The Lightstone

Chapter 40

We were all quiet when we set out the next morning. Our breath steamed out into the bitter air, and our boots crunched against the cold, squeaking snow. It was enough, I thought, to avoid trpping and tumbling down some steep slope, enough merely to keep placing one foot ahead of the other and continue plowing through Sakai's frozen wastes. But I couldn't help thinking of Angra Mainyu, this great, fallen Galadin whose dreadful face could darken whole worlds. I knew that somehow, through Morjin, he, too, sensed my defiance and trembled to crush me in his wrath.

And so for two days we worked our way closer to Argattha. Our approach led us through a wild, broken country where we lost the thread of our road. Finally, following Ymiru's map and the lines of the land, we came to a great gorge running for forty miles to either side of us, north and south. It was hundreds of feet wide and very deep: standing at the lip of it, we looked down and saw a little river winding its way past layers of rock far below. Ymiru had hoped to find a bridge here, but it seemed that the only way across the gorge was to fly.

'Is there no way down it?' Atara asked, looking over the edge. I think she knew there wasn't. A very agile man, perhaps, might be able to climb down such a forbidding wall but no horse ever could.

Liljana looked up and down the gorge, at the Mountains framing it, and then at the map which Ymiru held out before him. She said, 'It would be hard work to walk around this. I should think it would add a hundred miles to our journey.'

'That's too far,' Master Juwain said. 'The horses would starve.'

As we stood with the horses on the narrow shelf of land above the gorge, I felt Altaru's belly rumbling with hunger – as I did my own. We had run out of oats for the horses and had little enough food for ourselves.

'Perhaps the bridge you seek is farther up the gorge,' Liljana said to Ymiru. Then she turned to look at the rent earth toward the right and said, 'Or perhaps that way.'

'I had thought the bridge would be right here,' Ymiru said despond ently.

He walked away from us, along the ragged lip of the gorge, looking down at the rocks below for any sign of a fallen bridge. Then he sat down on a rock and bent his head low as he stared down at the ground in silence.

'So,' Kane said, 'seeking for non-existent bridges up and down this gorge would be as futile as trying to walk around it.'

'Then we will have to turn back,' Maram said.

'Turn back?' Kane said to him. 'To what?'

After a while, I gave Altaru's reins to Atara, and went over to Ymiru where he sat fifty yards away, now staring down into the gorge as if he were contemplating throwing himself into it.

'I was sure the bridge would be here,' he said, not even bothering to look up at me.

'Now I've put us in a hrorrible spot.'

'You can't blame yourself,' I said, sitting down beside him. 'And you can't give up hope, either.'

'But, Val, what are we to do?' he asked as he pointed at the gorge. 'Walk across this on air? You might as well put your hropes into old wives' legends.'

Something sparked in me as he said this. And so I asked him, 'What legends are these?'

He finally looked up at me and said, There are stories told that the ancients built invisible bridges. But no one believes them.'

'Perhaps you should believe them,' I said, gazing at the sun-filled spaces of the gorge. 'What else is there to do?'

'Nothing,' he said. 'There be nothing to do.'

'Are you sure?'

He smiled at me sadly and said, 'That be what I love about you, Val – you never give up hrope.'

'That's because there always is hope.'

'In you, perhaps, but not in me.'

Inside him, I sensed, was a whole, dark, turbid ocean of self doubt and despair. But there, too, was the sacred spark: the ineffable flame that could never be quenched so long as life was in life. And in Ymiru this flame burned much brighter than it did in other men. How was it that he, who could feel so much, couldn't feel this?

'Ymiru,' I said, grasping his huge hand. It was much warmer than mine, and yet as my heart opened to him, I felt a knife-like heat passing from me into him. 'You've led us this far. Now take us the rest of the way toward Argattha or else the work of your father and all your grandfathers will have been in vain.'

His ice-blue eyes suddenly lit up as he squeezed my hand almost hard enough to break it. He looked across the gorge and said, 'But Val, even if there were such a bridge here, how would I ever find it?'

'Your people are builders,' I said to him. 'If you were to build a bridge across this ditch, where would you put it?' A fire seemed to flare inside him then. He gathered up a great handful of stones and leapt to his feet. His hard eyes darted this way and that measuring distances, assessing the lay of the great, columnar buttresses of rock along the length of the gorge. He began walking along it with great strides and great vigor. Here and there, he paused a moment to hurl a stone far out into the gorge and watch it plunge through the air down towards the river below.

'What did you say to him?' Master Juwain asked as Ymiru came up to the place where he and the others waited with the horses. 'What is he doing?'

Ymiru cast another stone arcing out into space, and Maram said, 'No doubt he's calculating how long it will take us to fall to the bottom if we're foolish enough to try to climb down this wall. Ah, we're not that foolish, are we, Val?'

At that moment, one of Ymiru's stones made a tinking sound and seemed to bounce up into the air before continuing its fall into the gorge. As Maram watched dumbfounded – along with Kane and the others – Ymiru threw another stone slightly to the right and achieved the same effect. Then he flung all the remaining stones in his hand out into space, and many of them bounced and skittered along what could only be the unseen span of one of the bridges told of in the Ymanir's old wives' tales.

'I suppose I'll have to pay more attention to old wives,' Maram said after Ymiru had explained things to him. 'Invisible bridges indeed! I suppose it's made of frozen air?'

Ymiru, looking out at the gorge with a happy smile, said, 'Our Elders have long sought the making of a crystal they called glisse. It be as invisible as air. This bridge, I'm sure, be made of it.'

It seemed a miracle that the gorge should be spanned by a crystalline substance that no one could see. All that remained was for us to cross over it.

'Perhaps,' Master Juwain suggested to Maram, 'you should lead the way.'

' I? I? Are you mad, sir?'

'But didn't you tell us, after your little escapade at Duke Rezu's castle, that you're unafraid of heights?'

'Ah, well, I was speaking of the heights of love, not this.'

Ymiru stepped forward and laid his hand on Maram's shoulder. He said, 'Don't worry, little man. I think you're going to love walking on air.'

As we made ready to cross the gorge, we found that the horses would not step very close to the edge of it; surely, I knew, they would balk at setting their hooves down on seemingly empty space. And so in the end, we had to blindfold them. We found some strips of cloth and bound them over their eyes.

'You'd do better to blindfold me,' Maram muttered as he fixed the cloth around Iolo. 'We're not really going to step out onto this glisse, are we, Val?'

'We are,' I said, 'unless you first discover a way to fly.' Ymiru, who was the only one of us freed from the burden of leading a horse, borrowed Kane's bow so that he could feel the way ahead of him. He stepped to the very edge of the gorge. Slowly, he brought the tip of the bow down through the air until it touched the invisible bridge. And then, as we all held our breaths, he stepped out into space onto it. 'It be true!' he shouted. 'The old tales be true!' In all my life, I had seen nothing stranger than this great, furry man seeming to stand on nothing but air. And now it was our turn to join him there.

And so, as Ymiru led forth, tapping the bow ahead of him like a blind man, we followed him one by one out onto the invisible bridge. With Maram and Iolo right behind him, we kept as straight a line as we could. Our lives depended on this discipline and exactitude. Ymiru discovered that the bridge wasn't very wide: little more than the width of a couple of horses. And it had no rails that we could grasp onto or keep us from slipping over its edge. It was, quite simply, just a huge span of some flawlessly clear crystal that had stood here for perhaps a thousand years.

For the first half of our crossing, we walked up a gradually curving slope. The horses' hooves dopped against the unseen glisse as they might any stone. We tried not to look down at what our boots were touching, for beneath the bridge, straight down hundreds of feet, were many rocks and boulders that had fallen into the gorge and piled up along the river's banks. It was all too easy to imagine our broken bodies dashed upon them. The wind – the icy, merciless wind of the Wailing Way – howled through the gorge and cut at us like some great battle-axe, threatening to drive us over the edge. It set the bridge swaying through space with a sicking motion that recalled the pitching and rolling of Captain Kharald's ship.

'Oh,' Maram gasped ahead of me as he clutched his belly with his free hand, 'this is too much!'

'Steady!' I called out to him from behind Master Juwain and Liljana. 'We're almost across.'

In truth, we were just cresting the highest part of the bridge, with the river directly below us.

'Oh,' Maram groaned, 'perhaps I shouldn't have drunk that kalvaas before trying this.'

My anger as he said this was an almost palpable thing. It seemed to reach out from me unbidden, like an invisible hand, and slap him across the face. 'But you'll wreck your balance!' I called to him.

'I only had a nip,' he called back. 'Besides, I thought I needed courage more than coordination.'

It seemed, as I watched him stepping daintily behind Ymiru, that he had coordination enough to complete the crossing. He moved quite carefully, with a keen awareness of what lay beneath him. And then, as he grabbed at his churning belly yet again and the wind hit the bridge with a tremendous gust at the same moment, his foot slipped on the glisse as against ice. He lost his balance – as the rest of us nearly did, too. He grabbed at Iolo's reins to steady himself, but just then Alphanderry's spirited horse stamped and whinnied and shook his head. This was enough to further throw Maram off his center. With a great cry and terror in his eyes, with his arms and legs flailing like windmills, he began his plunge into space.

He surely would have died if Ymiru hadn't moved very quickly to grab him. I watched in disbelief as Ymiru's great hand shot out and locked onto Maram's hand.

For a moment, he held him dangling and kicking in mid-air. Maram, despite what Ymiru liked to call him, was no little man. He must have weighed in at a good eighteen stone. And yet Ymiru hauled him back onto the bridge as easily as he might a sack of potatoes.

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram gasped, falling against Ymiru and grabbing on to him. 'Oh, my Lord – thank you, thank you!'

Almost as quickly, Ymiru had moved to grasp Iolo's reins with his other handgnd steady him. Now he pressed these leather straps into Maram's hand and told him,

'Here, take your hrorse.'

Maram did as he was bade, and he stroked Iolo's trembling side as it to calm him – and himself. And then he gathered up the best ot his courage, turned to Ymiru and said, 'Thank you, big man. But I m afraid we both missed a great chance.'

'And what be that?'

'To see if I could really fly.'

We completed the rest of the crossing without further incident. When we reached the far side of the gorge, Maram let loose a great shout of triumph and insisted on drinking a little kalvaas to celebrate. My nerves were so frayed that I agreed to this indulgence. Maram smiled, glad to be forgiven his foolishness., and passed me his cup. The disgusting brew was just as greasy and rancid as it always was. But at that moment, with out feet firmly planted on ground that we could see, it tasted almost like nectar.

That was the last great obstacle we faced along the Wailing Way. Five days later, after traversing a good part of the Nagarshath to the south of the headwaters of the Blood River, we came out around the curve of a mountain through some foothills to behold the great golden grasslands of the Wendrush. To the east of us, as far as the eye could see, was a rolling plain opening out beneath a cloudless blue sky. There antelope gathered in great herds and lions hunted them. There, too, the tribes of the Sarni rode freely over the wind-rippled grass, hunting the antelope – and each other.

Many times before, faring west from the kel keeps of Mesh's mountains, I had lost myself in the vast sweeps of this country. And now I wondered what it would be like to ride across it, five hundred miles, toward Vashkel and Urkel and the other mountains I knew so well.

'That way be your hrome,' Ymiru said as we gathered on the side of a great hill.

Then he turned and pointed to the south of us, where the easternmost mountains of the Nagarshath edged the grasslands. 'And that be Skartaru.'

The sight of this grim, black mountain struck an icy dread deep into my bones. If Alumit had been made by the Galad in, Skartaru might have been carved by the Baaloch himself. It was a great mound of basalt, cut with sharp ridges and points like the blades of knives. Snow and glaciers froze its upper slopes; sheer walls of forbidding rock formed its lower ones. I marveled at Ymiru's feat of navigation, for he had brought us out on the side of a mountain just to the north and east of it. From this vantage, we had a good look at two of its faces. The filmed east face was shaped like an almost perfect triangle, save that near its higher reaches, a notch seemed to have been cut from it between its two great peaks. Far beneath the higher and nearer of these – a great pointed horn of black rock three miles high – a road led out of one of Argattha's gates and sliced across the Wendrush. Along this road, I thought, the ancient Valari had been crucified after the Battle of Tarshid. And a thousand feet above the gate, on the east face's sun-baked rock, Morjin had crucified the great Kalkamesh for taking the Lightstone from him.

I stared at this glowing black sheet, and almost unbidden, the ancient words formed upon my lips:

The lightning flashed, struck stone, burned white -

The prince looked up into the light;

Upon Skartaru nailed to stone

He saw the warrior all alone.

'It doesn't seem possible,' I whispered to the wind.

'What doesn't?' Maram asked me. 'That Kalkamesh could have sur vived such torture?'

'Yes, that,' I said. 'And that Telemesh could have climbed that wall at night and brought Kalkamesh down.'

I was not the only one struck with the marvel of this great feat. Liljana and Atara stared at the mountain's east face, while Ymiru pointed his furry finger at it and Master Juwain shook his head. And as for Kane, his black eyes were so full of fire that they might have melted the mountain itself. Sometimes I could sense the swell of the passions and hates that streamed inside him. But now there was only a burning, bottomless abyss.

'Skartaru,' he growled. 'The Black Mountain.'

He tore his eyes from its east face and pointed at the darker north one. 'There's the Diamond,' he said.

A few miles from where we stood, across some grassy buttes where the plains came up against the mountains, we had a good view of the long-sought Skartaru's north face. As shown by Ymiru's map, this was a towering diamond of black rock, at least three miles high, framed on either side by enormous, humped buttresses. We looked between them for the rock formation told of as the Ogre. But either we were too far away or lacked the proper angle for viewing, because we couldn't discern it.

'It be there, I'm sure of it,' Ymiru said. 'But we've got to get closer.'

So began the final leg of our journey toward Argattha. We might simply have ridden straight across the mounded grasslands toward the valley that cut beneath Skartaru's north face. But such exposure, so near to the enemy's secret city, would have been a great foolishness. As it was standing here on the side of a mountain above the lands of the Zayak tribe of the Sarni – and in clear sight of Argattha – we were taking a great risk And so we decided on the longer, and relatively safer, route toward our objective. This would keep us close to the mountains, hugging their curve toward the south and through their foothills. It would take us over wooded slopes and around rocky ridges, past the mouths of two small canyons giving out onto the Wendrush's plain. And so it would take us much longer. But now that we had come so near to our fate, whatever that might be, none of us felt much hurry to meet it.

We spent the rest of the day walking through the foothills. Here, so close to Argattha, every flight of a bird and every sound was a call to grip our weapons more tightly. Atara, who had the best eyes of any of us, kept a tense vigil, watching the ridgelines above us, peering far out on the plains of the Wendrush. Kane brought up the rear of our company, and he seemed able to sense danger through every pore of his skin. And yet despite Skartaru's looming presence and the dread that crushed down upon us like immense, black boulders from its heights, our luck held good.

We reached a little canyon to the north of the mountain without sighting anyone.

Here, in this grassy hollow where only a single ridge blocked the way toward Skartaru's north face, we came to the moment that I had been dreading almost more than entering the mountain. For here we decided that we must set the horses free.

'Ah, perhaps one of us should remain with them,' Maram said, looking about the canyon.

Actually, it was more of a great bowl scooped out of the side of the mountain to the west, with ridges framing it to the north and south. A few trees ran around the curve of these ridges, but in between was a half mile of good grass.

'Hmmph,' Atara said to Maram, 'has coming so close to Argattha made you forget the prophecy?'

'I know, I know,' he said, 'the seven of us must go forth… to where we must go.

But what will happen to the horses? And what will happen to us should our quest prove a success and we return to find the horses gone?'

He suggested that we should perhaps hobble the horses or even picket them so that they remained in the valley.

'No, there are wolves and lions about,' I said, looking down into the plain. 'If we tie the horses, they'd be unable to run or defend themselves. And if we don't return…'

Maram watched my face for sign of despair, and then asked, 'But what are we to do?'

I moved quickly to ungird Altaru's saddle and remove his harness. When he was free of these encumbrances and naked as an animal should be, I faced him stroking his neck and looking into his eyes. In these large, brown orbs was something deep and ancient that brought a mist to mine. I stood there breathing my love for him into his nostrils while he gave voice to the covenant of friendship that had always been between us.

'Stay with the other horses,' I told him as he nickered softly. 'Don't let them leave this valley – do you understand?'

He nickered again, this time louder, and I was seized with a strange, soaring sense that somehow he did understand

It took Atara and the others only a few moments to loose their horses, too. We hid the saddles and tack in some bushes beneath the nearby trees. After taking up our weapons and some supplies, we turned to leave the horses grazing on the canyon's brown grass.

We might have done well to wait for night and approach Skartaru under the cover of darkness. But we needed to find the Ogre and the cave leading into Argattha, and for this we needed light And so in the day's last hours, we crossed the ridge to the south and then made our way across the narrow canyon cutting beneath the mountain's north face. We found what cover we could among the trees and stony outcroppings there. Now Skartaru loomed so high and huge above us that it blocked the sun and most of the sky. Its black rock seemed the whole of the world; looking at this stark and terrible face, I could almost feel Kalkamesh's blood running down its jags and cracks, even as the cries of those still trapped inside the underground city sounded from inside it.

We walked almost straight up a rocky slope toward the base of the Diamond. We expected to be caught at any moment But except for a few birds and deer keeping a watch for lions, the valley seemed empty of anyone except us.

'Look!' Ymiru said in a low voice that broke into the quiet air like thunder. He pointed at a great hump of rock five hundred feet high swelling out the Diamond's dark wall. 'Does that look like an Ogre to anyone?'

'Almost,' Liljana said. 'But it's hard to tell from this angle.'

We changed the course of our hike slightly toward the west. After a couple of hundred yards, we came to the very bottom of the Diamond's lower point in a hollow pressed between the north face's two immense buttresses. And there, jutting out of this dread face, the hump of rock did indeed look like an ogre kneeling down on one knee.

We rushed up to this knob-like prominence, looking for the cave told of in Ymiru's verse. But no cave, to either side of it could we find. The black rock of the Diamond was scarred with many cracks, but otherwise unmarked. Even though we spread out along the wall searching more carefully, we found no sign of any cave.

'But it must be here!' Ymiru said, pounding the cold rock with his great fist.

Maram, breathing deeply against the day's exertions, leaned back against what must have been the Ogre's knee and sighed, 'Well, who's ready to try one of Argattha's gates?'

Liljana fixed her eyes upon the mountain's rock; suddenly she spoke to both of them, saying, 'Don't you give up so soon. Don't you remember the verse's last two lines?'

Even as she said this, Atara, standing back from the wall, descried a vein of red running through the black rock. Now we all stood back as she pointed at it. It was surely iron ore, I thought, and it ran in jagged bands that pointed like an arrow straight toward the base of the wall just to the right of the Ogre's knee.

'But there be no cave there!' Ymiru said, 'There be nothing but rock.'

'Only rock,' Kane muttered. Then he stepped back toward the wall and began moving his hands over it. 'And smooth rock at that, eh? Ymiru, come here and look at this! Tell me if you've ever seen a mountain's rock so smooth.'

Ymiru joined him there, as did the rest of us. And then Ymiru said, 'It looks like the rock that the ancients cut through the passes of the Wailing Way.'

'So, cut with firestones,' Kane said. 'Melted out of the mountains -as this mountain has been melted down over the cave.'

He told us them that Morjin, perhaps after making other escape tunnels from Argattha, must have sealed off this one.

'But why?' Maram asked. 'Just to confound us, no doubt.'

'Who knows why?' Kane said, rapping his knuckles against the wall. 'Maybe too many knew about this. But I'd wager our lives we'll find the cave behind this rock.'

We all looked at each other in the grim certainty that we were wagering our lives here. And then Ymiru, after first casting quick glances up and down the valley, began tapping his borkor at various points along the wall. When he reached the place beneath the bands of iron ore, the reverberations from the rock sounded slightly hollow.

'There be something behind here,' he said.

Now he raised his iron-shod club straight back and struck the wall a tremendous blow. The rock rang as if hammered by a god. Chips of black basalt sprayed out into the air. But if Ymiru had hoped to break through to the hidden cave, he failed.

Thrice more he wielded his club, before turning to Kane and saying, 'The rock be too thick. And I haven't the right tools to mine into it.'

'Ha you don't,' Kane said. Then he looked at Maram. 'But he does'

Maram drew forth his firestone and stood looking up at the sky. He said, 'There's not much light here, and I've never burned rock like this, but…'

He pointed his red crystal at the wall and told us, 'Stand back now!'

We did as he bade us. A moment later, a thin tendril of flame flickered out from his crystal and licked the wall. But it scarcely heated up the rock there.

'It's too dark here,' Maram muttered. 'There's too little light.'

'So,' Kane told him, 'I think it's not only light that fires your stone.'

Maram nodded his head and closed his eyes as he searched inside himself. And then, as his gelstei began glowing bright red, he looked straight at the wall, concentrating on the exact spot that he wished to open. At that moment, a great bolt of lightning shot from his crystal and burned into the rock, which vaporized in a tremendous blast. Fire flew back into Maram's face, scorching it lobster-red and singing his beard and eyebrows. Lava ran down from the wall in thick, glowing streams. Maram had to be careful that it didn't engulf his feet and melt away his flesh into a hellishly hot soup.

'Be careful with that stone or you'll kill us all!' Kane shouted at him. He looked at the shallow hole that Maram had melted in the rock. 'Here, I'd better help you.'

He took out his black gelstei and held it facing Maram's firestone. Then he nodded at him and said, 'All right.'

For the next half hour, he and Maram worked together to open the way into the mountain. At times, when the red crystal flared too brightly and great sheets of flame fell out against the rock, Kane used his black gelstei to damp the fury of the firestone. At other times he had to desist altogether, for all Maram's efforts sufficed only in coaxing from his stone a dull red glow. Little by little, however, Maram melted away layers of rock and cut deeper into the face of Skartaru.

All this time, Atara and I had been keeping watch. Now she nudged me gently and pointed down the valley out toward the plain. 'Val, look!' she said.

I squinted and strained my eyes to see some twenty men on horses riding straight toward the canyon.

'Do you think they saw us?'Wana asked Atara, looking toward the riders, too.

'They saw something,' Atara said. 'Probably the flashes of the firestone.'

Ymiru approached the hole that Maram had made in the wall, and rammed his club against the still-glowing rock there. But he failed break through. He said, 'It still be too thick.'

'Get down!' I said to him, waving my hand toward the ground. The men were approaching the mouth of the canyon. 'Get down, Ymiru -they mustn't see you!'

I pointed at a nearby rock formation to our left and told him to hide behind it. Then I nodded at some trees to our right and told Liljana, Master Juwain and Atara to wait there.

'So, Val,' Kane said looking down the canyon. 'So.'

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram said, hurrying down from the scorched wall over to where I stood. 'Val – shouldn't we flee?'

'No, they might already have seen us,' I said. 'They would catch us wherever we ran.

Or give the alarm.'

'But what are we to do, then?'

I smiled at him and said, 'Bluff it out.'

And so, there beneath Skartaru's dark face, with the Ogre's grim, black eyes staring down at us, we waited as the twenty riders drew closer. Maram, who was clever enough at need, busied himself gathering wood as if for a fire. Kane sat back against a rock and began whittling a long pole with his knife. And I gathered some round stones and set them in a circle as for a firepit.

Soon we saw that the riders were wearing the livery of Morjin: their surcoats showed blazing red dragons against a bright yellow field. They had sabers girded at their sides and bore long lances pointing at us. At a very quick pace, they urged their snorting mounts up the rocky slope straight toward the place where we sat.

'Who are you?' their leader called out to us. He was a thickset man with long yellow hair that spilled out from beneath his iron helm. His drooping mustaches couldn't hide the scars cut into his long, truculent face. 'Stand up and identify yourselves!'

After grabbing up a stone in either hand, I did as he bade us, and so did Maram and Kane. We gave the scowling captain names and stories that we had made up on the spot. He glowered at us as if he didn't like our look and said, 'Three more vagabonds come to sell their swords to the highest bidder. Well, you've come to the right place – show us your passes!'

'Passes?' Maram asked him.

'Of course – you're in Sakai now. How did you come this far without being given a pass?'

Now he gripped his lance more tightly as he looked at us suspiciously. He told us that no one was permitted to move about Sakai without the proper scroll signed by an officer of the border guard – or without one of the seals of the kingdom which the Red Priests bestowed upon the especially privileged.

So saying, he touched the heavy gold disk that hung on a chain from his neck. It was hard to tell across a distance of twenty feet, but it seemed embossed with a coiled, fire-breathing dragon.

'Oh, that,' Maram said with a nonchalance that I knew he didn't feel. 'We didn't know you called them passes.'

And with that he opened his cloak to show the captain the gift that King Kiritan had given him. I did the same, and so did Kane.

Our medallions, cast with the Cup of Heaven at their centers, gleamed in day's last light. For a moment, I thought that this mistrustful captain might let us go. And then, as he spurred his horse forward, he called out, 'Let me see those!'

We waited for him and three of his men to come closer, and then Kane growled out,

'I'll let you see this! '

And with that, he cast the pole that he had been whittling straight through the captain's eye, killing him instantly. I hurled the two stones in my hands at two of the knights bearing down on us, and managed to strike one of them full in his face, knocking him off his horse. And then, at the call of one of the captain's lieutenants, the remaining knights whipped up their horses and thundered down upon us, and the battle began.

The knights clearly intended to make quick work of us. And so they might have if their lieutenant, a young man with a dark, vulpine look that reminded me of Count Ulanu, hadn't pointed his sword at us and said, 'Take them alive! Lord Morjin will want to question them!'

But it was not so easy for anyone to take Kane this way – or to kill him. With a lightning-quick motion he reached back the hand holding his knife and whipped it forward. The knife spun through space, and its sharp point tore straight into the lieutenant's mouth, which he hadn't had time to close. At the same moment, from the right, an arrow hissed out from behind a tree as Atara found her mark and killed another of Morjin's men. Three more arrows followed in a quick, sizzling succession before the knights even realized that a hidden archer was firing upon them. They had counted on their greater numbers and the great advantage in height that their charging horses gave them to strike terror into us.

And then, from the left, with a great, thundering war-cry that shook even me to my bones, Ymiru arose from behind his rock. His face contorted with a ferocious look as he raised his huge club above his head.

'The Yamanish!' one of the knights cried. 'The Yamanish are upon us!'

Ymiru stood as high as the knights upon their horses; with four quick, savage blows, he knocked four of them off them. None got up.

And then the remaining nine knights, who had given up all thought of maiming and capturing us, fell upon Kane, Maram and me. They tried to kill us with their lances, swords and maces. And we tried to kill them. Kane drew his sword; I drew Alkaladur and cut one of the knights off his mount. Ymiru swung his club against the side of a knight's neck, and struck his head clean off. Blood sprayed the air as more arrows hissed out. Horses flailed their hooves against the earth, reared and screamed. I heard Maram call out the name of his father as he met a flashing saber with his sword and then managed a clean thrust through the belly of one of the knights – just in time to keep him from skewering me with his lance. And Kane, as always, fought like an angel of death in the thickest part of the battle, growling as horses knocked against him, grabbing their bits and tearing them from their mouths, parrying the blows of the knights, cutting and thrusting and snarling out his hate.

And then, miraculously, it was over. The agony of the men I had killed came flooding into me as I stared at the bodies of the nine teen dead knights and fought to keep myself from falling down and I joining them.

'Look!' Ymiru called out. 'One of them is getting away!'

Indeed, one of the knights, in the heat of the battle, had turned his horse around and was now galloping straight toward the mouth of the canyon.

Atara came out from behind her tree then to get a better angle upon him. She pulled back the string of her great bow, sighting one of her diamond-tipped arrows on the red dragon of the surcoat covering the knight's back. It was a long shot that she trembled to make – made even longer with every second that she hesitated loosing her arrow.

'Shoot, damn it!' Kane shouted. 'Shoot now, I say, or all is lost!'

Atara finally let fly the arrow. It split the air in an invisible whining and drove straight through the knight's surcoat and armor, burying itself in his back. He remained in his saddle for only a few strides of his bounding horse before plunging off to crash against the rocky ground.

During the next few minutes, Kane went about the mountain's slope with his sword making sure that none of Morjin's men remained alive. And then Master Juwain noticed that some of the blood dripping from his white hair was not the enemy's but his own. It seemed that one of the knights had sliced off his ear.

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram said.

None of us had ever seen Kane wounded. But as always, he made no complaint not even when Maram set a brand afire and Master Juwain used it to cauterize the bloody hole at the side of his head.

'So, that was close,' he said as Master Juwain fixed a bandage over what remained of his ear. 'The closest yet, eh?'

All the rest of us were untouched. But I was still shaking from the deaths I had meted out and Maram stood staring at his bloody sword not quite daring to believe that he had used it to kill two armored knights.

'You did well, Maram,' Kane said to him. 'Very well. Now let's get back to work before anyone else comes, eh?'

Maram cleaned his sword and sheathed it. He took out his red crystal. But he was not quite ready to use it. He walked off a way, up a slight rise, and stood staring down at the carnage that we had made.

After a while, after the shooting pains were gone from my chest and I could breathe again, I went over to him and said, 'You did do well, you know. You saved my life.'

'I did, didn't I?' he said as he smiled brightly. And then the horror returned to his face as his eyes fell upon the bodies of the slain. 'Kane was right, I think. That was the closest yet.'

He turned to look at the dark hole that he had burned in Skartaru's dark north face.

Then he said, 'And yet I think that perhaps worse awaits us inside there.'

'Perhaps,' I said.

'Perhaps it's the end of the road, for all of us.'

'Don't worry,' I said to him, grasping his hand. 'I won't let you die.'

'Ah, death,' he said, smiling sadly. 'I must die someday. It seems strange, but I know it's true.'

I squeezed his hand harder, trying not to think of the lines of the poem that had haunted me ever since I had killed Raldu in the forest beneath my father's castle.

'And when I do die, Val,' he said, 'if I could choose, I'd rather have it come fighting beside you.'

'Maram, listen to me, you mustn't speak -'

'No, I must speak of this, now, because I might not have another chance,' he told me. Then he looked straight into my eyes. 'Ever since we set out from Mesh, you've shown me a realm I never dreamed. I… I was born the prince of a great kingdom.

But it's you who have made me noble.'

He clasped me to him then and hugged me as hard as he could. And then, as he dried his eyes and I did mine, he took a step back and said, 'Now let's finish this nasty business and get out of here, if we can.'

There was a man whom Maram wished to be. This man now gathered up all of his bravura and stood up straight and tall. Then he gripped his red crystal and marched up to Skartaru's darkening face without hesitation.

As before, with Kane's help, he used his firestone to melt the moun tain's black rock.

He stood there, by the base of the Ogre's knee, for most of an hour, working flame against the wall. And at last, in the failling light, he broke through to the hidden cave spoken of in the ancient verse. He stepped aside from this black glowing gash In the earth. And then he smiled proudly to show us that the door to Argattha had been opened.