Читать книгу The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two - David Zindell, David Zindell - Страница 10

The city of Khaisham was built on a strong site where the plains of Yarkona come up against the curve of the White Mountains. Directly to its east was Mount Redruth, an upfolding of great blocks of red sandstone that looked like pieces of a rusted iron breastplate. Mount Salmas, to the east and north, was more gentle in its rise toward the sky and slightly higher, too. Its peak pushed its way above the treeline like a bald, rounded pate. Out from the gorge between these two mountains rushed a river: the Tearam. Its swift flow was diverted into little channels along either side of it in order to water the fields to the north and west of the city. The city itself was built wholly to the south of the river. A wall following its curves formed the city’s northern defenses. It rose up just above the Tearam’s banks and ran east into the notch between the mountains. There it turned south along the steep slopes of Mount Redruth for a mile before turning yet again west through some excellent pasture. The wall’s final turning took it back north toward the river. This stretch of mortared stone was the wall’s longest and its most vulnerable – and therefore the most heavily defended. Great round towers surmounted it along its length at five-hundred-foot intervals. The south wall was likewise protected.

The men and women of Khaisham had good reason to feel safe in their little stone houses behind this wall, for it had never been breached or their city taken. The Lords of Khaisham, though, desired even more protection for the great Library and the treasures it held. And so, long ago they had built a second, inner wall around the Library itself.

This striking edifice occupied the heights at Khaisham’s northeast corner, almost in the mouth of the gorge, and thus further protected by the Tearam and Mount Redruth. Unlike Khaisham’s other buildings, which had been raised up out of the sandstone common in the mountains to the east, the Library had been constructed of white marble. No one remembered whence this fine stone had come. It lent the Library much of its grandeur. Its gleaming faces, which caught and reflected the harsh Yarkonan sun, showed themselves to approaching pilgrims even far out on the pasturage to the west of the city. The centermost section of the Library was a great, white cube; four others, forming its various wings, adjoined it to the west, south, east and north so that its shape was that of a cross. Smaller cubes erupted out of each of these four, making for wings to the wings. The overall effect was that of a great crystal, like a snowflake, with points radiating at perfect angles from a common center.

We came to Khaisham from the Kul Moroth almost directly to the west. I was never to remember very much of this twenty-mile journey for I was conscious during only parts of it. It was I, not Atara, whom my companions had to lash to his horse. At times, when my eyes opened slightly, I was aware of the rocky green pastures through which we rode and the shepherds tending their flocks there. More than once, I listened as Kane seemed to sigh out the name of Alphanderry with his every breath. I watched as his eyes misted like mirrors and he clamped shut his jaws so tightly that I feared his teeth would break and the splinters drive into his gums. At other times, however, the darkness closed in upon me, and I saw nothing. Nothing of this world, that is. For the bright constellations I had longed to apprehend since my childhood were now all too near. I could see how their swirling patterns found their likeness in those of the mountains far below them – and in Flick’s fiery form, and in a man’s dreams, indeed, in all things. In truth, from the moment of Alphanderry’s death, I was like a man walking between two worlds and with my feet firmly planted in neither.

It was just as well, perhaps, that I couldn’t touch upon my companions’ grief. Can a cup hold an entire ocean? With the passing of Alphanderry from this world, it seemed that the spirit of the quest had left our company. It was as if a great blow had driven from each of us his very breath. I was dimly aware of Maram riding along on Alphanderry’s horse and muttering that instead of burning the Kul Moroth’s rocks, he should have directed his fire at Count Ulanu and his army. He voiced his doubt that we would ever leave Khaisham, now. The others were quieter though perhaps more disconsolate. Liljana seemed to have aged ten years in a moment, and her face was deeply creased with lines that all pointed toward death. Master Juwain was clearly appalled to have saved Atara only to lose Alphanderry so unexpectedly a few minutes later. He rode with his head bowed, not even caring to open his book and read a requiem or prayer. Atara, healed of her mortal wound, looked out upon the landscape of a terrible sadness it seemed that only she could see. And Kane, more than once, when he thought no one was listening, murmured to himself, ‘He’s gone – my little friend is gone.’

As for me, the sheer evil of Morjin and all his works chilled my soul. It pervaded the world’s waters and the air, even the rocks beneath the horses’ hooves; it seemed as awesome as a mountain and unstoppable, like a rockslide, like the ocean in storm, like the fall of night. For the first time, I realized just how slim our chances of finding the Lightstone really were. If Alphanderry, so bright and pure of heart, could be slain by one of Morjin’s men, any of us could. And if we could, we surely would, for Morjin was spending all his wealth and bending all his will toward defeating all who opposed him.

By the time we found our way past Khaisham’s gates and into the Library, my desolation had only deepened as a cold worse than winter took hold of me and would not let go. Now the stars were all too near in the blackness that covered me; it seemed that I might never look upon the world again. For four days I lay as one dead in the Library’s infirmary, lost in dark caverns that had no end.

My friends nearly despaired of me. Atara sat by my side day and night and would not let go my hand. Maram, sitting by my other side, wept even more than she did, while Kane stood like a statue keeping a vigil over me. Liljana made me hot soups which she somehow managed to make me swallow. As for Master Juwain, after he had failed to revive me with his teas or the magic of his green crystal, he called for many books to be brought to our room. It was his faith that one of them might tell of the Lightstone, which alone had the power to revive me now.

It was the Lightstone, I believe, no less the love of my friends, that brought me back to the world. Like a faint, golden glimmer, my hope of finding it never completely died. Even as Liljana’s soups strengthened my body, this hope flared brighter within my soul. It filled me with a fire that gradually drove away the cold and awakened me. And so on the thirteenth day of Soal, and the one hundred and fifteenth of our quest, I opened my eyes to see the sunlight streaming through the room’s south-facing windows.

‘Val, you’ve come back!’ Atara said. She bent to kiss my hand and then she pressed her lips to mine. ‘I never thought …’

‘I never thought I’d see you again either,’ I told her.

Above me, Flick turned about slowly as if welcoming me back.

We spoke of Alphanderry for a long while. I needed to be sure that my memory of what happened in the Kul Moroth was real and true, and not just a bad dream. After Atara and my other friends attested to hearing Alphanderry’s screams, I said, ‘It’s cruel that the most beloved of us should be the first to die.’

Maram, sitting to my left, suddenly grasped my hand and squeezed it almost hard enough to break my bones. Then he said, ‘Ah, my friend, I must tell you something. Alphanderry, while dearer to all of us than I could ever say, was not the most beloved. You are. Because you’re the most able to love.’

Because I didn’t want him to see the anguish in my eyes just then, I closed them for a few moments. When I looked out at the room again, everything was a blur.

Master Juwain was there at the foot of my bed, reading a passage from the Songs of the Saganom Elu: ‘“After the darkest night, the brightest morning. After the gray of winter, the green of spring.”’

Then he read a requiem from the Book of Ages, and we prayed for Alphanderry’s spirit; I wept as I silently prayed for my own.

Food was then brought to us, and we made a feast in honor of Alphanderry’s music which had sustained us in our darkest hours, in the pathless tangle of the Vardaloon and in the starkness of the Kul Moroth. I had no appetite for meat and bread, but I forced myself to eat these viands even so. I felt the strength of it in my belly even as the wonder of Alphanderry’s last song would always fill my heart.

After breakfast, Kane brought me my sword. I drew forth Alkaladur and let its silver fire run down its length into my arm. Now that I was able to sit up and even stand, weakly, I held the blade pointing toward the Library’s eastern wing. The silustria that formed its perfect symmetry seemed to gleam with a new brightness.

‘It’s here,’ I said to my companions. ‘The Lightstone must be here.’

‘If it is,’ Kane informed me gravely, ‘we’d better go look for it as soon as you’re able to walk. Much has happened these last few days while you’ve slept with the dead.’

So saying, he sent for the Lord Librarian that we might hold council and discuss Khaisham’s peril – and our own.

While we waited in that sunny room, with its flowering plants along the windows and its rows of white-blanketed beds, Kane reassured me that the horses were well tended and that Altaru had taken no wound or injury in our flight across Khaisham from the pass. Maram admitted to having to leave his lame sorrel behind; it was his hope that some shepherd might find him and return him before we left Khaisham. If he took any joy from inheriting and riding Alphanderry’s magnificent Iolo, he gave no sign.

Soon the door to the infirmary opened, and in walked a tall man wearing a suit of much-scarred mail over the limbs of his long body. His green surcoat showed an open book, all golden and touched with the sun’s seven rays. His face showed worry, intelligence, command and pride. He had a large, jutting nose scarred across the middle and a long, serious face with a scar running down from his eye into his well-trimmed gray beard. His hands – long and large and well-formed – were stained with ink. His name was Vishalar Grayam, the Lord Librarian, and like his kindred, he was both a scholar and a warrior.

After we had been presented to each other, he shook my hand, testing me and looking at me for a long time. And then he said, ‘It’s good that you’ve come back to us, Sar Valashu. You’ve awakened none too soon.’

He went on to tell me what had happened since our passage of the Kul Moroth. Count Ulanu, he said, disbelieving that the mysterious rockslide might keep him from his quarry, had sent many of his men scrambling over it. They had all perished on Kane’s and Maram’s swords. Kane had then led the retreat from the pass, and Count Ulanu hadn’t been able to pursue us. By the time he had raced his men south to the Kul Joram, our company had nearly reached Khaisham’s gates.

Count Ulanu had then sent for his army, still encamped near Tarmanam in Virad. It had taken his men four days to march across to eastern Yarkona, pass through the Kul Joram and encamp outside of Khaisham. Now the forces of Aigul and Sikar, and the Blues, were preparing to besiege the city’s outer walls.

‘And if that isn’t bad enough,’ the Lord Librarian told us, ‘we’ve just had grievous news. It seems that Inyam and Madhvam have made a separate peace with Aigul. And so we can’t expect any help from that direction.’

And worse yet, he told us, was what he had heard about the domains of Brahamdur, Sagaram and Hansh.

‘We’ve heard they’ve agreed to send contingents to aid Count Ulanu,’ he said. ‘They’re being brought up as we speak.’

‘Then it seems all of Yarkona has fallen,’ Maram said gloomily.

‘Not yet,’ Lord Grayam told him. ‘We still stand. And so does Sarad.’

‘But will Sarad come to your aid?’ I asked him. I tried to imagine the Ishkans marching out to aid Mesh if the combined tribes of the Sarni tried to invade us.

‘No, I doubt if they will,’ the Lord Librarian said. ‘I expect that they, too, in the end, will do homage to Count Ulanu.’

‘Then you stand alone,’ Maram said, looking toward the window like a trapped beast.

‘Alone, yes, perhaps,’ the Lord Librarian said. He looked from Kane to Atara and then me. Lastly, he fixed Maram with a deep look as if trying to see beneath his surface fear and desperation.

‘Then will you make peace with the Count yourselves?’ Maram asked him.

‘We would if we could,’ the Lord Librarian said. ‘But I’m afraid that while it takes two to make peace, it only takes one to make war.’

‘But if you were to surrender and kneel to –’

‘If we surrendered to Count Ulanu,’ the Lord Librarian spat out, ‘he would enslave those he didn’t crucify. And as for our kneeling to him, we Librarians kneel to the Lord of Light and no one else.’

He went on to tell us that the Librarians of Khaisham were devoted to preserving the ancient wisdom, which had its ultimate source in the Light of the One. Theirs was the task of gathering, purchasing and collecting all books and other artifacts which might be of value to future generations. Much of their labor consisted of transcribing old, crumbling volumes and illuminating new manuscripts. They worked gold leaf into paper and vellum, and spent long hours in their calligraphy, penning black ink to white sheets with devout and practiced hands. Perhaps their noblest effort was the compilation of a great encyclopedia indexing all books and all knowledge – which was still unfinished, as Lord Grayam sadly admitted. But their foremost duty was to protect the treasures that the Library contained. And so they took vows never to allow anyone to desecrate the Library’s books or to forsake guarding the Library, even unto their deaths. Toward this end, they trained with swords almost as diligently as with their pens.

‘You’ve taken vows of your own,’ he said, nodding toward my medallion. ‘You’re not the first to come here looking for the Lightstone, though none has done so for quite some time.’

He told us that once, many had made the pilgrimage to Khaisham, often paying princely sums for the right to use the Library. But now the ancient roads through Eanna and Surrapam were too dangerous, and few dared them.

‘Master Juwain,’ he said to me, ‘has already explained that you’ve brought no money for us. Poor pilgrims you are, he tells me. That’s as may be. But you have my welcome to use the Library as you wish. Any who have fought Count Ulanu as you have are welcome here.’

From what he said then, it was clear that he regarded Master Juwain, Maram and Liljana as scholars, and esteemed Kane, Atara and me as warriors protecting them.

‘We are fortunate to be joined by a company of such talents,’ he said, searching in the softness of Maram’s face for all that he tried to conceal there. ‘I would hope that someday you might tell of what happened in the Kul Moroth. How very strange that the ground should shake just as you passed through it! And that rocks should have blocked Count Ulanu’s pursuit. And such rocks! The knights I sent there tell me that many of them were blackened and melted as if by lightning.’

Maram turned to look at me then. But neither of us – or our other companions – wished to speak of our gelstei.

‘Well, then,’ Lord Grayam said, ‘you’re good at keeping your own counsel, and I approve of that. But I must ask your trust in three things in order that you might have mine. First: If you find here anything of note or worth, you will bring it to me. Second: You will take great care not to harm any of the books, many of which are ancient and all too easy to harm. Third: You will remove nothing from the Library without my permission.’

I touched the medallion hanging from my neck and told him, ‘When a knight takes refuge in a lord’s castle, he doesn’t dispute his rules. But you must know that we’ve come to claim the Lightstone and take it away to other lands.’

The Lord Librarian bristled at this. His bushy eyebrows pulled together as his hand found the hilt of his sword. ‘Does a knight in your land then enter his lord’s castle to claim his lord’s most precious possession?’

‘The Lightstone,’ I told him, remembering my vows, ‘is no one’s possession. And we seek it not for ourselves but for all Ea.’

‘A noble quest,’ he sighed, relaxing his hand from his sword. ‘But if you found the Cup of Heaven here, don’t you think it should remain here where it can best be guarded?’

I managed to climb out of bed and walk over to the window. There, below me, I could see the many houses of Khaisham, with their square stone chimneys and brightly painted shutters. Beyond the city streets was Khaisham’s outer wall, and beyond it, spread out over the green pastures to the south of the city, the thousands of tents of Count Ulanu’s army.

‘Forgive me, Lord Librarian,’ I said, ‘but you might find it difficult guarding even your own people’s lives now.’

Lord Grayam’s face fell sad and grave, and lines of worry furrowed his brow as he looked out the window with me.

‘What you say is true,’ he admitted. ‘But it is also true that you won’t find the Lightstone here. The Library has been searched through every nook and cranny for it for most of three thousand years. And so here we stand, arguing over nothing at a time when there’s much else to do.’

‘If we’re arguing over nothing,’ I said, ‘then surely you won’t mind if we begin our search?’

‘So long as you abide by my rules.’

If we abided by his rules, as I pointed out to him, we would have to bring the Lightstone to him should we be so fortunate as to find it.

‘That’s true,’ he said.

‘Then it would seem that we’re at an impasse.’ I looked at Master Juwain and asked, ‘Who has the wisdom to see our way through it?’

Master Juwain stepped forward, gripping his book, which Lord Grayam eyed admiringly. Master Juwain said, ‘It may be that if we gain the Lightstone, we’ll also gain the wisdom to know what should be done with it.’

‘Very well then, let that be the way of it,’ Lord Grayam said. ‘I won’t say yea or nay to your taking it from here until I’ve held it in my hands and you in yours. Do we understand each other?’

‘Yes,’ I said, speaking for the others, ‘we do.’

‘Excellent. Then I wish you well. Now please forgive me while I excuse myself. I’ve the city’s defenses to look to.’

So saying, the Lord Librarian bowed to us and strode from the room.

I counted exactly three beats of my heart before Maram opened his mouth and said, ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’

I drew my sword again and watched the light play about its gleaming contours.

‘You must follow where your sword leads you,’ Master Juwain told me, clapping me on the shoulder. Then he picked up a large book bound in red leather. ‘But I’m afraid I must follow where this leads me.’

He told us that he was off to the Library’s stacks to look for a book by a Master Malachi.

‘But, sir,’ Maram said to him, ‘if we find the Lightstone in your absence –’

‘Then I shall be very happy,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘Now why don’t we meet by the statue of King Eluli in the great hall at midday, if we don’t meet wandering around the other halls first? This place is vast, and it wouldn’t do to lose each other in it.’

Liljana, too, admitted that she wished to make her own researches among the Library’s millions of books. And so she followed Master Juwain out the door, each of them to go separate ways, and leaving Maram, Kane, Atara and me behind.

The infirmary, as I soon found, was a rather little room off a side wing connected by a large hall to an off-wing leading to the Library’s immense south wing. Upon making passage into this cavernous space, I realized that it would be easy to become lost in the Library, not because there was anything mazelike about it, but simply because it was huge. In truth, the whole of this building had been laid out according to the four points of the world with a precise and sacred geometry. Everything about its construction, from the distances between the pillars holding up the roof to the great marble walls themselves, seemed to be that of cubes and squares. And of a special kind of rectangle, which, if the square part of it was removed, the remaining smaller rectangle retained the exact proportions of its parent. What these measures had to do with books puzzled me. Kane believed that the golden rectangle, as he called it, symbolized man himself: no matter what parts were taken away, a sacred spark in the image of the whole being always remained. And as with man, even more so with books. As any of the Librarians would attest, every part of a book, from its ridged spine to the last letter upon the last page, was sacred.

There were certainly many books. The south wing was divided into many sections, each filled with long islands of stacks of books reaching up nearly three hundred feet high toward the stone ceiling with its great, rectangular skylights. Each island was like a mighty tower of stone, wood, leather, paper and cloth; stairs at either end of an island led to the walkways circling them at their different levels. Thirty levels I counted to each island; it would take a long time, I thought, to climb to the top of one should a desired volume be shelved there. Passing from the heights of one island to another would have taken even longer but for the graceful stone bridges connecting them at various levels. The bridges, along with the islands stacked with their books, formed an immense and intricate latticework that seemed to interconnect the recordings of all possible knowledge.

As I walked with my friends down the long and seemingly endless aisles, I breathed in the scents of mildew and dust and old secrets. Many of the books, I saw, had been written in Ardik or ancient Ardik; quite a few told their tales in languages now long dead. By chance, it seemed, we passed by shelves of many large volumes of genealogies. Half a hundred of these were given over to the lineages of the Valari. Because my curiosity at that moment burned even brighter than my sword, I couldn’t help opening one of them that traced the ancestry of Telemesh back son to father, generation to generation, to the great Aramesh. This gave evidence to the claim that the Meshian line of kings might truly extend back all the way to Elahad himself. My discovery filled me with pride. It renewed my determination to find the golden cup that the greatest of all my ancestors had brought to earth so long ago.

Alkaladur’s faintly gleaming blade seemed to point us into an adjoining hall that was almost large enough to hold King Kiritan’s entire palace. Here were collected all the Library’s books pertaining to the Lightstone. There must have been a million of them. It seemed impossible that each of them had been searched for any mention of where Sartan Odinan might have hidden the golden cup after he had liberated it from the dungeons of Argattha. But a passing Librarian, hastily buckling on his sword as he hurried through the stacks to Lord Grayam’s summons, assured us that they had. There were many Librarians, he told us, and there had been many generations of them since the Lightstone had become lost at the beginning of the Age of the Dragon long ago. That his generation might be the last of these devout scholar-warriors seemed not to enter his mind. And so he turned his faith from his pens to the steel of his sword; he excused himself and marched off toward his duty atop the city’s walls.

Our search took us through this vast hall, with its even vaster silences and echoes of memory, into an eastern off-wing. And then into a side wing, where we found hall upon hall of nothing but paintings, mosaics and friezes depicting the Lightstone and scenes from its long past. And still my sword seemed to point us east. And so we passed into a much smaller, cubical chamber filled with vases from the Marshanid dynasty; these, too, showed the Lightstone in the hands of various kings and heroes out of history.

At last, however, we came to an alcove off a small room lined with painted shields. We determined that we had reached this wing’s easternmost extension. We could go no farther in this direction. But I was sure that the Lightstone, wherever it was hidden, lay still to the east of us. Alkaladur gleamed like the moon when pointed toward the alcove’s eastern window, and not at all when I swept it back toward the main body of the Library or any of the room’s artifacts.

‘So, we must try another wing,’ Kane said to me. Maram and Atara, standing near him above an ancient Alonian ceremonial shield, nodded their heads in agreement. ‘If your sword still shows true, then let’s find our way to the east wing.’

Our search thus far had taken up the whole morning and part of the afternoon. Now we spent another hour crossing the Library’s centermost section, also called the great hall. It dwarfed even the south wing, and was filled with so many towering islands of books and soaring bridges that I grew dizzy looking up at them. I was grateful when at last we passed into the east wing; in its cubical proportions, it was shaped identically to the others. One of its off-wings led us to a hall giving out on a side wing where the Librarians had put together an impressive collection of lesser gelstei. These were presented in locked cabinets of teak and glass. Atara gasped like a little girl to see so many glowstones, wish stones, angel eyes, warders, love stones and dragon bones gathered into one place. We might have lingered there a long time if Alkaladur hadn’t pointed us down a long corridor leading to another side wing. 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 hands and 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 an 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 then Atara, staring at the bowl as if transfixed by its splendor, whispered to me, ‘Val, I can see it! It’s inside!’

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 me. ‘Strike it with your sword, Val.’

‘But 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 anything here.’

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

‘Perhaps we should bring the cup 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 Juwain’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 is 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 Atara next took the bowl, I saw Flick whirling above us as he had at the sound of Alphanderry’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 brought 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 Juwain 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 warmedUntil 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 titles 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.

Here Master Juwain looked up from the journal and said, ‘Please remember, this was written shortly after Kalkamesh had befriended Sartan and they had entered Argattha to reclaim the Lightstone. That tale certainly wasn’t widely known at the time. The Red Dragon had only just begun his torture of Kalkamesh.’

The stillness of Kane’s eyes as they fell upon Master Juwain just then made me recall the Song of Kalkamesh and Telemesh that Kane had asked the minstrel Yashku to recite in Duke Rezu’s hall. I couldn’t help thinking of the immortal Kalkamesh crucified to the rocky face of Skartaru, and his rescue by a young prince who would become one of Mesh’s greatest kings.

‘Let me resume this at the critical point,’ Master Juwain said, tapping the journal with his finger. ‘You already know how Kalkamesh and Sartan found the Lightstone in the locked dungeon.’

And so he said that just as he and this mythical Kalkamesh opened the dungeon doors, the Red Dragon’s guards discovered them. While Kalkamesh turned to fight them, he said, he grabbed the Cup of Heaven and fled back through the Red Dragon’s throne room whence they had come. For this man, who claimed to have once been a High Priest of the Kallimun, had again fallen and was now moved with a sudden lust to keep the Cup for himself.

And now he reached the most incredible part of his story. He claimed that upon touching the Cup of Heaven, it had flared a brilliant golden white and burned his hands. And that it had then turned invisible. He said that he had then set it down in the throne room, glad to be rid of it – this hellishly beautiful thing, as he called it. After that, he had fled Argattha, abandoning Kalkamesh to his fate. The story that he told me was that he made his way into the Red Desert and across the Crescent Mountains and so came here to our sanctuary.

It is difficult to believe his story, or almost any part of it. The myth of an immortal man named Kalkamesh is just that; only the Elijin and Galadin have attained to the deathlessness of the One. Also, it would be impossible for anyone to enter Argattha as he told, for it is guarded by dragons. And nowhere is it recorded that the Cup of Heaven has the power to turn invisible.

And yet there are those strange burns on his hands to account for. I believe this part of his story, if no other: that his lust for the Lightstone burned him, body and soul, and drove him mad. Perhaps he did somehow manage to cross the Red Desert. Perhaps he saw the image of the Lightstone in some blazing rock or heated iron and tried to hold onto it. If so, it has seared his soul far beyond my power to heal him.

I am old now, and my heart has grown weak; my varistei has no power to keep me from the journey that all must make – and that I will certainly make soon, perhaps next month, perhaps tomorrow, following my doomed patient toward the stars. But before I go, I wish to record here a warning to myself, which this poor, wretched man has unknowingly brought me: the very great danger of coveting that which no man was meant to possess. Soon enough I’ll return to the One, and there will be light far beyond that which is held by any cup or stone.

Master Juwain finished reading and closed his book. The silence in that room of ancient artifacts was nearly total. Flick was spinning about slowly near the False Gelstei, and it seemed the whole world was spinning, too. Atara stared at the wall as if its smooth marble was as invisible as Master Aluino’s patient had claimed the Lightstone to be. Kane’s eyes blazed with frustration and hate, and I couldn’t bear to look at him. I turned to see Maram nervously pulling at his beard and Liljana smiling ironically as if to hide a great fear.

And then, as from far away, through that little room’s smells of dust and defeat, came a faint braying of horns and booming of war drums: Doom, Doom, Doom. I felt my heart beating out the same dread rhythm, again and again.

Maram was the first to break the quiet. He pointed at the journal in Master Juwain’s hands and said, ‘The story that madman told can’t be true, can it?’

Yes, I thought, as I listened to my heart and the pulsing of the world, it is true.

‘Ah, no, no,’ Maram muttered, ‘this is too, too bad, to think that the Lightstone was left in Argattha.’

DOOM! DOOM! DOOM!

I looked at the False Gelstei sitting on its stand. I gripped the hilt of my sword as Maram said, ‘Then the quest is over. There is no hope.’

I looked from him to Master Juwain and Liljana, and then at Atara and Kane. No hope could I see on any of their faces; there was nothing in their hearts except the beat of despair.

We stood there for a long time, waiting for what we knew not. Atara seemed lost within some secret terror. Even Master Juwain’s pride at his discovery had given way to the meaning of it and a deepening gloom.

And then footfalls sounded in the adjoining chamber. A few moments later, a young Librarian about twelve years old came into the room and said, ‘Sar Valashu, Lord Grayam bids you and your companions to take shelter in the keep. Or to join him on the walls, as is your wish.’

Then he told us that the attack of Count Ulanu’s armies had begun.