'It was the Galadin who sent us here to recover the Lightstone,' he told us. 'For them, who were immortal and could not be killed, Ea was deemed too perilous. For us, who were merely immortal, this world proved to be perilous enough, eh?'
How was it possible, I wondered? How was it possible that this man who stood before us grim, angry, pained and still dripping with the blood of those whom he had slain - could be one of the blessed Elijin?
'Five men Kalkin put to the sword, eh? But we were forbidden to kill men. And so in breaking with the Law of the One, Kalkin broke with the One, perhaps forever.'
Kane stared at the cup in my hand, and there was an immense and endless blackness inside him waiting to be filled with light. How long he had been waiting, I thought!
For he, who had once held the Lightstone and had beheld its perfect radiance even as I had, had been cast into a lightless void and had endured a dark night of the soul that had lasted nearly seven thousand years.
Maram, suddenly understanding this, gazed at Kane in awe. 'No wonder you fought so hard to bring us here to recover the Lightstone.'
'Ha!' Kane called out. 'I never thought we would find the Lightstone here. I never believed the account of Master Aluino's journal. I knew Sartan Odinan, and I never thought it possible that his greed would have permitted him simply to drop the Lightstone down on top of Morjin's damn throne.'
Maram looked at him nervously and said, 'If that's true, then you must have wanted
-'
'Revenge!' Kane cried out. He raised up his bloody sword and swept it about the hall. 'I came here to put this into Morjin's treacherous heart! Does anyone deserve death more? What's one more murder against all those I have slain?'
'Perhaps,' I said, remembering Atara's warning, 'one too many.'
"You say that?' growled at me, looking at my sword. 'How many have you slain with that today?'
'Too many,' I said as I looked about the hall. Then I held Alkaladur out toward him and said, 'If you are really Kalkamesh, then you forged this sword. And so it is yours.'
'No, it's yours now. You're better at killing with it than I ever was,'
'But if you were to take it back, the silver gelstei might -'
'It's not your damn bloody sword I want!' he thundered at me. There was a strange, faraway look in his eyes - and the faint fire of madness, too. 'It's not the silver gelstei that I want.'
Now the red flames in his eyes built hotter as he stared at the Lightstone. His voice filled with anger and a choking desire as he pointed at the cup and called out 'So, Morjin has escaped me, eh? But it seems that fate has put the Lightstone in my hands.'
'In Val's hands,' Maram said, stepping forward. 'That was the rule we made in Tria, that whoever found the Lightstone would have final say as to what would be done with it.'
'So,' Kane said, taking a step closer to me. His knuckles were white around the hilt of his sword. 'So.'
'You pledged your sword to Val's service!' Maram reminded him.
'So I did,' Kane said. 'I pledged it only so long as he sought the Lightstone. Well, the Lightstone has been found, and so he seeks it no longer.'
I didn't know if Kane had fallen so far that he would kill me to claim the Lightstone; I didn't know if I could kill him, even in its defense. I doubted that I could kill him.
Despite his words of praise as to my prowess with the Bright Sword that he had forged, he was an angel of death who gripped in his hands a killing sword of his own.
'Kalkin,' I said to him.
'Don't call me that!'
'No matter how many you kill, even Morjin, even Angra Mainyu himself, it will never bring back the light.'
'Damn you!'
We met eyes suddenly, and the anguish that I saw in him cut open my heart. I knew then that I could never kill this brave blessed man whom I loved.
Without a further glance at my sword, I quickly sheathed it. I looked deep into Kane's black eyes, so like my own. As the Valari were sons and daughters of the Star People, so were the Elijin - in transcendence and immortality. Kane, I thought, was Valari in his soul, and something more.
I held the Lightstone out to him then. I said, 'Take it. If you will promise to guard and keep it for the Maitreya, then I would have the Lightstone go with you.'
Kane stepped forward and reached out to grasp the Lightstone with his left hand.
My hand, suddenly freed from this slight weight, suddenly, felt a thousand times heavier.
'So,' he whispered, 'so.'
He stood looking back and forth between the cup in his left hand and the sword in his right. He blinked his eyes in rhythm with the beating of my heart. His belly tightened into a hard knot, and his hands, first the left and then the right, began to tremble. 'Kalkin,' I said.
With a great effort, he broke off gazing at the Lightstone and looked at me. His grim mouth could make no words, but his heart spoke to me all the same. In the quiet deep thunder of the blood that we shared, in the touching of each other's unfathomable suffering and pain, his soul cried out that I had offered him something more precious than a small, golden cup, and that was friendship and trust What is it to love a man? This above all: that you want with all the polished silver of your being to show him the glory of his own.
Now Kane's jaws clamped shut as if he were trying to bite back the worst of pains. I felt him swallowing against a hard knot in his throat that would not be dislodged. A great pressure built in his chest and burned up through his eyes. He took a long, deep look at the Lightstone.
'Valashu,' he gasped.
He suddenly cast his sword clanging down upon the bare rock floor. I felt tears burning in my eyes a moment before his filled as well. And then, at last, the storm broke. He lifted the Lightstone up high and threw back his head. His mouth opened wide as he let loose a terrible sound: 'KALKIN!' No torture of Morjin's could have torn such a cry of agony and despair from a man. He fell down to his knees before me, weeping for himself and the world. In his wracking sobs was all his grief at losing Alphanderry to death - and much, much else that he had held inside for years beyond counting. His breath burst out so violendy that the stone of the hall seemed to shake and the very heavens open up even through miles of rock and ice. For a moment his tears, and my own, flowed so freely that they seemed almost to wash away the blood spilled here this terrible day.
I rested my hand on top of his thick, white hair as he reached his hand behind my leg and pressed his forehead against the hard rings of steel covering my knee. The tremors ripping through his powerful body took a long time to subside. At last, when he had grown quiet again, as I listened to Atara's pained breaths breaking out into the air behind me and to Maram weeping like a child, he looked up at me. He pulled away from me, slightly, and pressed the Lightstone back into my hand.
'You take it,' he said to me. 'Guard it for the Maitreya. So, guard it with your life -
that is your fate.'
I gave the cup to Maram to hold, and his large hand closed around it.
'Some wounds,' Kane said, 'only he can heal.' I reached out to grasp Kane's hard hand in mine as I helped him to his feet. Then he let go of me and pulled himself up tall and straight. The tears in his eyes were gone. I looked deep into their bright, black depths; as had been the Lightstone, they were full of stars.
'Valashu,' he said, smiling at me.
For millennia he had waged the bitterest of wars against himself, but angels cannot so easily be killed. A broken man had knelt before me, but here rose up another. The lines of his face seemed to lose their hardness and rigidity. Years fell from him, untold years, and I saw him as he must have been in his youth when he had walked with the One. His skin gleamed all golden like the sun, and his white hair had taken on the silver tones of silustria; a crown of light surrounded his head and fell about his shoulders like a lion's mane set on fire. He seemed raimented all in glorre, while his whole being was transparent to the hopes and dreams of a deeper world. A man he truly was, like the first man to w
alk the earth and perhaps the last.
And yet he was also something more, for here he stood all noble, wise, beautiful and radiant, blazing like a star, as one of the great Elijin.
But only for a moment. He moved over to Atara and laid his hand on her face to turn her toward him. Then, with infinite gentleness, he touched his thumbs into the hollows of her eyes. And the angel fire passed into her and out of him.
'Val!' Atara cried out. 'I know where the passageway is!'
Once, speaking of Morjin, Kane had asked what could be greater than the power to make others see what is not. And here, in this beautiful woman restored for a moment to her vision, the only answer: the power to help them see what really is.
Maram gave the Lightstone to Ymiru, who stood holding it in his single hand a few moments before turning it over to Liljana. Then Maram, looking at Kane in awe, said,
'Lord Kalkin, you are -'
'Don't say that name again!' Kane told him. Much of the light had now gone out of him; with its passing, Kane had returned to us - but never quite the same Kane again.
'So, you'll call me as you have, do you understand?'
'All right, then,' Maram said.
Kane smiled grimly as he bent to pick up his sword.
Liljana, after gazing into the Lightstone as long as she dared, gave the cup to Master Juwain, who held it only a moment before placing it in Atara's hands. While Daj stood close to Liljana, looking on in awe. Flick suddenly appeared and looped around the cup as if spinning out strands of a silvery cocoon of light.
'So, the second quest ends,' Kane said, casting one last look at the Lightstone. As a great noise of pounding boots and shaking steel sounded from outside the hall, his eyes flashed around the throne room's three gates. 'And it will be the end of us if we don't find our way out of here soon. It sounds as if they're bringing up the whole damn army!'
'Come,' Atara said softly, talcing my hand.
She gave the Lightstone back to me, and I returned it to its resting place beneath my armor. Then she led us over to the wall behind the throne. There, set into the fearsome face of a carving of Angra Mainyu, she found the hidden door. It took only a few moments to open it.
'Come,' she said again, this time taking Daj's hand. 'Let's go home.'
Then she turned into the tunnel beyond the open door and bravely led the way into the bright, black darkness.
Chapter 46
The passageway took us straight toward the southeast for a distance of a few hundred yards. It gave onto a much larger corridor running east and west. Just at the juncture, however, we found our way blocked by lines of iron bars running from the ceiling down into the floor. An iron door, like one leading from a jail cell, was set into the middle of the bars.
'Locked!' Maram cried out as he rushed forward to try it. 'Then we're Still trapped in this forsaken place!'
None of us knew how long it would be before Morjin's men burst into the throne room behind us and found their way to this secret passage.
'Hrold your noise!' Ymiru said softly, stepping up to the bars.
Then he brought forth his purple gelstei and worked its magic upon them. Its violet light transformed the crystal within the iron into a softer substance - soft enough so that Ymiru's great strength, with Maram, Kane and me helping, sufficed to bend them. Daj danced through this opening, and as for the rest of us, only Ymiru had much trouble squeezing through.
'There!' he huffed out after leaving shreds of white fur upon the rough iron bars.
'We're not trapped! I'll never allow myself to be trapped and taken again.'
'But how did Morjin take you?' Maram asked him.
'It was bad chance,' he said. 'After Val killed the dragon, we made it back past the old throne room and up to the seventh level without much trouble. Then we ran into that company of Grays.'
The Grays, as he explained, had scented out the secrets of their minds, and had used their frightful minds to freeze them with fear until Morjn's guards - and Morjin himself - could be summoned to bind them in chains.
'It was hrorrible,' Ymiru said, nodding at Atara and Master Juwain. 'We fought them as hard as we could, with the light meditations, but how long can one hrold against such creatures? And then Morjin suggested taking us into the throne room; he said that the torture of our bodies might help the Grays break into our minds.' 'Are you sure they didn't?' Kane asked him.
'I think not,' Master Juwain said, stepping up to Ymiru. 'When Morjin discovered that you and Val had broken into the throne room, he was very keen to have the Grays turn their minds toward you.'
'So, then it's possible that the enemy doesn't know how we entered Argattha?'
'It's likely,' Master Juwain said. 'I heard Morjin give orders to double the guard at the city's gates. He berated the captain of his guards for allowing a giant such as Ymiru to pass through un challenged.'
'Then they will likely look for us at these gates,' Maram said. 'If we can find our way back as we came, we may yet have time to make our escape.'
'A little time, perhaps,' Kane said. 'But we must hurry.' And so hurry we did, out onto the larger corridor, which was lit with numerous glowstones set at intervals into the black, basalt walls. To the west as Kane told us, the corridor led back toward Morjin's palace. And to the east, this bore through solid rock would take us straight through the mountain to the window carved into its side known as Morjin's Porch.
'But how did you know that?' Daj asked him. 'If this is the way toward Morjin's Porch, only Lord Morjin is ever allowed to use it.'
'Not ever, lad,' Kane said grimly as he stared down the corridor. 'Once, a long time ago, one named Kalkamesh was taken this way and crucified to the face of the mountain.' Daj, who apparently hadn't heard this story, stared at Kane in awe. 'If I remember aright,' Kane said, 'it also leads to Morjin's Stairs.'
As Daj had told us, Morjin's Stairs would lake us down to Argattha's lower levels, perhaps as far down as the abandoned first level - though not even Daj or Ymiru could say where it might give out. 'Can you see where?' Kane asked Atara.
Atara, who could 'see' well enough to keep from stumbling along this dim corridor, shook her head and told us, 'It's too far.'
'Let's find out, then,' Kane said.
We had no trouble in finding Morjin's Stairs about a quarter mile to our left. They spiraled deep into the dark mountain, turning around and around, and down and down for hundreds of feet. After a while, we came to a landing giving out onto a tunnel, which we supposed led to the secret tunnel system and sanctuaries on the sixth level. It was quiet in that direction. This gave us good hope as we turned the other way and resumed our journey down the endlessly winding stairs Thus we passed openings to the fifth, fourth, third and second levels There, as we had prayed, the stairs didn't end; they led us another five hundred feet down to the first level of Argattha.
'What is this?' Maram said, pointing ahead of us. The stairs let us out onto a very short corridor that seemed to end abruptly in a wall. 'Another trap?'
'Ha, another secret door, most likely!' Kane said, clapping him on the shoulder. Then he stepped forward and called out, 'Memoriar Damoom!'
Remember Damoom, I thought as Kane pushed open the carefully concealed door. I looked back at Atara and the one-armed Ymiru, and I knew that all of us, live though we might another thousand years, would always remember Argattha.
By great, good fortune, we discovered that the door opened upon Morjin's old throne room. We stepped out into the great hall where we had fought our first battle with the dragon. Here, with its great, cracked columns of basalt and the pyramid of skulls, the floor was still caked with the blood from Ymiru's severed arm. And across from the great portal leading out to the first level, the doorway to the stairs by which we had first entered the hall still stood open.
It was strange and disquieting to cross this vast open space where once had thundered a dragon. We were glad to gain the shelter of the stairwell. And glad, too, to climb down a little way to the corrid
or leading back toward the labyrinth. Daj, who had explored many of the tunnels of Argattha's first level, had never dared to enter this dark, twisting place. As I held high Alkaladur, now blazing brilliantly in the Lightstone's presence, he and the others followed closely behind me around and through its turnings. At last we came out of it as we had entered it. And so we stepped into the close, foul-smelling, rat-infested tunnel system leading to the cave hidden behind Skartaru's north face.
We found the cave as we had left it: piled with the bodies of the knights we had slain, as well as the saddles of their driven-off horses and other accouterments. Here, despite our fear of pursuit, despite the awful fetor of the rotting bodies, we had to pause to search through the knights' gear. We took away as many saddlebags of food as we could carry, and the smallest saddle that we could find. Atara was very happy to lay her hands on a full quiver of arrows; although they were not so well-made as those that the Sarni carefully shaped and fletched, she said that they would likely fly straight enough if only she could aim them at our enemies.
When we were finally ready, we rolled aside the great rocks with which we had sealed the cave. We stepped outside into a brilliant night. In all my life, the air that I breathed had never smelled so clean and sweet -even though that air was still of Sakai. A cold wind blew down from the Nagarshath through the valley to the north of the mountain. It set all of us except Ymiru to shivering, even so we were glad for the scent of ice and pines that it carried along in its frigid gusts. 'What time is it?'
Maram asked softly as he gazed at the shadowed rockscape of the valley.
I looked up at the sky; to the east of us, above the dark, rolling plains of the Wendrush, the Morning Star stood like a beacon among the Night constellations.
'It's nearly dawn,' I told him. 'What day is it?'
None of us seemed to know. In the lightless hell of Argattha, we might have journeyed and fought for two days - or two years.
'I would guess it's the 24th,' Master Juwain said 'Or perhaps the 25th.'
'The 25th of Ioj?' Maram asked.
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