The Lightstone

Chapter 39

And so we went into Sakai. It was the work of the rest of the day to fight our way over the nearest pass in this towering front range. We had a bad time of it. Atara slipped on an ice-glazed rock and nearly broke her leg. The horses suffered grievously in the thin air, panting and sweating until their fur froze in the cold. We put blankets over them to ease their shivering, but it didn't seem to help very much.

When the wind rose to a screaming howl as we crested the pass, whipping up flurries of snow, it seemed that our great, white coats didn't help us much, either.

'I'm cold, I'm tired,' Maram complained as he drove himself into the wind and pulled at Iolo's reins. To either side of us were towers of rock and clouds of snow; beneath the powder at our feet was a mat of old snow made hard as ice by a season of melting and refreezing. 'In fact, I'm very cold,' Maram called out into the bitter air.

I'm so cold that I'm… frozen! Oh, my Lord, my fingers are frozen! I can't feel them!'

I hastened to his side and helped him pull off the mittens that Audhumla had knitted him. The tips of his fingers were hard and white. I placed them between my hands and blew on them to warm them. Then Master Juwain came over to take a look.

'I was afraid of this,' Master Juwain said, gently pressing hid knotty fingers against Maram's.

Dread cut through Maram like a shark's fin breaking cold waters. He said, 'Is there anything you can do? Never to touch a woman again, never to feel -'

'I think,' Master Juwain said, 'we can save the arm.'

He winked as he said this, and his obvious care and confidence reassured Maram somewhat. He told me to keep working on Maram's fingers until I had completely thawed them; he told Maram to keep his hands in his pockets close to his body until we made camp that night and he could heal Maram's savaged flesh with his varistei.

'All right,' Maram said. 'But if this is Sakai, I've had enough of it already.' :

So had I. So, I thought, had all of us – except perhaps Ymiru, who consented to take Iolo's reins and lead the descent down into the valley that his map had showed.

Here, in this windy groove in the earth tens of miles long, we found a few stunted dead trees that provided us wood for a fire. There was a little grass for the horses, too, and water that ran down its center in a little brown stream. The valley seemed too high to shelter much life beyond some marmots and a few rock goats. Blessedly, we seemed the only people to have set foot here for a thousand years.

Our camp that night was a cold one. Master Juwain, his green crystal in hand, accomplished the minor miracle of fully restoring Maram to himself. Maram vowed to exercise more caution on the long journey that still lay ahead of us. I knew that he would. No man, I thought, had a greater fondness for his various appendages.

For the next four days we worked our way down the valley. I didn't like it that we had so little cover here. But there seemed no one to see us, except the occasional vultures circling on the mountain thermals high above us. We made good time and good distance. The horses held steady and so did we. By the afternoon of our fifth day in Sakai, with the valley abruptly coming to an end in a great massif that blocked our way, we were all gathering our strength for yet another foray into the grim, mountain heights.

Ymiru's map showed a pass off to our right, hidden by a great buttress of the massif ahead of us. We climbed up the rocky slope at the valley's very end, praying that the map proved true. And so it did. After an hour of hard, panting work, we came upon a break in the massif, the highest pass yet that we had tried to cross. Master Juwain took his first look at this huge saddle of snow and ice, and thought it was too high to cross. And so, for a moment, did I. And then, at the very center of the pass, I noticed what seemed a cleft cut straight through it. It looked much like the Telemesh Gate that we had passed through from Mesh into Ishka.

'So,' Kane said to Ymiru, looking at him strangely, 'your people once used firestones against the earth.'

As Ymiru stared up at the pass, I sensed some deep, dark thing devour ing his insides. There was great doubt in him, and great sadness, too.

'Yes, we used firestones,' he said, pointing upward. Thus we made the Wailing Way.'

Liljana shifted about uneasily, as if trying to gain respite from the fierce wind pounding against the shawl she had wrapped around her head. I felt within her the same dread that crept up my legs into my spine: that here it wasn't just the wind that wailed but the very earth itself.

If ever there had been a road leading up to the pass, snow and the relentless work of the seasons had long since obliterated it. But the cleft through the pass itself remained much as the Ymanir's firestones had burned it long ago. And on the other side, below some of the deepest snowfields we had plowed through yet, we found an ancient track leading down from the heights.

We followed this band of packed earth and stone for many miles, all that afternoon and for the next ten days. It wound its way toward the southeast through the furrows between great ice-capped prominences. In places, where it led across a mountain's slope, it was cunningly cut so as to be hidden behind rock and ridgeline from the vantage of the valleys farther below. In other places it disappeared altogether, and there Ymiru had to trust his instinct, following the logic of the land around pinnacles, across basins, until he found the track again. It was a high road, this Wailing Way that the Ymanir had built. In most of the valleys through which it ran, we could find only a little grass for the horses; a few were altogether barren and seemed nothing more than chutes of rocky earth.

This starkness of Sakai appalled us all. But it was nothing, I thought, against the much deeper ugliness that had been worked into the land by the hand of man. The occasional tunnels – through icy ridges too high to cross – seemed like holes cut through the flesh of the earth into her very bones. And worse, by far, were the open pits scooped out the high meadows or basins, sometimes out of the sides of the mountains themselves. They were like sores in the earth, like festering wounds that hadn't healed after even thousands of years. Something in their making, perhaps the piles of slag torn up from the ground, seemed to have poisoned the earth currents that Ymiru had spoken of, for near them nothing would grow. I was given to understand that other parts of Sakai were much more devastated and blighted than this.

'This must be the work of the Beast,' Ymiru explained to us, pointing at a circular pock in the valley far below us. 'It be told that his men have dug such pits all across Sakai.'

'But why?' Maram asked him. 'Are there diamonds here? Gold?'

I had my sword drawn and pointing east to see if the Lightstone still lay in that direction. In the reflected sunlight off its silvery surface, a sudden thought flashed through my mind.

'The Red Dragon does seek gold,' I said. 'The true gold, from which he hopes to forge another Lightstone.'

Ymiru looked at me strangely, with a deep sadness. 'So it be, so it be.'

This mark of the Beast disturbed me, and all of us, for if Morjin's men had once come here, they might come again. I felt his presence all around me, in the jagged knifeblades of the ridgelines, in the pinnacles' icy spears, and most of all, in the bitter wind. As promised, it swept across the Nagarshajh as through a dragon's teeth and wailed without relief. It bit at my bones, it carried in its icy gusts whispers of torment and death. As we drew closer to Morjin and the seat of his power on earth, it seemed that he was seeking me even as I sought the Lightstone, calling me as always to surrender up my will and dreams and kneel before him.

I doubted that he could perceive my actual physical presence in these terrible mountains he claimed as his own. But the kirax still poisoned my blood and connected us in ways that chilled me with a growing dread. I knew that he could sense my soul. The howling wind told me this, as did the silent screaming of my lungs. In the icy wastes through which we passed for many days, he sent illusions to confuse and break me. In many of these, I saw myself chained to the face of some rock and being tortured with fire and steel; in others, the frozen ground beneath me suddenly gave way, and I found myself plunging into a black and bottomless abyss.

But the hardest illusion for me to bear was the one in which I had regained the Lightstone and used it to restore the tormented lands of Ea. The imagined pleasure of simply touching this golden cup nearly overwhelmed me. It seduced me into covetousness and pride, and made me want to possess the Lightstone for myself alone and never suffer another even to behold it. So great was the greed for the golden light that Morjin aroused in me that I made for myself illusions of my own. In the dazzling whiteness of Sakai's snows, in the glare and glister of the sun off glacier ice, I began seeing the Lightstone everywhere: on rocky ledges, dropped down into frozen drifts or even floating in the air. It was there, in the nearly blinding fastness of the White Mountains, that I began the fiercest battle yet for my sanity and my very soul.

I drew great strength to join it from my friends, of course, particularly Atara. But they each had battles of their own. And in the end, one must journey far out into the icy wastes of despair to face one's demons alone. I did have a mighty weapon with which to fight. Alkaladur's silustria, like a perfect mirror, threw Morjin's deceits back at him and shielded me from his hideous golden eyes and the worst of his hate. And more, as I attuned to it, it helped me cut through all illusion to see the world as it really is. My whole being began opening to the numinous and the true: in the stark, snowy landscapes of the White Mountains and in the shimmering stars above them, but also within myself. For there shone the bright sword of my soul. I saw that it was indeed possible to polish it more brilliantly than even the silustria itself. And with every bit of rust that I rubbed from it, as I cleansed myself of pride and fear, I felt this sword gleaming brighter and brighter and pointing me on toward my fate.

One night, just past the ides of loj, we made camp at the foot of a glacier. Maram got a fire going out of the last of our wood, and there Ymiru sat with a huge chunk of ice between his legs as he chiseled it with his knife. He worked with a quick, fierce concentration. It was as if he were trying to bring forth the image of some perfect thing that he longed to create. He would not tell us what this was. He did not speak to us, for he had fallen deep into one of his glooms. He even refused the tea that Master Juwain made him. He was, I thought, a man who held onto the dark side of his feelings, afraid that if the demons of his melancholy were driven from him, the angels of his ecstasies would be, too.

'What is it you're carving there?' Maram asked, sidling closer. 'It almost looks like Val's mother.'

It looked like, I thought, the great carving of the Galadin Queen I had seen passing through the Ashtoreth Gate on our entrance to Tria.

But Ymiru didn't answer him. He just set his sculpture down into the snow and then took up a flaming brand from the fire. He held it so that it melted the ice of the sculpture's surface. Then he brought out his purple gelstei, positioning it in front of the sculpture's face.

'What are you doing?' Maram asked him.

None of us knew. But we were all curious, so we gathered around to watch.

And then, as the starlight flickered off the blade of my drawn sword, a sudden thought came to me. I said, 'He's trying to turn his carving to stone.'

'Turn ice to stone?' Maram said. 'Impossible!'

Ymiru suddenly looked up from his work, staring at me in amaze ment. 'How did you know that?' he asked me.

How did I know, I wondered? I looked down at the star-sparkled length of my sword. Its silver geistei gave me to know many things from the slightest hint.

'It be impossible to turn ice to stone, truly,' Ymiru said. 'But to turn water to stone – this be one of the powers of the lilastei.'

'But how?' Maram asked.

Ymiru ran his finger over the sculpture's dripping surface. 'When water falls cold, it wants to turn to ice. This be its natural crystallization. But there be another, too, and that is the clear stone called shatar. The purple galastei makes water want to freeze into this stone. And stone it truly be shatar be as hard as quartz and never thaws.'

As he moved to put away his violet stone, Maram said, 'What are you doing? Aren't you going to show us this shatar of yours?'

'No,' Ymiru said, 'I can't make the lilastei make the water want to freeze this way. I haven't the power.' 'Perhaps not yet.'

Ymiru said nothing as he stared at his sculpture's wet face, now freezing in the wind like that of a spurned lover. 'But what else can the lilastei do?' Maram asked.

'You've told us so little about them, or your people.'

The silence into which Ymiru now fell seemed greater than the expanse of all the mountains of the Nagarshath. He looked east along the line toward which my gleaming sword pointed.

'The lilastei,' I said, gasping at the images that flooded into my mind, 'can mold rock, as the firestones can burn it. That was how the Ymanir made Argattha.'

As Kane's eyes went wide with wonder, everyone looked at me in astonishment. And Ymiru thundered at me, 'Who told you that?'

I felt Alkaladur's bright blade almost humming in the starlight, I said, 'Is it true, Ymiru?'

Ymiru suddenly slumped back, his great chest deflating like a bellows emptied of air.

And then he sighed out, 'Yes, it be true.'

'But how?' Maram asked. 'How can it be?'

Ymiru rubbed his broken nose for a few moments and sighed again. 'How? How, you ask? You see, there was a time when we Ymanir thought that Morjin was our friend.'

The story he now told us was a sad one. Long, long ago, he said, during Morjin's first rise at the end of the Age of the Swords, he had gone to Sakai to win the Ymanir to his cause. At this time his evil deeds were mostly unknown. Morjin was fair of form and graceful with his words; he flattered the ancient Ymanir and brought them gifts: of diamonds and gold, but greatest of all, the purple gelstei.

'It was the Beast himself,' Ymiru said, 'who gave us the first lilastei and taught us to use them. It was he who suggested that we seek beneath Skartaru for the true gold that we might use it to forge a new Lightstone.'

Toward this end, Morjin had called his Red Priests into Sakai to teach the Ymanir and aid in the excavations beneath Skartaru that would come to be the city called Argattha. They remained as counselors when Morjin went off to conquer Alonia and eventually be defeated at the Sarburn. it was they who poisoned the ancient Ymaniris' minds and seduced them into believing terrible lies: that Morjin only wished to unite Ea under one banner to bring peace to its torn lands; that his fall had been brought by treachery and the evil of his enemies. And so, when Morjin had been imprisoned on Damoom for all the Age of Law, Ymiru's ancestors had worked hard and long to prepare Argattha for Morjin's return.

'We built a city fit for kings,' Ymiru said. 'Argattha was a great and glorious place, as we may yet live to see.'

Maram, sipping a mug of kalvaas as he listened to Ymiru speak, said, 'I don't care what we see there – I just want to live to come back out.'

'Tell us,' Kane said, watching Ymiru with his dark eyes, 'what hap-pened when the Lord of Lies did return.'

'That be easy to tell,' Ymiru said sadly. 'Easy, but the hardest of tales: in the time that followed Morjin's second coming to Argattha, we discovered that the Lord of Light, as he called himself, was really the Lord of Lies. He had taken back the Lightstone then, but he kept us digging beneath Skartaru all the same. He used it to try to bend us to his will and tried to make us slaves. But no one will rule the Ymanir – not even other Ymanir. And so began our war with the Beast that has lasted until this day.'

After he had finished speaking, Atara sat listening to the wind as she stared into her white crystal. Master Juwain gripped his old book and looked at Liljana, who had taken out her blue whale. Kane, crouching near Ymiru like a tiger ready to spring, growled, 'Damn his golden eyes.'

Maram was nearly drunk, but he had a clear enough wit to appreciate that as far as we were concerned, Ymiru's story might not be wholly tragic. 'If your people made Argattha,' he said, 'did they keep any maps of its streets?'

'No,' Ymiru said, 'all such perished in the wars.'

'Ah, too bad, too bad,' Maram said. 'I had hoped, for a moment, that there might be a way into the city other than through one of its gates.'

For a hundred miles, at least, we had discussed the problem of entering Argattha and finding our way to Morjin's throne room. I had thought that our knowledge of the city was scarcely more than anyone's: that Argattha had been built up through the black mountain on seven levels, with Morjin's palace and throne room at the highest.

And that five gates, named in mockery of Tria's, opened upon its streets. Each gate, it was said, was guarded by ferocious dogs and a company of Morjin's men. And perhaps, as Kane suggested, by the mind-reading Grays as well.

'There be another way into Argattha,' Ymiru said. 'A dark way, an ancient way.'

We all looked at him, waiting for him to say more.

'When Morjin came to Argattha with the Lightstone,' he explained, 'he feared that his enemies would assault the mountain and trap him inside. And so my people built escape tunnels for him. Secret tunnels, and the knowledge of all of them has been lost to us – except one.'

'Do you know where this tunnel is?' Maram asked.

'Ho, I don't know,' Ymiru said, to Maram's bitter disappointment. 'But I know where it might be found.'

Maram's face immediately brightened again as Ymiru brought out his map arid oriented it toward the east. For quite a few days now, we had used it to set our course on the greatest of the mountains to show through the clay along the map's eastern edge. This was Skartaru, whose shape was famous across Ea: as seen from the east, from across the Wendrush, its twin peaks thrust like the points of pyramids high into the sky. And now, as Ymiru told us of a secret way into this dread mountain, we studied the model of it in the map that he held in his huge, furry hands.

'I can't see anything here,' Maram said, peering at the living clay in the fire's flickering light.

'No, the scale be much too small,' Ymiru said. 'The map shows only the mountain's greater features.'

'Then how do you hope to find this tunnel of yours?'

'Because there be a verse,' Ymiru said. 'Words that have survived where paper or clay have not.'

'What is it, then?'

Ymiru cleared his throat, and then recited for us six ancient lines: Beneath the Diamond's icy walls,

Where brightest sunlight never falls;

Beside the Ogre's knobby knee:

The cave that leads to liberty.

The rock there marked with iron ore

Which points the way to Morjin's door.

We sat there listening to the wind shriek across the high mountains around us. It seemed to carry the whisperings of the frozen rocks and echoes ten thousand years old.

'So,' Kane said, pointing his finger at Ymiru's map, 'this Diamond that the verse tells of must be Skartaru's north face.'

The black mountain's north face, I saw, was indeed shaped like a standing diamond three miles high, with great buttresses to either side seeming to hold it up.

'That is confirmed by the verse's next line,' Master Juwain said.

'But what about the Ogre?' Liljana asked, looking at the map's dark clay. 'I don't see any such formations beneath the north face.'

'No, the scale be too small,' Ymiru said. 'And so we can deduce that this Ogre rock formation will be rather small, in relation to the rest of the mountain. We won't be able to find the cave until we actually stand beneath it.'

'We won't find anything,' Kane said, 'if the verse doesn't tell true.'

'I believe that it be true,' Ymiru said.

Maram took another swig of his kalvaas, then asked him, 'This matter of the verse, ah, your people making escape tunnels, making Argattha itself – why didn't you tell us all this before now?'

'I didn't want to arouse false hrope.'

I sat beneath the stars of the bright Owl constellation, which I could see reflected in the silver of my sword. Then I looked up and said, 'Isn't there another reason, Ymiru?'

Ymiru looked straight at me then, but seemed not to see me. His great heart was booming like a drum.

The ancient Ymanir,' I said to him, 'sought the true gold beneath Skartaru, but they also sought something else, didn't they?'

'Yes,' he finally said, as everyone stared at him. 'You see, beneath the White Mountains, the earth currents are very strong – the strongest on all of Ea. And they touch the currents of other worlds.'

Kane's black eyes seemed to flare up in the firelight and fall upon Ymiru like hot coals. I remembered him telling us how the telluric currents of all worlds were interconnected.

'My ancestors believed,' Ymiru said, 'that if they could open the currents beneath Skartaru, they might open doors to other worlds. The worlds of the Galadin. They built Argattha to welcome them to Ea.'

'And who,' I asked Ymiru, 'suggested to the ancient Ymanir that such doors might be opened?'

'Morjin did.'

If my sword had shattered into a. thousand pieces just then, I would have been able to see the whole of it from a single glittering shard. I found Ymiru's eyes in the dark and said to himy 'Seeking the true gold was never Morjin's real purpose either, was it?'

'No,' Ymiru whispered. As the wind cut at us with icy knives, we waited for him to say more. Then he looked down at his map and told us, 'Morjin wanted to open a door to the Dark World where the Baaloch, Angra Mainyu, is imprisoned. And he came dose, we believe, so very close.'

I could hardly bear Kane's presence just then, so deep and dark was the well of hate that opened inside him.

He knows, I thought. Somehow, he knows.

'And what do you believe,' Kane growled at Ymiru, 'kept Morjin from opening this door?'

'Kalkamesh did,' Ymiru said. 'And Sartan Odinan. When they took the Lightstone out of the dungeon where it was kept, they took away Morjin's greatest chance of freeing the Baaloch.' 'How so?' Master luwain asked.

'Because the Lightstone,' Ymiru said, 'is attuned to the galastei and all things of power, but especially to the telluric currents. With it, Morjin almost certainly would have been able to see exactly where In the earth beneath Skartaru he must send his slaves to dig.'

All this time, even as Atara stared silently into her crystal, Liljana had been nearly as quiet. But now she fingered her blue gelstei and turned to Ymiru, saying, 'When I stood beneath Alumit and its colors changed, I thought I heard the voices of the Galadin. Speaking to me, speaking to everyone. There was a warning about Angra Mainyu, I think. A warning told of in a great prophecy.'

Now Atara finally looked up from her gleaming sphere at Ymiru as she waited for him to speak.

'Yes, there be a great, great prophecy,' Ymiru said. 'An old proph ecy – ages old.

The Elders know of this. They have heard the Galadin speak of it.'

He went on to tell us what the grandfathers and grandmothers of the Urdahir had gleaned from the otherworldly voices that poured out of Alumit's singular color. He said that ages ago, when the Star People discovered Ea, their greatest scryer, Midori Hastar, had prophesied two paths for this sparkling new world: either it would give birth to the Cosmic Maitreya who would lead all worlds everywhere to a glorious destiny, or else it would descend into the darkest of worlds and bring forth a dark angel who would free the Baaloch, thus loosing upon the entire universe a great evil and possibly destroying it.

'The Galadin,' Ymiru told us, 'took a terrible chance in sending the Lightstone to Ea.

And the dice they shook six ages ago are tum bling still.'

I felt my heart beating in rhythm with Ymiru's and with the deeper pulsing of the earth. My sword gleamed in my hand as the distant stars called to me. I saw in their shimmering lights a grand design that had long awaited completion. Some great event, I sensed, had been coming for untold years, set into motion ages of ages ago with the force of whole worlds tumbling through space. I knew then that I and my friends, must face Morjin in Argattha. For that, too, was one of the virtues of the silver gelstei, that it let me see the way that my fate was aligned with the much greater fate of the world and the whole universe itself

'You should have told us,' Atara said to Ymiru. 'You should have told us before this.'

'I'm sorry,' Ymiru said, 'I should have. But I didn't want to crush your hrope.'

Maram was now drunk on the potent kalvaas – but not quite drunk enough to suit him. He took another swallow of it, belched and sighed out, 'Ah, to think we've come this far for nothing.'

'What do you mean, little man?'

'Well, surely in light of what you've told us, the risk of entering Argattha is too great.

Surely you can see that. If we should find the Lightstone, and Morjin finds us, then. .. ah, I don't like to think about then.'

'I can't see that,' Atara said, squeezing her white gelstei in her hand. 'We've known for many miles that we were taking a great risk.'

Master Juwain nodded his lumpy head, agreeing with her. To Maram, and all of us, he said, 'The Galadin, in their wisdom, sent the Lightstone to Ea, hoping for the best.

So we should hope, too.'

'So we should,' Liljana added. 'It's not upon us to weigh this risk down to the last grain. Only to take it.'

Maram took yet another pull of his drink. He looked at me and asked, 'Does that mean we are still going to Argattha?'

'Ha!' Kane said, clapping him on the back, 'it means just that.'

'Does it, Val?' Maram asked me.

'Yes,' I said, 'it does.'

With the exception of Ymiru, who insisted on staying awake to take the first watch, we all retired to our furs. But I, at least, could not sleep. Great things had been told that night. Far beneath Skartaru's pointed summit, in the bowels of the earth, Morjin labored long and deep to free the Dark Lord from his prison on the world of Damoom. And now we must labor to find the door into Argattha. What we would find on the other side, I thought, not even the Galadin themselves could know.