The Lightstone

by David Zindell

  Liljana smiled mysteriously and told us that she was good at keeping secrets; she promised that it would be safe with her. And then Master Juwain said, 'Yes, keep the belstei if you must, but please don't use it. Or else you'll risk falling mad like the ancient Sisters.'

  Liljana opened her hand to show us her little blue crystal. Then she said, 'Do you think this came to me not to be used? What have I done that you think I would misuse it?'

  'It's not you we doubt, Liljana,' Master Juwain said, 'but only the blue gelstei.'

  'And what of the prophecy, then?'

  We sat around the fire munching down roasted mussels as we spoke of Ayondela Kirriland's prophecy.

  "The seven Brothers and Sisters of the earth,"' Liljana reminded us, ' "with the seven stones will set forth into the darkness." '

  'Ah, well, if we are those seven,' Maram said, looking toward the south, 'at least we've already gone into the darkness. What could be darker than the Vardaloon?'

  He brought out his red stone and gazed at it as if its fire might reassure him, while Kane turned his black gelstei around and around in his hard, thick fingers. Atara gripped her scyrer's sphere even as Master Juwain studied his varistei and Liljana played with her bit of blue driftglass. And then Liljana said, 'If we are those seven, then we have two more gelstei to gain before the Lightstone can be found.'

  'And if those two are of the greater gelstei,' Master Juwain said, 'they must be the purple and the silver.'

  'Everyone looked at me and Alphanderry then as if wondering which of us would gain which stone.

  'The prophecy,' Alphanderry pointed out, 'said only that seven with the seven stones would set forth and that the Lightstone would be found. But we don't know that it will be found after the seven stones are gained.'

  'If we find the Lightstone first,' Maram said, 'what would be the need of gaining the seven gelstei?'

  'What would be the need of gaining them,' Liljana said, glancing at her figurine, 'if they are not to be used?'

  I thought of how Morjin had used a varistei to make a monster named Meliadus and how the Grays had nearly stolen my soul with Kane's black stone. I said, 'All the gelstei are dangerous, aren't they? Why should we single out Liljana's stone as being especially so?'

  'But, Val,' Master Juwain said, 'consider this stone's origins. The blue gelstei captured some of the essence of the kiriol. And kiriol is made from an infusion of kirque juice, as is its more deadly cousin, kirax.'

  The mere mention of this word itensified the pain of the poi-son that would always taint my blood. My thoughts turned again toward Morjin, and I feared yet again that the very act of thinking about him connected us heart to heart and mind to mind. As did the kirax.

  I looked at Kane and asked, 'You said before that the Lord of Lies must have a blue gelstei - why do you think this?'

  For a moment Kane stared into his black stone as if caught by a mirror. Then he looked up and told me, 'The Lord of Illusions has great powers, eh? What could be greater than the power to make others see what is not? But even he can't cast these illusions and nightmares all over Ea. For that he would surely need a blue gelstei.'

  'He has seen my mind, then,' I said. 'He has seen me.'

  Kane got up and stepped past the fire so that he could grab my arm and shake some courage into me. 'So, he's seen your mind, and that's too bad. But he hasn't seen your soul, I think. That's beyond any of the blue gelstei to reveal, even the most powerful.'

  The strength of his hand reassured me a little. But his words disturbed Maram, who said, 'But can he see Val, in his body? See where he is? If he can see him, then he can see us.'

  'I don't think he can,' Liljana said. 'So long as Val keeps from speaking to his mind and revealing the details of what he sees about him, I would think that the Lord of Illusions would be able to do nothing more than sense his presence somewhere - but not know where.'

  'This accords with what is known of the blue gelstei,' Master Juwain said. 'But we mustn't forget the poison that his man put into Val. I'm afraid that the kirax speaks for Val whether he wills it or not.'

  'So, it speaks,' Kane said. 'But speaks how? Surely not to the mind. As we've seen by Val's most recent dream.'

  'How so?' Master Juwain asked. 'Aren't dreams of the mind?'

  'Ha, the mind!' Kane coughed out. 'I say that dreams are of the soul. But no matter.

  Val has been free from Morjin's dreams and illusions since we killed the Grays. Why this sudden dream, then?'

  Master Juwain thought for a moment and then said, 'Meliadus.'

  'Just so,' Kane said. 'When Meliadus died, the pain of it opened Val up. Morjin felt his son's death - and much else as well. It's the valarda that truly joins Val to Morjin.

  This is his greatest vulnerability, eh?'

  As the fire sent up sparks into the darkening sky, we sat there speaking of the blue gelstei and the black, the purple and the silver and the gold -as well as the gifts of mindspeaking and the valarda. Finally, Kane held up his hand as if to ward off our most fearful speculations. And then he told us, 'No one knows everything about the Great Beast's powers. But this much we can take courage from: he can be fought.

  So, he casts illusions, but not all are maddened by them. He sends terrible dreams, but those there are who refuse to make them their own. He turns men and women into ghuls - but never the strongest, eh? In the end, I have to believe that each of us has the will to turn away from him.'

  He went on to say that one's will must be tempered like the toughest of steels and sharpened so that it cut through all fear; it must be polished to a mirrorlike finish so as to cast back to Morjin all his illusions, nightmares and lies.

  'Isn't this what I've always said?' Master Juwain asked, turning toward me. 'Have you been doing the exercises I taught you, Val?'

  I remembered him telling me how I must create an ally who would watch over me in my sleep and guard me from evil dreams, I shook my head as I told him, 'After the Grays' deaths, there seemed no need.'

  'I see,' Master Juwain said. 'Then perhaps it's time for some new lessons.'

  'Yes, perhaps it is, sir.'

  'And the dreams are the least of it,' he went on. 'While you're awake, you must try to turn your thoughts away from the Lord of Lies.'

  I bowed my head in acknowledgement that this was so.

  'And so must you, Liljana,' Master Juwain said, pointing at her blue crystal. 'Of all of us save Val, you must be the most careful.'

  'Of course I will,' she told him. 'Have you known me to be other-wise?'

  Master Juwain sighed as he rubbed the back of his head. 'Will you promise that if you do use your gelstei, you'll refrain from trying to see what is in the Red Dragon's mind?'

  'Of course I will,' she said again. 'I think I know too well what is in such men's minds.'

  Her offhand dismissal of Morjin as merely a man like any other alarmed me. As it did Atara. During our talk of the blue gelstei and mindspeaking, she had been mostly silent. But now she suddenly looked up from her clear crystal and said, 'Beware, Liljana - on the day you touch Morjin's mind, you'll smile no more, nor will you laugh again.'

  And that, I thought, as we said good night to each other and settled down onto our sleeping furs, was a warning that we all should heed.

  That night I was touched with dark dreams again, and I awakened long before sunrise to watch the clouds blowing in over the ocean and covering up the moon's feeble light. But then I meditated as Master Juwain had taught me; as I fell asleep again, I tried to remain aware of that part of me that never slept and remained always aware. It must have helped, for after that, I dreamed only of my family, whom I missed more than even the mountains of Mesh. My brothers - and my father, mother and grandmother, too - smiled at me from inside the castle of my soul and urged me to complete my quest and return home soon.

  The clouds blew away with the rising of the sun, and we were given a fine, bright day for traveling. As we were saddling the horses, Master Juwain looked out at
the ocean and said, 'Unless I've missed my count, today is the first of Marud. That's a good month for crossing the sea.'

  'Hoy, it's the best of months,' Alphanderry said. 'But where are we to find a ship to cross it?'

  That remained our most pressing problem, and we set out toward the west to solve it. We let the horses walk slowly along the beach for a couple of hours. Even though they had eaten their fill of grass during our camp, they were still sluggish in all their motions. They needed a good feed of oats, I knew, to fatten them up and renew their strength. But oats we had none, and neither in this country of sandy beaches and shrubs were we likely to find barley or rye or any other such grain. Altaru kept up his spirits even so. Twice, when I dismounted to walk beside him and give him a rest, he shook his head and kicked the sand as if offended that I doubted his ability to bear me. He was so great-hearted a beast I thought, that he would have plunged into the sea in an effort to swim us across it. What he would make of a ship if ever we came upon one, I didn't know.

  After perhaps ten miles, the shoreline curved toward the northwest, even as Kane and Master luwain had decided it must if we had reached the Bay of Whales. Eanna, of course, lay almost due west of us, and we might have ridden straight toward it in that direction, thus cutting a good chunk of country - and many miles - from our journey. But to do so would have meant re-entering the Vardaloon. And as Maram put it he'd rather ride around the coastline of all Ea than go back into that accursed forest again.

  And so we hugged the coast as nearly as we could. But with its many coves, headlands and cliffs, we often found ourselves veering quite a few miles inland where the goldenrod, fleabane and other shrubs gave way to a forest of oaks and tall pines that fairly reeked of pitch. We were all very glad to find few mosquitoes there and no leeches or ticks. The bloodbirds that had tormented the horses so terribly seemed to be creatures of the deeper woods, and the fiercest flying things that we saw were some windcatchers who seemed happy to eat the mosquitoes rather than us.

  The next day and the day after that found us still working our way to the northwest along the Bay of Whales. But on our fourth day since our talk about the blue gelstei, we came to a rocky prominence that pointed out toward the Northern Ocean. There the coast turned sharply toward the southwest. A hundred miles across these gray-green waters, Master Juwain said, the many small islands of the Nedu archipelago gave way to the those of the Elyssu. He told us that many ships sailed the sea between those islands and the bit of land upon which we stood- But that day we saw nothing but a few cormorants hovering over the sea,

  'Something is worrying you, sir,' I said to Master Juwain as we gazed out at the ocean. The wind off the water whipped my hair about my head, as it did the horses'

  manes. But Master Juwain, bald as an egg, was spared this nuisance.

  'Worrying me?' he said. 'Worrying, well, yes - I'm afraid there is.'

  He turned to point along the coast to our left. 'Unless the old maps no longer show the world as it is, fifty miles from this cape, we'll come to a river. The Ardellan, it used to be called. It drains the whole of the Vardaloon and empties into the ocean.

  How are we to cross it?'

  It might have vexed me that Master Juwain had waited until we had come so far to voice such doubts. But there was no help for it: he was a man who turned thing?

  over in his mind so thoroughly that he too often supposed what was obvious to him must be to others as well. As it happened, however, I had already discussed the crossing of the Ardellan with Kane.

  'We'll build rafts,' I said, 'and float across it.'

  'Rafts is it?' Master Juwain said. 'And how are we to build such things?'

  The failings of his knowledge made me smile. He could find a herb in a strange wood that would drive away some mysterious fever or tell of the making of the gelstei thousands of years ago. But the making of a simple raft seemed beyond him.

  'We'll cut trees,' I told him, 'and tie them together.'

  'Trees, is it? Yes, I see, I see.'

  Alter making camp that night near a little stream that ran into the sea, we set out to the southwest along the coast early the next morning. The shoreline here grew straighter and gentler and we found that we could keep to the beaches for many long stretches. Twenty-five miles we made that day at a slow walk, and our progress on the day following that was even more encouraging. By the late afternoon, we had our first signs that we were approaching the great river. We saw a flock of long winged azulenes, and Master Juwain said that they were birds of fresh water, not salt. The horses, sniffing at the air, seemed to smell this water beyond the haze of trees and shoreline ahead of us. And so did Liljana.

  'We're close,' she told us, pointing along the beach. Ahead of us some four miles, the coast seemed to take a turn to the south. 'That must be the mouth of the Ardellan.'

  We rode straight toward it now at a much quickened walk. The beach narrowed and then disappeared altogether, and we were forced to take to the forest that grew almost down to the sea. The trees here were the usual oaks and pines that found root in the sandy soil along true coast. They formed a thick wall blocking any view of the river that we must certainly be drawing nearer. I was glad for the tarry-smelling pines, for they grew stratghter than the oaks and would be much easier to cut. Just as I was wondering how many it would take to build a raft large enough to bear up two or three of the horses, the woods gave out suddenly onto a line of fields. And just beyond these patches of green. I gasped to see a wailed city built along the banks of the wide, blue river.

  'I didn't know there were any cities in this part of the world,' Maram said, speaking for all of us. 'Who are these people?'

  'Let's find out,' I said, nudging Altaru forward.

  In truth, the city was more of a town, being much smaller than Tria - or even Silvassu. And the wall surrounding it was neither magnificent nor formidable: it was made of poles of wood planted down into the moist earth like a long line of rafts joined together. And most of it we saw as we drew closer, was eaten with wormholes or rotten. The houses and all the buildings beyond it were made of the same rotting pine so that the whole city reeked of decay and the stench of tar and turpentine.

  But the wall at least had a gate and a road leading up to it. We made our way down this dirt track past ragged peasants who ran from us as they cried out and covered their faces. They disappeared into their tiny wooden huts and shut the doors behind them.

  'Ah, a friendly people,' Maram said as he rode next to me. 'Perhaps we shouldn't take advantage of their hospitality.'

  'But they might be able to help us cross the river,' I told him. 'Besides, we should find out what has frightened them so.'

  The peasants' cries had alerted the city's guards, who stood along a walkway behind the low walls looking down at us. They each had long blond hair and tangled blond beards. They wore tattered blue tunics emblazoned with crests showing an eagle clutching two crossed swords in its talons. Their iron helmets were pitted with rust, as were the poor, shortish swords they brandished at us.

  'Who are you?' demanded one of these blue-eyed guards that I took to be their captain. 'From where do you come?'

  We gave them our names and those of our lands; we told them that we needed help in crossing the Ardellan so that we could continue on our journey. After conferring with his fellows for a moment, the captain looked at us with his icy blue eyes and said, 'We know of Alonia and the Elyssu, but there are no kingdoms called Mesh and Delu that we have ever heard.'

  'So, it's a big world,' Kane growled at him as he tossed a little stone against the gate.

  'If you'll let us in, we'll tell you more about it'

  'The King will decide that,' the guard captain said. 'You'll wait here while he is summoned.'

  As if to give more weight to his command, the other guards suddenly produced crossbows and aimed them at us. But the iron of their mechanisms seemed worn away, and I doubted if they would fire.

  'What kind of king is it,' Maram whisper
ed to me, 'who is summoned to greet us rather than we to him?'

  For a while, as we sat on our horses and listened to the wind rattling across the potato fields surrounding the city, we awaited the answer to this question. And then we heard heavy steps behind the rickety old wall as of boots treading up wooden stairs. An old man suddenly showed his white-haired head and wispy white beard. I saw that he must have once been quite tall but was now stooped with age. He wore a faded purple mantle collared with white ermine that had seen better days. Upon his head was a silver crown that seemed to have been hastily polished in a vain effort to rub the tarnish away. The guard captain presented him as King Vakurun. The King looked down upon us with rheumy blue eyes that held no welcome but a great deal of fear.

  'Tell us your names again,' he commanded us in a quavering voice. 'Speak up so that we can hear you.'

  Again, we gave our names and waited for the gates to be opened.

  'How do we know you are who you say?' he asked us.

  'Who else could we be?' I replied.

  King Vakurun traded a quick look with his captain, then pointed at the trees beyond the fields. 'Only evil things have ever come out of those woods.'

  I smiled at Atara and Alphanderry, then called out, 'Do we look evil to you?'

  'That which has slain my people,' he told us as he pointed his old finger at Atara, 'is said sometimes to appear as fair as this maiden.'

  He went on to say that his realm had been attacked by a succession of enemies: great black bears deeper in the woods; an invincible knight mounted on a great white horse armored in diamonds; a tribe of warrior women; giant men with hideous faces and white fur; long, leechlike worms as big as whales - and other things.

  Now it was my turn to trade looks with Kane and the others. Then I looked up at the King and said, 'It would seem that all these enemies were really one enemy. And he has been slain.'

  We told of our passage through the Vardaloon and of Meliadus. We assured him that we had put this monster in the earth, from which he would never rise again. Then we told him about the quest and showed him the medallions that King Kiritan had given us.