The Lightstone

by David Zindell

  'Ha!' Kane said, clapping him on the back, 'it means just that.'

  'Does it, Val?' Maram asked me.

  'Yes,' I said, 'it does.'

  With the exception of Ymiru, who insisted on staying awake to take the first watch, we all retired to our furs. But I, at least, could not sleep. Great things had been told that night. Far beneath Skartaru's pointed summit, in the bowels of the earth, Morjin labored long and deep to free the Dark Lord from his prison on the world of Damoom. And now we must labor to find the door into Argattha. What we would find on the other side, I thought, not even the Galadin themselves could know.

  Chapter 40

  We were all quiet when we set out the next morning. Our breath steamed out into the bitter air, and our boots crunched against the cold, squeaking snow. It was enough, I thought, to avoid trpping and tumbling down some steep slope, enough merely to keep placing one foot ahead of the other and continue plowing through Sakai's frozen wastes. But I couldn't help thinking of Angra Mainyu, this great, fallen Galadin whose dreadful face could darken whole worlds. I knew that somehow, through Morjin, he, too, sensed my defiance and trembled to crush me in his wrath.

  And so for two days we worked our way closer to Argattha. Our approach led us through a wild, broken country where we lost the thread of our road. Finally, following Ymiru's map and the lines of the land, we came to a great gorge running for forty miles to either side of us, north and south. It was hundreds of feet wide and very deep: standing at the lip of it, we looked down and saw a little river winding its way past layers of rock far below. Ymiru had hoped to find a bridge here, but it seemed that the only way across the gorge was to fly.

  'Is there no way down it?' Atara asked, looking over the edge. I think she knew there wasn't. A very agile man, perhaps, might be able to climb down such a forbidding wall but no horse ever could.

  Liljana looked up and down the gorge, at the Mountains framing it, and then at the map which Ymiru held out before him. She said, 'It would be hard work to walk around this. I should think it would add a hundred miles to our journey.'

  'That's too far,' Master Juwain said. 'The horses would starve.'

  As we stood with the horses on the narrow shelf of land above the gorge, I felt Altaru's belly rumbling with hunger - as I did my own. We had run out of oats for the horses and had little enough food for ourselves.

  'Perhaps the bridge you seek is farther up the gorge,' Liljana said to Ymiru. Then she turned to look at the rent earth toward the right and said, 'Or perhaps that way.'

  'I had thought the bridge would be right here,' Ymiru said despond ently.

  He walked away from us, along the ragged lip of the gorge, looking down at the rocks below for any sign of a fallen bridge. Then he sat down on a rock and bent his head low as he stared down at the ground in silence.

  'So,' Kane said, 'seeking for non-existent bridges up and down this gorge would be as futile as trying to walk around it.'

  'Then we will have to turn back,' Maram said.

  'Turn back?' Kane said to him. 'To what?'

  After a while, I gave Altaru's reins to Atara, and went over to Ymiru where he sat fifty yards away, now staring down into the gorge as if he were contemplating throwing himself into it.

  'I was sure the bridge would be here,' he said, not even bothering to look up at me.

  'Now I've put us in a hrorrible spot.'

  'You can't blame yourself,' I said, sitting down beside him. 'And you can't give up hope, either.'

  'But, Val, what are we to do?' he asked as he pointed at the gorge. 'Walk across this on air? You might as well put your hropes into old wives' legends.'

  Something sparked in me as he said this. And so I asked him, 'What legends are these?'

  He finally looked up at me and said, There are stories told that the ancients built invisible bridges. But no one believes them.'

  'Perhaps you should believe them,' I said, gazing at the sun-filled spaces of the gorge. 'What else is there to do?'

  'Nothing,' he said. 'There be nothing to do.'

  'Are you sure?'

  He smiled at me sadly and said, 'That be what I love about you, Val - you never give up hrope.'

  'That's because there always is hope.'

  'In you, perhaps, but not in me.'

  Inside him, I sensed, was a whole, dark, turbid ocean of self doubt and despair. But there, too, was the sacred spark: the ineffable flame that could never be quenched so long as life was in life. And in Ymiru this flame burned much brighter than it did in other men. How was it that he, who could feel so much, couldn't feel this?

  'Ymiru,' I said, grasping his huge hand. It was much warmer than mine, and yet as my heart opened to him, I felt a knife-like heat passing from me into him. 'You've led us this far. Now take us the rest of the way toward Argattha or else the work of your father and all your grandfathers will have been in vain.'

  His ice-blue eyes suddenly lit up as he squeezed my hand almost hard enough to break it. He looked across the gorge and said, 'But Val, even if there were such a bridge here, how would I ever find it?'

  'Your people are builders,' I said to him. 'If you were to build a bridge across this ditch, where would you put it?' A fire seemed to flare inside him then. He gathered up a great handful of stones and leapt to his feet. His hard eyes darted this way and that measuring distances, assessing the lay of the great, columnar buttresses of rock along the length of the gorge. He began walking along it with great strides and great vigor. Here and there, he paused a moment to hurl a stone far out into the gorge and watch it plunge through the air down towards the river below.

  'What did you say to him?' Master Juwain asked as Ymiru came up to the place where he and the others waited with the horses. 'What is he doing?'

  Ymiru cast another stone arcing out into space, and Maram said, 'No doubt he's calculating how long it will take us to fall to the bottom if we're foolish enough to try to climb down this wall. Ah, we're not that foolish, are we, Val?'

  At that moment, one of Ymiru's stones made a tinking sound and seemed to bounce up into the air before continuing its fall into the gorge. As Maram watched dumbfounded - along with Kane and the others - Ymiru threw another stone slightly to the right and achieved the same effect. Then he flung all the remaining stones in his hand out into space, and many of them bounced and skittered along what could only be the unseen span of one of the bridges told of in the Ymanir's old wives'

  tales.

  'I suppose I'll have to pay more attention to old wives,' Maram said after Ymiru had explained things to him. 'Invisible bridges indeed! I suppose it's made of frozen air?'

  Ymiru, looking out at the gorge with a happy smile, said, 'Our Elders have long sought the making of a crystal they called glisse. It be as invisible as air. This bridge, I'm sure, be made of it.'

  It seemed a miracle that the gorge should be spanned by a crystalline substance that no one could see. All that remained was for us to cross over it.

  'Perhaps,' Master Juwain suggested to Maram, 'you should lead the way.'

  ' I? I? Are you mad, sir?'

  'But didn't you tell us, after your little escapade at Duke Rezu's castle, that you're unafraid of heights?'

  'Ah, well, I was speaking of the heights of love, not this.'

  Ymiru stepped forward and laid his hand on Maram's shoulder. He said, 'Don't worry, little man. I think you're going to love walking on air.'

  As we made ready to cross the gorge, we found that the horses would not step very close to the edge of it; surely, I knew, they would balk at setting their hooves down on seemingly empty space. And so in the end, we had to blindfold them. We found some strips of cloth and bound them over their eyes.

  'You'd do better to blindfold me,' Maram muttered as he fixed the cloth around Iolo. 'We're not really going to step out onto this glisse, are we, Val?'

  'We are,' I said, 'unless you first discover a way to fly.' Ymiru, who was the only one of us freed from the burden of leading a horse,
borrowed Kane's bow so that he could feel the way ahead of him. He stepped to the very edge of the gorge. Slowly, he brought the tip of the bow down through the air until it touched the invisible bridge. And then, as we all held our breaths, he stepped out into space onto it. 'It be true!' he shouted. 'The old tales be true!' In all my life, I had seen nothing stranger than this great, furry man seeming to stand on nothing but air. And now it was our turn to join him there.

  And so, as Ymiru led forth, tapping the bow ahead of him like a blind man, we followed him one by one out onto the invisible bridge. With Maram and Iolo right behind him, we kept as straight a line as we could. Our lives depended on this discipline and exactitude. Ymiru discovered that the bridge wasn't very wide: little more than the width of a couple of horses. And it had no rails that we could grasp onto or keep us from slipping over its edge. It was, quite simply, just a huge span of some flawlessly clear crystal that had stood here for perhaps a thousand years.

  For the first half of our crossing, we walked up a gradually curving slope. The horses' hooves dopped against the unseen glisse as they might any stone. We tried not to look down at what our boots were touching, for beneath the bridge, straight down hundreds of feet, were many rocks and boulders that had fallen into the gorge and piled up along the river's banks. It was all too easy to imagine our broken bodies dashed upon them. The wind - the icy, merciless wind of the Wailing Way - howled through the gorge and cut at us like some great battle-axe, threatening to drive us over the edge. It set the bridge swaying through space with a sicking motion that recalled the pitching and rolling of Captain Kharald's ship.

  'Oh,' Maram gasped ahead of me as he clutched his belly with his free hand, 'this is too much!'

  'Steady!' I called out to him from behind Master Juwain and Liljana. 'We're almost across.'

  In truth, we were just cresting the highest part of the bridge, with the river directly below us.

  'Oh,' Maram groaned, 'perhaps I shouldn't have drunk that kalvaas before trying this.'

  My anger as he said this was an almost palpable thing. It seemed to reach out from me unbidden, like an invisible hand, and slap him across the face. 'But you'll wreck your balance!' I called to him.

  'I only had a nip,' he called back. 'Besides, I thought I needed courage more than coordination.'

  It seemed, as I watched him stepping daintily behind Ymiru, that he had coordination enough to complete the crossing. He moved quite carefully, with a keen awareness of what lay beneath him. And then, as he grabbed at his churning belly yet again and the wind hit the bridge with a tremendous gust at the same moment, his foot slipped on the glisse as against ice. He lost his balance - as the rest of us nearly did, too. He grabbed at Iolo's reins to steady himself, but just then Alphanderry's spirited horse stamped and whinnied and shook his head. This was enough to further throw Maram off his center. With a great cry and terror in his eyes, with his arms and legs flailing like windmills, he began his plunge into space.

  He surely would have died if Ymiru hadn't moved very quickly to grab him. I watched in disbelief as Ymiru's great hand shot out and locked onto Maram's hand.

  For a moment, he held him dangling and kicking in mid-air. Maram, despite what Ymiru liked to call him, was no little man. He must have weighed in at a good eighteen stone. And yet Ymiru hauled him back onto the bridge as easily as he might a sack of potatoes.

  'Oh, my Lord!' Maram gasped, falling against Ymiru and grabbing on to him. 'Oh, my Lord - thank you, thank you!'

  Almost as quickly, Ymiru had moved to grasp Iolo's reins with his other handgnd steady him. Now he pressed these leather straps into Maram's hand and told him,

  'Here, take your hrorse.'

  Maram did as he was bade, and he stroked Iolo's trembling side as it to calm him -

  and himself. And then he gathered up the best ot his courage, turned to Ymiru and said, 'Thank you, big man. But I m afraid we both missed a great chance.'

  'And what be that?'

  'To see if I could really fly.'

  We completed the rest of the crossing without further incident. When we reached the far side of the gorge, Maram let loose a great shout of triumph and insisted on drinking a little kalvaas to celebrate. My nerves were so frayed that I agreed to this indulgence. Maram smiled, glad to be forgiven his foolishness., and passed me his cup. The disgusting brew was just as greasy and rancid as it always was. But at that moment, with out feet firmly planted on ground that we could see, it tasted almost like nectar.

  That was the last great obstacle we faced along the Wailing Way. Five days later, after traversing a good part of the Nagarshath to the south of the headwaters of the Blood River, we came out around the curve of a mountain through some foothills to behold the great golden grasslands of the Wendrush. To the east of us, as far as the eye could see, was a rolling plain opening out beneath a cloudless blue sky. There antelope gathered in great herds and lions hunted them. There, too, the tribes of the Sarni rode freely over the wind-rippled grass, hunting the antelope - and each other.

  Many times before, faring west from the kel keeps of Mesh's mountains, I had lost myself in the vast sweeps of this country. And now I wondered what it would be like to ride across it, five hundred miles, toward Vashkel and Urkel and the other mountains I knew so well.

  'That way be your hrome,' Ymiru said as we gathered on the side of a great hill.

  Then he turned and pointed to the south of us, where the easternmost mountains of the Nagarshath edged the grasslands. 'And that be Skartaru.'

  The sight of this grim, black mountain struck an icy dread deep into my bones. If Alumit had been made by the Galad in, Skartaru might have been carved by the Baaloch himself. It was a great mound of basalt, cut with sharp ridges and points like the blades of knives. Snow and glaciers froze its upper slopes; sheer walls of forbidding rock formed its lower ones. I marveled at Ymiru's feat of navigation, for he had brought us out on the side of a mountain just to the north and east of it. From this vantage, we had a good look at two of its faces. The filmed east face was shaped like an almost perfect triangle, save that near its higher reaches, a notch seemed to have been cut from it between its two great peaks. Far beneath the higher and nearer of these - a great pointed horn of black rock three miles high - a road led out of one of Argattha's gates and sliced across the Wendrush. Along this road, I thought, the ancient Valari had been crucified after the Battle of Tarshid. And a thousand feet above the gate, on the east face's sun-baked rock, Morjin had crucified the great Kalkamesh for taking the Lightstone from him.

  I stared at this glowing black sheet, and almost unbidden, the ancient words formed upon my lips:

  The lightning flashed, struck stone, burned white –

  The prince looked up into the light;

  Upon Skartaru nailed to stone

  He saw the warrior all alone.

  'It doesn't seem possible,' I whispered to the wind.

  'What doesn't?' Maram asked me. 'That Kalkamesh could have sur vived such torture?'

  'Yes, that,' I said. 'And that Telemesh could have climbed that wall at night and brought Kalkamesh down.'

  I was not the only one struck with the marvel of this great feat. Liljana and Atara stared at the mountain's east face, while Ymiru pointed his furry finger at it and Master Juwain shook his head. And as for Kane, his black eyes were so full of fire that they might have melted the mountain itself. Sometimes I could sense the swell of the passions and hates that streamed inside him. But now there was only a burning, bottomless abyss.

  'Skartaru,' he growled. 'The Black Mountain.'

  He tore his eyes from its east face and pointed at the darker north one. 'There's the Diamond,' he said.

  A few miles from where we stood, across some grassy buttes where the plains came up against the mountains, we had a good view of the long-sought Skartaru's north face. As shown by Ymiru's map, this was a towering diamond of black rock, at least three miles high, framed on either side by enormous, humped buttresses. We
looked between them for the rock formation told of as the Ogre. But either we were too far away or lacked the proper angle for viewing, because we couldn't discern it.

  'It be there, I'm sure of it,' Ymiru said. 'But we've got to get closer.'

  So began the final leg of our journey toward Argattha. We might simply have ridden straight across the mounded grasslands toward the valley that cut beneath Skartaru's north face. But such exposure, so near to the enemy's secret city, would have been a great foolishness. As it was standing here on the side of a mountain above the lands of the Zayak tribe of the Sarni - and in clear sight of Argattha - we were taking a great risk And so we decided on the longer, and relatively safer, route toward our objective. This would keep us close to the mountains, hugging their curve toward the south and through their foothills. It would take us over wooded slopes and around rocky ridges, past the mouths of two small canyons giving out onto the Wendrush's plain. And so it would take us much longer. But now that we had come so near to our fate, whatever that might be, none of us felt much hurry to meet it.

  We spent the rest of the day walking through the foothills. Here, so close to Argattha, every flight of a bird and every sound was a call to grip our weapons more tightly. Atara, who had the best eyes of any of us, kept a tense vigil, watching the ridgelines above us, peering far out on the plains of the Wendrush. Kane brought up the rear of our company, and he seemed able to sense danger through every pore of his skin. And yet despite Skartaru's looming presence and the dread that crushed down upon us like immense, black boulders from its heights, our luck held good.

  We reached a little canyon to the north of the mountain without sighting anyone.

  Here, in this grassy hollow where only a single ridge blocked the way toward Skartaru's north face, we came to the moment that I had been dreading almost more than entering the mountain. For here we decided that we must set the horses free.

  'Ah, perhaps one of us should remain with them,' Maram said, looking about the canyon.

  Actually, it was more of a great bowl scooped out of the side of the mountain to the west, with ridges framing it to the north and south. A few trees ran around the curve of these ridges, but in between was a half mile of good grass.