The Lightstone

Chapter 22

The next morning we packed up the horses and gathered by the river. It was a cool day of big, puffy clouds that drifted slowly past the sun. As promised, Mithuna arrived with the other scryers to say goodbye. They brought cheeses and fresh bread to sustain us on our journey. Although we were grateful for their gift, we needed oats for the horses even more, and this they could not provide. Where we would be going, I thought, we would find no grain and precious little grass.

'The Vardaloon,' Maram said, shaking his head as he adjusted the sad-dle of his sorrel. 'I can't believe we're setting out to cross the Vardaloon.' We might, of course, have retraced our path back through Iviunn and then proceeded north through Jerolin, hugging the mountains until we reached the sea. And there, we might have kept to the oast as we skirted along the edge of the great forest, all the way to the Bay of Whales. But Jerolin was said to be a Kallimun stronghold. And such a course would also be much longer, and might not even bring us to the end of our Quest. After the emptiness of the Tower, I feared dangers that fired up the spirit less than the discouragement of a journey that might seem to have no end.

'There are dangers in the great forest,' Mithuna whispered to me as I stroked Altaru's neck. 'There is something in there.' 'What is it, then?' I whispered back.

'I don't know,' Mithuna said, looking at Ayanna and the other scryers. 'We've never quite been able to see it – it's too dark.'

A shudder rippled through my belly then, and I told her, 'Please say nothing of this to my friends.'

But Maram needed no fell words from Mithuna to feed the flames pf his already vivid imagination. He looked off toward the mountains to the west as he muttered,

'Ah, well, if any bears come for us, we've cold steel to give them. And if the forest grows too deep, we can always burn our way through the trees.'

Here he held up his firestone, which gleamed a dull red in the weak morning light.

Mithuna came over to him and pointed at the crystal. While the other scryers gathered around, and Kane and my friends looked on from where they stood by their horses, Mithuna's sad voice flowed out above the rushing of the river: 'You have a great fire in your heart, and now a great gelstei to hold it. But you must use it only in pursuit of the Lightstone -not for burning trees or against any living thing, if you can help it. This we have all seen.'

To our astonishment, Maram's most of all, she leaned forward and kissed him full upon the lips. Then she laughed out, 'I hope you won't mind leaving me with a little of this fire.' After that, she pointed out a path along the river that led up into the woods surrounding the Tur-Solonu. 'If you follow this west, it will take you over the mountains into the Vardaloon.'

'And then?' Maram asked.

'And then we don't know,' Mithuna said. 'Farther than that none of us has ever been.

I'm afraid you'll have to find your own way through the forest.'

We went among Mithuna and he sister scryers, embracing them and making our final farewell. Then we mounted our horses and lined up in the same order as we had left Tria: I led forth and Kane rode warily at the rear. We left the scryers standing almost in the shadow of the Tur-Solonu as they watched us with cold, clear eyes that seemed as old as time.

For a few miles, we wound our way along the river through the rising woods. Then the path veered off to the right, where the trees grew thickest in an unbroken swath of gleaming leaves. It was a good path that Mithuna had shown us: wide enough for the horses to keep their footing, if a little overgrown. Its pitch was long and low, cutting as it did along the gende slopes of one of the long, low Blue Mountains. High passes such as we had crossed from Mesh into Ishka we would not find here. Nor were there jagged escarpments ready to hurl down boulders upon us or biting cold.

Our greatest obstacle, I thought, would be the forest itself, for it grew thickly all around us, the elms and chestnuts rising up through mats of oak fern and other bracken. Shrubs such as virburn and brambles made for low, green walls between the trees. If the path hadn't cut through this dense vegetation, we would have had to cut through it with our sword. Or burn through it with the firestone that Mithuna had said we must not use.

We traveled all that day through the peaceful mountains. It was quiet in the woodls, with little more to listen to than the tapping of a woodpecker or the calls of the occasional thrush or tanager. And we were quiet as we picked our way along the path; our failure to gain the Lightstone drove all of us inside ourselves, there to ask our souls if we really had the courage to keep on seeking unless illness, wounds or death struck us down first. It was one thing, I thought, to make such a vow in the splendor of King Ki titan's hall, with thousands of shouting | people, each of whom was convinced that he was the one destined to find the golden cup. And it was quite another to continue on through unknown lands after suffering great disappointment and the mud and cold of an already long journey.

And yet we all rode along toward the west in good spirits. We had cause for much faith. Atara's newly found gift and her vision of the Sea People gave us to hope that she might see our way through to the end of our quest. And we had not left the Tur-Solonu with empty hands. Maram had his firestone and Atara her kristei; with Kane's black stone and Master Juwain's healing crystal, that made four of the seven gelstei told of in Ayondela's prophecy. Was this nothing more than the rarest of chances? Or could it be that we were the ones destined to set forth into the darkness and win the Lightstone?

Of course, we all knew that it was not enough simply to have gained these four gelstei. Somehow we must learn how to use them. Toward that end, Master Juwain continued his own private quest of moving the dwelling of his soul from his head to his heart. Often, as we rode through the thick greenery, he would take out his green crystal and hold it up to the swaying leaves as if trying to capture their life-fire and hold it within himself. There, where his blood sang to the music of the birds and all living things, he would find a forest deeper and darker than a thousand Vardaloons.

And with the aid of the gelstei he held in his hand, he must find his own way through it.

Atara had her own paths to negotiate. For her, scrying was a most difficult journey.

Standing beneath the stars at night to unlock time's mysteries came unnaturally to her, for she was a creature of sun and wind and water rushing over open plains. Her temperament inclined her to want to look out upon all things with open eyes and go among the fields and flowers like a wild mare running tree. And to leave all peoples or places she came across better for her passing. This was her will, to work her dreams upon the world. But now she had to call upon all her will to enter the otherworld of dreams of the future. And so, as she rode along behind me though the mountains, she brought forth her crystal sphere and fixed her bright eyes upon it.

She turned inward into that dark place that she hated to go. And there brought what light she could.

As for Maram, he regarded his firestone as might a child who has been given a long-desired birthday present. Even while guiding his sorrel down the steepest segments of the path, he kept his crystal always at hand, now waving it about like a sword, now holding it tightly to his chest. He studied its dark, red interior with a diligence he had never applied to the Saganom Elu or the healing arts. He had a great passion to use this crystal, I thought and I prayed that he had an equally great devotion to using it well.

Late that afternoon, as we made camp by a stream running through a pretty vale, he managed to coax the first fire from his stone. We all watched as he knelt over a pile of dry twigs and positioned the gelstei so that it caught what little light the sun drove through the forest's thick canopy. And it was good that the crystal drank in only a little light. For just as Maram's whole body trembled excitedly and he let loose a great gasp of wonder, the pointed end of the crystal erupted with a bolt of red flame.

It shot like lightning into the firepit, instantly igniting and consuming the tinder, and turning it to black ash. The pit's stones cast the fire straight back into Maram's face so that it burned his cheeks and scorched his eyebrows. But he seemed not to mind this chastisement, or even to feel it. He jumped away from the pit and thrust his crystal toward the sky as he cried out, 'Yes! Oh, my Lord, yes – I've done it!'

After that, we all decided that Kane should stand over Maram when-ever he practiced summoning the fires of the red gelstei, and this Kane did. The next morning, as Maram tried to burn holes in an old log just for the fun of it, Kane drew forth his black stone. His black eyes came alive to match the dark glister of his gelstei, but otherwise his whole being seemed to touch upon a place that utterly devoured light. The coldness that came over him chilled my heart and reminded me of things that I wished to forget. But it also seemed to cool the fires of Maram's crystal. In truth, Maram managed to call from it scarcely more than a candle's worth of flame- and this only after Kane had gathered his gelstei into his clenched fist. If Maram chafed at having to work with Kane and having his best efforts at firemaking dampened, Kane was wroth. When Maram complained that Kane had gone too far, Kane practically shoved the black gelstei in Maram's face and growled out, 'Do you think I like using this damn stone? Too far, you say, eh? What do you know about too far?'

His words remained a mystery to me until that night when we made our second camp in the mountains. Our two days of traveling had taken us almost all the way across this narrow range; just to the west, below us, gleamed the sea of green that was the Vardaloon. We found a shelf of earth on the side of a mountain overlooking it, and there we made our firepit and set out our furs. Around midnight, just after Alphanderry had finished his watch and gone to sleep, Kane and I stood together gazing at Flick's whirling form against the backdrop of the stars.

'Too far,' Kane said again in a low voice, 'always too far.'

'What is too far?' I asked, turning toward him.

He looked at me for a long few moments as his face softened and his eyes seemed to fill with starlight. Then he said, 'You might understand. Of all men, you might.'

He smiled at me, and the warmth that poured out of him was a welcome tonic against the chill of the mountains. Then he opened his hand to show me the black gelstei and said, 'There is a place. One place, and one only, eh? All things gather there; there they shimmer, they whirl, they tremble like a child waiting to be born. From this place, all things burst forth into the world. Like roses, Val, like the sun rising in the morning. But the sun must set, eh? Roses soon die and return to the earth. The source of all things is also their negation. So, this is the power of the black gelstei. It touches upon this one place, this utter blackness. It touches: red gelstei or white, flowers or men's souls. And whatever fire burns there is sucked down into the blackness like a man's last gasp into a whirlpool.'

He paused to stare down at his stone, even as Flick spun faster and flared more brightly. I waited for him to go on, but he seemed caught in silence.

'To use this gelstei,' I said, 'you must touch upon this place, yes?'

'So, just so – I must,' Kane muttered, nodding his head. 'I cannot, but I must.'

'It is dangerous, yes?'

'Dangerous – ha! You don't know, you don't know!'

'Tell me, then.'

His voice fell strange and deep as he looked at Flick and said, 'This place I have told of – it's darker than any night you've ever seen. But it's something else, too. Out of it come the sun, the moon, the stars, even the fire of the Timpimpiri. The fire, Val, the light. There's no end to it. This is why the black stones are the most dangerous of the gelstei. Go too far, touch what may not be touched, and there's no end. Then instead of negation, its opposite. So, a light beyond light. If a black gelstei is used wrongly in controlling a firestone, then out of it might pour such a fire as hasn't been seen since the beginning of time.'

He looked over toward Maram where he slept by the fire holding his red crystal in his hand. Then he stared out at the blazing stars for a long time and said, 'No, Val, it's not the darkness I fear.'

We stood there on the side of the mountain talking of the gelstei as the sky turned and the night deepened. After a while, because he was Kane, the man of stone who also held a deep and brilliant light I told him of Mithuna's last words to me.

'There is something there,' I said as I looked off toward the dark hills of the Vardaloon. 'Some dark thing, Mithuna said.'

'So, stories are told of the Vardaloon,' Kane muttered.

'Tell me.'

'They're just stories.'

'Perhaps,' I said.

'You fear this thing, eh?'

I continued staring into the night for as long as it took for my heart to beat ten times, then said, 'Yes.'

'So,' he said. 'So it always is. It's fear that's the worst, eh? Well, let's at least slay this one enemy, if we can.'

Without other warning, he suddenly whipped his sword from its sheath. So quickly did he move that it seemed to bum the air. I heard its steel hissing scarcely inches in front of my face.

'What are you doing?' I asked him.

'Draw! Draw now, I say! It's time we had a little practice with these blades.'

'Here? Now? It must be nearly midnight.'

'So?'

'So it's too dark to see.'

'Of course it is – that's the point! Now draw before I lose my patience!'

'But we'll wake the others.'

'Let them wake, then, damn it! Now draw your sword!'

I looked over at our five friends sleeping soundly by the fire. There was little enough ground between them and the wall of thistles and branches we had cut to surround our camp. I looked back at Kane, and the change that had come over him chilled me.

He stood glaring at me with his kalama held at the ready. The stars gave off just enough light that I could see it glinting behind his head.

'All right then.' I said, freeing my kalama from its sheath.

I should have been grateful that he deigned to fence with me. In all the battles i had fought, in all the duels I had ever watched, I had never seen his like with the sword.

He knew things that even Asaru and my father's weapons master, Lansar Raasharu, did not. And it was his way to hold on to his secrets more tighdy than a miser does gold. But now, it seemed, he was willing to share them with me.

'Ha!' he cried out. 'Ha, now, Valashu Eiahad!'

His long steel blade leaped out of the dark like lightning from a blackened sky. I barely had a moment to raise up mine to parry it. The clash of steel against steel rang out across the side of the mountain. As I had feared, it brought Atara and the others flying out of their sleep. While Maram waved his crystal wildly in front of his face, Atara made a quick grab for her sword and might have charged toward us if Kane hadn't called out: 'It's only us, now go back to sleep! Or stay up and watch, if that's what you want!'

Again his sword flashed out at me, and again I parried it – by inches, by the shrieking sound of it as much as sight. We stared at each other through the darkness as we each waited for the other to move.

And move Kane did, suddenly, explosively, attacking me in a fury of slashing steel.

For several moments, we whirled about the dark ground, feinting and cutting at each other. Something dark came over him then -or came howling out of him like a tiger who hunts at night. It knew little of fellowship and nothing at all of the conventions of a friendly fencing match. I stood before Kane with drawn sword, and that was the only thing that mattered to him. In the madness of the moment, in the wildness of his black eyes that I could barely see, I had somehow become his enemy. And I wondered if he had become mine: had Morjin somehow suborned him? Had the Red Dragon's lies finally found their way to his heart? His sudden and utter viciousness terrified me, for I knew that he would destroy me, if he could.

'Ha!' he cried out gleefully. 'Ha – again!'

If not for my gift of sensing his movements – and the skills that my father had taught me – he might well have killed me then. He struck out with his sword straight toward me again and again, and I managed to dance out of his way or parry his ferocious blows only by the narrowest of distances.

'Again!' he called to me. 'Again!'

And again we circled each other, watching and waiting and exchanging slashes of our swords in a flurry of motion. We dueled thus for a very long time – so long that sweat soaked through my mail and the cool air that I gasped burned my lungs like firee. I lunged about the starlit earth looking for an opening that I couldn't find. At last, I retreated toward the fire where the others sat watching us. I held up my hand as I shook my head and leaned forward to catch my breath.

'Again!' Kane cried out. The fire cast its red light over his closely cropped white hair and harsh face.

'What are you doing?' Atara asked him. She was now dearly alarmed and gripped the hilt of her curved sword in her hand.

'Fight, Valashu!' Kane roared at me. 'Don't hide behind others! Now fight, damn it – fight, I say!'

I had no choice but to fight. If I hadn't raised my sword to parry his blow, he would have sent me on to the otherworld. Not even Atara could have moved quickly enough to stop him. The fury of his renewed attack caught me up like a whirlwind.

His black eyes flashed in the fire's glow to the lightning strokes of his sword, and I felt my eyes flashing, too. I felt something else. His whole being burned with one purpose: to cut, to thrust, to tear and rend, to survive – no, to thrive, always and only to live deeply and completely, exultantly, destroying with joy anything that stood ready to destroy him. To know with uncertainty that he couldn't fail, that a light beyond light would always showihim where his sword must strike and an infinite fire pooled always ready to fill his wild heart. His sword touched mine, and I suddenly felt this terrible will blazing inside me. I knew then that the light of it could always drive away any darkness that I feared. This was his first lesson to me, and the last.

'Good!' he cried out. 'Good!'

Zanshin's timeless calm in the face of extreme danger, I thought, was one thing; but this was quite another. I suddenly found the strength to spring forward and attack him with all the fury he had directed at me. The steel of my kalama caught up the starlight as I whirled the long blade at him. For a moment, it seemed that I might cut through his defenses. But he had more cunning and was better with the sword than I.

He slipped beneath my blow and leaped forward with an unbelievable speed. And I suddenly found the point of his sword almost touching my throat.

'Good!' he cried out again. 'Very good, Valashu! That's enough for one night, eh?'

After that, he put away his sword and came forward to embrace me. Then I stood back looking at him.

'You would have killed me, wouldn't you?' I asked him.

'Would I have?' Kane said, almost to himself. Then his gaze hardened, and he growled, 'So – I would have, if you hadn't fought with all your heart. This quest of ours is no practice session, you know. We may only have one chance to gain the Lightstone, and we'd damn well better be ready to take it.'

I went to sleep thinking about what he had said to me – and taught me. I awoke the next morning strangely eager to crow blades with him again. But it was a day for travel into an unknown land. Kane promised another round of swordplay that evening if I were willing, and I had to content myself with that, And so we went down into the Vardaloon. The path we had been following took us into a hilly country at the very edge of it. But soon the ground leveled out into a lowland of little streams and still ponds.

Although the forest was rather thick here, we had no trouble making our way through it. The elms and oaks were familiar friends; birds sang in their branches, while beneath them shrubs such as lowbush blueberries were heavy with fruit and promised a welcome addition to our meals.

And yet, there was something disquieting about these woods. The air was too warm and close, and too little light found its way through the unbroken cover of leaves.

The squirrels who made their home here were rather sluggish in their motions and seemed too thin. A doe that crossed our path bounded out of the way too slowly; neither were her eyes as bright as they should have been. That there should have been a path at all in woods where no one had lived or gone for thousands of years disturbed us all. Perhaps, I thought, it was only an ancient game trail.

'Perhaps,' Maram said as we stopped to catch our breath, 'it is used by people.'

'I doubt that,' Kane said. 'I've never heard of people living in the Vardaloon.'

'They must,' Maram said as he slapped a mosquito that had landed on the side of his sweating neck. And then he waved his hand at another hovering near his ear. 'How else are these bloodsuckers fed?'

We resumed our journey, riding in order along the path as it wound its way west through the trees. We saw no people but there were plenty of mosquitoes, even in the full warmth of the day. They dung to the leaves of the bushes and took to the air in whining swarms as we brushed by them. They bedevilled our mounts as well, biting their ears and choking their nostrils. The dark woods soon filled with the sounds of slapping hands and horses snorting.

'I was wrong, Val,' Maram called from behind me. His big voice filled the spaces between the tall trees around us; it almost drowned out the whumph of Altaru's hooves and the whine of the mosquitoes biting us. 'People couldn't live here. And neither can we. Perhaps we should turn back.'

'Be quiet!' Kane called from behind him farther down the path. 'No one ever died from a few mosquitoes!'

'Then I'll be the first,' Maram complained. He sighed and said 'Well at least they can't get any worse.'

But that evening, as we made camp near some pretty poplars at least a hundred feet high, they got worse. With the bleeding away of the thin sunlight from the forest, the mosquitoes came out of the bushes like demons from hell. They sought us out in swarms of swarms, and now I began to fear that they might really kill us draining us of blood or filling our noses and mouths so that we couldn't breathe. If not for an ointment made of yusage that Master Juwain found in his wooden chest, we might have been helpless before their onslaught. We lathered the reddish ointment over our faces, hands and necks, quickly exhausting Master Juwain's supply. While it didn't keep the mosquitoes from biting us and certainly didn't drive them off, it seemed that they attacked us in somewhat fewer numbers and with slightly less viciousness.

'I've never seen mosquitoes like these!' Maram said, waving his firestone and slapping at his face. 'They can't be natural!'

He sat with the rest of us between three smoky fires that he had built. We were all hunched over with our cloaks pulled tightly around our faces as we now choked on the thick streams of smoke that wafted this way and that. But it was better than being stung by the mosquitoes.

'They're just hungry,' Kane muttered to Maram. 'If you were that hungry, you'd carve up your own mother for dinner.'

At any other time, Maram might easily have found a riposte to Kane's jibe. But now it seemed to drive him into a sullenness and self-pity that he couldn't shake. Master Juwain tried to cheer him by reading an uplift-ing verse from the Book of Ages, but Maram waved his hand at his too-blithe words as if warding off yet another assault of mosquitoes. Liljana made him some mint tea sweetened with honey the way he liked it, but he said that the evening was too hot for tea. He even refused the cup of brandy that Atara brought him. And when Alphanderry brought out his mandolet and struck up a song, Maram complained that he couldn't hear the music against the whining of the mosquitoes' wings in his ears.

'We're all miserable,' I said as I came over and knelt by his side. 'Don't make it worse.'

'What shall I do, then?'

I walked off toward the stream and returned a few moments later with a large, round rock. I handed it to Maram and said, 'This is a beautiful thing, don't you think?'

'It's a rock, Val,' he said, looking at it dubiously.

'Yes,' I said, 'it is. But don't you think it has a beautiful shape?'

'Ah, I suppose so.'

'It lacks only one thing, though.'

'And what is that?'

'A hole.'

'A… hole?' He looked at me as if my head were full of holes.

'Yes, a hole,' I told him. 'Someday, when we return to Mesh with the Lightstone and tell the story of our journey, we'll show this as well. And everyone will marvel at the rocks of the Vardaloon that have holes in them.'

Maram's eyes shone with a sudden understanding as he hefted the rock in his hand and tapped it with his firestone.

'Make me a hole,' I said, smiling at him.

'All right,' he said, smiling back. 'For you, my friend, I'll make the most beautiful hole you've ever seen.'

And with that, he bent over it and went to work. There was just enough light left in the woods to bring his gelstei alive and summon forth a thin stream of flame. It melted out a little bit of rock before the light failed altogether, and with it the firestone. But Maram had the beginnings of a hole to show for his efforts, and this pleased him greatly. And it distracted him, for the moment, from the murderous mosquitoes.

When it grew dark, Kane and I further entertained him with another round of swordplay. Then it came time for sleep, which none of us managed very well. The merciless whining in our ears, I thought, was the song of the Vardaloon, and it kept us turning and slapping at the air far into the night.

We arose the next morning in very low spirits. All of our hands and faces were puffy from mosquito bites – all of us except Kane. He gazed out at the forest from behind his tough, unmarked face and explained, 'These little beasts drink blood for breakfast. Well, some blood is too bad even for them, eh?'

After we had saddled the horses, we held council and decided it was time we left the path. It was taking us ever farther into the Vardaloon toward the west, whereas we needed to cut off northwest to reach the Bay of Whales.

'The going will be rougher,' I said, looking off at the wall of green in that direction.

'But there may be higher ground that way, and so fewer mosquitoes.'

'Then let's go,' Maram called out as he waved his hand about his head. 'Nothing could be worse than these accursed mosquitoes.'

In our three days of travel from the Tur-Solonu, we must have come some fifty miles. That meant we had another fifty miles ahead of us before the Vardaloon gave out on the open country said to surround the Bay of Whales. If we found no swamps or large rivers to cross and rode hard, we might reach it in only two more days.

We rode as hard as we could. But the horses, drained of blood, moved off slowly, and we couldn't bring ourselves to drive them faster. As I had hoped, the ground rose away from the path, and it seemed that the swarms of mosquitoes grew thinner.

The undergrowth, however, did not. We forced our way through some hobblebush and thickets of a dense shrub with pointed leaves. These scratched the horses' flanks and pulled at our legs. In a few places, we had to hack our way through with swords to keep the branches out of our faces.

Thus we endured the long morning. It was dark beneath the smothering cover of the trees – darker than in any woods I had ever been. The shroud of green above us almost completely blocked out the sun. In truth, we couldn't tell if the sun shone at all that day or whether clouds lay over the world, for the leaves were so thick we could see nothing of the sky.

'It's too damn dark here,' Maram said as we paused to take our lunch in a relatively clear space beneath an old oak tree. 'Not as dark as the Black Bog, but dark enough.'

He looked down at the red crystal he held in his much-bitten hand as if wondering how he might ever find enough light to fill it. Then he said, 'At least the mosquitoes aren't so bad here. I think the worst is…'

His voice suddenly died off as a look of horror came over his swollen face. His hand darted toward his other wrist, where his fingers closed like pincers, and he plucked something off him and cast it quickly to the ground. Then he jumped to his feet as he shuddered and began brushing wildly at his trousers and feeling with his panicked hands through his thick brown beard and hair.

'Ticks!' he cried out. 'I'm covered with ticks!'

We all were. The undergrowth here, it seemed, was infested with these loathsome insects. They were rather large ticks, flat and hard with tiny black heads. They clung to our garments and worked their way through their openings to find flesh to attach themselves. They crawled along our scalps beneath our hair.

We all jumped up then, and beat at our clothes to drive the ticks off us. Then we paired off to search through each other's hair. Atara carefully ran her fingers through my hair. She found at least seven ticks, which she pulled off me and threw back into the bushes. Then I parted her soft blond hair lock by lock and returned the favor.

Master Juwain tended Liljana (for once I was envious of his bald head), while Alphanderry and Maram groomed each other like monkeys. Only Kane, the odd man out, seemed unconcerned with what might be hiding on his body. But he had great care for the horses. He went among them, laying his rough hands on their jumping hides, and combing through their hair as he began pulling off ticks by the tens and twenties.

'Let's ride,' he said when we had flashed, 'Let's get out of here.'

I led the way through the woods, trying to keep a more or less slight line toward the northwest. But this way led through yet more undergrowth. We all looked down at the leaves of the bushes, hoping to espy any ticks there and pull our legs out of the way before they could cling to us. It was thus that our attention was turned in that direction. And so we did not see what hung from the branches above us until it was too late.

'What was that?' Maram shouted. He dapped his hand to his neck and sat bolt upright in his saddle. 'Val, did you throw something at me?'

'No,' I said, 'it must be -

'I can feel it,' Maram said, now pulling frantically at the collar of his shirt. 'Oh, my Lord, no, no – it can't be!'

But it was. Just then, as Maram looked up into the trees to see what had fallen on him, a dozen leeches dropped down upon his face and neck. They were black, wormy things at least four inches long – segmented, with bloated bodies thick in the middle but tapering off toward their sucking parts at either end. They fell upon the rest of us as well. They hung lengthwise from the branches above us in the hundreds and thousands like so many swaying seedpods. And as we passed beneath them they rained down upon us in streams of hungry, writhing flesh.

'I've got to get this off!' Maram shouted as he pulled at his shirt. 'I've got to get them off me!'

'No, not here!' I called back. Even as I felt something smooth and warm moving down my neck beneath my mail, I pulled my cloak around my head to cover myself from the leeches. 'Ride, Maram! Everyone ride until we're out of this!'

We pressed our horses then, but the undergrowth caught at their legs and kept them from moving very fast. They were weak, too, from being eaten by mosquitoes, as were we. We rode as hard as we could for a long while, perhaps an hour, and in all that time the leeches in the trees never stopped falling on us and trying to find their way inside our clothes. They drummed against my cloak and bounced off Altaru's sides – those that didn't fasten to his sweating black hide. After a while, I forgot to check the bushes for ticks. And I almost didn't notice the mosquitoes that still danced around my face.

'This is unbearable!' Maram called out from beside me. We had long since broken order, and now we rode as we could, strung out in a ragged line beneath the trees.

'I've got to get my clothes off! I can feel these bloodsuckers attached to me!'

We all could. I could feel the shuddering skin of my companions as my own. This was my gift and my glory – now my hell. Their horror of the leeches and their other sufferings only multiplied mine. Maram, especially, was fighting back panic, and everyone except Kane was near to despair.

'Atara,' I said as we stopped to catch our breaths, 'can you see our way out of this?'

She sat on her big roan mare, looking down into the crystal sphere that she held in her hands. For all of our journey from the mountains, she had struggled with her newly found skills of scrying. More than once, I thought she had gazed with terror upon futures that she did not wish to see. But away from the time-annihilating fires of the Tur-Solonu, these visions seemed to come at their own calling, not hers. And so she looked up from her gelstei and smiled grimly. 'I see leeches everywhere. But I didn't need to be a scryer to see that.'

'Well, we've got to try to get them off us,' I said to her. I climbed down from Altaru and asked the others to dismount as well. 'Kane, Alphanderry, Master Juwain – please come here.'

While they approached me across the damp bracken, I whipped off my cloak and shook it out. Then, holding one corner of it above my head, I asked my three friends each to take a corner while Maram stood under it to disrobe.

'But, Val, your cloak!' Maram called out. 'You've nothing to cover yourself!'

'Hurry!' I told him. I stood with my eyes closed as a leech dropped down the back of my neck. 'Please hurry, Maram!'

I think that Maram had never moved so quickly to take off his clothes in all his life, not even at the invitation of Behira or other beauties. In a few moments, he stood bare to the waist, his big hairy belly and chest bare to the world. But my cloak, like a shield, protected him from the falling leeches. And so Liljana was able to join him beneath the makeshift canopy to cut away those that had already attached themselves along his sides and back. When she had finished, she rubbed one of Master Juwain's ointments into the half dozen wounds, which oozed copious amounts of blood. That was the strange thing about leech bites, the way they wouldn't easily stop bleeding.

'All right, Atara,' I said, 'you next.'

Maram dressed himself, taking care to pull his cloak so tightly around him that any leech would have to work very hard to force its way inside. Then Atara took his place as Liljana cut at her with her knife. I tried not look upon the splendor of her naked body. And so it went, each of us taking our turns one by one. Even Kane submitted to her ministrations. But he took no more care of the leeches fastened to him than he would twigs fallen into his hair. He dipped his finger into the blood dripping down his deep chest and said to me, 'So – it's as red as yours, eh?'

At last it came my turn. Atara helped me strip off my armor and its underpadding.

While Maram held up my corner of my cloak, Liljana cut more than a dozen leeches from me. Then I quickly dressed, and when I had finished, my friends let my cloak fall around me so that I was well-covered against further assault.

Maram, looking around the forest at the many leeches that still hung from the trees, shook his head and said, This can't be natu-ral.'

'Perhaps it's not,' Kane admitted.

'What do you mean?'

Kane's eyes swept the walls of green around us. 'There's a rumor that once Morjin went into the heart of the Vardaloon. To breed things. Leeches, so we've seen, and mosquitoes and ticks – anything that drinks blood as do his filthy priests. It's said he had a varistei, that he used it in essays of this filthy art.'

'Are you saying that it was he who made these things?' Maram asked.

'No, not made, as the One makes life,' Kane said. 'But made them to be especially numerous and vicious.'

'But why would he do that?'

'Why?' Kane grumbled. 'Because he's the Crucifier, that's why. He's the bloody Red Dragon. It's always been his way to torment living things until they find the darkest angels of their natures. And then to use them in his service.'

Kane's words disturbed us all, and as we set out again, we rode in silence thinking about them. After a while, Kane pulled his horse over toward me, and in a low voice, said, 'You lead well, Valashu Elahad. So, taking off your cloak – that was a noble gesture.'

A noble gesture – well, perhaps, I thought. But I wouldn't get very far on gestures alone or on merely putting up a good face. Soon, after a few more miles of this accursed forest, its creatures would slowly suck away my life and then my spirits would sink as low as Maram's.

That night, for me, was the worst of our journey since the Grays had attacked us.

We made camp on the side of a low hill which I had thought might catch a bit of breeze to drive away the mosquitoes. But at dusk our whining friends came out in full force; there were many leeches here, and as I pulled off Altaru twenty ticks swollen as big as the end of my thumb, his sufferings touched me deeply. Another thing touched me, too. And that was a sense that something was once again hunting me. I thought it could smell my blood, which ran from the leech bites and stained my clothes. It was a dark thing that sought me through the forest, and it had the taste of Morjin.