The Lightstone

by David Zindell

  'Will the dragon follow us?' Maram asked.

  Daj, who was growing more impatient by the moment, pulled at my hand as he said, 'The dragon is very strong. She'll come soon -let's go!'

  Liljana looked at me as she nodded her head. 'Shell come,' she said with certainty.

  I knew she would. And so I turned to Daj and said, 'Take us out of here, then.'

  Daj led forth just ahead of me; Maram puffed and panted behind me followed by Liljana, Kane, Master Juwain and Ymiru. Atara insisted on bringing up the rear. If the dragon caught us here on the open streets, she said, she still might be able to turn and stop her with a few well-placed arrows.

  And so we made our way through dark tunnels of rock that twisted througth the earth. We passed by scoops in the mountain's basalt where once people had burrowed like moles. Daj led us through a snarl of streets almost as complex as the labyrinth. I had hoped that if the dragon did pursue us, we might lose her in this maze. But the dragon, I sensed, could track us by the scent of our sweat no less than of our minds. And since she had been imprisoned here untold years, perhaps no one or nothing knew the streets of Argattha's first level so well.

  It was just as we had turned onto a narrow street that we heard a deep drumming of the dragon's footfalls behind us: Doom, doom, doom. Daj took a quick look behind him and then called out, 'Run! Faster now! The stairs are close!'

  We ran as fast as we could. My boots slapped against dark, dirty stone as Maram wheezed along behind me. Farther back, Master Juwain was working very hard to keep up, while Ymiru's breath broke upon the fetid air in great gasps. His strength amazed me. He seemed to have shaken off the shock of his terrible wound. As had the dragon.

  She was drawing closer now, gaining upon us with a frightening speed. Her great body, no doubt filling most of the narrow tunnel, seemed to push the air ahead of her. Her thick cinnamon scent carried to us and stirred up a thrill of fear. And the sound of her clawed feet echoed down the twisting tube of rock: Doom, doom, dooml

  'Quick!' Daj shouted to us as his feet flew across the rock. 'We're almost there!'

  He led us onto a long, winding street that seemed not to intersect any others or have any outlet. If we were caught here, I thought, it would be the end. And then, to the drumming of the dragon's feet and the growing stink of relb, as I had begun to fear that Daj had forgotten the way toward the stairs, he ran down the street's final turning and through a portal into an immense open space. This, it seemed, had once been a great hall or perhaps an open square where people had gathered -in Argattha there was really no difference. Long ago, it seemed, the mountain had moved, opening a huge rent through the rock here. A chasm thirty feet wide ran almost straight through the center of this cavernous square. It would have blocked our way if not for the narrow stone bridge that led across it.

  'Come on!' Daj shouted to us as he made for the bridge.

  On the other side of it was a huge shelf of rock about as large as the dragon's hall.

  And at the far end of the chamber, two hundred yards away, loomed a large portal.

  'Val!' Maram shouted, 'she's coming!'

  Even as he said this, the chamber shook with a terrible sound: DOOM, DOOM, DOOM. 'Run!' I called.

  Daj was the first across the crumbling old bridge, followed by me, Maram and Liljana. But just as Kane set foot upon it, Atara's bowstring cracked, and I turned to see the dragon thunder into the chamber. She drove her great, scaled body bounding toward us as she hissed and growled. Her golden eyes were as full of hate as her throat was of the poisonous relb. There was no time, I saw, for anyone else after Kane to cross the bridge. And so I turned and pointed at a crack that ran deep into the chamber's side wall. To Master Juwain, I shouted, 'Hide!'

  Master Juwain, trapped on the rock shelf on the other side of the chasm, jumped toward the crack and fairly pulled Atara into it. Ymiru followed them a moment later.

  I was afraid that the dragon, striking sparks with her great claws, might thrust her head into the crack and burn them with her fire. But the dragon's eyes were fixed upon Maram, who was running behind Daj toward the portal. It was he who had wounded the dragon with his fire. And so it would be he, I sensed, whom the dragon would bum first before rending him with her terrible teeth. DOOM! DOOM!

  DOOM!

  But there was no way that he, or any of us, could now escape the dragon by running. With great, heaving bounds, she leapt toward us. Her wings beat out just as her huge hind feet struck down upon the center of the bridge. There was a loud cracking of stone and a flurry of driven air. The dragon descended upon the other side of the chasm just as the bridge swayed and shuddered and broke into great pieces in its plummet into the earth's dark and fathomless deeps.

  'Val!' Atara called to me from the other side of the chasm. She had stepped out of the crack and had her hands up to her mouth. 'Don't attack yet! If you move, you die!'

  Behind me, Daj and Maram were still running for the portal. But Kane stood on the huge rock shelf by my right side and Liljana on my left. My sword was drawn, and I had determined that I must charge the dragon to give them time to flee.

  The dragon, in her fury of driving feet and beating wings, thundered closer. Liljana waited calmly next to me, staring into her great eyes. Kane had his black stone in hand as his black eyes fixed upon the dragon's snarling face.

  'Val,' Atara called again. 'Wait until she rises! There will be a moment - you will see the moment!'

  Now the dragon, closing quickly upon me from some yards away opened her jaws. I wondered if I could endure the burning of her fire long enough to put my sword into her before I died.

  Doom, doom, doom. I felt my heart beating out the moments of my life: doom, doom, doom.

  The dragon's throat suddenly contracted and tightened even as mine did. And I heard Kane growling at my side, 'So . so .'

  The relb spurted at me in a great red jet of jelly. But just then, Kane finally found his way into the depths of his black crystal. The gelstei damped the fires of the relb and kept it from igniting. It splattered upon me like gore hacked out of an enemy's body.

  It was warm, wet and sticky, but it burned no worse than blood.

  The dragon, catching sight of this miracle with her intelligent eyes, dug her claws into the rock as she reared back and rose up above me. Her long neck drew back like a snake's so that she could strike out at me with her jaws and teeth.

  'Val!' Ymiru's huge voice rang out. He stood next to Atara on the other side of the chasm, pointing his purple crystal at the dragon. 'Can you see the scale?'

  I saw the scale, the one just above the dragon's belly that was now darker than all the others. Ymiru had given his arm so that he could work the magic of his gelstei against this stone-hard scale and soften it.

  Doom, doom, doom.

  The dragon's eyes stared down at me like searing suns. Her spicy, overpowering stench sickened me as she wetched and waited like a giant cobra. I knew that she would never allow me to get close to her exposed belly.

  'ANGRABODA!'

  With all the power of her stout body, Liljana suddenly shouted out this name that she had wrested from the dragon's mind. It was the dragon's true name, the breath of her soul, and for a moment it chilled her soul and froze her motionless. And in that moment I struck.

  I rushed in forward, Alkaladur held high. Its bright blade flared with a silver light. It warded off the last, desperate, paralyzing poison of the dragon's mind. And then I thrust it straight through the softened scale, deep into her heart. And a terrible fire, like blood bursting into flames, leapt along the length of my sword, into my blood -

  straight into my heart. If Atara hadn't cried out for me to move, I would have fallen beneath the dragon even as she fell to the chambers floor with a tremendous roar of anguish and a crash that shook the

  mountain's stone.

  It took me a long time to return from the dark world to which the dragon's death had sent me. Only my sword's shining silustria, quick ened by Flick's twi
nkling lights, called me back to life. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself lying on the cold stone floor of a cavern deep in the earth. The dragon lay dead ten feet away from me. And Liljana, Kane, Maram and Daj all knelt above me rubbing my cold limbs.

  'Come on,' Daj said, pulling at my hand. He pointed at the portal at the far end of the chamber. 'We're almost at the stairs.' I sat up slowly, gripping the diamond-studded hilt of my sword. Strength flowed into me even as the dragon's heart emptied the last of her blood into the great pool of crimson gathering upon the floor. I wanted to weep because I had killed a great, if malignant, being. But instead I stood up and walked over to the lip of the chasm.

  'Val - are you all right?' Atara called to me.

  She stood with Ymiru and Master Juwain on the other side, thirty feet away. It might as well have been thirty miles. There was nothing left of the stone bridge that had spanned it only a few minutes before.

  'Daj,' I said, looking at the boy, 'how can they get over to us?'

  'I don't know,' he said, 'that was the only way.'

  He pointed behind us at the portal and added, 'That corridor leads right to the stairs to the second level. There's nowhere else we can go,'

  'No other streets join the corridor?'

  'No.' 'But are there any other stairs on this level that lead up to the next?'

  As it happened, there was another set of stairs, back through the first level two miles beyond the dragon's hall. Daj told Master Juwain, Ymiru and Atara how to reach them.

  'Then where,' I asked Daj, 'can we meet on the second level?'

  'I don't know,' Daj said. 'I don't know that level at all.'

  'But you know the seventh level, don't you?'

  'As well as I know this one.'

  'Is there a place we can meet there?' I asked.

  'Yes, there's a fountain near Lord Morjin's palace. It's called the Red Fountain.

  Everyone knows where it is.'

  We held quick council then, shouting back and forth across the chasm. We decided that it would be foolish to try to wander about the city's second level hoping to run into each other somewhere in its twisting streets. And so we resolved to find the fountain that Daj had told of and meet there before stealing into Morjin's throne room.

  'But we've never been separated before,' Maram said, looking back at Master Juwain.

  'I don't like this at all.' None of us did But if we were to complete our quest we had no choice. And so we stood facing our friends across a dark crack in the earth and said goodbye to them.

  'If something should happen and we don't reach the fountain, don't wait for us,' I called to Atara. 'Find your own way into the throne room. Find the cup and take it out of this place, if you can.'

  'All right,' she called back. 'And you, too.'

  With a last look that cut deep into me, she turned to lead Master Juwain and Ymiru out of the chamber the way that they had come. And then, with Daj pulling at my hand, we turned the other way toward the portal and the dark corridor that pointed toward the stairs to Argattha's upper levels.

  Chapter 43

  The opening to the stairway proved quite narrow. There was no way, I saw, that the dragon could ever have forced her body into it. Daj informed us that there was a much larger passage from the first level to the second: a great road that wound up through the layers of rock and into the next level, where an enormous iron gate, kept closed, blocked the dragon from escaping into the inhabited parts of Argattha.

  It was into these parts, with great wariness, that we finally made our way. As in ascending a castle's high tower, we climbed five hundred feet up the winding stairs.

  In this turning tube of rock, it was cold and dark, with only my sword and Flick's lights providing any illumination. Few ever used this stairway, Daj told us. The Red Priests, torches in hand, might bear a struggling offering for the dragon down the stairs, but no one else would ever think of daring its domain. Likewise, none looked for anyone to emerge from the stairway into the second level. We found that the stairs gave out into a deserted corridor leading to a quiet street in the western district of the city. No one was about the street as we debouched onto it. The doors of the apartments along this tunnel of rock were closed. I wondered if it was night; in the twistings of the labyrinth and our fight with the dragon, we had utterly lost the thread of time.

  'It is night,' Kane said to us as we made our toward the noise of a larger street ahead of us. 'In this accursed city, always night.'

  Daj was little help to us here. Some days ago, he said, he had made his way up the stairs, even as we just had, only to be captured very near this district.

  'Lord Morjin's spies,' he said, 'saw the mark and captured me.'

  To cover this foul mark inked into his forehead, Master Juwain had rigged a length of cloth around his head. It looked, Kane told us, something like the flowing kaftafs worn by the tribesmen of the Red Desert.

  I worried how well Daj's disguise would hold up. I worried about Ymiru, as well. It was bad enough that he had to go forth dressed as a Saryak. Would his missing arm, I wondered, attract even more attention his way?

  In this matter, at least, we had little to fear. Soon we reached a street where many people were about. And many of them, I saw, were veterans of Morjin's conquests.

  Quite a few of those not dressed in his livery, mostly the invalided and old, showed signs of service in faraway lands: they had scars upon their faces and arms - that is, if their arms and other limbs hadn't long since been hacked off. Other people -

  blacksmiths, potters, masons, carpenters, bakers, and especially the tattooed slaves

  -bore the marks of Morjin's displeasure. The Red Dragon, as Daj told us, had settled upon mutilation as punishment for even minor offenses. As we made our way through the crowds behind rolling carts laden with iron ore, hay, water barrels and other supplies, we saw men and women with branded faces, notched ears and gouged-out eyes. Thieves who hadn't been given to the dragon lacked hands with which to cut others' purses. In no other city had I seen so many carved-up, burnt, tortured, unfortunate people. Ymiru, I thought, would attract no attention on account of his severed arm.

  It reassured me as well that we passed several Saryaks hurrying past us. These very tall men were dressed as Ymiru in black robes whose cowls covered their faces.

  They were girded with maces and curved swords; they served Morjin freely, for pay, as did other mercenaries whose appearance and dress led me to believe that their homelands were Sunguru and Uskudar - and even Surrapam, Delu and Alonia. Many Sami warriors, accoutered in leather armor as Atara, rode their steppe ponies boldly through the streets. Kane identified their tribes as Zayak, Marituk and western Urtuk, all of whom were said to have made alliances with Sakai. As well, we passed a band of Blues with their battleaxes and companies of marching levies from Hesperu, Karabuk and Galda, which Morjin's Red Priests had conquered outright in his name.

  It seemed that Morjin was gathering a great host under his banner and sheltering them here in this dark, impregnable city. If any of Argattha's residents looked our way, I hoped they would think that we were just a few more warriors come to sell our swords.

  Daj explained to us that the various levels of the city were mostly devoted to differing activities. Thus on the seventh level were to be found Morjin's palace and throne room, many of Argattha's temples, and other chambers given over to matters of ceremony and state. There lived the Red Priests and nobles, while the higher artisans such as painters and sculptors had shops on the sixth level, with weavers, clothmakers and dryers on the fifth, and so on down to the second level, the city's largest where Morjin's armies were quartered in dim, cramped barracks and the blacksmiths and armorers labored over their forges preparing for war.

  We saw signs of the coming cataclysm all around us. Carts stacked with yew and horn, bound for the bowmakers' shops, rolled past us. Other carts laden with sheaves of arrows moved the other way. Slaughterhouses laying in pork for long campaigns shook with the
squeals of pigs having their throats cut; their blood flowed out into the streets' gutters, there to be drunk by the scurrying rats or the clouds of flies that plagued Argattha.

  From smithies came the constant hammering of steel as men beat mauls against white-hot metal and made spearheads, swords, maces, arrowheads, helmets, shields and suits of mail. From the many forges billowed a thick smoke that choked the streets. Although numerous air shafts opened like chimneys upon ironworks and dank corridors, they were too few to carry away the fumes and stinks of the city.

  The foul mixture of smoke, rotting blood and fear was the smell of Argattha, and I worried that it would cling not just to my clothes and hair but to my soul.

  And how much worse, I thought, was the assault of this dreadful place on those who were forced or had chosen to dwell here. Mercenaries scur ried like rats themselves through the dirty streets. Mole-like merchants spent their years in little shops no better than pits and in scooped-out apartments that were worse. To the crack of whips, slaves dug new passages out of solid rock, and in long lines bore boulders and other debris out of Argattha's tunnels. They reminded me of ants more than men. Men and women, I thought, were not made to live so. We were noble beings who had come from far away to make a better world than this. We should have roses and starlight and hopes swelling like the Poru in flood. We should have great, soaring cities like Alundil and forests like the Lokilani's magical wood. A true king, my father once told me, turned all his thoughts and actions toward fulfilling the dreams of his people. In the end, he became their servant. But Morjin had bent the will of his subjects toward serving his dark design. They were a twisted people, bearing marks of woe upon their bodies and stunted in their souls.

  I thought that if I couldn't soon lay my hands upon the Lightstone and escape from this city, the sufferings of these thousands of tortured men, women and children would drive me mad. And escape, it seemed, was near. After stopping a broken, old women to ask directions, we found our way onto one of this level's boulevards. This great bore through tne mountain's basalt, lit with oil lamps and lined with shops, ran almost straight from the Gashur Gate in the east face of Skartaru to the Vodya Gate in the west. It intersected another similar boulevard connecting the Lokir Gate and the Zun Gate, long since closed. Gashur, Lokir Vodya and Zun - four of the great Galadin who had joined Angra Mainyu's rebellion against the angelic hosts and had been imprisoned with him on the world of Damoom. Their names were reminders of why we had come to Argattha - and why we co uldn't just flee out of the city's gates.