The Lightstone

Chapter 43

The opening to the stairway proved quite narrow. There was no way, I saw, that the dragon could ever have forced her body into it. Daj informed us that there was a much larger passage from the first level to the second: a great road that wound up through the layers of rock and into the next level, where an enormous iron gate, kept closed, blocked the dragon from escaping into the inhabited parts of Argattha.

It was into these parts, with great wariness, that we finally made our way. As in ascending a castle's high tower, we climbed five hundred feet up the winding stairs.

In this turning tube of rock, it was cold and dark, with only my sword and Flick's lights providing any illumination. Few ever used this stairway, Daj told us. The Red Priests, torches in hand, might bear a struggling offering for the dragon down the stairs, but no one else would ever think of daring its domain. Likewise, none looked for anyone to emerge from the stairway into the second level. We found that the stairs gave out into a deserted corridor leading to a quiet street in the western district of the city. No one was about the street as we debouched onto it. The doors of the apartments along this tunnel of rock were closed. I wondered if it was night; in the twistings of the labyrinth and our fight with the dragon, we had utterly lost the thread of time.

'It is night,' Kane said to us as we made our toward the noise of a larger street ahead of us. 'In this accursed city, always night.'

Daj was little help to us here. Some days ago, he said, he had made his way up the stairs, even as we just had, only to be captured very near this district.

'Lord Morjin's spies,' he said, 'saw the mark and captured me.'

To cover this foul mark inked into his forehead, Master Juwain had rigged a length of cloth around his head. It looked, Kane told us, something like the flowing kaftafs worn by the tribesmen of the Red Desert.

I worried how well Daj's disguise would hold up. I worried about Ymiru, as well. It was bad enough that he had to go forth dressed as a Saryak. Would his missing arm, I wondered, attract even more attention his way?

In this matter, at least, we had little to fear. Soon we reached a street where many people were about. And many of them, I saw, were veterans of Morjin's conquests.

Quite a few of those not dressed in his livery, mostly the invalided and old, showed signs of service in faraway lands: they had scars upon their faces and arms – that is, if their arms and other limbs hadn't long since been hacked off. Other people – blacksmiths, potters, masons, carpenters, bakers, and especially the tattooed slaves

– bore the marks of Morjin's displeasure. The Red Dragon, as Daj told us, had settled upon mutilation as punishment for even minor offenses. As we made our way through the crowds behind rolling carts laden with iron ore, hay, water barrels and other supplies, we saw men and women with branded faces, notched ears and gouged-out eyes. Thieves who hadn't been given to the dragon lacked hands with which to cut others' purses. In no other city had I seen so many carved-up, burnt, tortured, unfortunate people. Ymiru, I thought, would attract no attention on account of his severed arm.

It reassured me as well that we passed several Saryaks hurrying past us. These very tall men were dressed as Ymiru in black robes whose cowls covered their faces.

They were girded with maces and curved swords; they served Morjin freely, for pay, as did other mercenaries whose appearance and dress led me to believe that their homelands were Sunguru and Uskudar – and even Surrapam, Delu and Alonia. Many Sami warriors, accoutered in leather armor as Atara, rode their steppe ponies boldly through the streets. Kane identified their tribes as Zayak, Marituk and western Urtuk, all of whom were said to have made alliances with Sakai. As well, we passed a band of Blues with their battleaxes and companies of marching levies from Hesperu, Karabuk and Galda, which Morjin's Red Priests had conquered outright in his name.

It seemed that Morjin was gathering a great host under his banner and sheltering them here in this dark, impregnable city. If any of Argattha's residents looked our way, I hoped they would think that we were just a few more warriors come to sell our swords.

Daj explained to us that the various levels of the city were mostly devoted to differing activities. Thus on the seventh level were to be found Morjin's palace and throne room, many of Argattha's temples, and other chambers given over to matters of ceremony and state. There lived the Red Priests and nobles, while the higher artisans such as painters and sculptors had shops on the sixth level, with weavers, clothmakers and dryers on the fifth, and so on down to the second level, the city's largest where Morjin's armies were quartered in dim, cramped barracks and the blacksmiths and armorers labored over their forges preparing for war.

We saw signs of the coming cataclysm all around us. Carts stacked with yew and horn, bound for the bowmakers' shops, rolled past us. Other carts laden with sheaves of arrows moved the other way. Slaughterhouses laying in pork for long campaigns shook with the squeals of pigs having their throats cut; their blood flowed out into the streets' gutters, there to be drunk by the scurrying rats or the clouds of flies that plagued Argattha.

From smithies came the constant hammering of steel as men beat mauls against white-hot metal and made spearheads, swords, maces, arrowheads, helmets, shields and suits of mail. From the many forges billowed a thick smoke that choked the streets. Although numerous air shafts opened like chimneys upon ironworks and dank corridors, they were too few to carry away the fumes and stinks of the city.

The foul mixture of smoke, rotting blood and fear was the smell of Argattha, and I worried that it would cling not just to my clothes and hair but to my soul.

And how much worse, I thought, was the assault of this dreadful place on those who were forced or had chosen to dwell here. Mercenaries scur ried like rats themselves through the dirty streets. Mole-like merchants spent their years in little shops no better than pits and in scooped-out apartments that were worse. To the crack of whips, slaves dug new passages out of solid rock, and in long lines bore boulders and other debris out of Argattha's tunnels. They reminded me of ants more than men. Men and women, I thought, were not made to live so. We were noble beings who had come from far away to make a better world than this. We should have roses and starlight and hopes swelling like the Poru in flood. We should have great, soaring cities like Alundil and forests like the Lokilani's magical wood. A true king, my father once told me, turned all his thoughts and actions toward fulfilling the dreams of his people. In the end, he became their servant. But Morjin had bent the will of his subjects toward serving his dark design. They were a twisted people, bearing marks of woe upon their bodies and stunted in their souls.

I thought that if I couldn't soon lay my hands upon the Lightstone and escape from this city, the sufferings of these thousands of tortured men, women and children would drive me mad. And escape, it seemed, was near. After stopping a broken, old women to ask directions, we found our way onto one of this level's boulevards. This great bore through tne mountain's basalt, lit with oil lamps and lined with shops, ran almost straight from the Gashur Gate in the east face of Skartaru to the Vodya Gate in the west. It intersected another similar boulevard connecting the Lokir Gate and the Zun Gate, long since closed. Gashur, Lokir Vodya and Zun – four of the great Galadin who had joined Angra Mainyu's rebellion against the angelic hosts and had been imprisoned with him on the world of Damoom. Their names were reminders of why we had come to Argattha – and why we co uldn't just flee out of the city's gates.

And so we turned northeast toward the Zun Gate, as the old woman had advised us.

The city's great central stairs, she had said, opened onto the boulevard only a quarter mile farther along. We passed bakeries, taverns and mess halls carved out of solid rock. The smells of hot bread, beer and roasted chicken mingled with the reek of sewage and the dung that the gong farmers hauled out of the city in wicker baskets.

Although it had been a long time since our last meal and we were fairly starving, we couldn't quite bring ourselves to stop and eat. But we must, as Maram pointed out, find something to drink. Atara had been carrying our water, and we had not the slightest drop to wet our parched throats.

'I'm thirsty,' Maram complained as we made our way against the jostling crowds in the street. He walked beside me, with Daj behind him and Kane and Liijana following protectively. 'I don't like to think that I'd drink the water in this filthy place, but i suppose I must.'

Although time was pressing us like a great boulder set rolling down a mountain, we decided to duck into a waterseller's shop and buy a few glasses of this precious liquid. But after we had drunk our fill of the greasy-seeming water, which tasted faintly of iron and blood, we found that we couldn't leave.

'Look,' Daj said to me, pointing out of the shop's doorway. I followed the line of his finger toward some men who were sitting around a table outside of the tavern next door. 'I know that man – he's one of Lord Morjin's spies.'

The man he had indicated, tall and blond like the Thalunes and dressed in a plain tunic and mail like many mercenaries, had his chair positioned facing the doorway to the waterseller's shop. His cruel blue eyes swept the street no doubt looking for a way that he could transmute his betrayal of others into gold. It would be impossible, I knew, for us to walk past him without him seeing us.

'What should we do?' Maram whispered to me.

'Wait,' I whispered back.

And so wait we did. We ordered more glasses of water and sat drinking them around a table at the rear of the shop. There was a chess set there, too, and Kane and I set up the pieces and began a game in the most desultory of ways. Maram chided mc for losing my knight in vain effort to forestall an attack upon my queen.

But I had no mind for a game at such a time, when my heart beat out like thunder at every round of laughter or curses that sounded from the tavern next door.

It took most of an hour for the spy and his friends to finish their ale and leave. We waited another quarter of an hour before daring to leave ourselves; the spy, we feared, might be skulking somewhere on the street nearby. Maram thanked the stars that we didn't see him anywhere in the crowds that streamed past us as we hurried along. But that didn't mean anything, as Kane pointed out. It was the essence of spying, he said, to seek out others without being seen.

But luck, I thought, had finally turned our way. We reached the central stairs without further incident. These great steps, a hundred feet wide, opened onto the boulevard exactly as the old woman had said. Streams of people poured down them on the left, while many others puffed laboriously up them on the right. We waited a few moments at the foot of them, hoping we might catch sight of Atara, Ymiru and Master Juwain in the throngs about us. But if they had kept to our plan, they had no doubt reached this spot before us and had gone on ahead.

And so with a final glance at the street, we began our climb up to Argattha's seventh level. With five levels to ascend and five hundred feet per level, we had to work our way up a distance of almost a half mile, straight up through the heart of the mountain. It took us a long time to make this climb. The stairs drove up toward the east until giving way to a great landing, before turning back west on their rise again.

And so it went, with many, many turnings as the seemingly endless stairs took us through the black rock past the openings to the third, fourth, fifth and sixth levels. At last, with Maram fairly wheezing and dripping sweat from his thick, brown beard, we came out onto one of the boulevards of the seventh level.

'Ah, here it is,' Maram said, puffing as we stepped out onto the huge street. 'Well, it doesn't look like much.'

Indeed, the street looked like every other tunnel in this unnatural city, save that it was even larger: it was a great, square-cut channel through black rock that was lit with foul-smelling oil lamps and pitted with doorways that were the openings to dank living spaces and shops. Although we were close to Morjin's throne room, as Daj told us, no vistas of magnificent domed buildings or soaring arches were to be seen, for Morjin's 'palace' was just another series of rat holes in a mountain gnawed with thousands of such dark places.

'The palace is that way,' he said, pointing almost due south at a wan of stone.

To the west of the palace, he said, was the great Gardens: a huge hall where flowering plants were bathed in the light of the thousands of glowstones on the walls.

To the east of the palace was a passage that only Morjin was permitted to use. This led past a series of private stairs to the lower levels, a mile and a half straight toward an opening cut onto Skartaru's east face. Daj called it Morjin's Porch, and there the Red Dragon liked to sit each morning to watch the rising of the sun. There, too, long ago, on the naked rock face, he had nailed the immortal Kalkamesh and tortured him for ten long years.

'I'd like to see this porch of his,' Maram said, looking about the dim street. 'I'd give anything to feel real light on my face again.'

'Don't be a fool!' Kane snapped at him. 'You won't be seeing it anytime soon unless Morjin puts you there.'

'He may put all of us there,' Maram said bravely. 'And it may be that someday the poets will sing of us and what we tried to do here. Do you think so, Val?'

'Perhaps,' I said to him. 'But it would please me more if Alphanderry were here to sing of the stars.'

The boulevard led us a quarter mile toward the east, where it intersected another running from north to south – directly toward the throne room of Morjin's Palace. In the great square where these two streets came together had been built a fountain.

Men and women sat around it in the spray of a great plume of water, red as rust, as if it had been forced through ancient iron pipes.

We sat there by this crimson pool, too, waiting for our friends. We watched carts full of silks and wine barrels roll past; one cart, stacked with glowstones that reminded me of the skulls in the dragon's hall, was clearly being taken outside of Argattha so that these gelstei could be refilled with the light of the sun. Hundreds of people from the boulevards poured in streams of living flesh around the fountain.

Many of these wore red robes embroidered with golden dragons: the vestments of the Red Priests of the Kallimun. These men – and they were almost all men – strode along with an air of rectitude and dominion, as if all things and peoples about them were their province. More than one of them cast us suspicious looks. And we were, I thought, a suspicious company: three men dressed like mercenaries, a noble-looking woman and a ragtag child. It was very good, I thought, that only we could see Flick.

After a while, it became clear that there were few mercenaries on this level of the city

– but many captains and lords of Morjin's armies. One of these, dressed in an ice-blue tunic with a broadsword buckled at the waist, swaggered up to us and demanded that we identify ourselves. Only the medallions that we had lifted off the dead knights kept us from being taken and bound in chains.

'That was close,' Maram said, after the captain had stalked off. We had hinted that we were spies, and that Morjin would be very displeased if the captain interfered with our mission. 'Too, too close.'

Liljana sat with her arms thrown protectively around Daj as might his mother. But there was something fierce and unyielding in her watchful gaze, as if she would reluctantly sacrifice him or any of us – or herself – in order to gain the Lightstone.

'We can't wait here much longer,' she whispered against the fountain's splatter.

I looked up and down the boulevards, praying that I might catch sight of Atara and the others.

'With our delay at the waterseller's, likely they're already come,' Kane said. 'And likely they've already gone on to the throne room.'

He pointed down the boulevard toward the south. According to Daj, it gave out onto Morjin's Palace little more than a quarter mile from the fountain.

'Perhaps we should wait just a few minutes longer,' I said. I looked for Atara's flowing blond mane among the mostly darker-haired women who seemed to populate Argattha.

'We agreed not to wait,' Kane reminded me. 'Likely they're trying to find their way into the throne room even as we waste our time here. And likely they'll need our help with the guards.'

Here Liljana fingered her blue figurine while Kane rested his hand on the haft of his dagger.

It seemed a desperate business to try to fool or force our way into the throne room past Morjin's guards. Although fortune often favored such boldness, I was reluctant to attempt this frontal assault even so. And then Daj surprised me, and all of us, saying, 'There's another way into the throne room.'

He told us that three great gates, on the throne room's east, west and north sides, opened upon the streets of the city and were always guarded. But a door inside the throne room, on its west wall, opened upon an unguarded passage that led directly through the palace to Morjin's private quarters.

'Oh, excellent,' Maram said to Daj. 'And I suppose you know a way to get inside the Red Dragon's rooms without just knocking at his door?'

'I do,' Daj said, and our surprise turned to amazement. 'There's a secret passage from Lord Morjin's rooms into the city.'

He went on to tell us that Morjin often used this passage to leave his palace unnoticed; he would go about the city in disguise, Daj said, acting as his own most trusted spy to ferret out any plots or slanders made against him.

'But why didn't you tell us this?' I asked him.

'Because I was afraid,' he said, looking at Kane grip his dagger.

'Afraid of what?'

'Afraid that you've come to kill Lord Morjin.'

He went on to say that an ancient curse had been laid upon anyone who would dare to try to slay the Red Dragon. And so he had been afraid, he said, to lead us through his private chambers.

'But why are you telling us this now, then?' I asked him.

'Because I don't care anymore,' he said. His dark, youthful eyes suddenly filled with hate, like Kane's. 'About the curse, I mean. I hope you do kill him. I'll never sleep well again until he's dead.'

The hurt inside him cut me like a heated knife. And I said to him, 'But we haven't come here to kill anyone. We're not assassins, Daj.'

As Kane's eyes flared like coals, I went on to tell him that we meant to enter Morjin's throne room in order to recover something that had once been stolen from the king's palace in Tria.

'What is it then, treasure?' he asked. 'There's plenty of that in the throne room.'

'Yes, treasure,' I said. And then, to myself, I whispered: The greatest treasure in the world.

We decided that Daj should take us through the district outside Morjin's Palace to the secret passage that led into it. But first we must reconnoiter the streets around the gates to the throne room, in the hope that we might find Atara and the others seeking a way inside. Then we might rejoin them and tell of our new plan for gaining entrance.

When we reached the street facing the throne room's north gate, however, we found many people milling about the food stalls and fortune tellers there, but none of them were our friends. The gate itself – great iron doors twenty feet high and as wide – was guarded by four of Morjin's men. We might simply have rushed upon them and murdered them; it would then be easy to push open the doors and storm our way into the throne room and begin our search for the Lightstone. But even if we completed our quest within a few minutes, the alarm would have been given, and we would have to try to fight our way back out against perhaps a hundred hastily summoned guards.

'Does this street ever grow quiet?' I asked Daj. I looked at the silksellers hawking their wares from their carts and other merchants displaying golden bangles, silver brooches and jeweled rings.

'At night it does,' he said.

Maram pulled at his beard and muttered, 'But how can you tell when it's night in this accursed place?'

'Well, the criers come to call out the curfew.'

'So,' Kane said, 'if our friends have discovered that then perhaps they're waiting for night to clear the streets.

'Perhaps,' I said, as I watched a nearby vendor roasting a baby pig over a little fire.

The spit and hiss of its dripping fat sent a greasy, black smoke out onto the noisy street.

'Perhaps we should wait here, after all,' Maram said. 'If we're to steal through the Red Dragon's rooms, it would be better to do so at night when he's sleeping.'

'But he doesn't sleep/ Daj said. 'He stays up all night reading his books. Or playing chess with himself. Or.. other things.'

'And during the day?' I asked, looking for some ray of light driving down the airshafts that opened upon the street.

'During the day,' Daj said, 'he could be anywhere in the city.'

I pulled my cloak more tightly about myself as he said this. I felt the eyes of many people about the street watching us.

'Anywhere except the throne room,' Liljana said.

'Yes, that's right,' Daj said, nodding toward the iron gate. 'The doors are almost always open when Lord Morjin is holding court.'

'Almost always?' Liljana asked him.

Daj nodded his head. 'Yes, sometimes he holds… private audi ences.'

I felt my heart beating like a hammer and sweat running beneath the padding of my armor. I said, 'All right, the throne room is likely empty, as we stand here talking.

And our friends, if they haven't been taken, are likely waiting somewhere for night to fight their way into it.'

'And if they have been taken?' Maram asked.

I tried not to look at the heated iron running through the sizzling pig or listen to the scream building inside me. I said, Then all the more reason that we should hasten to find this secret passage that Daj has told of And if our friends are safe, we'll no doubt find them outside one of the gates tonight after we've completed our quest'

Everyone agreed that it would be best if we attempted the secret passage now, before we were discovered or our courage foiled And so Daj led the way into the district to the northwest of the palace. Here the streets were narrow and twisted like tunnels that would have contused an ant. Nobles, mostly, lived here between the shops of the bakers, vintners and others who served their needs. The stares of these people as we quickly passed by disquieted all of us. But we moved along without any trouble until we came to another square, much smaller than that of the Red Fountain.

Here, on a great wooden cross caked with layers of old blood, a nearly naked man had been crucified for all to see. A crowd had gathered to watch his death throes, and for a moment we joined them. I couldn't take my eyes off the man's head, which was slumped down against his chest as if he were watching his heart's last flame about to be blown out.

Almost against my will, I found my hand sliding beneath my cloak and gripping the hilt of my sword. And then Kane's steely fingers gripped my arm as he shook his head and told me, 'You can't save everyone, Val.'

'But what was his crime?' I whispered to him.

No one around us seemed to know. One old woman, likely the wife of some great lord, gathered in her silks and told her attendant that she believed the condemned man had somehow insulted Morjin.

'Come, now,' Kane saillpulling at my arm. 'Let's take our revenge on Morjin by stealing from him what he covets most.'

I nodded my head, and we pushed our way out of the crowd. Daj led us onto a dim street that turned toward the north, in the direction of the great stairs. But then it turned again, west and south. We walked on a little way. Then Daj pointed at an open doorway next to a butchery where many fly-blown chickens and lambs were hung. It was an unusual doorway, the rock on either side of it being carved with standing dragons that framed it like pillars. It gave into a little chamber that was one of Argattha's many sanctuaries. Inside, as we found, was little more than a single glowstone hanging from the low ceiling. This one light, Daj said, symbolized the Light of the One. The meaning of our passage through the pillars was clear: that the way toward the One was through the way of the Dragon.

'People are supposed to come here and meditate,' Daj told us. We stood at the center of the deserted chamber, staring at a tapestry of various Elijin and Galadin on the far wall. 'But no one ever comes.'

'Why not?' Maram asked him.

'Because it's said that Lord Morjin seeks his sacrifices from the most faithful and finds them in the sanctuaries.'

Such tales, I thought, were an excellent way of keeping the sanc tuaries empty – so that Morjin could reserve them for his private use.

With Maram standing watch in the doorway, we moved over to the tapestry, and Liljana held it away from the wall. Behind it was a door, barely perceptible as such: a crack ran horizontally through the black rock just above the level of our heads, while two others cut lengthwise framing a large basalt slab. If pushed against, I thought, it would revolve and open onto the secret passage.

I pushed against it now, but it was like pushing against a solid wall, and the door did'nt move. and Daj said to me, 'You have to know the password.'

'I presume you know what this is?' Kane said to him.

'Yes, there's a door like this at the other end of the passage – in Lord Morjin's rooms. One time, I hid there and watched him use it. And then followed him here.'

'Brave boy,' I said, nodding my head in acknowledgement of his feat.

'Yes, you're a brave little spy,' Kane said, grinning savagely. 'Well, let's see if Morjin has kept the password. What is it?'

'Memoriar-damoom,' Daj said softly. 'I don't know what it means.'

'It means,' Kane said, translating the ancient Ardik, ' "Remember Damoom." '

He stood directly facing the door and spoke the word clearly, louder this time. And from within the door came a clicking sound as of a lock being slid open.

As Maram hurried across the room to view this marvel, Kane's grin grew larger, and he said, 'In the Age of Law, many locks were made thusly. Song stones, keyed to a word or a voice, turn at the touch of the right sound and set the locking mechanism in motion.'

Now he set his hand against the edge of the door and leaned his weight into it. The part that he pushed against swung inward smoothly while the left edge of the slab revolved out into the room. Beyond the opening lay a dark tunnel.

'So,' he said.

He started straight into the tunnel, followed by Daj and me. But when it came Maram's turn to step forward, he hesitated and said, 'Ah, I don't like the look of this at all.'

'Come,' I said, turning back toward him. 'Where's your courage?'

'Ah, where indeed, my friend? I'm afraid that almost all of that coin has been spent.'

'There's always more,' I said to him.

'For you, perhaps, but not for me. After all, I'm no Valari.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, I mean that for you Valari, courage is a birthright. You breathe it in as easily as others do air.'

'No, you're wrong, Maram,' I told him, shaking my head. My belly churned as if I had swallowed a nest of writhing snakes. 'Courage never gets to be a habit. Each time… it gets harder to find. As it is now for me.'

'For you?'

'Yes,' I said, glancing at Kane and Liljana. And then I looked straight at Maram.

'Without you by my side, I don't know how I'd ever be able to do this.'

'Do you really mean that?'

I clasped his hand in mine and smiled at him. 'Will you come with me this last mile?'

He hesitated another long moment before slowly nodding his head. And then he sighed out 'All right, then, I'll come. But this has to be the last time.'

Then he, too, stepped into the tunnel, followed by Liljana, who had so arrayed the tapestry that it fell back over the door as we pushed it shut. Darkness swallowed us; for a moment we stood nearly blind beneath the black shroud of night. Then I drew my sword. Daj stared at the glowing blade in wonder, but seemed too afraid to ask by what miracle it gave light. All that he said was: 'The last time I was here, all I had was a candle. But this is better.'

He started off down the tunnel, with me, Maram, Liljana and Kane close behind. The dark tube of rock seemed empty even of rats. We walked quiedy, but the scrape of our boots echoed off the bare rocks. After a while we came to a place where another tunnel joined ours. Daj told us that he thought it led to another sanctuary somewhere on the seventh level. Or perhaps, he said, it gave out onto the passage that led to Morjin's Porch on Skartaru's east face. Along that way was to be found Morjin's Stairs, which led down to Argattha's lower levels and the secret escape tunnels there that Morjin still kept open.

'Do you know these tunnels?' I asked him.

'Well, I know about them,' Daj said. 'But I was never able to find out where they were.'

We walked on for another two hundred yards and came across two more of these adjoining tunnels. And then, after turning left, toward the east, our tunnel ended abruptly in what seemed a wall of solid rock.

'He's sealed it off!' Maram whispered when he saw this. 'We're trapped!'

I smiled as I brought my sword up dose to the wall to reveal the cracks running through it, outlining a door – the door that must open onto Morjin's private chambers. I pressed my ear to the cold rock and listened for any sounds from the room beyond it

'What do you hear?' Maram whispered, pressing close.

'Only your breath in my ear. Now be quiet.'

I continued listening for a murmur of voices, the slap of boots against stone, silverware clacking against a plate – for anything at all. But the rock was as quiet as a skull. The only sound I heard was the drumming of my heart up through my ear.

'All right,' I said, turning back to look at liljana and Kane. 'Is everyone ready?'

Both of them had their swords drawn, as did Maram and I. I gripped Alkaladur's hilt more tightly as I faced the door and said, 'Memoriar Damoom!'

There came a clicking from within the rock of the door. I placed my hand on the edge of it; it felt wet as from dripping water, but I realized that it was only my sweat.

Slowly, I pushed against the door. It opened directly into a cloth that I discovered to be another tapestry. I squeezed out from behind its clinging folds and stepped into a well-lit room.

'This is it,' Daj said, joining me there. 'Lord's Morjin's room.'

I knew that it was. All at once, a sickly-sweet odor as of incense mixed with decay made my stomach chum. As the others moved out from behind the tapestry and then pushed the door shut. I looked out at a large, richly furnished room. Intricate tapestries, like the one hiding the door behind us, completely covered the room's four walls so that not a square inch of bare rock remained exposed to remind Morjin that he had chosen to live inside a mountain. We stood with our backs to the room's west wall. To our left, along the north wall, was a heavy bronze door cast with roses and other flowers – the door to the rest of Morjin's palace. Straight ahead stood another door, like in size, but it showed a great, spreading tree beneath a bronze sun.

Daj said that it opened upon the passage that led to the throne room.

Before starting toward this door, I quickly took in the room's other features. Above the great bed along the south wall was hung a blue-black canopy embroidered with thousands of tiny diamonds. These were set in the patterns of the constellations' stars. On either side of the bed were gilded chests and wardrobes; three long mirrors, framed in ornate gold, were set into the east north and west walls. The ceiling was a chessboard of white and black wood squares, while the floor was covered with a single carpet woven with the shapes of knights on horses, winged lions and ferocious beasts. As before, when Morjin had brought me to this room through the doorway of nightmare and illusion, I looked down to sec that I was standing on the head of a fire-breathing dragon. 'Look, Val!' Maram whispered to me as he nudged my side. 'That's a touchstone, isn't it!'

I turned to see him pointing at a massive desk on which many books lay open.

There, too, set out as if Morjin had been studying them, were warders, wish stones, dragon bones and other lesser gelstei. I saw three precious music marbles as well as a sleep stone, with its many swirling colors that looked something like a fire agate.

Maram took a step straight toward the desk, perhaps intending to touch or take one of these treasures. But i grabbed his elbow and said, 'We don't have time for this.'

Kane, moving quickly, swept up a few bloodstones glowing with a dreadful red light and pocketed them. Then he pointed his sword at a large stand next to the desk. He snarled out, 'So, we have time for this, then.'

I saw that the stand, which looked something like a brazier, held six large eggs thrice the size of an eagle's. Before I could stop him, Kane crossed the room and thrust his sword straight through one of the eggs, breaking open the leathery shell. Five more times he thntst out and when he was done, the steel of his sword dripped with a thick, blood-orange yolk. Thus did he destroy the eggs of Angraboda, one of the dragons that Morjin had summoned here from Damoom.

'But there were seven eggs!' Daj whispered as he crossed the room to where Kane stood snarling down at the broken, oozing mass of shells.

'Seven, eh? Are you sure?'

Daj nodded his head, looking about the room, as did Kane. He stalked across it to wipe his sword contemptuously on the silk coverings of Morjin's bed.

'Kane, there's no time!' I said, making for the door with the great tree. 'We've got to go!'

'You go,' he said, casting his eyes about the room. 'This is a rare chance.'

'To destroy an egg?'

'Yes, that,' he said, stabbing his sword into one of the bed's feather pillows. 'And to destroy Morjin.'

Now he looked at the door on the north wall that led to the rest of the palace; he gazed fiercely at the tapestry covering the door by which we had entered the room.

And then he said, 'So, I'll wait here for him. And when he comes, I'll send him back to the stars.'

Liljana, who had a cooler head than mine, went over to him and touched his sword arm. 'You might wait days then. And what are we to do while you wait to make this murder?'

'Complete your quest.'

'But what if we need your help?'

'You won't,' he snapped. Then his savage gaze fell upon her. 'I know that you want him dead almost as badly as I do.'

'Perhaps,' Liljana said, looking away from him. 'But not as badly as I want to find what we came here to find.'

I, too, found it hard to bear the fire in Kane's blazing eyes just then. But I stared straight at him and said a single word: 'Pease.'

There was a moment when I thought he would turn inward to that burning ocean of hate that pulled him ever downward into the hell of his own being. But once, near a little clearing littered with the bodies of the gray men that we had slain, he had pledged his sword to my service so long as I sought the Lightstone. The deep, knowing touch of our eyes told me that he remembered this promise. And that he would keep it

'All right,' he said, pointing his sword toward the east door that led to Morjin's throne room, let's finish this damn quest of yours then!'

I stepped over and twisted the knob of the door, which was unlocked and pulled open like any other. Behind it was a hallway, draped with flowing silks, that ran straight east I led the way into it and then Kane shut the door behind us.

We marched forward for a distance of a few hundred yards. No other doors or passages gave out onto this new tunnel. On either side of us and above us, Daj said, were the rooms of Morjin's palace that could only be reached from his room through its north door. Many people, I sensed, were all about us through thin walls of rock.

As we hurried along, my breath came more quickly in bursts that seemed to burn my nostrils and mouth. And yet the air was cold, as was the rock beneath the thin, silk wall coverings. The door at the opposite end of the hallway was cold, too. We came upon it in a rush of driving feet and beating hearts. Like the door to Morjin's room, it was cast of bronze and unlocked.

With a last look back at Kane and the others, I pushed it open. And then I stepped out into Morjin's throne room.

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram whispered in my ear. 'Oh, my Lord!'

We stood along the west wall of one of the largest enclosed spaces I had ever beheld. The vast chamber, carved out of solid rock, must have been three hundred feet high and nearly as long and wide. Immense pillars rose up from the floor like giant stone trees and fluted out to support the dark ceiling high above. Everything about this cold, vaulted hall seemed dark, with its acres of bare, black basalt Yet Morjin and the hall's makers had applied all their art toward filling it with light. In the walls and ceiling were set many hundreds of glowstones, throwing out their soft, silky sheen. The pillars were jacketed in gold leaf, which reflected this radiance out into the hall Various statues, encrusted with rubies, sapphires and other gems, added to the glitter. And yet it was not quite enough to reach into the farthest corners and drive away the shadows. In the midst of all this ancient and hideous splendor hung an air of dread that seemed to ooze from the exposed rock along the ceiling, floor and walls; here echoed the memory of torments as old as the ages and the future cries of hopelessness and doom.

For a moment I pressed back against the bronze door to still my dizziness and orient myself. 1 noted the three closed gates, along the east, north and west walls.

Opposite the door to Morjin's rooms where we gathered, at the center of the hall and toward its southern end, stood a great throne. It had been built, it seemed, in imitation or mockery of the king's throne in Tria. Six broad steps led up to it, and eacs step was framed at either end by the sculptures of Gashur and Zun and other Galadin who had become as monsters. The greatest of these was the coiled, red dragon monument to Angra Mainyu into which the throne itself was set. When Morjin took his place on this seat of power, his head would be framed just below the huge dragon's head, which looked out into the room with golden eyes carved out of two huge amber stones.

Leaving the door behind us open should we have to beat a hasty retreat, we moved out into the great hall as we began what I hoped would be the final moments of the quest. But even as Alkaladur's blade shone with a new light, my hope faded. For in truth, the silustria blazed too brightly. It whatever direction I pointed it – north, east, south and west – I could detect not the slightest change in its luminosity. I knew from this frightful radiance that the Lightstone must be very close – so close that my silver sword could lead us no farther. But how we were otherwise to find it in so vast a space, I didn't know.

For there were a thousand places where Sartan Odinan might have set down a little golden cup. Behind the throne, and in other parts of the room, there were altars, cabinets and pedestals that might have been the Lightstone's resting place. And cold braziers, lamp stands, benches, shelves and even the plinths of the great stone pillars holding up the ceiling. Along the huge walls themselves – carved with dragons, demons and a huge bas-relief of the Baaloch and the dark angels imprisoned with him on Damoom – there were recesses and rocky projections, any one of which might have hidden the Lightstone.

'Well?' Maram said to me as we walked out into the room.

'It's here,' I said. 'But it's so close, my sword can't tell us where.'

'Then how are we to find it?' He stopped by the line of pillars running down the hall to the right of the throne. He bent to feel along a pillar's massive, square-cut plinth, tapping his hands along the stone like a blind man. 'My Lord – we can't just hope we'll stumble across it!'

We worked our way straight across the hall, passing between the throne and an evil-looking, circular area with several great standing stones arising from the floor.

We came to the line of pillars running down the hall to the left of the throne. And there, suddenly, Flick appeared. His small, scintillating form, now throwing out sparks of silver and gold, shot straight up into the air like fireworks. He whirled about ecstatically, then dived down like a firebird and began weaving his way in and out of the mighty pillars in streaks of violet flame.

'Do you think he knows where it is?' Maram asked. 'Do you think he is trying to tell us?'

Flick looped in and out of the pillars and then spun directly over the circular area with its standing stones, which looked to be used for rituals. Flick, I thought, certainly knew where the Lightstone was. And more, it seemed he was drinking in its presence through every sparkling bit of his being and growing ever brighter. But I sensed that he couldn't simply tell us where it had been hidden. For whatever Mick really was, it couldn't have occurred to him that for my friends and me. the lightstone remained invisible.

It was the greatest torment of Argattha to stand so close to the Lightstone, almost to feel its numinous presence charging the air as before a storm, but not be able to see it.

Daj, watching us look across the room as Flick streaked about must have thought we had fallen mad. He could not make out the Timpum's fiery shape. And so he was the first of us to behold another sight.

'Val – over there!' he suddenly cried as he pulled on my arm. He pointed across the ritual area at the gate on the west side of the hall. 'They're coming!'

And even as my eyes fell upon the gate's iron doors, they flew open, swinging inward. Many guards, dressed in mail and yellow livery stained with angry, red dragons, charged into the hall. Many of them bore swords and halberds in their hands; some had long, thrusting spears. Their captains arrayed them in four lines, two on either side of the doorway. Almost without thinking, I took a quick count of their numbers: there were about twenty-five of them in each line.

'So,' Kane muttered. Just then the door to Morjin's private chamber by which we had entered the hall slammed shut 'Four of us against a hundred – so.'

Without any more prompting, Maram ran over to the gate on the east wall behind the pillars where we gathered. He pounded against it but it was locked. 'Trapped!' he cried out. 'Now we're truly trapped!' So we were. As Maram quickly rejoined us and we stood with our backs to the pillars, there came a flurry of motion from outside the open gate to the throne room. And then a man dressed in a golden tunic, trimmed with black fur and emblazoned with a ferocious, red dragon, strode through the doorway. He was almost tall and bore himself with an unshakeable air of command.

His close-cropped hair shone like gold while the beauty of his form and face seemed almost too perfect. His eyes appeared golden, too. For he was, of course, Morjin the Fair – the Lord of Lies and the Great Beast who had so often Come for me with his daws and illusions in the worst of my nightmares.

'Ah, my friend,' Maram said to me as we pressed back against the pillars, preparing for a last stand. 'This is the end – finally, the end.'

Morjin took another step forward, before pausing to beckon with his hand to his guards. He stared across the room straight at me – and at Kane, Maram, Liljana and Daj. There was utter triumph in his hideously beautiful eyes. And then, without a word, his face fell into a mask of hate as he and his guards began marching toward us.