The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom

by David Zindell

  ‘The Lightstone,’ Mithuna said. She traded quick looks with Ayanna, who had white hair and a deeply lined face, and was the oldest of the scryers. ‘Always the Lightstone.’

  Here Kane smiled savagely and said, ‘Ha – you didn’t see that, eh?’

  ‘No scryer has ever seen the Lightstone,’ she said, staring back at him. ‘At least, not in our visions.’

  ‘But why not?’ Atara asked her.

  Now Mithuna favored the young and almond-eyed Songlian with one of her faraway gazes before turning back to Atara. ‘Because, dear child, all that is or ever will be flows out of a single point in time, and there the Lightstone always is. To look there is like looking at the sun.’

  ‘Paradoxes, mysteries,’ Kane spat out. ‘You scryers make a mystery of everything.’

  ‘No, it is not we who have made things so,’ Mithuna reminded him.

  In the light given off by Flick’s twinkling form, Kane’s face filled with both resentment and longing.

  ‘The Singing Caves,’ Alphanderry said to Mithuna, ‘spoke these words: “If you would know where the Gelstei was hidden, go to the Blue Mountains and seek in the Tower of the Sun.”’

  The Singing Caves always speak the truth,’ Mithuna said. She pointed at Maram’s red crystal and smiled. ‘There is the gelstei.’

  ‘Hoy, there it is,’ Alphanderry agreed. ‘But it is not the Gelstei.’

  ‘It is difficult, isn’t it, to know of which gelstei the Caves spoke?’

  ‘But when one speaks of the Gelstei, what is always meant is the Lightstone.’

  ‘Always?’

  Kane, who was growing angrier by the moment, scowled as he looked about the starlit ruins and the dark mountains that towered above us.

  ‘Are you saying that the Lightstone wasn’t hidden here?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Mithuna said, shaking her head, ‘I wouldn’t say that. Morjin hid it here long ago.’

  ‘But it is not hidden here now?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say that either,’ she said mysteriously. ‘The Lightstone still is here. But if you truly want to recover it and hold it in your hands, you’ll have to journey somewhere else.’

  ‘So,’ Kane muttered to the wind. ‘Scryers.’

  But I wasn’t about to give up so easily. I said to Mithuna, ‘So the Lightstone is here, somewhere, somehow – but it isn’t here, as well?’

  ‘Is the Tur-Solonu here?’ she asked, pointing at the broken tower above us. ‘Are you here, Valashu Elahad? What would a scryer have said to this ten thousand years ago? What would she say ten thousand years hence?’

  I took a deep breath as I asked, ‘If the Lightstone is here, have you seen it, with your eyes?’

  ‘No one sees the Lightstone with just the eyes,’ Mithuna said. ‘The eyes won’t hold it anymore than hands will light.’

  ‘But how do you know it isn’t somewhere among these ruins, then?’

  ‘Because,’ she said, ‘although I cannot see where it is, I can see where it is not.’

  ‘But I thought you said it was everywhere.’

  ‘That is true – it is everywhere and nowhere.’

  I was beginning to see why Kane hated scryers. Was Mithuna, I wondered, willfully confounding us? Talking with her was like trying to eat the wind.

  ‘We’ve come a very long way, Mistress Mithuna,’ I told her. ‘A great deal may depend on our finding the Lightstone. Would you mind if we searched the ruins for it?’

  Mithuna’s face fell sad; almost as if speaking to herself, she said, ‘Should I mind the rising of tomorrow’s sun? What should be shall be.’

  She turned to Atara and said, ‘It’s growing late – will you sit with us tonight beneath the stars?’

  Atara brushed back the hair from her eyes and stood up straight like the warrior she was. She said, ‘Are you inviting my friends as well?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mithuna said, ‘but only scryers may see our refuge.’

  ‘Do you mean, see with the eyes or… see?’

  This made Mithuna smile, and she said, ‘You see, you really are a scryer.’

  She turned as if to make ready to leave, which prompted Maram to hold up his hand and say, ‘No, don’t go just yet! We’ve brandy and beer and Ea’s finest minstrel to help us appreciate it. Won’t you share this with us?’

  He held the crystal carelessly so that it stuck straight out from his body. All his attention was turned on Mithuna, and I knew that he wanted to share much more with her than beer.

  Mithuna looked at him a long time, then said, ‘It was foretold that a man in red would find the firestone that destroyed the Tur-Solonu. I, myself, saw you in one of my visions.’

  ‘You saw me, did you?’ Maram said. His smile suggested that he had seen her in his dreams. ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘What do you mean? I saw you with the firestone.’

  ‘And is that all?’

  ‘Should there be more?’ Mithuna asked as her eyes brightened.

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed there should be,’ Maram said as he gripped his crystal more tightly. ‘Did you see my heart filling up with the fire of the sun? Did you see this fire pouring out of the gelstei?’

  ‘I saw it melting the hardest rock,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Did you? And did you, ah, see the earth shake, volcanoes erupting?’

  ‘It is said that the firestones of old caused such cataclysms,’ Mithuna admitted. ‘They were very powerful.’

  ‘Powerful, yes,’ Maram said, holding his crystal pointing almost straight up. ‘I suspect none of us knows just how powerful.’

  ‘That is a dangerous thing,’ Mithuna said, stretching her finger toward the firestone. ‘We do know that.’

  ‘Yes, but surely one can learn how to use it.’

  ‘Perhaps some can. But can you?’

  ‘Do you doubt me?’ Maram said with a hurt look. ‘Perhaps I should leave it where I found it?’

  ‘No, surely it is yours to do with as you will.’

  ‘Should I give it to you, then, Mistress Mithuna?’

  ‘And what would I do with a firestone?’

  ‘I wish I could, ah, give you something.’

  Mithuna’s face suddenly fell serious as if the whole weight of the world were pulling at it. In a sad voice, she said, ‘Then give me your promise that you’ll learn to use this stone wisely.’

  ‘I do promise you that,’ Maram said, glancing at the broken Tur-Solonu. Then his eyes covered her as he smiled. ‘More wisely than did the Red Dragon.’

  ‘Don’t joke about such things,’ she told him. Now she pointed fiercely at the firestone. ‘You should know that a doom was laid upon this crystal: that it would bring Morjin’s undoing. That is why he left it here.’

  We all looked at the firestone more closely. And then Kane asked, ‘And who laid this doom?’

  ‘Her name was Rebekah Lorus,’ Mithuna said. ‘She was mistress of the murdered scryers.’

  ‘Now that would be a strange justice,’ Kane said, ‘if the very gelstei that Morjin made unmade him.’

  ‘But he didn’t make it,’ Mithuna said.

  ‘What? Didn’t make it, eh? Then who did?’

  ‘A man named Kaspar Saranom. He was one of Morjin’s priests.’

  ‘And how do you know this?’

  ‘Kaspar destroyed the Tur-Solonu at Morjin’s command. The scryers who came before us have told of this for six thousand years.’

  She went on to say that Morjin had never learned the art of making the red gelstei, for after nearly being killed creating the relb, he had grown deathly afraid of all such crystals. And so he had left their making to others. Kaspar Saranom had been the first on Ea to forge a firestone. That he had forged only one, Mithuna seemed certain.

  ‘After the Tower was destroyed,’ Mithuna said, ‘Morjin wanted Kaspar to burn down every town from here to Tria. But Kaspar refused. For his defiance, Morjin had him crucified along with the scryers.’

  Here Master Juwain came f
orward and said, ‘This is news indeed. Then Kaspar Saranom, not Petram, was the first to have made the red gelstei. His name will be remembered.’

  ‘Ha,’ Kane said, ‘it’s even greater news that Morjin didn’t know the art of making the firestones. We can hope he never learned it.’

  ‘Then this stone,’ Master Juwain said, daring to touch Maram’s crystal, ‘would be the first firestone ever made.’

  ‘So – and we can hope it’s the last remaining on earth.’

  We all looked at the firestone in a new light as Maram held it out and marveled at it.

  ‘It’s growing late,’ Mithuna said again. ‘Will you come with us, Atara?’

  ‘No,’ Atara said, ‘I’ll stay with my friends.’

  ‘Then we’ll return tomorrow,’ Mithuna said. ‘Good night.’ And with that, she gathered her sister scryers around her, and they walked off into the deep shadows of the mountains.

  ‘A beautiful woman,’ Maram said to me after she was gone. ‘How long do you think it’s been since she did more than, ah, look at a man?’

  ‘She’s a scryer of an oracle,’ I told him. Therefore she must have taken vows of celibacy.’

  ‘Well, so have I.’

  ‘Ha!’ Kane said, stepping up to him. ‘You might as well try to love this crystal as a scryer!’

  Maram look down at the firestone in his hand and muttered, ‘Ah, well, perhaps I will.’

  We camped that night by the stream where the ancient scryers had built their baths. It was a long, dark night of dreams and brilliant stars. The wind blew unceasingly down from the mountains to the north. Altaru and the other horses were restless, more than once whinnying and pulling at their picket stakes. In the dark notch of the Tur-Solonu, the ruins gleamed faintly in the starlight like bleached and broken bones defying time.

  Atara, lying on top of the inconstant earth with its whirling and numinous fires, sweated and turned in a sleep that wasn’t quite sleep. Her murmurs and cries kept me awake most of the night. Nightmares I had suffered through with her before as she had with me. But this was something different. I felt something vast and bottomless as the sea pulling her down into its onstreaming currents. There, in the turbid darkness, Atara screamed silently in fascination and fear, and I wanted to scream, too.

  We were all grateful the next day for the rising of the sun. When I asked Atara what she had seen in her sleep, she looked at me strangely as an uncharacteristic coldness came over her. Then she told me, ‘If I had been blind from birth and asked you to describe the color of the sky to me, what would you say?’

  I looked above the mountains, with their silvery rocks and emerald trees sparkling in the sun. There the sky was a blue dome growing bluer by the moment.

  ‘I would say that it is the deepest of colors, the softest and the kindest, too. In the blue of morning, we find ourselves soaring with hope; in the blue of night, with infinite possibilities. In its opening out onto everything, we remember who we really are.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have been a minstrel instead of a warrior,’ she said with a wan smile. ‘I’m sure I can’t do as well.’

  ‘Why don’t you try?’

  ‘All right, then,’ she said. The sleeplessness that haunted her face convinced me that she had seen something much worse than ghosts. ‘You spoke of remembrance, but who are we really? Infinite possibilities, yes, but only one can ever be. The one that shall be is the one that should be. But all of them are, always, and we are … so delicate. Like flowers, Val. Which is the one you will pick for me and tell me that you love me? And which is the one that can stand beneath the light of the sun?’

  Already, I thought, she was beginning to talk like a scryer, and I didn’t like it. To bring her back to the world of wind and grass and standing stones gleaming red beneath the rising sun, I suggested eating some of the delicious breakfast that Liljana was cooking, and this we did.

  After that, we climbed the cracked stone steps of the Tur-Solonu to look for the Lightstone. It was cool and dark inside that broken tower, and except for the faint radiance streaming off Flick’s spinning form, we wouldn’t have been able to see very much. As it was, there was nothing much to see – nothing more interesting than a few cobwebs and the bones of some poor beast who had dragged itself inside the door to die there in peace. The Tower, much to our disappointment, held no rooms that might be explored, for it was only a series of steps winding up inside a tube of marble. The ancient scryers had used it only as a means of standing closer to the stars. There was nowhere in its stark interior that Sartan Odinan could have hidden a golden cup.

  ‘Perhaps there are secret recesses,’ Maram said as he tapped the wall with the pommel of his sword. We were all gathered in the stairwell about seventy feet up inside the Tower. The outer wall curved dark and smooth around us, while the inner wall was like a pillar rising up as the Tower’s core. ‘Perhaps one of the stones is loose, and there Sartan hid the Lightstone.’

  But try as we might, we could find no loose stone in the walls or steps of the well-made Tur-Solonu. We tested every one of them all the way to the top of the Tower, which was broken and open to the sun high above the mountains.

  ‘It’s not here,’ I said, looking out over the standing stones below us. To the east, the ruins of the temple gleamed white in the harsh light. ‘Sartan could not have hidden it here.’

  Maram joined me upon the topmost unbroken step to stare out above the cracked and melted outer wall. He pointed at the temple’s ruins below us and said, ‘Perhaps there, then.’

  ‘No, it won’t be there,’ I said. The taste of disappointment, I thought, was as bitter as the molds growing across the exposed stones. ‘The words that Venkatil heard in the Caves told us to seek in the Tower of the Sun.’

  ‘But shouldn’t we at least go and see?’ Maram asked.

  ‘Of course we will,’ I said. ‘What else can we do?’

  After breaking to eat a simple lunch of bread and cheese that Mithuna and the other scryers brought us, we spent the whole afternoon picking among the temple’s ruins. If the Tower had suggested no possible places where a plain, golden cup could have been hidden, the scattered stones of the temple provided too many. Many sections of the walls had cracked and fallen down into great heaps of rubble; the Lightstone might have been buried in any one of them. During the centuries since Sartan had brought the Lightstone out of Argattha, wind had driven grit and soil into the cracks between the fallen stones, in some places, almost covering them altogether. And now grass grew in the soil, making a patchwork of green seams and turf among the many irregular-shaped mounds. Excavating any one of them could take many days, and there were many, many such mounds.

  ‘Oh, my Lord, it’s hopeless,’ Maram said to me as we gathered near one of the temple’s few standing pillars. The six scryers, with Mithuna at their center, stood off a few paces near a great slab of stone. ‘What shall we do?’

  Now Master Juwain and Liljana looked toward me with discouragement coloring their faces, while Alphanderry sat on a stone merrily munching on a handful of nuts. Kane stood staring at one of the mounds as if his eyes were firestones that might burn open the very ground. And Atara, next to me, was staring out into the nothingness of the deep blue sky.

  ‘It’s not hopeless,’ I said to Maram. ‘It can’t be hopeless.’

  Maram swept his hand out toward the remains of the temple and said, ‘Shall we all take up shovels and start digging, then?’

  ‘If all else fails, yes.’

  ‘We’d dig for a hundred years.’

  ‘Better that,’ I said, ‘than giving up.’

  At the prospect of so much work, Maram groaned and Alphanderry ate another nut. Then Maram pointed his red crystal at one of the mounds and said, ‘Perhaps I could melt the rock with this until the Lightstone was uncovered.’

  ‘But wouldn’t you melt it along with the rock?’ Alphanderry asked.

  ‘No,’ Maram told him. ‘It’s said that nothing can harm the Lightstone in an
y way. It’s said that even diamond won’t scratch it.’

  ‘But what if the sayings are wrong?’

  Maram stared across the ruins of the temple as if realizing the folly of what he had suggested. And then Mithuna stepped forward and said to Atara, ‘It would seem that your quest here has ended.’

  Atara suddenly broke off staring at the sky. To Mithuna, she said, ‘But how can it be since we haven’t found what we came here to find?’

  ‘Perhaps you have, Atara,’ Mithuna said, smiling at her. ‘Perhaps you should remain here with us.’

  Atara looked at Mithuna for a long time, and I was afraid that she might accept her invitation. Our quest, at that moment, certainly seemed hopeless. Freely we had all joined together to seek the Lightstone, and freely any of us might leave the company – so we had agreed before setting out from Tria.

  And then Atara turned toward me as her bright blue eyes filled with tears and a deeper thing. It was all warm and shimmering and more adamantine than diamond.

  ‘No,’ Atara finally said to Mithuna, ‘I’ll remain with my friends.’

  What should be shall be,’ Mithuna said. ‘In the end, we choose our futures.’

  Atara looked over at the Tur-Solonu where it rose up a few hundred yards away. Her eyes grew dry and clear as diamonds and gleamed with a wild light. She pointed at it and said, ‘Inside there is the future. I should have seen that all along.’

  Without another word she began walking quickly toward the Tower, and we all followed her. It didn’t take very long for us to wind our way among the standing stones and those lying down in the grass.

  ‘You were right,’ Atara said to Mithuna as we approached the Tower’s door. The Lightstone is here.’

  She stepped inside the door and so did I. And almost immediately I saw what I had missed before. On the Tower’s inner wall, high up to the left, ran a jagged crack almost a foot wide. And wedged into it was a plain golden cup shining with a beautiful light.

  ‘Atara!’ I cried out. ‘Atara, look!’

  But the crack was high enough above the dusty floor that only a tall man could look into it. Or reach into it with arm and hand. This I now did, scraping the skin off my knuckles as I jammed my hand into the rock to feel for the cup. But even though I turned and twisted about and ran my whole arm up and down the crack, my fingers closed around nothing but cold marble and air.