The Lightstone

Chapter 8

The Ishkans let us alone while Master Juwain dressed my wound in that cold little room off the main hall. It was a strange coincidence, he remarked, that Salmelu had cut me so near the scratch that the arrow had made in my side. He told me that I was lucky that Salmelu's sword had cut the muscle lengthwise, along the grain. Such wounds usually healed of their own with no more treatment than being sown shut.

That is, they healed if given the chance to heal, which I would not now have.

It hurt as Master Juwain punctured my flesh with a sharp, little needle and piece of thread. Working on my armor and surcoat hurt even more. Master Juwain fashioned a sling for my dangling arm, and then it was time to go.

We left King Hadaru's palace as we had entered it. Outside, at the bottom of the stairs beneath the front door, we found the grooms waiting for us with our horses.

Lord Nadhru and Lord Issur – and an entire squadron of Ishkan knights mounted on their stamping horses – were waiting for us there, too.

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram called out when he saw them. 'It seems we have an escort.'

Master Juwain smiled grimly as he looked from the knights to me. Then he asked,

'Can you ride?'

'Yes,' I said. With a sharp gasp, I used my good arm to pull myself onto Altaru's back. The great beast's glossy coat was like black jade in the moonlight; he angrily shook his head at the Ishkan knights and to their horses. 'Let's go,' I said.

We made our way slowly down the tree-lined road leading away from King Hadaru's palace. The sound of the horses' iron-shod hooves striking the paving stones seemed very loud against the stillness of the quiet grounds. It was now fall night and falling cold. In the sky there were many stars. They rained their silver light upon the tinkling fountains and the rows of flowers that perfumed the air. Even though I vowed not to do so, I turned in my saddle to see this bright starlight glinting off the points of the Ishkans' lances and armor. Like me, they wore steel mail and not their diamond battle armor. They followed us at a distance of perhaps a hundred yards; as we turned onto the road leading to the bridge that crossed the Tushur, I was afraid that they intended to follow us all the way to Anjo.

'Shouldn't we return to Mesh?' Maram asked as rode his tired sorrel beside me. 'If we go on to Anjo, the Ishkans will kill us as soon as we cross the border.'

'If we return to Mesh,' I told him, 'they'll likely attack us as soon as we enter the Telemesh Gate.'

I went on to say that my death there, on Meshian soil at the hands of the Ishkans, would make war between our two kingdoms almost certain.

'Perhaps you should return to Mesh,' I said to Maram. I looked at Master Juwain riding his sorrel to my right. 'And you, too, sir. It's not you that the Ishkans want.'

'No, it is not,' Master Juwain agreed. 'But if you journey without us, who will tend you if you fall to fever? And we can't just leave you alone to the Ishkans' lances, can we, Brother Maram?'

Maram, casting a glance back at Lord Nadhru and the other knights, let out a little moan of distress and said, 'Ah, no, I suppose we can't. But if we can't go back to Mesh, what are we to do?'

That, it seemed, was the question of the moment. Four points there are to the world, and one of these we could not follow. And as for the other three, each had its perils.

To the west rose a wall of almost impassable mountains; beyond it were the warriors of the fierce Adirii tribe of the Sarni who patrolled the vast gray plains of the Wendrush. To the east, just beyond theTushur, we would meet the King's Road which might take us into the kingdom of Taron. We could follow this road to Nar, where we would intersect the ancient Nar Road leading all the way to Tria. But the Taroners, while no friends of Ishka, were neither friendly with Mesh. In our war with Waas, Taron had sent knights to aid their ancient ally, and many of these my brothers had killed. Then too, the road to Nar led east, while if we were to make our quest we must eventually turn around and journey northwest toward Tria.

'It's only sixty miles to Anjo,' I said, looking across the dark landscape toward the bright north star. 'In that direction lies our best hope.'

'How so?' Master Juwain asked me. 'Brother Mdaram is right. With the Duke of Adar under King Hadaru's fist the Ishkans will feel free to attack us as soon as we cross the Aru-Adar Bridge.'

'That's true,' I said. 'But there are other dukedoms in Anjo where the Ishkans might fear to ride. And other ways to cross into them. '

Without explaining too much, I told them that it was my intention to cross the border into Anjo much to the west of the bridge where the waters of the Aru River did not flow so fiercely. Under the cover of night we would simply ride into the mountains and lose the Ishkans somewhere in the thick, sloping forests.

'And that is your plan?' Maram said to me.

'Can you think of a better one?'

Maram waved his hand toward the lights of Loviisa glowing at the foot of the hill beneath us. 'King Hadaru's knights won't touch us so long as we remain in Ishka.

Why not find an inn for the night and hope that morning will find his heart has softened?'

'His heart won't soften that soon,' I said. 'And besides, have you forgotten that he's denied us fire, bread and salt? So long as we remain in Ishka, we'll have only our supplies to eat, and after they're gone, we'll starve.'

Since Maram liked little in the world more than his evening meal, he rubbed his empty belly and agreed that we should leave Ishka as soon as possible. Neither he nor Master Juwain could think of a better course than the one I had suggested. And so we rode on into the night.

Loviisa, although not a large city, was spread out on both sides of the Tushur. We quickly found our way through its streets back to the North Road and the bridge that spanned the river. This great archway, with its stone pylons sunk down into the river's gurgling, black waters, was lit by torches along its rails. Lord Issur and his knights followed us across it. They kept a good hundred yards to our rear, not so close that they would have to suffer our presence, but not so far that we might lose them in the maze of streets winding through the northern half of the city.

Soon the buildings thinned out and gave way to the rolling farmland surrounding Loviisa. The moon shone upon fields of barley and wheat whose new leaves glistened in the soft light. More than once, Maram cast a longing glance toward one of the little houses in the fields off the side of the road. We all listened to the lowing of cows and smelled the maddening aroma of roasting meat that wafted on the wind.

We were very hungry, but all we had to eat was a few wheels of cheese and some battle biscuits pulled from the pack horses' bags. Maram complained that the iron-hard biscuits hurt his teeth; he bemoaned my due with Salmelu, and then chided me, saying, 'Why couldn't you at least wait until after the feast before drawing on him?'

Eating the biscuits hurt my teeth, too. Everything about that nighttime flight from Ishka hurt. As always, Altaru sensed my condition and moved so as to ease the discomfiture of my wound. Even so, I could feel my outraged body throbbing with every beat of my heart. Around midnight, some clouds came up, and it rained. It grew suddenly colder. Maram pulled his cloak tightly around himself and then shook his fist at the sky as he growled out, 'I'm cold, I'm tired; I'm wet – and I'm still hungry. The merciless Ishkans can't expect as to ride all night can they?'

It seemed they could. Soon after that Master Juwain insisted that we stop to make camp for the night. But even as we were tethering our horses to to the fence edging a farmer's fields, Lord Nadhru came thundering up the road on a huge war horse. I could barely make out his sharp features through the spattering of the rain. But his quick eyes found me easily enough. He stared straight at me and said, 'You've been denied any hospitality while in Ishka Mount your horses, and don't try to stop again.'

'Are you mad?' Maram snapped at him. 'We've ridden since dawn, and our horses are exhausted, we are too, and -'

'Mount your horses,' Lord Nadhru commanded again, 'or we'll bind you with ropes and drag you from Ishka!'

Just then Lord Issur came riding up. He sat high on his horse while he regarded us through the rain. He was a spirited, graceful man, perhaps even kind in his own way, and I thought. I might have liked him if we had met under different circumstances.

'Please mount your horses,' he told us. 'We've no liking to do as Lord Nadhru has said.'

Master Juwain stepped forward and looked up at these two towering knights on their horses. Although he was a small man, it seemed that he might be able to keep them at bay by the power of his voice alone.

'My friend is badly wounded and needs rest,' he said. 'If you have any compassion, you'll let us be.'

'Compassion?' Lord Issur cried out 'We should all strive for such a noble estate, but does Sar Valashu? If he had any compassion at all, he would have slain my brother rather than condemning him to live in shame.'

'At least your brother is still alive,' Master luwain said. 'And so long as he continues to draw breath, there's always hope that he'll find a way to undo his shame, is there not?' 'Perhaps,' Lord Issur said.

Master Juwain pointed at me and said, 'This journey might kill Valashu. His best hope lies in finding rest as soon as possible.'

'You don't understand,' Lord Issur said shaking his head sadly. 'For him, there is no hope. He made his choice and he must live by it – and die by it Now please mount your horses, or I'll have to let Lord Nadhru fetch his ropes.'

There was no arguing with him. Kind he might be, deep in his heart but there was steel in him, too, and he seemed determined to execute King Hadaru's wishes no matter how bravely Master Juwain stood before him.

After he and Lord Nadhru had ridden back to the other knights, we prepared to set out again. Then Maram suddenly drew his sword and shook it at the dark road in their direction.

'How they speak to you!' he called out to me. 'Didn't they see what you did to Salmelu? I've never seen such sword work in my life? Tie us with ropes, they say!

Why, if they even lay a hand om you. I'll -'

'Maram, please,' I broke in. 'Save your fight for our passage into An jo. Now let's ride while we still can.'

The Sarni warriors, it is said, eat and sleep in the saddle, and let a little blood from a vein in their horses' necks for drink. Riding hard, they can cover a hundred miles in a day. We rode hard ourselves that night, although we did not cover nearly so many as a hundred miles. But we did well enough. As the rain pelted my cloak and the farmland gave way to rougher country, I struggled to remain awake. The pain in my side helped me. As for Maram, more than once he nodded off with a loud snoring, only to be jolted rudely awake when he felt himself slipping off his horse. Master Juwain, however, seemed to need little sleep. He admitted that his daily meditations had nearly overcome his need for such sweet oblivion. Beneath his vow of nonviolence and his kindly ways, he was a very tough man, as many of the Brothers are.

Sometime before morning, the rain stopped and the clouds pulled back from the night's last stars. Daybreak found us in a broad, green valley more than half the way to Anjo. To the east a low range of mountains cut the golden-red disk of the rising sun. Its streaming rays fell upon us, not so warmly that it dried our garments, but not so weakly that we didn't all feel a little cheered. To the west framed by the great snow-capped peaks of the Shoshan Range, the sunlight glinted off an expanse of blue water. I guessed that this must be Lake Osh, which was the largest and only real lake in Ishka. From the northern shore of its gleaming waters to the ishkan border, if I remembered correctly, was a distance of only fifteen miles.

'Will I insult you,' Maram asked as he rode by my side, 'if I observe that this is a beautiful country? Almost as beautiful as Mesh.'

'Beauty can never be an insult,' I told him. I looked at him and tried to smile. 'Does it distress you that you might have remained to appreciate it if you hadn't ogled King Hadaru's wife?'

'Ogle, you say?' Maram's flushed beet-red with resentment 'But I wasn't ogling her!'

'What were you doing, then?'

'Ah, I was only appreciating her. You have to be grateful to a world that could bring such beauty into life.' I smiled again and said, 'You sound as if you're in love with her.' 'Well, I am.'

'But you only just met her – you weren't even properly presented. How could you love her?'

'Does a fish need an introduction to love the water? Does a flower need more than a moment to love the sun?'

'But Irisha,' I said, 'is a woman.'

'Ah, yes, a woman indeed – just so. When you touch a woman's eyes with your own, you touch her soul. And then you know.'

'Do you think it's always so simple, then?'

'Of course it is – what could be simpler than love?'

What, indeed? Because I had no answer for him, I just rubbed my tired eyes and smiled.

Then Maram continue, 'How old do you think Irisha is – eighteen? Nineteen? King Hadaru has set himself to planting very old seed in some very fertile earth. I predict that nothing will grow from it. He won't live forever, either. And then someday I'll return for her.'

'But what about Behira?' I asked him. 'I thought you loved her.'

'Ah, sweet Behira. Well, I do love her – I think. But I'm sure I love Irisha even more.'

I wondered if Maram would ever return for either of these women -or even return at all. Even as the sparrows chirped in the fields around us and the sun began its climb into the sky, King Hadaru was still very much alive in his palace, and his knights were still pursuing us. A couple of hundred yards behind us, their brightly colored surcoats flapped in the early wind as they urged their horses forward.

We rode, too, as hard and steadily as we dared. More than once we stopped to feed and water the horses. The Ishkans made no complaint against these brief breaks.

They might press us until we dropped from exhaustion, but being knights, they would have no wish to kill our horses. The morning deepened around us as the sun grew ever brighter. It heated up my armor, and I was grateful for the surcoat that covered most of its searing, steel rings. The warmth of the day made me drowsy and I scarcely noticed the rocky slabs of the mountains to the east or the higher peaks that lay ahead of us. By noon, we had passed well beyond Yarwan, a pretty little town that reminded me of Lashku in Mesh. I guessed that the border to Anjo – and the Aru-Adar Bridge – lay only ten or twelve miles farther up the road. And so I eased Altaru to a halt, and turned to talk with Maram and Master Juwain. 'It would be best,' I told them, 'if you go on from here without me.' 'What do you mean?' Maram asked. I pointed up the road, which led north like a ribbon of gleaming stone. 'The Ishkans won't follow you across the bridge.'

'But where are you going?'

Now I pointed west to the hilly country that lay between Lake Osh and the mountains to the north.

'If what my father's minstrel once told me is true,' I said, 'there's a way through the mountains farther to the west. We'll part company for a few days and meet in Sauvo.'

In Sauvo, I explained, King Danashu would give us shelter, and there the Ishkans would not go.

Now Master Juwain nudged his horse over to me and touched his cool hand to my forehead. 'You're very hot, Val – you have a fever, and that might kill you before the Ishkans do. You need rest, and soon.'

'That might be,' I said. I closed my eyes for a moment as I tried to remember why I had set out on this endless journey. 'The world needs peace, too, but must go on all the same.' 'We won't leave you alone,' Master Juwain said. 'No, we won't,' Maram told me. Then, as he realized what he had committed himself to, doubt began to eat at his face, and he summoned up the bravado to bluster his way through it. We'll follow even through the gates of hell, my friend.' 'How did you know,' I said with a smile, 'where we were going?' And with that, I turned Altaru toward the west and left the road. We began riding easily through the soft, green hills. The Ishkans, obviously alarmed at our new tack, tightened their ranks and followed us more closely. The soil beneath our horses' trampling hooves was too poor for crops, and so there were few farms about. Few trees grew, either, having been cut long ago for firewood or the Ishkans' wasteful building projects. I had hoped for more cover than this from Lord Issur's and Lord Nadhru's unrelenting vigilance. In truth, I had hoped for a thick forest into which we might dash wildly trying to make our escape.

There were forests in this part of Ishka, but only on the steep slopes or the mountains rising up to the north. I considered riding straight into them, but thought the better of it. I doubted if I or the horses, even Altaru, had any strength left for negotiating such rocky terrain. And even if we evaded Lord Issur and his knights, we would still have to make our way through one of the three passes along this part of the border. I was afraid that any of the garrisons guarding them might hold us up until Lord Issur tracked us down. The only unguarded pass – if it could be called that – still lay some miles ahead across these bare, undulating foothills. It took all my will to keep Altaru moving toward it, but I could think of nothing else to do.

And so I followed the sua and Maram and Master Juwain followed me. It was the longest day of my life. My side felt as if Salmelu's sword was still stuck there, and every bone in my body, particularly those of my trembling legs, hurt. After some hours, the country around us seemed to dissolve into a sea of blazing green. I dozed in my saddle and I dreamed feverish dreams. More than once, I almost toppled off Altaru's back; but each time he moved with a knowing grace to check my fall. I marveled at the trust he had in me, leading him on toward a destination that none of us had ever seen. My trust in him – his surefootedness and his plain good sense – grew with every mile we put behind us; it seemed even more solid than the earth over which we rode.

Nightfall made our journey no easier. Indeed, if not for the full moon that rose over the hills about us, we wouldn't have been able to journey at all. I tried to set my gaze on a great, white-capped peak that swelled against the black sky straight ahead; there the lesser mountains to the north met the Shoshan Range like a great hinge of rock.

But my eyes were dry as stones, and I could hardly keep them open. I was so tired that I couldn't even eat the pieces of bread that Master Juwain kept trying to urge into my mouth like a mother bird. It was all I could do to gulp down a few swallows of water. Soon, I knew, I would slip from Altaru's back no matter the great horse's agility and love for me. I would find oblivion in the sweet heather that blanketed the hills. And then Lord Nadhru would have to come for me with his ropes.

It was the Lightstone, I believe, that kept me going. I held the image of this golden cup close to my heart. From its deep hollows welled a cool, clear liquid that seemed to flow into me and give my body a new strength. It woke me up, at least enough so that my eyes didn't close in darkness.

It awakened me, too, to the sorry state of my friends, for they were nearly as tired as I was. And they were even more fearful of the unknown lands ahead. Their plight struck to my heart, and I vowed to do all that I could for them so long as any strength remained to me.

I rode side by side with them over the silver hills. And then, around midnight, just as we topped a hill crowned with many sharp rocks, I caught a moist, disturbing scent that jolted me wide awake. I stopped Altaru as I gazed at a depression in the generally rising terrain that seemed out of place. Patches of mist hung over it as of cotton balls floating in a great bowl. On the east side of it, the range of mountains along which we had been riding came to a sudden end. On the west side farther ahead of this dark scoop in the earth was the mountainous wall of the great Shoshan Range. Here, at last, was the hinge in the mountains that I had been seeking. And as I had hoped, the hinge was broken at its very joint, and the way into Anjo lay open before us.

'What is it?' Master Juwain said as he stared down across the moon-lit land.

Now a whiff of decay fell over me, and the air seemed suddenly colder. And then I said, 'It's a bog – and not a large one, either.'

I went on to tell both him and Maram what I knew about this unseemly break in the mountains. Indeed, it was more than unseemly, I said, it was an evil wound upon the land. For once, in the Age of Law, a mountain had stood upon this very spot. The Ishkans of old had named it Diamond Mountain in honor of the richest deposits of these gems ever to be found in the Morning Mountains. In their lust for wealth, they had used firestones to burn away layers of useless rock and uncover the veins of diamonds. Such wasteful mining, over hundreds of years, had burned away the entire mountain. It had left a poorly-drained depression that filled with silt and sand so that now, a whole age later, only a foul-smelling bog remained.

Maram, staring in horror at this miles-wide patch of ground, took me by the arm and said, 'You can't mean to ride down into that, can you? Not at night?'

If my father had taught me anything about war, it was that a king should never rely on mountains, rivers or forests – or even bogs – for protection. Such seemingly impenetrable natural barriers are often quite penetrable, sometimes much more readily than one might suspect. Often, hard work and a little daring sufficed for forcing one's way through them.

'Come on,' I said to Maram, 'it won't be so bad.'

'Oh no?' he said. 'Why do I suspect that it will be worse than bad?'

As we were debating the perils of bogs – Maram held that the quicksands in them could trap both man and horse and suck them down into a dreadful death – the Ishkans came riding up to us. Lord Issur and Lord Nadhru led eighteen grim-faced knights who seemed nearly as tired as we were. They sat shifting about uneasily in their saddles as the line of their horses stretched across the top of the hill.

'Sar Valashu!' Lord Issur called out to me. He pressed his horse a few paces closer to me and pointed down into the bog. 'As you can see, there is no way out of Ishka in this direction. Now you must return as you have come, and set out through one of the passes to the north.'

'No,' I said, looking down the line of his outstretched finger, 'we'll go this way.'

'Through the Black Bog?' he asked as his countrymen laughed uneasily. 'No, I think not.'

Maram wiped the sweat from his bulging forehead. 'The Black Bog, is it called?

Excellent – now there is a name to inspire courage.'

'It will take more than courage,' Lord Nadhru put in, 'for you to cross it.'

'How so?' Maram asked.

'Because it is haunted,' Lord Nadhru said. 'There's something in there that devours men. No one who has ever gone into it has ever come out again.'

Now Master Juwain looked at me as I felt his belly suddenly tighten. But his steely will kept his fear from overcoming him; I smiled at him to honor his courage, and he smiled back. To Lord Issur I said, 'Nevertheless, we will go into it.' 'No, you mustn't,' he said.

'Your father,' I told him, 'has said that we must leave Ishka. But surely the choice of our route out of it is ours to make.'

'Go back,' he urged me. There was a tightness in his own voice which I suspected he didn't like. 'It is death to go into this bog.'

'It is deatth for me to go into any of the passes if you follow so closely behind me.'

'There are worse things than death,' he said. I stared down into the misty depression but said nothing. 'At least,' Lord Issur went on, nodding at Master Juwain and Maram, 'it will be your own death only. And you may die fighting with a sword in your hand.'

Just then, Altaru let out a whinny of impatience, and I patted his trem-bling neck to steady him. 'No, there's been enough fighting,' I said.

'Master Juwain?' Lord Issur called out. 'Prince Maram Marshayk -what will you do?'

In a voice as cool as the wind, Master Juwain affirmed that he would follow me into the bog. Maram looked at me for a long moment as our hearts beat together. And then, after taking a deep breath, he said that he would go with me, too. And then he muttered to the sky, 'Ah, the Black Bog indeed – why don't you just kill us here and save us the misery?'

For a moment it seemed that the Ishkans might do exactly that. The eighteen knights each gripped their lances more tightly as they looked at Lord Nadhru and Lord Issur and waited for their command.

'You must understand,' Lord Issur said to me, 'that it would be death as well for me to lead my men into the bog.'

'Perhaps,' I said.

'And that I will not do,' he told me.

I listened to the far-off howling of a wolf as I waited to see what he would do. Many miles before, I had foreseen that he might kill me on this very spot – and kill as well Master Juwain and Maram as witnesses to such a crime. But I had counted on him honoring Salmelu's promise that I wasn't to be harmed while on Ishkan soil. In the end, one is either a Valari or not.

'We won't follow where you're going,' he said. 'There's no need.'

At this, many of his knights sighed gratefully. But Lord Nadhru edged his horse closer to us and let his hand rest upon the hilt of his sword. To Lord Issur, he said, '

But what of the King's command that Sar Valashu and his friends leave Ishka?'

Again, Lord Issur pointed down into the bog. 'That is no longer part of Ishka. It belongs to no kingdom on earth.'

He turned to me and said, 'Farewell, Valashu Elahad. You're a brave man, but a foolish one. We'll tell your countrymen, as we will our own, that you died in this accursed place.'

There was nothing to do then but go down into the bog. I said farewell to Lord Issur, then urged Altaru down the hill. Master Juwain and Maram, with the pack horses tied behind their sorrels, followed behind me. And so, for a few hundred yards, did the Ishkans. They watched us through the wavering moonlight to make sure that we did as we had said we would.

The slope of the hill gradually gave way to more even ground as we rode down into the depression. And the heather beneath our horses' hooves gave, way to other vegetation: sedges and grasses and various kinds of moss. There was no clear line demarcating the bog from the land around it But there came a point where the air grew suddenly colder and smelled even more pungently of decay. There Ataru suddenly planted his hooves in the moist ground and let out a great whinny. He shook his head at the mist-covered terrain before us, and would not go any farther.

'Come on, boy,' I said as I patted his neck. 'We have to do this.'

Master Juwain and Maram came up to us, and their horses pawed the ground uneasily, too.

'Come on,' I said again. 'It won't be so bad.'

I tried to clear my feverish head as Master Juwain had taught me. Some part of the calm I achieved must have passed into Altaru, for he turned his head to look back at me with his great misting eyes. And then he began moving slowly forward, into the bog.

The other horses followed him, and their hooves made moist squishing sounds in the cold ground. It was strange, I thought, that although the ground over which we rode oozed with water, it seemed solid enough to look at. In few places were there actually patches of standing water. These almost black meres we avoided easily enough as we kept pressing forward. Our path through the bog, while not perfectly straight, was direct enough that I was sure we would soon be out of it.

I tried to keep us oriented toward the north so that we wouldn't lose direction in this trackless waste. After a while, I looked back to fix our position by the hill where we had left the Ishkans. Although it was hard to see very far, even in the bright moonlight, I thought I could make out their forms far off as they watched us from the top of the hill. And then a mist came up, covering us as it obliterated all sight of them. When it pulled back a few minutes later, the hill seemed barren of knights, or indeed, of any living thing. I couldn't even perceive the jagged rocks along the hill's crest. The hill itself seemed flatter and wider; it was as if the heavy air over the bog were like a spectacle maker's lens that distorted the world around us.

'Val,' Maram called out from behind me, 'I feel sick – it's like I'm falling.'

I, too, felt a strange, sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. It was something like the time Asaru and I had jumped off the cliffs above Lake Silash into the dark, freezing waters. It seemed mat the bog was pulling at us, pulling us down into the inconstant earth, even though at no point did its seeping water rise much above the horses' fetlocks.

'It will be all right,' I said as the mist slid along the ground and wrapped its gray-black tendrils around us. 'If we keep moving, it will be all right.'

And then, even as the mist opened slightly and I looked up at the sky, I knew that it would not be all right. For something about this accursed opening in the earth was distorting the sight of the very stars. The brightest of them – Solaru, Aras and Varshara – seemed strangely dulled and slightly out of place. I blinked my eyes and shook my head in disbelief. And the feeling of falling down into an endless dark hole grew only stronger.

'Maram,' I said. 'Master Juwain – there's something wrong here!'

I turned to tell them that we should stay close together. But when I peered through the swirling mist, I couldn't see either of them. And that was very strange because I had thought they were no more than ten yards behind me.

'Maram!' I called out. 'Master Juwain – where are you?'

I stopped Altaru and listened as carefully as I could. But the bog was quiet and deathly still. Not even a cricket chirped.

'Maram! Master Juwain!'

The shock of being suddenly alone was like a hammer striking me beneath my ribs.

For many moments, I had trouble breathing the dank, stifling air. Had both Maram and Master Juwain, I wondered, plunged into a quicksand that had instantly sucked them down without a sound? Had they simply vanished from the earth?

I felt the sweat beading along my skin beneath my layers of armor and clothing. My whole body felt icy cold even as I shivered uncontrollably. For a moment, I covered my forehead and rubbed my fevered eyes. Was I mad, I wondered? Was I ill to my death and forever lost in this choking mist?

'Altaru,' I whispered as I stroked the coarse, long hair of his mane, 'where are they?

Can you smell them?'

Altaru nickered nervously, then turned his head right and left. He pawed the sodden ground and waited for me to tell him what to do.

'Maram! Master Juwain!' I shouted. 'Why can't you hear me?'

There came a booming sound then as if the whole earth was shaking. It took me a while to realize that it was only the beating of my heart and not some gigantic drum.

And then Maram called to me – but not from behind me as I had expected. A moment later, the mist parted again, and I could see him and Master Juwain riding their horses barely twenty yards ahead of me.

'Why did you leave me?' I called out as I rode up to them.

'Leave you?' Maram said. He leaned over on his horse and grasped my good arm with his as if to reassure himself that I was really there. 'It was you who left us.'

'Don't play games, Maram,' I said. 'How did you get ahead of me?'

'How did you get behind us?'

Because I had no strength to argue, I just sat astride Altaru looking at him in relief. I had never thought that the sight of his thick, brown beard and weepy eyes could please me so greatly.

Then Master Juwain came over to us and said, 'There is something wrong with this place. I've never heard of anything like it. Why don t we tie the horses together and stay closer to each other now?'

Both Maram and I agreed that this was an excellent idea. With some rope that we found in one of the horses' packs, we tied the sorrels close behind Altaru, and the pack horses behind them.

'Let's go,' I said, not wanting to spend another minute there. 'We must have come at least a couple of miles. It can't be much more than that to drier ground.'

Again, with me in the lead, we moved off toward what I thought was due north. In places, the mist was so thick that we couldn't see more than ten feet in any direction.

The ground beneath us now was mostly of large, spongy mosses that made sucking sounds as the horses trampled over them. The air was cold and wet and smelled of dark scents that were strange to me. There were no animals to be seen or to be heard either. Even so, as we made our way across the drowned sedges and grasses and muck, I felt something following us. Although I thought that it couldn't be an animal – and certainly nothing like a wolf or a bear -It had an uneasy sensation that it could smell me from miles away even through the thickest of mists. And then I closed my eyes for a moment, and I was certain of nothing at all. For in my mind, I could see gray shapes on horseback riding hard in our pursuit. I was afraid that Lord Issur had changed his mind after all, and was coming to murder us.

I pressed Altaru more urgently then; the other horses, tied to my saddle with short lengths of rope, quickened their paces. We rode in near-silence for what seemed a long time. I couldn't guess how many miles we covered, for both time and distance in this terrible bog seemed to be different from that of the mountains and valleys in which I had spent my whole life. With every bit of sodden ground that we passed over, the sense that something or someone was following us grew stronger. I couldn't understand why we hadn't found the bog's northern edge and the safety of Anjo. And then, even as the mist thinned a little, Maram let out a cry of terror because he had found something else.

'Look!' he said as he pointed at the ground ahead of us. 'Oh, my -oh, my Lord!'

Now the moonlight seemed to wax stronger for a moment as it fell upon a form half-sunken into the mosses and muck. It was a man, I saw, or rather the remains of one. His bones, gleaming a dull white, were spread out along the ground. His eyeless skull seemed to stare straight at us, and his finger joints were gapped around the hilt of a great, rusted sword. Almost the whole of his skeleton was encased in a suit of slowly rotting, diamond-studded armor. Its hundreds of stones, although smeared with mud, still had some fire to them. They caught my eye with their sparkle even as Maram and Master Juwain drew up beside me.

'Look!' Maram said again. He pointed to the nearby skeleton of a horse lying down among the mosses. 'How long do you think this knight has been here?'

I looked at the style of the armor, particularly at the aventail that hung down from the back of the knight's helmet, and I said, 'Perhaps a hundred years – perhaps more.'

'Why do you think he came here?'

'That's hard to say.'

'What do you think killed him, then?'

I studied the knight's armor, looking for any sign that it had been pierced or crushed.

I shrugged my shoulders, then shook my head.

'Do you think he got lost?' Maram asked, 'Do you think he ran out of food and starved to death?'

There was a note of near-panic in his voice, and Master Juwain took hold of his arm and gently shook him. He said, 'There are some things it's better not to ask and better not to know. Now let's leave this place before we unnerve each other completely.'

Although Maram quickly agreed to that, he was already so unnerved that he didn't even suggest looting the knight of his armor, as I feared he might. We rode hard then for an hour or so. At those rare moments when I could see the sky, I tried to steer by the stars. But they kept shifting about in strange new patterns that didn't make sense to me. Master Juwain suggested trying to fix our position by the bright disk of the moon, and this I tried to do. But then, some miles from the spot where we had left the knight, I looked up to see half the moon missing as if some great beast had taken a bite out of it. I shook my head in disbelief, and sat there on top of Altaru blinking my eyes.

'Perhaps it's only an eclipse,' Master Juwain said to encourage me.

I looked at him and smiled as I shook my head. And then, as Maram let out a shriek of terror, I looked up at the sky again, and the moon was completely gone.

'Let's ride,' I said. 'Let's find a way out of here before we all lose our minds.'

And so yet again we set out in a direction that might have been north, south, east or west – or some entirely new direction that would take us nowhere forever. We rode hard for what seemed many hours. There was nothing to do but listen to the splashing that the horses made and breathe the chill air. Once, the stars returned to their familiar positions within their ancient constellations, and more than once, the full moon again burned a silvery circle through the black sky. We might have taken comfort from this bright disk, but then, as we were gazing up at it, a dark shape like that of a dragon or an impossibly huge bat flew straight across it. And then a moment later the moon vanished, and the mist closed around us like a wet, gray shroud.

'Val,' Maram said to me in a low voice, 'I'm afraid.'

'We all are,' I told him. 'But we have to keep going – there's nothing else to do.'

And then, seeing that my words had done little to cheer him, I nudged› Altaru closer to him and gripped his hand in mine. I said, 'It's all right -I won't let anything happen to you.'

As we rode on in silence over the socking mosses, I was very afraid that the pain and fever of my wounded side would soon set me to screaming. But even worse than this throbbing agony was the sensation of something squirming in my head, clawing my eyes from inside. I could still feel something or someone following us through the mist. And something else – It felt like a vast, black, bloated spider – was watching us and waiting for us even as it somehow called us toward the darkest of places at the bog's very center. The more I tried to evade this dreadful thing, the closer I seemed to be drawn to it – and Maram and Master Juwain with me. It was only a matter of time, I thought, until it seized me and tore me open to suck out my mind.

Before fear maddened me completely, I tried to use my mind to reason our way out of the bog, Hadn't we been traveling through it for at least twelve hours? Shouldn't we men have covered at least forty miles and not merely the four or five miles of the bog's true width? Were we moving in circles? Was the black, rippling mere to our right new to us or one that we had left behind many miles ago? And if we kept the mountains of the Shoshan Range always to our left – during those rare moments when the mist lifted and we could see them – shouldn't we have long since found our way into Anjo?

'Val, I'm so tired,' Maram said to me as our horses stepped through a patch of sodden grasses. He waved his hand in front of his face as if to dispel the mist nearly blinding us. ' Will this night never end?'

No, I suddenly thought, the neverness of night has no end.

'Where are we?' he asked. 'Why can't we find our way out of here?' Master Juwain, riding beside him, touched his arm to steady him. But he had no answer for him, and neither did I. I had no answers for myself, and no hope, either. My command of direction, on which I had always prided myself, seemed to have abandoned me utterly. I could neither see nor sense my way out of this forsaken place. Perhaps there was no way out even as Lord Issur had said. Soon, we would all slip off our horses and have to rest. We might awaken, once, twice, or even twenty more times to continue our journey into the endless night. But in the end, our food would run out and we would weaken beyond repair we would fall into the sleep from which there is no awakening, even as the poor knight had. And then we would die in this desolate bog -I was as certain of this as I was of the fever eating through my side into my mind. Perhaps someday another knight would find our bones and behold the fate that awaited him. At last, I slumped forward in my saddle and threw my good arm around Altaru's neck to keep from myself plunging down into the wet earth. And then I whispered in his ear, 'We're lost my friend, we're very lost. My apologies for bringing you here. Now go where you will, and bring yourself out, if you can.'

I closed my eyes then, and tried to hold on to his thickly muscled neck as the long column of it vibrated with a sudden nicker. He seemed to understand me, for he nickered again and surged forward with a new strength. Master Juwain's and Maram's sorrels, tied to him along with the pack horses, followed closely behind him. As I felt the rocking of Altaru's great body, my mind emptied and I drifted toward sleep. I was only dimly aware of him pausing before various meres and sniffing the air as he circled right or left and wound his way across the squishing mosses. My only thought was to keep hold of him and not let myself fall into the bog.

How long we traveled this way, I couldn't say. The heavy mist devoured both moon and stars. The darkness of the night seemed ever to deepen into a blackness as thick as ink. Although I knew that the fever must be working at me, my entire body felt as cold as death, and I couldn't stop shivering.

On and on we rode for many miles. I fell into a sleep in which I was strangely aware that 1 was sleeping. I dreamed that Altaru somehow found true north, and I felt the ground beginning to rise beneath us. And then this horse that I loved beyond all others let loose a tremendous whinny that shook me fully awake. The mist fell away from me. 1 opened my eyes to see both moon and stars and the jagged mountains of the Shoshan rising up to the west. Behind us – we all turned to look – the hazy bog steamed silver-gray in the soft light. But ahead us, a mile away on top of a steep hill, a castle stood limned against the glowing sky. Maram called out that we were saved, even as I let out a cry of joy. And then I finally let myself slip from Altaru's back, and I lay down against the hard, rocky, sweet, beautiful earth.