The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom

by David Zindell

  Even as I now feared that men were attacking my mind. With the coming of night, the pain in all our heads grew suddenly worse. It seemed that the Stonefaces, whatever they were, took their greatest strength and boldness from the dark.

  ‘If we ride,’ I said, ‘it would be very bad if the Stonefaces were waiting on the road to ambush us.’

  I looked at Master Juwain slumped on his horse and at Atara forcing a smile to her worn-out face. We were all exhausted, I thought, and growing weaker by the hour. I doubted whether we could ride half the night to the next village.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be worse if they ambushed us here?’ Maram asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, pointing behind us. ‘We passed a meadow less than half a mile back. We could make camp there and fortify it against attack.’

  ‘All right,’ Maram said wearily. ‘I’m too tired to argue.’

  We mounted our horses again, and made our way back to the meadow. It was a broad, grassy expanse perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. Copses of mulberry and oak surrounded it. We hauled some deadfall from these woods to the center of the meadow where we built up around our camp a sort of circular fence. It took many trips back and forth to gather enough wood to construct such rudimentary fortifications. But when we were finished, we felt very glad to go inside it and lay out our bearskins.

  It was full night by the time we finished our dinner. The moon had climbed above the meadow and silvered it with its cold light. Long, grayish grasses swayed in the gentle wind blowing in from the east. In the eerie sheen of the earth, the many rocks about us seemed as big as boulders. We had a clear line of sight fifty yards in any direction toward the rim of dark trees that surrounded us. Unless it grew very cloudy, no one could steal upon us unseen. And if anyone attacked us openly, we would kill them with arrows. Toward this end, Maram unpacked my arrows and bow and kept them close at hand. We checked our swords as well. Atara stood up against the breastwork of the fence as she practiced drawing her great, horn bow and aiming arrows over the top of it. She seemed satisfied that we had done all we could. After bidding us good night, she slipped down to the ground to sleep holding her bow as child might a blanket.

  I took the first watch while the others slept fitfully. I knew they must be having evil dreams: Maram sweated and rolled about, while Master Juwain’s small body twitched and started whenever he let out a low moan. Several times Atara murmured, ‘No, no, no,’ before falling into the ragged rhythms of her breathing.

  When it came my turn to sleep, I couldn’t bear the thought of closing my eyes. It was selfish of me, but I couldn’t bring myself to wake up Master Juwain, either. And so I walked in a slow circle behind the fence looking out across the meadow. The horses, tethered outside the fence, were silently sleeping. So still did they stand that they looked like statues. As did the trees of the surrounding woods. In their dark shadows, I could see nothing. I listened for any telltale that men might be coming to attack us, but the only sounds were the crickets in the meadow and the distant howling of some wolves. Wherever these great, gray beasts stood, I throught, they must be looking upon the same moon as did I. I watched this pale disk climb the starry heavens inch by inch. I might have measured out the moments of its rise and fall by the painful beating of my heart, but the night seemed to deepen into a timelessness that had no end.

  I let Maram sleep as well in place of standing his watch. And Atara, too. Despite the pain in my head, which drove through my eyes like nails, I was wide awake. The night was very warm, and I sweated beneath my armor. My legs shook with the effort of remaining standing. Even so, for many hours, I stared out across the meadow, listening and waiting. I walked around and around our camp trying to catch the sense of whoever might be hunting us.

  Near dawn, without warning, Atara started out of her sleep and rose to stand by my side. When she saw the angle of the moon, she chided me for staying awake nearly all night. Then she sniffed the wind as might a tawny lioness and said, ‘They’re close, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they are.’

  ‘Then you should have gotten some sleep to face them.’

  ‘Sleep,’ I said, shaking my head.

  For a while we spoke of little things such as the direction of the wind and the grimness of the gray face of the moon. And then I looked at her and asked, ‘Are you afraid to die?’

  She thought about this for a long moment before saying, ‘Death is like going to sleep. Should I be afraid of sleeping, then?’

  I looked at Master Juwain as he lay against the ground moaning softly. I almost told Atara that death is cold, death is dark, death is an evil dream full of empty black nothing. But I kept myself from voicing such despair.

  Even so, she seemed to sense my doubts. She smiled at me bravely and said, ‘We take our being from the One. How can the One ever stop being? How can we?’

  Because I had no answer for her, I looked up at the black spaces between the stars.

  I felt her hand touch my face, and I turned to look at her as she asked me, ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘But most afraid for you.’

  She smiled at me in the silent understanding that had flowed between us almost from our first moment together. Then her face fell serious as she said a strange thing: ‘I can see them, you know.’

  ‘See who, Atara?’

  ‘The men,’ she said. ‘The gray men.’

  ‘You mean, you saw them in your dreams?’

  ‘Yes, that of course. But I can see them here, now.’

  I looked at the gray trees standing in a circle all about us with their leafy arms raised toward the sky, but I saw no men standing with them.

  Then Atara pointed out across the moonlit meadow and said, ‘I can see them walking toward us with their knives.’

  If the Stonefaces came to attack us, I thought, then surely they would stand behind the trees shooting arrows at us or charge us on horses with their swords drawn.

  ‘Once, when I was a child,’ she said, ‘I saw a spider weaving a web in a corner of my father’s house a month before she actually did. I can see the gray men the same way.’

  I continued looking out around the meadow; other than the wind-rippled grasses, nothing moved. The moon seemed like a silver nail pinning still the sky. In between the soughs of Atara’s breaths, I could almost feel each beat of her heart as it hung in the air like a boom of a great red drum.

  And then Altaru came violently awake and let out a tremendous whinny, and I saw them, too. They suddenly appeared next to the trees as if the dark shadows had given them birth. Tall men they were, with hooded, grayish cloaks covering them from head to knee. As Atara had said, there were at least nine of them. Although we couldn’t see their faces, they stood around the circle of trees watching us and waiting for something.

  I quickly drew my sword.

  Again, Altaru whinnied and stomped the earth as he pulled and rattled the fence. His noise shook Master Juwain and Maram awake.

  ‘What is it?’ Maram grumbled as he struggled to his feet rubbing his eyes. Then he looked across the meadow and cried out, ‘Oh, no! Oh, my Lord – it’s them!’

  When pressed, Maram could move very quickly, big belly or no. It took only a moment for him to grab up his bow and join Atara and me by the fence.

  ‘Don’t shoot them!’ Master Juwain pleaded as he stepped forward, too. By now, both Maram and Atara had arrows nocked to their bowstrings as they began to pull and sight on the gray men. ‘We should try to talk to them first.’

  Yes, we should, I thought. And so I called out, ‘Who are you? What do you want of us?’

  But their only answer was a silence that came with the sudden dying of the wind.

  ‘Go away!’ Maram called to them. ‘Go away or we’ll shoot you!’

  But still the gray men didn’t move, and the silence in the meadow grew only deeper.

  ‘I’m going to give them a warning,’ Maram said, squeezing his arrow between his fingers. ‘I’m going to shoo
t this into a tree.’

  Without waiting for me to say yea or nay, he quickly drew his bow. But his hands and arms suddenly started trembling; the arrow, when it came whining off his string, buried itself in the ground only forty feet from the fence.

  ‘Hmmph – shooting at moles again,’ Atara said. Then she too fired off a shot. But at the moment she released her arrow, her bow arm buckled as if broken at the elbow. Her arrow drove into the ground after covering even less distance than had Maram’s.

  Something moved then in the shadows of the trees. Twigs cracked, and even from fifty yards away, we could hear the rustling of leaves. A very tall man stepped forward into the moonlight. He was dressed as the others in gray trousers and a hooded cloak that covered his face. He had an air of command about him. When he turned his unseen face toward us and stood as if scenting us or staring intently into our souls, the others did too.

  ‘Go away!’ Maram cried again. ‘Go away now, please!’

  The gray men seemed not to hear him. Following their leader, they all drew forth long, gray knives and began walking across the meadow toward us, even as Atara had foreseen.

  Atara and Maram fired more arrows at them, but they flew wild. The men advanced slowly as if taking care not to stumble over any branch or rock. Their gray-steel knives glinted dully in the moon’s eerie light. When they had covered perhaps half the distance toward our camp, I caught a glimpse of their leader staring at me from beneath his cloak’s gray hood. His face was long and flat, without expression and as gray as slate. There seemed to be something stuck to the middle of his forehead, where it was said one’s third eye lies: it looked like a leech or some kind of flat, black stone.

  ‘Go away,’ I whispered. ‘Go away, or one of us will have to die.’

  Just then a swirl of little lights appeared as of stars dropping down from the heavens. It was Flick, spinning about furiously as he streaked back and forth in front of the gray men. It seemed that he was trying to warn them away or perhaps weaving a fence of light through which they couldn’t pass. But the men took no notice of his presence. They walked slowly forward as if nothing stood between them and us.

  In their disbelief at missing such easy marks, the urge to flee overcame Maram and Atara all at once. They began backing away from the gray men, all the while shooting arrows at the men as I joined them in edging up near the rear of the fence. Master Juwain pressed up close to us. And then the gray men’s leader stood very still. The black stone on his forehead caught the moonlight, and gleamed darkly. At that moment, a crushing heaviness fell across my whole body. I dropped my sword, and my friends let go of their bows. My arms and legs were so weak that it seemed something had drained the blood from them. I wanted desperately to run, to will myself to move, but I could not. A terrible coldness spread quickly through me and froze me motionless like a fish caught in ice. I couldn’t even open my mouth to scream.

  And neither could my friends. But I sensed them screaming inside for the gray men to go away, and I knew that they could hear the screams of the horses, even as I could. The gray men’s leader dispatched two of his confederates toward them. All of the horses were now whinnying and rearing and kicking the ground. Altaru aimed a mighty kick at the fence. It splintered the wood, and he pulled free from it, along with the two sorrels and Tanar, who immediately ran off into the woods. Altaru charged straight for the two men closest to the fence. But then they showed him their knives and something worse, and he suddenly changed course, galloping off into the woods, too. Although he was the bravest of beings, something about the gray men sent him into a panic.

  The two men now closed on the remaining horses. They seemed bothered by their screaming and the beating of their hooves; it was as if the gray men sought silence in the outer world so that they could hear the voices of the inner. And so, moving with great care, they used their long knives to slash open the horses’ throats.

  No, I cried out in my voice of my mind, no, no, no!

  The other gray men began pulling at the branches and logs of the fence, dismantling it and making an opening wide enough for all of them to pass. And still I stood with the others at the rear of the fence, watching them but unable to move.

  And then the gray men’s leader stepped forward and threw back his hood. The black stone on his forehead was a dark moon crushing us to the earth. The flesh of his face was gray as that of a dead fish. As Atara had told us, he had no eyes like any man I had ever seen. They were all of one hue and substance: a solid and translucent gray that covered them like dark glass. I couldn’t guess how they let in any light; they let forth no light either, no hint of humanity or soul. They seemed utterly without pity, utterly empty, utterly cold. This cold struck straight into my heart like a lance of ice. It filled me with a wild fear. A steely voice spoke inside me then and told me that I couldn’t move. I was nothing, it said to me; I was nothing more than an empty husk of flesh to be used as the gray men wished. I was one with the dead, and would take a long, long time in dying.

  Evil, I knew then, was much more than darkness: it was a willful turning away from the light of the One. It was a poison that twists the soul, a madness, a terrible need to inflate one’s self at the expense of others, as a tick swells on its victims’ blood.

  No – go back!

  All the gray men now gathered around their leader at the opening to the fence. Their knives pointed toward us. Then they too threw back their hoods. Although they wore no stones on their foreheads, their faces were as eyeless and stonelike as their leader’s. They stood in the cold moonlight, watching us and waiting.

  Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!

  I felt Atara’s terror, and Master Juwain’s and Maram’s, thundering at me with the wild beating of their hearts. I couldn’t close it out. Neither could I close my eyes as the gray men pierced me with theirs and began drinking from inside me that which was more precious than blood.

  NO! NO! NO!

  I wanted with all my soul to close my eyes and end this living nightmare from which I could not awaken. But then, even as I tried desperately to move my legs and run away, I looked across the meadow to see another cloaked figure break from the trees. This lone man, slightly shorter than the others, ran as silently as a wraith through the silvery grass. He had a sword drawn: it was longer than a knife, and longer than many swords, for it was a kalama. His powerful strides revealed the gleaming mail beneath his cloak. It took him only a few seconds to reach the wolf pack of men by the open fence. He crashed into them, sending two flying and slicing through the neck of a third. And then, even as the gray men finally realized they were under attack and turned toward him, he stabbed his sword straight through the back of their leader.

  ‘Move!’ he cried to us in a voice like the roar of a tiger. ‘Move now, I say!’

  And then he drove into the men with his sword, whirling about powerfully yet gracefully, cutting at them with a rare and terrible fury.

  With the death of the gray men’s leader, I found myself suddenly free to move. A great surge of life welled up inside me and filled my hands with a new strength. Some of the gray men were running from the wild man at the opening of the fence; some were running at Atara and me. One of these aimed his knife at Atara’s throat; without thinking, I picked up my sword and chopped off his arm in almost a single motion. Grayish-black blood sprayed into the air. It surprised me that he wore no armor and that the steel of my sword sliced through him so easily. The kalama is a fearsome weapon at any time, but most terrible to use against unprotected flesh. As I was forced to use it now. For in the rush of men coming at us with their gray, slashing knives, even as Maram and Atara drew their swords and laid about them in a wild death struggle, one of the men stole up behind her to stab her in the back. His back was to me, his knife poised to thrust home, and I was faced with a terrible choice: I could cut him down or let him kill her. It was no choice at all. And so, still reeling from the wound I had inflicted on the first man, I swung my sword at him. It sliced into his side and t
hrough his chest; I felt its cold steel rip through his heart. Dark blood sprayed into my eyes; I could hardly see as he jumped in agony and turned to regard me for a moment in the strange silence of his hate. And then he died, and I almost died, too. I fell down to the blood-soaked earth screaming like a child as the darkness closed in and the battle raged all about me.

  Later, when the last of the gray men had been killed and Maram and Atara stood panting with their bloody swords in their hands, the man who had run to our rescue let loose a howl of triumph. He stood in the moonlight holding his sword up to the stars. I felt his great joy at having slain so many of his enemies. Even through the death-agony covering my eyes like a dark, gray shroud, I watched him turn toward me. He threw back the hood of his cloak. His face blazed with a terrible beauty, his eyes all black and bright, and I gasped to see that it was Kane.

  16

  With Atara, Maram and Master Juwain still weak and trembling from what the gray men had done to us, Kane immediately took command. He ordered Master Juwain to tend to me while he walked around our camp counting the bodies of the slain. He numbered them at twelve, including the one that I had killed. Maram had managed to send two on to the other world, while Atara had added three more enemies toward her hundred. That meant Kane had accounted for six. As I lay with my head in Master Juwain’s lap, I blinked my eyes in disbelief. I had never seen anyone fight with such quickness, skill and sheer ferocity.

  After Kane had completed his tally, he knelt by the gray men’s leader on the bloody earth. He used his sword to cut the black stone from his forehead. He studied this flat oval a long time before tightening his fist around it. Then he turned toward us and said, ‘This is no place to remain, eh? The sun will be up soon. Let’s get Val into the shade of the trees before it boils his brains.’