But even as we were sharing a cup of brandy with him and eating some dried figs, a knight wearing a green and white surcoat over his gleaming mail came riding down from the rock formation above us. He had the same browned skin and dark beard as the goatherd, but he rode with an air of confidence as if his lord commanded the lands hereabouts. He presented himself as Rinald, son of Omar the Quiet; he said that he was in the service of Lord Nicolaym, who had a castle hidden in the rocks above us.

‘We saw you ride up to the well,’ he told us, looking from me to my friends. ‘We were afraid that you would pass this way unheralded.’

He came down from his horse and broke bread with us. He was only too happy to share some of our brandy, too, which was nearly the last of the vintage we had carried from Tria.

‘Lord Nicolaym,’ he said to us, ‘would like to offer his hospitality, for the night or as many nights as you wish.’

I thought of the golden cup that likely awaited us in Khaisham. An image sprang into my mind of time running out of it like the sands from an hourglass. If we came to Khaisham too late, I thought, we might find the Library emptied of the Lightstone, perhaps carried away by another.

‘Sar Valashu?’

I looked up at the sun, still high in the cloudless sky. We had many hours left that day that we might travel, and I told Rinald this.

‘Of course, you’re free to ride on as you please,’ Rinald said to us. ‘Lord Nicolaym doesn’t order the comings and goings of pilgrims or charge them tolls as some do. But you should be careful of where you go. Not everyone welcomes pilgrims these days.’

With an apology to the goatherd, he went on to dispute his advice that we should journey east through Sarad.

‘Baron Jadur’s knights are jealous of their borders there,’ Rinald told us. ‘Although they hate Count Ulanu, they’ve no love of Khaisham and the Librarians, either. It’s said that for many years they’ve turned pilgrims away from their domain – those they haven’t plundered or imprisoned.’

At this news, the goatherd took a drink of brandy and shrugged his shoulders. His business, he said, was keeping his goats fat and healthy, not in keeping apprised of the injustices of distant lords.

As for injustice, Rinald informed us sadly that there was too much of that in his own domain. ‘Duke Rasham is a good enough man, but some of his lords have gone over to the Kallimun – we’re not quite sure which ones. But there have been murders of those who speak for joining arms with Khaisham. We caught an assassin trying to murder Lord Nicolaym just last month. You should be careful in Karkut, I’m sorry to say, Sar Valashu. These are evil times.’

‘It would seem that we must take care wherever we go in Yarkona,’ I told him.

‘That is true,’ he said. ‘But there are some domains you must avoid at all costs. Aigul, of course. And to the west of those crucifiers, Brahamdur, whose baron and lords are practically Count Ulanu’s slaves. And Sagaram – you were lucky to cross it unmolested, for they’ve been forced into an alliance with Aigul. To the north of us, between here and Aigul, Hansh has nearly lost its freedom as well. It’s said that soon Count Ulanu will press Hansh levies into his army.’

Maram, of course, didn’t like the news that he was hearing. He looked at me a long moment before asking Rinald, ‘How are we to reach Khaisham, then?’

‘The route through Madhvam would be the safest,’ Rinald said, naming the domain just east of us. ‘There’s strength there for opposing Count Ulanu; their knights would join Khaisham in arms but for their bad blood with Sarad. That feud occupies all their attention, I’m afraid. I haven’t heard, though, that they have any quarrel with pilgrims.’

But Madhvam, as Maram learned, adjoined Aigul to its north, and that was too close for him. ‘What if this Ulanu the Handsome attacks Madhvam while we’re crossing it?’

‘No, that’s impossible,’ Rinald said. ‘We’ve just had word that Count Ulanu has marched against Sikar. The fortifications of that city are the strongest in all Yarkona. He’ll be at least a month reducing them.’

Sikar, he said, lay a good sixty miles north of Madhvam up against the White Mountains, with the domain of Virad partially squeezed in between. He told us then what Duke Rasham and Lord Nicolaym supposed would be Count Ulanu’s strategy for the conquest of Yarkona.

‘Khaisham is the key to everything that Count Ulanu desires,’ Rinald told us. ‘Other than Aigul, it’s the strongest domain in Yarkona, and Virad, Sikar and Inyam all look to the Librarians to lead the opposition against the Count. If Khaisham falls, the whole of the north will fall as well. Count Ulanu already has the west under his thumb. Hansh, too. The middle domains – Madhvam and Sarad, even Karkut – can’t stand alone. And once Aigul has swallowed us all up, it will be nothing for the Count’s army to take the Nashthalan.’

His words encouraged us to finish our brandy in quick swallows. And then Maram said, ‘Ah, well, I should think that the Count’s invasion of Sikar would lead all the free domains to join against him.’

‘That is my lord’s hope, too,’ Rinald said. ‘But I’m afraid that many lords think otherwise. They say that if Count Ulanu’s conquest is inevitable, they should join with him rather than wind up nailed to crosses.’

‘Nothing’s inevitable,’ Kane growled out, ‘except such cowardly talk.’

‘That is so,’ Rinald said. ‘Even Sikar’s fall is uncertain. If only Khaisham’s knights would ride to its aid …’

‘Will they?’ I asked.

‘No one knows. The Librarians are brave enough, and none better at arms. But for a thousand years, they’ve used them only in defense of their books.’

‘Then what about Virad? What about Inyam?’ I asked, naming the domain north of Virad and between Sikar and Khaisham.

‘I think they’ll wait to see what Khaisham does,’ Rinald says. ‘If the Librarians stay behind their walls and Sikar falls, then likely they’ll sue for peace.’

‘You mean, surrender,’ Kane snarled.

‘Better that than crucifixion, many would say.’

Because Kane’s flashing eyes were difficult to behold just then, I turned toward Maram, who was looking for reasons to abandon his courage.

‘If the Red Dragon desires the conquest of Yarkona so badly,’ he said, ‘I don’t see why he doesn’t just send an army to reduce it. Sakai isn’t so far from here, is it? What could stop him?’

‘Niggardliness could,’ Atara said perceptively. ‘I think the Lord of Lies is very careful: he hoards his forces like a miser does gold.’

‘Just so,’ Rinald said. ‘For him such a conquest would be an expensive campaign.’

‘How so?’ Maram asked.

‘If I had a map, I would show you,’ Rinald said. ‘But there’s no good route from Sakai to Yarkona. If a Sakayan army tried the Red Desert, the heat would kill them like flies if the Ravirii didn’t first.’

‘What about the direct route through the mountains?’

‘That would be even more dangerous,’ Rinald said. ‘The White Mountains, at least the stretch of that range between Yarkona and Sakai, is the land of the Ymanir. They are much worse than the Ravirii.’

He went on to say that the Ymanir were also called the Frost Giants; they were savage men nearly eight feet tall and covered with white fur, who were known to kill all who entered their country and eat them.

‘Frost Giants, is it now?’ Maram exclaimed as he shuddered. ‘Oh, too much, too much.’

I felt my own insides churning as I looked at the war-torn landscape to the east and tried to make out the great White Mountains beyond. In the haze of the burning distances, I saw a golden room whose great iron door was slowly closing like that of a vault. We had to enter the room safely and get out again before we were trapped inside.

‘Val,’ Maram said to me, ‘I don’t have a very good feeling about this land. Perhaps we should turn back before it’s too late.’

I looked at him then, and the fire in my eyes told him that I wasn’t about to come within inches of fulfilling the quest simply to turn back. This same fire blazed inside Kane and Atara, and in Liljana, Alphanderry and Master Juwain. It smoldered, too, beneath the damp leaves of Maram’s fear, even if he didn’t know it.

‘All right, all right, don’t look at me like that,’ Maram said to me. ‘If we must go on, we must. But let’s go soon, okay?’

And with that, we finished our little meal and thanked the goatherd for his hospitality. Then Rinald helped us finally decide our route: we would cut through Karkut and Madhvam toward the northeast along the line of the Nashbrum River. And then turn southeast through Virad’s canyon lands, coming eventually to a little spur running down from the White Mountains that separated Virad and Inyam from Khaisham. There we would find a pass called the Kul Joram, and beyond that, Khaisham.

‘I wish you well,’ Rinald said to us as he mounted his horse. ‘I’ll remind Lord Nicolaym to keep a few rooms empty for your return.’

We watched him ride off toward the rocks above us and the castle that we couldn’t see. And then we turned to mount our horses as well.

All that hot afternoon we rode along the line that Rinald had advised. We found the Nashbrum, a smallish river that ran down from the mountains and seemed to narrow and lose substance to the burning earth as it flowed toward the Nashthalan. Cottonwood trees grew along its course, and we kept their shimmering leaves in sight as we paralleled it almost all the way to Madhvam. We were lucky to come across none of the traitorous lords or knights who had gone over to the Kallimun. We made camp along the Nashbrum’s sandy banks, keeping a careful watch.

But the night passed peacefully enough; only the howling of some wolves pointing their snouts toward the moon reminded us that we were not alone in this desolate country. When morning came, clear and blue and hinting of a sweltering heat later in the day, we set out early and rode quickly through what coolness we could find. It was good, I thought, that we kept close to the river; the sweating horses made free with its water and so did we. By the time the sun crested the sky, we decided to break for our midday meal beneath the shade of a great, gnarled cottonwood. No one was hungry enough to eat, but at least we had some cover from the blistering sun.

But soon enough, we had to set out again. Toward mid-afternoon, some big clouds formed up and let loose a quick burst of thunder and rain. It lasted only long enough to wet the ursage and dried grasses and the sharp rocks that tore at our horses’ hooves. It was a measure of our desire to reach Khaisham that we still made a good distance that day. By the time the sun had left its fierceness behind it in the waves of heat radiating off the glowing land, we found ourselves in the domain of Virad. To the north of us, and to the east, too, the knifelike peaks of the White Mountains caught the red fire of the setting sun.

‘Well, that was a day,’ Maram said. He wiped the sweat from his dripping brown curls and dismounted to look for some wood for the night’s fire. ‘I’m hot, I’m thirsty, I’m tired. And what’s worse,’ he said, pressing his nose to his armpit, ‘I stink. This heat is much worse than the rain in the Crescent Mountains.’

‘Hmmph,’ Atara said to him, ‘it’s only worse because you’re suffering from it now. Just wait until our return.’

‘If we do return,’ he muttered. He scratched at some beads of sweat in the thick beard along his neck as he looked about. ‘Val, are you sure this is Virad?’

I pointed along the river where it abruptly turned north about five miles across the rocky ground ahead of us. I said, ‘Rinald told us to look for that turning. There, we’re to set our course to the southeast and so come to the pass after another forty miles.’

Directly to the east of us, I saw, was a large swelling of black rock impossible to cross on horses. And so, at the river’s turning, we would ride up and around it.

‘Well, then, we must have ridden nearly forty miles today.’

‘Too far,’ Kane said, coming over to us and studying the terrain around us. ‘We pressed the horses too hard. Tomorrow we’ll have to satisfy ourselves with half that distance.’

‘I don’t like the look of this country,’ Maram said. ‘I don’t want to remain here any longer than we have to.’

‘If we cripple the horses, we’ll be here even longer,’ Kane told him. ‘Do you want to walk to Khaisham?’

That night, we fortified our camp with some of the logs and branches we found down by the river. The moon, when it rose over the black hills, was clearly waning though still nearly full. It set the wolves farther out on the plain to howling: a high-pitched, plaintive sound that had always unnerved Maram – and Liljana and Master Juwain, as well. To soothe them, Alphanderry plucked the strings of his mandolet and sang of ages past and brighter times to come when the Galadin and Elijin would walk the earth again. His clear voice rang out across the river, echoing from the ominous-looking rocks. It brought cheer to us all, though it also touched Kane with a deep dread I felt pulling at his insides like the teeth of something much worse than wolves.

‘Too loud,’ Kane muttered at Alphanderry. ‘This isn’t Alonia, eh? Nor even Surrapam.’

After that Alphanderry sang more quietly, and the golden tones pouring from his throat seemed to harmonize with the wolves’ howls, softening them and rendering them less haunting. But then, above his beautiful voice and those of the wolves, from the north of us where the river turned into some low hills, came a distant keening sound that was terrible to hear.

‘Shhh,’ Maram said, tapping Alphanderry’s knee, ‘what was that?’

Alphanderry now put down his mandolet and listened with the rest of us. Again came the far-off keening, and then an answering sound, much closer, from the hills to the east. It was like the shrieking of a cat and the scream of a wounded horse and the cries of the damned all bound up into a single, piercing howl.

‘That’s no wolf!’ Maram called out. ‘What is it?’

Again came the howl, closer, and this time it had something of a crow’s cawing and a bear’s growl about it: OWRRRUULLL!

Kane jumped to his feet and drew his sword. It seemed to point of its own toward the terrible sound.

‘Do you know what that is?’ Maram asked him, also drawing his sword.

OWRRULLLLL!

Now all of us, except Master Juwain, took up weapons and stood staring at the moonlit rocks across the river.

‘Ah, for the love of woman, Kane, please tell us if you know what we’re facing!’

But Kane remained silent, staring off into the dark. The cry came again, but it seemed to be moving away from us. After a while, it faded and then vanished into the night.

‘This is too too much,’ Maram said. He turned toward Kane accusingly as if it was he who had called forth the hideous voices. ‘Wolves don’t howl like that.’

‘No,’ Kane muttered, ‘but the Blues do.’

‘The Blues!’ Maram said. ‘Who or what are the Blues?’

But it was Master Juwain who answered him. He knelt by the fire, reading from his book as he quoted from the Visions: ‘ “Then came the blue men, the half-dead whose cries will wake the dead. They are the heralds of the Red Dragon, and the ghosts of battle follow them to war.” ’

He closed his book and said, ‘I’ve always wondered what those lines meant.’

‘They mean this,’ Kane said. ‘None of us will sleep tonight.’

He told us then what he knew of the Blues. He said that they were a short, immensely squat and powerful people, a race of warriors bred by Morjin during the Age of Swords. It was their gift – or curse – to have few nerves in their bodies and so to feel little pain. This gift was deepened by their eating the berries of the kirque plant, which enabled them to march into battle in a frenzy of unfeeling wrath toward their foes. The berries also stained their skin a pale shade of blue; most of their men accentuated this color by rubbing berry juice across their skin so that the whole of their bodies were blemished a deep blue the color of a bruise. Most of them, as well, displayed many scabs, open cuts and running sores across their arms and legs, for in their nearly nerveless immunity to pain, they were wont to wound themselves and take no notice of the injury. But others couldn’t help noticing them: they went into battle naked wielding huge, terrible, steel axes. They howled like maddened wolves. They killed without pity or feeling as if their souls had died. Because of this, they were called the Soulless Ones or the Half-Dead.

‘But if the Beast created these warriors during the Age of Swords for battle,’ Master Juwain asked, thumping his book, ‘why isn’t more told of their feats in here?’

‘There are other books,’ Kane said, scanning the gleaming terrain about us. ‘If we ever reach the Library, maybe you’ll read them.’

As if realizing that he had spoken too harshly to a man he had come to respect, he softened his voice and said, ‘As for their feats, they were almost too terrible to record. Great axes they wielded, remember, and they had even less care for others’ flesh than they did their own.’

He went on to say that Morjin had employed the Blues in his initial conquest of Alonia. They had left almost no one alive to tell of their terror. They had also proved almost impossible to control. And so after one particularly vicious battle, Morjin – the Lord of Lies, the Treacherous One – had invited the entire host of Blues to a victory celebration. There, with his own hand, he had poured into their cups a poisoned wine.

‘It’s said that all the Blues perished in a single night,’ Kane told us, looking toward the mountains to the north. ‘But I think that some must have escaped to take refuge here. I’ve long heard it rumored that there was some terror hidden in the White Mountains – other than the Frost Giants, of course.’

In silence, we all looked at the great, snow-capped peaks glistering in the moonlight. And then Maram said, ‘But we’re still a good forty miles from the mountains. If it is the Blues we heard, what are they doing in the hills of Yarkona?’

‘That I would like to know,’ Kane told him. Then he clapped him on the arm and smiled his savage smile. ‘But not too badly. And not tonight. Now why don’t we at least try to sleep? Alphanderry and I will take the first watch. If the Blues come back to sing for us, we’ll be sure to wake you.’

But the Half-Dead, if such they really were, did not return that night. Even so, none of us got much sleep. By the time morning came, we were all red-eyed and crabby, almost too tired to pull ourselves on top of our footsore horses. We prayed for a few clouds to soften the sun. Each hour, however, it waxed hotter and hotter so that it threatened to set all the sky on fire.

We rode through a land devoid of people. After we turned southeast at the bend in the river, we sought out the few scattered huts along the rock-humped plain to gather knowledge of the country through which we passed. But the huts were all empty, deserted it seemed in great haste. Perhaps, I thought, the cries of the Soulless Ones had driven their owners away. Perhaps they had fled for protection to a nearby castle of some local lord.

Late that morning, we saw some vultures circling in the sky ahead of us. As we rode closer, the air thickened with a terrible smell. Maram wanted to turn aside from whatever lay in that direction, but Kane was eager as always to see what must be seen. And so we pressed on until we crested a low rise. And there before us, growing out of the sage and grass like trees, were three wooden crosses from which hung the blackened bodies of three naked men. Vultures, perched on the arms of the crosses, bent their beaks downward, working at them. When Kane saw these death birds, his face darkened and his heart filled with wrath. He charged forward, waving his sword and growling like a wolf himself. At first, the vultures managed to ignore him. But such was his fury that when his sword leapt out to impale one of the vultures in the chest, the others sprang into the air and began circling warily about, waiting for the maddened Kane to leave them to their feast.

‘How I hate these damn birds!’ Kane raged as he dismounted to wipe his sword on the grass. ‘They make a mockery of the One’s noblest creation.’

We rode up to him, holding our cloaks over our noses against the awful smell. I forced myself to look up at these husks of once-proud men, which iron nails and the iron-hard beaks of the vultures had reduced so pitifully. To Kane, I said, ‘You didn’t tell us that the Blues learned the defilements of the Crucifier.’

‘I never heard that they did,’ he said, looking at the crosses. ‘This may be the work of some lord who has gone over to the Kallimun.’

‘What lord?’ Liljana asked, nudging her horse closer to Kane. ‘Rinald said that the lords of Virad looked to Khaisham for leadership.’

‘So, it seems that some of them may look to Aigul.’

I dismounted Altaru and walked over to the center cross. I reached out and touched the foot of the man who had been nailed to it. His flesh was soft, swollen and hot – as hot as the burning air itself.

‘We should bury these men,’ I said.

Kane stuck his sword down into the rock-hard earth. ‘We should bury them, Val. But it would take us a day of digging, eh? Whoever put them here may come back and find us.’

Maram, whose hand was trembling as he held his cloak tightly covering his face, said, ‘Come, please, let’s go before it’s too late!’

And then Kane, always a man of oppositions, snarled out, ‘He’s right, we should go. Let’s leave these birds their meal. Even vultures must eat.’

And so, after saying a prayer for the three men who had ended their lives in this desolate place, we mounted our horses and resumed our journey. But as we rode over the hot, tormented earth, Alphanderry wet his throat with a little blood from his cracked lips and gave us a song to hearten us. He made a hauntingly beautiful music in remembrance of the dead men, singing their souls up to the stars behind the deep blue sky. Despite the terrible thing we had just seen, his words were in praise of life:

Sing ye songs of glory,Sing ye songs of glory,That the light of the OneWill shine upon the world.

‘Too loud,’ Kane muttered as he scanned the low hills about us.

But Alphanderry, perhaps concentrating on an image of the Lightstone that lay somewhere before us, raised up his voice even louder. He sang strongly and bravely, with a reckless abandon, and his voice filled the countryside. Even the grasses, I thought, sere and stunted here, would want to weep at the sound of it.

‘Too damn loud, I say!’ Kane barked out, flashing an angry look at Alphanderry. ‘Do you want to announce us to the whole world?’

Alphanderry, however, seemed drunk on the beauty of his own singing. He ignored Kane. After a while, strange and wonderful words began pouring from his lips in a torrent that seemed impossible to stop.

‘Damn you, Alphanderry, come to your senses, will you?’

As Kane glowered at Alphanderry, he finally fell quiet. The look on his face was that of a scolded puppy. To Kane, he said, ‘I’m sorry, but I was so close. So very close to finding the words of the angels.’

‘If the crucifiers come upon us here,’ Kane said, ‘not even the angels will be able to help us.’

Even as he said this, Atara pointed at a far-off hill. I looked there and thought I saw a hazy figure vanish behind it.

‘What is it?’ Kane asked, squinting.

Atara, who had the best eyes of any of us, said, ‘It was a man – he seemed dressed in blue.’

At this news, Maram sat swallowing against the fear in his throat as if he could so easily make it go away.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alphanderry said again. ‘But maybe the blue man didn’t see us.’

‘Foolish minstrel,’ Kane said softly. ‘Let’s ride now, and hope he didn’t.’

And so we set out again, riding as swiftly as we dared for half an hour. And with each mile we covered, the air grew hotter so that it fairly roiled, and the stench of death stayed with us. We entered a country of rolling swells of earth like the waves of the sea; some were a hundred feet high and broken with rocky outcroppings. We kept a reasonably straight course, winding our way down their troughs. After a while, I felt a sick sensation along the back of my neck as if the vultures were watching me. I stopped and turned toward the left; I looked toward the top of the rise even as Atara did, too.

‘What is it?’ Maram said, reining up behind us. ‘What do you see?’

We had been told to avoid Aigul, and so we had. But Aigul hadn’t avoided us. Just as Maram swallowed another mouthful of air and belched in disquiet, a company of cavalry broke over the rise and thundered down the slope straight toward us. There were twenty-three of them, as I saw at a glance. Their mail and helms gleamed in the sun. And holstered and upraised from a horse near their leader was a long pole from which streamed their standard: a bright yellow banner showing the coils and fiery tongue of a great red dragon.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram cried out. ‘Oh, my Lord!’

Liljana, who had drawn her sword, looked about with her calm, penetrating eyes and said to me, ‘Do we flee or fight, Val?’

‘Perhaps neither,’ I said, trying to keep my voice calm for Maram’s sake – and my own. I turned, pointing toward the right, where a hummock stood like a grass-covered castle. ‘Up there – we’ll face them up there.’

‘That’s very right,’ Master Juwain said reassuringly as he looked at the men bearing down on us. ‘This is probably just some wayward lord and his retainers. If we flee, he’ll think we’re thieves or afraid of them.’

‘Well, we are afraid of them!’ Maram pointed out. He might have said more, but we had already turned to gallop up the hummock, and the shock of his horse’s heaving muscles drove the wind from him.

It took us only a few moments to gain what little protection the hummock’s height provided us. Its top was nearly flat, perhaps fifty yards across; we sat on our horses there as we watched the men approach. I didn’t remark what we could now see quite plainly: that next to this great lord, who bore upon his yellow surcoat another red dragon, rode three naked men whose bodies seemed painted blue. Their little mountain ponies carried them up our hummock with greater agility than did the war horses of their more heavily armored companions. Each of the three men was short and immensely muscled, and they each brandished in their knotted fists an immense steel axe.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alphanderry said to Kane, who had his sword drawn as his black eyes stared down at the approaching company.

‘It’s not your sorrow that we need now, my young friend,’ Kane said with a grim smile, ‘but your strength. And your courage.’

The company drew up in a crescent on the slope below us. And then their leader, along with the standard-bearer and one of the blue men, rode forward a few paces. He was a quick-eyed man with a vulpine look to his hard face, which seemed all angles and planes, like pieces of chipped flint. Many would have called him handsome, a grace that he seemed to relish as he sat up straight on his horse in all his vanity and pride. His eyes were almost as dark as his well-trimmed beard; they fixed upon me like poisoned lances that pierced my heart with all the darkness of his.

‘Who are you?’ he called out to me in a raspy voice. ‘Come down and identify yourselves!’

‘Who are you,’ I said to him, ‘who rides upon us in surprise like robbers?’

‘Robbers, is it?’ he said. ‘Be careful how you speak to the lord of this domain!’

I traded a quick look with Kane and then Atara, who held her strung bow down against her saddle. Rinald had told us that Virad’s lord was Duke Vikram, an old man with scars along his white-bearded face. To this much younger man below us, I said, ‘We had heard that the lord of this domain is Duke Vikram.’

‘Not anymore,’ the man said with glee. ‘Duke Vikram is dead. I’m the lord of Virad now. And of Sikar and Aigul. You may address me as Count Ulanu.’

It came to me, all in a moment, what the terrible stench in the air must be: the taint of many corpses rotting in the sun. Somewhere near here, I knew, a battle had recently been fought. And Count Ulanu claimed the lordship of Virad by right of conquest.

‘You have my name, now give me yours,’ the Count said to me.

‘We’re pilgrims,’ I told him, ‘only pilgrims bound for Khaisham.’

‘Pilgrims with swords,’ he said, looking at Kane, Maram and Liljana. Then he turned his gaze on me and studied my face for a long time. ‘It’s said that the Valari look like you.’

I slipped my hand beneath my cloak as I rested it on the hilt of my sword. I noticed Maram gripping his red crystal in his free hand even as Liljana held her blue stone to her head.

‘What’s that you’ve got in your hand?’ Count Ulanu barked at her.

But Liljana didn’t answer him; she just sat staring at him as if her eyes could drink up all the challenge in his and still hold more.

Count Ulanu bent his head to whisper something to one of the Blues, whose large, round head was shaved and stained darkly with the juice of the kirque berries, even as Kane had said. One of his ears was missing, and the skin about the hole there all scabbed over. Along his side, he showed an open wound, probably from a sword cut; in the dark red suck of it squirmed many white maggots eating away the decaying flesh there. As he pointed at Alphanderry and whispered back to Count Ulanu, I understood that this was the man who had sighted us earlier. Most likely, he had then gone to fetch the Count and his other men upon us.

‘You picked an evil time for your pilgrimage,’ the Count said, looking up at us. His raspy voice had now softened as if he were trying to lure a reluctant serving girl into his chambers. ‘There has been unrest in Sikar and in Virad. Both Duke Amadam and Duke Vikram were forced to ask our help in putting down rebellions. This we did. We’ve recently fought a battle not far from here, at Tarmanam. Victory was ours, but sadly, Duke Vikram was killed. A few of the rebellious lords and their knights escaped us. They’ll likely turn to outlawry now and fall upon pilgrims such as you. This country isn’t safe. That is why we must ask you to lay down your arms and come with us for your own protection.’

I sat on top of Altaru sweating in the burning sun as I listened to him. I smelled the acridness of his own sweat and that of the knights about him. I knew that he was lying, even if I couldn’t quite tell what the truth really was. I noticed Liljana suddenly close her eyes; it was strange how she seemed to be staring straight at him even so.

‘You might ask us to lay down,’ Kane told him, with surprising politeness, ‘but we must respectfully decline your request.’

‘I’m afraid we must do more than ask,’ Count Ulanu said, his voice rising with anger. ‘Please lay down now and come with us.’

‘No,’ Kane told him. ‘No, we can’t do that.’

‘When peace has been restored,’ the Count went on, ‘we’ll provide you an escort to Khaisham so that you may complete your pilgrimage.’

‘No, thank you,’ Kane said icily.

‘You have my word that you’ll be treated honorably and well,’ Count Ulanu said, smiling sincerely. ‘There’s a tower for guests at Duke Vikram’s castle – it overlooks the Ashbrum River. We’ll be happy to set you up there.’

Now Liljana’s nose pointed straight toward him as if she were sniffing out poison in a cup. She suddenly opened her eyes to stare at him as she said, ‘He speaks the truth: there are many towers of wood now at the Duke’s castle. He intends to set us on these crosses with the Duke’s knights and his family.’

The sudden rage that enpurpled Count Ulanu’s face just then was terrible to behold. He whipped out his saber and pointed it at Liljana as he shouted, ‘Damn you, witch! Give me what’s in your hand before I cut it off and take it from you!’

Liljana opened her hand to show him her blue gelstei. Then she smiled defiantly as she closed her hand about the stone and stuck her fist out toward him.

‘Damn witch,’ the Count muttered.

‘There was a battle at Tarmanam,’ she said to all who could hear. ‘But there were no rebellious lords – only those faithful to Duke Vikram, who has been cruelly tortured to death.’

In her frightfully calm and measured way, she went on to tell us something of what she had seen in the Count’s mind. She said that he and his army had marched into Sikar even as Rinald had told us. But there had been no siege of the mighty fortifications there. As soon as the Count’s engineers had set up their catapults and battering rams, his army had been joined by a host of Blues. And then Kallimun priests within the city had assassinated the Duke of Sikar and his family; the Duke’s cousin, Baron Mukal, bowing before the terror of these priests, had thrown open the city gates. Hostages had been taken and threatened with crucifixion. The Sikar army had then gone over to the Count, taking oaths of loyalty to him and his distant master. Thus Sikar had fallen in scarcely a day.

Count Ulanu had then gathered up both armies – and the companies of Blues. In a lightning strike, he had swept south, into Virad. Duke Vikram and his lords had had no time to watch events unfold in Sikar and to sue for peace on favorable terms; their only choice was to surrender unconditionally or to ride out to battle. With the Khaisham Librarians still preparing to send a force to Sikar, much too late, Duke Vikram chose to fight alone over bowing to Count Ulanu and the Red Dragon. But his forces had been slaughtered and many of the survivors crucified. And now his captured family awaited the same fate, imprisoned in his own castle.

‘It was treachery that took Sikar,’ Liljana said to us. ‘And, listen, do you hear the lies in the Count’s words? He promises us more treachery with every breath.’

As Count Ulanu stared at her, I was given to understand that he had been out riding with his personal guard in search of the best route to march his army through to Khaisham when one of his Blues had alerted him as to our presence.

On either side of the Count, two of his knights, clad in mail and armed with wicked-looking, curved swords, nudged their horses closer to him as if to steady him and show their support in the face of Liljana’s barbs. It was to her that the Count now said, ‘You know many things but not the one that really matters.’

‘And what is that, dear Count?’ Liljana asked.

‘In the end, you’ll beg to be allowed to bow before me and kiss my feet. How long has it been, old witch, since you’ve kissed a man?’

In answer, Liljana again held out her fist to him, this time with her middle finger extended.

The Count’s face filled with hate, but he had the force of will to channel it into his derisive words: ‘Why don’t you try looking into my mind now?’

Then he, this priest of the Kallimun, turned upon her a gaze so venomous and full of malice that she gave a cry of pain. As something dark yet clear as a black crystal flared inside him, I felt the still-sheathed Alkaladur flare as well even through its jade hilt.

‘What a gracious lord you are!’ she said. She continued to stare at him despite her obvious anguish. ‘I should imagine that all Yarkona has remarked your exemplary manners.’

I knew, of course, what she intended, and I approved her strategy: she was trying to use her blue gelstei and all the sharpness of her tongue to provoke the Count into an action against us. For surely there must be a battle between us; it would be best for us if we forced the Count and his men to fight it, here, upon this high ground, charging up this hill. This was our fate, perhaps written in the moon and stars, and I could see it approaching as clearly as could Atara. And yet it was also my fate that I must first speak for peace.

‘Count Ulanu,’ I said, ‘you are now Lord of Sikar and Virad by conquest. But your domains were gained through treachery. No doubt the lords of Khaisham are preparing to take them back. Why don’t you withdraw your men so that we may continue our journey? When we reach Khaisham, we’ll speak to the Librarians concerning these matters. Perhaps a way can be found to restore peace to Yarkona without more war.’

It was a poor speech, I thought, and Count Ulanu had as much regard for it as I. His contemptuous eyes fell upon me as he said, ‘If you are Valari, it seems you’ve lost your courage that you should suggest such cowardly schemes of running off to the enemy.’

For quite a few moments, he stared at the scar on my forehead. Then his eyes, which had caused Liljana nearly to weep, bored into mine. I felt something like black maggots trying to eat their way into my brain. My hand closed more tightly around Alkaladur’s swan-carved hilt. I felt the fire of the silustria passing into me and gathering in my eyes. And suddenly Count Ulanu looked away from me.

‘Pilgrims, are you?’ he muttered. ‘Seven of you, what’s to be done with seven damn pilgrims?’

As the hot wind rippled the grasses about the hill, the Blue warrior with the shaved head impatiently turned to speak to the Count. His words came out in a series of guttural sounds like the grunts of a bear. He suddenly raised his axe, which caught the fierce rays of the sun. From his neck dangled a clear stone, which also gleamed in the bright light. It was a large, square-cut diamond like those that are affixed to leather breastpieces to make up the famed Valari battle armor. The other Blues sported identical gems. With the veins of my wrist touching my sword’s diamond pommel, I saw in a flash how these Blues had acquired such stones: they had been ripped free from the armor of the crucified Valari after the battle of Tarshid an entire age ago. For three thousand years, Morjin had hoarded them against the day they might be needed. As now they were. For clearly, he had bought the service of the Blues’ axes – and perhaps their forgetfulness of past treacheries – with these stolen diamonds.

‘Urturuk here,’ the Count said, nodding at the scabrous Blue, ‘suggests that we do send you on to Khaisham. Or at least your heads.’

Like a perfect jewel forming up in my mind, I suddenly saw what Morjin’s spending of this long-hoarded treasure portended: that he had finally committed to the open conquest of not only Yarkona but all of Ea.

‘The Librarians,’ the Count said, ‘must be sent some sign that they’ve forfeited the right to receive more pilgrims.’

While the horses, ours and theirs, nickered nervously and pawed the earth, Count Ulanu stared up the grassy hill at us deciding what to do.

And then Liljana smiled at him and said, ‘But haven’t you already made your request to the Librarians?’

Again, the rage returned to Count Ulanu’s face as he caught Liljana in his hateful eyes. And she stared right back at him, taking perhaps too much delight in her power to provoke him. Then she told us of the hidden thing that she had so painstakingly wrested from the Count’s mind.

‘After Tarmanam,’ she said to him loudly so that all his men could hear, ‘didn’t you send your swiftest rider to Khaisham demanding a tribute of gold? And didn’t the Librarians send you a book illumined with gilt letters? A book of manners?’

Her revelation of the Librarians’ rebuke and the Count’s secret shame proved too much for him. With his true motives for wanting to humble the Librarians exposed like a raw nerve, the Count’s hand tightened on his horse’s reins, pulling back its head until it screamed in pain. And then the Count himself suddenly pointed his sword at us and screamed to his men, ‘Damned witch! Take her! Take them all! And be sure you take the Valari alive!’

This command pleased the three Blues greatly. They clanked their great axes together, and in harmony with the ringing steel, they let loose a long and savage howl: OWRRULLL!

Then the twenty knights kicked their spurs against their screaming horses’ flanks, and the battle was joined.

3

The Count himself led the charge up the hill. He was daring enough to show brave, but cunning enough to know that his knights wouldn’t let him ride right onto our swords unprotected and alone. As their horses wheezed and sweated and pounded up the steep slope, two of his knights spurred their mounts slightly ahead of him to act as living shields. And it was well for him that they did. For just then, behind me, a bowstring twanged and an arrow buried itself in the lead knight’s chest. I heard Atara call out, ‘Twenty-three!’ A few moments later, another arrow sizzled through the roiling air, only to glance off the Count’s shield. And then he and his men were upon us.

The first knight to crest the hill – a big, burly man with fear-maddened eyes – drove his horse straight toward me. But due to his uphill charge, he had little momentum and less balance in his saddle; with Altaru’s hooves planted squarely in the earth, the point of my lance took him in the throat and drove clean through him. The force of his fall ripped the lance from my grasp. I heard him screaming, but then realized that he was going to his death in near silence, a wheeze of bloody breath escaping from his ruined throat and nothing more. The scream was all inside me. It built louder and louder until it seemed that the earth itself was shrieking in agony as it split asunder beneath me and pulled me down toward a black and bottomless chasm.

‘Val!’ Kane called out from somewhere nearby. ‘Draw your sword!’

I heard his sword slice the air and cleave through the gorget surrounding a knight’s neck. I was vaguely aware of Maram fumbling with his red crystal and trying to catch a few rays of sun with which to burn the advancing knights. Master Juwain, to my astonishment, scooped up the shield of the man I had unhorsed; he held it protecting Liljana from another knight’s sword as she tried to urge her horse toward Count Ulanu. Behind me, to the right and left, Atara and Alphanderry worked furiously with their swords to beat back the attack of yet more knights who were trying to flank us along the rear of the hill and take us from behind.

With a trembling hand, I drew forth Alkaladur. The long blade gleamed in the light of the sun. The sight of the silver gelstei shining so brilliantly dismayed Count Ulanu and his men, even as it drove back the darkness engulfing me. My mind suddenly cleared and a fierce strength flowed up my hand into my arm, a strength that felt as bottomless as the sea. It was as if I were drawing Altaru’s surging blood into me, and more, the very fires of the earth itself.

The Bright Sword flared white then, so brilliant and dazzling that the nearest knights cried out and threw their arms over their eyes. But other knights and the three Blues pressed toward me. Kane was near me, too, cutting and killing and cursing. Horses collided with each other, snorted and screamed. Altaru, steadying me and freely lending me his great strength, turned his wrath on any who tried to harm me. An unhorsed knight tried to hammer my back with his mace; Altaru kicked out, catching him in the chest and knocking him over. And then, even as Urturuk, the Blue with the missing ear, came for me with his huge axe, Altaru backed up to trample the fallen knight with his sharp hooves. He struck down with tremendous force, again and again until the knight’s head was little more than white bones and broken brains beneath his crumpled helm.

‘Val – on your right!’

I narrowly pulled back from Urturuk’s ferocious axe blow that would have chopped through Altaru’s neck. Altaru, now sensing the enemy’s strategy of trying to kill him to get at me, furiously bit out at Urturuk, taking a good chunk of flesh from his shoulder. Urturuk seemed not to notice this ugly wound. He drove straight toward Altaru again, his mouth fairly frothing with wrath, this time trying to split open his skull.

At last I swung Alkaladur. It arced downward in a silvery flash, cutting through the axe’s iron-hard haft and into Urturuk’s bare chest, cleaving him nearly in two. The spray of blood from his opened chest nearly blinded me. I almost didn’t see one of the Count’s knights coming at me from the other side. But a sudden whinny and tensing of Altaru’s body told me of his attack. I whirled about, swinging Alkaladur again. Its terrible, star-tempered edge cut through both shield and the mailed forearm behind it, and then bit into the steel rings covering the knight’s belly. He cried out to see his arm fall away like a pruned tree limb, and plunged to the ground screaming out his death agony.

‘Take him!’ Count Ulanu screamed to his knights scarcely a dozen yards from me. ‘Can’t you take one damned Valari!’

Perhaps his men could have taken us but for Kane’s fury and the suddenly unleashed terror of my sword. Then, too, they were disadvantaged by trying to cripple and capture us rather than kill. With knights now pressing us on all sides, I urged Altaru toward Count Ulanu. But Liljana, with Master Juwain still holding out the shield to protect her right side while Kane bulled his way forward on her left, had already reached him. She struck her sword straight out toward his sneering face. The point of it managed to slice off the tip of his nose even as one of his knights’ horses knocked into hers. Blood streamed from this rather minor gash. But it was enough to unnerve Count Ulanu – and his men.

‘The Count is wounded!’ one of his captains cried out. ‘Retreat! Protect the Count! Take him to safety!’

Although it hadn’t been Count Ulanu who ordered this ignoble retreat, he made no move to gainsay his knight’s command. He himself led the flight back down the hill. Two of his knights guarded his back as he turned his horse’s tail to us – and paid with their lives. Kane’s sword took one of them clean through the forehead while I pushed the point of mine straight through the other’s armor into his heart. And suddenly the battle was over.

‘Do we pursue?’ Maram called out, reining in his horse at the top of the hill. He was either battle-drunk, I thought, or mad. ‘I’ll give them a taste of fire, I will!’

So saying, he drew out his gelstei and tried to loose a bolt of flame upon Count Ulanu and his retreating knights. But although the crystal warmed to a bright scarlet, it never came fully alive.

‘Hold!’ I called out. ‘Hold now!’

Atara, who had her bow raised, fired off an arrow which split the mail of one of the retreating knights. He galloped away from us with a feathered shaft sticking out of his shoulder.

‘Hold, please!’

With the three men I had killed lying rent and bleeding on the grass, I could barely keep from falling, too. Kane had dispatched two knights and the other two Blues. Atara had added two more men to her tally, while Maram, Alphanderry, Liljana and Master Juwain had done extraordinarily well in beating off the assault of armored knights without taking any wounds themselves. But now the agony of the slain took hold of my heart. A doorway showing only blackness opened to my left. The nothingness there beckoned me deeper toward death than I had ever been. To keep from being pulled inside, I held onto Alkaladur as tightly as I could. Its numinous fire opened another door through which streamed the light of the sun and stars. It warmed my icy limbs and brought me back to life.

‘Val, are you wounded?’ Master Juwain asked as he came up to me. Then he turned to take stock of the corpse-strewn hummock and called out to the rest of our company, ‘Is anyone wounded?’

None of us were. I sat on top of the trembling Altaru, gaining strength each moment as I watched the last of Count Ulanu’s men disappear over the same ridge from which they had come.

‘What now, Val?’ Liljana said to me as she wiped the Count’s blood from the tip of her sword. ‘Do we pursue?’

‘No, we’ve had enough of battle for one day,’ I said. ‘And we don’t know how close the rest of the Count’s army is.’

I looked up at the blazing sun and then out across Yarkona’s rocky hills, calculating time and distances. To Liljana, to my other battle-sickened friends, I said, ‘Now we flee.’

They needed no further encouragement to put this hill of carnage behind us. We eased the horses down its slopes into the grassy trough through which we had been riding when the Count had surprised us. And then, wishing to cover ground quickly, we urged them to a fast canter toward the east. The pass into Khaisham called the Kul Joram, I guessed, lay a good twenty-five or thirty miles ahead of us. And beyond that, we would still need to ride another twenty miles to reach the Librarians’ city.

We kept up a good pace for most of five miles, but then one of the pack horses threw a shoe, and we had to go more slowly as the sun-scorched turf gave way to ground planted with many more rocks. Here, too, there was a little ring-grass and sage pushing through the dirt, which the horses’ hooves powdered and kicked up into the air. It was dry and hot, and the glazy blue sky held not the faintest breath of wind. The horses sweated even more profusely than did we. They kept driving onward through the murderous heat, snorting at the dust, making choking sounds in their throats and gasping until their nostrils and lips were white with froth. When we came across a little stream running down from the mountains, we had to stop to water them lest our dash across the burning plain kill them.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered to Altaru as he bent his shiny black neck down to the stream. ‘Only a few more miles, old friend, only a few more.’

Alphanderry, gazing back in the direction from which we had come, spoke to all of us, saying, ‘I’m sorry, but this is all my fault. If I hadn’t opened my mouth to sing, we’d never have been discovered.’

I walked up to him and laid my hand on the damp, dark curls of his head. I told him, ‘They might have found us in any case. And without your songs, we’d never have had the courage to come this far.’

‘How far have we come?’ Master Juwain said, looking eastward. ‘How far to this Kul Joram?’

Liljana brushed back the hair sticking to her face as she caught my eye. ‘There’s something I must tell you, something else I saw in the Count’s filthy mind. After Tarmanam, he sent a force to the Kul Joram to hold it for his army’s advance into Khaisham.’

Maram, bending low by the stream to examine the hooves of his tiring sorrel, suddenly straightened up and said, ‘Oh, no – this is terrible news! How are we to cross into Khaisham, then?’

‘Don’t you give up hope so easily,’ Liljana chided him. ‘There is another pass.’

‘The Kul Moroth,’ Kane spat out as he gazed into the wavering distances. ‘It lies twenty miles north of the Kul Joram. It’s an evil place, and much narrower, but it will have to do.’

Maram pulled at his beard as he fixed Liljana with a suspicious look. ‘I thought you promised that you’d never look into another’s mind without his permission? This was a sacred principle, you said.’

‘Do you think I’d have let that treacherous Count nail you to a cross because of a principle?’ Liljana said. ‘Besides, I promised you, not him.’

Master Juwain came up to look into my eyes and said, ‘It seems that you’re growing ever more able to put up shields against others’ agonies.’

‘No, it’s just the opposite,’ I said, thinking of the three men I had slain. ‘Each time a man goes over now, it carries me deeper into the death realm. But the valarda, even as it opens me to this void, also opens me to the world. To all its pain, yes, but to its life as well. The sword that Lady Nimaiu gave me only aids in this opening. When I wield it truly, it’s as if the soul of the world pours into me.’

So saying, I drew Alkaladur and held it gleaming faintly toward the east.

‘Then the sword lends you a certain protection against the vulnerabilities of your gift.’

‘No, it is not so, sir. Someday when I kill, the death realm will grab hold of me so tightly that I’ll never return.’

Because there was nothing for him to say to this, he stood looking at me quietly even as the others fell silent, too.

Then Atara, scanning the horizon behind us, drew in a quick breath as she pointed toward the west. ‘They’re coming,’ she said. ‘Don’t you see?’

At first none of us did. But as we stared at the far-off hills until our eyes burned, we finally saw a plume of dust rising into the sky.

‘How many are there?’ Maram asked Atara.

‘That’s hard to say,’ she told him.

But even as we stood there beneath the quick beatings of our hearts, the dust plume grew bigger.

‘Too many, I think,’ Kane said. ‘Let’s ride now. We’ll have to leave the pack horses behind. They’re practically lame and slowing us down.’

This imperious announcement sparked fierce protest from Maram and Liljana. Maram couldn’t abide the thought of separating ourselves from most of our food and drink, while Liljana bitterly regretted having to forsake her beloved pots and pans.

‘You have your shield,’ she said to Kane, ‘so why shouldn’t I be allowed at least one pot for cooking a hot meal when we might most need one?’

‘And what about the brandy?’ Maram put in. ‘There’s little enough left, but we’ll need it for our return from Khaisham.’

‘Return?’ Kane growled. ‘We won’t even reach Khaisham if we don’t ride now. Now fetch your pot and your brandy, and let’s be off.’

We made a quick redistribution of those vital stores that the pack horses carried, filling our mounts’ saddlebags as full as we dared. Then we said goodbye to these faithful beasts that had carried our belongings so far. I prayed that they would wander over Yarkona’s mounded plains until some kind farmer found them and put them to work.

With pursuit now certain, though still far away, we set out for the Kul Moroth. We rode hard, pressing the horses to a full gallop until it became clear that they couldn’t hold such a pace. Altaru and Iolo were strong enough, and Fire, too, but Kane’s big bay and Liljana’s gelding had little wind left for such heroics. Master Juwain’s sorrel seemed to have aged greatly since setting out from Mesh, while Maram’s poor horse was in the worst shape of any of our mounts. His sore hoof, now bruised by hot stones, was getting worse with every furlong we covered. I worried that soon he would pull up ruined and lame. And Maram worried about this as well.

‘Ah, perhaps you should just leave me behind,’ he gasped as he urged his limping sorrel to keep up with us. For a moment, we slowed to a trot. ‘I’ll ride off in a different direction. Perhaps the Count’s men will follow me, instead of you.’

It was a courageous offer, if a little insincere. I thought that he might hope that our pursuers would follow us instead of him.

‘On the Wendrush,’ Atara said from atop her great roan mare, ‘that is how it must be. Where speed is life, a war party is only as fast as its slowest horse.’

Her words greatly alarmed Maram, who had no real intention of simply riding away from us. She saw his disquiet and said, ‘But this is not the Wendrush and we are no war party.’

‘Just so,’ I said. ‘Our company will reach Khaisham together or not at all. We have a lead; now let’s keep it.’

But this proved impossible to do. As the ground grew even drier and rougher, Maram’s sorrel slowed his pace even more. And the plume of dust behind us grew closer and thickened into a cloud.

‘What are we to do?’ Maram muttered. ‘What are we to do?’

And Kane, bringing up the rear, answered him with one word, ‘Ride.’

And ride we did. The rhythm of our horses’ hooves beat against the ground like the pounding of a drum. It grew very hot. I squinted against the sun pouring down upon the rocks to the east of us. Its rays, I thought, were like fiery nails fixing us to the earth. Dust stung my eyes and found its way into my mouth. Here the soil tasted of salt and men’s tears, if not those of the angels. Here, in this burning waste, it would be easy for horse and man to perish, sweated dry of all their water.

After some miles, my thoughts turned away from the men behind us and toward visions of water. I remembered the deep blue stillness of Lake Waskaw and the rivers of Mesh; I thought of the soft white clouds over Mount Vayu and its glittering snowfields melting into rills and brooks. I began to pray for rain.

But the sky remained clear, a hot and hellish blue-white that glared like fired iron. It consoled me not at all that Count Ulanu and his men must suffer this dreadful heat even as we did. I took courage, however, from the thought that if we endured it more bravely, we still might outdistance them.

But it was they who closed the distance between us. The cloud of dust following us grew ever larger and nearer.

‘The Count,’ Kane observed bitterly, looking back, ‘can afford to leave his laggards behind.’

As the hours passed, we entered terrain in which a series of low ridges ran from north to south like dull knife-blades pushing up the earth. They roughly paralleled the much greater mountain spur still ahead of us where, if Kane’s memory proved true, we would find the Kul Moroth. In most places, we had no choice but to ride up and over these sun-baked folds. This hot, heaving work tortured the horses. From the top of one of them, where we paused to rest our faithful and sweating friends, we had a better view of the men pursuing us.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram groaned. ‘There are so many!’

For now, beneath the roiling column of dust drawing closer to the west, we saw perhaps five hundred men on horses following the dragon standard. I thought I caught a glimpse of another red dragon set against a yellow surcoat: surely that of Count Ulanu leading the pursuit. There were many knights behind him, both heavy cavalry and light, and even a few horse archers accoutered much as Atara. A whole company of Blues on their swift, nimble ponies galloped after us as well. It seemed that Count Ulanu had summoned the entire vanguard of his army to help him wreak his vengeance upon us.

During the next hour of our flight, clouds began moving in from the north and darkening the sky. They built to great heights with amazing quickness. Their black, billowing shapes blocked out much of the sun. It grew much cooler, a gift from the heavens for which we were all grateful.

Count Ulanu’s men, though, drew as much relief from the approaching storm as did we. He sent some of his horse archers galloping forward in a wild dash finally to close with us. They fired off a few rounds of arrows, which fell to earth out of range.

‘Hmmph, archers shouldn’t waste arrows so,’ Atara said. ‘If they come any closer, I’ll spare them a few of mine.’

They did come closer. As we began ascending yet another ridge, a feathered shaft struck the earth only a dozen yards behind Kane’s heaving bay. Atara’s great, recurved bow was strung and ready; I thought that she would wait until gaining the crest of the ridge before turning to shoot back at them.

The rapidly cooling air about us seemed charged with anticipation and death. The sky rumbled with great rolling waves of thunder. I felt an itch at the back of my neck as if something were pulling at my hair. And then a bolt of lightning flashed down from the clouds and burned the air. It struck the ridge above us, and sent a blue fire running along the rocks. Balls of hail fell down, too, pelting us and pinging off my helmet. Master Juwain and the others made a sort of canopy of their cloaks, holding them up to protect their heads. And still the lightning streaked down and set the very earth to humming.

It seemed pure folly to climb toward the ridgeline where the lightning was the fiercest. But behind us rode six archers firing off certain death from their bows. These steel-tipped bolts struck even closer than did the lightning. One of them glanced off my helmet like a piece of hail – only from a different direction and with much greater force. The sound of it dinging against the steel caused Atara to turn in her saddle and finally fire off a shot of her own. The arrow sank into the belly of the lead archer, who fell off his horse onto the hail-shrouded earth. But the others only charged after us with renewed determination.

I was the first to the ridge, followed in quick succession by Alphanderry, Liljana, Master Juwain, Maram and Kane. Atara rode more slowly, the better to make her shots and fight her arrow duel. Another two found their marks, and she called out, ‘Twenty-seven, twenty-eight!’ Just as she reached the ridge-top, however, with the sky’s bright fire sizzling the very rocks, the hail began to fall much harder. It streaked down from the sky at a slant like millions of silver bolts. Her arrows crashed into these hurtling balls of ice with sharp clacking sounds, sometimes shattering them into a spray of frozen chips and snow. The hail deflected the advancing archers’ arrows, too. They fired off many rounds to no effect. But one of their arrows ripped through Atara’s billowing cloak just before two more of hers raised her count to thirty. Then the remaining archer, sighting his last arrow with great care despite the rain and hail, fired off a desperate shot. Lightning flashed and thunder rent the sky, and somewhere beneath these terrifying events came the even more terrible twang of his bowstring. And then I gasped to see a couple feet of wood and feathers sticking out of Atara’s chest.

‘Ride!’ she choked out as she kicked her horse forward. ‘Keep riding!’

It wasn’t fear that drove her on through the pain of such a grievous wound nor even will but regard for us and what must happen if her strength failed. I felt this in the way that she waved on Master Juwain every time he turned his worried gaze toward her; it was obvious in her brave smiles toward Kane and especially in the bittersweet protectiveness that filled her eyes whenever she looked at me. Of all the courageous acts I had witnessed on fields of battle, I thought that her jolting ride across the final miles of Virad was the most valorous.

Liljana, galloping by her side, suggested that we must stop to offer her a little water. But Atara waved her on, too, gasping out, ‘Ride, ride now – they’re too close.’ There was blood on her lips as she said this.

Soon the thunder and rain stopped, and the dark clouds boiled above us as if threatening to break apart. The mountainous spur marking Khaisham’s border came into view. It was a barren escarpment of reddish rock perhaps a thousand feet high. It stood like a wall before us. In many places along its length, it was cut with fissures starkly defining great rock forms that looked like pyramids and towers. From the miles of plain that still lay between us and it, it was hard to make out much detail. But I prayed that one of these dark openings into the upfolded earth would prove to be the pass named the Kul Moroth.

So began our wild dash toward whatever safety the domain of Khaisham might afford us. Count Ulanu and his men were close now, and thundering closer with each passing minute. We rode as fast as we could considering the lameness of Maram’s horse and Atara’s injury. I felt the jolts of pain that shot through her body with every strike of her horse’s hooves; I felt her quickly weakening in her grip upon the reins as her vitality drained out of her. She was coughing up blood, I saw, not much but enough.

Kane pointed out a rent in the rocks ahead of us a little larger than the others. We rode straight toward it over the stony ground. Now, from behind us along the wind, came the high-pitched howling of the Blues; it chilled us more cruelly than had any rain or hail. It seemed to promise us a death beneath steel-bladed axes or even the gnashing teeth of enemies mad for revenge.

Death was everywhere about us. We felt it immediately as we found the opening to the Kul Moroth. As Kane had warned us, it seemed an evil place. Others, I knew, had died here in desperate battles before us. I could almost hear their cries of anguish echoing off the walls of rock rising up on either side of us. The pass was dark in its depths, and the sunlight had to fight its way down to its hard, scarred floor. And it was narrow indeed; ten horses would have had trouble riding through it side by side. We had trouble ourselves, for the ground was uneven and strewn with many rocks and boulders. Other boulders, and even greater sandstone pinnacles, seemed perched precariously along the pass’s walls and top as if ready to roll down upon us at the slightest jolt. Long ago, perhaps, some great cataclysm had cracked open this rent in the earth; I prayed that it wouldn’t close in upon us before we were free of it.

And that, it seemed as we drove the horses forward, we might never be. For just as we made a turning through this dark corridor and caught a glimpse of Khaisham’s rough terrain a half mile ahead of us through the pass, Atara let loose a gasp of pain and slumped forward, throwing her arms around Fire’s neck. She could go no farther. My first thought was that we would have to lash her to her horse if we were to ride the rest of the distance to the Librarians’ city.

But this was not to be. I dismounted quickly, and Master Juwain and Liljana did, too. We reached Atara’s side just as she slipped off her saddle and fell into our arms. We found a place where the fallen boulders provided some slight protection again Count Ulanu’s advancing army, and there we laid her down, against the cold stone.

‘There’s no time for this!’ Kane growled out as he gazed back through the pass. ‘No time, I say!’

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram said, coming down from his horse and looking at Atara. ‘Oh, my Lord!’

Now Alphanderry dismounted, too, and so did Kane. His dark eyes flashed toward Atara as he said, ‘We’ve got to put her back on her horse.’

Master Juwain, after examining Atara for a moment, looked up at Kane and said, ‘I’m afraid the arrow pierced her lights. I think it’s cut an artery, too. We can’t just lash her to her horse.’

‘So, what can we do?’

‘I’ve got to draw the arrow and staunch the bleeding somehow. If I don’t, she’ll die.’

‘So, if you do she’ll die anyway, I think.’

There was no time to argue. Atara was coughing up more blood now, and her face was very pale. Liljana used a clean white cloth to wipe the bright scarlet from her mouth.

‘Val,’ she whispered to me as the slightness of her breath moved over her blue lips. ‘Leave me here and save yourself.’

‘No,’ I told her.

‘Leave me – it’s the Sarni way.’

‘It’s not my way,’ I told her. ‘It’s not the way of the Valari.’

From the opening of the pass came the sound of many iron-shod hooves striking against stone and a terrible howling growing louder with each passing moment.

‘Go now, damn you!’

‘No, I won’t leave you,’ I told her.

I drew Alkaladur, then. The sight of its shimmering length cut straight through to my heart. I would kill a hundred of Count Ulanu’s men, I vowed, before I let anyone come close to her. I knew I could.

OWRRULLL!

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram said, taking out his red crystal. ‘Oh, my Lord!’

As Master Juwain brought forth his wooden chest and opened it to search inside among the clacking steel instruments of its lower drawer, Alphanderry laid his hand upon Atara’s head. He told her, ‘I’m sorry, but this is my fault. My singing –’

‘Your singing is all I wish to hear now,’ Atara said, forcing a smile. ‘Sing for me, now, will you? Please?’

Master Juwain found the two instruments that he was looking for: a razor-sharp knife and a long, spoonlike curve of steel with a little hole in the bowl near its end. Just then Alphanderry sang out:

Be ye songs of glory,Be ye songs of glory,That the light of the OneWill shine upon the world.

Maram, with tears in his eyes, stood above Atara as he tried to position his gelstei so that it caught what little light filtered down to the floor of the pass. He called out, to the rocks and the clouded sky above us, ‘I’ll burn them if they come close! Oh, my Lord, I will!’

The wild look in his eyes alarmed Kane. He drew out his black gelstei and stood looking between it and Maram’s stone.

‘Hold her!’ Master Juwain said to me sharply as he looked down at Atara.

I put aside my sword, sat and pulled Atara onto my lap. My hands found their way between her arms and sides as I hung on to her tightly. Liljana bent to help hold her, too.

Master Juwain cut open her leather armor and the softer shirt beneath. He grasped the arrow and tugged on it, gently. Atara gasped in agony, but the arrow didn’t move. Then Master Juwain nodded at me as if admonishing me not to let go of her. Sighing sadly, he used the knife to probe the opening that the arrow had made between her ribs and enlarge it, slightly. Now it took both Liljana and me to hold Atara still. Her body writhed with what little strength she had left. And still Master Juwain wasn’t done tormenting her. He took out his spoon and fit its tip to the red hole in Atara’s creamy white skin. Then he pushed his elongated spoon down along the arrow, slowly, feeling his way, deep into her. He twirled it about while Atara’s eyes leapt toward mine; from deep in her throat came a succession of strangled cries. At last Master Juwain smiled with relief. I understood that the hole at the spoon’s tip had snagged the tip of the arrow point; its curved flanges would now be wrapped around the point’s barbs, thus shielding Atara’s flesh from them so that they wouldn’t catch as Master Juwain drew the arrow. This he now did. It came out with surprising smoothness and ease.

And so did a great deal of blood. It truth, it ran out of her like a bright red stream, flowing across her chest and wetting my hands with its warmth.

And all the while, Alphanderry knelt by her and sang:

Be ye songs of glory,Be ye songs of glory,That the light of the OneWill shine upon the world.

‘Maram!’ I heard Kane call out behind me. ‘Watch what you’re doing with that crystal!’

The quick clopping of many horses’ hooves against stone came closer, as did the hideous howling, which filled the pass with an almost deafening sound: OWRRULLL!

Kane glanced down at Atara, who was fighting to breathe, much air now wheezing out of her chest along with a frothy red spray.

‘So,’ he said. ‘So.’

Master Juwain touched her chest just above the place where the archer’s arrow had ripped open her lungs. Everyone knew that such sucking wounds were mortal.

‘She’s bleeding to death!’ I said to Master Juwain. ‘We have to staunch it!’

He stared at her, almost frozen in his thoughts. He said, ‘The wound is too grievous, too deep. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid there’s no way.’

‘Yes, there is,’ I said. I reached my bloody hand into his pocket where he kept his green crystal. I took it out and gave it to him. ‘Use this, please.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know how.’

‘Please, sir,’ I said again to him. ‘Use the gelstei.’

He sighed as he gripped his healing stone. He held it above Atara’s wound. He closed his eyes as if looking inside himself for the spark with which to ignite it.

‘I’m afraid there’s nothing,’ he said.

Maram, breaking off his fumblings with his crystal, said, ‘Ah, perhaps you should read from your book. Or perhaps a period of meditation would –’

‘There is no time,’ Master Juwain said with uncharacteristic vehemence. ‘Never enough time.’

OWRULLLLLLL!

Through my hand, I felt Atara’s pulse weakening. I felt her life ready to blow out like a candle flame in an ice-cold wind. I didn’t care then if Count Ulanu’s men fell upon us and captured us. I wanted only for Atara to live another day, another minute, another moment. Where there was life, I thought, there was always hope and the possibility of escape.

‘Please, sir,’ I said to Master Juwain, ‘keep trying.’

Again, Master Juwain closed his eyes even as his hard little hand closed tightly around the gelstei. But soon he opened them and shook his head.

‘One more time,’ I said to him. ‘Please.’

‘But there is no rhyme or reason to using this stone!’ he said bitterly.

‘No reason of the mind,’ I said to him.

Atara began moving her lips as if she wanted to tell me something. But no words came out of them, only the faintest of whispers. The touch of her breath against my ear was so cold it burned like fire.

‘What is it, Atara?’ In her eyes was a look of faraway places and last things. I pressed my lips to her ear and whispered, ‘What do you see?’

And she told me, ‘I see you, Val, everywhere.’

In her clear blue eyes staring up at me, I saw my grandfather’s eyes and the dying face of my mother’s grandmother. I saw our children, Atara’s and mine, who were worse than dead because we had never breathed our life into them.

A door to a deep, dark dungeon opened beneath Atara then. I was not the only one to look upon it. Atara, who could always see so much, and sometimes everything, turned and whispered, ‘Alphanderry.’

Alphanderry stood up and smoothed the wrinkles out of his tunic, stained with sweat, rain and blood. He smiled as Atara said, ‘Alphanderry, sing, it’s time.’

Just as Count Ulanu and the knights of his hard-riding guard showed themselves down the pass’s dark turnings, Alphanderry began walking toward them. I didn’t know what he was doing.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram said above me. ‘Here they come!’

OWRRULLLL! sang the voices of the Blues riding behind Count Ulanu as they clanked their axes together.

And Alphanderry, with a much different voice, sang out, ‘La valaha eshama halla, lais arda alhalla …’

His music had a new quality to it, both sadder and sweeter than anything I had ever heard before. I knew that he was close to finding the words that he had so long sought and opening the heavens with their sound.

‘Valashu Elahad!’ Count Ulanu called out as he rode with his captains and crucifiers inexorably toward us. ‘Lay down your weapons and you will be spared!’

And then, as the Count reined in his horse and stopped dead in his tracks, Alphanderry began singing more strongly. The Count looked at him as if he were mad. So did his captains and the knights and Blues behind him. But then Alphanderry’s song built ever larger and deeper, and began soaring outward like a flock of swans beating their wings up toward the sky. So wondrous was the music that poured out of him that it seemed the Count and his men couldn’t move.

Something in it touched Master Juwain, too, as I could tell from the faraway look that haunted his eyes. He was staring into the past, I thought, and looking for an answer to Atara’s approaching death in the fleeting images of memory or in the verses of the Saganom Elu. But he would never find it there.

‘Look at her,’ I said to Master Juwain. I took his free hand and brought it over Atara’s and mine so that it covered both of them. ‘Please look, sir.’

There was nothing more I could say to him, no more urgings or pleadings. I no longer felt resentment that he had failed to heal Atara, only an overwhelming gratitude that he had tried. And for Atara, I felt everything there was to feel. Her weakening pulse beneath my fingers touched mine with a deeper beating, vaster and infinitely finer. The sweet hurt of it reminded me how great and good it was to be alive. There seemed no end to it; it swelled my heart like the sun, breaking me open. And as I looked at Master Juwain eye to eye and heart to heart, he found himself in this luminous thing.

‘I never knew, Val,’ he whispered. ‘Yes, I see, I see.’

And then Master Juwain, who turned back to Atara, did look and seemed suddenly to see her. He found the reason of his heart as his eyes grew moist with tears. He found his greatness, too. Then he smiled as if finally understanding something. He touched the wound in her chest. Then he held the varistei over it, the long axis of the stone exactly perpendicular to the opening that the arrow had made. He took a deep breath and then let it out to the sound of Atara’s own anguished gasp.

I was waiting to see the gelstei glow with its soft, healing light. Even Kane, despite his despair, was looking at the stone as if hoping it would begin shining like a magical emerald. What happened next, I thought, amazed us all. A rare fire suddenly leaped in Master Juwain’s eyes. And then viridian flames almost too bright to behold shot from both ends of the gelstei; they circled to meet each other beneath it before shooting like a stream of fire straight into Atara’s wound. She cried out as if struck again with a burning arrow. But the green fire kept filling up the hole in her chest, and soon her eyes warmed with the intense life of it. A few moments later, the last of the fire swirled about the opening of the wound as if stitching it shut with its numinous light. As it crackled and then faded along her pale skin, we blinked our eyes, not daring to believe what we saw. For Atara was now breathing easily, and her flesh had been made whole.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram sighed out from above us. ‘Oh, my Lord!’

It seemed that neither Count Ulanu nor his men witnessed this miracle, for Liljana’s and Master Juwain’s backs blocked their view of it. And before them unfolded a miracle of another sort. For now, at last, as Alphanderry stood in all his glory facing down the vanguard of an entire army, his tongue found the turnings of the language that he had sought all his life. Its sounds flowed out of him like golden drops of light. And words and music became as one, for now Alphanderry was singing the Song of the One. In its eternal harmonies and pure tones, it was impossible to lie, impossible to see the world other than as it was because every word was a thought’s or a thing’s true name.

And truth, I knew as I held Atara’s hand and listened to Alphanderry sing, was really just beauty – a terrible beauty almost impossible to bear. Nothing like it had been heard on Ea since the Star People first came to earth ages ago. With every passing moment, Alphanderry’s words became clearer, sweeter, brighter. They dissolved time as the sea does salt, and hatred, pride and bitterness. They called us to remember all that we had lost and might yet be regained; they reminded us who we really were. Tears filled my eyes, and I looked up astonished to see Kane weeping, too. The stony Blues had belted their axes for a moment so that they might cover their faces. Even Count Ulanu had fallen away from his disdain. His misting eyes gave sign that he was recalling his own original grace. It seemed that he might have a change of heart and renounce the Kallimun and Morjin, then and there with all the world witnessing his remaking.

In the magic of that moment in the Kul Moroth, all things seemed possible. Flick, near Alphanderry, was spinning wildly, beautifully, exultantly. The walls of stone around us echoed Alphanderry’s words and seemed to sing them themselves. High above the world, the clouds parted and a shaft of light drove down through the pass to touch Alphanderry’s head. I thought I saw a golden bowl floating above him and pouring out its radiance over him as from an infinite source.

And so Alphanderry sang with the angels. But he was, after all, only a man. One single line of the Galadin’s song was all that he could call forth in its true form. After a while, his voice began to falter and fail him. He nearly wept at losing the ancient, heavenly connection. And then the spell was broken.

Count Ulanu, still sitting on his war horse in his battle armor, shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what he had heard. It infuriated him to see what a dreadful sculpture he had made of himself from the sacred clay with which the One had provided him. His wrath now fell upon Alphanderry for showing him this. And for standing between him and the rest of us. A snarl of outrage returned to his face; he drew his sword as his knights pointed their lances at Alphanderry. The Blues, with unfeeling fingers, gripped their axes and readied themselves to advance upon him.

OWRRULLL! OWRRULLLLL!

At last, with the howls of the Blues drowning out the final echoes of Alphanderry’s music, I grabbed up my sword and leaped to my feet. Kane gripped his gelstei as his wild black eyes fell upon Maram’s red crystal.

‘I’ll burn them!’ Maram called out. ‘I will, I will!’

The clouds above the pass broke apart even more, and rays of light streamed down and touched Maram’s firestone. It began glowing bright crimson.

Alphanderry, who had marched many yards down the pass away from us, turned and looked up toward his right. Something seemed to catch his eye. For a moment, he recaptured his joy and something of the Star People’s lost language as he cried out: ‘Ahura Alarama!’

‘What?’ I shouted, gathering my strength to run to his side.

‘I see him!’

‘See who?’

‘The one you call Flick.’ He smiled like a child. ‘Oh, Val … the colors!’

Just then, even as Count Ulanu spurred his horse forward, Maram’s gelstei flared and burned his hands. He screamed, jerking the blazing crystal upwards. A great stream of fire poured out of it and blasted the boulders along the pass’s walls. Kane was now working urgently with his black crystal to damp the fury of the firestone. But it drew its power from the very sun and fed the fires of the earth. The ground around us began shaking violently; I went down to one knee to keep from falling altogether. Stones rained down like hail, and one of them pinged off my helmet. Then came a deafening roar of great boulders bounding down the pass’s walls. In only a few moments, the rockslide filled the defile to a height of twenty feet. A great mound stood between Alphanderry and the rest of the company, cutting off his escape. And keeping us from coming to his aid. We couldn’t even see him.

But we could still hear him. As the dust choked us and settled slowly down, from beyond the heaped-up rubble I heard him singing what I knew would be his death song. For I knew that Count Ulanu, who spared no mercy for himself, would find none for him.

My hand gripped the hilt of my sword so fiercely that my fingers hurt; my arm hurt even as I felt Count Ulanu’s arm pull back and his sword thrust downward. Alphanderry’s terrible cry easily pierced the rocks between us. It pierced the whole world; it pierced my heart. My sword fell from my hand, even as I clasped my chest and fell myself. A door opened before me, and I followed Alphanderry through it.

I walked with him through the dark, vacant spaces up toward the stars.

4

The city of Khaisham was built on a strong site where the plains of Yarkona come up against the curve of the White Mountains. Directly to its east was Mount Redruth, an upfolding of great blocks of red sandstone that looked like pieces of a rusted iron breastplate. Mount Salmas, to the east and north, was more gentle in its rise toward the sky and slightly higher, too. Its peak pushed its way above the treeline like a bald, rounded pate. Out from the gorge between these two mountains rushed a river: the Tearam. Its swift flow was diverted into little channels along either side of it in order to water the fields to the north and west of the city. The city itself was built wholly to the south of the river. A wall following its curves formed the city’s northern defenses. It rose up just above the Tearam’s banks and ran east into the notch between the mountains. There it turned south along the steep slopes of Mount Redruth for a mile before turning yet again west through some excellent pasture. The wall’s final turning took it back north toward the river. This stretch of mortared stone was the wall’s longest and its most vulnerable – and therefore the most heavily defended. Great round towers surmounted it along its length at five-hundred-foot intervals. The south wall was likewise protected.

The men and women of Khaisham had good reason to feel safe in their little stone houses behind this wall, for it had never been breached or their city taken. The Lords of Khaisham, though, desired even more protection for the great Library and the treasures it held. And so, long ago they had built a second, inner wall around the Library itself.

This striking edifice occupied the heights at Khaisham’s northeast corner, almost in the mouth of the gorge, and thus further protected by the Tearam and Mount Redruth. Unlike Khaisham’s other buildings, which had been raised up out of the sandstone common in the mountains to the east, the Library had been constructed of white marble. No one remembered whence this fine stone had come. It lent the Library much of its grandeur. Its gleaming faces, which caught and reflected the harsh Yarkonan sun, showed themselves to approaching pilgrims even far out on the pasturage to the west of the city. The centermost section of the Library was a great, white cube; four others, forming its various wings, adjoined it to the west, south, east and north so that its shape was that of a cross. Smaller cubes erupted out of each of these four, making for wings to the wings. The overall effect was that of a great crystal, like a snowflake, with points radiating at perfect angles from a common center.

We came to Khaisham from the Kul Moroth almost directly to the west. I was never to remember very much of this twenty-mile journey for I was conscious during only parts of it. It was I, not Atara, whom my companions had to lash to his horse. At times, when my eyes opened slightly, I was aware of the rocky green pastures through which we rode and the shepherds tending their flocks there. More than once, I listened as Kane seemed to sigh out the name of Alphanderry with his every breath. I watched as his eyes misted like mirrors and he clamped shut his jaws so tightly that I feared his teeth would break and the splinters drive into his gums. At other times, however, the darkness closed in upon me, and I saw nothing. Nothing of this world, that is. For the bright constellations I had longed to apprehend since my childhood were now all too near. I could see how their swirling patterns found their likeness in those of the mountains far below them – and in Flick’s fiery form, and in a man’s dreams, indeed, in all things. In truth, from the moment of Alphanderry’s death, I was like a man walking between two worlds and with my feet firmly planted in neither.

It was just as well, perhaps, that I couldn’t touch upon my companions’ grief. Can a cup hold an entire ocean? With the passing of Alphanderry from this world, it seemed that the spirit of the quest had left our company. It was as if a great blow had driven from each of us his very breath. I was dimly aware of Maram riding along on Alphanderry’s horse and muttering that instead of burning the Kul Moroth’s rocks, he should have directed his fire at Count Ulanu and his army. He voiced his doubt that we would ever leave Khaisham, now. The others were quieter though perhaps more disconsolate. Liljana seemed to have aged ten years in a moment, and her face was deeply creased with lines that all pointed toward death. Master Juwain was clearly appalled to have saved Atara only to lose Alphanderry so unexpectedly a few minutes later. He rode with his head bowed, not even caring to open his book and read a requiem or prayer. Atara, healed of her mortal wound, looked out upon the landscape of a terrible sadness it seemed that only she could see. And Kane, more than once, when he thought no one was listening, murmured to himself, ‘He’s gone – my little friend is gone.’

As for me, the sheer evil of Morjin and all his works chilled my soul. It pervaded the world’s waters and the air, even the rocks beneath the horses’ hooves; it seemed as awesome as a mountain and unstoppable, like a rockslide, like the ocean in storm, like the fall of night. For the first time, I realized just how slim our chances of finding the Lightstone really were. If Alphanderry, so bright and pure of heart, could be slain by one of Morjin’s men, any of us could. And if we could, we surely would, for Morjin was spending all his wealth and bending all his will toward defeating all who opposed him.

By the time we found our way past Khaisham’s gates and into the Library, my desolation had only deepened as a cold worse than winter took hold of me and would not let go. Now the stars were all too near in the blackness that covered me; it seemed that I might never look upon the world again. For four days I lay as one dead in the Library’s infirmary, lost in dark caverns that had no end.

My friends nearly despaired of me. Atara sat by my side day and night and would not let go my hand. Maram, sitting by my other side, wept even more than she did, while Kane stood like a statue keeping a vigil over me. Liljana made me hot soups which she somehow managed to make me swallow. As for Master Juwain, after he had failed to revive me with his teas or the magic of his green crystal, he called for many books to be brought to our room. It was his faith that one of them might tell of the Lightstone, which alone had the power to revive me now.

It was the Lightstone, I believe, no less the love of my friends, that brought me back to the world. Like a faint, golden glimmer, my hope of finding it never completely died. Even as Liljana’s soups strengthened my body, this hope flared brighter within my soul. It filled me with a fire that gradually drove away the cold and awakened me. And so on the thirteenth day of Soal, and the one hundred and fifteenth of our quest, I opened my eyes to see the sunlight streaming through the room’s south-facing windows.

‘Val, you’ve come back!’ Atara said. She bent to kiss my hand and then she pressed her lips to mine. ‘I never thought …’

‘I never thought I’d see you again either,’ I told her.

Above me, Flick turned about slowly as if welcoming me back.

We spoke of Alphanderry for a long while. I needed to be sure that my memory of what happened in the Kul Moroth was real and true, and not just a bad dream. After Atara and my other friends attested to hearing Alphanderry’s screams, I said, ‘It’s cruel that the most beloved of us should be the first to die.’

Maram, sitting to my left, suddenly grasped my hand and squeezed it almost hard enough to break my bones. Then he said, ‘Ah, my friend, I must tell you something. Alphanderry, while dearer to all of us than I could ever say, was not the most beloved. You are. Because you’re the most able to love.’

Because I didn’t want him to see the anguish in my eyes just then, I closed them for a few moments. When I looked out at the room again, everything was a blur.

Master Juwain was there at the foot of my bed, reading a passage from the Songs of the Saganom Elu: ‘“After the darkest night, the brightest morning. After the gray of winter, the green of spring.”’

Then he read a requiem from the Book of Ages, and we prayed for Alphanderry’s spirit; I wept as I silently prayed for my own.

Food was then brought to us, and we made a feast in honor of Alphanderry’s music which had sustained us in our darkest hours, in the pathless tangle of the Vardaloon and in the starkness of the Kul Moroth. I had no appetite for meat and bread, but I forced myself to eat these viands even so. I felt the strength of it in my belly even as the wonder of Alphanderry’s last song would always fill my heart.

After breakfast, Kane brought me my sword. I drew forth Alkaladur and let its silver fire run down its length into my arm. Now that I was able to sit up and even stand, weakly, I held the blade pointing toward the Library’s eastern wing. The silustria that formed its perfect symmetry seemed to gleam with a new brightness.

‘It’s here,’ I said to my companions. ‘The Lightstone must be here.’

‘If it is,’ Kane informed me gravely, ‘we’d better go look for it as soon as you’re able to walk. Much has happened these last few days while you’ve slept with the dead.’

So saying, he sent for the Lord Librarian that we might hold council and discuss Khaisham’s peril – and our own.

While we waited in that sunny room, with its flowering plants along the windows and its rows of white-blanketed beds, Kane reassured me that the horses were well tended and that Altaru had taken no wound or injury in our flight across Khaisham from the pass. Maram admitted to having to leave his lame sorrel behind; it was his hope that some shepherd might find him and return him before we left Khaisham. If he took any joy from inheriting and riding Alphanderry’s magnificent Iolo, he gave no sign.

Soon the door to the infirmary opened, and in walked a tall man wearing a suit of much-scarred mail over the limbs of his long body. His green surcoat showed an open book, all golden and touched with the sun’s seven rays. His face showed worry, intelligence, command and pride. He had a large, jutting nose scarred across the middle and a long, serious face with a scar running down from his eye into his well-trimmed gray beard. His hands – long and large and well-formed – were stained with ink. His name was Vishalar Grayam, the Lord Librarian, and like his kindred, he was both a scholar and a warrior.

After we had been presented to each other, he shook my hand, testing me and looking at me for a long time. And then he said, ‘It’s good that you’ve come back to us, Sar Valashu. You’ve awakened none too soon.’

He went on to tell me what had happened since our passage of the Kul Moroth. Count Ulanu, he said, disbelieving that the mysterious rockslide might keep him from his quarry, had sent many of his men scrambling over it. They had all perished on Kane’s and Maram’s swords. Kane had then led the retreat from the pass, and Count Ulanu hadn’t been able to pursue us. By the time he had raced his men south to the Kul Joram, our company had nearly reached Khaisham’s gates.

Count Ulanu had then sent for his army, still encamped near Tarmanam in Virad. It had taken his men four days to march across to eastern Yarkona, pass through the Kul Joram and encamp outside of Khaisham. Now the forces of Aigul and Sikar, and the Blues, were preparing to besiege the city’s outer walls.

‘And if that isn’t bad enough,’ the Lord Librarian told us, ‘we’ve just had grievous news. It seems that Inyam and Madhvam have made a separate peace with Aigul. And so we can’t expect any help from that direction.’

And worse yet, he told us, was what he had heard about the domains of Brahamdur, Sagaram and Hansh.

‘We’ve heard they’ve agreed to send contingents to aid Count Ulanu,’ he said. ‘They’re being brought up as we speak.’

‘Then it seems all of Yarkona has fallen,’ Maram said gloomily.

‘Not yet,’ Lord Grayam told him. ‘We still stand. And so does Sarad.’

‘But will Sarad come to your aid?’ I asked him. I tried to imagine the Ishkans marching out to aid Mesh if the combined tribes of the Sarni tried to invade us.

‘No, I doubt if they will,’ the Lord Librarian said. ‘I expect that they, too, in the end, will do homage to Count Ulanu.’

‘Then you stand alone,’ Maram said, looking toward the window like a trapped beast.

‘Alone, yes, perhaps,’ the Lord Librarian said. He looked from Kane to Atara and then me. Lastly, he fixed Maram with a deep look as if trying to see beneath his surface fear and desperation.

‘Then will you make peace with the Count yourselves?’ Maram asked him.

‘We would if we could,’ the Lord Librarian said. ‘But I’m afraid that while it takes two to make peace, it only takes one to make war.’

‘But if you were to surrender and kneel to –’

‘If we surrendered to Count Ulanu,’ the Lord Librarian spat out, ‘he would enslave those he didn’t crucify. And as for our kneeling to him, we Librarians kneel to the Lord of Light and no one else.’

He went on to tell us that the Librarians of Khaisham were devoted to preserving the ancient wisdom, which had its ultimate source in the Light of the One. Theirs was the task of gathering, purchasing and collecting all books and other artifacts which might be of value to future generations. Much of their labor consisted of transcribing old, crumbling volumes and illuminating new manuscripts. They worked gold leaf into paper and vellum, and spent long hours in their calligraphy, penning black ink to white sheets with devout and practiced hands. Perhaps their noblest effort was the compilation of a great encyclopedia indexing all books and all knowledge – which was still unfinished, as Lord Grayam sadly admitted. But their foremost duty was to protect the treasures that the Library contained. And so they took vows never to allow anyone to desecrate the Library’s books or to forsake guarding the Library, even unto their deaths. Toward this end, they trained with swords almost as diligently as with their pens.

‘You’ve taken vows of your own,’ he said, nodding toward my medallion. ‘You’re not the first to come here looking for the Lightstone, though none has done so for quite some time.’

He told us that once, many had made the pilgrimage to Khaisham, often paying princely sums for the right to use the Library. But now the ancient roads through Eanna and Surrapam were too dangerous, and few dared them.

‘Master Juwain,’ he said to me, ‘has already explained that you’ve brought no money for us. Poor pilgrims you are, he tells me. That’s as may be. But you have my welcome to use the Library as you wish. Any who have fought Count Ulanu as you have are welcome here.’

From what he said then, it was clear that he regarded Master Juwain, Maram and Liljana as scholars, and esteemed Kane, Atara and me as warriors protecting them.

‘We are fortunate to be joined by a company of such talents,’ he said, searching in the softness of Maram’s face for all that he tried to conceal there. ‘I would hope that someday you might tell of what happened in the Kul Moroth. How very strange that the ground should shake just as you passed through it! And that rocks should have blocked Count Ulanu’s pursuit. And such rocks! The knights I sent there tell me that many of them were blackened and melted as if by lightning.’

Maram turned to look at me then. But neither of us – or our other companions – wished to speak of our gelstei.

‘Well, then,’ Lord Grayam said, ‘you’re good at keeping your own counsel, and I approve of that. But I must ask your trust in three things in order that you might have mine. First: If you find here anything of note or worth, you will bring it to me. Second: You will take great care not to harm any of the books, many of which are ancient and all too easy to harm. Third: You will remove nothing from the Library without my permission.’

I touched the medallion hanging from my neck and told him, ‘When a knight takes refuge in a lord’s castle, he doesn’t dispute his rules. But you must know that we’ve come to claim the Lightstone and take it away to other lands.’

The Lord Librarian bristled at this. His bushy eyebrows pulled together as his hand found the hilt of his sword. ‘Does a knight in your land then enter his lord’s castle to claim his lord’s most precious possession?’

‘The Lightstone,’ I told him, remembering my vows, ‘is no one’s possession. And we seek it not for ourselves but for all Ea.’

‘A noble quest,’ he sighed, relaxing his hand from his sword. ‘But if you found the Cup of Heaven here, don’t you think it should remain here where it can best be guarded?’

I managed to climb out of bed and walk over to the window. There, below me, I could see the many houses of Khaisham, with their square stone chimneys and brightly painted shutters. Beyond the city streets was Khaisham’s outer wall, and beyond it, spread out over the green pastures to the south of the city, the thousands of tents of Count Ulanu’s army.

‘Forgive me, Lord Librarian,’ I said, ‘but you might find it difficult guarding even your own people’s lives now.’

Lord Grayam’s face fell sad and grave, and lines of worry furrowed his brow as he looked out the window with me.

‘What you say is true,’ he admitted. ‘But it is also true that you won’t find the Lightstone here. The Library has been searched through every nook and cranny for it for most of three thousand years. And so here we stand, arguing over nothing at a time when there’s much else to do.’

‘If we’re arguing over nothing,’ I said, ‘then surely you won’t mind if we begin our search?’

‘So long as you abide by my rules.’

If we abided by his rules, as I pointed out to him, we would have to bring the Lightstone to him should we be so fortunate as to find it.

‘That’s true,’ he said.

‘Then it would seem that we’re at an impasse.’ I looked at Master Juwain and asked, ‘Who has the wisdom to see our way through it?’

Master Juwain stepped forward, gripping his book, which Lord Grayam eyed admiringly. Master Juwain said, ‘It may be that if we gain the Lightstone, we’ll also gain the wisdom to know what should be done with it.’

‘Very well then, let that be the way of it,’ Lord Grayam said. ‘I won’t say yea or nay to your taking it from here until I’ve held it in my hands and you in yours. Do we understand each other?’

‘Yes,’ I said, speaking for the others, ‘we do.’

‘Excellent. Then I wish you well. Now please forgive me while I excuse myself. I’ve the city’s defenses to look to.’

So saying, the Lord Librarian bowed to us and strode from the room.

I counted exactly three beats of my heart before Maram opened his mouth and said, ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’

I drew my sword again and watched the light play about its gleaming contours.

‘You must follow where your sword leads you,’ Master Juwain told me, clapping me on the shoulder. Then he picked up a large book bound in red leather. ‘But I’m afraid I must follow where this leads me.’

He told us that he was off to the Library’s stacks to look for a book by a Master Malachi.

‘But, sir,’ Maram said to him, ‘if we find the Lightstone in your absence –’

‘Then I shall be very happy,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘Now why don’t we meet by the statue of King Eluli in the great hall at midday, if we don’t meet wandering around the other halls first? This place is vast, and it wouldn’t do to lose each other in it.’

Liljana, too, admitted that she wished to make her own researches among the Library’s millions of books. And so she followed Master Juwain out the door, each of them to go separate ways, and leaving Maram, Kane, Atara and me behind.

The infirmary, as I soon found, was a rather little room off a side wing connected by a large hall to an off-wing leading to the Library’s immense south wing. Upon making passage into this cavernous space, I realized that it would be easy to become lost in the Library, not because there was anything mazelike about it, but simply because it was huge. In truth, the whole of this building had been laid out according to the four points of the world with a precise and sacred geometry. Everything about its construction, from the distances between the pillars holding up the roof to the great marble walls themselves, seemed to be that of cubes and squares. And of a special kind of rectangle, which, if the square part of it was removed, the remaining smaller rectangle retained the exact proportions of its parent. What these measures had to do with books puzzled me. Kane believed that the golden rectangle, as he called it, symbolized man himself: no matter what parts were taken away, a sacred spark in the image of the whole being always remained. And as with man, even more so with books. As any of the Librarians would attest, every part of a book, from its ridged spine to the last letter upon the last page, was sacred.

There were certainly many books. The south wing was divided into many sections, each filled with long islands of stacks of books reaching up nearly three hundred feet high toward the stone ceiling with its great, rectangular skylights. Each island was like a mighty tower of stone, wood, leather, paper and cloth; stairs at either end of an island led to the walkways circling them at their different levels. Thirty levels I counted to each island; it would take a long time, I thought, to climb to the top of one should a desired volume be shelved there. Passing from the heights of one island to another would have taken even longer but for the graceful stone bridges connecting them at various levels. The bridges, along with the islands stacked with their books, formed an immense and intricate latticework that seemed to interconnect the recordings of all possible knowledge.

As I walked with my friends down the long and seemingly endless aisles, I breathed in the scents of mildew and dust and old secrets. Many of the books, I saw, had been written in Ardik or ancient Ardik; quite a few told their tales in languages now long dead. By chance, it seemed, we passed by shelves of many large volumes of genealogies. Half a hundred of these were given over to the lineages of the Valari. Because my curiosity at that moment burned even brighter than my sword, I couldn’t help opening one of them that traced the ancestry of Telemesh back son to father, generation to generation, to the great Aramesh. This gave evidence to the claim that the Meshian line of kings might truly extend back all the way to Elahad himself. My discovery filled me with pride. It renewed my determination to find the golden cup that the greatest of all my ancestors had brought to earth so long ago.

Alkaladur’s faintly gleaming blade seemed to point us into an adjoining hall that was almost large enough to hold King Kiritan’s entire palace. Here were collected all the Library’s books pertaining to the Lightstone. There must have been a million of them. It seemed impossible that each of them had been searched for any mention of where Sartan Odinan might have hidden the golden cup after he had liberated it from the dungeons of Argattha. But a passing Librarian, hastily buckling on his sword as he hurried through the stacks to Lord Grayam’s summons, assured us that they had. There were many Librarians, he told us, and there had been many generations of them since the Lightstone had become lost at the beginning of the Age of the Dragon long ago. That his generation might be the last of these devout scholar-warriors seemed not to enter his mind. And so he turned his faith from his pens to the steel of his sword; he excused himself and marched off toward his duty atop the city’s walls.

Our search took us through this vast hall, with its even vaster silences and echoes of memory, into an eastern off-wing. And then into a side wing, where we found hall upon hall of nothing but paintings, mosaics and friezes depicting the Lightstone and scenes from its long past. And still my sword seemed to point us east. And so we passed into a much smaller, cubical chamber filled with vases from the Marshanid dynasty; these, too, showed the Lightstone in the hands of various kings and heroes out of history.

At last, however, we came to an alcove off a small room lined with painted shields. We determined that we had reached this wing’s easternmost extension. We could go no farther in this direction. But I was sure that the Lightstone, wherever it was hidden, lay still to the east of us. Alkaladur gleamed like the moon when pointed toward the alcove’s eastern window, and not at all when I swept it back toward the main body of the Library or any of the room’s artifacts.

‘So, we must try another wing,’ Kane said to me. Maram and Atara, standing near him above an ancient Alonian ceremonial shield, nodded their heads in agreement. ‘If your sword still shows true, then let’s find our way to the east wing.’

Our search thus far had taken up the whole morning and part of the afternoon. Now we spent another hour crossing the Library’s centermost section, also called the great hall. It dwarfed even the south wing, and was filled with so many towering islands of books and soaring bridges that I grew dizzy looking up at them. I was grateful when at last we passed into the east wing; in its cubical proportions, it was shaped identically to the others. One of its off-wings led us to a hall giving out on a side wing where the Librarians had put together an impressive collection of lesser gelstei. These were presented in locked cabinets of teak and glass. Atara gasped like a little girl to see so many glowstones, wish stones, angel eyes, warders, love stones and dragon bones gathered into one place. We might have lingered there a long time if Alkaladur hadn’t pointed us down a long corridor leading to another side wing. The moment that we stepped into this chamber, with its many rare books of ancient poetry, my sword’s blade warmed noticeably. And when we crossed into an adjoining room filled with vases, chalices, jewel-encrusted plates and the like, the silustria flared so that even Atara and Maram noticed its brightness.

‘Is it truly here, Val?’ Maram said to me. ‘Can it be?’

I swept my sword from north to south, behind me and past the room’s four corners. It grew its brightest whenever I pointed it east, toward a cracked marble stand on which were set two golden bowls, to the left and right, on its lowest shelves. Two more crystal bowls gleamed on top of the next higher ones, and at the stand’s center on its highest square of marble sat a little cup that seemed to have been carved out of a single, immense pearl.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram cried out. ‘Oh, my Lord!’

Being unable to restrain himself – and wishing to be the first to lay his hands on the Lightstone and thus determine its fate according to our company’s rules – he rushed forward as fast as his fat legs would carry him. I was afraid that in his excitement and greed, he would crash into this display. But he drew up short inches from it. He thrust out his hands and grasped the golden bowl to his right. Without even bothering to examine it, he lifted it high above his head, a wild light dancing in his eyes.

‘Be careful with that!’ Kane snapped at him. ‘You don’t want to drop it and dent it!’

‘Dent the gold gelstei?’ Maram said.

Atara, whose eyes were even sharper than her tongue, took a good look at the bowl in his hands and said, ‘Hmmph! If that’s the true gold, then a bull’s nose ring is more precious than my mother’s wedding band.’

Much puzzled, Maram lowered the bowl and turned it about in his hands. His brows narrowed suspiciously as he finally took notice of what was now so easy to see: the bowl was faintly tarnished and scarred in many places with fine scratches and wasn’t made of gold at all. As Atara had hinted, it was only brass.

‘But why display such a common thing?’ Maram asked, embarrassed at his gullibility.

‘Common, is it?’ Kane said to him.

He walked closer to Maram and took the bowl from him. Then he picked up a much-worn wooden stick still lying on the shelf near where the bowl had been. With the bowl resting in the flat of one callused hand, he touched the stick to the rim of the bowl and drew it round and round in slow circles. It set the bowl to pealing out a beautiful, pure tone like that of a bell.

‘So, it’s a singing bowl,’ he said as he set it back on its stand. He nodded at the crystal bowls at the next highest level. ‘So are those.’

‘What about the one that looks like pearl?’ Maram called out.

Not waiting for an answer, he picked up the pearly cup from the stand’s highest level and tried to make music from it using the same stick as had Kane. After failing to draw forth so much as a squeak, he put it back in its place and scowled as if angry that it had disappointed him.

‘It seems that this bowl,’ he said, ‘is for the beauty of the eye and not the ear.’

But I was not so sure. Just as I brought my sword closer to it and aligned its point directly toward its center, it began glowing very strongly. I thought that I could hear this pearly bowl singing faintly, with a soaring music that recalled Alphanderry’s golden voice.

‘There’s something about this bowl,’ I said. I took a step closer, and now Alkaladur began to hum in my hands.

Atara picked up the iridescent bowl and wrapped her long fingers around it. She said, ‘It’s heavy – much heavier than I would think a pearl of this size would be.’

‘Have you ever seen a pearl so large?’ Maram asked her. ‘My Lord, it would take an oyster the size of a bear to make one so.’

Atara set this beautiful bowl back in its place. She stared at it with a penetrating sight that seemed to arise from a source much deeper than her sparkling blue eyes. And so did Kane.

‘Can it be?’ Maram said. Then he turned his head back and forth as if shaking sense into himself. ‘No, of course it can’t be. The Lightstone is of gold. This is pearl. Can the gold gelstei shimmer like pearl?’

‘Perhaps,’ Atara said, ‘the Gelstei shimmers as one wishes it to.’

The silence that filled the chamber then was as deep as the sea.

‘This must be it,’ I said, staring into Alkaladur’s bright silver and listening to the pearl bowl sing. ‘But how can it be?’

My heart beat seven times in rhythm with Atara’s, Maram’s and Kane’s. And then Atara, staring at the bowl as if transfixed by its splendor, whispered to me, ‘Val, I can see it! It’s inside!’

As we kept our eyes on the gleaming bowl, she told us that the pearl formed only its veneer; somehow, she said, the ancients had layered over this lustrous substance like enamel over lead.

‘But it’s no base metal that’s inside,’ she said. ‘It’s gold or something very like gold – I’m sure of it.’

‘If it’s gold, then it must be the true gold,’ I said.

Kane’s eyes were now black pools that drank in the bowl’s light.

‘So, we must break it open,’ he told me. ‘Strike it with your sword, Val.’

‘But what about the Lord Librarian’s second rule?’ I asked.

Maram wiped the sweat from his flushed face. ‘We weren’t to harm any of the books, Lord Grayam said.’

‘But surely the spirit of his rule was that we weren’t to harm anything here.’

‘Ah, surely,’ Maram said, ‘this is the time to abide by the letter of his rule?’

‘Perhaps we should bring the cup to him and let him decide.’

Atara, who had a keener sense of right and wrong than I, nodded at the cup and told me, ‘If you were Lord of Silvassu and your castle was about to fall by siege, would you want to be troubled by such a decision?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Then shouldn’t we abide by the highest rule?’ she asked. And then she quoted from Master Juwain’s book: ‘“Act with regard to others as you would have them act with regard to you.”’

I was quiet while I gripped my sword, looking at the bowl.

‘Strike, Val,’ Kane told me. ‘Strike, I say.’

And so I did. Without waiting for doubt to freeze my limbs, I swung Alkaladur in a flashing arc toward the bowl. Kane had taught me to wield my sword with an almost perfect precision; I aimed it so that its edge would cut the pearl to a depth of a tenth of an inch, but no more. The impossibly sharp silustria sliced right into the soft pearl. This thin veneer split away more easily than the shell of a boiled egg. Pieces of pearl fell with a tinkle onto the marble stand. And there upon it stood revealed a plain, golden bowl.

‘Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lord!’

Kane, ignoring the stricken look on Maram’s face, picked it up. It took him only a moment to peel away the pieces of pearl that still clung to the inside of the bowl. Its gleaming surface was as perfect and unmarked as the silustria of my sword.

‘It is the Lightstone!’ Maram cried out.

A strangeness fell over Kane then. His face burned with wonder, doubt, joy, bitterness and awe. After a very long time, he handed the bowl to me. And the moment that my hands closed around it, I felt something like a sweet, liquid gold pouring into my soul.

‘I wish Alphanderry was here to see this,’ I said.

The coolness of the bowl’s gold seemed to open my mind; I could hear inside myself each note of Alphanderry’s last song.

As Atara next took the bowl, I saw Flick whirling above us as he had at the sound of Alphanderry’s music. His exaltation was no less than my own. Then Maram’s fat fingers closed around the bowl and he cried out again, louder now: ‘The Lightstone! The Lightstone!’

We held quick council and decided that we must find Liljana and Master Juwain. But it was they who found us. At the sound of footsteps in the adjoining chamber with its poetry books, Maram quickly tucked the bowl into one of his tunic’s pockets and very guiltily began sweeping the shards of pearl off the stand into his other pocket. When Liljana followed Master Juwain into the room, however, he breathed a sigh of relief and broke off hiding the signs of our desecration. He brought out the bowl and told them, ‘I’ve found the Lightstone! Look! Look! Behold and rejoice!’

As Master Juwain’s large gray eyes grew even larger, I again beheld this golden bowl and drank in its beauty. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

‘So this is what you’ve been shouting about,’ Master Juwain said, staring at the bowl. ‘We’ve been looking all over for you – did you know it’s past midday?’

In this windowless room, time seemed lost in the hollows of the bowl that Maram held up triumphantly. In defense at missing our rendezvous by King Eluli’s statue, he said again, ‘I’ve found the Gelstei!’

‘What do you mean, you found it?’ Atara asked him.

‘Well, I mean, ah, I was the first to pick it up. The first to see it.’

‘Were you the first to see it?’ Atara asked him.

She went on to say that Kane was the first to pick it up after I had cut away the pearl, and who could say who had first laid eyes upon it? Then she told him that it was ignoble to fight over who should receive credit for finding the Lightstone.

‘I don’t think that anyone has found the Lightstone,’ Master Juwain said.

Maram looked at him in such disbelief that he nearly dropped the bowl. Atara and I clasped hands as if to reassure each other that Master Juwain had ruined his sight in reading his books all day. And Kane just stared at the bowl, his black eyes full of mystery and doubt.

Master Juwain took the bowl from Maram as Liljana stepped closer. He looked at us and said, ‘Have you put it to the test?’

‘It is the Gelstei, sir,’ I said. ‘What else could it be?’

‘If it’s the true gold,’ he told me, ‘nothing could harm it in any way. Nothing could scratch it – not even the silustria of your sword.’

‘But Val has already struck his sword against it!’ Maram said. ‘And see, there is no mark!’

In truth, though, Alkaladur’s edge had never quite touched the bowl. Because I had to know if it really was the Lightstone, I now brought out my sword again. And as Master Juwain held the bowl firmly in his hands, I drew the sword across the curve of the bowl. And there, cut into the gold, was the faintest of scratches.

‘I don’t understand!’ I said. The sudden emptiness in the pit of my belly felt as if I had fallen off a cliff.

‘I’m afraid you’ve found one of the False Gelstei,’ he told me. ‘Once upon a time, more than one such were made.’

He went on to say that in the Age of Law, during the hundred-year reign of Queen Atara Ashtoreth, the ancients had made quests of their own. And perhaps the greatest of these was to recapture in form the essence of the One. And so they had applied all their art toward fabricating the gold gelstei. After many attempts, the great alchemist, Ninlil Gurmani, had at last succeeded in making a silver gelstei with a golden sheen to it. Although it had none of the properties of the true gold, it was thought that the Lightstone might take its power from its shape rather than its substance alone. And so this gold-seeming silustria was cast into the form of bowls and cups, in the likeness of the Cup of Heaven itself. But to no avail.

‘I’m afraid there is only one Lightstone,’ Master Juwain told me.

‘So,’ Kane said, glowering at the little bowl that he held. ‘So.’

‘But look!’ I said, pointing my sword at the bowl. ‘Look how it brightens!’

The silver of my sword was indeed glowing strongly. But Master Juwain looked at it and slowly shook his head. And then he asked me, ‘Don’t you remember Alphanderry’s poem?’

The silver sword, from starlight formed,Sought that which formed the stellar light,And in its presence flared and warmedUntil it blazed a brilliant white.

‘It warms,’ he said, ‘it flares, but there’s nothing of a blazing brilliance, is there?’

In looking at my sword’s silvery sheen, I had to admit that there was not.

‘This bowl is of silustria,’ Master Juwain said. ‘And a very special silustria at that. And so your sword finds a powerful resonance with it. It’s what pointed you toward this room, away from where the Lightstone really lies.’

The hollowness inside me grew as large as a cave, and I felt sick to my soul. And then the meaning of Master Juwain’s words and the gleam in his eyes struck home.

‘What are you saying, sir?’

‘I’m saying that I know where Sartan Odinan hid the Lightstone.’ He set the bowl back on its stand and smiled at Liljana. ‘We do.’

I finally noticed Liljana holding a cracked, leather-bound book in her hands. She gave it to him and said, ‘It seems that Master Juwain is even more of a scholar than I had thought.’

Beaming at her compliment, Master Juwain proceeded to tell us about his researches in the Library that day – and during the days that I had lain unconscious in the infirmary.

‘I began by trying to read everything the Librarians had collected about Sartan Odinan,’ he said. ‘While I was waiting for Val to return to us, I must have read thirty books.’

A chance remark in one of them, he told us, led him to think that Sartan might have had Brotherhood training before he had fallen into evil and joined the Kallimun priesthood. This training, Master Juwain believed, had gone very deep. And so he wondered if Sartan, in a time of great need, seeking to hide the Lightstone, might have sought refuge among those who had taught him as a child. It was an extraordinary intuition which was to prove true.

Master Juwain’s next step was to look in the Librarian’s Great Index for references to Sartan in any writings by any Brother. One of these was an account of a Master Todor, who had lived during the darkest period of the Age of the Dragon when the Sarni had once again broken the Long Wall and threatened Tria. The reference indicated that Master Todor had collected stories of all things that had to do with the Lightstone, particularly myths as to its fate.

It had taken Master Juwain half a day to locate Master Todor’s great work in the Library’s stacks. In it he found mention of a Master Malachi, whose superiors had disciplined him for taking an unseemly interest in Sartan, whom Master Malachi regarded as a tragic figure. Master Juwain, searching in an off-wing of the north wing, had found a few of Master Malachi’s books, the titles of which had been indexed if not their contents. In The Golden Renegade, Master Juwain found a passage telling of a Master Aluino, who was said to have seen Sartan before Sartan died.

‘And there I was afraid that this particular branch of my search had broken,’ Master Juwain told us as he glanced at the False Gelstei. ‘You see, I couldn’t find any reference to Master Aluino in the Great Index. That’s not surprising. There must be a million books that the Librarians have never gotten to – with more collected every year.’

‘So what did you do?’ Maram asked him.

‘What did I do?’ Master Juwain said. ‘Think, Brother Maram. Sartan escaped Argattha with the Lightstone in the year 82 of this age – or so the histories tell. And so I knew the approximate years of Master Aluino’s life. Do you see?’

‘Ah, no, I’m sorry, I don’t.’

‘Well,’ Master Juwain said, ‘it occurred to me that Master Aluino must have kept a journal, as we Brothers are still encouraged to do.’

Here Maram looked down at the floor in embarrassment. It was clear that he had always found other ways to keep himself engaged during his free hours at night.

‘And so,’ Master Juwain continued, ‘it also occurred to me that if Master Aluino had kept a journal, there was a chance that it might have found its way into the Library.’

‘Aha,’ Maram said, looking up and nodding his head.

‘There is a hall off the west wing where old journals are stored and sorted by century,’ Master Juwain said. ‘I’ve spent most of the day looking for one by Master Aluino. Looking and reading.’

And with that, he proudly held up the fusty journal and opened it to a page that he had marked. He took great care, for the journal’s paper was brittle and ancient.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘this is written in Old West Ardik. Master Aluino had his residence at the Brotherhood’s sanctuary of Navuu, in Surrapam. He was the Master Healer there.’

No, no, I thought, it can’t be. Navuu lay five hundred miles from Khaisham, across the Red Desert in lands now held by the Hesperuks’ marauding armies.

‘Well,’ Atara asked, ‘what does the journal say?’

Master Juwain cleared his throat and said, ‘This entry is from the 15th of Valte, in the year 82 of the Age of the Dragon.’ Then he began reading to us, translating as he went:

Today a man seeking sanctuary was brought to me. A tall man with a filthy beard, dressed in rags. His feet were torn and bleeding. And his eyes: they were sad, desperate, wild. The eyes of a madman. His body had been badly burned from the sun, especially about the face and arms. But his hands were the worst. He had strange burns on the palms and fingers that wouldn’t heal. Such burns, I thought, would drive anyone mad.

All my healings failed him; even the varistei had no virtue here, for I soon learned that his burns were not of the body alone but the soul. It is strange, isn’t it, that when the soul decides to die, the body can never hold onto it.

I believe that he had come to our sanctuary to die. He claimed to have been taught at one of the Brotherhood schools in Alonia as a child; he said many times that he was coming home. Babbled this, he did. There was much about his speech that was incoherent. And much that was coherent but not to be believed. For four days I listened to his rantings and fantasies, and pieced together a story which he wanted me to believe – and which I believe he believed.

He said his name was Sartan Odinan, the very same Kallimun priest who had burned Suma to the ground with a firestone during the Red Dragon’s invasion of Alonia. Sartan the Renegade, who had repented of this terrible crime and betrayed his master. It was believed that Sartan killed himself in atonement, but this man told a different story as to his fate.

Here Master Juwain looked up from the journal and said, ‘Please remember, this was written shortly after Kalkamesh had befriended Sartan and they had entered Argattha to reclaim the Lightstone. That tale certainly wasn’t widely known at the time. The Red Dragon had only just begun his torture of Kalkamesh.’

The stillness of Kane’s eyes as they fell upon Master Juwain just then made me recall the Song of Kalkamesh and Telemesh that Kane had asked the minstrel Yashku to recite in Duke Rezu’s hall. I couldn’t help thinking of the immortal Kalkamesh crucified to the rocky face of Skartaru, and his rescue by a young prince who would become one of Mesh’s greatest kings.

‘Let me resume this at the critical point,’ Master Juwain said, tapping the journal with his finger. ‘You already know how Kalkamesh and Sartan found the Lightstone in the locked dungeon.’

And so he said that just as he and this mythical Kalkamesh opened the dungeon doors, the Red Dragon’s guards discovered them. While Kalkamesh turned to fight them, he said, he grabbed the Cup of Heaven and fled back through the Red Dragon’s throne room whence they had come. For this man, who claimed to have once been a High Priest of the Kallimun, had again fallen and was now moved with a sudden lust to keep the Cup for himself.

And now he reached the most incredible part of his story. He claimed that upon touching the Cup of Heaven, it had flared a brilliant golden white and burned his hands. And that it had then turned invisible. He said that he had then set it down in the throne room, glad to be rid of it – this hellishly beautiful thing, as he called it. After that, he had fled Argattha, abandoning Kalkamesh to his fate. The story that he told me was that he made his way into the Red Desert and across the Crescent Mountains and so came here to our sanctuary.

It is difficult to believe his story, or almost any part of it. The myth of an immortal man named Kalkamesh is just that; only the Elijin and Galadin have attained to the deathlessness of the One. Also, it would be impossible for anyone to enter Argattha as he told, for it is guarded by dragons. And nowhere is it recorded that the Cup of Heaven has the power to turn invisible.

And yet there are those strange burns on his hands to account for. I believe this part of his story, if no other: that his lust for the Lightstone burned him, body and soul, and drove him mad. Perhaps he did somehow manage to cross the Red Desert. Perhaps he saw the image of the Lightstone in some blazing rock or heated iron and tried to hold onto it. If so, it has seared his soul far beyond my power to heal him.

I am old now, and my heart has grown weak; my varistei has no power to keep me from the journey that all must make – and that I will certainly make soon, perhaps next month, perhaps tomorrow, following my doomed patient toward the stars. But before I go, I wish to record here a warning to myself, which this poor, wretched man has unknowingly brought me: the very great danger of coveting that which no man was meant to possess. Soon enough I’ll return to the One, and there will be light far beyond that which is held by any cup or stone.

Master Juwain finished reading and closed his book. The silence in that room of ancient artifacts was nearly total. Flick was spinning about slowly near the False Gelstei, and it seemed the whole world was spinning, too. Atara stared at the wall as if its smooth marble was as invisible as Master Aluino’s patient had claimed the Lightstone to be. Kane’s eyes blazed with frustration and hate, and I couldn’t bear to look at him. I turned to see Maram nervously pulling at his beard and Liljana smiling ironically as if to hide a great fear.

And then, as from far away, through that little room’s smells of dust and defeat, came a faint braying of horns and booming of war drums: Doom, Doom, Doom. I felt my heart beating out the same dread rhythm, again and again.

Maram was the first to break the quiet. He pointed at the journal in Master Juwain’s hands and said, ‘The story that madman told can’t be true, can it?’

Yes, I thought, as I listened to my heart and the pulsing of the world, it is true.

‘Ah, no, no,’ Maram muttered, ‘this is too, too bad, to think that the Lightstone was left in Argattha.’

DOOM! DOOM! DOOM!

I looked at the False Gelstei sitting on its stand. I gripped the hilt of my sword as Maram said, ‘Then the quest is over. There is no hope.’

I looked from him to Master Juwain and Liljana, and then at Atara and Kane. No hope could I see on any of their faces; there was nothing in their hearts except the beat of despair.

We stood there for a long time, waiting for what we knew not. Atara seemed lost within some secret terror. Even Master Juwain’s pride at his discovery had given way to the meaning of it and a deepening gloom.

And then footfalls sounded in the adjoining chamber. A few moments later, a young Librarian about twelve years old came into the room and said, ‘Sar Valashu, Lord Grayam bids you and your companions to take shelter in the keep. Or to join him on the walls, as is your wish.’

Then he told us that the attack of Count Ulanu’s armies had begun.

5

We retreated through the Library’s halls and chambers to the infirmary, where I retrieved my helmet and Atara her bow and arrows. There we said goodbye to Master Juwain and Liljana. Master Juwain would be helping the other healers who would tend the Librarians’ inevitable battle wounds, and Liljana decided that she could best serve the city by assisting him. I tried not to look at the saws, clamps and other gleaming steel instruments that the healers set out as I embraced Master Juwain. He told me, and all of us, ‘Please don’t let me see that any of you have returned to this room until the battle is won.’

The young page who had found us earlier escorted Kane, Maram, Atara and me out of the Library and through the gates of the inner wall. He led the way through the narrow city streets, which were crowded with anxious people hurrying this way and that. Many were women clutching screaming babies, with yet more children in tow, on their way to take refuge in the Library’s keep or grounds behind its inner wall. But quite a few were Librarians dressed as Kane and I were in mail, and bearing maces, crossbows and swords. Still more were Khaisham’s potters, tanners, carpenters, papermakers, masons, smiths and other tradesmen. They were only poorly accoutered and armed, some bearing nothing more in the way of weaponry than a spear or a heavy shovel. At need, they would take their places along the walls with the Librarians – and us. But they would also keep the fighting men supplied with food, water, arrows and anything else necessary to withstanding a siege.

The flow of these hundreds of men, with their carts and braying donkeys, swept us down across the city to its west wall. This was Khaisham’s longest and most vulnerable, and there atop a square mural tower near its center stood the Lord Librarian. He was resplendent in his polished mail and the green surcoat displaying the golden book over his heart. Other knights and archers were with him on the tower’s ledge, behind the narrow stone merlons of the battlements that protected them from the enemy’s arrows and missiles. We followed the page up a flight of steps until we stood at the top of the wall behind the slightly larger merlons there. And then we walked up another flight of steps, adjoining and turning around and up into the tower itself.

‘I knew you would come,’ the Lord Librarian said to us as we crowded onto the tower’s ledge.

‘Yes,’ a nearby Librarian with a long, drooping mustache said, ‘but will they stay?’

He turned to look down and out across the pasture in front of the wall, and there was a sight that would have sent even brave men fleeing. Three hundred yards from us, across the bright green grass that would soon be stained red, Count Ulanu had his armies drawn up in a long line facing the wall. Their steel-jacketed shields, spears and armor formed a wall of its own as thousands of his men stood shoulder to shoulder slowly advancing upon us. To our left, half a mile away where Khaisham’s walls turned back toward Mount Redruth, I saw yet more lines of men marching across the pasture to the south of the city. And to the right, in the fields across the Tearam, stood companies of Count Ulanu’s cavalry and other warriors. These men, blocked by the river’s rushing waters, would make no assault upon the walls, but they would wait with their lances and swords held ready should any of Khaisham’s citizens try to flee across it. Behind us to the east of the city, Lord Grayam said, between the east wall and Mount Redruth on ground too rough for siege towers or assaults, yet more of the enemy waited to cut off the escape of anyone trying to break out in that direction.

‘We’re surrounded,’ Lord Grayam told us. He ran his finger along his scarred face as he watched the Count’s army march toward us. ‘So many – I had never thought he’d be able to muster so many.’

Out on the plain below us, I counted the standards of forty-four battalions. Ten bore the hawks and other insignia of Inyam and another five the black bears of Virad. There were masses of Blues, too, at least two thousand of them, huddled and naked and holding high their axes – and letting loose their bone-chilling howls.

OWRRULLL! OWRRULLLLLL!

‘We should have sent for aid to Sarad,’ Lord Grayam said. ‘And we might have if we’d had more time. Too late, always too late.’

From out across the rolling pasture came the terrible sound of the enemy’s war drums. It set the very stones of the walls to vibrating:

DOOM, DOOM, DOOM! DOOM, DOOM, DOOM!

‘No, that wasn’t it,’ Lord Grayam said to a knight nearby whom I took to be one of his captains. ‘I was too proud. I thought that we could stand alone. And now but for Sar Valashu and his companions, we do.’

Maram looked down at the advancing armies and took a gulp of air as if it were a potion that might fortify him. He seemed to be having second thoughts about joining the city’s defense. Then he belched and said, ‘Ah, Lord Grayam, as you observed before, I’m no warrior, only a student of the Brotherhoods and –’

‘Yes, Prince Maram?’

Maram noticed that all the men at the top of the tower were looking at him. So were those along the wall below.

‘– and I really shouldn’t remain here, if I would only get in your way. If I were to join the others in the keep, then –’

‘You mean, the women and the children?’ Lord Grayam asked.

‘Ah, yes, the … noncombatants. As I was saying, if I were to join them, then …’

Maram’s voice trailed off; he noticed Kane had his black eyes fixed on him as did I my own.

Again he gulped air, belched and rolled his eyes toward the heavens as if asking why he was always having to do things that he didn’t want to do. And then he continued, ‘What I mean is, ah, although I’m certainly no swordmaster, I do have some skill, and I believe my blade would be wasted if I had to wait out this battle in the keep – unless of course you, sir, deem my inexpertise to be dangerous to the coordination of your defenses and would –’

‘Good!’ Lord Grayam suddenly called out, wasting no more time. ‘I accept the service of your sword, at least for the duration of the siege.’

Maram shut his mouth then, having woven a web of words in which he had caught himself. He seemed quite disgusted.

‘All of you,’ Lord Grayam said, ‘Sar Valashu, Kane, Princess Atara – we’re honored that you would fight with us, of your own choice.’

In truth, I thought, listening to the booming of the drums, we had little choice. Our escape was cut off. And because the Librarians had succored us, especially me, in a time of great need, it would be ignoble of us to forsake them. And perhaps most importantly, Alphanderry’s cruel murder needed to be avenged.

DOOM, DOOM, DOOM!

Maram, gulping again, drew his sword as he looked out one of the crenels of the battlements. He muttered, ‘At least there’s a good wall between us and them.’

But the wall, I thought, as I looked down at the Librarians lined up along it, might not provide as much safety as Maram hoped. It was neither very thick or high; the red sandstone its masons had built with was probably too soft to withstand very long a bombardment of good, granite boulders, if the Count’s armies had the siegecraft to hurl them. The mural towers, being square instead of round, were also more vulnerable, and the wall had no machicolation: no projecting stone parapet at its top from which boiling oil or lime might be dropped down upon anyone assaulting it. Even now, in the last moments before the battle, the city’s carpenters were hurriedly nailing into place hoardings over the lip of the wall to extend it outward toward the enemy. But these covered shelters were few and protected the walls only near the great towers at either side of the vulnerable gates. Since they were made of wood, fire arrows might ignite them. To forestall this calamity, the carpenters were also nailing wet hides over them.

‘Sar Valashu,’ Lord Grayam said to me as he placed his arm around the Librarian next to him, ‘allow me present my son, Captain Donalam.’

Captain Donalam, a sturdy-looking man about Asaru’s age, grasped my hand firmly and smiled as if to reassure me that Khaisham had never been conquered: if not because of her walls, then due to the valor of her scholar-warriors. Then he excused himself, and walked down the tower’s stairs to the wall, where he would command the Librarians waiting for him there.

We, too, took our leave of the Lord Librarian. There was little room for us along the crowded ramparts in the tower. We walked down the stairs, thirty feet to the wall, and took our places behind the battlements. Maram bemoaned being that much closer to the enemy. And with every passing moment, as the drums beat out their relentless tattoo and the first arrows began hissing through the air, the enemy marched closer to us.

As they drew in upon the city in their lines of flashing steel, the nervousness in my belly felt as if I had swallowed whole mouthfuls of butterflies. I counted the standards of twenty-nine of Aigul’s battalions. Among them fluttered the much larger standard of Count Ulanu’s whole army: the yellow banner stained blood-red with its great, snarling dragon. Near it, on top of his big brown horse, was Count Ulanu himself. The knights of his vanguard rode with him. Soon enough, I thought, they would let the lines of their men advance forward past them to prosecute the very dangerous assault of the walls. But for the moment, Count Ulanu had the point of honor as the thousands of men on both sides of the wall turned their gazes upon him.

‘Damn him!’ Kane growled out beside me. ‘Damn his eyes! Damn his soul!’

Everyone could see that we had hard work ahead of us. Four great siege towers, as high as the walls and with great iron hooks to latch onto them, were being rolled slowly forward across the grass. They were shielded with planks of wood and wet hides; the moment they came up against the walls, many men would mount the stairs inside them and come pouring over the top. Three battering rams, each aimed at one of the west wall’s gates, rolled toward us, too. But the most fearsome of the enemy’s weapons were the catapults that had now ceased their advance and had begun heaving boulders at the city. One of these was a mangonel, which flung its missiles in a low arc against the wall itself. Even as I drew in a deep breath and grasped the hilt of my sword, a great boulder soared across the pasture and crashed into the wall a hundred yards to the south, shattering its battlements in a shower of stone.

Now it begins, I thought, with a terrible pulling inside me. Again and always, it begins.

As I did before any battle, I built up walls around me. These were as high as the stars and as hard as diamond; they were as thick as the mountains that keep peoples apart. My will was the stone that formed them, and my dread of what was to come was the mortar that cemented them in place. Already, the screams of men hit by flying rocks or pierced with arrows filled the air. But their agonies couldn’t touch me.

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