Diamond Warriors

Chapter 11

Somehow, I managed to stumble back through my tent and to find my bed. I fell onto it. Given all that had occurred over the past four days, none of those present — Lord Avijan, Lord Sharad and Joshu Kadar — thought this strange. I asked Lord Avijan and Lord Sharad to leave me. Then I bade Joshu Kadar to go find Master Juwain.

Alone in my tent I tried to summon the fierce light inside myself by which I had twice driven off the Ahrim. But either I could not find it or else my life fires had burned too low. I pressed my hands against the pain stabbing into my eyes, and then opened them. I could not make out any of the things of my pavilion: the council and map tables; my small clothes chest and a larger one full of treasure; the candles in their stands and the braziers full of hot coals. All was lost into a blackness as total as a cave's deepest depths.

There came a moment when I despaired. I shook my head from side to side in a wild, terrified fury. But it did nothing to dispel the Ahrim. I seemed only to find within myself a deeper blackness inside the blackness, if that were possible.

Finally, Master Juwain came into my tent and knelt by the side of my bed. He asked me, 'Val, what is wrong?'

I turned my head toward the sound of his voice and said, 'I am blind.'

I tried to explain what had happened. I asked him for his help. Only a few days before, however, he had tried to use his green gelstei to heal my afflicted throat, to no avail.

'What attacks you is beyond my power to drive away,' he told me. 'Beyond the power of our friends, as well. That, I think, has been proven. But on that first day in the woods, it seemed that in opening yourself to what power we do possess, it helped you find your own.'

I nodded my head at this. 'But on that day, Atara had not left me.'

'True — and I can only imagine how much her love for you strengthens you. But you have two friends, now, who weren't with us in the woods.'

'Kane,' I murmured. 'Bemossed.'

'Indeed. Kane seems to know things about the Ahrim. And Bemossed is Bemossed.'

Again, I nodded my head. 'Please summon them, then. And Liljana. Maram, too, of course — and the children. I want all my friends by my side.'

At this, Alphanderry somehow came into being within my tent — or so Master Juwain told me. I could not see him any more than I could Master Juwain or anything else.

'And please ask Joshu Kadar to come back inside,' I said to Master Juwain. 'He will have to know what has happened to me, but no one else must.'

'But what of Abrasax and the other Masters?'

'All right,' I said, 'bring them with you, too, but no one else.'

The Guardians standing outside my tent during that watch — Sar Jonavar, Sar Shivalad, Sar Kanshar and Siraj the Younger — must have thought it strange that I summoned my old friends to me so late at night. But kings must sometimes take council at odd hours, and so I hoped that my actions would cause my warriors no suspicion or distress.

A little later, everyone I had sent for gathered by my bedside as I had requested. Kane pressed his rough old hand to my forehead, taking care to avoid the plaster that Master Juwain had set over my reopened scar. And he told me, 'I know less about the Ahrimana than you might hope. It partakes of Angra Mainyu's being — this I have said. It has escaped from Damoom, where the Baaloch is still bound, eh? And so I must wonder if anything can bind it. I think not. At least not here on Ea. For in a way, the Ahrimana has not really escaped at all, but merely made its way from the darkest of the Dark Worlds to one that has been falling into shadow for a long time.'

'But two times, now,' Master Juwain said to him, 'Val did drive it away.'

'So,' Kane said. 'So he did — through the light of the sword he holds inside himself. When it blazes brightly enough, the Ahrimana can no more abide it than Angra Mainyu can the radiance of Star-Home.'

'But it is dead within me,' I said to Kane. 'Either dead or blackened like a piece of charred wood. I cannot find it.'

'That is because,' Kane said in a pitiless tone that chilled me, 'your blindness is not just of the eyes but the soul.'

Abrasax, usually a much kinder man, took my hand in his and said to me, 'You must somehow open your third eye so that your other two might see. In this, we can help you perhaps a little, but no more.'

I sensed him and the other Masters taking out their seven Great Gelstei in order to call forth the fires along my spine's seven chakras and brighten their flames. Although their magic gave me new strength, it failed to lift the blindness from me.

I heard Kane draw in an angry gasp of breath. Then his great regard for me filled his voice as his manner softened and he said, 'So dark — so damnably dark. I have said that Ea is almost a Dark World, and it is. But there are bright things here, and the soul of Valashu Elahad is only one.'

I sensed him looking at Bemossed then. Even through my panic at having been blinded, I felt the vast weight of expectation that people had fastened around Bemossed's neck like a collar made of lead.

Then Bemossed pressed his warmer and softer hand to the side of my face. And out of the darkness above me, he told me: 'I had dreams just before Master Juwain woke me. The most evil of dreams yet. I could feel Morjin, all his twisted desire. Somehow, he lends his power to the Ahrim and guides it. And sics it on Val as he might a hound. He has learned that Val has become a king — I am sure of this. And he is desperate to destroy him.'

After that, with infinite gentleness, Bemossed touched his fingers to my closed eyelids, to my temples and the back of my head. For more than an hour, he tried with the full force of his soul to heal me. But he could not drive the Ahrim away.

'I am sorry, Valashu,' he said to me at last. 'I have told you before that I can't really heal people. Only, somehow and sometimes, help them to heal themselves.'

His words seemed to touch off deep emotions in Kane, who said, 'So, it's not healing that Val really needs — it's freedom from that filthy thing!'

I heard him pick up my unsheathed sword, which then he pressed into my open hand. 'The Sword of Sight, this is called. In the end, it might be that you, yourself, will have to see your way free.'

I closed my hand around Alkaladur's diamond-set hilt. It seemed strange how I could feel the shape of the swans carved into its black jade through the skin of my palm. Still lying flat on my back, I gripped my sword with both hands and pointed it straight up toward the roof of my tent and the stars beyond.

And through the dark came a softly glowing white light. I could see the faint, flaring outline of my sword's blade against a wall of blackness.

'There is something!' I cried out, to Kane and my other friends. 'There is something!'

I managed to lever myself up and rise from my bed. Then, after nearly knocking over a brazier, I found my way to the center of the tent. I told everyone to stand clear, then I swept out my sword toward the south, west, north and east. It flared even more brightly. A band of silver shimmered before my eyes. It was the only thing in all the world that I could see.

And then, as if lightning flashed out of a dark night, I knew a thing. I called out to my friends: 1 must go there.'

'Go where?' Kane said to me.

To the wood,' I told him. 'The place where the Ahrim first found me.'

'There? But why? There's nothing there but deer and trees.'

'I don't why, Kane. I only know that I must go — and go now!'

At this, Maram came over and grabbed my arm. 'But you can't go now! You are beyond being exhausted. Go back to bed, eat a good meal, drink a little brandy, sleep. Who knows? — you might wake up to find the Ahrim gone.'

I shook my head at this. 'No, it will not be gone. And there is no time. We will march in two more days, and I cannot lead my men to war if I am blind.'

'At least wait until dawn,' Maram said to me. 'It's nearly pitch black outside.'

I thought of Atara again, and I suddenly sensed at least a small part of what her life had become. And I told Maram, 'For me, it will still be dark in the morning. And it is better that we should go now, that the warriors will not behold their king's blindness.' I issued commands then. It was Abrasax who came up with the story that we would tell everyone to explain my headlong rush out into the black of night: I was to go on a meditation retreat into the mountains in order to seek a vision toward victory. My fiends, along with the Seven and Bemossed, were to help prepare me for a great battle. In its way, it was true enough.

Joshu Kadar led my great stallion up to the very opening of my tent. I tried not to rumble as I mounted him; I sat on Altaru's great back with all the sureness that I could muster. My friends had their horses brought up, too. So did the Abrasax and the rest of the Seven. Although Sar Jonavar and the other Guardians on duty that night must have thought it strange to see us prepare for an outing at such an hour, they said nothing. Neither did Lord Avijan, still awake, who came out of his tent nearby. I was now their king, and they did not like to question me.

I left it to Maram and Kane to lead the way out of our encampment, with me riding close behind them, and the others following me. As we proceeded down the lanes that I could not see, I felt the eyes of many men looking upon me. I prayed that they would not be able to make out the staring emptiness of my eyes

— or at least would not wonder at it if they did. I had feared that I would not be able to ride blind. I needn't have. Altaru, always so aware of my every nuance of motion and the fires of my heart, seemed to sense my impairment and that he would have to see his way through the night for both of us. I told him simply to follow Maram and his big brown horse, and this he did. All I had to do was to keep my legs wrapped around his sides and not fall off.

It was strange journeying through the dark. The dark was nothing, in itself, and yet it seemed to envelop me like an evil substance that I could feel with every particle of my being. Every motion and shift in location seemed a threat to my very life. I had to fight my urge, again and again, to call for a halt so that I might find a little peace in stillness. How, I wondered, had Atara ever learned to bear her blindness? How could anyone? Never, not even in the lightless tunnels of Argattha, had I felt so vulnerable. I wanted nothing more than to go back to my bed and lie there in safety beneath the blankets that my mother had once embroidered

— and to remain there for the rest of my life.

We rode at a decent pace for a couple hours back along the route we had taken from Lord Avijan's castle. The sun finally rose and warmed my face. Its light, however, failed to touch my eyes, even slightly. I heard birds' wings beating the air above flower-scented fields, and then the drumming of our horses' hooves as we crossed the bridge over the roaring Arashar River. Twice I dozed, and only the snap of my head dropping down to my chest kept me from falling off Altaru's back. After the third time that I nodded off, in the lake country outside of Hardu, Maram insisted that we stop so that I could rest. I slept for a couple of hours in a fallow wheatfield off the side of the road. It seemed that I had found one good thing, at least in being blind: that I would be able to sleep as easily during full day as I could at night.

And then it came time to go. Kane, who had taken charge of our little expedition, shook me awake and said to me, 'For you it might make no difference, but I want to find my way into these woods of yours while it's still light enough to see.'

Our course took us along the excellent North Road, up through Silvassu and below my family's burned-out castle that I could not see. Despite my sleeping break, we made excellent time, covering a distance of nearly five miles each hour. So it was that early in the afternoon, we turned down the smaller roads leading past many farms to the wood that I sought. The closer that we came to this place where I had fought a bear so many years before, the brighter my sword flared. This length of almost infinitely sharp silustria remained the only thing that I could see.

Alkaladur, I thought as I pointed it in front of me. The Sword of Fate.

Although Maram, riding ahead of me, said very little and Kane even less, I knew that we must be close to my wood. We rode through a stand of birch trees that seemed familiar to me. I sensed them from the sound of the wind across their papery bark and by their fermy fragrance. Each kind of tree, I suddenly realized, as with the animals, had its own smell. I knew that the wood of great oaks and elms where Salmelu had fired his poison arrow into me must be close, scarcely a mile from this spot. There, too, the Ahrim had found me and nearly killed me with the even more terrible poison that afflicted my soul.

'We might do best to enter the wood,' I libra Maram say to Kane, 'as we did that day when I went hunting with Val and Asaru. But that would take us past Lord Harsha's farm, and as badly as I would like to see Behira, I don't think it would serve for her to see Val in such a state.'

We paused then, and I heard the horses of the Seven and my friends come up behind me. I heard them gathering in together, and I had to suppose that no one had lagged behind. I found myself able to pick up the little boy smell of Daj and Estrella's sweeter scent, as well as the rosewater perfume that Liljana often wore. But I was a man, and not a hound, and whether or not Abrasax and Master Starr and the others had kept pace with us, I could not say — at least until their voices announced their presence.

'I remember that day,' Joshu Kadar said to Maram from out of the darkness behind me. 'I waited for hours at the edge of the wood by Lord Harsha's farm while you went after your deer. But surely we could enter it from a different direction.'

'Surely we could,' I said, pointing my sword to the right of the birch, trees. My sense of direction burned like an arrow through my blood as strong as ever. 'If we go straight that way, we will come to the place where the Ahrim attacked me.'

'Ah,' Maram said to me, 'I still can't see how it will avail us to go back there.'

'I can't either, Maram,' I told him. 'I am sorry.'

'But what if the Ahrim only draws more power from that dark, damned wood? What if it finds a way to blind the rest of us?'

The radiance sparking off my sword seemed to pull me forward as might the twinkling of the North Star. And I said to Maram, 'I can find my own way from here, if I must. I would ask no one to come with me.'

'Ah. well, you might not ask it then. But what kind of a man would let his friend go stumbling off blindly through the trees?'

And then Joshu Kadar said to me: 'I have pledged my sword to you, in life and in death. Sire. Please let there be no more talk of you going on alone.'

I smiled at this, then nodded my head to Kane that we should continue.

As we left the road and entered the forest, we moved more slowly, letting the horses pick their way through the bracken. I left it to Kane to determine if we should dismount and walk, should the undergrowth become too thick or the downed, dead trees threaten to break the horses' legs. But all of our horses. I thought, had become used to journeys through the forest. So had I. It seemed to me that I had spent nearly my entire youth walking through this one, or others. I could not see the tall oaks, elms, maples and chestnuts that I knew lay beyond the birch grove. I could not make out their two stories, dark lower down and a lighter green where their leaves bushed up against the sky. Bin I could almost feel their hugeness and the great streams of life that coursed through them. I could smell the humus of the forest floor and bear droppings full of raspberry seeds and many flowers. Bees buzzed from some honeysuckle hanging on a tree nearby, and I heard a woodpecker knocking its needle like hill into the bark of another farther away.

All my senses, save my sight, seemed to have come fully alive here.

As Kane led on, taking his bearings from the direction in which I pointed my sword, I perceived Alkaladur's blade gradually warming to a brighter silver. It almost drove back the blackness clinging to the trees and holding fast about my head.

'I think we are close,' I heard Maram say to Kane, and me. 'It can't be much farther — maybe just past that rotting log.'

Behind me, I heard Liljana murmur soft reassurances to the children, and behind them, Abrasax announced that the trees here exuded a more powerful aura than those of any he had ever encountered. And then, fifty yards farther on, I heard Maram call for a halt.

'There's something strange here,' he said.

I, too, felt what he felt, and perhaps even more strongly. The air suddenly grew denser and moister, and seemed to waver with a charge as if lightning might strike out at any moment.

'Val — I feel sick to my stomach. It's as if a fist is driving into me and keeping me back.'

As it turned it out, when we gathered in close to discuss things, we all felt a deep and silent force working at our bodies and souls like an ocean's tide pushing us back the way we had come.

'It was this way,' Master Juwain said, 'with the Vilds.'

I remembered vividly the three magic woods that we had found in Ea's wild places: in the great tract of the Alonian forest and on the grasslands of the Wendrush and in the burning waste of the Red Desert. It did not seem possible that another Vild could exist in the middle of Mesh, surrounded by farms and men who had hunted all through these woods many thousands of times over thousands of years.

'Kane,' I called out, 'you once said that at least five Vilds still remained somewhere on Ea. Can one of them be here?'

'Not that I know,' he said with a strange tightness in his voice. 'At least, not that I remember.'

I could almost hear Master Juwain rubbing the back of his bald head in intense cogitation. He suddenly said to me, 'In the three Vilds, we have found great power and great healing. Perhaps, in your forays here, you sensed the presence of a Vild within this wood, even if you wire never aware of it. And have now sought it in your blindness.'

His thoughts, it seemed, almost exactly mirrored my own. 'Let us go on then,' I said. 'Into that very place where it seems the hardest to go.'

The silver streak of my sword pointed us deeper into the woods. More than once, the force pushing at us almost caused me to turn my sword to one side or the other, or lower it altogether. But I kept a hold of it, and we continued moving through the great; silent trees.

'Do you see anything?' I heard Maram say to Kane. 'Does anyone see anything? There are only trees here, just as there always weTe, and one tree is like another!'

I smiled at this, for not even two oaks that grew from a pair of acorns would be like each other — to say nothing of the immense oaks of Ea's Vilds that were like no other trees on earth. I felt sure that we must be close to these living giants that grew out of the forest floor. I wondered why no one seemed able to make them out.

'Wait!' Maram shouted. 'There is something ahead of us — I can almost see it!'

I, however, could could not. Trapped within a cloud of blackness as I was, I wondered at the nature of sight, itself. How did anyone, or anything, really see? Vision could not merely be a matter of light filling up the eyes with colors and shapes, or else my eyes would behold a sea of green all around me. When my grandfather had taken me hunting as a young boy, he had taught me how to look for fire moth caterpillars, whose form and hue exactly matched that of the twigs they hid among. Detecting them, he had told me, required patience, concentration and a training of the mind behind the eye. Had it been this way for Atara, too, searching among millions of possible futures for the one that might hold life for the earth?

True seeing, I thought, could not be possible without a will to see. One must learn to look behind surfaces and the usual expectation and habits of the eye and mind. There must be a sensitivity to nuance, a drive toward something higher and deeper, the sudden perceiving of things in a new light — and a sort of astonished touching of the real. To see the unseen required a freshness of the mind and a cleanness of the spirit. And seeing, as my grandfather had told me, was much of what the One had created us to do. What did the One will us behold? Above all the infinite depths and delights of the One's creation and the immense glory of life that filled even the tiniest of seeds as they sent up through the earth green shoots that fought their way higher and ever higher toward that brilliant and beautiful star in the sky that men had named the. .

'Maram!' I heard Kane shout out from ahead of me. 'Can you see me? Can you hear me?'

With the breaking of Kane's voice into the peace of the woods, the darkness suddenly lifted from me. It was as if the door to a dungeon had been flung open: I blinked against the burning stabs of light that drove into my eyes. It took me many moments before everything began to clear. Then I gasped in awe to see that we had somehow left the wood to find ourselves in a grove like unto no other that I had ever seen. The trees around us, with their silver bark and golden leaves, all were astors but much taller and more magnificent than their cousins in Ea's other Vilds. They grew not like the trees of most woods, crowded together crown to crown, but rather spaced apart allowing a clear sight of the blue, sun-filled sky. Few bushes spread out above the forest floor, carpeted with old leaves and patches of grass, but flowers grew everywhere.

'Maram!' Kane called out once more. And then: 'Liljana! Daj! Master Juwain!'

I whipped about in my saddle, looking around me. I could see none of our friends whom Kane had named, nor Joshu Kadar, Master Matai, Master Nolashar, Master Yasul or Master Storr. Of the Seven, only Master Virang and Abrasax himself seemed to have found their way into this new place. As had Bemossed and Estrella, but no one else.

Or so I thought until I saw Alphanderry suddenly take form to stand in a spray of crimson flowers almost as bright as his mysterious being, which seemed somehow much more luminous and real than it had ever been before.

Kane saw me looking about, and called to to me: 'You can see again!'

'Yes,' I told him, 'the Ahrim left me suddenly. I think it is gone.'

I cast about trying to sense it, perhaps hiding in the lee of one of the great trees. But the brightness of this wood made even shadow seem light. 'But what happened?' I said to Kane. 'Where are the others?'

Beneath the silvery bough of one the astors high above us, we gathered to hold council: Abrasax, Master Virang, Bemossed, Alphanderry and myself. And Estrella. Although our passage into these wondrous trees had not cured her of her muteness, she could say more with a smile and a brightening of her eyes than most people could with a whole stream of words.

'So, this happened,' Kane said. 'I was looking for the Vild, and suddenly found myself within it.'

'So it was with me,' Abrasax said. The intense sunlight seemed to set his white hair and beard on fire. 'I was looking, as a Master Reader is trained to look. There should be an aura to any Vild, different from other woods. And then, of a moment, instead of the wood where the Ahrim attacked Val, I saw this.'

Off through the silver and golden shimmer of astor trees, I noticed gardens of emeralds and diamonds that the Vild's people cultivated, along with dozens of other gems and even gelstei themselves. Birds as bright as parrots flew from tree to tree. Timpum — in all their swirling, scintillating, many-colored millions — hung about nearly every branch, twig and leaf. Never had I seen these luminous beings blaze so brilliantly.

It turned out that all of us had experienced a sort of ripping away of our bodies and souls to find ourselves suddenly riding our horses through this glorious wood. Even Kane, who must have experienced almost everything that could be experienced, seemed distressed. Estrella, however, simply gazed up in wonder above the trees at the fiery red sun. She evinced no fear at how she had come to be in this place; in truth, she seemed utterly at home here, as in some strange way she did everywhere.

It was Bemossed who asked the questions that pressed most keenly on all our minds: 'But where are the others, then? Did they remain behind? And if so, why?'

At this, Kane shrugged his shoulders then scowled at the sky. Not even Grandmaster Abrasax, wise in all lore, had an answer for him.

'And if they did make their way here,' Bemossed continued, 'is it possible that they came out into a different part of this wood?'

No one knew. The Vild seemed to spread out for miles around us in all directions. So open were the spaces between the giant trees that one could say that no path led through them — or that a thousand did.

'We must search for our friends then,' I said. I turned toward Kane. 'You have the most woodcraft, and so it might be best if you …'

I did not finish my sentence. For at that moment, from behind a tree nearby, a small, muscular man stepped out to greet us. He had the leaf-green eyes and curly hair of many of his people, whom I had first known as the Lokilani and Kane called by their more ancient name: the Lokii. He wore an emerald necklace which hung down upon his brown-skinned chest and a skirt woven of some kind of gleaming fiber, but nothing else. I expected him to speak with that strange lilt to his words, as had the other Lokii in the other Vilds. Instead he ddressed us in an almost formal manner, as might an envoy sent from a great king.

'Valashu Elahad,' he said, stepping closer, 'you have come here again — and now as King Valamesh. Allow me to present myself: my name is Aukai.'

Although he did not bow to me, for such was not the Lokii's way, he might as well have. I dismounted then, and so did the others. And I said to Aukai with astonishment: 'But how do you know who I am? For I never have come here before.'

At this, he just smiled. And then his hand swept out, pointing through the trees as he said, 'There is a forest beyond here that the Forest sometimes touches upon. You have come there, three times now, at least, for that is your fate. As you have come here.'

'But how do you know this, then?'

'I know because I know. And because it was foretold.'

'Foretold by whom?'

Aukai looked from Abrasax to Master Virang, and then at Bemossed before his gaze finally settled on Kane. And he said to me, 'The messenger told of your coming, Valashu Elahad.'

'And what messenger is this?'

'Her name is Ondin.' He paused as he looked at me more deeply. 'She is of the El Alajin.'

'One of the Elijin, here!' I said. 'But they are not permitted to come to Ea!'

Aukai used his bare toe to dig at the golden leaves spread out over the earth. And he said to me, 'But you do not now stand on Ea.'

At this, I looked up at the sun, almost as deeply red as a ruby. And I said to Aukai, 'But where do we stand, then?'

'In the Forest, of course.'

'Yes — but where is the Forest?'

In the third Vild, I had fallen into a magic pool only to emerge dripping wet upon the Star People's world of Givene. I wondered if once again I had made a passage to the stars,

'The Forest,' Aukai said to me, 'is where it is. Sometimes it is one place, and sometimes another. But always it is where one wills it to be.'

Abrasax, I noticed, paid keen attention to Aukai's words, and so did Master Virang. Bemossed, though, looked up at the sun. To my amazement, it now shone as yellow-golden as the sun I had known all my life.

'I am sorry,' Aukai said to me, 'I have confused you, and I did not mean to. But some things are hard to explain. Let me try again.'

He drew in a breath of the wood's bracing air as he watched Estrella touching a small, five-pointed flower. Its white petals radiated a soft white light, and we would later learn that the Lokii named this wonder as a stellular.

'In truth,' Aukai told us, 'it might be most accurate to say that the Forest always just is. And it always is upon the world you call Ea. But it also exists upon Lahale, where the El Alajin dwell.'

He paused to let us consider what he had said. Kane, I saw, stared at Aukai so intently that I could feel the raw, red hammering of his heart.

And then Master Virang asked the question that anyone, and not just a Master of the Brotherhood, would wonder at: 'But how can your wood be two places at once?'

'In the same way that yout thoughts can dwell with two things at once,' Aukai told him. 'And your awareness, and your will. Above all, your will to be aware. That was how all of you found your way here.'

He told us that the attainment of a certain awareness would allow one to perceive the Forest and enter it. In a way, one called the Forest into the world and 'set' it either on Ea or Lahale.

'Then would it be possible,' Master Virang asked, his almond eyes sparkling, 'for one of us to set the Forest on Lahale and walk out onto the world of the Elijin?'

Aukai looked at Kane for a moment before he said, 'It would be possible — someday, perhaps, if a man attained the awareness of the Immortal Ones. But not I, nor my people. Nor you, I think.'

'I think not, too,' Master Virang said sadly. 'But clearly the Elijin whom you call Ondin can set the Forest on Lahale. Can all of their order?'

'All who wish to. But why should they come to our Forest, or call it to them, when theirs is even brighter and spreads out across almost their whole world?'

'Why, indeed,' Master Virang said as he watched the light of the stellular fill up Estrella's hand with its warm sheen. And then he asked: 'But if the people of Ea cannot pass to Lahale, can the Elijin pass to Ea?'

'Some can. But it is difficult,' Aukai sighed as he seemed to look through the trees for the wood in which the Ahrim had attacked me. 'To set the Forest on Ea requires entering into a lower awareness, and only some of the El Alajin are willing to put themselves in such jeopardy. And even those the Shining Ones have forbidden to walk upon Ea.'

I thought of my friends, whom I feared we had left behind, on Ea. I asked Aukai about this.

'They have not entered the Forest, that I know,' Aukai said. 'I do not think they will. It was foretold that seven of you would come, and seven of you are here.'

'Seven,' I said, watching Altaru browse on a bit of grass, 'and our horses, too.'

I thought it strange that an animal should be able to pass into the Lokii's wood, but then I recalled that it had been my wise, black stallion who had found his way (and ours) into the first of the Vilds. Altaru's awareness, I thought, in its own way might be higher than that of most men — or at least deeper and more primeval. But that did not explain how my other companions' mounts had managed to 'set' the forest so that they could enter it as well.

Aukai did not have a very satisfactory explanation for this. All that he could manage to tell us was: 'When a man and horse move together, there must be a sharing of awareness. Or perhaps your horses, being as one with you, were able to enter the Forest with you. I do not really know.'

I nodded my head as I considered this. Then I asked him, 'There was a thing attached to me even more completely than was my horse. A dark thing. And yet it seems not to have made the passage to this place.'

'Yes, the Ahrimana,' Aukai said with great distaste. 'For a long time, it has wandered the world, seeking entrance to the Forest. But it cannot bear to behold the trees here. And much else. And so it can never enter the Forest. It is bound to Ea, and finds its home most readily in the darkest of places.'

I did not like to consider the implications of his words, although they accorded closely enough with what Kane had told me.

'But come,' Aukai finally said, holding out his hand to me. He smiled at Bemossed and Estrella, and the rest of us. 'Your other companions will be waiting for you when the time comes for you to leave. Now is the time for other things. You must eat and restore yourself. And then speak with the El Alajin.'

It seemed that we hid no better choice than to go where Aukai beckoned us. He led the way through the great astor trees, and my friends and I led our horses by their reins as we walked along in wonder. I felt so glad at being able to see again that I almost forgot the exhaustion that weighed down every particle of my body. Our journey, though, took us a good seven miles, or so I guessed, and by the time we neared the end of it, I was almost sleeping on my feet. The weariness cramping my stomach and other muscles made me doubt if I would be able to eat any of the foods that Aukai's people had prepared for us.

However, as in the other Vilds, the Lokii set out a feast of the most delicious things. On a large lawn within a great circle of astors, we met the rest of Aukai's people: some five hundred men, women and laughing children, who had come here to greet us. As we had before, we sat at one of the leaf-woven mats that served as tables. Aukai presented to us some of the most honored of the Lokii: a man named Kele, and three small but striking women: Anouhe, Sharais and Eilai — and others. Anouhe had a spray of wispy white hair and an air of kindness about her that reminded me of my grandmother. We ate of the bounty of the Forest, and then afterward Anouhe passed around a bowl full of golden timanas. These sacred fruits, which the astors bore only once every seven years, afforded lasting visions of the Timpum to all who tasted them who did not then die from the power and beauty of the experience. Daj and Estrella, of course, as children, were still not permitted to put their teeth to the timanas, but Abrasax and Master Virang took great wonder from what they ate and then beheld. And I took great strength from a clear, sweet drink that Anouhe poured just for me: the sap taken from a young astor tree. Miraculously, like a cool wind blowing everything clean, it drove away my body's weariness and cleared the haze from my head. When it grew dark and the stars came out, I almost didn't want to sleep — for the fifth straight night. But sleep I must, as Anouhe told me, for on the morrow Ondin would come to the Forest, and I must face her with a freshness of the eye and the spirit.

I awoke just after dawn to find the glade nearly deserted. The sun's golden light wanned the leaves of the astors and illumined the forms of my friends resting beside me. All except for Kane, that is. He stood watching over us as silently as the silver-barked trees all around us. Off perhaps fifty paces, Aukai and Anouhe gathered at the center of the glade as if waiting for someone. From a bush nearby, a lark sang out its morning song.

My friends and I then roused ourselves and bathed in a nearby stream. I put on a clean tunic embroidered with the silver swan and seven stars of the Elahads — and of my distant ancestors long before Elahad had come to earth. We breakfasted on some fresh fruit. And then we walked out into the center of the glade to join Aukai and Anouhe.

Abrasax, who had a mind every bit as sharp and curious as Master Juwain's, asked Aukai, 'Will the Elijin come here into this place as we did into the Forest?'

'She will come into the Forest as you did,' Aukai told him. 'But into what part of it, not even the Immortal Ones can know. And so, most likely, we will have to wait for Ondin to walk here.'

And so wait we did. While the trees around us brightened with whole flocks of birds and uncountable numbers of Timpum, we looked for the great Elijin to appear. The summer sun, sometimes yellow and sometimes red, rose above the crowns of the trees. The glade filled with a warm and vivid light.

And then, from out of the east, I saw a white form moving against the woods' colors of silver, gold and green. Ondin, I knew this must be, a women who was also something more — and yet she walked toward us with an animal grace that hinted of great power. Then she stepped closer, and I thought rather of a waterfall flowing across smooth rocks and sparkling in the sun. By the time she entered the glade so that I could look upon her in all her glory, she seemed more like the sun itself: brilliant, beautiful and beaming out all the hope and warmth of life.

She carried herself perfectly straight, though perfectly naturally and without obvious effort. She wore nothing more than a white gown, which covered her tall, lithe body from neck to knee. Her long hair, black as jet, fell down past her shoulders. Her aquiline nose seemed to split the sun's rays and scatter this radiance across her face so that her ivory skin gleamed. I could not say that in the loveliness and symmetry of her features she was more beautiful than the most beautiful of Valari women: Vareva or my mother, for instance. But in Ondin gathered a power and grace that seemed otherworldly in its perfection. It stunned my eyes and caused me to stare at her in wonder.

As Ondin drew up close to us, Aukai took charge of making the presentations. Then Ondin spoke to each of us in turn, pronouncing our names in her rich, ringing voice as if to honor us. I could not keep myself from staring at her, for I felt sure that I had seen her before, if only in my dreams.

'Grandmaster Abrasax,' she said, smiling at him. 'I have hoped my path would cross yours.'

She seemed even wiser than this wisest of men. I could not guess her age: she might have been thirty years old — or thirty thousand.

'Alphanderry — famed minstrel,' she said, addressing the sparkling form of my old companion as if he were a real man. And then, more mysteriously: 'You have come so far, and have only a little farther to go.'

Then she turned to Kane. After gazing at him deeply, she uttered a single name that seemed to echo through the glade and the vast, open spaces of time: 'Kalkin.'

Kane, his black eyes blazing, clamped his hand to his sword's hilt as he suddenly thundered at her: 'Do not call me by that name!'

'I call you as you are,' she told him in a voice that rang out sweet but sure, 'and not as you wish you could cease to be.'

I had never known anyone or anything able to intimidate Kane. But as Ondin stared back at him with eyes every bit as black and brilliant as his own, I felt a strange fear come alive within him. It seemed that he could not bear to look upon her. And so he stared down at his hard, clenched hand as if in disappointment and dread.

Then Abrasax, trying to be kind, said to Kane, 'Bright she is, indeed, but no more so than you. In truth — '

'Say no more!' Kane snarled at him. 'I won't hear it, do you understand?'

Abrasax bowed his head to Kane, then looked at him as if he did understand my savage friend's most terrible wounds.

Ondin did not press matters with Kane — but neither did she let his dark mood gloom her. She finally turned to me, and her smile was like a honey tea warming my heart. And she said to me, 'Valashu Elahad, ni al'Adar — you have changed.'

I stood still gazing at the marvel of her, as did everyone else. Abrasax, I thought, the Brotherhood's Master Reader, might have spoken of the perfect progression of the fires that whirled within each of Ondin's chakras, the colors of each ingathering and then strengthening each other so as to cast a brilliant aura about her being. I however, had no such talent. Even so, I could not help sensing her splendor, for it seemed at once both numinous and utterly real.

'You speak,' I said to her, 'as if you had seen me before — and not in a scryer's visions.'

I wondered how Ondin — and Aukai — seemed to know so much about me and the world of Ea beyond this Vild.

'But we have met bofore!' Ondin said to me,

'Where, then? In the dreamworld?'

'No, here. In this very place. When you were seven years old.'

I stared at her as if she had told me that I really had wings and could fly.

'You do not remember, I know,' she said. 'But it is time that you should remember.'

She nodded at Anouhe, who now held a wooden cup full of a bright green liquor that might have been the juice of crushed grass. Anouhe gave the cup to Ondin, who inhaled its fragrance and then handed it to me.

'There is no danger in this,' Ondin told me, 'but only remembrance. Drink, Valashu, and know what has truly been.'

Because I wanted to solve the mystery that Ondin had presented me — and because I trusted her — I put the cup to my lips and took a drink. The liquor tasted at once sweet and peppery, cool and bitter. I could not guess from what fruits or plants Anouhe had brewed it.

Upon swallowing, the liquor streaked like fire straight down through my insides. Before it even reached my belly, it seemed, I did feel myself flying, as if a catapult had flung me straight up into the sky's empty space. There came a moment of blinding brilliance. And then, as if a fireflower had opened inside my mind fully formed, I remembered what Ondin had hinted to me:

On my seventh birthday, my father had taken me on my first hunting trip into the woods behind Lord Harsha's farm. Two of my brothers, Asaru and Yarashan, had come with us. They had each put arrows into the same deer at the same moment, and then argued over whose had killed it. And as they stood beneath the elms disputing with each other and my father judged their deeds, I had wandered off. I made my way deeper into the woods, drawn by the call of a scarlet tanager — and something else. I remembered thinking that I could walk to the end of the woods and right up the slopes of Mount Eluru to the very stars. Instead, I had somehow walked straight into the Forest. Now, as I looked around the glade at the silvery astor trees and the glowing stellulars, I relived my wonder at beholding this magical place for the first time sixteen years before.

'I did come here!' I shouted in astonishment. I looked at Aukai. 'You were here! You taught me how to listen to the animals, and call them to me!'

Aukai smiled hugely as he nodded his head and whistled like a wood thrush.

'And you,' I said, turning to Anouhe, 'gave me a drink that you told me would keep me from dying, should I ever take any wounds that became infected.'

She, too, smiled as I pressed my hand to my side where Salmelu's sword had driven through me during our duel. I noticed that Abrasax, Master Virang and Bemossed were looking at me in amazement.

'And you,' I said, bowing my head to Ondin, 'were waiting for me here. You played the flute with me and taught me three songs! You told me that music would quicken my spirit.'

I remembered leaving the Forest and walking away from it holding the flute that Ondin had given me: the very same one that I had years later passed on to Estrella. This beautiful girl smiled as she now took out this slip of wood and held it up to the shining sun.

'And it has quickened it,' Ondin said to me. 'As much else has, too. You have such a bright spirit, Valashu Elahad. So bright, and so strong.'

'But why did I forget this place?' I asked her. 'And forget you?'

Ondin looked down at the Cup of Remembrance, as she called it, that I still held in my hand. Then she nodded at Anouhe to take it and told me, 'Because I asked this wise one to give you to drink from the Cup of Oblivion.'

'But why?'

'Because,' Ondin explained, 'in looking upon the glory of this place, you did not want to return to your woods. And since you had to return, we took away your memory of the Forest so that it would not haunt you.'

'But why did I have to go back? I might have remained here and spent my whole life making music with the birds.'

Ondin smiled at this. 'You said the same thing when you were seven years old. But you had to go back to Ea to fulfill your fate, which you would have found impossible to do if you lamented the darkness all around you while always longing for the brightness of the Forest.'

'My fate, you say? But what do you know of that? Can not a man make his own fate?'

I noticed Ondin looking at the sword I had strapped over my shoulder, and I felt its weight pulling at me.

'Your fate,' she told me, 'was to fight — and fight you have done.'

'Yes, I have. But always with an eye toward the end of war, when I would have time to make music again.'

'And that time is coming. When war shall end, or all things shall end. And you have your part to play in that.'

'Yes, but what part?' I asked her.

I was never to know if Ondin possessed the gift of looking into others' minds as Liljana could. But she seemed able to look into my soul — and those of Abrasax, Master Virang, Bemossed and Kane. She seemed to sense, all in a moment, the nature of the argument that divided us as to how Morjin must be fought.

'You are Valashu ni al'Adar,' she told me, 'descendant of the Lightstone's first Guardian and one of the first Valari. And the Valari were once warriors of the spirit, and must be again.'

'Others have told me that,' I said to her. I drew out my bright blade from its sheath. 'But fate, it seems, has also called me to be a warrior of the sword.'

'So it seems,' she said, smiling at me. 'But not just any sword.'

I pressed my hand to my chest and said, 'That which I hold inside myself is not enough to defeat Morjin as people wish.'

'No? Do you know that, Valashu? I have come here to tell you that the true Alkaladur has not yet been fully forged. And so no one has ever wielded it as it should be wielded.'

I thought of the great War of the Stone that the angels (and many Valari) had fought across the heavens for a million years, and one of its most terrible moments: when the Amshahs, led by Kalkin, had tried to touch Angra Mainyu with a splendid light and return him to the Law of the One. In an amphitheater outside of Tria, one of the ghostly Urudjin had recited these verses to us, and more recently, Kane:

In ruth the warrior went to war,

A host of angels in his train:

Ten thousand Amshahs, all who swore

To heal the Dark One's bitter pain.

With Kalkin, splendid Solajin

And Varkoth, Set and Ashtoreth -

The greatest of the Galadin

Went forth to vanquish fear of death.

And Urukin and Baradin,

In all their pity, pomp and pride:

The brightest of the Elijin

In many thousands fought and died.

Their gift, valarda, opened them:

Into their hearts a fell hate poured;

This turned the warrior's stratagem

For none could wield the sacred sword.

Alkaladur! Alkaladur!

The Brightest Blade, the Sword that Shone,

Which men have named the Opener,

Was meant for one and one alone.

Kane, the very warrior spoken of in the verse, stared at Ondin with bottomless black eyes full of pain. And I said to her, 'If the tale is a true one, then all the angels, even Ashtoreth herself, could not together forge what you call the true Alkaladur. Angra Mainyu turned the force of their souls back upon them! And slew all those who could be slain! And so why should you speak to me as if I can have anything to do with Alkaladur's forging, much less wielding it as you desire?'

She watched the sun's light play on my sword's silver blade, and she said to me, 'But you must know that you must have something to do with its forging. As all who follow the Law must. There will come a day when the Amshahs, in our millions, will again strike the soul force into Angra Mainyu's heart.'

As she spoke these words, Kane ground his jaws together, and his whole being seemed to writhe with fire.

'But you failed once,' I said to Ondin. 'Why, then? Why couldn't the ancient Maitreyas heal Angra Mainyu?'

'That is not know,' Ondin told us sadly. 'But the great Maitreya, who will lead all worlds into the Age of Light, has yet to come forth.'

At this Estrella's large deep eyes seemed to catch up Bemossed's brightness and give it back a hundredfold. Then everyone else looked at him, too.

And Ondin, feeling the weight of our expectation, said to us, 'I am the messenger of Ashtoreth, but not even she knows who this great Maitreya will be. All we can say is that the Maitreya has not yet quickened and come into his power.'

Her words did not distress Bemossed. He smiled at Ondin as if at least one person existed who understood him.

I thought again of the verse's refrain:

Alkaladur! Alkaladur!

The Brightest Blade, the Sword that Shone,

Which men have named the Opener.

Was meant for one and one alone.

'Then the great Maitreya,' I said, 'must the one for whom the

true Alkaladur was intended. The verse tells that none of the

ancients could wield it.'

'None could,' Ondin said, with even greater sadness. 'Just as you

have not yet learned to wield the sword you hold in your hands.'

I raised up my silver sword a little higher. And I said, 'But what does this have to do with that?'

'No one knows. Perhaps no one,' Ondin turned to look at Kane. 'You forged Valashu's sword and gave it its name. Why did you call it Alkaladur?'

For a long moment, Kane stood in a cold silence staring at me and what I held in my hands. Then he snapped at Ondin, 'So, it's a sword, of silustria, most luminous of all substances — as the true Alkaladur was to be a sword of light. What else should I have called it, eh?'

'You make a mystery out of your creation,' Ondin told him.

'So what if I do, then? Creation, itself, is mysterious, eh?'

Ondin gazed at him, then finally turned away to touch her finger to my sword's blade. She said to me, 'Ashtoreth sent me to tell you that this must somehow be used in the battle against Angra Mainyu and Morjin.'

She lifted her hand away from my sword and set it down upon my tunic over my heart. 'And this. And you must find the way to use them.'

'But I do not know how!'

'You said that, too, when you were a boy learning the songs I taught you. You will learn how.'

'But who will be my teacher then? Will you leave the Forest and remain on Ea?'

'No, Valashu — you know I cannot,' She looked at Bemossed. 'But you will have the greatest of teachers. You will come into your power when the Maitreya comes into his.'

I gripped my hands more tightly around Alkaladur's hilt; I could almost feel the sun's light coursing through it.

'You will face Morjin, soon,' she told me. 'And then, if you are a warrior of the spirit and a true king, you will find a way to forgive him. You must desire his healing and only good for him — even his happiness. And in the end, with ail your heart, you must find a way to — '

'No!' I cried out. 'I will slay Morjin, for that is my fate!'

'But Valashu, you cannot know — '

'I do know!' I shouted at her. 'Ashtoreth and all the Galadin, and you, yourself, might be capable of finding inside such a benevolent and selfless soul force. But I am not so noble!'

'You are — '

'I am not the one who can do this thing!' I shouted at her.

Her face grew stern as she looked at me. 'You are King Valamesh.'

I pointed my bright blade straight toward the heart of the sun. 'Yes, I am now King of Mesh — and this is my sword. And Morjin is my enemy.'

Ondin just smiled at this, with an immense sadness that flooded over fee like the tide of the sea. Then she said to me, 'You are right: that is your sword. And its inscription was graven there for you.'

'What do you mean?' I asked, angling the sword slightly so that the light played over the silver blade. Its surface gleamed as unmarked as the most perfect of mirrors. 'Alkaladur bears no inscription!'

'Does it not?'

I gazed more deeply at my sword. 'If it does, then time has worn it away.'

'From silustria, Valashu?'

My sword's silustria, I knew, was so hard that not even thousands of years of its immersion in the sea had left the slightest mark upon it.

'But what is inscribed there?' I asked her.

'I do not know what is inscribed there. Only that it is inscribed there.'

'Inscribed how, then? I can see nothing.'

'No? Can you not? Then look, Valashu!'

Kane, three paces from me, stood still as a mountain as he gazed at my sword.

Then I looked, too. I looked at the smooth, shining silustria with a will to see behind its surface and the habits of my eye and mind. I must, I thought, let my the whole of my awareness blaze forth. I must drive myself to perceive something deeper within the silver gelstei and to grasp it with all the force of my soul in a sort of astonished touching of…

'It flares!' I cried out. 'The letters — they flare!'

From within the sword's bright surface near the hilt, curved glyphs suddenly leaped out from the silustria with an even brighter light. They formed and flared like etchings made from a silvery flame: Vas Sama Yeos Valarda. .'

Abrasax, almost without thought, translated these words from the ancient Ardik:

With his eye of compassion He saw his enemy Like unto himself

As he spoke, I studied the luminous glyphs graven into my sword near the hilt — but leaving the patch of silustria nearest it unmarked.

Then Ondin said to me, 'With your eye, Valashu. Look! There is more to the inscription.'

I looked at my bright sword with all the power I could find within myself to look. But the patch of silustria beneath the inscription remained as smooth as glass.

'I cannot see anything else!' I said. 'What are the lines, then?'

'I cannot tell you. It is known only that the sword's maker inscribed six lines.'

Here she turned toward Kane and asked him, 'Can you tell us what they are?'

Kane shifted his attention from my sword to Ondin, and gazed at her with a fierce, deep longing. He seemed to fight back tears with a terrible savagery toward himself. I sensed in him, however, no desire for her, as a man desires a woman, but only the keenest of urges to behold her as she truly was and to embrace that luminous part of her hidden so deeply from his sight.

'So, I cannot tell you,' he finally said. 'I have forgotten them.'

Ondin nodded at Anouhe, still holding the cup of green liquor. 'Then perhaps you should drink from her cup.'

I felt something flash inside Kane, and I feared that he might strike out at Ondin. Instead, in a voice both gentle and anguished, he said, 'No — it would not help.'

Ondin took a step closer to him, and with a sad smile, touched his face. I stared at the two of them in amazement. I had never seen Kane let anyone make free with his person or tender him this sort of kindness.

'Someday,' she told him, 'you will remember.'

Then she withdrew her hand and looked back at me. She tapped her finger just above the hilt of my sword. 'Just as you will find the last three lines inside yourself, and then see them written here.'

She drew in a long breath of the glade's flower-scented air. 'The time is coming, Valashu. Ashtoreth bids me to tell you that just as Angra Mainyu has sent the dark thing to attack you, the Ieldra will shower upon Ea their blessed light.'

Abrasax, who seemed as well-schooled in astrology as the Brotherhood's Master Diviner, pointed up into the sky to the left of the sun. 'The Golden Band still strengthens. Never have I seen it flare so.'

To most people, most of the time, the radiance that the Ieldra sent out to all worlds of the universe remained invisible. Now, however, Abarasax aimed his ringer at a patch of cloudless sky far beyond which lay Ninsun at the center of all things. And suddenly, I thought, I beheld what he did: the sky's blueness seemed to break open to reveal the deeper color behind. It was glorre, the one color that possessed the qualities and attributes of all the others while shimmering with its own marvelous and unique splendor.

Without knowing why I did what I did, I raised up Alkaladur straight toward this band of glorre. My sword's silustria grew almost clear then. It seemed to draw down the onstreaming glorre and drink it in. And then, as with the flash of lightning, my sword showered out a brilliance of this color. Its radiance fell upon all of us, and brought a gleam to our eyes and hope to our hearts.

To Alphanderry, it brought much more. We all watched in wonder as he stood near my glistering sword as beneath a water-fall. He raised back his head and opened his mouth as if he wanted to let the Ieldra's light run down his throat deep into his being. His hands closed about the glorre-filled air, almost as might a real hand of flesh and blood. At last, I lowered my sword, and the glade returned its more usual hues of silver, gold and green. But Alphanderry did not return to the same substance he had been. He laid his hand on top of my hand, and the warmth of his skin burned me; I felt hard bones beneath, and the blood of life streaming through him all warm and good, and I shook my head in astonishment because I knew that somehow he had been made again as real as any other man.

'It is a miracle,' Bemossed said, putting his hand to Alphanderry's wrist. 'A true miracle — and not the kind that men say I make.'

'As it has been promised, Minstrel,' Ondin said to Alphanderry, 'you have been restored to yourself.'

Alphanderry — and all of us — bowed our heads in awe.

Then Kane, his eyes filling with tears, moved over to Alphanderry and embraced him. His hands thumped with great force and sound against Alphanderry's back as he cried out: 'My little friend, my little friend! Ha — you are alive!'

Thus did Alphanderry, killed in the pass of the Kul Moroth, rejoin his companions of old, and both Kane and I wept without restraint.

Then Ondin told us that her work here had been completed and that she must go. 'And you must, too,' she said to me.

I knew that I must. I asked her, 'But what of the Ahrim, then? It will be waiting for me when I leave these woods, won't it?'

Ondin nodded her head at this. 'It will always be waiting for you, Valashu. Just as we will be waiting for you to defeat it, once and for all.'

We both looked at the flaming inscription sealed into my sword's silustria. Then she smiled at me and added, 'Farewell, mighty King. Until we meet again.'

Without another word she inclined her head as if to bid us all goodbye. Then she turned and walked from the glade as she had come.

Kane, now exultant, moved over to his horse, where he retrieved the mandolet that he had inherited from Alphanderry. He gave it into Alphanderry's hands and said, 'Now you can play this again!'

And play Alphanderry did. For the rest of that morning, as we took one last meal with Anouhe, Aukai and a few other of the Lokii, Alphanderry plucked the strings of his mandolet as he sang out in his poignant, beautiful voice the very lyrics which had brought down the wrath of Morjin's men in the Kul Moroth: La valaha eshama halla, lais arda alhalla..

Now it brought only smiles to our faces.