The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two

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.