The Lightstone

by David Zindell

  The moment that we stepped into this chamber, with its many rare books of ancient poetry, my sword's blade warmed noticeably. And when we crossed into an adjoining room filled with vases, chalices, jewel-encrusted plates and the like, the silustria flared so that even Atara and Maram noticed its brightness.

  'Is it truly here, Val?' Maram said to me. 'Can it be?'

  I swept my sword from north to south, behind me and past the room's four corners.

  It grew its brightest whenever I pointed it east, toward a cracked marble stand on which were set two golden bowls, to the left and right, on its lowest shelves. Two more crystal bowls gleamed on top of the next higher ones, and at the stand's center on its highest square of marble sat a little cup that seemed to have been carved out of a single, immense pearl.

  'Oh, my Lord!' Maram cried out. 'Oh, my Lord!',

  Being unable to restrain himself - and wishing to be the first to lay his hands on the Lightstone and thus determine its fate according to our company's rules - he rushed forward as fast as his fat legs would carry him. I was afraid that in his excitement and greed, he would crash into this display. But he drew up short inches from it. He thrust out his hands and grasped the golden bowl to his right. Without even bothering to examine it, he lifted it high above his head, a wild light dancing in his eyes.

  'Be careful with that!' Kane snapped at him. 'You don't want to drop it and dent it!'

  'Dent the gold gelstei?' Maram said.

  Atara, whose eyes were even sharper than her tongue, took a good look at the bowl in his handstand said, 'Hmmph! If that's the true gold, then a bull's nose ring is more precious than my mother's wedding band.'

  Much puzzled, Maram lowered the bowl and turned it about in his hands. His brows narrowed suspiciously as he finally took notice of what was now so easy to see: the bowl was faintly tarnished and scarred in many places with fine scratches and wasn't made of gold at all. As Atara had hinted, it was only brass.

  'But why display such a common thing?' Maram asked, embarrassed at his gullibility.

  'Common, is it?' Kane said to him.

  He walked closer to Maram and took the bowl from him. Then he picked up a much-worn wooden stick still lying on the shelf near where the bowl had been. With the bowl resting in the flat of one callused hand, he touched the stick to the rim of the bowl and drew it round and round in slow circles. It set the bowl to pealing out a beautiful, pure tone like that of a bell.

  'So, it's a singing bowl,' he said as he set it back on its stand. He nodded at the crystal bowls at the next highest level. 'So are those.'

  'What about the one that looks like pearl?' Maram called out.

  Not waiting for a answer, he picked up the pearly cup from the stand's highest level and tried to make music from it using the same stick as had Kane. After failing to draw forth so much as a squeak, he put it back in its place and scowled as if angry that it had disappointed him.

  'It seems that this bowl,' he said, 'is for the beauty of the eye and not the ear.'

  But I was not so sure. Just as I brought my sword closer to it and aligned its point directly toward its center, it began glowing very strongly. I thought that I could hear this pearly bowl singing faintly, with a soaring music that recalled Alphanderry's golden voice.

  'There's something about this bowl,' I said. I took a step closer, and now Alkaladur began to hum in my hands.

  Atara picked up the iridescent bowl and wrapped her long fingers around it. She said, 'It's heavy - much heavier than I would think a pearl of this size would be.'

  'Have you ever seen a pearl so large?' Maram asked her. 'My Lord, it would take an oyster the size of a bear to make one so.'

  Atara set this beautiful bowl back in its place. She stared at it with a penetrating sight that seemed to arise from a source much deeper than her sparkling blue eyes. And so did Kane.

  'Can it be?' Maram said. Then he turned his head back and forth as if shaking sense into himself. 'No, of course it can't be. The Lightstone is of gold. This is pearl. Can the gold gelstei shimmer like pearl?'

  'Perhaps,'Atara said, 'the Gelstei shimmers as one wishes it to.'

  The silence that filled the chamber then was as deep as the sea.

  'This must be it,' I said, staring into Alkaladur's bright silver and listening to the pearl bowl sing. 'But how can it be?'

  My heart beat seven times in rhythm with Atara's, Maram's and Kane's. And men Atara, staring at the bowl as if transfixed by its splendor, whispered to me, 'Val, I can see it! It's insidel'

  As we kept our eyes on the gleaming bowl, she told us that the pearl formed only its veneer; somehow, she said, the ancients had layered over this lustrous substance like enamel over lead.

  'But it's no base metal that's inside,' she said. 'It's gold or something very like gold -

  I'm sure of it.'

  'If it's gold, then it must be the true gold,' I said.

  Kane's eyes were now black pools that drank in the bowl's light. 'So, we must break it open,' he told rat. 'Strike it with your sword Val.'

  'Bur what about the Lord librarian's second rule?' I asked.

  Maram wiped the sweat from his flushed face. 'We weren't to harm any of the books, Lord Grayam said.'

  'But surely the spirit of his rule was that we weren't to harm any-thing here.'

  'Ah, surely,' Maram said, 'this is the time to abide by the letter of his rule?'

  'Perhaps we should bring the cap to him and let him decide.'

  Atara who had a keener sense of right and wrong than I, nodded at the cup, and told me, 'If you were lord of Silvassu and your castle was about to fall by siege, would you want to be troubled by such a decision?'

  'No, of course not.'

  'Then shouldn't we abide by the highest rule?' she asked. And then she quoted from Master Juwam's book 'Act with regard to others as you would have them act with regard to you.'

  I was quiet while I gripped my sword, looking at the bowl.

  'Strike, Val,' Kane told me. 'Strike. I say.'

  And so I did. Without waiting for doubt to freeze my limbs, I swung Alkaladur in a flashing arc toward the bowl Kane had taught me to wield my sword with an almost perfect precision; I aimed it so that its edge would cut the pearl to a depth of a tenth of an inch, but no more. The impossibly sharp silustria sliced right into the soft pearl. This thin veneer split away more easily than the shell of a boiled egg. Pieces of pearl fell with a tinkle onto the marble stand. And there upon it stood revealed a plain, golden bowl.

  'Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lord!'

  Kane, ignoring the stricken look on Maram s face, picked it up. It took him only a moment to peel away the pieces of pearl that still clung to the inside of the bowl. Its gleaming surface was as perfect and unmarked as the silustria of my sword.

  'It a the Lightstone!' Maram cried out

  A strangeness fell over Kane then. His face burned with wonder, doubt, joy, bitterness and awe. After a very long time, he handed the bowl to me. And the moment that my hands closed around it, I felt something like a sweet liquid gold pouring into my soul.

  'I wish Alphanderry was here to see this.' I said.

  The coolness of the bowl's gold seemed to open my mind; I could hear inside myself each note of Alphanderry's last song.

  As Atata next took the bowl, I saw Flick whirling above us as he had at the sound of Arphanderry's music. His exaltation was no less than my own. Then Maram's fat fingers closed around the bowl and he cried out again, louder now: 'The Lightstone!

  The Lightstone!'

  We held quick council and decided that we must find Liljana and Master Juwain. But it was they who found us. At the sound of footsteps in the adjoining chamber with its poetry books, Maram quickly tucked the bowl into one of his tunic's pockets and very guiltily began sweeping the shards of pearl off the stand into his other pocket.

  When Liljana followed Master Juwain into the room, however, he breathed a sigh of relief and broke off hiding the signs of our desecration. He b
rought out the bowl and told them, 'I've found the Lightstone! Look! Look! Behold and rejoice!'

  As Master juwain's large gray eyes grew even larger, I again beheld this golden bowl and drank in its beauty. It was one of the happiest moments of my life,

  'So this is what you've been shouting about,' Master Juwain said, staring at the bowl.

  'We've been looking all over for you -- did you know it's past midday?'

  In this windowless room, time seemed lost in the hollows of the bowl that Maram held up triumphantly. In defense at missing our rendezvous by King Eluli's statue, he said again, 'I've found the Gelstei!'

  'What do you mean, you found it?' Atara asked him.

  'Well, I mean, ah, I was the first to pick it up. The first to see it.'

  'Were you the first to see it?' Atara asked him.

  She went on to say that Kane was the first to pick it up after I had cut away the pearl, and who could say who had first laid eyes upon it? Then she told him that it was ignoble to fight over who should receive credit for finding the Lightstone.

  'I don't think that anyone has found the Lightstone,' Master Juwain said.

  Maram looked at him in such disbelief that he nearly dropped the bowl. Atara and I clasped hands as if to reassure each other that Master juwain had ruined his sight in reading his books all day. And Kane just stared at the bowl, his black eyes full of mystery and doubt.

  Master luwain took the bowl from Maram as Liljana stepped closer. He looked at us and said, 'Have you put it to the test?'

  'It is the Gelstei, sir,' I said. 'What else could it be?'

  'If it's the true gold,' he told me, 'nothing could harm it in any way. Nothing could scratch it - not even the silustria of your sword.'

  'But Val has already struck his sword against it!' Maram said, 'And see, there is no mark!'

  In truth, though, Alkaladur's edge had never quite touched the bowl. Because I had to know if it really was the Lightstone, I now brought out my sword again. And as Master Juwain held the bowl firmly in his hands, I drew the sword across the curve of the bowl. And there, cut into the gold, was the faintest of scratches.

  'I don't understand!' I said. The sudden emptiness in the pit of my belly felt as if I had fallen off a cliff.

  'I'm afraid you've found one of the False Gelstei,' he told me. 'Once upon a time, more than one such were made.'

  He went on to say that in the Age of Law, during the hundred-year reign of Queen Atara Ashtoreth, the ancients had made quests of their own. And perhaps the greatest of these was to recapture in form the essence of the One. And so they had applied all their art toward fabricating the gold gelstei. After many attempts, the great alchemist, Ninlil Gurmani, had at last succeeded in making a silver gelstei with a golden sheen to it. Although it had none of the properties of the true gold, it was thought that the Lightstone might take its power from its shape rather than its substance alone. And so this gold-seeming silustria was cast into the form of bowls and cups, in the likeness of the Cup of Heaven itself. But to no avail.

  'I'm afraid there is only one Lightstone,' Master Juwain told me.

  'So,' Kane said, glowering at the little bowl that he held. 'So.'

  'But look!' I said, pointing my sword at the bowl. 'Look how it brightens!'

  The silver of my sword was indeed glowing strongly. But Master Juwain looked at it and slowly shook his head. And then he asked me, 'Don't you remember Alphanderry's poem?'

  The silver sword, from starlight formed,

  Sought that which formed the stellar light,

  And in its presence flared and warmed

  Until it blazed a brilliant white.

  'It warms,' he said, 'it flares, but there's nothing of a blazing brilliance, is there?'

  In looking at my sword's silvery sheen, I had to admit that there was not.

  'This bowl is of silustria,' Master Juwain said. 'And a very special silustria at that.

  And so your sword finds a powerful resonance with it. It's what pointed you toward this room, away from where the Lightstone really lies.'

  The hollowness inside me grew as large as a cave, and I felt sick to my soul. And then the meaning of Master Juwain's words and the gleam in his eyes struck home.

  'What are you saying, sir?'

  'I'm saying that I know where Sartan Odinan hid the Lightstone.' He set the bowl back on its stand and smiled at Liljana. 'We do.'

  I finally noticed Liljana holding a cracked, leather-bound book in her hands. She gave it to him and said, 'It seems that Master Juwain is even more of a scholar than I had thought.'

  Beaming at her compliment, Master Juwain proceeded to tell us about his researches in the Library that day - and during the days that I had lain unconscious in the infirmary.

  'I began by trying to read everything the Librarians had collected about Sartan Odinan,' he said. 'While I was waiting for Val to return to us, I must have read thirty books.'

  A chance remark in one of them, he told us, led him to think that Sartan might have had Brotherhood training before he had fallen into evil and joined the Kallimun priesthood. This training, Master Juwain believed, had gone very deep. And so he wondered if Sartan, in a time of great need, seeking to hide the Lightstone, might have sought refuge among those who had taught him as a child. It was an extraordinary intuition which was to prove true.

  Master Juwain's next step was to look in the Librarian's Great Index for references to Sartan in any writings by any Brother. One of these was an account of a Master Todor, who had lived during the darkest period of the Age of the Dragon when the Sarni had once again broken the Long Wall and threatened Tria. The reference indicated that Master Todor had collected stories of all things that had to do with the Lightstone, particularly myths as to its fate.

  It had taken Master Juwain half a day to locate Master Todor's great work in the Library's stacks. In it he found mention of a Master Malachi, whose superiors had disciplined him for taking an unseemly interest in Sartan, whom Master Malachi regarded as a tragic figure. Master Juwain, searching in an off-wing of the north wing, had found a few of Master Malachi's books, the tides of which had been indexed if not their contents. In The Golden Renegade, Master Juwain found a passage telling of a Master Aluino, who was said to have seen Sartan before Sartan died.

  'And there I was afraid that this particular branch of my search had broken,' Master Juwain told us as he glanced at the False Gelstei. 'You see I couldn't find any reference to Master Aluino in the Great Index. That's not surprising. There must be a million books that the Librarians have never gotten to - with more collected every year.'

  'So what did you do?' Maram asked him.

  'What did I do?' Master Juwain said. 'Think, Brother Maram. Sartan escaped Argattha with the Lightstone in the year 82 of this age - or so the histories tell. And so I knew the approximate years of Master Aluino's life. Do you see?'

  'Ah, no, I'm sorry, I don't.'

  'Well,' Master Juwain said, 'it occurred to me that Master Aluino must have kept a journal, as we Brothers are still encouraged to do.'

  Here Maram looked down at the floor in embarrassment. It was clear that he had always found other ways to keep himself engaged during his free hours at night.

  'And so,' Master Juwain continued, 'it also occurred to me that if Master Aluino had kept a journal, there was a chance that it might have found its way into the Library.'

  'Aha,' Maram said, looking up and nodding his head.

  'There is a hall off the west wing where old journals are stored and sorted by century,' Master Juwain said. 'I've spent most of the day looking for one by Master Aluino. Looking and reading.'

  And with that, he proudly held up the fusty journal and opened it to a page that he had marked. He took great care, for the journal's paper was brittle and ancient.

  'You see,' he said, 'this is written in Old West Ardik. Master Aluino had his residence at the Brotherhood's sanctuary of Navuu, in Surrapam. He was the Master Healer there.'

  No,
no, I thought, it can't be. Navuu lay five hundred miles from Khaisham, across the Red Desert in lands, now held by the Hesperuks' marauding armies.

  'Well,' Atara asked, 'what does the journal say?'

  Master Juwain cleared his throat and said, 'This entry is from the 15th of Valte, in the year 82 of the Age of the Dragon.' Then he began reading to us, translating as he went:

  Today a man seeking sanctuary was brought to me. A tall man with a filthy beard, dressed in rags. His feet were torn and bleeding. And his eyes: they were sad, desperate, wild. The eyes of a madman. His body had been badly burned from the sun, especially about the face and arms. But his hands were the worst. He had strange burns on the palms and fingers that wouldn't heal. Such burns, I thought, would drive anyone mad.

  All my healings failed him; even the varistei had no virtue here, for I soon learned that his burns were not of the body alone but the soul. It is strange, isn't it that when the soul decides to die, the body can never hold onto it.

  I believe that he had come to our sanctuary to die. He claimed to have been taught at one of the Brotherhood schools in Alonia as a child; he said many times that he was coming home. Babbled this, he did. There was much about his speech that was incoherent And much that was coherent but not to be believed. For four days I listened to his rantings and fantasies, and pieced together a story which he wanted me to believe - and which I believe he believed.

  He said his name was Sartan Odinan, the very same Kallimun priest who had burned Suma to the ground with a firestone during the Red Dragon's invasion of Alonia. Sartan the Renegade, who had repented of this terrible crime and betrayed his master. It was believed that Sartan killed himself in atonement, but this man told a different story as to his fate.