Black Jade
Book Three of the Ea Cycle
DAVID ZINDELL

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely fictional.

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2005

Copyright © David Zindell 2005

David Zindell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006486220

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN 9780007387717

Version: 2016-09-01

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

Keep Reading

Appendices

Heraldry

The Gelstei

The Greater Gelstei

The Lesser Gelstei

Books of the Saganom Elu

The Ages of Ea

The Months of the Year

About the Author

By David Zindell

About the Publisher

Map

1

Each man and woman is a star. As long as we are alive, my grandfather used to say, we must endure burning if we are to give light. As for the dead, only the dead know if their eternal flame is a glory or an anguish. In the heavens they shine through the dark nights of the ages in uncountable numbers. There, since I was a child, my grandfather has dwelled with Aras and Solaru and the other brightest lights. There, my mother and father, my grandmother and brothers, have joined him, sent on by the deadly lies and misdeeds of one they loved. Some day, it is said, a man will come forth and impel the stars to end their vast silence, and then these splendid orbs will sing their long, deep, fiery songs to those who listen. Will this Shining One, with the Lightstone in his hands, cool the tormented hearts of men, the living and the dead? I must believe that he will. For it is also said that the Lightstone gathers all things to itself. Within its luminous center dwells the earth and men and women and all the stars – and the blackness between them that allows them to be seen.

The Lightstone, however, was as far from this Shining One’s grasp as the sun was from mine. With the Red Dragon’s ravaging of my father’s castle to steal the golden cup, men and women in every land were looking toward the Dragon’s stronghold of Argattha with fevered and fearful eyes. In Surrapam, the victorious armies of King Arsu stood ready to conquer Eanna and the other Free Kingdoms of the far west, and crucify their peoples in the Dragon’s name. In Alonia, mightiest of realms, quarrelsome dukes and lords slew each other to gain King Kiritan’s vacant throne. Across the Morning Mountains of my home, the Valari kings fought as always for ancient grudge and glory. A great rebellion in Galda had ended with ten thousand men being mounted on crosses of wood. The Wendrush was a sea of grass running red with the blood of the Sarni tribes. Too many of these fierce warriors had surrendered their independence to declare for the Red Dragon, whose name was Morjin. As scryers had foreseen in terrible visions, it seemed that the whole world was about to burn up in a holocaust that would blacken the very stars.

And yet, as the scryers had also told, somewhere on Ea lived the Shining One: the last Maitreya who might bring a light so pure and sweet that it would put out this all-consuming fire. I sought this great-souled being. My friends – heroes, all, of the Quest to find the Lightstone – sought him, too. Our new quest, by day and by night, took us ever farther from the green valleys and snow-capped mountains of my homeland. To the west we journeyed, following the fiery arc of Aras and Varshara and the other bright stars of the ancient constellations where they disappeared beyond the dark edge of the heavens.

And others followed us. Early in Ashte in the year 2814 of the Age of the Dragon, a squadron of Morjin’s famed Dragon Guard and their Sarni allies pursued us across the Wendrush’s rolling steppe. Our enemies seemed not to care that we were under the escort of forty-four Sarni warriors of the Danladi tribe; for three days, as we approached the great, icy, stone wall of the White Mountains, they had ridden after us like shadows through the Danladi’s country – always keeping at a distance that neither threatened nor invited attack. And for three nights, they had built their campfires and cooked their dinners scarcely a mile from the sites that we chose to lay our sleeping furs. When the third night fell upon the world and the wind shifted and blew at us from the north, we could smell the smoky char of roasting meat and other more disturbing scents.

On a swell of dark grass at the edge of our camp, I stood with my friend Kane gazing out to the northwest at the orange glow of our enemy’s campfires. Kane’s cropped, white hair was a silvery sheen beneath a round, silver moon. He stared off into the starlit distances, and his lips pulled back from his white teeth in a fearsome grimace. His large, savage body trembled with a barely-contained fury. I could almost hear him howling out his hate, like a great, white wolf of the steppe lusting to rend and slay.

‘So, Val, so,’ he said to me. ‘We must decide what we are to do about these crucifiers, and soon.’

He turned his gaze upon me then. As always, I saw too much of myself in this vengeful man, and of him in me. His bright, black eyes were like a mirror of my own. He was nearly as tall as I; his nose was that of a great eagle, and beneath his weathered, ivory skin, the bones of his face stood out boldly. Between us was a likeness that others had remarked: of form, certainly, for he looked as much a Valari warrior as had my father and brothers. But our deeper kinship, I thought, was not of the blood but the spirit. Now that my family had all been slaughtered, I sometimes found the best part of them living on in his aspect: strange, wild, beautiful and free.

I smiled at him and then turned back toward our enemy’s campfires. One of our Sarni escort, after earlier riding close enough to take an arrow through the arm, had put their numbers at fifty: twenty-five Zayak warriors under some unknown chief or headman and as many of the Red Knights, with their dragon blazons and their iron armor, tinctured red as with blood.

‘We might yet outride them,’ I said to Kane. ‘Perhaps tomorrow, we should put it to the test.’

We could not, of course, so easily escape the Zayak warriors, for none but a Sarni could outride a Sarni. The Red Knights, however, encased in heavy armor and mounted on heavy horses, moved more slowly. Of our company, only Kane and I, with our friend, Maram, wore any kind of real armor: supple mail forged of Godhran steel that was lighter and stronger than anything Morjin’s blacksmiths could hammer together. Our horses, I thought, were better, too: Fire, Patience and Hell Witch, and especially my great, black warhorse, Altaru, who stood off a hundred paces with our other mounts taking his fill of the steppe’s new, sweet grass.

‘Well, then,’ Kane said to me, ‘we must test it before we reach the mountains.’

He pointed off toward the great, snow-capped peaks that glinted beneath the western stars. As he held out his thick finger, his mail likewise glinted from beneath his gray, wool traveling cloak, similar in cut and weave to my own.

‘So, then – fight or flee,’ he growled out. ‘And I hate to flee.’

As we pondered our course, mostly in silence, a great bear of a man stood up from the nearby campfire and ambled over to hear what we were discussing. He tried to skirt the inevitable piles of horse or sagosk dung, and other imagined dangers of the dark grass, all the while sipping from a mug of sloshing brandy. I drank in the form of my best friend, Maram Marshayk. Once a prince of Delu and an honorary Valari knight of great renown, fate had reduced him to accompanying me into Ea’s wild lands as outcasts.

‘Ah, I heard Kane say something about fleeing,’ he said to us. A belch rumbled up from his great belly, and he wiped his lips with the back of his hand. ‘My father used to say that whoever runs away lives to fight again another day.’

His soft eyes found mine through the thin light as his thick, sensuous lips broke into a smile. Upon taking in the whole of his form – the dense, curly beard which covered his heavy face, no less his massive chest, arms and legs – I decided that it would be a bad idea to try to outride the Red Knights. No weight of their armor, be it made of steel plate, could match the mass of muscle and fat that padded the frame of Maram Marshayk.

‘If we flee,’ Kane said to him, poking his finger into Maram’s belly, ‘are you willing to be left behind when your horse dies of exhaustion?’

It was too dark to see Maram’s florid face blanch, but I felt the blood drain from it, even so. He looked out toward our enemy’s campfires, and said, ‘Would you really leave me behind?’

‘So, I would,’ Kane growled out. His dark eyes drilled into Maram. ‘At need, I’d sacrifice any and all of us to fulfill this quest.’

Maram took a long pull of brandy as he turned to regard Kane. ‘Ah, a sacrifice is it, then? Well, I won’t have that on your conscience. If a sacrifice truly needs to be made, I’ll turn to cross lances with the Red Knights by myself.’

I looked back and forth between Maram and Kane as they glared at each other. I did not think that either of them was quite telling the truth. I rested my hand on Maram’s shoulder as I caught Kane’s gaze. And I said, ‘No one is going to be left behind. And we will fulfill this quest, as we did the first.’

Just then Master Juwain, sitting with our other friends by the fire, finished writing something in one of his journals and came over to us. He was as small as Maram was large and as ugly as Kane was well-made. His head somewhat resembled a walnut, and a misshapen one at that: all lumpy and bald with a knurled nose and ears that stuck out too far. But I had never known a man whose eyes were so intelligent and clear. Like the rest of us, he wore a gray traveling cloak, though he refused to bind his limbs in steel rings or carry any weapon more deadly than the little knife he used to sharpen his quills.

‘Come,’ he said as he grasped Maram’s wrist. ‘If we’re to hold council, let us all sit together. Liljana is nearly finished making dinner.’

I looked over toward the fire where a plump, matronly woman bent over a pot of bubbling stew. A girl about ten years old sat next to her making cakes on a griddle while a boy slightly older poked the fire with a long, charred stick.

‘Excellent,’ Maram agreed, ‘we’ll eat and then we’ll talk.’

‘You would talk more cogently,’ Master Juwain told him, ‘if you would take your drink after you eat. Or forbear it altogether.’

With fierce determination, Master Juwain suddenly clamped his knotted fingers around Maram’s mug. His small hands were surprisingly strong, from a lifetime of disciplines and hard work, and he managed to pry free the mug from Maram’s thick palm.

Maram eyed the mug as might a child a candy that has been taken from him. He said, ‘I have forborne my brandy these last three days, waiting for the Red Knights to attack us, too bad. As for talk, cogent as it is clever, please don’t forget that I’m now called Five-Horned Maram.’

Once, a lifetime ago it seemed, Maram had been an adept of the Great White Brotherhood under the tutelage of Master Juwain, and everyone had called him ‘Brother Maram.’ But he had long since abjured his vows to forsake wine, women and war. Now he wore steel armor beneath his cloak and bore a sword that was nearly as long and keen as my own. Less than a year before, in the tent of Sajagax, the Sarni’s mightiest chieftain, he had become the only man in memory to down five great horns of the Sarni’s potent beer – and to remain standing to tell everyone of his great feat.

Kane continued glaring at Maram, and again he poked his steely finger into his belly. He said, ‘You’d do well to forbear brandy and bread, at least for a while. Are you trying to kill yourself, as well as your horse?’

In truth, ever since the Battle of Culhadosh Commons and the sack of my father’s castle, Maram had been eating enough for two men and drinking more than enough for five.

‘Forbear, you say?’ he muttered to Kane. ‘I might as well forbear life itself.’

‘But you’re growing as fat as a bear.’

Maram patted his belly and smiled. ‘Well, what if I am? Haven’t you seen a bear eat when winter is coming?’

‘But it’s Ashte – in another month, summer will be upon us!’

‘No, my friend, there you’re wrong,’ Maram told him, with a shake of his head and another belch. ‘Wherever we journey, it will be winter – and deep winter at that, for we’ll be deep into this damn new quest. Do you remember the last time we went tramping all across Ea? I nearly starved to death. And so is it not the soul of prudence that I should fortify myself against the deprivations that are sure to come?’

Kane had no answer against this logic. And so he snapped at Maram: ‘Fortify yourself then, if you will. But at least forbear your brandy until there’s a better time and place to drink it.’

So saying, he took the mug from Master Juwain and moved to empty its contents onto the grass.

‘Hold!’ Maram cried out. ‘It would be a crime to waste such good brandy!’

‘So,’ Kane said, eyeing the dark liquor inside the mug. ‘So.’

He smiled his savage smile, as if the great mystery of life’s unfairness pleased him almost as much as it pained him. Then, with a single, quick motion, he put the mug to his lips and threw down the brandy in three huge gulps.

‘Forbear yourself, damn you!’ Maram called out to him.

‘Damn me? You should thank me, eh?’

‘Thank you why? For saving me from drunkenness?’

‘No – for taking a little pleasure from this fine brandy of yours.’

Kane handed the mug back to Maram, who stood looking into its hollows.

‘Ah, well, I suppose one of us should have savored it,’ he said to Kane. ‘It pleases me that it pleased you so deeply, my friend. Perhaps someday I can return the favor – and save you from becoming a drunk.’

Kane smiled at this as Maram began laughing at the little joke he had made, and so did Master Juwain and I. One mug of brandy had as much effect on the quenchless Kane as a like amount of water would on all the sea of grasses of the Wendrush.

I looked at Kane as I tapped my finger against Maram’s cup. I said, ‘Perhaps we should all forbear brandy for a while.’

‘Ha!’ Kane said. ‘There’s no need that I should.’

‘The need is to encourage Maram to remain sober,’ I said. I couldn’t help smiling as I added, ‘Besides, we all must make sacrifices.’

Kane looked at Maram for an uncomfortably long moment, and then announced, ‘All right then, if Maram will vow to forbear, so shall I.’

‘And so shall I,’ I said.

Maram blinked at the new moisture in his eyes; I couldn’t quite tell if our little sacrifice had moved him or if the prospect of giving up his beloved brandy made him weep. And then he clapped me on the arm as he nodded at Kane and said, ‘You would do that for me?’

‘We would,’ Kane and I said with one breath.

‘Ah, well, that pleases me more than I could ever tell you, even if I had a whole barrel full of brandy to loosen my tongue.’ Maram paused to dip his fat finger down into the mug, moistening it with the last few drops of brandy that clung to its insides. Then he licked his finger and smiled. ‘But I must say that I would wish no such deprivation upon my friends. Just because I suffer doesn’t mean that the rest of the world must, too.’

I glanced at the campfires of our enemies, then I turned back to look at Maram. ‘In these circumstances, we’ll gladly suffer with you.’

‘Very well,’ Maram said. Then he nodded at Master Juwain. ‘Sir, will you be a witness to our vows?’

‘Even as I was once before,’ Master Juwain said dryly.

‘Excellent,’ Maram said. ‘Then unless it be needed for, ah, medicinal purposes, I vow to forbear brandy until we find the one we seek.’

‘Ha!’ Kane cried out. ‘Rather let us say that unless Master Juwain prescribes brandy for medicinal purposes, we shall all forbear it.’

‘Excellent, excellent,’ Maram agreed, nodding his head. He held up his mug and smiled. ‘Then why don’t we all return to the fire and drink one last toast to our resolve?’

‘Maram!’ I half-shouted at him.

‘All right, all right!’ he called back. The breath huffed out of him, and for a moment he seemed like a bellows emptied of air. ‘I was just, ah, testing your resolve, my friend. Now, why don’t we all go have a taste of Liljana’s fine stew. That, at least, is still permitted, isn’t it?’

We all walked back to the fire and sat down on our sleeping furs set out around it. I smiled at Daj, the dark-souled little boy that we had rescued out of Argattha along with the Lightstone. He smiled back, and I noticed that he was not quite so desperate inside nor small outside as when we had found him a starving slave in Morjin’s hellhole of a city. It was a good thing, smiling, I thought. It lifted up the spirit and gave courage to others. I silently thanked Maram for making me laugh, and I resolved to sustain my gladness of life as long as I could. This was the vow I had made, high on a sacred mountain above the castle where my mother and grandmother had been crucified.

Daj, sitting next to me, jabbed the glowing end of his firestick toward me and called out, ‘At ready! Let’s practice swords until it’s time to eat!’

He moved to put down his stick and draw the small sword I had given him when we had set out on our new quest. His enthusiasm for this weapon both impressed and saddened me. I would rather have seen him playing chess or the flute, or even playing at swords with other boys his age. But this savage boy, I reminded myself, had never really been a boy. I remembered how in Argattha he had fought a dragon by my side and had stuck a spear into the bodies of our wounded enemies.

‘It is nearly time to eat,’ Liljana called out to us. Her heavy breasts moved against her thick, strong body as she stirred the succulent-smelling stew. ‘Why don’t you practice after dinner?’

Although her words came out of her firm mouth as a question, sweetly posed, there was no question that we must put off our swordwork until later. Beneath her bound, iron-gray hair, her pleasant face betrayed an iron will. She liked to bring the cheer and good order of a home into our encampments by directing cooking, eating and cleaning, even talking, and many other details of our lives. I might be the leader of our company on our quest across Ea’s burning steppes and icy mountains, but she sought by her nature to try to lead me from within. Through countless kindnesses and her relentless devotion, she had dug up the secrets of my soul. It seemed that there was no sacrifice that she wouldn’t make for me – even as she never tired, in her words and deeds, of letting me know how much she loved me. At her best, however, she called me to my best, as warrior, dreamer and man. Now that the insides of my father’s castle had been burnt to ashes, she was the only mother I still had.

‘There will be no swordwork tonight,’ I said, to Liljana and Daj, ‘unless the Red Knights attack us. We need to hold council.’

‘Very well, then, but I hope you’re not still considering attacking them.’ Liljana looked through the steam wafting up from the stew, straight at Kane. She shook her head, then called out, ‘Estrella, are those cakes ready yet?’

Estrella, a dark, slender girl of quicksilver expressions and bright smiles, clapped her hands to indicate that the yellow rushk cakes – piled high on a grass mat by her griddle – were indeed ready to eat. She could not speak, for she, too, had been Morjin’s slave, and he had used his black arts to steal the words from her tongue. But she had the hearing of a cat; in truth, there was something feline about her, in her wild, triangular face and in the way she moved, instinctually and gracefully, as if all the features of the world must be sensed and savored. With her black curls gathered about her neck, her lustrous skin and especially her large, luminous eyes, she possessed a primeval beauty. I had never known anyone, not even Kane, who seemed so alive.

Almost without thought, she plucked one of the freshest cakes from the top of the piles and placed it in my hand. It was still quite hot, though not enough to burn me. As I took a bite out of it, her smile was like the rising sun.

‘Estrella, you shouldn’t serve until we’re all seated,’ Liljana instructed her.

Estrella smiled at Liljana, too, though she did not move to do as she was told. Instead, seeing that I had finished my cake, she gave me another one. She delighted in bringing me such little joys as the eating of a hot, nutty rushk cake. It had always been that way between us, ever since I had found her clinging to a cold, castle wall and saved her from falling to her death. And countless times since that dark night, in her lovely eyes and her deep covenant with life, she had kept me from falling into much worse.

‘The girl never minds me,’ Liljana complained. ‘She always does just as she pleases.’

I smiled because what she said was true. I watched as Estrella tried to urge one of the cakes into Liljana’s hand. She seemed not to resent Liljana’s stern looks or scolding; indeed, Liljana’s oppressive care for her and her desire to teach her good manners obviously pleased her, as did almost everything about the people she loved. Her will to be happy, I thought, was even greater than Liljana’s urge to remake the world as the paradise it had been in the Age of the Mother. It must have vexed Liljana that our quest depended utterly upon this wild, magical child.

‘She was a slave of the Red Priests,’ Kane said to Liljana. ‘So who can blame her for not wanting to be your slave, too?’

As Liljana paused in stirring the stew to glare at Kane, more wounded by his cruel words than angry, Master Juwain cleared his throat and said, ‘The closer we’ve come to Argattha, it seems, the more she has relished her freedom.’

We were, I thought, much too close to Morjin’s dark city, carved out of the dark heart of the black mountain called Skartaru. Our course across the Wendrush had inevitably brought us this way. And it seemed that it had inevitably brought the knights of Morjin’s Dragon Guard upon our heels.

As Estrella began passing out rushk cakes to everyone, Liljana called for Atara to sit down, and she began ladling the stew into wooden bowls. From out of the darkness at the edge of our encampment where our horses were hobbled, a tall woman appeared and walked straight toward us. And that, I thought, was a miracle, because a white cloth encircled her head, covering the hollows which had once held the loveliest and most sparkling pair of sapphire-blue eyes. Atara Ars Narmada, daughter of the murdered King Kiritan and Sajagax’s beloved granddaughter, moved with all the prowess of the princess and the warrior-woman that she was. In consideration of our quest, she had cast off the lionskin cloak that she usually wore in favor of plain gray woolens. Gone were the golden hoops that had once encircled her lithe arms and the lapis beads bound to her long, golden hair. Few, outside of the Wendrush, would recognize her as one of the Sarni. But in her hand she gripped the great, double-curved bow of the Sarni archers, and the Sarni knew her as the great imakla warrior of the Manslayer Society. I knew her as a scryer who had great powers of sight, in space and time, and most of all, as the only woman I could ever love.

‘Vanora, Suri and Mata,’ she told me, naming three of her sisters of the Manslayers, ‘will take watches tonight, so we won’t have to worry about the Zayak trying to steal the horses.’

For the thousandth time that day, I looked back in the direction where our enemy gathered. As Atara knew very well, I worried about much more than this.

She sat down between Liljana and Master Juwain, and picked up a bowl of stew. Before permitting herself to taste any of it, she continued her report: ‘Karimah has set patrols, so there won’t be any surprises. Bajorak has, too.’

In the deepening night, the steppe’s grasses swayed and glowed beneath the stars. There, crickets chirped and snakes slithered, hunting rabbits or voles or other prey. There, forty yards to our left, Bajorak and some thirty Danladi warriors sat around their fires roasting sagosk joints over long spits. And forty yards to our right, Karimah and her twelve Manslayers – women drawn from half a dozen of the Sarni tribes – prepared their own dinner. It was our greatest strategic weakness, I thought, that the Manslayers disdained camaraderie with the Danladi men. And that both contingents of our Sarni escort neither really liked nor trusted us.

‘I would sleep better tonight,’ Maram told her, ‘if the enemy weren’t so close.’

‘Hmmph, you sleep better than any man I’ve ever known, enemy or no enemy,’ Atara said to him. ‘But fear not, we Sarni rarely fight night battles. There won’t be any attack tonight.’

‘Are you speaking as a Sarni warrior or a scryer?’

In answer, Atara only smiled at him, and then returned to her dinner.

‘Ah, well,’ Maram continued, ‘I should tell you that it’s not the Zayak who really concern me, at least not until daybreak – and then I shall fear their arrows, too bad. No, it’s those damn Red Knights. What if they charge straight into our encampment while we’re sleeping?’

‘They won’t do that,’ Atara reassured him.

‘But what if they do?’

‘They won’t.’ Atara looked up at the bright moon. ‘They fear arrows as much as you do. And there’s enough light that they would still make good targets, at least at short range.’

I touched the hilt of my sword, sheathed beside me, and I said, ‘We can’t count on this.’

‘In three days,’ Atara said, ‘they’ve kept their distance. They haven’t the numbers to prevail.’

‘And that is precisely the point,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they are waiting for reinforcements.’

‘So, just so,’ Kane said as he squeezed his bowl of stew between his calloused hands. ‘And so, if there must be battle, we should take it to them before it’s too late.’

For three days and nights, I thought, my friends and I had been arguing the same argument. But now the mountains were drawing nearer, and a decision must be made.

‘We may not have the numbers to prevail, either,’ Atara said. She positioned her head facing Estrella and Daj, who sat across the fire from her. ‘And what of the children?’

The children, of course, were at risk no matter what course we chose: attacking our enemy would only expose them to recapture or death all the sooner. It was that way with all children everywhere, even in lands far away and still free. With Morjin in control of the Lightstone, uncontested, it would only be a matter of time before everyone on Ea was either put on crosses or enslaved.

‘I can fight!’ Daj suddenly announced, drawing out his small blade.

We all knew that he could. We all knew, too, that Estrella had a heart of pure fire. Her great promise, however, was not in fighting the enemy with swords but with a finer and deeper weapon. As her dark, almond eyes fixed on me, I felt in her an unshakeable courage – and her unshakeable confidence in me to lead us the right way.

‘We must either fight or flee,’ I said. ‘But if we do flee, flee where?’

‘We could still go into the mountains,’ Maram said. ‘But farther south of the Kul Kavaakurk. And then we could turn north toward the Brotherhood school. We’ll lose our enemy in the mountains.’

‘We’ll lose ourselves,’ Master Juwain put in. ‘Try to remember, Brother Maram, that –’

‘Sar Maram,’ Maram said, correcting him. He held up his hand to show the double-diamond ring that proclaimed him a Valari knight.

‘Sar Maram, then,’ Master Juwain said with a sigh. ‘But try to remember that this school has remained a secret from the Lord of Lies only because our Grandmaster has permitted knowledge of it to very few. No map shows its location. I may be able to find it – but only from the gorge called the Kul Kavaakurk.’

For the thousandth time, I scanned the ghostly, white wall of mountains to the west of us. Could we find this secret school of the Great White Brotherhood? And if by some miracle we did reach this place of power deep within the maze of mountains of the lower Nagarshath, would we find the Grandmaster still alive? And more importantly, would he – or any of the Brotherhood’s masters – be able to tell us in which land the Maitreya had been born? For it was said that this great Shining One might be able to wrest the Lightstone from Morjin, if not in the substance of the golden bowl, then at least in the wielding of it.

‘There must be such a gorge,’ I told Master Juwain. ‘We will certainly find it, if not tomorrow, then the next day.’

‘We would find it the easier,’ Atara said, ‘if we took Bajorak into our confidence. Surely he would know what gorges or passes give out onto the Danladi’s country.’

‘He might know,’ Master Juwain agreed. ‘But he might not know it by that name. And if we can help it, he must not know that name.’

He went on to say that Bajorak, under torture or the seduction of gold, might betray the name to Morjin. And that might key ancient knowledge of clues as to the school’s whereabouts.

‘If the Red Dragon discovered our greatest school so close to Argattha,’ he told us, ‘that would be a greater disaster than I can tell.’

The fire, burning logs of cottonwood that we had found by a stream, crackled and hissed. I stared into the writhing flames as I marvelled at the near-impossibility of this new quest. There were too many contingencies that must fall in our favor if we were to succeed. Would Estrella, I wondered, when the time came, really be able to show us the Maitreya, as had been prophesied? And if she did, was it not the slenderest of hopes that we would be able to spirit him to safety before Morjin succeeded in murdering him?

‘All right,’ I said, ‘we cannot go south, as Maram has suggested. Our choices, then, are either to turn and attack or to lead the way into this Kul Kavaakurk and hope that we can lose our enemy before we betray the way to the school.’

Master Juwain’s lips tightened in dismay because either alternative was repugnant to him.

‘Or,’ Maram put in, ‘we could still try to outride the Red Knights. If you’re concerned about me lagging and can’t bear to see me make a stand against them, I could always turn off in another direction and try to meet up with you later.’

I leaned over to grasp his arm, and I said, ‘No, you’d only make yourself easy prey, and I couldn’t bear that. Whatever we do, we’ll all stay together.’

‘Then perhaps we should make our way to Delu and stay there until next year.’

He went on to say that his father, King Santoval Marshayk, would provide us shelter – and perhaps even a ship and crew to sail the lands of Ea in search of the Maitreya.

I stared at the sky in the west over the mountains leading to Skartaru, and in my mind’s eye, I saw a great hourglass full of sparkling sands like unto stars. And with every breath that I drew and every word wasted in speculation – with every minute, hour and day that passed – the sands fell and crashed and darkened like burnt-out cinders as Morjin gained mastery of the Lightstone.

‘We cannot wait until next year,’ I said. ‘And we are agreed that our best hope of finding the Maitreya lies in reaching the Brotherhood school.’

‘In that case,’ Maram said, ‘our dilemma remains: do we flee or fight?’

Atara had now finished her stew, and she sat quietly between Liljana and Master Juwain as the fire’s orange light danced across her blindfolded face. Sometimes, I knew, she could ‘see’ the grasses and grasshoppers and other features of the world about her, and other times she was truly blind. Just as sometimes she could see the future – or at least its possibilities.

‘Atara,’ I asked her, ‘what do you think we should do?’

‘Flee,’ she said. ‘Let’s see how well these Red Knights can ride.’

She waited as my heart drummed five times, then turned toward me as she declared, ‘You would rather see how well they can fight.’

I said nothing as I gripped the hilt of my sword.

‘I must tell you, Val,’ she said to me, ‘that it is not certain that the warriors who ride with us will fight just because you ask them to.’

I pointed out across the steppe and said, ‘Fifty men, Red Knights and Zayak, pursue us. And your warriors are Manslayers, are they not?’

‘Indeed they are,’ she said. Now it was her turn to grip the great unstrung bow that she had set by her side. ‘And indeed they will fight – if I ask them. But Bajorak and his warriors are another matter.’

‘He agreed to escort us to the mountains.’

‘Yes, and so he will certainly fight if we are attacked. So far, though, we are only followed.’

‘In this country,’ I said, ‘with this enemy, it is the same thing.’

Liljana made a show of collecting our empty bowls and serving us some succulent bearberries for dessert. During dinner she had not said very much. But now, as she often did, she cut me to the quick with only a few words: ‘I think you love to hate this enemy too much,’ she told me.

For a moment I looked down at my sword’s hilt, at the diamond pommel and the smaller diamonds set into the black jade. Then I met eyes with Liljana and said, ‘How should I not hate them? They might be the very same knights who put nails through my mother’s hands and feet!’

‘They might be,’ she admitted. ‘But would you then throw yourself upon their lances and put nails through my heart?’

Because I could not bear to look at Liljana just then, I returned to my vigil, staring out across the steppe at our enemy’s fires. I muttered, ‘How did they find us and who leads them? What do they intend?’

Kane scowled at this and spat out, ‘What does Morjin ever intend?’

‘I must know,’ I said. I looked around the circle at my friends. ‘We must know, if we are to reach a decision.’

‘Some things,’ Master Juwain said, ‘are unknowable.’

I turned to Liljana and asked, ‘What of your crystal?’

‘And other things,’ Master Juwain continued, looking from me to Liljana, ‘are better left unknown.’

Liljana reached into her tunic’s inner pocket and brought out a small figurine cast into the form of a whale. It had the luster of lapis and the hint of the ocean’s deep currents. Long ago, in another age, it had been forged of blue gelstei.

‘Are you asking,’ she said to me, ‘that I should look into the minds of these Red Knights?’

Just then, out of the blackness beyond the fire, Flick appeared like a tiny, whirling array of stars. His colors of crimson, silver and blue, throwing out sparks, also pulsed in patterns that I took to be a warning. What was this strange being who had followed me across the length of Ea, I wondered? Was he truly a messenger of the Galadin, a little bit of starlight and angel fire? Or did he possess a will all his own, and therefore his own life and his own fate?

Master Juwain, upon glancing at Flick, turned to Liljana and commanded her, ‘No, do not use your gelstei!’

Then he brought out his own gelstei: the emerald healing crystal that he had gained on our first quest. He held it up to the fire, letting the flickering light pour through its green-tinged translucency. Although it was hard to tell in the deep of night, a darkness seemed to have fallen over the crystal, as if it were steeped in shadow.

‘It’s too dangerous!’ he said to Liljana. ‘Now that the Dragon has regained the Lightstone, too damned dangerous! Especially for you.’

Maram regarded Master Juwain in shock, and so did I, for we had never heard him curse before. Liljana sat looking at her gelstei, cupped in her hands. As if she were holding a newborn, she swayed rhythmically back and forth.

‘I won’t believe that Morjin can use the Lightstone to taint this crystal,’ she said. ‘How can that which is most fair abide anything foul?’

‘Surely the foulness,’ I said, ‘arises from Morjin himself and our weakness in resisting him. He desecrates everything he touches.’

I turned to look at the white cloth binding Atara’s face. I couldn’t help remembering how Morjin, with his own fingers, had torn out her eyes.

‘So, every abomination, every degradation of the spirit,’ Kane said, gazing at Liljana’s blue stone. ‘But things aren’t as simple as you think, eh? Don’t be so sure you understand Morjin – or the Lightstone!’

‘I understand that we must fight him – and not with swords,’ Liljana said.

She was a wise woman, but a willful one, too. And so she clasped her figurine between her fingers and brought it up to the side of her head.

‘No,’ Master Juwain called out again, ‘do not!’

Once, in the depths of Argattha where the very rocks stank of rotting blood and terror, Liljana had touched minds with Morjin. And now, even as Estrella could not speak, Liljana would never smile again.

The moment that the gelstei touched her temple, she cried out in betrayal and pain. The crystal seemed to burn her like a heated iron, and she dropped it onto the grass. Her eyes rolled back into her head, showing the whites.

‘Liljana!’ I cried out. ‘Liljana!’

It took me a moment to realize that not only I had called to her, but Maram, Master Juwain and Atara – even Daj and Kane. And then Atara sidled closer to Liljana and wrapped her arm around her back as she cradled Liljana’s drooping head against her breasts. Estrella took Liljana’s hand between hers and squeezed it tightly. Their little comforts must have worked a quick magic on Liljana, for soon her eyes regained their focus, and she gathered herself together and forced herself to sit up straight again. She drew in ten deep breaths, and let each of them out, slowly. She wiped the sweat from her sodden hair. Finally she retrieved her blue gelstei. In her open hand it glinted, and she sat staring at it.

Then she cried out: ‘He is there!’

‘Morjin!’ I called back to her. ‘Damn him! Damn him!’

Daj rose up to one knee and leaned over to get a better look at Liljana’s crystal. He asked, ‘How, then? Where, then – here?’

‘He is everywhere!’ Liljana gasped. ‘Watching, always watching.’

She closed her fist around her stone and put it back in her pocket. Atara still embraced her, and now they both swayed together back and forth, back and forth.

Although I hated the need of it, I put to Liljana the question that must be asked: ‘Were you able to open the minds of the Red Knights?’

‘No!’ she snapped at me. And then, more gently, ‘He was waiting for me, Morjin was. Waiting to open up my mind. To twist his soul and his sick sentiments into me. Like snakes, they are, cold, and full of venom. I … cannot say. You cannot know.’

I could know, I thought. I did know. When I closed my eyes, the bodies of my mother and grandmother, nailed to wood, writhed inside me. Only, they were not cold, but warm – always too warm as they cried out in their eternal anguish, burning, burning, burning ….

‘I’m sorry,’ Liljana said to Master Juwain, ‘but you were right.’

Master Juwain sighed as he knotted his small, hard fingers together. ‘I’m afraid it’s too dangerous for any of us to use our gelstei, now.’

‘And dangerous not to,’ I said. ‘Atara can still see, sometimes, with her gift, but without my eyes, I would be blind.’

And with that, I drew my sword from its sheath. Even in the thick of the night, the long blade gleamed faintly. The silustria from which it was wrought, like living silver, caught the stars’ light and gave it back manyfold. It was harder than diamond and double-edged and sharp enough to cut steel. Alkaladur, men called it, the Sword of Sight that could cut through the soul’s dark confusions to release the secret light within. The immortal Kalkin had forged it at the end of the Age of Swords, and it had once defeated Morjin. The silver gelstei was said to be one of the two noble stones; it was also said that the gold gelstei that formed the Lightstone had resonance with the silver but no power over it.

‘Put it away!’ Master Juwain said to me as he pushed out his palm. ‘Use it in battle with the enemy, if you must, but until then, put it back in its sheath.’

I held my beautiful sword straight up, pointing toward the stars. A lovely, silver light spilled down the blade and enveloped my arm; it built around me like a luminous sea and flowed out to bathe the grasses and the cottonwood trees and the other things of the world.

‘Valashu!’ Master Juwain said to me.

And I said to him, ‘Liljana is right: the enemy is here, and everywhere. And the battle never ends.’

I turned to look north and west, toward Skartaru where Morjin dwelled. Although I could not see the Black Mountain among the lesser white peaks leading up to it, I felt it pulling at my mind and memory, and darkening my soul. Then suddenly, my sword darkened, too. I held before me a length of gelstei no brighter than ordinary burnished steel.

‘Damn him!’ I whispered. ‘Damn him!’

Now I pointed my sword toward Skartaru, and the blade began to glow and then flare in resonance with the faroff Lightstone – but not as brightly as it once had.

‘He is there,’ I murmured. ‘There he sits on his filthy throne with the Lightstone in his filthy hand, watching and waiting.’

How could the world abide such a being as Morjin and all his deeds? How could the mountains, the wind, the stars? The same bright orbs poured down their radiance on Skartaru as they did the Wendrush and the mountains of my home. Why? And why shine at all? My eyes hurt from staring so hard as I brooded over the conundrum of a star: if it let fire consume itself, it would burn out into blackness. So it was with me. Soon enough I would be dead. A Sarni arrow would find my throat or I would freeze to death crossing the mountains. Or, more likely, one of Morjin’s armies would trap me in some land near or faraway, and then I would be taken and crucified. I would descend to that dark, cold realm where I had sent so many, and that was only justice. But it seemed wrong to me, terribly and dreadfully wrong, that with my death, the bright memory of my mother, father and brothers that lived inside me would perish, too. And so those I loved most would truly die, and Morjin would have twice murdered my family and stolen them from the world.

‘Valashu!’ Master Juwain called to me again.

Where, I wondered, did the light of a candle’s flame go when the wind blew it out? Could it be that the land of the dead was not fell but rather as cool and quiet as a long, peaceful sleep? Why should Morjin keep me in this world of iron nails, crosses and fire even one more day?

‘Valashu – your sword!’

I squeezed my sword’s hilt of black jade, carved with swans and set with seven diamonds. Once, I had sliced the sharp blade through Morjin’s neck, but by the evil miracle of his kind, he had lived. My aim, the next time, must be true. I would plunge the star-tempered point straight through his heart. Atara had once prophesied that if I killed Morjin, I would kill myself. So, just so, as Kane would say.

‘Damn him!’ I whispered as I pointed my sword toward Argattha. ‘Damn him! Damn him! Damn him!’

I would cut off Morjin’s head and mount it on a pike for all to behold. I would hack his body into pieces and pour pitch upon them and set them on fire. I would feel the heat of the flames upon my face, burning, burning, burning …

‘Valashu!’ Master Juwain, Liljana and Atara cried out as one.

When my vision suddenly cleared, I gasped to see that my silver sword seemed to have caught fire. Blue flames clung to the silustria along its whole length like a hellish garment, while longer orange and red ones twisted and leaped and blazed with a searing heat. So violent was this fire that I dropped my sword upon the ground. The grass there was too green to easily ignite, but Liljana and Daj hastened to douse it with water even so. We all watched with amazement as the flames raced up and down my sword’s blade, cooled, faded and then finally died.

‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram called out. ‘Oh, my Lord!’

‘I didn’t know your sword could burn like that!’ Daj said to me.

‘Neither did I,’ Master Juwain told me.

And neither did I. Even Kane, who had once been Kalkin, the great Elijin lord who had forged this sword with his own two hands and all the art of the angels, stared at it mysteriously. His black eyes seemed as cold as the space between the stars. He held himself utterly still.

‘Like hell, that was,’ he finally said. He turned to stare at me.

‘Like hate, it was,’ Master Juwain said to me. Again he pushed his palm toward my cast-down sword. ‘Surely its fire came out of that which consumes you.’

Daj, who was bright beyond his years, studied my sword and asked, ‘Did it? Or did it burn because Lord Morjin is gaining control of the Lightstone?’

Liljana patted his head at his perceptiveness, then looked at me as she said, ‘In the end, of course, it might be the same question.’

‘Whatever the answer,’ Master Juwain said to me, ‘it is certain that the Lord of Lies is learning the Lightstone’s secrets. Your hate will not deter him. Put your sword away.’

I leaned forward to wrap my fingers around Alkaladur’s hilt. The black jade was as cool as grass. But the blade’s silustria still emanated a faint heat, like a paving stone after a long summer day.

‘Surely this is damned,’ I said as I lifted up my sword. ‘As I am damned.’

Liljana slapped her hand into her palm, then shook her head violently as she waggled her finger at me. ‘Don’t you ever say that!’

She edged past Daj and Estrella and knelt before me, and she laid her hand on top of mine. Her voice grew soft and gentle as she told me, ‘You are not damned! You, of all people. And you, of all people, must never think that of yourself.’

I smiled at her kindness, but she did not smile back. I let go of Alkaladur for a moment to squeeze her hand. And then I grasped yet again the sword that would carve my fate.

‘Morjin is poisoning the gelstei,’ I said. ‘Or trying to.’

Once, I remembered, in a wood near my home, Morjin’s priest named Igasho had shot at me an arrow tipped with kirax. The poison had found its way into my blood, where it would always work its dark enchantment. I wondered if this evil substance that connected me to Morjin was slowly killing me after all. As I fiercely gripped my sword, I felt the kirax burning my stomach, liver and lungs with every breath, and stabbing like red-hot needles through my eyes and brain.

‘Damn him!’ I said again, shaking my sword at the heavens.

In the west, clouds were moving in, blocking out the stars. Lightning rent the sky there, and thunder shook the earth. Far out on the steppe, wolves howled their strange and mournful cries. There, too, our enemy’s campfires burned on and on through the night.

‘And damn them, too!’ I said, stabbing my sword at the Red Knights who followed us.

I watched with dread as my silver sword again burst into flame. And then something dark and dreadful as a dragon burned through my hand, arm and chest, straight into my heart.

‘He is here!’ I cried out as I sprang up to my feet.

‘Who is here?’ Master Juwain asked me. Now he stood up, too, and came over to me, and so did the others.

‘Morjin is – he rides with the Red Knights!’ I said.

‘Morjin, here?’ Kane shouted. His eyes flared like fire-arrows out toward the steppe. ‘Impossible!’

Atara stood by my side, but well away from my burning blade. She put her hand on my shoulder to gentle me, and she said, ‘Your sword shone much as it ever did when you pointed it toward Argattha, and so the Lightstone must still be there. And so, as you have said yourself, must Morjin.’

‘No, he is here, a mile away across the grass!’

‘Atara is right,’ Master Juwain said to me. He rested his hand on my other shoulder. ‘Think, Val: the Dragon would never leave the Lightstone out of his clutches, even for moment, not even to ride after you.’

‘And if he did hunt you,’ Atara added, ‘he would have come out of Argattha at the head of his whole army, and not leading a couple of dozen knights.’

As lightning lit the mountains and fire sheathed my sword, my friends tried to reason with me. I could hardly listen. For I felt Morjn’s presence too near me. The flames of his being writhed and twisted as they ever did, in shoots of madder, puce and incarnadine, and other colors that recalled his tormented soul.

‘I know it is he!’ I said, to Atara and my other friends.

Then Liljana moved closer and told me, ‘Your gift betrays you. As mine betrayed me.’

All my life, it seemed, I had felt others’ passions, hurts and joys as my own. Kane called this gift the valarda: two hearts beating as one and lit from within as with the fire of a star. He had also said it was impossible that Morjin should be here, in our enemy’s encampment scarcely two thousand yards away. But it seemed impossible that the malice, decay and spite I felt emanating from that direction could have its source in any man except Morjin.

‘Do you remember Argattha?’ I said to Liljana. ‘There Morjin soaked his skin with the essence of roses to cover the smell of his rotting flesh. But he could not cover the stench of his soul. I … smell it here.’

Liljana pointed at my sword, at the flames that still swirled up and down its length. And she said to me, ‘Is that really what you smell?’

I noticed that Flick, spinning like a top in the air beyond my reach, seemed to be keeping his distance from me.

Liljana brushed past Master Juwain, and laid her hand over the steel rings that encased my chest. And she said, ‘I think you hate Morjin so much that you always sense him close now. Here, in your own heart.’

I held my breath against the pain that her words caused me. My sword dipped lower, and its flames began to recede.

‘There is a great danger for you here, Val,’ Master Juwain said to me. ‘Do you remember the prophecy?: “If a man comes forth in falseness as the Shining One concealing darkness in his heart, if he claims the Lightstone for his own, then he shall become a new Red Dragon, only mightier and more terrible.”’

‘But that’s just it, sir!’ I said to him. ‘I have proved that I am not the Maitreya!’

‘Yes, you have. But have you proved that you could not become like unto the Red Dragon?’

I watched the flames working at my sword, and I could not breathe.

‘Do you not remember your dream?’ Master Juwain asked me.

I slowly nodded my head. Once, in the innocence of my youth, I had vowed to bring an end to war.

‘But there’s no help for it!’ I gasped out. ‘The more I have sought not to kill, the more I have killed. And the more war I have brought upon us!’

Master Juwain squeezed my shoulder, and then pointed out toward the Red Knights’ campfires. And he told me, ‘Killing, even at need, is an evil of itself. But killing when there may be no need is much worse. And killing as you feel compelled to kill, in vengeance and hate … that is everything you’ve been fighting against.’

‘But there’s no help for that either!’ I said. I blinked my eyes against my sword’s searing flames. ‘Ten thousand men Morjin crucified in Galda! He is poisoning the world!’

I went on to say that Morjin would use the Lightstone to master men: their lusts, fears and dreams, even as he was trying with our gelstei. And then soon, perhaps in another year, perhaps less, all of Ea would be lost – and much more.

‘You know,’ I said to Master Juwain. ‘You know what will happen, in the end.’

‘I do not know about ends,’ Master Juwain said. ‘I only know that it is as it ever was: if you use evil to fight evil, then you will become evil.’

‘Yes,’ I said, gripping my sword, ‘and if I do not, the whole world will fall to evil and be destroyed.’

It grew quiet in our encampment after that. The fire made little crackling sounds, and from out on the grasslands an owl hooed faintly, but none of us spoke. I stood staring at my burning sword. It was strange how the blue and red flames licked at the bright silustria but did not seem to really touch it.

Then Liljana said to me, ‘Morjin has long tried to make a ghul of you. It may be that, through your sword, he could seize your will.’

‘No, I won’t let him,’ I said. Then I smiled grimly. ‘But if he does, then Kane will have to kill me – if he can.’

‘Ah, Val, Val!’ Maram said to me as sweat beaded on his fat cheeks. He cast his eyes upon Kane. ‘Don’t make jokes, not at a time like this!’

No one, I thought, not even Liljana, could read the look on Kane’s face just then. He stood as still as death, gazing at my sword as his hand rested on the hilt of his own. Like coals, his black, blazing eyes seemed to burn open the night.

And then this strange man said a strange thing: ‘Hate is just the left hand of love, eh? And so with evil and good. So – Val hates Morjin, even as Morjin hates him. Don’t be so sure what will come of it.’

I pointed Alkaladur toward the Red Knights a mile away. I said, ‘There Morjin watches us and waits. Let us end things now, if we can.’

Kane followed my gaze, and I felt his insides churning with an unusual disquiet. ‘Don’t be so sure he is there. The Lord of Lies has laid traps for us before, eh? Let us ride tomorrow, for the mountains, as fast as we can.’

Master Juwain nodded his head at this and said, ‘Yes, surely he has conjured up confusions, somehow. Let us ride, as Kane has said.’

Maram, naturally, agreed with this course of action, and so did Liljana, Atara and even Daj. It was not Estrella’s way to pit her will against mine or even to make a vote by pointing towards or away from the Red Knights. But she knew with a quiet certainty that she had a part to play in our decision. She came up close to me, heedless of my burning sword. Against the curve of the dark world, with her fine features and wisps of black hair, she seemed small and slight. She stood gazing at me, her lovely eyes looking for something bright and beautiful in my own. She was a seard, I remembered, gifted with finding things and the secrets inside them; a dying scryer had once promised me that she would show me the Maitreya. Since the night I had met her, it been both a grace and a torment that she had also shown me myself.

‘Don’t look at me like that!’ I said to her. I stabbed my sword out toward the steppe. ‘If Morjin is there, he won’t expect us to attack. When we do, you and Daj will ride with Liljana and Master Juwain toward the mountains. You’ll be safe there. After we’ve won, we’ll meet up with you. And then it will all be over … everything. We’ll regain the Lightstone, and much else besides.’

Evil, I know, speaks in the most seductive of voices. It plays to our lusts, fears, delusions and hates. There is always a part of us that wants to heed this voice. But there is always a deeper voice, too, which we might take to heart if only we would listen. As Estrella looked at me with so much trust, I heard it whispering, like the songs of the stars: that war could be ended; that I could grip my sword with hate’s right hand; that darkness could always be defeated by shining a bright enough light.

‘Estrella,’ I whispered, ‘Estrella.’

I would give anything, I thought, that she should grow into womanhood without the blight of murder and war.

Then she called back to me in her silent way, with a smile and a flash of her eyes. She placed one hand over my heart and the other upon my hand that held my sword. I watched as its fires dimmed and died.

‘All right, we won’t attack – not tonight, not like this,’ I said. I slid my sword back into its sheath. ‘But if Morjin is out there, it will come to battle, in the end.’

After that, I sat back down with my friends to finish our dessert of fresh berries. Maram brought out his brandy bottle; I heard him muttering to himself, commanding himself not to uncork it. He licked his lips as he held himself proud and straight. In the west, lightning continued to torment the sky, but the threatened storm never came. As I watched our enemy’s campfires burning with a hazy orange glow, far into the night, the wolves on the dark grass about us howled to the stars.

2

The sun, at the breaking of the morning, reddened the green grasslands in the east like a great blister of flame. We rose at first light and ate a quick, cold breakfast of dried sagosk and battle biscuits. I pulled myself on top of my great, black warhorse, Altaru, as my friends did their mounts. The twelve Manslayers formed up behind us to cover our rear. Their captain was Karimah, a fat, jolly woman who was almost as quick with her knife as she was with her arrows, which she could fire with a deadly accuracy while turning in her saddle. Bajorak and his thirty warriors took their places on their lithe steppe ponies ahead of us, as a vanguard. If we were attacked from the rear, he and his men could quickly drop back to support Karimah and the Manslayers. But as he had told me the day before: ‘The danger in that direction is known, and I scorn the Zayak, even more the Crucifier’s knights. But who knows what lies ahead?’

As we pushed our horses to a quick trot and then a canter, I watched this young headman of the Tarun clan. Although he was not tall, as the Sarni headmen and chieftains usually are, he had an air of fierceness that might easily intimidate a larger man. His handsome face was thrice-scarred: an arrow wound and two saber cuts along his cheeks had the effect of pulling his lips into a sort of permanent scowl. Like his warriors, he wore much gold: around his thick, sunburned arms and wrists and encircling his neck. Unlike the men he led, however, the leather armor encasing his barrel chest was studded with gold instead of steel. A golden fillet, woven with bright blue lapis beads, held back his long, blond hair and shone from his forehead. His senses were as keen as a lion’s, and as we pounded across the grass, he turned to regard me with his bright blue eyes. I liked his eyes: they sparkled with intelligence and spirit. They seemed to say to me: ‘All right, Valashu Elahad, we’ll test these enemy knights – and you and yours, as well.’

For most of an hour, as the sun rose higher into a cobalt sky, we raced across the steppe. Bajorak and his warriors fanned out in a great V before us, like a flock of geese, while the Manslayers kept close behind us. Our horses’ hooves – and those of our remounts and our packhorses – drummed against the green grass and the pockets of bitterbrush. Meadowlarks added their songs to the noise of the world: the chittering of grasshoppers and snorting horses and lions roaring in the deeper grass. I felt beneath me my stallion’s great surging muscles and his great heart. He would run to his death, if I asked him to. Atara, to my right, easily guided her roan mare, Fire. It was one of those times when she could ‘see’ the hummocks and other features of the rolling ground before us. Then came Daj and Estrella, who were light burdens for their ponies. What they lacked in stamina, they made up for in determination and skill. Master Juwain and Liljana followed close behind, and Maram struggled along after them. His mounds of fat rippled and shook beneath his mail as he puffed and sweated and urged his huge gelding forward. Kane, on top of a bad-tempered mare named the Hell Witch, kept pace at the end of our short column. He seemed to be readying himself to stick the point of his sword into either Maram’s or his horse’s fat rump if they should lose courage and lag behind. But we all rode well and quickly – though not quite quickly enough to outdistance our enemy.

As we galloped along, I turned often to study these two dozen Red Knights, flanked by as many of the Zayak warriors. At times, a hummock blocked my line of sight, and they were lost to me, and I hoped that we might truly outride them. And then they would crest some swell of earth, and the sun would glint off their carmine-colored armor, giving the lie to my hope. They seemed always to keep about a mile’s span between us; I could not tell if they held this close pursuit easily or were hard put to keep up. Fear and hate, I sensed, drove them onward. I felt Morjin’s ire whipping at them, even as I imagined I heard the crack of their silver-tipped quirts bloodying their horse’s sides.

‘Damn him!’ I whispered to myself. ‘Damn him!’

After a while we slowed our pace, and so did our pursuers. Then we stopped by a winding stream to water our panting horses, and change them over with our remounts. Bajorak rode up to me, and so did Karimah and Atara. Bajorak nodded at Maram, and said, ‘You kradaks ride well, even the fat one, I’ll give you that.’

Maram’s face, red and sweaty from his exertions, now flushed with pride.

Then Bajorak turned to look farther down the stream where the Red Knights had also paused to change horses. ‘Well indeed, but not well enough, I think. The Crucifier’s men will not break chase. Their horses are as good as yours, and they have more remounts.’

It was Bajorak’s way, I thought, to speak the truth as plainly as he knew how.

‘We still might outrun them,’ I said.

‘No, you won’t. You’ll only ruin your horses.’

Bajorak dismounted and came over to lay his hand on Altaru’s sweating side. It amazed me that my ferocious stallion allowed him this bold touch. But then it is said that the Sarni warriors love horses more than they do women, and Altaru must have sensed this about him.

‘If all you kradaks had horses like him,’ Bajorak said, stroking Altaru, ‘it might be a different matter. I’ve never seen his like. You still haven’t told me where you found him.’

‘This isn’t the time for tales,’ I said. I shielded my eyes from the sun’s glare as I took in the red glint of our enemy’s armor a mile away.

Bajorak spat on the ground and said, ‘The cursed Red Knights won’t move unless we do. Why, I wonder, why?’

I said nothing as I continued studying the twenty-five knights and the Zayak warriors who stood by the stream to the east of us.

‘You haven’t told me, either,’ he went on, ‘why you wish to cross our lands and what you seek in the mountains?’

At this, Kane stepped up and growled at him: ‘Such knowledge would only burden you. We’ve paid you good gold that we might ride in silence, and that’s burden enough, eh?’

Bajorak’s blue eyes flashed, and so did the fillet of gold binding his hair and his heavy golden armlets. And he said, ‘The gold you gave us is only a weregild to pay for my men’s lives should there be battle between us and Morjin’s men – or anyone else. But it is not why we agreed to ride with you.’

I knew this, and so did Kane. I grasped his steely arm to restrain him. And Bajorak, whose blood was up, went on to state openly what had so far remained unspoken: ‘I owe a debt to the Manslayers, and debts must be repaid.’

He nodded at Karimah, and this stout, matronly woman gripped her bow as she nodded back.

‘When Karimah came to me,’ he said, looking at me, ‘and asked that we should escort your company across our lands, I thought she had fallen mad. Kradaks should be killed out of hand – or at least relieved of the burdens of their horses, weapons and goods. Hai, but these kradaks were different, she said. One of them was Valashu Elahad, who had ridden with Sajagax to the great conclave in Tria and would have made alliance against the Crucifier. The Elahad, who had taken the Lightstone out of Argattha and whom everyone was saying might be the Maitreya.’

As he had spoken, two of his captains had come over, bearing their strung bows. One of them, Pirraj, was about Bajorak’s height, but the other, whose name was Kashak, was a giant of a man and one of the largest Sarni warriors I had ever seen.

‘And with the Elahad,’ Bajorak went on, ‘rode Atara Manslayer, Sajagax’s own granddaughter, the great imakla warrior. She, the blind one, who has slain seventy-nine men! And so might become the only woman of her Society in living memory to gain her freedom.’

Here Bajorak’s sensual lips pulled back to reveal his straight white teeth. It was a smile meant to be charming, but due to the thick scars on his cheeks, seemed more of a leer. All the women of the Manslayers, when they entered their Society, took vows to slay a hundred of their enemy before they would be free to marry. Few, of course, ever did. But those who fulfilled this terrible vow had almost free choice of husbands among the Sarni men, who would be certain to sire out of them only the strongest and fiercest of sons. As Bajorak’s desire pulled at his blood, my own passion surged inside me: hot, angry, wild and pained. I glared at him as I gripped the hilt of my sword. Then it was Kane’s turn to wrap his hand around my arm and restrain me.

‘And so,’ Bajorak said, looking at Pirraj and Kashak, ‘my warriors and I agreed to Karimah’s strange request. We were curious. We wanted to see if all kradaks are like them.’

He pointed to the Red Knights down the stream. Then his clear blue eyes cut into me, testing me.

And I said, testing him, ‘Do you think we’re alike? The Red Knights are our enemies, as they are yours. What is strange is that you allow them to ride freely across your lands – the Zayak, too.’

‘You say,’ he muttered. He shot me a keen, knowing look. ‘I think you want us to attack them, yes?’

‘I have not said that, have I?’

‘You say it with your eyes,’ he told me.

I continued scanning the glints of red armor along the river, looking for a standard that might prove the presence of Morjin.

‘If we attacked them,’ I asked Bajorak, ‘would you join us?’

‘Nothing would please me more,’ he said, causing my hope to rise. And then my sudden elation plummeted like a bird shot with an arrow as he continued, ‘But we may not attack them.’

‘May not? They are crucifiers! They are Zayak, from across Jade River!’

‘They are,’ he said, turning to spit in their direction, ‘and Morjin has paid for their safe passage of our lands.’

This was news to us. We crowded closer to hear what Bajorak might say.

‘In the darkness of the last moon,’ he told us, ‘the Red Knights came to Garthax with gold. He is greedy, our new chieftain is. Greedy and afraid of Morjin. And so Garthax allowed the Crucifier’s knights to range freely across our country, from the Jade River to the Oro, from the Astu to the mountains in the west. They are not to be attacked, curse them! And curse Morjin for defiling the Danladi’s country!’

His warriors, savage-seeming men, with faces painted blue, braided blond hair and moustaches hanging down beneath their chins, nodded their heads in agreement with Bajorak’s sentiments.

‘Was it Morjin, himself, then,’ I asked Bajorak, ‘who paid this gold to Garthax? Does he lead the Red Knights?’

‘I have not heard that,’ he told me. ‘Were it so, we would attack them no matter if Morjin had paid Garthax a mountain of gold.’

‘It will come to that, in the end!’ Kashak barked out. Blue crosses gleamed on his sunburned cheeks to match the smoldering hue of his eyes. ‘Let us ride against them now, with these kradaks!’

‘And break our chieftain’s covenant?’

‘A chieftain who makes covenant with the Crucifier is no chieftain! Let us do as we please.’

Bajorak, too, shared Kashak’s zeal for battle. But he had a cool head as well as a fiery heart, and so to Kashak and his other men he called out: ‘Would you commit the Tarun clan to going against our chieftain? If we break the covenant, it will mean war with Garthax.’

‘War, yes, with him,’ Pirrax said, shaking his bow. ‘We’re warriors, aren’t we?’

Now Atara stepped forward, and her white blindfold gleamed in the strong sunlight. Her face was cold and stern as she addressed these fierce men of the Tarun clan: ‘It’s wrong for warriors to make war against their chieftain. Can not Garthax be persuaded to return this gold?’

Bajorak shook his head. ‘You do not know him.’

‘I know what my grandfather, Sajagax, said of Garthax’s father: that Artukan was a great chieftain who would never scrape before Morjin. Does a lion sire a snake?’

‘Garthax,’ Bajorak said, ‘is not his father’s son.’

‘Have you tried helping him to be?’

It was one of Atara’s graces, I thought, that she tried ever to remake men’s natures for the good.

‘Help him?’ Bajorak said. ‘You do not understand. Garthax quarreled with Artukan over the question of whether we should treat with Morjin. And two days later Artukan died while drinking his beer … of poison!’

‘Poison!’ Atara cried out. ‘That cannot be!’

‘No, no one wanted to believe it – certainly not I,’ Bajorak told her. ‘But it is said that upon taking the first sip of his beer, Artukan cried out that his throat was on fire. One of his wives offered him water, but Artukan said that this burned his lips. Everything … burned him. No one could touch him. It is said that he put out his own eyes so that he would not have to bear the torment of light. His skin turned blue and then black, like dried meat. He screamed, like a kradak burnt at the stake. It took him a whole day to die.’

Master Juwain’s face paled, and then he said to Bajorak, ‘If what you tell is true, then surely the poison was kirax.’

Surely it was, I thought as my heart pushed my flaming blood through my veins. And surely thus I would have died, too, if only the assassin sent by Morjin had managed to bury his arrow even a tenth of an inch into my flesh.

‘I do not know this poison, kirax,’ Bajorak said to Master Juwain.

And Master Juwain told him, ‘It is used only by the Red Priests of the Kallimun. And by Morjin.’

Bajorak’s gaze flashed from Master Juwain to Kashak and Pirraj, and he made a warding sign with his finger as he cried out, ‘Treachery! Abomination! If Garthax really was in league with the Red Priests, if he is, then …’

‘Then his eyelids should be cut off, and he should be staked out in the sun for the ants and the yellowjackets to eat!’

These terrible words came from Atara, and I felt my heart nearly break against my chest bones to hear her pronounce the age-old punishment that the Sarni meted out to poisoners.

‘He should be unmanned,’ she added, ‘and his parts given to the vultures!’

It was one of Atara’s griefs, I knew, that when her hopes for men failed, she could fall icy cold and full of judgment, like a killer angel.

‘If true,’ Bajorak said, nodding his head, ‘what you say should be done. But we know not that it is true. Only that, from what we’ve learned of Garthax, it could be.’

‘Then until it is proved,’ Atara said, ‘he is still your chieftain. And so you must persuade him with words to break this covenant with Morjin, rather than with arrows and flaying knives.’

‘Words,’ Bajorak spat out. He looked from Atara to Kane and then at me. ‘Valashu Elahad, all of you, rode with Sajagax to Tria to unite the free peoples against Morjin, with words. And what befell? Alonia is in flames, and in the Morning Mountains, the Elahad’s own Valari make war with each other. And on the Wendrush! The Zayak ride openly into our country! It is said that the Marituk have allied with the Dragon, the Janjii, too! And so the Tukulak and the Usark, and other tribes, soon will. They think to choose the winning side before it is too late. They have no sense of themselves! Whatever side the Sarni choose will be victorious. And that is why we Tarun, and the other Danladi clans, must choose another chieftain, before it is too late. And we shall make our votes with these!’

So saying, he reached into his quiver and drew out a long, feathered shaft. With one smooth, quick motion, he nocked it to his bowstring, drew it back to his ear and loosed it toward the Red Knights and the Zayak warriors. His great horn bow unbent with a crack like thunder. The arrow whined through the air and buried itself in the grass a few hundred yards away. Not even Sajagax, I thought, could shoot an arrow a mile.

Bajorak’s eyes gleamed, but he sighed. ‘Atara Manslayer is right,’ he said. ‘Until Garthax’s treachery is proven, he is still our chieftain. And so his cursed covenant will be honored.’

Much of what he had told me we had learned while in winter camp with Karimah and the Manslayers, for the Wendrush is Ea’s crossroads, and news flows as freely as the great sagosk herds over its windswept plains. I had not, however, known about the Marituk’s alliance with Morjin. They were a great tribe, and so this was evil tidings – but no surprise. In Tria, I had nearly claimed the Lightstone for myself; I had spoken a lie and slain a man, and as with a stone cast into a black water, these evil deeds had rippled outward to touch many peoples and many lands.

‘And so,’ Bajorak continued, looking from the Red Knights back at me, ‘we shall not attack our enemy. They know this. It is why they ride so impudently.’

‘But what if they attack us?’ Maram wanted to know. It was a question that he could not stop asking Bajorak – and himself.

‘They won’t,’ Bajorak told him. ‘They haven’t the numbers … yet.’

‘Yet?’ Maram called out. ‘Ah, I don’t like the sound of that, not at all. What do you mean, yet?’

‘I believe,’ Bajorak said, ‘that these are not the only companies of Red Knights or Zayak that Garthax has allowed into our country.’

At this Maram craned his neck about, scanning the horizon. And all the while he muttered, ‘Oh, too bad, too bad!’

Bajorak ignored him and looked straight at me. He said, ‘Until Karimah came to me asking us to escort you, I could not imagine what these companies were seeking in our lands.’

I said nothing as I watched the Red Knights, who seemed to be waiting for us to remount so that they might renew the chase.

‘But I do not understand,’ he went on, ‘why they are seeking you.’

‘Surely that is simple,’ I told him. ‘We are Morjin’s enemies. Surely he would pay much gold to anyone who brings him our heads.’

I rested my hand on the hilt of my sword; I looked into Bajorak’s eyes to see if he desired this gold badly enough to betray us. But I saw there only a blazing hatred of Morjin and a fierce pride.

Then Bajorak looked away from me toward our enemy. ‘Perhaps they do want to kill you. But perhaps they are seeking the same thing as you.’

His perceptiveness vexed me, and I told him, ‘We have not said that we are seeking anything.’

He smiled as best he could and said, ‘No, you say little, with your lips, Valashu Elahad. But your eyes sing like the minstrels. I have never seen a man who desires as you do.’

‘Perhaps,’ I told him, ‘we desire nothing more than to cross your lands.’

He pointed at the snowy peaks in the west. ‘To go into the wild mountains where no one dwells?’

‘Perhaps we wish to dwell there.’

He held out his hand toward Estrella and Daj. ‘It is strange that you take children with you on such a journey.’

‘Is it strange to want to find a place where they might come of age in peace?’

Bajorak’s face softened as he said, ‘No, that is not strange – if any such place exists. But if it did exist, surely you would not seek it in the Sarni’s lands so close to Sakai.’

‘We go where we must,’ I told him. ‘Will you help us?’

‘We would help you better if you helped us.’

‘We ride together,’ I said. ‘If our enemy attacks you, we will fight them.’

‘That is good. But it would be even better if you trusted us.’

‘We’ve trusted you with our lives.’

‘Yes, but not with that which impels you to risk your lives.’

‘As Kane has told you, that would be an unnecessary burden.’

‘You say. But the greater burden is not knowing where we are going or why. It puts my men at risk. And I do not spend their lives as readily as I do gold.’

As the sun’s light broke upon the fillet binding his forehead, I pressed my finger hard into the little zags of the scar that cut mine like a lightning bolt. And I said, ‘You have pledged to ride with us, even so. Will you keep your pledge?’

Bajorak looked back and forth between Pirraj and Kashak as anger clouded his eyes. He shook his bow at me and snapped out: ‘We Tarun are no pledge-breakers! Hai, but you are a hard man, Valashu Elahad. And a willful one! Let us ride then, if that is your wish!’

And with that, he jumped back on his horse, and with Pirraj and Kashak, galloped back to the bend in the river where most of his warriors were gathered.

Liljana stood with her arms thrown protectively around Daj and Estrella. And she scolded me: ‘You were barely cordial to him. I’ve never seen you be so hard.’

I watched as Karimah returned to the Manslayers, who were getting ready to ride again. And I said, ‘We know little of this Bajorak and his true intentions. And you’ve been able to tell me little.’

She clapped her hand to her pocket where she had secreted her blue gelstei. ‘Would you have me try to tell you?’

‘As you tried with the Red Knights?’

Liljana’s heavy eyebrows pulled into a frown. ‘You’re hard with me, too – cruel hard. What have I done to make you so?’

The hurt in her eyes stabbed straight into me. I took her hand in mine and said, ‘My apologies, Liljana. You’ve done nothing. Now why don’t we see if we can lose these damn knights before the sun reaches noon?’

After that we set out as before and continued our race across the Wendrush. We drove our remounts too hard; I felt fire in the lungs of these great beasts and spreading out along their blood to torment their bunching muscles and straining joints. It grew hot, not quite so sweltering as in Marud or Soal, but too hot for early Ashte. The sun rose higher and shot its golden flames at us. I sweated beneath layers of wool, mail and leather underpadding. The wind in my face carried some of this moisture away, but did little to cool my sodden body. I turned to see the others working hard as well. Maram, on top of his bounding brown gelding, puffed and grunted and sweated like a pig. Kane sweated, too, for he was attired no differently. As always, though, he made no complaint. His black eyes seemed to say to me that the Red Knights following us in their thicker armor suffered even worse than we.

The riding quickly became a misery. Biting black flies buzzed around our eyes and ears. I watched Bajorak leading his more lightly-clad warriors ahead of us. Would he honor his word, I wondered? Or did he hope to use us as bait, inviting an attack by other companies of Red Knights and Zayak who would join our pursuers? Perhaps, I thought, Bajorak would then call down a host of Tarun warriors that he might have secreted somewhere among the steppe’s long grasses. He would annihilate his enemy and use this incident as a reason to mount a rebellion against Garthax. And he would not care if my friends and I – kradaks, all, except for Atara – happened to be annihilated, too.

My father had once told me that a king should strive to dwell inside others’ skins and perceive the world as they did. It should have been easy for me to know the truth about Bajorak, easier than it was for Liljana. But it was harder. In the shallows of the Great Northern Ocean, I had once seen an oyster which closed itself inside its shell when disturbed. So it was with me and my gift. All my life I had avoided the harsh touch of others’ passions. And why? Because, like grit in the eyes, it hurt. And even more, because I was afraid. Bajorak had said that Garthax was not his father’s equal. Neither, I thought, was I mine.

And so I rode on and on, watching the glints of gold about Bajorak ahead of me and turning to gaze at the red smear of Morjin’s knights and the Zayak warriors on their ponies pounding after us across the sunlit plain. We did not escape them all that long day. We were only three miles from the mountains when at last we stopped to make camp by a stream that flowed down from these heights. And, as with the night before, our enemy set up their tents only a mile away.

We were all tired and sore from the cruel day’s work, and so none of us had much enthusiasm for tending the horses, gathering wood and water, making the fire, and other such things. As usual when the sun went down, Liljana took charge. She insisted on preparing us a hot meal, and it was good to sit down with our bowls of bloody sagosk meat, whose juices we mopped up with fresh rushk cakes. These Liljana made herself, for she had excused both Daj and Estrella from their chores. The children were so weary and worn that they could hardly hold their bowls to eat their dinners. The sun had burnt their faces, and dust dirtied their hair. Although Daj would not allow himself to whine as other children did, much less to weep, I knew that the hard riding had chafed him, nearly flaying the flesh from his legs. Estrella was in even worse condition. She sat very still, fighting to keep her eyes open. Even the slightest motion caused her to wince in pain.

‘Ah, that was a day!’ Maram sighed out as he worked at a piece of hastily roasted meat. ‘The hardest ride we’ve had since Count Ulanu chased us to Khaisham.’

I remembered that day too well. It had ended with an arrow shot through Atara’s lung and the death of our friend, Alphanderry. I suddenly could not bear the iron tang of my meat, and I put down my knife and bowl.

‘Ah, oh – oh, my poor, poor aching body!’ Maram groaned. He moved stiffly to bring out his brandy bottle, and he caught Master Juwain’s eye. ‘Surely, sir, this is a night for prescribing a little restorative drink?’

‘Surely it is not,’ Master Juwain told him, taking the bottle and putting it away. ‘At least, not that kind of drink. I shall make us all a tea that will soothe rather than numb us.’

So saying, he found some herbs in his medicine chest and brewed up a pot of tea. The hot drink, sweetened with honey, stole some of the hurt from our limbs. Upon sipping it, Daj and Estrella almost immediately lay down upon their furs. Liljana sat between them, stroking their hair and singing them to sleep. After a while her dulcet voice murmured out above the crackle of the fire as she said to me: ‘We cannot travel tomorrow as we did today. They’re children, Val.’

Because her words disturbed me, I stood up to walk by the stream. I paused beneath a huge old cottonwood tree as I looked out at our enemy’s campfires. Across the stream Karimah had posted sentinels who would sit on their horses all night guarding us from attack. Kane found me there, staring at their dark, ghostly forms as I listened to the water gurgling over rounded rocks.

‘You shouldn’t be alone here,’ he told me as he stood with his hand on the hilt of his sword. His eyes searched the grass for stalking lions, no less Zayak warriors.

‘I shouldn’t have brought Daj and Estrella with us,’ I told him. ‘All on such a narrow chance.’

‘You know the need,’ he growled out. ‘You did the right thing.’

‘Did I? Or have I only stolen from them the few days of peace they might have had before … before there is no peace, for anyone?’

‘You take too much upon yourself.’

‘No, too little,’ I said. ‘Daj is as tough as a diamond, but Estrella suffers. Inside, even more than out. I … cannot tell you. She sees too deeply inside of things. There are places she’s terrified to go. And it’s as if I am taking her into the worst of these places, back into a black tunnel that has no end.’

‘Is it her suffering that grieves you or your own?’

‘But there is no difference!’ I said. ‘Especially with her, it is one.’

‘She is a radiant child,’ he told me. ‘I have seen many moments when her joy, too, became your own.’

‘Even then,’ I said, listening to the stream, ‘it is like drinking too much wine too quickly.’

Kane stared up at the stars, and his voice grew strange and deep as he told me, ‘The valarda is the gift of the One. You have yet to learn how to use it.’

‘It is a curse!’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It is an affliction, like a pox upon the skin, like a rupture of the heart.’

At this, he grabbed my arm and shook me as a lion might a lamb. And he growled out, ‘You might as well complain that life is a curse. And that light is an affliction because it carries into your eyes all the ugliness and evil of the world!’

‘Yes,’ I said, feeling the fire inside me. ‘It must have been like that for Artukan when the kirax made him gouge out his own eyes.’

Now Kane squeezed my arm so hard I thought my bones might break. ‘Tell that to Atara, why don’t you? Let her hear you damn your eyes, and hers, and see what she will say!’

I pulled away from him, and looked past the cottonwood’s dark, fluttering leaves at the sky. I found the Seven Sisters and the Dragon and other twinkling constellations. The stars there were so bright, so beautiful. Which ones, I wondered, burned with the light of my father and my mother and all the rest of my slaughtered family?

‘You saw!’ I said to Kane. ‘In Tria, you stood and saw with your own eyes as I struck down Ravik with my “gift”!’

‘So – so I did. The valarda is a double-edged sword, eh?’

It was bad enough that others’ dreads and exaltations should flood into me. But why, I wondered, should my passions strike into them when I lost my head – especially my killing passions?

‘I murdered a man!’ I shouted at him.

‘No, you killed a Kallimun priest who would have killed Atara.’

‘You don’t understand!’

‘Don’t I? So, I’ve seen you kill rabbits and rock goats for food, and how many of our enemy have you sent on with that sword you wear? Killing is only killing, eh? It doesn’t matter how we kill, only who.’

The stream purled in darkness, and the wind rustled the steppe’s grasses, and the whispering inside me told me that Kane was wrong.

‘It must matter,’ I said. ‘Just as everything we do matters.’

‘These are hard times, Val. So, we must do hard things.’

‘Hard things, yes.’

‘Would it be so hard for you to tell Bajorak that we seek a great treasure in the mountains beyond the Oro River? And that in finding it, we would fight Morjin’s gold with our own? Is that not close to the truth?’

I smiled at this as I listened to my heart drumming inside me. I said, ‘I have learned … that the smallest of lies can grow, like a rat’s bite beginning a plague of death.’

‘We need Bajorak on our side, you know.’

‘I will not lie to him.’

‘But you cannot tell him the truth about our purpose! What if he is captured, eh? What if he sells our secrets for gold?’

‘I trust him no more than you do.’

‘Do you trust him to fight, if it comes to that? So, it would not take much, at need, for you to push him into battle.’

I ground my teeth at the fury I felt for Morjin seething inside me. How hard would it be to touch Bajorak – or anyone – with a little of this flame?

‘No, I will not,’ I said to Kane.

‘No? No matter what befalls? No matter which of your friends is threatened? What else won’t you do, then?’

I drew in a deep breath and held it until my lungs burned. And then I said, ‘I will not torture. I will not sacrifice innocents, not to save you or me, or even the children. I will not use the valarda … as I would my sword, to strike terror or maim. And never again to kill.’

As Kane glared at me through the near-darkness, I drew Alkaladur and watched the play of starlight along its length.

‘So,’ he said, gazing at it, ‘in such goodness, in such purity of truth, you think to fight Morjin and all his evil deeds?’

I smiled sadly as I shook my head. ‘I am neither good, nor pure, nor am I renowned as an exemplar of the truth. Who, then, am I to fight evil?’

‘Ha – is that not itself an evil question?’

I said to him, ‘I don’t understand you! Once, on top of a mountain, you told me that I could not fight Morjin your way without losing my soul!’

‘So – perhaps I lied.’

‘No, you did not!’

His voice softened then as he told me, ‘Listen to me, my young friend: we do what we have to do, eh? Just don’t be so sure it’s always easy to know what is evil and what is not.’

And with that, he stalked off back toward our encampment.

I waited with my drawn sword, watching the world turn into darkness.

I breathed in the smells of grass and woodfire and the fresh blood of a lion’s kill wafting on the wind. I sensed many things. The horses standing in their small herd nearby were all exhausted and would have a hard time when morning came. I quivered with the fear of the field mice as they looked for the owls who hunted them, and my heart leaped with the gladness of the wolves as they followed the scent of their prey. And in all this immense anguish and zest, I thought, in all this incessant struggle and striving there was no evil but only the terrible beauty of life. It was too much for me to take in, too much for any man. And yet I must, for the stars, too, had a kind of life: deeper and wilder and infinite in duration. How, I wondered, would I ever feel my mother’s breath upon my face or hear Asaru laughing again if I could not open myself to this eternal flame?

Just then Atara appeared out of the glare of our campfire and walked closer to me. Then she called out: ‘Val, your face – your sword!’

To be open to love, I knew, is to be vulnerable to hate.

‘Morjin is out there,’ I said to her. My sword glowed red like an ember as I pointed it toward our enemy. ‘Can you “see” him?’

Atara drew out her scryer’s crystal and stood rolling it between her hands. She said, ‘Everywhere I look now, Morjin is there. It is why I am loath to look.’

‘Your gift,’ I told her, ‘is a curse. As is mine.’

I went on to relate my conversation with Kane. She came up close to me and grasped my hand. ‘No, it is just the opposite. Kane was right: you have yet to learn how to use the valarda.’

I wrenched free my hand and said, ‘If I could, I would cut it out of me, the way I’ve cut off others’ hands and carved out their hearts.’

‘No – please don’t say that!’

‘Such terrible things I have done! And what is yet to come?’

I stared at the Red Knights’ campfires, then Atara touched my cheek to turn my face toward her. And she said to me, ‘I don’t know what is to come, strange though you might think it. But I know what has been. And I know where I have been, with my gift.’

She held up her gelstei: a little white sphere gleaming beneath the white circle of the moon. ‘I’ve tried to tell you what it is like to see as I have seen. To live. Such glory! So much light! Truly, there are infinite possibilities, the dreams of the stars waiting to be made real. I’ve seen them all, inside this crystal. And here, for too long, I have dwelled. It is splendid, beyond the beating of a butterfly’s wings or the sun rising over the sea. But it is cold. It is like being frozen in ice at the top of a mountain as high as the stars. And all the time, I am so utterly, utterly alone.’

‘A curse,’ I said softly as I covered her crystal with my hand.

‘No! You don’t see! The price of such beauty has been such terrible isolation – almost too terrible to bear. But I have borne it, even gloried in it, because of you. Your gift. You are such a gift, Valashu. You have a heart of fire, and it is so brilliantly, brilliantly beautiful! Is there any ice it could not melt? No, I know – only you. You bring me back into the world, where everything is warm and sweet. I don’t want to know what it would be like to live without you. You are the one being with whom I do not feel alone.’

Her hand was warm against mine. Because she had no eyes, she could not weep. And so I wept for her instead.

‘Kane has suggested,’ I finally told her, ‘that I should use the valarda to manipulate Bajorak. Like a puppeteer pulling on strings.’

She smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘Kane is so knowing. But sometimes, so willfully blind.’

‘How should I use the valarda, then?’

‘You know,’ she said to me. Her voice was as cool and gentle as the wind. ‘You’ve always known, and you always will know, when the time comes.’

I looked out at the millions of stars shimmering through the night. The black sky could hold their splendor, but how could any man?

‘And now,’ she said to me, ‘you should get some rest. Tomorrow will be a long day, and a bad one, I think. Come to bed, Val.’

She pulled at my hand to lead me back to our camp. But I let go of her to grip my sword, and I told her, ‘In a moment.’

I watched her walk back to the fire as she had come, and I marvelled yet again that she could find her way without the use of her eyes. I wondered then how I would ever find my own way to whatever end awaited me. I gazed at Alkaladur, whose silustria glistered with dark reds and violets. The Sword of Fate, men called it. How should I point it, I wondered, toward all that was good, beautiful and true? I wondered, too, if I would ever be free of the valarda. I had spoken of using my sword to make a brutal surgery upon myself, but I might as well try to cut away my face, my limbs and all my flesh – no less my memories and dreams – and hope to remain Valashu Elahad.

‘So, just so,’ I whispered.

And with this sudden affirmation, my heart opened, and my sword filled with the light of the stars. Then, to my astonishment, its substance began radiating a pure and deep glorre. This was the secret color inside all others, the true color that was their source. It flared with all the fire of red and shone as numinously as midnight blue, and yet these essences – and those of the other colors it contained – were not just multiple and distinct but somehow one. Kane called it the color of the angels, and said that it belonged far away across the heavens, in the splendor of the constellations near the Golden Band, but not yet here on earth. For most men had neither the eyes nor the heart to behold it.

‘So bright,’ I whispered. ‘Too bright.’

I, too, could not bear the beauty of this color for very long. And so as the world continued its journey into night and carried the brilliant stars into the west, I watched as the glorre bled away, and the radiance of my sword dimmed and died.

I returned to the fire after that and lay down on my furs to sleep. But I could not. As my sword remained within its sheath, waiting to be drawn, I knew that the glorre abided somewhere inside me. But would I ever find the grace to call upon it?

3

The next day’s dawn came upon the world with a red, unwelcome glare. We ate a hasty breakfast of rushk cakes smeared in jelly and some goose eggs that Liljana had reserved for especially difficult work. And our riding that morning, while not nearly so fast or jolting as that of the previous day, was difficult enough. We set out parallel to the mountains, and our course here took us southeast over ground humped with many hummocks and rocky crests. We crossed streams all icy cold and swollen into raging brown torrents that ran down from the great peaks above us. All of us, I thought, rode stiffly. We struggled to keep our tired horses moving at a good pace. Often I wondered at the need, for no matter how quickly or slowly we progressed, our enemy in their carmine-colored armor kept always a mile’s distance behind us.

‘Surely they don’t intend to attack us,’ Maram puffed out as he nudged his horse up beside me. ‘Unless Bajorak is right and they are only waiting for reinforcements.’

Toward this contingency, Bajorak had sent forth outriders to search the grassy swells and sweeps of the Wendrush.

‘Of course,’ Maram added, ‘it seems most likely that they only intend to follow us into the mountains.’

‘We cannot go into the mountains,’ I told him, ‘so long as they do follow us.’

‘Ah, it seems we cannot go at all unless we find this Kul Kavaakurk. Where is this gorge, then? How do we know it really exists?’

Maram kept on complaining at the uncertainties of our new quest as his eyes searched the folds and fissures of the rocky earth to our right. His voice boomed out into the morning, and Master Juwain caught wind of our conversation. He rode up to us and told Maram, ‘It surely does exist.’

‘Ah, sir, but you are a man of faith.’

‘I have faith in our Brotherhood’s lore.’

‘But, sir,’ Maram reminded him, ‘it is our Brotherhood no longer.’

‘And that is precisely why you are ignorant of this lore.’

‘Lore or fables?’

‘The Way Rhymes are certainly no fables,’ Master Juwain said. ‘They are as true as the stories in the Great Book of the Ages. But they are not for the common man.’

He went on to speak of that body of esoteric knowledge entrusted only to the masters of the Brotherhood. As he often did when riding – or sitting, standing or even sleeping – he clutched in his hand his travelling volume of the Saganom Elu.

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said to him, ‘one of the things that I could never abide about the Brotherhood was this madness for books.’

‘A love for books, you mean.’

‘No, it is more of a bibliolatry.’

‘But the Way Rhymes are recorded in no book!’

‘And that is precisely the point,’ Maram said, needling him. ‘The Brotherhood makes an idol of the very idea of a book.’

Master Juwain’s homely face screwed up in distress. ‘It is one of the noblest ideas of man!’

‘So noble that you withhold this lore from men? Should not all that is best and most true be recorded in the Saganom Elu?’

Now Master Juwain’s lips tightened with real pain. And he held up his worn book as he tried to explain to Maram: ‘But all is recorded there! You must understand, however, that this rendering of the Saganom Elu is only for men. It is said that the Elijin have a truer telling of things, recorded on tablets of gold. And the Galadin as well have theirs, deeper and truer still, perhaps etched in diamond or read in starfire, for they are deathless and cannot be harmed, and so it must be with their writings. And the Ieldra! What can any man say of those whose being is pure light? Only this: that their knowledge must be the brightest reflection of the one and true Saganom Elu, the word of the One which existed before even the stars – and which was never created and therefore cannot be destroyed.’

For a while, as our horses made their way over the uneven ground at a bone-bruising trot, Master Juwain continued to wax eloquent as his ideals soared. And then Maram rudely brought him back to earth.

‘What I always detested about the Brotherhood,’ Maram said, ‘was that you always kept secrets from lesser men – even from aspirants such as I when I, ah, still aspired to be other than I am.’

‘But we’ve had to protect our secrets!’ Master Juwain told him. ‘And so protect those who are not ready for them. Is a child given fire to play with? What would most men do if given the power of the Red Dragon?’

I turned in my saddle to look at the Red Knights trailing us as if bound to our horses with chains. I wondered yet again if Morjin rode with them; I wondered what he would do with the unfathomable power of the Lightstone.

Maram must have sensed the trajectory of my concerns, for he said to Master Juwain: ‘And so like precious gems, like gelstei hidden in lost castles, you encode these precious secrets in your rhymes?’

‘Even as we encode the way to our greatest school.’

Maram sighed at this, and he sucked at his lip as if wishing for a drink of brandy. ‘Tell me again the verses that tell of this school.’

Now it was Master Juwain’s turn to sigh as he said, ‘You’ve an excellent ear for verse when you put yourself to it.’

‘Ah, well, I suppose I should put myself since you have honored me with this precious lore that you say is no fable.’

‘It is not a question of honor,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘If I fall before we reach the school, at least one of us must know the verse. Now listen well and try to remember this:

Between the Oro and the Jade

Where sun at edge of grass is laid,

Between the rocks like ass’s ears

The Kul Kavaakurk gorge appears.

Maram nodded his head as his fat lips moved silently. Then he looked at Master Juwain and said, ‘Well, the first two lines are clear enough, but what about the third? What about these “ass’s” ears?’

‘Why, that is certainly clear as well, isn’t it? Somewhere, at the edge of the steppe, we will find two rocks shaped like an ass’s ears framing the way toward the Kul Kavaakurk.’

‘Why two rocks, then?’

Master Juwain cast Maram a strained look as if he were being as dull and difficult as an ass. He said, ‘How many ears does an ass have?’

‘No more than two, I hope, or I would not want to see such a beast. But what if the line you told me was instead:

Between the rocks like asses’ ears

That could mean two asses or three, and so there could be four rocks or six – or even more.’

As Master Juwain pulled at his ruined ear, the one into which Morjin’s priest had stuck a red-hot iron, he gazed at the mountains to the west. And he said, ‘I’m afraid I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘And that is the problem with these Way Rhymes of yours. Since none of them are written down, how are we to make such distinctions?’

Master Juwain fell quiet as we trotted along. Then he thumped his book yet again and said to Maram, ‘The words in here are meant to be clear for any man to read. But the words in the Way Rhymes are only for the masters of the Brotherhood. And any master would know, as you should know, to apply Jaskar the Wise’s Scales to any conundrum.’

‘Scales?’ Maram said. ‘Are we now speaking of fish?’

‘Now you are being an ass!’ Master Juwain snapped out.

‘Ah, well, I must confess,’ Maram said, ‘that I do not remember anything about this Jaskar the Wise or his scales.’

‘Jaskar the Wise,’ Master Juwain reminded him, ‘was the Master Diviner and then Grandmaster of the Blue Brotherhood in the Age of Law. But never mind for right now who he was. We are concerned with the principle that he elucidated: that when faced with two or more equally logical alternatives, the simplest should be given the greatest weight.’

‘And so we are to look for an ass’s ears, and so two rocks and not four, is that right?’

‘I believe that is right.’

Maram covered his heavy brows with his hand as he scanned the great wall of the Nagarshath along our way. And he said, ‘I haven’t seen anything that looks like ears, those of an ass or any other beast, and we’ve come at least a hundred and forty miles from the Jade.’

‘And we’ve still another forty until we reach the Oro. And so we can deduce that we’ll come across this landmark between here and there.’

Maram looked behind at our pursuers and said, ‘Closer to here would be better than closer to there. I’m getting a bad feeling about all this. I hope we find these damn donkey’s ears, and soon.’

After that we rode even faster through the swishing grasses along the mountains, and so did the men who followed us. I, too, had a bad feeling about them, and it grew only hotter and more galling as the sun rose higher above us. I turned often to make sure that Karimah and her Manslayers covered our rear, just as I watched Bajorak and his Danladi warriors fanned out ahead of us. After brooding upon Master Juwain’s and Maram’s little argument and all that my friends had said to me the night before, I finally pushed Altaru forward at a gallop so that I might hold counsel with this strong-willed headman of the Tarun clan.

After pounding across the stone-strewn turf and accidentally trampling the nest of a meadowlark, I came up to Bajorak. He held up his hand and called for a halt then. When he saw the look in my eyes, he led me away from Pirraj and the huge Kashak and his other warriors. He reined in his horse near a large boulder about fifty yards from his men. And he said to me, ‘What is it, Valashu Elahad?’

For a moment I studied this great Sarni warrior, with his limbs, neck and head encircled in gold and his face painted with blue stripes like some sort of strange tiger. Most of all I looked deeply into his dazzling blue eyes. And then I asked him: ‘Do you know of two rocks, along the mountains, shaped like an ass’s ears? There would be a span between them – and possibly a stream or a river.’

His eyes grew brighter and even harder, like blue diamonds, as he stared at me. And he answered my question with a question: ‘Is that where we are to escort you then?’

‘Perhaps,’ I told him.

His fine face pulled into a scowl, and he snapped his braided, black quirt against his hand. ‘I know not of any ass’s ears, and I care not.’

I couldn’t keep down my disappointment, and he must have felt this for his eyes softened as he said, ‘But there are two great rocks like unto those you describe, about ten miles south of here. We call them the Red Shields. If that is your destination, however, you would have had a hard time finding it.’

‘Why so?’

‘Because the Shields face east, and we approach them from the northwest. From our vantage, we will see only their edges – and the rocks and trees on the slopes behind them.’

I continued gazing at him, and I finally asked, ‘Do these shields, then, guard a gorge cutting through the mountains?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I know not. No Sarni would ever journey into the mountains to find out.’

He turned to snap his quirt toward the mountains, and asked me, ‘What is the name of this gorge?’

Our eyes locked together, and something inside him seemed to push at me, as I pushed at him. I said, ‘If you’ve no care for gorges, you would have even less for its name.’

Now he whipped the quirt against his hand so hard that it instantly raised up a red welt – but no redder and hotter than his anger at me. He seemed to bite back words that he might regret speaking. He turned away from my gaze to look at the mountains and then behind us at the Red Knights, who had also paused to take a rest. Then his eyes moved toward my friends, grouped together in front of the Manslayers; I knew with a painful leap of my blood that he was watching Atara.

‘What have I done,’ he asked, ‘to make you scorn me so?’

And I blurted out: ‘I do not scorn you, only the way that you look at one … whom you should not look at at all.’

Astonishment poured out of him like the sweat that shone from his brow and beaded up on his golden fillet. And he said to me, ‘Atara is a great warrior, and more, imakla! And even more, a beautiful woman. How should a man look at such a woman, then?’

Not in lust, I thought, fighting at the knot of pain rising up in my throat. Not in such terrible desire.

He turned back to me, and his astonishment only deepened. And he half-shouted, ‘You are Valari, and she is Sarni – half-Sarni! And she is your companion in arms who has yet to fulfill her vow! You cannot be betrothed to her!’

‘No, we are not betrothed,’ I forced out. ‘But we are promised to each other.’

‘Promised how, then?’

I watched Atara giving Estrella a drink from her water horn, and I said, ‘Promised with our hearts.’

I did not really expect this savage Danladi warrior to understand such deep and tender sentiments, for the Sarni beat their women when they displease them and rarely show them kindness. And so he astonished me once more when he said, ‘I am sorry, Valashu, I will not look at her again. But I, too, know what it is to love this woman.’

I glared at him and said, ‘My father taught me that one should not mistake lust for love.’

‘No, one should not,’ he agreed. ‘But it surprises me to hear a Valari speak of love.’

‘I have heard,’ I told him, ‘that you Sarni speak of love only for your horses.’

He patted the neck of his brown stallion as he smiled sadly. ‘That is because you know little about us.’

Some hurt in his voice – seething and keen and covered with layers of scar – made me feel my way past my jealousy deeper into his being. And what I sensed pulsing inside him so fiercely was only love. Love for Atara, love for his family, for his horses or the beautiful land over which they rode, I could not tell. It didn’t matter. For this bright flame filled my blood and broke me open, and I could never scorn him again.

‘And you,’ I said to him, ‘know little about us.’

His eyes softened, and he looked at me strangely as he said, ‘I have heard what the Red Dragon did to your land. What he did to your mother and grandmother.’

My eyes filled with a hot stinging, and the green grasses of the steppe beyond Bajorak’s wild, mournful face grew blurry. I swallowed against the lump in my throat and could not speak.

Now he wiped at his own eyes, and his throat seemed raw and pained as he said, ‘When I was twelve years old, the Zayak crossed the Jade to raid for women. They surprised us, and many were taken. My mother, my sister, too – Takiyah was her name. But they would not consort with the Zayak, and so their chieftain, Torkalax, scourged them with his quirt and gave them to Morjin. But they would not be slaves in Argattha either, and they tried to kill themselves to keep Morjin’s priests from possessing them. It mattered not. The filthy Red Priests ravished them all the same. And then Morjin crucified them for the crime of trying to steal the use of their bodies from the priests. It is said that he set them in his great hall as an example to others. A gem seller who did business with my father brought us the news of their torture. And on that day my father made me vow that I would never make peace with the Zayak or with Morjin.’

Out on the steppe, a lion roared and a meadowlark chirped angrily – perhaps the same bird whose nest Altaru had destroyed. And I said to Bajorak, ‘Our enemy is one and the same, and so there should be no quarrel between us.’

‘No quarrel, perhaps. But the enemy of our enemy is not always our friend. Were it so, we would make cause with the Marituk, who hate the Zayak as much as we do.’

‘It is hard,’ I said to him, ‘for a Valari and a Sarni to be friends.’

‘And yet you and the Manslayer call each other “friend”, if nothing more.’

I saw him searching for something in my eyes as he gazed at me. And I searched for something in him. I found it beneath his gold-studded armor in the sudden surge of his blood. It was the promise of life, the very pulse of the world and breath of the stars. When I opened my heart to him, I felt it beating strong, wild and true.

‘Friends,’ he told me, ‘do not keep secrets from each other.’

‘No, they do not,’ I said.

It came to me then that I had a sort of Scales of my own, for I gave great weight to what my heart told me was true. One either had faith in men, or not. As Bajorak looked at me so openly, without entreaty or guile, I knew that I trusted him and that he would never betray me.

‘The name of the gorge we seek,’ I told him, ‘is the Kul Kavaakurk.’

I went on to explain the nature of our quest. Only the Maitreya, I said to him, could contend with Morjin for mastery of the Lightstone. We had no idea where on Ea to search for this great-souled being, but the Grandmaster of the Great White Brotherhood in their ancient school in the mountains above us might know.

‘It is a small hope,’ I said to him. ‘But unless the Maitreya is found, it won’t matter if the Danladi or Kurmak or Valari refuse to make peace with Morjin. For Morjin and all his allies will make war against us and destroy us one by one.’

‘No, that will not be,’ he said. ‘Morjin may indeed destroy us. But not one by one.’

And with that, he leaned out away from his horse and extended his calloused hand toward me. I grasped it in mine, and we sat there for a few moments testing each other’s resolve. With a gladness that he could not contain, he looked at me and smiled as he said, ‘Friend.’

I smiled, too, and nodded my head. ‘Friend.’

Each telling of the truth, I suddenly knew, was like a whisper that might grow into a whirlwind.

‘It is a strange thing you do,’ he said to me, ‘seeking this Maitreya instead of gold, women or war. And you, a great warrior, or so it’s said.’

‘I’ve seen enough war to last to the end of my days if I lived another ten thousand years.’

And Bajorak surprised me once more, saying, ‘So have I.’

I took in the paint on his face, the saber thrust through his braided gold belt and the great horn bow strapped to his back. I said to him, ‘I have never heard a Sarni warrior speak so.’

Again he smiled, an expression made difficult by the scars cutting his cheeks. And he said, ‘I have wives and daughters, and I would not see them violated by any man. I have a son. I would hear him make music.’

My eyes filled with amazement as I smiled at him.

‘Promise me, Valashu Elahad, that you will not tell anyone what I have told you here. For me to speak of love is one thing. But if my warriors heard me speak of ending war, they would think me mad.’

‘All right,’ I said, clasping hands with him again, ‘I promise.’

He nodded his head to me, once, fiercely, and then turned his horse about and rode back to his warriors. And I returned to my friends, who were gathered in a circle on top of their horses between the Bajorak’s Danladi and our Manslayer rear guard.

‘Well?’ Maram called out to me as I came up to them. ‘What was all that about?’

Kane, however, needed no account of my meeting with Bajorak to know what had transpired. His black eyes were like two disks of heated iron as he said to me, ‘So, you told him.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had to.’

‘You had to?’ The muscles beneath his wind-burnt jaws popped out as if he were working at a piece of meat. I knew that he was furious with me. ‘Ha! – we will see what comes of this. Your fate is your fate, eh? Some men wait for theirs, but you have to go rushing in, like a child into a dragon’s den.’

After that we continued our journey toward the place that Bajorak had told of. Five miles we put behind us in less than an hour before pausing to water the horses at a little stream trickling through the grass. I kept a watch on our enemy, and wondered yet again why they took such pains to keep their distance from us.

‘It must be,’ I said to Atara as she sipped from her water horn, ‘that Morjin does not wish me to catch sight of his face.’

‘Perhaps,’ she told me. Maram, Liljana and Kane stood next to her along the stream listening to what she had to say. ‘But consider this as well: If it really is Morjin, he must know, or guess, our mission. It would be hard for him, I think, so terribly, terribly hard to decide between letting us lead him to the Maitreya and killing us while he had the chance.’

‘He has little chance,’ I said. ‘And if he comes too close, it is we who shall kill him.’

But fate was to prove me wrong on both these counts. Just as we bent low to refill our horns in the ice-cold water, I saw Bajorak, farther down the stream, suddenly put away his horn and throw his hand to his forehead like a visor. He looked out toward the east, where a grassy rise blocked sight of the flatter country there. A few moments later, a dappled horse and a Sarni warrior charged up over the rise and galloped straight toward us. I recognized the man as Ossop, one of the outriders that Bajorak had sent to keep watch on our flank.

We mounted quickly, and Kane, Atara and I rode over to learn why Ossop returned in such haste. Karimah and one of her Manslayers met there in front of Bajorak as well, just as Ossop called out: ‘They come, out of the east, and five miles behind me!’

He pulled up and gasped out that another company of Red Knights, fifteen strong, and twenty-five more Zayak warriors were quickly bearing down upon us.

I turned to look for them, but could see little more than the windswept rise running parallel to the eastern horizon. To the northwest, the Red Knights who had trailed us so far were remounting their horses. And so were the twenty-five Zayak warriors who rode with them.

‘Now we’ve no choice!’ I said, looking at our enemy. ‘It’s too late to attack them, and so we must flee!’

I pointed at two long strips of red rock marking the front range of the White Mountains five miles away. If these were truly the edges of the Ass’s Ears – or the Red Shields – Bajorak was right that they appeared very different from this point of view.

‘Hold!’ Kashak called out to Bajorak. Although this huge man had a savage look about him, with his ferocious blue eyes and bushy blond, overhanging brows, I sensed in him little that was actually cruel. But he was quite capable of dealing with life’s cruelties in a businesslike and almost casual way. ‘Hold, I say! We agreed to escort the kradaks to the mountains, and so we have done. If we remain here, trapped between two forces and these cursed rocks, we’ll be slaughtered along with them. Let us therefore leave them to what must befall.’

My heart took a long time between beats as I waited to hear what Bajorak would say to this. But he hesitated not a moment as he called back to Kashak: ‘We shall not leave them!’

‘But we have earned our gold, and our contract has been fulfilled.’

‘No – the spirit of it has not!’

‘I say it has.’

‘You say! But who is headman of the Tarun, you or I?’

Bajorak locked eyes with Kashak, and so fierce and fiery was his gaze that Kashak quickly looked away.

‘There is no time!’ Bajorak called out, to Pirraj and his other warriors. He began issuing orders as he rearrayed his men to cover us on our left flank along the line of our flight. Then he snapped his quirt near his horse’s ear and shouted, ‘Let us ride!’

Without a backward glance at Kashak, he urged his horse straight toward the two red rocks five miles away. Kashak paused only a moment to regard me with his bleak, blue eyes. Freely had this Sarni warrior chosen to ride with Bajorak, and freely he might choose to ride elsewhere. But he would not desert his headman and friends in the face of battle. He said to me, without rancor or resentment: ‘It always comes to this, does it not? I hope you’re good at fighting, Valari. Well, we shall see.’

And with that, he whipped his quirt against his horse’s side and galloped off to rejoin his kith and kin.

My friends and I took only a few moments longer to urge our mounts forward and gain speed across the uneven terrain. Karimah and her twelve Manslayers rode close behind us, like a shield of flaxen-haired women and bounding horseflesh. And behind them, scarcely a mile away, the Red Knights charged at us, and they seemed intent at last upon closing the distance between us. I heard them blowing their warhorns and felt the beating of their horses’ hooves upon grassy ground; I felt, too, the beating of the heart of the man who was their master. He pushed his men forward with all his spite and will, even as my blood pushed at me with a fierce, quick fire that I had learned to hate.

So began our wild flight toward the mountains. I rode beside Daj and close to Estrella, for I worried that she might be too tired to sustain such a chase. But she kept her horse moving quickly and showed no sign of slumping into exhaustion or falling off. Master Juwain and Liljana watched her, too; they were now experienced campaigners, if not warriors, and they rode nearly as well as the Danladi to our left and the Manslayers behind us. Maram, though, labored almost as heavily as his sweating horse. I felt the strain in his great body as a bone-crushing weariness in my own.

It did not surprise me that the Red Knights seemed to gain on us. But they did not gain much: perhaps a hundred yards with every mile that we covered. And we put these miles behind us quickly, with the wind whipping at our faces, to the drumming of hooves against the ground. A mile of grassy terrain vanished behind us, and then two and three. The rocks called the Ass’s Ears loomed larger and larger. This close to them, I could see more than just their edges. It seemed that Master Juwain’s Way Rhymes had told true, for the rocks were indeed like great, elongated triangles of stone rising up into the sky. Behind them, layers of the White Mountains built up into even greater heights toward the clouds. Between them flowed a stream. A rocky ridge ran along the Ear to the north nearest us. A smaller ridge across the stream seemed to protect the approach to the second and southern Ear. The ground between the great rocks, I saw, was broken and strewn with boulders: very bad terrain for any horse to negotiate at speed.

Bajorak, upon studying the lay of the land here, saw its obvious advantages for defense – though he came to a different conclusion than I as to what our strategy should be. With only a mile to cover before we reached this gateway into the mountains, he dropped back to me and shouted out above the pounding and snorting of our horses: ‘My warriors and I will dismount and set up behind that ridge!’

Here, with a lifetime of coordinating such motions to the beat and bound of his horse, he held out his finger pointing steadily toward the northern ridge.

‘Any who try to force their way between the Shields, we will kill with arrows!’ he shouted. ‘You will have time to escape into this Kul Kavaakurk Gorge – if there really is such a gorge!’

As Altaru charged forward with rhythmic surges of his great muscles, I gazed between the red rocks, at the rushing stream. If this narrow gap opened into a gorge, I could not tell, for great boulders and the curves of the mountains’ wooded slopes obscured it.

‘No!’ I called back to Bajorak. ‘You have chosen not to desert us, and so we will not desert you!’

‘Don’t be a fool!’ he said. ‘Think of the children! Think of the Shining One!’

Even though each moment of our dash across the steppe seemed to jolt any thoughts from my mind, I was thinking of both Daj and Estrella, as well as the need of our quest. I did not, however, have time to argue with Bajorak – or the heart to dispirit him. For I was sure that if my friends and I fled with the children into the mountains, Bajorak’s warriors would inevitably be overwhelmed, and then Morjin and his Red Knights would trap us in the gorge.

‘Here is what we’ll do!’ I called back to him. ‘As you have said, you will set up with your warriors behind the ridge – all except Kashak and his squadron!’

I quickly shouted out the rest of the battle plan that I had devised. It seemed that Bajorak might dispute with me over who would take command here. But after gazing into my eyes for a long moment, he looked away and nodded his head as he said, ‘All right.’

We continued our charge toward the Ass’s Ears, slowing to a trot and then a quick walk as the ground broke up and rose steeply. I turned to see that the Red Knights and the Zayak warriors had halted about half a mile behind us. Clearly, they saw that they could not overtake us before we established ourselves behind the rocky ridge. Clearly, too, they awaited the arrival of the new companies of Red Knights and Zayak that Ossop had told of.

When the ground grew too rotten for riding, we dismounted and led our horses along either side of the wooded stream. It was hard work over rocks and up shrub-covered slopes, but necessity drove us to move like demons of speed. Bajorak and twenty-three of his warriors turned up behind the rocky ridge and deployed at the wall-like crest along its length, as would archers behind a castle’s battlements. They hated fighting on foot, away from their horses tethered behind them, but there was no help for it. I led the rest of our force – Karimah’s Manslayers, Kashak’s seven warriors and my friends – behind the smaller ridge fronting the second Ass’s Ear to the south. The trees there and humps of ground obscured our movement from our enemy, or so I prayed.

While Kashak stood with his men behind some trees and Karimah waited with her Manslaying women nearby, I turned to speak with my companions and friends. I called Liljanja closer to me. I whispered to her: ‘Here is what we must do.’

I cupped my hands over her ears and she slowly nodded her head. Then she brought forth her blue gelstei, cast into a whale-shaped figurine. She held this powerful crystal up to the side of her head. With a gasp that tore through me like a spear puncturing my lungs, she suddenly grimaced and cried out in pain. Then she jerked her hand away from her head and opened it. The blue gelstei gleamed in the strong sun. As Liljana’s eyes cleared, she stared at me and said, ‘It is done.’

After that I called Master Juwain, Daj and Estrella over as well. I said to Master Juwain: ‘You and Liljana will take the children into the mountains. We will follow when we can. And if we can’t, it will be upon you to find the Brotherhood school – and the Maitreya.’

‘No!’ Daj cried out, laying his hand upon the little sword that he wore. ‘I want to stay here with you and fight!’

Estrella, too, did not like this new turn of things. She came up to my side and wrapped her arms around my waist, and would not let go.

‘Here, now,’ I said as I pulled away her hands as gently as I could. ‘You must go with Master Juwain – everything depends upon it.’

She shook the dark curls out of her eyes and looked up at me. The bright noon light glinted off her fine-boned cheeks and the slightly crooked nose that must have once been broken. She smiled at me, and I felt all her trust in me pouring through me like a river of light. I promised her that I would rejoin her and Daj in the mountains, and soon. Then I lifted her up to kiss her goodbye.

‘Karimah!’ I called out, motioning this sturdy woman over to us. Despite her bulk, she came at a run, gripping her strung bow. ‘Would you be willing to appoint two of your warriors to escort Master Juwain and the children into the mountains, a few miles perhaps, until they find a safe place?’

‘I will, Lord Valashu,’ she agreed. She pulled at her jowly chin as she looked at me. ‘But no more than two – we shall need the rest of my sisters here before long.’

She turned to choose two of her sister Manslayers for this task. I quickly said goodbye to Master Juwain, Liljana and Daj. And so did Maram, Atara and Kane. I watched as a young lioness of a woman named Surya led the way up the stream between the Ass’s Ears. My friends, walking their horses beside them, hurried after her and so did another of the Manslayers whose name I did not know.

A few moments later, they disappeared behind the curve of a great sandstone buttress and were lost to our view. Then I turned back toward the Wendrush to complete our preparations for battle.

4

To the sound of battle horns blaring out on the grasslands that we could not quite see, I called everyone closer to me. Karimah and Atara crowded in close, with Kashak and two Danladi warriors, between Maram and Kane. And I said to them, ‘The Zayak are fifty in number, and Morjin will appoint at least three dozen of them to ride against Bajorak’s men along the ridge, keeping them pinned with arrows. The rest of the Zayak, with his forty Red Knights, he will send up along this stream.’

Here I pointed at the water cutting between Bajorak’s ridge and the one that we hid behind. ‘He will try to flank Bajorak and come up behind him. But we shall meet him here with arrows and swords.’

So saying I drew Alkaladur; Kashak’s men and many of the Manslayers gasped to behold its brilliance, for they had never seen a sword like it.

Kashak, fingering his taut bowstring, asked me: ‘How do you know that is what Morjin will do?’

Now I pointed behind us, where the Ass’s Ears rose up above what I presumed was the way to the Kul Kavaakurk. And I said to Kashak, ‘Morjin cannot go into the mountains until he clears Bajorak from the ridge.’

‘Then he might decide not to go into the mountains. Or to besiege our position.’

‘No, he will be afraid that I and my companions will escape him,’ I said. ‘And so, despite the cost, he will attack – and soon.’

Kashak’s bushy brows knitted together as he shot me a suspicious look. ‘You seem to know a great deal about this filthy Crucifier.’

‘More than I would ever want to know,’ I said, watching the slow smolder of flames build within my sword.

He looked at the rocky, sloping ground over which Morjin’s men would charge, if they came this way, and he said, ‘Why did you ask Bajorak for me and my squadron to stand with you, when I spoke in favor of abandoning you?’

‘Because,’ I said, smiling at him, ‘you did speak of this. And having decided to remain even so, you will fight like a lion to prove your valor.’

Kashak’s eyes widened in awe, and he made a warding sign with his finger. He stared at me as if he feared that I could look into his mind.

‘I will fight like a pride of lions!’ he called out, raising up his bow.

I smiled at him again, and we clasped hands like brothers. One either believes in men or not.

A horn sounded, but the swells of earth separating us from the steppe beyond muffled the sound of it. The two forces of our enemy, I thought, would be meeting up on the grassy slope below the ridges and preparing to attack us.

‘We should see how they deploy,’ Kashak said to me. He pointed toward the ridge above us. ‘We could steal up to those rocks and see if you are right.’

I nodded my head at this. And so leaving Kashak’s men behind with Kane, Atara, Maram and the Manslayers, Kashak and I picked our way up the ridge running in front of the second of the Ass’s Ears. As we neared the crest, we dropped down upon our bellies and crept along the ground for the final few yards like snakes. With the taste of dirt in my mouth, I peered around the edge of a rock, and so did Kashak. And this is what we saw:

Out on the steppe, a quarter mile away, some forty of the Zayak warriors were arrayed in a long line below the ridge to the left of us where Bajorak had set up with his Danladi. They gripped their thick, double-curved bows in preparation for a charge and an arrow duel. The ten remaining Zayak, dismounted, gathered along the stream with the two score Red Knights, who would also fight on foot. I looked for the leader of these knights, encased in their armor of carmine-tinged mail and steel plate, but I could not make him out.

‘It is as you said!’ Kashak whispered to me. ‘It is as if you can look into Morjin’s mind!’

No, I thought, I had no such gift. But Liljana did. At my request, she had used her blue gelstei one last time, seemingly to seek out the secrets of Morjin’s mind – and his intentions for the coming battle. And she had, in this invisible duel of thoughts and diamond-hard will, with great cunning, let him see our intentions: our company’s flight into the mountains with the Manslayers as an escort. That Kane, Maram, Atara and I remained behind, lying in wait with Kashak’s men and the rest of the Manslayers, she had not let Morjin see, or so I hoped. It was a ruse that might work one time – but one time only.

Then one of the Red Knights below us raised up his arm, and another horn rang out its bone-chilling blare. The forty Zayak on their horses began their charge toward Bajorak and his warriors. And the Red Knights – bearing drawn maces or swords – began moving at the double-pace up between the two ridges.

‘They come!’ Kashak whispered to me.

I remained frozen to the ground, gripping a rock with one hand and my sword in the other. The entire world narrowed until I could see neither mountain nor sky nor rocks running along the edge of the gray-green grasslands. I had eyes for only one man: he who led the Red Knights up along the stream cutting between the two ridges. His yellow surcoat blazed with a great red dragon. I felt the fury of the sun heating up my sword and a wild fire inside me, and I knew that this man was Morjin.

‘Lord Valashu, they come!’ Kashak whispered more urgently.

He pulled at my cloak, and I nodded my head. We scuttled crablike down the slope a dozen yards before rising to a crouch and then running back down to join our companions.

There were too few trees here to provide cover for all the Sarni. Kashak’s warriors grumbled at being ordered to hide behind them, while Karimah’s Manslayers almost rebelled at being asked to lie down behind some raspberry bushes. I stood with Kane, Maram and Atara behind a rock the size of a wagon. We waited for our enemy to appear in the notch down and around the curve of the stream.

‘Oh, Lord, my Lord!’ Maram sighed out to me. He fingered the edge of his drawn sword: a Valari kalama like the one that Kane held to his lips as he whispered fell words and then kissed its brilliant steel. ‘That Kashak was right, wasn’t he? It seems always to come to this.’

I looked up to my left past the stream, at the ridge where Bajorak waited with his warriors. The curve of the ground obscured the sight of most of his small force, but I knew they were ready because I could see three of the Danladi nearest us. They pulled back their bowstrings as they sighted their arrows on the Zayak who would be riding uphill against them.

‘Why, Val, why?’ Maram murmured to me. ‘I should be sitting by a stream in the Morning Mountains, preparing to eat a picnic lunch that my beloved has made for me. Look at this lovely day! Ah, why, why, why did I ever consent to leave Mesh?’

‘Shhh!’ Kane whispered fiercely to him. ‘You’ll give us away!’

I smiled sadly, for Maram was right about one thing: it was a beautiful day. In the hills behind us, birds were singing. The sun rained down a bright light upon the reddish rocks and the silvery green leaves of the cottonwood trees. Below us, along either bank of the stream and up the rocky slopes, millions of small white flowers grew. Atara called them Maiden’s Breath. A soft breeze rippled their delicate petals, which shimmered in the sunlight. It occurred to me that I should be picking a bouquet for Atara, rather than gripping a long sword in which gathered reddish-orange flowers of flame.

We heard our enemy before we saw them, for as they advanced up the stream, they made a great noise: of boots kicking at rocks; of grunts and hard breath puffing out into the warm air; of interlocking rings of mail jangling and grinding against the sheets of steel plate that covered their shoulders, forearms and chests. And of twanging bowstrings, as well, as Bajorak’s warriors upon the ridge rained down arrows upon them. Steel points broke against steel armor and shields with a clanging terrible to hear. A few of these must have broken through to the flesh beneath for the air below the towering Ass’s Ears rang with the even more terrible screams of men struck down or dying. I wondered if Bajorak’s men were concentrating on the Red Knights or the more vulnerable Zayak warriors in their flimsy leather armor. And then our enemy rounded the curve of the stream and charged up the flower-covered slopes straight toward us.

They did not see us until it was too late. I waited until they came close enough to smell their acrid sweat, and then I shouted out: ‘Attack!’

Kashak’s men stepped out from behind the trees at the same moment that Karimah’s Manslayers lifted their bows over the tops of the raspberry bushes. With Atara, these archers were twenty in number, and they loosed their arrows almost as one. The first volley, fired at such short range, killed a dozen of the Red Knights and the Zayak. A few arrows glanced off red armor, but many found their marks through the Zayaks’ throats or chests, or straight through the Red Knights’ vulnerable faces. I shouted at Kashak’s men to keep to the cover of the trees, but in this one matter they did not heed me. They were Sarni warriors, used to battle on the open steppe, and they thought it shameful to hide behind trees. The second volley found our enemy better prepared; the knights covered their faces with their shields, while the Zayak warriors loosed arrows of their own at us. I grunted in pain as a long, feathered shaft slammed into my shoulder but failed to penetrate my tough Godhran armor. There was no third volley. With our two small forces so close to each other, our enemy’s leader shouted out for his men to close the distance and charge into us where the fighting would be hand to hand.

With a chill that shot down my spine, I recognized this voice as belonging to Morjin. It was a strong voice, almost musical in its tone, and it vibrated with sureness and command. And with malevolence, vanity and a hunger for cruelty that made my belly twist with hot acids and pain. His face was Morjin’s, too: not, however, the aged, haunted countenance with the blood-red eyes and grayish, decaying flesh that I knew to be his true face, but rather that of his youth. He was fine and fair to look upon. His eyes were all clear and golden, and sparkled like freshly minted coins. His thick hair, the color of Atara’s, spilled out from beneath his carmine helm. Although not quite a large man, he moved with a power that I felt pulsing out across three dozen yards of ground. In truth, he fairly quivered with all the fell vitality of a dragon.

Was it possible, I wondered, that he had somehow regained the power to deceive me with the same illusions that he cast over other men? Or had he found in the Lightstone a way to renew himself? There was something strange about him, in the way he moved and scanned the flower-covered slopes before him. He seemed to apprehend the rocks and trees and the men standing beside them both from close-up and from far away, like an ever-watchful angel of death. His gaze found mine and seared me with his hate. The flames of his being writhed in flares of madder, puce and incarnadine – and with other colors that I could not quite behold. The burning sickness inside me told me that this must be Morjin.

Without warning, Atara loosed an arrow at him. But he moved his head at the same moment that her bowstring cracked, and the arrow whined harmlessly past him. He pointed his finger at her then. Atara gave a gasp, and slumped back against our rock. I could feel her second sight leave her. She shook her bow at Morjin in her helplessness and rage at being made once more truly blind.

‘Kill that witch!’ he shouted to his men. Now he pointed at me. ‘Kill the Valari!’

‘Morjin!’ I shouted back at him. ‘Damn you, Morjin!’

I rushed at him then even as he charged at me. But his Red Knights close by, those still standing, would not let him take straight-on the fury of my sword. A few of them crowded ahead of him as a vanguard. I cut down the foremost with a slash through his neck. Blood sprayed my face, and I cried out in the agony of the man I had killed. I was only dimly aware of other combats raging around me as Kashak’s warriors and the Manslayers ran down the slopes with flashing sabers to meet the advance of the Red Knights and the Zayak. Some part of me saw steel biting into flesh and bright red showers raining down upon the snowy white blossoms at our feet. I heard arrows whining out upon the ridge above us, and curses and screams, and I knew that Bajorak’s men were fighting a fierce battle with the mounted Zayak. But I had eyes only for Morjin. I fought my way closer to him, shivering the shield of a knight with a savage thrust. I felt Maram on my left and Kane on my right, stabbing their swords into the Red Knights who swarmed forward to protect their lord. The world dissolved into a glowing red haze. And then I killed another of his vanguard, and Morjin suddenly stood unprotected in front of me.

‘Mother!’ I cried out. ‘Father! Asaru!’

I raised high my bright silver blade, dripping with blood. And then one of Kashak’s warriors – or perhaps it was a Manslayer – nearly robbed me of my vengeance. A bow cracked, and an arrow streaked forth. But as before with Atara, Morjin moved out of the way at the instant the bolt was loosed at him. He must, I knew, possess some sort of uncanny sense of when others were intending to deal him a death blow. As I did, too. We were brothers in our blood, I thought, bound to each other in the quick burn of the kirax poison no less than in our souls’ bitter hate.

‘Morjin!’

‘Elahad!’

I swung my sword at him. He parried it with a shocking strength. Steel rang against silustria, and I felt a terrible power run down my blade into my arms and chest, and nearly shiver my bones. Once, twice, thrice we clashed, pushed against each other and then sprang apart. Maram knocked against my left side as he grunted and gasped and tried to kill the knight in front of him. On my right, Kane’s sword struck out with a rare passion to rend and destroy. He wanted as badly as I to kill Morjin. But fate was fate, and it was I who rushed in to slay the dragon.

MORJINNN!

I stabbed Alkaladur’s brilliant point at his neck, but he parried that thrust as well and then nearly cut off my head. He sliced his sword at me, again and again, with a prowess I had encountered in no other man except Kane. The flashing of our blades nearly blinded me; the ringing of steel rattled my skull. This was not the same Morjin that I had fought in Argattha. In his cuts and savage thrusts there was a recklessness, as if he willed himself to lay me open but had little care for his own flesh. This made him vastly more formidable. Twice he missed running me through by an inch. As his sword burned past my head yet again, his contempt blazed out at me. There was something strange, I sensed, in his hate. It was not immediate, like the blast of an open furnace, like mine for him, but rather like the sun’s flares as viewed through a dark glass. It had enough fire, though, to kill me if I let it.

‘Look at the Valari!’ I heard someone shout above the tumult of the battle. ‘His sword! It burns!’

Blue and red flames ran along my shining blade and blazed only brighter and hotter as I whipped it through the air. The fiery brilliance of my sword dazzled Morjin. Fear ran like molten steel in his eyes, and I knew that I had it within me to slay him. And he knew it, too. With a boldness born of desperation, he gripped his sword with one hand and suddenly thrust at me: quick, low and deep. I moved aside, slightly, and felt his sword scrape past the armor that covered my belly. And then, like a lightning flash, I brought Alkaladur down against his elbow. The silustria fairly burned through steel, muscle and bone, and struck off his arm. The hellish heat seared his flesh; I heard blood sizzling and smelled his cauterized veins. He screamed at me then as he reached for his dagger with the only arm that remained to him.

‘Lord Morjin is wounded!’ someone called out. ‘To him! To him! Kill the Valari!’

I raised back my sword to send Morjin into the heart of some distant star, where he would burn forever. But just then one of the Zayak loosed an arrow at me. I pulled back my head at the very moment that it would have driven through my face – right into the path of another arrow aimed by another Zayak. This arrow struck the mail over my temple at the wrong angle to penetrate but with enough force to stun me. A bright white light burst through my eyes, and the world about me blurred. I felt Kane to my right and Maram beside me working furiously with their swords to protect me from the maces and swords of the nearby Red Knights. When my vision finally cleared, I saw other knights closing around Morjin as they bound his arm with twists of rawhide to keep him from bleeding to death and bore him back down the stream, away from the battle.

‘Morjin!’ I cried out. ‘Damn you – you won’t escape!’

With my friends, I hacked and stabbed at the wall of knights in front of us. On either side of the stream, arrows sizzled out and sabers flashed as the Manslayers and Danladi threw themselves at the Red Knights and the Zayak. As promised, Kashak fought like a pride of lions. In this close combat against the Red Knights, his thinner sword and lighter armor proved a disadvantage, as with the other Sarni. But Kashak made up for this with a rare fierceness and strength. He towered over the Red Knights, calling out curses as his saber slashed through wrists or throats with a savagery that shocked our enemy. He closed with one of them, and he used his great fist like a battering ram, driving it into the man’s face with a sickening crunch that I heard above the din of the battle. I heard Kane, as well, growling and cursing to my right even as a howl of rage built inside me. I cried out to Morjin, in a hot, red, silent wrath, my vow that he would never get away.

And as his paladins bore him down the rocky banks of the stream, away from the high ground in front of the Ass’s Ears, he screamed back at me: ‘You won’t escape me, Elahad! All you Valari! He is nearly free! The Baaloch is! And when he walks the earth again, we shall crucify all your kind, down to the last woman and child!’

Deep within my memory burned the image of my mother and grandmother, nailed to wood. I suddenly killed one of the Red Knights in front of me with a quick thrust of my sword, and then another. My friends threw themselves at these champions of Morjin, and so did the Manslayers and Kashak’s Danladi. We had cut down more than a score of them, and their bleeding bodies crushed the white flowers about the stream and reddened its waters. Even so they still outnumbered us, for they had killed too many of us as well. And yet it was we who pushed them back, with beating sabers and long swords, ever backward down the stream and over broken ground out from the saddle between the two ridges. Through the shifting gaps in the mass of men before me, I watched as four of the Red Knights bore Morjin toward a bend in the stream where our enemy had left their horses. To our left, the Zayak who had ridden against Bajorak along the ridge were in full retreat, galloping back down toward the steppe. It would be only a matter of moments, I saw, before Morjin mounted his horse and joined them.

‘Morjin!’ I cried out, yet again. ‘Morjin!’

I could not get at him. Swords flashed in front of me like a steel fence. I howled out my rage at being thwarted. Atara, wandering the battlefield blindly as she felt her way over rocks or dead bodies with the tip of her useless bow, moved closer to me, perhaps drawn by the sound of my voice. She held her unused saber in her hand, and I knew that she would fight to her death to try to protect me. Two of the Red Knights, like jackals, moved in on her to take advantage of her sightlessness. But I moved even more quickly. I cleaved the first of these knights through the helm, and the second I split open with a thrust through his chest. He died burning with a lust to lay his hands about Atara’s throat and drag this helpless woman down into darkness with him.

I fell mad then. I threw myself at the Red Knights and the Zayak warriors, who were slowly retreating over the swells of ground that flowed down to the grasslands of the Wendrush. I cursed and gnashed my teeth and howled like a wolf; I struck out with my fearsome sword, again and again, at arms, bellies, throats, and faces. Steel shrieked and terrible cries split the air. Hacked and headless men dropped before me. The living, in ones and twos, began to break and run. One of the knights threw down his sword and begged for quarter. In my killing frenzy, however, I could not hear his words or perceive the surrender in his eyes. I sent him on without pity, and then another and yet another. And then, suddenly, no more of the enemy remained standing near me – only Kashak, Maram and Kane, who were gasping for breath and spattered with blood. Kashak’s warriors, the few who hadn’t fallen, gathered behind us, with the remaining Manslayers and Atara.

‘They’re getting away!’ Kane shouted at me. He pointed his bloody sword out toward the open steppe. ‘He is getting away … again!’

Morjin’s four paladins, I saw, were grouped around their lord, and their horses galloped over the swaying grasses, away from the mountains. They were already far out on the Wendrush, to the east. The Red Knights and the few Zayak who had survived the slaughter had mounted their horses and hurried after them, soon to be joined by the Zayak who had ridden against Bajorak.

‘He won’t get away!’ I shouted. ‘Let us ride after him!’

Our horses, however, were nowhere near at hand. Bajorak ran down from the ridge then and came up to us. He said, ‘Six of my men have fallen and four of Kashak’s. And six of the Manslayers. We are only thirty, now.’

He went on to tell that we had slain some thirty of the Red Knights and all but two of the Zayak who had followed Morjin up the stream. With the Zayak that Bajorak’s men had felled with arrows, we had accounted for more than fifty of our enemy.

‘But they still outnumber us,’ Bajorak told me. ‘And if we pursue them, there will be no surprise.’

‘I don’t care!’

‘Morjin has the distance now!’

‘Growing greater by the moment, as we stand here!’

‘There may be other companies, other Red Knights and Zayak,’ Bajorak told me. ‘We have a victory. Morjin might not survive the wound you dealt him. You’re free to complete your quest.’

‘I don’t care!’ I shouted again. I pointed my flaming sword toward the east. ‘There is our enemy!’

Bajorak slowly shook his head. ‘I will not pursue him. And neither will my warriors.’

‘It is Morjin!’ I shouted in rage. ‘And so he will survive, to kill and crucify again!’

So hot did the fire swirling about my sword grow that Bajorak stepped away from me, and so did Kashak. But Kane, with a terrible wildness in his eyes, pointed toward Morjin racing away from us and shouted, ‘He won’t survive, damn him! Kill him, Val! You know the way!’

As I met eyes with Kane, we walked together through a land burning up in flames. And yet, despite the fire and the terrible heat, it was a dark land, as black and hideous as charred flesh.

‘Kill him!’ Kane called out as he pointed at Morjin. ‘He is weak, now! This is your chance!’

In my hands I held a sword that flared hotter and hotter as I stared out at Morjin’s shrinking form. Fire burned my face and built to a raging inferno inside me. I held there another sword, finer and yet even more terrible. It was pure lightning, all the fury and incandescence of the stars. With it I had slain Ravik Kirriland. I knew that I had only to strike out with this sword of fire and light to slay Morjin now.

‘So – kill him! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!’

Father! I cried out silently. Mother! Nona! Asaru!

‘No, Val!’ Atara called out to me, stumbling across the uneven ground. She found her way to my side and laid her hand on my shoulder. ‘Not this way!’

‘Do it!’ Kane howled at me.

Could I slay Morjin with the valarda, of my own will? Could I tell a thunderbolt where to strike?

‘He is getting away, damn it! You are letting him get away!’

No, a voice inside me whispered. No, no, no.

‘Kill him, now!’

‘No, I won’t!’ I howled back at Kane.

‘He crucified your own mother!’

MORJINNN!

I cried out this name with all the agony of my breath, like a blast of fire. My hate for Morjin swelled to the point where I could not control it, where I did not want to control it. Could I stop a whirlwind from blowing? No, I could not, and so finally the lightning tore me open. I felt all my evil rage flash straight out toward the tiny, retreating figure of Morjin as he galloped across the open grasslands. But it was too late. The sword of wrath, I sensed, struck him and stunned him, but did not kill. I watched helplessly as he made his escape toward the curving edge of the world.

‘It is too far!’ Kane shouted at me. ‘You waited too long!’

I bowed my head in shame that I had failed to kill Morjin – and in even greater shame that, in the perversion of my sacred gift, I almost had.

‘Damn him!’ Kane shouted.

I lowered my sword and watched as its flames slowly quiesced. With a ringing of silustria against steel, I slid it back into its sheath.

And then I turned to Kane and said, ‘If I can help it, I won’t use the valarda to slay.’

He stared at me for a moment that seemed to last longer than the turning of the earth into night. His eyes were like hell to look upon. And he shouted at me: ‘You won’t? Then it is you who are damned!’

He watched as Morjin’s red form vanished into the shimmering nothingness of the horizon. Then he threw his hands up to the sky, and stalked off up the stream where the dead lay like a carpet leading to a realm that none would wish to walk.

Neither Bajorak nor Kashak, nor even Karimah, understood what had transpired between us, for they knew little of the nature of my gift. But they realized that they had witnessed here something extraordinary. Kashak stared at Alkaladur’s hilt, with its black jade grip and diamond pommel, and he said to me, ‘Your sword – it burned! But it didn’t burn! How is that possible?’

He made a warding sign with his finger as Bajorak stared at me, too. And Bajorak said to me, ‘Your face, Valari! It is burnt!’

I held my hand to my forehead; it was painful and hot, as if a fever consumed me. Karimah told me that my face was as red as a cherry, as if I had been staked out all day in the fierce summer sun. She produced a leather bag containing an ointment that the fair-skinned Sarni apply as proof against sunburns. Atara took it from her, and dipped her fingers into it. Her touch was cool and gentle against my outraged flesh as she worked the pungent-smelling ointment into my cheek.

‘Come,’ I said, pulling away from her. ‘Others have real wounds that need tending.’

So it was with any battle. Bajorak’s men had taken arrows through faces, legs or other parts of the body, and Kashak’s warriors and the Manslayers had sword cuts to deal with. But these tough Sarni warriors were already busy binding up their wounds. In truth, there was little for me and my friends to do here except stare at the bodies of the dead.

I pointed at the hacked men lying on top of the pretty white flowers called Maiden’s Breath, and I said, ‘They must be buried.’

‘Yes, ours will be,’ Bajorak said to me. ‘The Manslayers and our warriors, even the Zayak, we shall take out onto the steppe and bury in our way. As for Morjin’s men, I care not if they rot here in their armor.’

‘Then we,’ I said, looking at Maram, ‘will dig graves for them here.’

Maram, exhausted and bloody from the battle, looked at me as if I had truly fallen mad.

And Bajorak said to me, ‘No, the ground here is too rocky for digging. And there is no time. You must hurry after your friends.’

He pointed up the stream where it disappeared between the two towering Ass’s Ears. ‘Go now, while you can – ten of my warriors have died that you might go where you must. Honor what they gave here, lord.’

‘And you?’

Bajorak nodded at Kashak, and then at his warriors still guarding the ridge above with bows and arrows. And he said, ‘We shall remain here in case Morjin returns. But I do not think that he will return.’

I looked up the stream at the many Red Knights that we had killed. They would remain here unburied to rot in the sun. So, then, I thought, that was war. I closed my eyes as I bowed down my head.

‘Go,’ Bajorak said to me again, pressing his hand against my chest.

‘All right,’ I said, looking at him. ‘Perhaps we’ll meet again in a better time and a better place.’

‘I doubt it not,’ he said to me. He clasped my hand in his. ‘Farewell, then, Valari.’

‘Farewell, Sarni,’ I told him.

Then I put my arm across Atara’s shoulders and turned toward the mountains. Somewhere, in the heap of rocks to the west, Master Juwain and Liljana would be waiting with the children for us. And Kane, I prayed, would be, too.

5

We collected our horses and then made our way up the stream into the gap between the Ass’s Ears. We caught up to my grim-faced friend about half a mile into the mountains. He said nothing to me. Neither did he look at me. He rejoined our company with no further complaint, taking his usual post behind us to guard our rear. Kane, I thought, might bear a cold anger at me like a sword stuck through his innards, but he would never desert me.

The way up the stream was rocky and broken, and so we walked our horses and remounts behind us. We had no need to track our friends, for the slopes of the foothills here were so steep and heavily wooded that a deer would have had trouble crossing them, and so there was only one direction Master Juwain and the others could have traveled: along the stream, farther into the mountains. These prominences rose higher and higher before us. Although not as immense as the peaks of the upper Nagarshath to the north, they were great enough to chill the air with a cutting wind that blew down from their snow-covered crests. It was said that men no longer lived in this part of the White Mountains – if indeed they ever had. It was also said that no man knew the way through them. This, I prayed, could not be true, for if Master Juwain could not lead us through the Kul Kavaakurk Gorge and beyond, we would be lost in a vast, frozen wilderness.

For about a mile, as the stream wound ever upward, we saw no sign of this gorge. But then the slopes to either side of us grew steeper and steeper until another mile on they rose up like walls around us. Higher and higher they built, to the right and left, until soon it was clear that we had entered a great gorge. Looking to the west, where this deep cleft through the earth cut its way like a twisting snake, we could see no end of it. Surely, I thought, we must soon overtake our friends, for there could be no way out of this stone-walled deathtrap except at either end.

‘Ah, I don’t like this place,’ Maram grumbled as he kicked his way along the stone-strewn bank of the stream. He puffed for air as he gazed at the layers of rock on the great walls rising up around us. ‘Can you imagine how it would go for us if we were caught here?’

‘We won’t be caught here,’ I told him. ‘Bajorak will protect the way into the gorge.’

‘Yes, he’ll protect that way,’ Maram said, pointing behind us. Then he whipped his arm about and pointed ahead. ‘But what lies this way?’

‘Surely our friends do,’ I told him. ‘Now let’s hurry after them.’

But we could not hurry as I would have liked, not with the ground so rotten – and not with Atara still blind and stumbling over boulders that nearly broke her knees. Even with Maram adding her horses to the string he led along and with me taking her by the hand, it was still treacherous work to fight our way through the gorge. And a slow one. With the day beginning to wane and no sign of our friends, it seemed that they might be traveling quickly enough to outdistance us.

And then, as we came out of a particularly narrow and deep part of the gorge, we turned into a place where the stream’s banks suddenly widened and were covered with trees. And there, behind two great cottonwoods, with a clear line of sight straight toward us, Surya and the other Manslayer stood pointing their drawn arrows at our faces. Their horses, and those of our friends, were tethered nearby.

Then Surya, a high-strung and wiry woman, gave a shout, saying, ‘It’s all right – it’s only Lord Valashu and our Lady!’

Surya eased the tension on her bow and stepped out from behind the tree, and so did the other Manslayer, whose name proved to be Zoreh. And then from behind trees farther up the gorge, Master Juwain, Liljana, Daj and Estrella appeared, and called out to us in relief and gladness.

‘The battle has been won!’ I called back to them as they hurried along the stream toward us. ‘The Red Knights will not pursue us here!’

Daj let loose a whoop of delight as he came running down the stream, dodging or jumping over stones with the agility of a rock goat. A few moments later, Estrella threw her arms around me, and pressed her face against my chest. Liljana came up more slowly. She took in the blood on our armor and garments. She gazed at my face and said, ‘You are burnt, as from fire.’

Her gaze lowered to fix upon my sheathed sword, and she slowly shook her head.

Because Surya and Zoreh were staring at me, too, I gave them a quick account of the battle. I said nothing, however, of my sword’s burning or my failure to kill Morjin.

‘We must go, then,’ Surya told us. ‘Six of our sisters are dead, and we must go.’

She turned to Atara and gazed at her blindfolded face as if trying to understand a puzzle. Then she embraced her, kissing her lips. ‘Farewell, my imakla one. We shall all sing to the owls, that your other sight returns soon. But if it does not, who will care for you? Must you go off with these kradaks?’

‘Yes, I must,’ Atara told her, squeezing my hand in hers.

‘Then we shall sing to the wind, as well, that fate will blow you back to us.’

And with that, she and Zoreh gathered up their horses and turned to begin the walk back down the gorge. We watched them disappear around the rocks of one of its turnings.

We decided to go no farther that day. We were all too tired, from battle and from too many miles of hard traveling. Surya had found a place that we could defend as well as any. Four archers, I thought, firing arrows quickly at the bend where the gorge narrowed behind us, could hold off an entire company of Red Knights. We had here good, clear water, even if it was little more than a trickle. Above the stream, the ground between the trees was flat enough to lay out our sleeping furs in comfort. There was grass for the horses, too, and plenty of deadwood for a fire.

Despite our exhaustion, we fortified our camp with stones and a breastwork of logs. Liljana brought out her pots to cook us a hot meal, while Atara and Estrella took charge of washing the blood from our garments in the stream and mending them in the places where an arrow or a sword had ripped through them. We gathered around the fire to eat our stew and rushk cakes in the last hour of the day. But here, at the bottom of the gorge where the stream spilled over rocks, it was already nearly dark. The sunlight had a hard time fighting its way down to us, and the walls of the gorge had fallen gray with shadow.

Although we had much to discuss and I desired Kane’s counsel, this ancient warrior stood alone behind the breastwork gazing down the stream in the direction from which our enemies would come at us, if they came at all. His strung bow and quiver full of arrows were close at hand as he ate his stew in silence.

‘Ah, what I would most like to know,’ Maram said as he licked at his lips, ‘is what will become of Morjin?’

He sat with the rest of us around the fire. From time to time, he poked a long stick into its blazing logs.

‘Unless he bled to death, which seems unlikely,’ Master Juwain said, ‘he will recover from his wound. A better question might be: what has become of him? If Val is right that it really was Morjin.’

‘It must have been Morjin,’ I said. ‘Changed, somehow, yes. He is something more … and something less. There was something strange about him. But I know it was he.’

‘Unless he has an evil twin, it was he,’ Maram agreed.

‘But how do we really know that?’ Master Juwain asked. ‘He is the Lord of Illusions, isn’t he? Perhaps he has regained the power to put into our eyes the same images with which he fools other people.’

Liljana shook her head at this. ‘No, what we faced earlier was no illusion. Morjin’s mind is powerful – so horribly powerful, as none know better than I. But he cannot, from hundreds of miles away in Argattha, cast illusions that fool so many through the course of an entire battle. And he cannot have fooled me.’

‘No,’ I said, fingering my cloak, spread out on a rock near the fire to dry. I had felt the blood from Morjin’s severed arm soak into it, and the red smear of it still stained the collar. ‘No, he has a great strength now. I felt this in his arms, when we were locked together sword to sword.’

‘Could this not, then, have been the old Morjin drawing strength from the Lightstone?’ Master Juwain asked. ‘And drawing from it as well the means to deceive you about his form?’

‘No,’ I said, touching the hilt of my sword, ‘I know that he has lost the power of illusion over me. And the Lightstone is all beauty and truth. There is nothing within it that could help engender illusions and lies.’

For the span of a year, after my friends and I had rescued the Lightstone out of Argattha, the golden bowl had been like a sun showering its radiance upon us. I missed the soft sheen of it keenly, nearly as much as I did my murdered family. Since the day that Morjin had stolen it back, I had known no true days, only an endless succession of moments darkened as when the moon eclipses the sun.

‘Then,’ Master Juwain sighed out, ‘we have dispensed with several hypotheses. And so we must consider that Morjin has indeed found a way to rejuvenate himself.’

‘I didn’t think the Lightstone had that power,’ Maram said.

‘Neither did I,’ Master Juwain admitted.

‘But what of the akashic crystal?’ Atara asked. ‘Was there no record within it of such things?’

Master Juwain sighed again as his face knotted up in regret. With the breaking in Tria of the great akashic crystal, repository of much of the Elijin’s lore concerning the Lightstone, Master Juwain’s hope of gaining this great knowledge had broken as well.

‘There might have been such a record within it,’ Master Juwain said. ‘If only I’d had more time to look for it.’

‘Then you don’t really know,’ Atara said, pressing him.

Master Juwain squeezed the wooden bowl of stew between his hands as if his fingers ached for the touch of a smoother and finer substance. ‘No, I suppose I don’t. But I spent many days searching through the akashic stone, following many streams of knowledge. One gets a sense of the terrain this way, so to speak. And everything I’ve ever learned about the Lightstone gives me to understand that it cannot be used to make one’s body and being young again. In truth, it is quite the opposite.’

‘What do you mean, sir?’ I asked him.

‘Consider what we do know about the Lightstone,’ he said, looking at me and the others. ‘Above all, that it is to be used by the Maitreya, and by him only. But used how? Of this, we still have barely a glimmer. “In the Shining One’s hands, the true gold; in the Cup of Heaven, men and women shall drink in the light of the One.” Indeed, indeed – but what does this really mean? We know that the Maitreya is thus to help man walk the path of the Elijin and Galadin, and so on to the Ieldra themselves, ever and always toward the One. And in so doing, the Maitreya will be exalted beyond any man: in grace, in vitality, in the splendor of his soul. But now let us consider what befalls when the Lightstone is claimed by one who is not the Maitreya. Let us consider Morjin. Clearly, he has used the Lightstone to try to gain mastery over all the other gelstei – even as he has tried to enslave men’s souls and make himself master of the world. He searches for the darkest of knowledge! And so he holds in his hands not the true gold but something rather like a lead stone that pulls him ever and always down into a lightless chasm. And so he has utterly debased himself: in his body, in his mind, in his soul. He is immortal, yes, and so he cannot die as other men do. But we have all seen his scabrous flesh, the deadness of his eyes, the rot that slowly blackens his insides. All his lusting for the Lightstone and struggle to master it has only withered him. And so how can he use this cup to make himself young again?’

I considered long and deeply what Master Juwain had said as I looked through the fire’s writhing flames and gazed at the darkening walls of the chasm called the Kul Kavaakurk. How close had I been to claiming the Lightstone for myself? As close as the curve of my fingers or the whispering of my breath – as close as the beating of my heart.

Maram cast a glance at the silent, motionless Kane standing like a stone carving above us, and he said, ‘Didn’t our grim friend tell us in Argattha that the Lightstone had no power to make one young again?’

I touched the hilt of my sword, and I recalled exactly what Kane had told us in Morjin’s throne room when he stood revealed as one of the Elijin: that the Lightstone did not possess the power to bestow immortality. I told this to Maram, and to the others, who sat around the fire quietly eating their dinner.

Then Maram nodded at Master Juwain and said, ‘Then it might be possible that Morjin has rejuvenated himself.’

‘It is possible,’ Master Juwain allowed. ‘No man knows very much about the Lightstone.’

He looked up at Kane, and so did everyone else. But still Kane said nothing.

‘We know,’ Liljana said, ‘that Morjin can draw a kind of strength from the Lightstone, as he does in feeding off others’ fear or adulation – or even in drinking their blood. And so I suppose we must assume he has found a way to renew himself, if only for a time.’

‘I suppose we must,’ Master Juwain said with another sigh. ‘Unless we can find another explanation.’

The fading sunlight barely sufficed to illuminate Kane’s fathomless black eyes. He seemed, in silence, to explain to us a great deal: above all that the distance between the Elijin and mortal men was as vast as the black spaces between the stars. As always, I sensed that he knew much more than he was willing to reveal, about the world and about himself – even to himself.

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said, looking up at Kane, ‘Morjin fought like a much younger man, didn’t he? In truth, like no man I have ever seen except Val – or Kane. He has a power now that he didn’t have in Argattha. Perhaps many powers. He pointed at Atara, and struck her blind!’

Atara paused in eating her stew to hold up her spoon in front of the white cloth covering her face. She said, ‘But I am already blind.’

‘You know what I mean.’

She brought out her scryer’s sphere and sat rolling it between her long, lithe fingers. ‘Morjin has power over my gelstei now, nothing more.’

‘But your second sight –’

‘My second sight comes and goes, like the wind, as it always has. Surely it was just evil chance, what happened on the battlefield.’

‘Evil, indeed,’ Maram said, looking at her. ‘But what if it was more than chance?’

Atara shook her head violently. Then she clapped her hands over her blindfold and said, ‘Morjin took my eyes and with them my first sight. Isn’t that enough?’

Because there was nothing to say to this, we sat around the fire eating our stew. The knock and scrape of our spoons against our wooden bowls seemed as loud as thunder.

And then I took her hand and said to her, ‘Please promise me that if the next battle comes upon us with the wind blowing the wrong way, you’ll find a safe place and remain there.’

‘I should have, I know,’ she said to me, pressing her hand into mine. ‘But I was sure that my sight would return, at any moment, so sure. Then, too, they were so many and we so few. I heard you calling out, to me it seemed. I thought you needed my sword.’

‘I need much more than your sword,’ I told her.

In the clasp of her fingers around mine was all the promise that I could ever hope for.

Maram, sitting nearby, cast us a wistful look as if he might be thinking of his betrothed, Behira. And he said, ‘It vexes me what Morjin said about the Baaloch. Can it be true that he is so close to freeing Angra Mainyu?’

‘He would lie,’ I said, ‘just to vex me. And to strike terror into you, and everyone else.’

‘He would,’ Master Juwain agreed. ‘But as we have seen before, he has no need of lies when the truth will serve him better.’

‘But how can we know the truth about this?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t you once teach me that Morjin possessed the Lightstone for thirty years at the end of the Age of Swords? And then for nearly ten times as long when the Age of Law fell to the Age of the Dragon? If he didn’t free Angra Mainyu then why should we fear that he will now?’

‘Because,’ Master Juwain told me, ‘that was then, and this is now. The first time he claimed the Lightstone, he used it in desperate battle to conquer Alonia. And the second time, to overthrow the order of the Age of Law, which everyone had thought eternal. Now that he has nearly conquered all of Ea, he will surely use it to bring his master here from Damoom.’

‘If he can, he will,’ I said, still not wanting to believe the worst. ‘But why should we think that he can?’

Atara’s hand suddenly tightened around mine as she said, ‘But, Val, I have seen this, and have spoken of it before!’

What Atara had ‘seen’ we all knew to be true: that beneath the buried city of Argattha, far beneath the mountain, Morjin had driven his slaves to digging tunnels deep into the earth. And there, through solid rock, as with the lightning-like pulses that coursed along a man’s nerves and through the chakras along his spine, ran the fires of the earth. Master Juwain called them the telluric currents. Their power was very great: if Master Juwain was right, the Lightstone could be used to direct them, as with the flames of a blacksmith’s furnace, to touch upon the currents of the world of Damoom. And then the door behind which Angra Mainyu was bound, like an iron gate, might be burnt open. And then Angra Mainyu, the Dark One, would be set free from his prison and loosed upon Ea.

‘Morjin is close,’ Atara told me, ‘so very close to cutting open the right tunnel. The wrong tunnel. Now that he has the Lightstone, it will be months, not years, before he sees clear where to dig.’

Daj, who had been a slave in the mines below Argattha’s first level, nodded his head at this. ‘It might be even sooner. I once heard Lord Morjin tell one of his priests that the Baaloch would be freed within a year. And that was before he took back the Lightstone.’

‘Well, then, Morjin either was wrong or he lied,’ Maram said to Daj. ‘It’s been more than a year since we freed you from Argattha.’

‘Morjin didn’t lie,’ Liljana said, ‘when I touched minds with him. He couldn’t lie, then. He believes that he will free Angra Mainyu, and soon.’

Master Juwain rubbed at the back of his bald head as he told us: ‘It has been a year and a half since we took the Lightstone out of Argattha. And in that time, Morjin must have lain long abed recovering from the first wound that Val dealt him. And then, many months planning and leading the invasion of Mesh. And now –’

‘And now,’ Maram said hopefully, ‘we’ve tempted him out of Argattha, along with the Lightstone no doubt, and so we’ve delayed the worst of what he can do yet again.’

‘Perhaps,’ Master Juwain said. ‘But now that Val has wounded him again, he’ll return to Argattha and to his greatest chance.’

‘And that,’ I said, looking up through the gorge at the mountains beyond, ‘is why we must find the Maitreya, and soon.’

I felt my heart beating hard against my ribs. Would even the Maitreya, I wondered, be able to keep Morjin from using the Lightstone?

‘Ah, well, even if we fail,’ Maram said, ‘must we give up all hope? If what we learned outside of Tria is true, then once before Angra Mainyu walked other worlds freely, and yet in the end was defeated. He is only one man, isn’t he, even if he is one of the Galadin.’

At this, Maram looked hopefully toward Kane, for it had been Kane, long ago and on another world, who had immobilized Angra Mainyu so that the Lightstone might be wrested from him.

A light flashed in Kane’s eyes as from far away. His gaze fell upon Maram. In a voice as harsh as breaking steel, he laughed out: ‘Ha – only a man, you say! Only one of the Galadin, eh? Fool! What would you do if this man faced you upon the battlefield or came at you in a dark glade? Die, you would – of fright. And you would be fortunate to be dead. You have seen the Grays! They are terrible, aren’t they? They nearly sucked out your soul, didn’t they? And yet they are as children happily playing games in a flowered field compared to the one you speak of.’

‘I wish I hadn’t,’ Maram said, pulling at the mail that covered his throat. ‘Must we really speak of this?’

‘So, we must speak of it,’ Kane growled out. His face had fallen fierce, like that of a tiger, and yet there was much in its harsh lines that was sad, noble and exalted. ‘This one time we shall, and never again. I have heard and seen today too much uncertainty. And too much pity, for ourselves. Master Juwain has told of the fires of the earth, these telluric currents that our enemy seeks to wield. Val dreads the flames of his sword. Fire and flame – ha! I shall tell you of fire! There is that in each of us that must utterly burn away. Liljana’s pride at besting Morjin: at least this one time. Maram’s self-indulgence, Atara’s desire to be made whole again, and Val’s rage for vengeance. So, and my own. The grief we all suffer from the poisoning of our gelstei. It is nothing. We are nothing. In the face of what comes, none of our lives matters. Except that we all do matter, utterly, and so long as we live and draw breath, everything that we do – every word, thought and act – must be keener and strike truer than even Val’s sword. For if we fail, Morjin will use the Lightstone as we all fear and open the way to Damoom.’

As Kane spoke, he paced back and forth behind the log breastwork gripping his strung bow. His fierce eyes danced about, now flicking toward the bend in the stream, now falling upon us. From time to time, he scowled as he looked up at the darkening sky.

‘And then,’ he told us, ‘he will come, with fire. Who of us will be able to bear even the sight of him? For his eyes are like molten stone, his flesh is red as heated iron, his hair is a wreath of flames. His mouth opens like a pit of burning pitch that devours all things. Angra Mainyu, men call him now. He is the Baaloch, the Black Dragon – but stronger than any thousand dragons. Do you hate, Valashu? It is as a match flame compared to the roaring furnace inside Morjin – and that is nothing against the hell that torments Angra Mainyu, like unto the fire of the stars. For he has been denied the stars. Ages and ages, the Galadin have bound him in darkness on Damoom, he who was once the greatest of the Galadin, and the most fair. So. So. He will burn to take his vengeance upon Ashtoreth and Valoreth and all their kind. Ha, all our kind as well.

‘Where will we be when Morjin delivers the cup into his hands? Wherever we are, even on the most distant isle across the seas, we will feel the earth shake and see clouds of smoke darken the air as the fire mountains burst forth. When Angra Mainyu lays grip upon Ea’s telluric currents, he will not care if the very earth is riven in two. First he will free the others bound with him on his dark world: Gashur, Yurlungurr, Yama, Zun. A host of Galadin, and Elijin, too – those who still survive. They will follow in Angra Mainyu’s train. He will take his first vengeance upon Ea and her peoples: we who have denied him the Lightstone for so long. In every land wooden crosses will sprout up like mushrooms. The Baaloch will breathe upon those to which Valari are nailed, and they will burst into flame. He will feast upon flesh, not as a lion upon lambs – not only – but as a master wears the sinews of his slaves down to the bone. All men will be his ghuls, ready to twitch or sing or mouth his thoughts, at his whim. When he has finished subduing Ea, not even a blade of grass will dare poke itself above the ground unless he wills it.

‘And then he will turn his blazing eyes upon the heavens. They who follow him will lend him all their strength. Time nearly beyond reckoning they have had to prepare for such a day. Stars, beyond counting, they will claim. Then the Baaloch will seize the stellar currents, bound inside pure starfire. Ten thousand men, it’s said, Morjin nailed to crosses in Galda. Ten thousand worlds will burn up in flame when Angra Mainyu makes war again upon Ashtoreth and Valoreth and the other Amshahs who still dwell across the stars on Agathad. But the Galadin are the inextinguishable ones, eh? Diamond will not pierce them, no fire can scorch them, nor age steal the beauty of their form. And so, as in ages past, ages of ages, Angra Mainyu will try to use the Lightstone to wrest the great fire, the angel fire, from the Ieldra themselves.’

Now Kane stood facing me, and he paused to draw in a deep breath. His eyes burned into mine as he said, ‘But it is the Ieldra, not the Galadin – not even Angra Mainyu – who are given the power of creation. And so no Galadin has the power to uncreate any other. Angra Mainyu, though, will never believe this, just as he will not accept that any power might be beyond his grasp, not even the very splendor of the One. So. So. The Ieldra, at last, at the end of all things when time has run out and there is no more hope, will be forced to make war upon Angra Mainyu, lest the evil that he has unleashed upon Eluru spill over into other universes: those millions that exist beyond ours and those countless ones that are yet to be. But Angra Mainyu was the first of the Galadin, and the greatest, and so as long as the stars shed their light upon creation, he, too, cannot be harmed. Knowing this, the Ieldra will be forced to put an end to their creation. In fire the universe came to be, and in fire the universe and all within will be destroyed. And so Eluru, and all its worlds and beautiful stars, will be no more.’

Kane finished speaking and stood still again. For a moment, I could not move, nor could our other friends. Daj and Estrella, in their short years, had seen and heard many terrible things, but Kane’s warning as to the horrible end of the War of the Stone seemed to strike terror into them. They sat next to each other, holding hands and staring at the stream. Above this pale water, Flick appeared, and the lights within his luminosity pulsed as in alarm. Above him, the forbidding walls of the Kul Kavaakurk grew ever darker. Their exposed rock ran along the gorge, east and west, in layers. How long, I wondered, had it taken for the stream to cut down through the skin of the earth? Each layer, it seemed, was as a million years, and as the stream had cut deeper and deeper, the War had gone on, layer upon layer. And not just the War of the Stone, but the war of all life against life, to triumph and dominate, to be and to become greater. And not just on Ea or Eluru but in all universes in all times, without end. Were all peoples everywhere, I wondered, afflicted with war? Was it possible that all worlds and universes, as seemed the fate of ours, might be doomed?

It was Maram, the most fearful of us and consequently the most hopeful, who could not bear to think of such an end. He loved the pleasures of life too much to imagine it ever ceasing – even for others. And so he looked at Kane and said, ‘But Angra Mainyu was defeated once, and so might be again. And it was you who defeated him!’

‘No, it was not I,’ Kane said as a strange light filled his eyes. ‘And I’ve told you before, he was not defeated. From Damoom, he still works his evil on all of Eluru.’

‘But he was bound there,’ Maram persisted. ‘And so might be again.’

‘No, he will not be,’ Kane told us. ‘Once, on Erathe, on the plain of Tharharra long ago, there was a battle – the greatest of all battles. A host of the Amshahs pursued Angra Mainyu and his Daevas there. Ashtoreth and Valoreth forbade this violence, but Marsul and others of the Galadin would not heed them. And neither would Kalkin.’

Kane, who had once borne this noble name, stood up tall and straight as the light of the night’s first stars rained down upon him.

‘A hundred thousand Valari died that day,’ Kane said to us. ‘And as many of the Elijin. So, Elijin slaying Valari and other Elijin, against the Law of the One, and Galadin such as Marsul and Varkoth slaying all – this was the evil of that day. A victory Maram calls it! Ha! Many of the Amshahs fell mad after that. Darudin threw himself on his sword in remorse, and so with Odin and Sulujin and many others. But it is not so easy for the living to expunge the stain of such an atrocity, eh? Many there were who bore the shadow of Tharharra on their souls.’

Kane paused in his account of this ancient history before known history. He began pacing about like a tiger again in front of the fire, and his hand clenched and unclenched like a beating heart.

‘And so,’ he said, ‘once a time the Amshahs came to Erathe; they will not come to Ea, especially if the Baaloch and his Daevas are loosed upon it. The danger is too great. Ea is a Dark World, now – almost a Dark World. Here, Morjin turned from the fairest of men into the most foul. Here, even the brightest of the Amshahs might come under Angra Mainyu’s spell, and how could the stars above us abide even one more fallen Galadin? And then, too, there is the Black Jade.’

Almost without thought, my hand fell upon my sword. Seven diamonds, like stars, were set into its hilt, carved out of true black jade, which might be dug up from the earth like any other stone. But the jade of which Kane spoke was the black gelstei, rarest of the rare, wrought in furnaces long ago from unknown substances and with an art long since lost. And not just any black gelstei.

Kane paused in his pacing to set his bow on top of the logs of the breastwork. Then he brought forth a flat, black stone, shiny as obsidian, and held it gleaming dully in the palm of his hand. And he said to us, ‘This baalstei is small, eh? And yet the one that Kalkin used upon Angra Mainyu was no larger – in size. But it had great power, like unto the dark of the moon, for in it was bound all the blackness of space and the great emptiness that lies inside all things.’

He stood still for a moment as he stared up at the sky. Then he continued: ‘You can’t imagine its power, for in a way, the Black Jade is the Lightstone’s shadow. I spoke of how the Ieldra might be forced to unmake the universe, but I say the Black Jade is the greater dread. For even men, such as Morjin, might use it to steal the very light from this world: all that is bright and good.’

Maram thought about this as he gazed at Kane. Then he asked him, ‘But why didn’t you tell us that the black gelstei you used on Angra Mainyu had power beyond any others?’

‘Because,’ Kane said, ‘I didn’t want to frighten you. So, I didn’t want to frighten myself. To wield it was to touch upon a cold so terrible and vast that it froze one’s soul in ice as hard as diamond. To wield it too long was to be lost in a lightless void from which there could be no escape. Angra Mainyu himself, early in the War of the Stone, forged this cursed stone we call the Black Jade. There will never be another like it. Long ago, it was lost. And so once the Baaloch is freed, no one will ever bind him again.’

Maram stood up from the fire to get a better look at the black crystal seemingly welded to Kane’s hand. And he asked: ‘If Angra Mainyu made the great baalstei, how did Kalkin come by it?’

‘So, how did Kalkin come by it, eh?’ Kane said. He spoke his ancient name as if intoning a requiem for a long lost friend. ‘That is a story that I won’t tell here, unless you’d like to remain in this cursed gorge for a month, and then half a year after. Let’s just say that the Lightstone wasn’t the only gelstei that the Amshahs and the Daevas fought over.’

‘But how was it lost, then?’

Kane clamped his jaws together with such force that I heard the grinding of his teeth. Then he said, ‘That story is even longer. I can tell you only that Angra Mainyu’s creatures regained it. Some say that it was brought to Ea, to await his coming.’

Again, I stared at the chasm’s layers of rock, now nearly black with the fall of night. It seemed that in ages without end, on uncountable worlds, anything might happen – and almost everything had. It seemed as well that the folds of the earth might conceal many dark things, even one as dark and terrible as the ancient black gelstei.

Kane suddenly made a fist, and the small crystal seemed to vanish. When he opened his hand again, there was nothing inside it except air.

And I asked him, ‘Do you believe the baalstei was brought to Ea?’

‘Where else would it have been brought if not here?’

My mysterious friend, I thought, possessed all the evasive arts of a magician. Somewhere on his person, no doubt, he had secreted the black gelstei. Just as somewhere in his soul he kept hidden even more powerful things.

‘You told us once,’ I said to him, ‘that the Galadin sent Kalkin to Ea. Along with Morjin, and ten others of the Elijin?’

Kane’s eyes grew brighter and more pained as he said, ‘Yes – Sarojin and Baladin, and the others. I have told you their names.’

‘Yes, you have. But you haven’t told us why you were sent here? Why, if Ea was so perilous for your kind?’

‘It was a chance,’ he said, looking up at the night’s first stars. ‘A last, desperate chance. The Lightstone had been sent here long before, and that was chance enough.’

And this supreme gamble on the part of Ashtoreth and the other Galadin on Agathad had nearly succeeded: Kalkin, in the great First Quest, had led the others of his order to recover the lost Lightstone. But then Morjin had fallen mad; he had murdered Garain and Averin to claim the Lightstone for himself. And Kalkin, in violation of the Law of the One, had killed five of Morjin’s henchmen, and in a way, slain himself as well. Now only Kane remained.

‘So, you see how it went for the Elijin who came to Ea,’ Kane said. ‘How much worse would it be for any Galadin to come to this cursed place?’

At this, Liljana’s kind face tightened in anger. She patted the ground beneath her, and snapped at Kane: ‘Such things you say! I won’t listen to such slander! The earth is our mother, the mother of us all – even you!’

As Kane regarded Liljana, I felt a strange, cold longing ripple through him.

‘Liljana is right,’ Master Juwain said. ‘You can’t blame Ea for corrupting Morjin. Neither can you blame the black gelstei.’

And Kane said, ‘The greatest of scryers foretold that Ea would give rise to a dark angel who would free the Baaloch.’

‘Either that,’ Master Juwain reminded him, ‘or give birth to the last and greatest Maitreya, who will lead all Eluru into the Age of Light.’

For a moment, Kane stared down at his clenched fists. Then he looked at Master Juwain and said, ‘I know you are right. It is not soil or even black gelstei that poisons men, but their hearts. What lies within.’

He reached down to scoop up a handful of dirt. He said to us, ‘And that is the hell of it, eh? What being, born of earth, does not suffer? Grow old and die?’

‘The Galadin do not,’ I said to him.

‘You think not, eh? So, the Bright Ones grow old in their souls. And in the end, it is their fate, too, to die.’

The brilliance of his eyes recalled the most beautiful, yet terrible, part of the Law of the One: that each of the Galadin, at the moment of a Great Progression, in the creation of a new universe, was destined to die into light – and thus be reborn as one of the numinous Ieldra.

‘And as for suffering, Valashu,’ he said to me, ‘despite what you have suffered, you cannot know. How many times have you swatted a mosquito?’

For a moment, his question puzzled me. My skin fairly twitched as I recalled the clouds of mosquitoes that had drained my blood in the Vardaloon. And I said, ‘Hundreds. Thousands.’

‘Could you have killed them so readily if they had been human beings? Do you think they suffered as men do?’

I, who had already killed many tens of men with my bright sword, said, ‘I know they did not.’

‘Just so,’ Kane said to me. ‘The pain that men, women and children know, compared to that of the Galadin, is minuscule. And yet it is no small thing, eh? And that in the end, is what poisoned Angra Mainyu’s sweet, sweet, beautiful heart.’

Kane’s words were like a bucket of cold water emptied upon me. I sat by the fire, blinking my eyes as a chill shot down my spine. I said to him, ‘I never thought to hear you speak such words of the Dark One.’

And he told me: ‘Angra Mainyu was not always Angra Mainyu, nor was he always evil. So, he was born Asangal, the most beautiful of men, and when still a man, it is said that he loved all life so dearly that he would not swat mosquitoes. And more, that once he saw a dog in excruciating pain from an open wound being eaten with worms. Asangal resolved to remove the worms, but could not bear for them to die. And so he licked out the worms with his own tongue so as not to crush them, and he let them eat his own flesh.’

At this, Daj’s face screwed up in disgust, and Maram shook his head. And Kane went on:

‘Asangal so loved the world that he thought he could take in all its pain. But after he became an Elijin lord and then was elevated as the first of the Galadin, the pain became an agony that he could not escape. In truth, like a robe of fire, it drove him mad. He began to question the One’s design in calling forth life only to suffer so terribly; as the ages passed into ages, it seemed to him particularly cruel that all beings should be made to bear such torment, only, at the end of it all, to die. Love thwarted turns to hate, eh?, for one of the Galadin no less than a man, and so it was with him. So, he began to hate the One. And in hating, he began to feel himself as other from the One and the Ieldra’s creation, and so he damned the One and creation itself.

‘And then, for the first time, a terrible fear seized hold of him. It gnawed at him, worse than worms of fire, for he knew that he had only damned himself. He could not bear to believe that he must someday die, as the Galadin do, in becoming greater. As the evil that he made inside his own heart worked at him, he could not bear to believe that any being, not the greatest of the Ieldra, not even the One, was greater than himself. For how could they be if they suffered to exist a universe as flawed and hurtful as ours? And so he resolved to gather all power to himself to remake the universe: in all goodness, truth and beauty, without suffering, without war, and most of all, without death. Toward this magnificent end, out of his magnificent love for all beings, or so he told himself, he would storm heaven and make war against the Ieldra, against all peoples and all worlds opposing him. So, even against the One.’

Kane stood closer to me now, looking down at me, and his face flashed with reddish lights from the fire’s writhing flames.

‘Do you see?’ he said to me. ‘It is possible to be too good, eh?’

‘Perhaps,’ I told him. I smiled, but there was no sweetness in it, only the taste of blood. ‘But I’m in no danger of that, am I?’

‘Damn it, Val, you might have killed Morjin!’

I stood up to face him and said, ‘Yes, I might have. And what then? Would one of his priests have used the Lightstone to free Angra Mainyu anyway? Or might I have regained it – only to become as Morjin? And then, in the end, been made to free Angra Mainyu myself?’

‘You ask too many questions,’ he growled. He pointed at my sheathed sword. ‘When you held the answer in your hand!’

My fingers closed around Alkaladur’s hilt, and I said, ‘Truly, I held something there.’

‘Damn you, Val!’ he shouted at me. ‘Damn you! Would you loose the Baaloch upon us!’

I looked down to see Daj set his jaw against the trembling that tore through his slight body. Master Juwain’s face had gone grave, and his eyes had lost their sparkle, and so it was with Maram and Liljana. It came to me then that our hope for fulfilling our quest hung like the weight of the whole world upon a strand as slender as one of Atara’s blond hairs. In truth, it seemed that there was no real hope at all. And if that were so, why not just ask Master Juwain to prepare a potion for all of us that we might die, here and now, in peace? Was death so terrible as I had feared? Was it really a black neverness, freezing cold, like ice? Was it a fire that burned the flesh forever? Or was it rather like a beautiful song and the brightest of lights that carried one upward toward the stars?

No, I heard myself whisper. No.

I glanced at Estrella, who looked up at me in dread. And yet, miraculously, with so much trust. Her quick, lovely eyes seemed to grab hold of mine even more fiercely than Kane grasped my arm. So much hope burned inside her! So much life spilled out to fill up her radiant face! Who was I to resign myself and consign her to its ending? No, I thought, that would be ignoble, cowardly, wrong. For her sake, no less my own, I would at least act as if there somehow might be hope.

I said to Kane, ‘Not even the greatest of scryers can see all ends.’

‘So, I think you can see your own end. And long for it too much, eh?’

I shook my head at this, and told him, ‘Last year, at the Tournament when Asaru lay abed with a wounded shoulder, King Mohan spoke these words to me: “A man can never be sure that his acts will lead to the desired result; he can only be sure of the acts, themselves. Therefore each act must be good and true, of its own.”’

‘A warrior’s code, eh? Act nobly, always with honor, and smile at death, if that is the result. The code of the Valari.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘better death than life lived as Morjin lives, or as one of his slaves.’

Kane regarded Daj and Estrella a moment before turning back to me. He said, ‘But we’re not speaking of the death of a lone warrior, or even an entire army, but that of the whole world and all that is!’

‘I … know.’

‘Do you really? What, then, is good? Where will you find truth? Do you know that, as well?’

‘I know it as well as I can. Is it not written in the Law of the One?’

‘So, so,’ he murmured, glaring at me.

‘Is it not written that a man may slay another man only in defense of life? And is it not also written that the Elijin may not slay at all?’

‘So, so.’

‘And yet you slay so gladly. As you would have had me slay Morjin!’

At this he gripped the hilt of his sword and smiled, showing his long white teeth. But there was no mirth on his savage face.

‘You are one of the Elijin!’ I said to him.

‘No, Kalkin was of the Elijin,’ he told me. ‘I am Kane.’

I held out my hand to him and said, ‘If I gave you this sword that is inside me, would you slay with it? What law for the valarda, then?’

‘I … don’t remember.’

His eyes smoldered with a dark fire almost too hot to bear. I felt his heart beating in great, angry surges inside him. It came to me then that there were those who could not abide their smallness, and they feared mightily obliteration in death. But those, like Kane, who turned away from their greatness dreaded even more the glory of life. How long had this ancient warrior stood alone in shadows and dark chasms, away from all others, even from himself? Was it not a terrible thing for a man to forget who he really was?

‘I know,’ I said to him, ‘that the valarda was not meant for slaying.’

‘So – you know this, do you?’

‘Somewhere,’ I said, ‘it must be written in the Law of the One.’

Kane stared at me as through a wall of flame. His jaws clenched, and the muscles of his windburnt cheeks popped out like knots of wood. It seemed that the veins of his neck and face could not contain the bursts of blood coursing through him.

Then he whipped his sword from its sheath and shouted at me, ‘Then damn the One!’

His words seemed to horrify him, as they did the rest of us. Daj sat looking at him in awed silence. Even Estrella seemed to wilt beneath his fearsome countenance.

Then Kane murmured, ‘What I meant to say was that Asangal damned the One. Angra Mainyu did – do you understand?’

I looked down at my open hand. A bloody spike pierced the palm through the bones. The agony of this iron nail still tore through me, as did that of the other nails driven through my mother’s hands and feet. And I said to Kane, ‘Yes – I do understand.’

I felt the hard hurt of his sword pressing into his own hand. He did not want to look at me, but he could not help it. His eyes said what his lips would not: I am damned. And so are you.

‘No, no,’ I told him. I took a step closer and covered his hand with mine. ‘Peace, friend.’

As gently as I could, I peeled back his fingers from his sword’s hilt, then took it away from him. He stood like a stunned lamb as he watched me slide it back into its sheath.

‘Valashu,’ he whispered to me.

I clasped hands with him then, and stood looking at him eye to eye. His blood burned against my palm with every beat of his great, beautiful heart. Such a wild joy of life surged inside him! Such a brilliance brightened his being, like unto the splendor of the stars! What was the truth of the valarda, I wondered? Only this: that it was a sword of light, truly, but something much more. It passed from man to man, brother to brother, as the very stars poured out to each other their fiery radiance, onstreaming, shining upon all things and calling to that deeper light within that was their source.

‘Kalkin,’ I said to him, whispering his name. For a moment, as through veil rent with a lightning flash, I looked upon a being of rare power and grace. But only for a moment.

‘No, no,’ he murmured. ‘You promised.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said.

‘No, it is I who am sorry. What do I really know of the valarda, eh? Perhaps you were right to try to keep that sword within its sheath.’

His gaze, it seemed, tore open my heart. I said to him, ‘If Angra Mainu is defeated, I do not believe that it will be by my hand, or yours, or even that of Ashtoreth and Valoreth.’

‘Perhaps you are right. Perhaps.’

‘And so with Morjin.’

‘So, so.’

‘Only the Maitreya,’ I said, ‘can keep him from using the Lightstone. And I do not believe I will ever be allowed to lay eyes upon this Shining One if I use the valarda to slay.’

Then he smiled at me, a true smile, all warm and sweet like honey melting in the sun. ‘So, there will be no slaying tonight, let us hope. Peace, friend.’

He stepped back over to the breastwork and picked up his bow again. His smile grew only wider as his eyes filled with amusement, irony and a mystery that I would never quite be able to apprehend.

After that it grew dark, and then nearly as black as a moonless eve, for here at the bottom of the gorge, there was very little light. Its towering walls reduced the heavens to a strip of stars running east and west above us. But one of these stars, I saw, was bright Aras. After all the work of washing the dishes and settling into our camp was completed, with Atara singing Estrella to sleep and Kane standing watch over us, I lay back against my mother earth to keep a vigil upon this sparkling light. It blazed throughout the night like a great beacon, and I wondered how this star of beauty and bright shining hope could ever be put out.

6

Idid not welcome my awakening the next morning. My battle wounds – mostly bruises from edged weapons or maces that had failed to penetrate my mail – hurt. The cold wind funneling down the gorge set my stiff body to shivering, and that hurt even more. No ray of sun warmed the gorge directly for the first few hours of the day, as we ate our breakfast and broke camp with a slowness and heaviness of motion. All of us, except Kane, perhaps, were exhausted. It would have been good to remain there all day before a crackling fire, eating and resting, but we needed to gain as much distance as we could from the gorge’s entrance at the gateway to the Wendrush. And so we loaded our horses and drank one of Master Juwain’s teas to drive the weariness from our bodies. Then we set forth into the gorge, winding our way around walls of naked rock deeper into the Kul Kavaakurk’s shadows.

As we kicked our way over the rattling stones along the riverbank, I looked back behind us often and listened for any sign of pursuit. I sniffed at the cool air and reached out with a deeper sense, as well. I heard water rushing along its course and smelled spring leaves fluttering in the wind, but the only eyes upon us were those of the squirrels or the birds singing in the branches of the gorge’s many trees. No one, it seemed, followed us. Nothing sought to harm us. The only enemy we faced that morning, I thought, dwelled within. The horror of what lay behind us in the previous day’s butchery haunted all of us, even those who had not actually witnessed the battle. We feared what lay ahead in the vast unmapped reaches of the lower Nagarshath. Fear, in truth, was the worst of all our inner demons, for who among us did not gaze up at the sky and wonder if the Dark One could devour the very sun?

It was after dinner that evening when Maram finally let fear take hold of him. He rose up from the campfire to tend his horse’s bruised hoof, or so he said. But I followed him and found him in the stand of trees where the horses were tethered, rummaging through the saddlebags of Master Juwain’s remount. Quick as a weasel stealing eggs, he prized out a bottle of brandy and uncorked it. I ran over to him and slapped my hand upon his wrist with such force that I nearly knocked the bottle from his hand. And I shouted at him, ‘What of your vow?’

And he shouted back at me, ‘What of your vow, then?’

I clamped my fingers harder around his massive wrist as he struggled to bring the mouth of the bottle up to his fat lips. And I asked him, ‘What vow?’

‘Ah, what you said when we first met, that ours would be a lifelong friendship. What kind of friend keeps his friend from drinking away his pain?’

‘The kind who would keep him from a greater pain.’

‘You speak as if we have endless moments left to us.’

‘Our whole lives, Maram.’

‘Yes, our whole lives, as long as they will be. But how long will they be? Didn’t you hear anything of what was said last night? Months we have, until Morjin frees Angra Mainyu, perhaps only days. And so why not allow me what little joy I can find in this forsaken place?’

I let go his arm and stood facing him. ‘Drink then, if that is what you must do!’

‘I shall! I shall! Only, do not look at me like that!’

I continued staring through the twilight into his large, brown eyes.

‘Ah, damn you, Val!’ he said more softly. ‘I’ll do what I want, do you understand? What I choose. And what I choose now is not to drink after all. You’ve ruined the moment, too bad.’

So saying, he put the cork back in the bottle and sealed it with an angry slap of his hand. He tucked it back into Master Juwain’s saddlebag. Then he stood beneath the gorge’s towering wall staring at me.

Our shouts drew the others. They stood around us in a half-circle as Maram said, by way of explanation, ‘All that talk last night of Angra Mainyu and worlds ending in fire – it was too much!’

Kane eyed the poorly tied strings of the saddlebag but did not comment upon them. Then he said, ‘Perhaps it was.’

There was a kindness in his voice that I had heard only rarely. His black eyes held Maram in the light of compassion, and that was rarer still.

‘There are only six of us against Morjin and all his armies!’ Maram cried out. ‘Eight, if we count the children! How can we possibly keep the Dragon at bay while we find the Maitreya?’

‘We were one fewer,’ Kane said, ‘when we found our way into Argattha.’

‘But Morjin is stronger now, isn’t he? I saw this. So damn strong. And there is Angra Mainyu, too.’

Kane regarded him as a deep light played in his eyes. And then he snarled out, ‘Strong, you say? Ha, they are weak!’

His words astonished us. I stared at him as I shook my head. He was a man, I thought, who could hold within fierce contradictions, like two tigers in rut locked inside the same small cage.

‘So, weak they are,’ he growled out again. ‘Who are the strong, then, the truly powerful? They who follow the Law of the One, even though their faithfulness leads to their death. They who bring the design of the One into its fullest flowering, for in creation lies true life. But Morjin and his master create nothing. They fear everything, and their own feebleness most of all. So, fearing, thus they hate, and in hating chain themselves to all that is hateful and foul. Daj escaped from Argattha, Estrella, too, but how can the two Dragons ever break free from the hellhole that they have made for themselves with every nail they have pounded into flesh and every eye they have gouged out? From the very chains that they have forged to make themselves slaves? So. So. Knowing this, they would cloak their slave souls in royal robes and seek to conquer others, as proof of their power over life – and death. But the truly free can never be conquered, eh? At least not conquered in their souls. The stars can all die, their radiance, too, but not the light of the One. It is this that terrifies Angra Mainyu, and Morjin, too. And that is why, in the end, we’ll win.’

His words stunned Maram more than they soothed him. But for the moment, at least, they drove back the demons that impelled him to find solace in his brandy bottle. He stood proud and tall staring at Kane, transformed from a drunkard into a Valari knight. And he said, ‘Do you really think we can win?’

‘So, we must win – and so we will.’

Kane, I thought, understood the nature of evil better than any man. But it was the nature of evil, the truly horrible thing about it, that understanding alone would not keep evil from devouring a man alive.

‘We will win,’ Master Juwain affirmed, looking at Maram, ‘so long as we do not let down our guard. Have you been practicing the Light Meditations?’

‘Ah, perhaps not as often as I should,’ Maram said.

‘Well, what about the Way Rhymes, then? Memorizing them would be a better balm than brandy.’

‘Ah, I’m too tired, and it’s too late. My brain aches almost as much as my poor body.’

‘Then I’ll prepare you a tisane that will wake you up.’

‘Ah, what if I don’t want to wake up?’

Master Juwain rubbed the back of his shiny head as he regarded Maram. He seemed at a loss for words.

It was Liljana who came to his rescue. She waggled her finger at Maram, then poked it below his ribs as she said, ‘How many nights have I stayed up cooking and cleaning so that you might go to bed with a full belly? Master Juwain has asked you to memorize his verses, and so you should, for our sakes, if not your own.’

Everyone looked at Maram then, and he held up his hands in defeat – or in victory, depending on one’s point of view.

‘All right, all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll learn these silly rhymes, if that’s what you all want. It will be easier than everyone nagging me all the time.’

Master Juwain’s smile lasted only as long as it took Maram to add, ‘I’ll begin tomorrow, then.’

Kane suddenly took a step closer to him and stood staring at him like a great cat tensing to spring. I knew that he was only testing Maram, and would never lay hands upon him. Maram, however, was not so sure of this.

‘All right, all right,’ he said again with a heavy sigh. He turned to Master Juwain. ‘What verses for tonight, then?’

At Master Juwain’s prompting, I heard Maram recite:

At gorge’s end, a wooded vale …

And so it went as we returned to our places around the fire and drank the spicy teas that Master Juwain made for us. It was much to his purpose that we should learn the Way Rhymes, too, and so we took turns intoning the verses and correcting each other when we made mistakes. We did not continue our practice quite as long as Master Juwain might have wished, for we all were quite tired. But when it came time to retire for the night, we took the words into sleep, and perhaps into our dreams. And that was a good thing, I thought, for the essence of the Way Rhymes was the promise that if a man took one step after another, in the right direction, he would always reach his journey’s end.

The next day dawned clear, as we could tell from the band of blue that slowly brightened above us. We continued our long walk through the gorge, over loose stone and through stands of cottonwood trees that gradually showed a sprinkling of elms and oaks the deeper we penetrated into the White Mountains. Twenty miles, at least, we had travelled since our battle with Morjin and his Red Knights. None of us knew the length of the Kul Kavaakurk, for Master Juwain’s rhymes did not tell of that. But here, deep in this cleft in the earth, where the wind whooshed as through a bellows’ funnel and tore at our hair and garments, the gorge seemed to go on and on forever.

And then, abruptly, as we rounded yet another bend in the stream, the gorge opened out into a broad valley. A forest covered its slopes, gentle and undulating to the north but still quite steep to the south of the river. For the first time in two days, we had all the sun we could hope for; its warm rays poured down upon rock, earth and leaf, and filled all the great bowl before us. Smaller mountains, cloaked in oak and birch with aspens and hemlock higher up, edged the rim of this bowl; beyond rose the great white peaks of the Nagarshath. The valley continued along the line of the gorge, toward the west, and it seemed that our course should be to follow the river straight through it. But there were other exits from the valley that we might choose: clefts and saddles between the slopes around us, through which smaller streams flowed down into the river. Any one of these, I thought, might lead us up toward the Brotherhood’s school, though the way would obviously be difficult and dangerous.

‘Well,’ Master Juwain said to Maram as we walked out into the valley, ‘what is our way?’

And Maram recited:

At gorge’s end, a wooded vale;

Its southern slopes show shell-strewn shale.

Toward setting sun the vale divides;

To left or right the seeker strides.

Recall the tale or go astray:

King Koru-Ki set sail this way.

Maram stood next to his horse licking his lips as he glanced to the left. He said, ‘Ah, who devised these rhymes, anyway? “Its southern slopes sow hell-strewn shale.” Now there’s a tongue-twister for you! I can hardly say it!’

‘But it’s not so hard!’ Daj said, laughing at him. Then quick as a twittering bird, he piped out perfectly:

Its southern slopes show shell-strewn shale.

Master Juwain beamed a smile at him and patted his head. And then he said to Maram, ‘The Rhymes aren’t supposed to be easy to say but to memorize – hence the rhythm and rhyme. The alliteration, too.’

‘Well, at least I did memorize it,’ Maram said. ‘Little good that it would do me if you weren’t here to interpret for us.’

The Way Rhymes, of course, might be meant to be easy to memorize, but they were designed so that only the Brotherhood’s adepts and masters might resolve them correctly. Thus did the Brotherhood guard its secrets.

‘Come, come,’ Master Juwain said to him. ‘These lines are as transparent as the air in front of your nose.’

Maram pointed at the turbulent water rushing past us and muttered, ‘You mean, as clear as river mud.’

‘What don’t you understand? Clearly, we’ve passed the Ass’s Ears and the Kul Kavaakurk, and have come out into this valley, as the verse tells. Look over there, at the rock! Surely that is shale, is it not?’

We all looked where he pointed, across the river at the nearly vertical slopes to the south of us. The rock there was dark, striated and crumbly, and certainly appeared to be shale.

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Maram said to him. ‘You know your stones. But does it bear shells? Who would want to cross the river to find out?’

Kane coughed out a deep curse then, and mounted his horse. He drove the big bay out into the river, which looked to be swift enough to sweep a man away but not so huge a beast. In a few mighty surges, his horse crossed to the other bank and soaked the stone there with water running off his flanks. Kane then rode up through the trees a hundred yards before dismounting and making his way up the steep slope on foot. We saw him disappear behind a great oak as he approached a slab of shale.

‘He’s as mad as Koru-Ki himself,’ Maram said, watching for him. ‘He’d cross an ocean just to see what was on the other side.’

A few moments later, Kane returned as he had gone, bearing a huge smile on his face.

‘Well?’ Maram said. ‘Did you see any of these shells-in-shale?’

‘Many,’ Kane told him as his smile grew wider.

‘I don’t believe you – you’re lying!’

‘Go see for yourself,’ Kane said, pointing across the river.

‘Do you think I won’t?’ Maram eyed the swift water that cut through the valley and shook his head. ‘Ah, perhaps I won’t, after all. It’s enough that one of us risked his life proving out those silly lines. You did see shells, didn’t you? She sells? I mean, sea shells?’

‘I’ve told you that I did. What more do you want of me?’

‘Well, it wouldn’t have hurt to bring back one of these shelled rocks, would it?’

Kane laughed at this and produced a flat, thick piece of slate as long as his hand. He gave it to Maram. All of us gathered around as Maram stared at the grayish slate and fingered the little, stone-like shells embedded within it.

‘Impossible!’ Maram said. ‘I saw shells like these on the shore of the Great Northern Sea!’

‘But then how did they get into this rock?’ Daj asked him.

Kane stood silently staring at the rock as the rest of us examined it more closely. Not even Master Juwain had an answer for him.

‘Perhaps,’ Atara said, ‘there really was once a great flood that drowned the whole world, as the legends tell.’

Kane’s black eyes bored into the rock, and he seemed lost in endless layers of time. He finally said to us, ‘So, the earth is stranger than we know. Stranger than we can know. Who will ever plumb all her mysteries?’

‘Well,’ Maram said, hefting the rock and then tucking it into his saddlebag, ‘this is one mystery I’ll keep for myself, if you don’t mind. If I ever return home, I can show this as proof that I found sea shells at the top of a mountain!’

I smiled at this because it was not Maram who had found the rock, nor had it quite been taken from a mountain’s top. It cheered me to know, however, that he still contemplated a homecoming. And so he held inside at least some hope.

‘Your way homeward,’ Master Juwain said to him, ‘lies through this valley. Are we agreed that we must traverse it?’

‘Toward the setting sun,’ Maram said, pointing to the west. ‘But I can’t see if the valley truly divides there.’

I stood with my hand shielding my eyes as I peered up the valley. It seemed to come to an end upon a great wedge of a mountain rising up to the west. But it was a good thirty miles distant, and the folds and fissures of the mountains along the valley’s rim blocked a clear line of sight.

‘Then let us go on,’ Atara said, ‘and we shall see what we shall see.’

A faint smile played upon her lips, and it gladdened my heart to know that she could joke about her blindness. Then she mounted her horse and said, ‘Come, Fire!’ She guided her mare along the strip of grass that paralleled the river, and it gladdened me even more to see that her second sight had mysteriously returned to her.

And so we followed the river into the west. It was a day of sunshine and warm spring breezes. Wildflowers in sprays of purple and white blanketed the earth around us where the trees gave way to acres of grass. It seemed that we were all alone here in this quiet, beautiful place. Our spirits rose along with the terrain, not so high, perhaps, as the great peaks shining in the distance, but high enough to hope that we might have at least a day or two of surcease from battle and travail.

And so it came to be. We made camp that first night in the valley on some good, grassy ground above the river. While Kane, Maram and I worked at fortifying it, and Liljana, Estrella and Daj set to preparing our dinner, Atara went off into the woods to hunt. Fortune smiled upon her, for she returned scarcely an hour later with a young deer slung across her shoulders. That night we made feast on roasted venison, along with our rushk cakes and basketfuls of raspberries that Estrella found growing on bushes in the woods. Master Juwain chanted the Way Rhymes to Maram, and later Kane brought out the mandolet that he had inherited from Alphanderry. It was a rare thing for him to play for us, and lovely and strange, but that night he plucked the mandolet’s strings and sang out songs in a deep and beautiful voice. He seemed almost happy, and that made me happy, too. Songs of glory he sang for us, tales of triumph and the exaltation of all things at the end of time. He held inside a great sadness, as deep and turbulent as oceans, and this came out in a mournful shading to his melodies. But there, too, in some secret chamber of his heart, dwelled a fire that was hotter and brighter than anything that Angra Mainyu could ever hope to wield. As he sang, this ineffable flame seemed to push his words out into the valley where they rang like silver bells, and then up above the snow-capped mountains through clear, cold air straight toward the brilliant stars.

With the making of this immortal music, Flick burst forth out of the darkness above the mandolet’s vibrating strings. At first this strange being appeared as a silvery meshwork, impossibly fine-spun, with millions of clear tiny jewels like uncut diamonds sewn into it. Strands of fire streamed from these manifold points throughout the lattice, making the whole of his form sparkle with a lovely light. The longer that Kane played, the brighter this light became. I watched with a deep joy as the radiance summoned out of neverness many colors: scarlet and gold, forest green and sky blue – and a deep and shimmering glorre. And still Kane sang, and now the colors scintillated and swirled, then mingled, deepened and coalesced into the form and face of Alphanderry. And then our lost companion stood by the fire before us. His brown skin and curly black hair seemed almost real, as did his fine features and straight white teeth, revealed by his wide and impulsive smile. Even more real was his rich laughter, which recalled the immortal parts of him: his beauty, gladness of life and grace. Once before, in Tria, this Alphanderry, as messenger of the Galadin, had come into being in order to warn me of a great danger.

‘Ahura Alarama,’ I said, whispering Flick’s true name. And then, ‘Alphanderry.’

‘Valashu Elahad,’ he replied. ‘Val.’

Kane stopped singing then, and put aside his mandolet to stare in amazement at his old friend.

‘He speaks!’ Daj cried out. ‘Like he did in King Kiritan’s hall!’

The boy came forward, and with great daring reached out to touch Alphanderry. But his hand, with a shimmer of lights, passed through him.

Alphanderry laughed at this as he pointed at Daj and said, ‘He speaks. But I don’t remember seeing him in King Kiritan’s hall.’

So saying, he reached out to touch Daj, but his hand, too, passed through him as easily as mine would slice air. Then he laughed again as he turned toward Estrella. His eyes were kind and sad as he said, ‘But the girl still doesn’t speak, does she?’

Estrella, her eyes wide with wonder, spoke entire volumes of poetry in the delight that brightened her face.

‘But where did you come from?’ I asked Alphanderry. ‘And why are you here?’

‘Where did you come from, Val?’ he retorted. ‘And why are any of us here?’

I waited for him to answer what might be the essential question of life. But all he said to me was, ‘I am here to sing. And to play.’

And with that, he reached for the mandolet, but his fingers passed through it. It was as hard, I thought, for such a being to grasp a material thing as it was for a man to apprehend the realm of spirit.

‘So,’ Kane said, plucking the mandolet’s strings, ‘I will play for you, and you will sing.’

And so it was. We all sat around listening as Kane called forth sweet, ringing notes out of the mandolet and Alphanderry sang out a song so beautiful that it brought tears to our eyes. The words, however, poured forth in that musical language of the Galadin that even Master Juwain had difficulty understanding. And so when Alphanderry finally finished, he looked at Master Juwain and translated part of it, reciting:

The eagle lifts his questing eye

And wings his way toward sun and sky;

The whale dives deep the ocean’s gloam –

Always seeking, always home.

The world whirls round through day and night;

All things are touched with dark and light;

The dusk befalls on light’s decay;

The dying dark turns night to day.

The One breathes out, creates all things:

The blossoms, birds and star-struck kings;

With every breath all beings yearn

To sail the stars and home return.

The dazzling heights light deep desire;

Within the heart, a deeper fire.

The road toward heavens’ starry crown

Goes ever up but always down.

As Kane put down the mandolet, Alphanderry looked at Master Juwain and smiled.

‘Am I to understand,’ Master Juwain asked him, ‘that these words were intended for me?’

It was one of the glories of Alphanderry’s music that each person listening thought that he sang especially for him.

‘Let’s just say,’ Alphanderry told him, ‘that there might be a sentiment in this song that a master of the Brotherhood would do well to take to heart. Especially if that master guided his companions on a quest through the dark places in the world.’

‘Were you sent here to tell me this?’ Master Juwain asked him.

In answer, Alphanderry’s smile only widened.

‘Who sent you, then? Was it truly the Galadin?’

Now sadness touched Alphanderry’s face, along with the amusement and a deep mystery. And he said to Master Juwain, and to all of us, ‘I wish I could stay to answer your questions. To sing and laugh – and even to eat Liljana’s fine cooking again. Alas, I cannot.’

He looked skyward, where Icesse and Hyanne and the other glittering stars of the Mother’s Necklace had just passed the zenith. In that direction, I thought, lay Ninsun, the dwelling place of the Ieldra – and the light that streamed out of it in the glorre-filled rays of the Golden Band.

‘But if you could remain only a few moments longer,’ Master Juwain persisted, ‘you might tell me if –’

‘I can tell you only what I have,’ Alphanderry said with a brilliant smile. And then he added:

The road toward heavens’ starry crown

Goes ever up but always down.

He reached out to touch Master Juwain’s hand, but this impulsive act served only to brighten Master Juwain’s leathery skin, as with starlight. And then Alphanderry dissolved back into that brilliant whirl of lights we knew as Flick. Only his smile seemed to linger as Flick, in turn, vanished once again into neverness.

‘Ah, how I do miss our little friend,’ Maram said, staring at the dark air.

Kane, I saw, stared too, and his dark eyes wavered as if submerged in water.

‘But I wonder what he meant,’ Maram continued, turning to Master Juwain. ‘His verses are even more a puzzlement than your Way Rhymes.’

Master Juwain held his hands out to the hissing fire. His fingers curled as if grasping at its heat.

‘It is possible,’ he finally said, ‘that Alphanderry sang verses of the true Way Rhymes.’

‘The true Rhymes?’ Maram said.

‘Perhaps I should have said, “the deeper Rhymes”. The higher ones. Just as there are verses that tell the way to many places on Ea, there are those that describe man’s journey toward the One.’

He went on to explain that the path to becoming an Elijin, and so on toward the Galadin and Ieldra, was almost infinitely more difficult than merely finding the Brotherhood’s secret sanctuary.

‘Our order,’ Master Juwain explained, ‘has spent most of ten thousand years trying to learn and teach this way. But we have understood only little, and taught less. The Elijin surely know, the Galadin, too. But they do not speak to us.’

Everyone looked at Kane then. But he sat by the fire as cold and silent as stone.

‘At least,’ Master Juwain went on, ‘the angels do not speak to us, we of Ea. Surely on other worlds, they share with the Star People and the eternal Brotherhood the songs that I have called the true Way Rhymes.’

‘Why are they so favored, then?’ Maram asked, looking up at the sky.

‘It is not that they are favored,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘It is rather that we, of Ea, are not. You see, the true Way Rhymes are perilous to hear. Consider the lesser Rhymes I’ve taught you. If learned incorrectly or in the wrong order, they could lead one off the edge of a cliff. This is even more pertinent of the higher Rhymes that would guide a man on the journey to becoming an Elijin, or an Elijin to becoming a Galadin.’

The fear that flooded into Maram’s face recalled the fall of Angra Mainyu – and that of Morjin.

‘I notice that you say, “guide a man on this journey”,’ Liljana carped at Master Juwain. Her voice was as sharp as one of her cooking knives.

‘It was a figure of speech,’ Master Juwain told her. ‘Of course women must walk the same path as men.’

‘Oh, must we, then?’ Liljana’s soft face shone with the steel buried deep inside her. Then she added, ‘You mean, walk behind men.’

‘No, not at all,’ Master Juwain said. ‘You are to be by our sides.’

‘How gracious of you to accept our company!’

Master Juwain rubbed the back of his neck as he sighed out, ‘I meant only that our way lies onward, together.’

‘Oh, does it really?’

Liljana moved closer to Master Juwain and knelt by his side. She placed her thumb against the tips of her other fingers and held them cocked and pointing at him. From deep inside her throat issued a hissing sound remarkably like that of an adder. And then, quick as any viper, she struck out with a snap of her arm and wrist, touching her pointed fingers against the lower part of Master Juwain’s back.

‘Your way, I think,’ she said to him, ‘is that of the serpent.’

‘And your way is not?’

‘There are serpents and there are serpents,’ she told him. ‘Ours is of the great circle of life, and we name her Ouroboros.’

What followed then, as the fire burnt lower and the night darkened, was a long argument as to the different paths open to man – or to woman. Liljana spoke of the sacred life force that dwelled inside everyone, and of the arts that the Maitriche Telu had found to quicken and deepen it. Master Juwain’s main concern was of transcendence and the way back toward the stars. I did not pretend to follow all the turnings of their contentions and justifications, for there was much in what they said that was esoteric, legalistic and even petty. I understood that their dispute went back to the breaking of the Order of Sisters and Brothers of the Earth long ago in the Age of the Mother. And like siblings of the same family who had set out on different paths in life, they quarreled all the more fiercely for sharing a mutual language and deep knowledge of each other. Both spoke of the serpent as the embodiment of life’s essential fire. Both taught the opening of the body’s chakras: the wheels of light that whirled within every man, woman and child. But each put different names to these things and understood their purpose differently.

Master Juwain, noticing how closely Daj followed their argument, turned to him to explain: ‘We of the Brotherhood teach the way of the Kundala. At birth, it lies coiled up inside each of us. There is a Rhyme that tells of this:

Around the spine the serpent sleeps.

Within its heart a fire leaps.

The serpent wakes, remembers, yearns –

And up the spine, like fire, it burns.

And through the chakras, one by one,

Until it blazes like the sun,

And then bursts forth, a crown of light:

An angel soars the starry height.

‘This is man’s path,’ he said to Daj, ‘and it is a straight one, though difficult and perilous. Seven bodies we each possess, corresponding to each of the seven chakras along the spine, and they each in turn must awaken.’

At this Daj’s eyes widened, and he looked down at his slender hand as he patted his chest. He said, ‘How can we have more than one body?’

Master Juwain smiled at this and said, ‘We have only one physical body, it’s true. But we have as well the body of the passions, associated with the second chakra, which we call the svadhisthan, and the mental body as well.’

‘I never knew they were called “bodies”. It sounds strange.’

‘But you understand that a boy could never become a man until they are fully developed?’

In answer, Daj rolled his eyes as if Master Juwain had asked him the sum of two plus two.

Master Juwain, undeterred, went on: ‘I’m afraid that most men do not progress beyond these three bodies, nor do they ever develop them fully. The physical body, for instance, can be quickened so as to heal any wound, even regenerating a severed limb. It is potentially immortal.’

At this, we all looked at Kane. But he said nothing, and neither did we.

‘But what is the fourth body, then?’ Daj asked him.

‘That is our dream body, also called the astral. It is the bridge between matter and spirit, and it is awakened through the anahata, the heart chakra.’

So saying, Master Juwain reached over and laid his gnarly hand across Daj’s chest.

‘Then, higher still,’ he went on, ‘there is the etheric body, which forms the template for our physical one and our potential for perfection, and then the celestial. There lies our sixth sight, of the infinite. The highest body is the ketheric, associated with the sahastara chakra at the crown of the head.’

Here Master Juwain stroked Daj’s tousled hair and went on to say that each of the bodies emanated an aura of distinctive color: red from the first chakra, orange from the second and so on to the sixth chakra, which radiated a deep violet light. The highest chakra, when fully quickened, poured forth a fountain of pure white light.

At this, Daj exchanged smiles with Master Juwain and recited:

And through the chakras, one by one,

Until it blazes like the sun,

And then bursts forth, a crown of light:

An angel soars the starry height.

‘Yes, that is the way of it,’ Master Juwain said as his voice filled with excitement. ‘When we have fully awakened, every part of us, the Kundala streaks upward and joins us to the heavens like a lightning bolt. And then as angels we walk the stars.’

Liljana scowled at this as she eyed Master Juwain’s hand resting on top of Daj’s head. Then she huffed out, ‘The serpent does not so much break through as to light up our being from within. And then, when we have come fully alive, like our mother earth turning her face to the sun, we can draw down the fire of the stars.’

Here she sighed as she shot Master Juwain a scolding look and added, ‘And as you should know, the serpent’s name is Ouroboros.’

She went on to tell of this primeval imago, sacred to her order. Ouroboros, she said, dwelled inside each of us as a great serpent biting its own tail. This recalled the great circle of life, the way life lived off other life, killing and consuming, and yet continuing on through the ages, always quickening in its myriads of forms and growing ever stronger. Ouroboros, she told us, shed its skin a million times a million times, and was immortal.

‘There is in each of us,’ she said, ‘a sacred flame that cannot be put out. It is like a ring of fire, eternal for it is fed by the fires of both the heavens and the earth. And our way must be to bring this fire into every part of our beings, and so into others – and to everything. And so to awaken all things and bring them deeper into life.’

So far, Atara had said very little. But now she spoke, and her words streaked like arrows toward Master Juwain and Liljana, and were straight to the point: ‘Surely the spirit of Alphanderry’s song was that both your ways are important, and indeed, in the end, are one and the same.’

Kane smiled at this in an unnerving silence.

And Maram willfully ignored the essence of what Master Juwain and Liljana had to say, muttering, ‘Ah, I’ve never understood all of this damn snake symbolism. Snakes are deadly, are they not? And the great snakes – the dragons – are evil.’

Master Juwain took it upon himself to try to answer this objection. He rubbed the back of his bald pate as he said, ‘Snakes are deadly only because they have so much power in their coils, and therefore life. And the dragon we fought in Argattha was evil, as are all beings and things that Morjin and Angra Mainyu have corrupted. But the dragon itself? I should say it is pure fire. And fire might be used to torture innocents as well as to light the stars.’

I thought his answer a good one, but Maram said, ‘Well, I for one will never like those slippery, slithering beasts. Whether they be found in old verses and books, or in long grass beneath the unwary foot.’

Liljana shot him a sharp look and said, ‘You’re just afraid of them, aren’t you?’

‘Well, what if I am?’

‘Your fear does neither you nor the rest of us any good. Perhaps if you had spent more time practicing Master Juwain’s lessons and moving into the higher chakras, you wouldn’t be as troubled as you are.’

‘But I thought you scorned Master Juwain’s way?’

‘Scorned? I can’t afford such sentiments. We do disagree about certain things, that’s all.’

The Sisters of the Maitriche Telu, as I understood it, also taught the quickening of the body’s chakras, but they numbered and named these wheels of light differently: Malkuth, Yesod, Tiphereth and seven others. Strangely, Liljana called the highest chakra, Keter, which corresponded almost exactly with the Brotherhood’s ketheric body, associated with the crown chakra at the top of the head.

‘You dwell too often,’ Liljana told Maram, ‘in the first chakra, in fear of your precious life. This impels a movement into the second chakra, in a blind urge to beget more life. And there, as we’ve all seen, you dwell much too often and wantonly.’

‘Ah, well, what if I do?’ Maram snapped at her.

Master Juwain, allying himself for the moment with Liljana, added to her criticism, saying, ‘Such indulgence fires your second chakra at the expense of the others and traps you there. It leaves you vulnerable to lust – and to drunkenness and the other vices that aid and abet it.’

Maram cast his gaze toward the horses, where the brandy was safely stowed within the saddlebags. He licked his lips and said, ‘Ah, that’s what I can’t stand about the Brotherhood and all your ways. You’re too damn dry. With your damn dry breath you’d blow out the sweetest of flames in favor of lighting these higher torches of yours. And why? So you can spend your days – and nights – in anguish over a transcendence that may never come? That’s no way to live, is it? If I had a bottle in hand, I’d make a toast to drunkenness in the sweet, sweet here and now – and a hundred more to lust!’

Again he eyed the saddlebags as if hoping that Master Juwain or I might retrieve a bottle and rescue him from his vow. And then he shook his head and muttered, ‘Well, if I can’t drink to what’s best in life, I’ll sing to it. Abide a moment while I make the verses – abide!’

Here he held out his right hand as he placed his other hand over his closed eyes. His lips moved silently, but from time to time he would call out to us, ‘Abide, only a few moments more – I almost have it.’

As Kane heaped a couple more logs on the fire, we all sat around listening to its crackle and hiss, and looking at Maram. At last he took his hand away from his thick brows and looked at us. He smiled hugely. And then he rose to his feet and rested his hands on his hips as he stared at Master Juwain and called out in his huge, booming voice:

The higher man seeks higher things:

Old tomes, bright crystals, angel’s wings.

He lives to crave and pray accrue

The good, the beautiful, the true.

And there he slithers, coils and dwells

In higher hues of higher hells;

In sixth or seventh wheels of light –

There’s too much pain in too much sight.

But ‘low the belly burns sweet fire,

The sweetest way to slake desire.

In clasp of woman, warmth of wine

A honeyed bliss and true divine.

I am a second chakra man;

I take my pleasure where I can;

At tavern, table and divan –

I am a second chakra man.

As Maram sang out these verses, and others that flew out of his mouth like uncaged birds, he would strike the air with his fist and then lewdly waggle his hips at each refrain. He finally finished and stood limned against the fire grinning at us. No one seemed to know what to say.

And then Kane burst out laughing and clapped his hands, and so did we all. And Atara said to him, ‘Hmmph, if you had remained with the Kurmak and taken wives as my grandfather suggested, these second chakra powers of yours would have been put to the test.’

‘How many wives, then?’

‘Great chieftains take ten or even twenty, but it’s said that only a great, great man such as Sajagax could satisfy them.’

Here she smiled at Liljana, who added, ‘Our order has discovered that when a woman awakens the Volcano, which we call Netzach, it would take ten or twenty men to match her fire.’

‘Do you think so?’ Maram said with a wink of his eye and yet another gyration of his hips. ‘I should tell you that my, ah, greatness has never thoroughly been put to the test. Perhaps I’m a fool for even considering marriage with Behira only and cleaving to Valari customs.’

‘Would you rather try our Sarni ways?’ Atara asked him.

‘In this one respect, I would. I’d take twenty wives, if I could. And I would, ah, entertain all of them in one night.’

‘My tribemates?’ Atara said. ‘They would kill you before morning.’

‘So you say.’

Atara laughed out, ‘And you would have them call you “Twenty-Horned Maram” I suppose?’

‘Just so, just so. It would create a certain curiosity about me, would it not?’

‘That it would. And you’d be happy satisfying this curiosity with other women who weren’t your wives, wouldn’t you?’

‘Ah,’ he said with a rumble of his belly and a contented belch, ‘at least someone understands me.’

‘I understand that if you practice your ways on the women of my tribe, their husbands and fathers will draw their swords and make you into No-Horned Maram.’

In the wavering firelight, Maram’s happy face seemed to blanch. And he muttered, ‘Well, I don’t suppose I’d make a very good Sarni warrior. I’ll have to practice on other women I meet along the way.’

Atara fingered the saber by her side. And this fierce young maiden told him, ‘If you must – but just don’t think of practicing on me.’

At this, Maram held up his hands in helplessness as if others were always conspiring to think the worst of him. His gaze fell upon Liljana, who said to him, ‘I should warn you that if you brought your horns to a practiced matron of the Maitriche Telu, she would likely kill you – with pleasure. Perhaps you’ll find a nice harridan somewhere in these mountains.’

The ghostly white peaks of the Nagarshath gleamed faintly beneath the stars. It seemed that there were no other human beings, much less willing women, within a thousand miles.

‘Maram would do better,’ Master Juwain said, ‘to practice the Rhymes I’ve taught him. Now, why don’t we all retire and get a good night’s sleep? Tomorrow we’ll journey up this valley and see what lies at the end of it.’

He smiled at Maram and added, ‘Tell me, again, won’t you, the pertinent Rhyme?’

And, again, Maram dutifully recited:

At gorge’s end, a wooded vale;

Its southern slopes show shell-strewn shale.

Toward setting sun the vale divides;

To left or right the seeker strides.

Recall the tale or go astray:

King Koru-Ki set sail this way.

Except for Kane, who took the first and longest of the night’s watches, we all wrapped ourselves in our cloaks and lay down on our sleeping furs. Maram spread out next to me, and I listened to him intoning verses for much of the next hour. But they were not those that Master Juwain hoped for. I smiled as I drifted off to sleep with the sound of my incorrigible friend chanting out:

I’m a second chakra man

I take my pleasure where I can …

7

The river wound through woods and meadows, and I couldn’t help thinking of it as a mighty brown snake. No great rocks or other obstacles blocked our way. The ground was good here, easy on the horses’ hooves, and provided all the fodder they needed to carry us higher into this beautiful country. By noon, the place where the valley came up against the mountain at its end was clearly visible; by late afternoon we reached the divide told of in the Way Rhyme. To the left of the mountain, the valley split off toward the south. And to the right was a great groove in the earth running between the rocky prominences north of us.

We all sat on our horses as we considered the next leg of our journey. Master Juwain, upon studying the lay of the land, turned to Daj and said:

Recall the tale or go astray:

King Koru-Ki set sail this way.

‘Well, young Dajarian – which way is that?’

And Daj told him: ‘North, I think. Didn’t King Koru-Ki set out to find the Northern Passage and the way to the stars?’

‘You know he did,’ Liljana said to him. ‘Didn’t I teach you that the ancients believed that the waters of all worlds flow into each other? And that there is a passage to other worlds at the uttermost north of ours?’

As Daj looked at Liljana, he slowly nodded his head.

‘Very good, then,’ Master Juwain said. He smiled at Maram. ‘We’ll turn north, tomorrow – are we agreed?’

‘Ah, we were agreed before we reached this place. This Rhyme, at least, was easy to unravel.’

‘Indeed it was. But the Rhymes grow more difficult, the nearer we approach our destination. Let’s make camp here tonight and ponder them.’

And so we did. That evening, after dinner, I heard Maram repeating the verses to the Way Rhymes as well as those of his epic doggerel that he insisted on adding to. Over the next few days, as we continued our journey, the Way Rhymes, at least, guided us through the maze of mountains, valleys and chasms that made up this section of the lower Nagarshath. Through forests of elm and oak, and swaths of blue spruce, we rode our horses up and up – and then down and down. But as the miles vanished behind us, it became clear that our way wound more up than down, and we worked on gradually higher. Each camp that we made, it seemed, was colder than the preceding one. On our fourth day after the King’s Divide, as we called it, it rained all that afternoon and turned to snow in the evening. We spent a miserable night heaping wood on the fire and huddling as close to its leaping flames as we dared, swaddled in our cloaks like newborns. The next day, however, the sun came out and fired the snow-dusted rocks and trees with a brilliance like unto millions of diamonds. It did not take long for spring’s heat to melt away this fluffy white veneer. We rode up a long valley full of deer, voles and singing birds, and we basked in Ashte’s warmth.

And then, just past noon, we came upon a landmark told of by the Rhymes. Master Juwain pointed to the right as he said, ‘Brother Maram, will you please give us the pertinent verses?’

And Maram, making no objection to being so addressed, said:

Upon a hill a castle rock,

Abode of eagle, kite and hawk.

From sandstone palisades espy

A tri-kul lake as blue as sky.

As Altaru lowered his head to feed upon the rich spring grass blanketing the ground, I sat on top of his broad back and stroked his neck. And I gazed up at the hill under study. A jagged sandstone ridge ran along its crest up to some blocklike rocks at the very top, giving it the appearance of a castle’s battlements.

‘This is surely the place,’ Maram said, holding his hand against his forehead. ‘But I see no eagles here.’

And then Daj, who had nearly the keenest eyes of all of us, pointed to the left of the hill at a dark speck gliding through the air and said, ‘Isn’t that a hawk?’

And Kane said, ‘So, it is, lad – and a goshawk at that.’

‘If I were an eagle,’ I said, looking at the crags around us, ‘I think I would make my aerie here.’

‘If you were an eagle,’ Maram told me, pointing to the north, ‘you wouldn’t have to climb that hill to spy out the terrain beyond it, as the verse suggests.’

‘You mean, we wouldn’t have to climb it, don’t you?’

‘I? I?’ Maram said. He rested his hands upon his belly and looked at me. ‘Surely you’re not suggesting that I dismount and haul my poor, tired body up that –’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘But such ascents were made for eagles or rock goats, not bulls such as I.’

‘Bulls, hmmph,’ Atara said from on top of her horse. ‘You eat enough for an elephant.’

Maram ignored this jibe and said to me, ‘You are the man of the mountains.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and so I’ll go with you. And then you can recite for me the next verse.’

Maram sighed at this as he grudgingly nodded his head. We decided then that Maram, Master Juwain and I would climb the hill while Liljana and the others worked on preparing lunch for our return.

Our hike up the hill proved to be neither as long or arduous as Maram feared. Even so, he puffed and panted his way up a deer trail and then cursed as he nearly turned an ankle on some loose rocks in a mound of scree. To hear him grunting and groaning, one might have thought he was about to die from the effort. But I was sure he suffered so loudly mainly to impress me. And to remind both him and me of the great sacrifices that he was willing to make on my behalf.

At last, we gained the crest, where the wind blew quickly and cooled our sweat-soaked garments. We stood resting against the sandstone ridge that topped it. We looked out to the northwest, where a great massif of snow-covered peaks rose up along the horizon like an impenetrable white fortress. But between there and here lay a country of rugged hills and lakes that pooled beneath them. All of them were blue. Which one

might be the lake told of in the Rhyme, I could not say. ‘A tri-kul lake,’ Maram intoned, looking out below us. ‘Very well, but what is that? A “kul” is a pass or a gorge, and I can’t say that any of these lakes is surrounded by three such, or even one.’

‘Are you sure the verse told of a tri-kul lake?’ Master Juwain asked him.

‘Are you saying I misheard the Rhyme?’

‘Indeed you did. The word in question is drakul.’

‘But why didn’t you correct me before this?’

‘Because,’ Master Juwain said, ‘I wanted to give you a chance to puzzle through the Rhymes yourself. Our goal will never be won through memory alone.’

‘But what is a drakul, then? I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

‘Are you sure? Think back to your lessons in ancient Ardik.’

‘Do you mean, try to remember lessons in that dry, dry tongue that I tried to forget, even years ago?’

Master Juwain sighed and rubbed his head, now covered with a wool cap. And he said, ‘Why don’t you give me the next verses, then? How many times have I told you that clues to a puzzle in one verse might be found in those before or after it?’

‘Very well,’ Maram said. And he dutifully recited:

The Lake’s two tongues are rippling rills

That twist and hiss past saw-toothed hills;

A cold tongue licks the setting sun,

But your course cleaves the shining one.

‘No, no,’ Master Juwain said to him. ‘You’ve misheard the final line here, too. It should be: “Your course cleaves the shaida one”.’

‘Shaida?’ Maram called out. His great voice was sucked up by the howling wind. ‘But what is that?’

‘Think back on your lessons – do you not remember?’

‘No.’

Master Juwain dragged his fingernails across the rough sandstone beneath his hand, then turned to me. ‘Val, do you remember?’

I thought for a moment and said, ‘Shaida is a word from a much older language that was incorporated into ancient Ardik, wasn’t it? Didn’t it have something to do with dragons?’

Master Juwain smiled as he nodded his head. And then here, at the top of this windy hill, where hawks circled high above us, he took a few minutes to repeat a lesson that he must have taught us when we were boys. Two paths, he told us, led to the One. The first path was that of the animals and growing things, and it was a simple one: the primeval harmony of life. The second path, however, was followed only by man – and the dragons. Only these two beings, Master Juwain said, pitted themselves against nature and sought to dominate or master it: man with all his intelligence and yearning for a better world and the dragon with pride and fire. Indeed, because men forged iron ore into steel ploughshares or swords and wielded the coruscating fury of the firestones themselves, our way also was called the Way of the Dragon. It was a hard way, perilous and cruel, for it led to war and discord with the world – and seemingly even with the One. But out of such strife, Master Juwain claimed, like the great Kundalini working his way up through the chakras, would eventually emerge a higher harmony.

‘The Star People surely know a paradise that we can only imagine, the Elijin and Galadin, too,’ Master Juwain told us. ‘That is, they would if not for Angra Mainyu and those who followed him. Their way, I’m afraid, is still our way, and we call it the Left Hand Path.’

Here he nodded at Maram. ‘And now you have all the clues you need to unlock these verses.’

Maram thought for a long few moments, pulling at his beard as he looked out at the blue sky and the even bluer lakes gleaming beneath it. And then he pointed west at the longest of them and said, ‘All right, then, surely we are to espy a drakul lake, and of all these waters, only that one looks very much like a dragon – or a snake. And, see, two streams lead down into it, or rather away from it, past those saw-toothed hills. They do look something like tongues, I suppose. And so I would say that we’re to follow the southernmost stream, to the left.’

‘Very good,’ Master Juwain said, nodding his head. ‘I concur.’

Our course being set, we hiked back down the hill and sat down to a lunch of fried goose eggs and wheat bread toasted over a little fire. Then we checked the horses’ loads and led them around the base of the hill topped by the castle rock. We worked our way through thick woods, and up and down the ravines that grooved the hill’s slopes. Finally we came out into the valley of the lakes on the other side. We made camp that evening in clear sight of the dragon lake to the west of us. Its two tongues, of dusk-reddened water, caught the fire of the setting sun.

It took us most of the next day to reach this lake, for we had to forge on past other hills, lakes and ground grown boggy from all the water that collected here. But reach it we did, and we began our trek through the dense vegetation of its southern shore. We paused for the night in a copse of great birch trees. We smelled the faint reek of a skunk and listened to the honking of the geese and the beating wings of other waterfowl out on the lake. The next day we walked on until we came to the stream told of in the Rhymes. We followed this rushing rill toward its source, south, and then curving west and north. The hills around us grew ever higher. In this way, over the next two days, we made a miles-wide circle and came up behind the great massif that we had sighted from the sandstone castle. And then, as the Rhymes also told, we came upon a road that snaked back and forth still higher, winding up through barren tundra toward what seemed a snow-locked pass between two of the massif’s mountains.

‘Ah, I don’t like the look of this,’ Maram said as we stood by our horses looking up at the white peaks before us. ‘It’s too damn high!’

‘But we don’t have to go over the pass,’ Daj said, ‘just through it.’

‘I don’t care – it’s still too high. It will be cold up there, cold enough to freeze our breath, I think. And what if there are bears?’

He went on complaining in a like manner for a while before he turned his disgruntlement to the road we must follow up to the heights. It was an ancient road and seemed once to have been a good one, built of finely-cut granite stones taken from the rock around us. Some of these stones, though worn, were still jointed perfectly. But time and ice and snow had riven many of the stones and reduced the road in places to no more than a path of rubble. Below us the road simply vanished into a wall of forest and the dark earth from which it grew. We could detect no sign of where this road might come from. Above us the road led on: through the mountains, we hoped, and straight to the Brotherhood’s secret school.

‘Well, I suppose we should camp here for the night,’ Maram said.

‘No, I’m afraid we must go up as high as we can,’ Master Juwain told him, pointing at the great saddle between the two mountains. ‘You have the verses – give them to me, please.’

Maram nodded grudgingly, then recited:

Approach the wall round Ashte’s ides –

There wait till dark of night subsides;

If sky is clear, at day’s first light

Go deep into a darker night.

‘But we have approached the wall!’ Maram said to Master Juwain.

‘Not close enough. The essence of these verses, I think, is that we must be ready to move quickly at the right moment. Now let us go on.’

And so we did. Our slog up the road was long and hard, though not particularly dangerous. As Maram had worried, it grew colder. The road passed through a swath of pines and broke out from treeline into tundra. Ragged patches of snow blanketed the side of the mountain and covered the road in several places. We had to break through the crust and work against the snow’s crunching, cornlike granules. Our feet, even through our boots, smarted sharply and then grew numb. The wind drove at us from the west in cruel, piercing gusts. But the sky, at least, was a great, blue dome and remained perfectly clear in all directions. And the sun comforted us for while – until it dropped behind the sharp-ridged peaks of the mountains farther to the west. Then it grew truly cold, enough to ice our sweaty garments and find our flesh beneath them. By the time we set to making camp at the crest of the road, we were all miserable and shivering.

Maram pointed at the pass, where the road disappeared into a dark tunnel cut through the white wall above us. And he said, ‘We would be warmer if we slept inside there.’

‘We would,’ Daj agreed, ‘but the Rhyme says that we’re supposed to wait out here.’

‘The damn Rhymes,’ Maram muttered. ‘They make no sense.’

‘But that’s just it,’ Daj said, ‘we’re supposed to make sense of them.’

Atara began unloading some faggots of wood from one of the packhorses, and she said to Maram, ‘It would be warmer in the tunnel. If there are any bears on this mountain, I’m sure they’ve made lair there.’

‘Bears?’ Maram said. ‘No, no – surely they’ve come out of their winter sleep and have gone down to feed on berries or trout. Surely they have. They at least have sense.’

He set to unloading wood and building a fire with a fervor that kept away his gut-churning fear of bears. But he must have remembered the great white bear that had attacked us on a similar pass in the Morning Mountains – as did Master Juwain and I. We said nothing of this maddened animal that Morjin had made into a ghul, for we did not wish to frighten the children, or ourselves. I prayed that no ghul-bears – nor snow tigers nor any other beasts directed by Morjin – would find us here. It was enough that we still had to fight our way through this rugged terrain and through the Rhymes that were our map to it.

We sat for most of the night by the fire. The ground here was too steeply sloped and rocky for reclining, and too cold, too. And so we made cushions of our sleeping furs and huddled together with our cloaks thrown over us as a sort of woolen tent. Estrella sat between me and Atara, and fell asleep with her head resting against my side. Maram’s back pressed firmly, and warmly, against my own. In this way, we propped each up and kept away the worst of the cold.

I slept only a little that night, and Master Juwain and Kane did not sleep at all. At times, in low voices, they discussed the meaning of the Way Rhymes; at other times they sat in silence as they looked up at the stars. I kept watch on these bright points of light as best I could. But I must have dozed, for I awakened in the deep of night to the weight of Kane’s hand gently shaking my shoulder. He stood above me uncloaked, and he pointed up at the constellations spread across the heavens.

‘Look, Val,’ he murmured. ‘The Ram is about to set.’

In the biting cold, we roused the others and broke camp. This required little more work than heaping a few handfuls of snow upon the fire’s coals and tying our rolled-up sleeping furs to the backs of the horses. We breakfasted on some battle biscuits and a little cold water to wash them down. And then we waited.

As the last stars of the Ram set behind the western horizon, a faint light suffused the world and touched the mountains around us with an eerie sheen. At a nod from Master Juwain, we lit the torches that we had readied for this moment. And then without wasting another breath, we set out up the road and into the tunnel.

None of us knew what we would find there. The tunnel’s starkness and long straight lines were almost a disappointment. The road through it seemed good and solid, and the horses’ hooves clopping against the paving stones sent echoes reverberating up and down around us. The light cast by our oily torches showed a tube seemingly melted through the mountain’s rock. The curving walls and ceiling above us gleamed all glassy and black, like sheets of obsidian more than fused granite. Maram guessed that the Ymanir must have once burned this tunnel with great firestones, for those shaggy giants had once ranged through most of the White Mountains and had built through them underground cities, invisible bridges and other marvels. Surely, I thought, this tunnel must be one of them. As we made our way down its gentle slope, I could see no end to it. Who but the Ymanir, I wondered, could carve a miles-long tunnel out of solid rock?

‘How I do miss Ymiru,’ Maram called out into the cold, still air. ‘He was a broody man, it’s true, but the only one I’ve ever known bigger and stronger than I. A great companion, he was, too. If he were here, I’m sure he could explain the mystery of this damn tunnel and what we’ll find when we come out on the other side.’

‘But we have the Rhyme for that,’ Master Juwain said to him. ‘Why don’t you recite it?’

‘Ah, you recite it,’ Maram said to him. ‘My head has never worked right at this accursed hour.’

‘All right,’ Master Juwain told him. And then he intoned:

And through the long dark into dawn,

The road goes down, yet up: go on!

‘Shhh, quiet now!’ Kane called out to us in a low voice. ‘We know nothing about this place or what might dwell here.’

His words sobered us, and we moved on more quickly, and more quietly, too. It was freezing cold in this long tube through the earth, though mercifully there was no wind. After a few hundred yards or so we came upon yellowish bones strewn across the tunnel’s floor and heaped into mounds. At the sight of them, Maram began shaking. The bones did not, however, look to be human; I whispered to Maram and the others that a snow tiger must have holed up here, dragging inside and devouring his kills. This did little to mollify Maram. As he walked his horse next to mine, he muttered, ‘Snow tigers, is it? Oh, Lord, they’re even worse than bears!’

The smell of the bones was old and musty, and I did not sense here the presence of snow tigers or any other beings besides ourselves. And yet something about this tunnel seemed strange, almost as if the melted rock that lined it sensed our presence and was in some way alive. As we moved farther into it, I felt a pounding from down deep, as of drums – but even more like the beating of a heart. I wondered, as did Master Juwain, if the tunnel’s obsidian coating might really be some sort of unknown gelstei. All the gelstei resonated with each other in some way, however faint, and a disturbing sensation tingled through the hilt of my sword. It traveled up my arm and into my body, collecting in the pit of my belly where it burned. It impelled me to lead on through the smothering darkness even more quickly.

‘Val,’ Maram whispered to me through the cold air, ‘I feel sick – like I did in the Black Bog.’

‘It’s all right,’ I whispered back. ‘We’re nearly through.’

‘Are you sure? How can you be sure?’

We journeyed on for quite a way, how far or how long I couldn’t quite tell. Our torches burnt down and began flickering out, one by one. We had brought no oil with which to renew them. And then, at last, with the horses’ iron-shod hooves striking out a great noise against cold stone, we sighted a little patch of light ahead of us. We fairly ran straight toward it. Our breath burst from our lungs, and the patch grew bigger and bigger. And then we came out of the tunnel into blessed fresh air.

We gathered on a little shelf of rock on the side of the mountain. A cold wind whipped at our faces. Spread out before us, to the north and east, was some of the most forbidding country I had ever seen. Far out to the horizon gleamed nothing but great jagged peaks covered with snow and white rivers of ice that cut between them. No part of this terrible terrain seemed flat or showed a spray of green.

‘This can’t be the Valley of the Sun!’ Maram cried out. ‘No one could live here!’

In truth, even a snow tiger or a marmot would have had a difficult time surviving in this ice-locked land. Snowdrifts covered the road before us; this little span of stone seemed to dip down along the spine of a rocky ridge before rising again and disappearing into the rock and snow of another mountain.

‘We must have made a mistake,’ Maram said. ‘Either that or the Rhymes misled us.’

‘No, we made no mistake,’ Master Juwain huffed out into the biting wind. ‘And the Rhymes always tell true.’

And Maram said:

And through the long dark into dawn

The road goes down, yet up: go on!

‘Well,’ he continued, ‘we went through that damn tunnel, and if we go on any farther, we’ll freeze to death. There’s nothing left of this road, and I wouldn’t follow it if there were. And there are no more Rhymes!’

But there were. As Kane again warned Maram to silence, Master Juwain said, ‘Yes, be quiet now – we have little time.’

And then he recited:

Through mountains’ notch, a golden ray:

The rising sun will point the way.

Before this orb unveils full face

Go on into a higher place.

‘Into that?’ Maram cried out, pointing at the icy wasteland before us. ‘I won’t. We can’t. And why should we hurry to our doom, anyway?’

‘Shhh, quiet now,’ Kane said to him. ‘Quiet.’

He watched as Master Juwain lifted his finger toward two great peaks to the east of us. The notch between them glowed red with the radiance of the sun about to rise.

‘This is why we were to come here near Ashte’s ides,’ Master Juwain said. ‘You see, on this date, the declination of the sun, the precise angle of its rays as it rises …’

His voice died into the howling wind as the first arrows of sunlight broke from the notch and streaked straight toward us. So dazzling was this incandescence that we had to shield our eyes and look away lest we be struck blind.

‘And so,’ Master Juwain went on, ‘the sun’s rays should illuminate exactly that part of this land leading on to our destination. Let us look for it before it is too late.’

‘I can’t look for anything at all,’ Maram said, squinting and blinking against the sun’s fulgor. ‘I can’t see anything – it’s too damn bright!’

‘Hurry!’ Liljana said to Master Juwain. She stood by her horse gripping its reins. ‘If these Rhymes of yours have any worth, we must hurry. What did you say are the next verses? The last ones?’

And Master Juwain told her:

If stayed by puzzlement or pride

Let Kundalini be your guide;

But hasten forth or count the cost:

Who long delays is longer lost.

‘The Kundala always rises,’ Master Juwain said. ‘Rises straight to its goal. But I can see no way to go up here, unless it is over the top of that mountain.’

Still shielding his eyes, he pointed straight ahead of us. And Liljana asked him, ‘Are you sure you’ve remembered the verses correctly?’

‘Are you sure your name is Liljana Ashvaran?’

I had rarely heard such peevishness in his voice – or pride. And then, as the sun pushed a little higher above the mountain’s notch and flared even brighter, a sick look befell Master Juwain’s face. I saw it drain the color from his skin, and so did Liljana.

‘Well?’ she said to him. ‘What is it?’

And Master Juwain, who honored truth above almost all else, said, ‘There is a small chance I may have rendered the lines inexactly. But it doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh, doesn’t it? Why not, then?’

‘The lines may have been:

If stayed by puzzlement or pride

Let sacred serpent be your guide.

He cleared his throat as he looked at Liljana, and said, ‘To my order, of course, the sacred serpent and the Kundala are one and the same.’

‘But what if the verses’ maker knew the deeper way of things?’ Liljana asked him. ‘What if his sacred serpent was instead Ouroboros?’

‘Impossible!’ Master Juwain called out.

Now the sun had risen like a red knot of fire almost entirely above the notch. We could not look upon its blazing brilliance.

‘Impossible!’ Master Juwain said again.

He turned around toward the mountain behind us. Although the dawn was lightening it seemed to me to be growing only darker, for our hope of finding our way was quickly evaporating before the fury of the sun.

And then I heard Master Juwain whisper the words that Alphanderry had sung to us on a magical night:

The dazzling heights light deep desire;

Within the heart, a deeper fire.

The road toward heavens’ starry crown

Goes ever up but always down.

‘Back!’ Master Juwain suddenly cried out. He pointed at the mouth of the tunnel and the snow of the mountain around it. The sun’s fiery rays had set the whole of it to glowing. ‘Back, now, before it’s too late!’

He turned his horse to lead him into the tunnel. And Maram shouted, ‘Are you mad? It’s black as night in there! I’m not going back inside unless we find a way to relight the torches!’

I reached out and snatched the reins of his horse from his hand, and followed after Master Juwain. Atara grabbed Maram’s empty hand to pull him after us. Then, quickly, came Liljana, Estrella and Daj. Kane, as usual, guarded our rear.

And so we went back into the tunnel. The moment we set foot within, it came alive. The glassy walls glowed, changed color to a translucent white and then poured forth a milky light. It was more than enough with which to see. There were few features, however, to catch the eye. The tunnel’s floor seemed the same cut-stone road that we had trod before. The air was cold, and lay heavy about us as we pushed on through this long scoop through the earth.

‘Val, I feel sick!’ Maram said to me. ‘My head is spinning, as if I’d drunk too much wine.’

I felt as he did, and so did the others, although they did not complain of it. But there seemed nothing to do except to follow Master Juwain deeper into the cold air of this mysterious tunnel.

And then the air around us was suddenly no longer cold. The walls and ceiling seemed to pulse unnervingly, even if the light they shed was steady and clean. I looked back behind me to reassure Maram that everything would be all right. But even as I opened my mouth to speak to him, his form wavered and dissolved into a spray of tiny lights before coalescing and solidifying again.

‘Oh, Lord!’ Maram called out as he stared at me in amazement. ‘Oh, Lord – let us leave this place as quickly as we can before we all evanesce and there’s nothing left of us forever!’

Just then Altaru let loose a long, bone-chilling whinny. He shook his great head, struck stone with his hoof hard enough to send up sparks and then reared up and beat the air with his hooves. He nearly brained Master Juwain, and it was all I could do to hold onto his reins.

‘Lo, friend!’ I called to him as I stroked his neck. ‘Lo, now!’

The other horses, too, began either to whinny or nicker in disquiet. And Kane called to me: ‘Let’s tie blindfolds around them as we did when we crossed the Ymanir’s bridge over the gorge!’

And as he said, it was done. With our dread working at us like a hot acid, it did not take us long to cut some strips from a bolt of cloth and bind them over the horses’ eyes.

After that, we moved on even more quickly. I tried not to look at Master Juwain’s flickering form, nor that of Maram or the pulsing, hollowed-out walls of the tunnel. I pulled at Altaru’s reins and concentrated on the rhythm of his hooves beating against stone. I tried to ignore those moments when this rhythm broke and my horse’s great hooves seemed to beat against nothing more than air. I did not want to listen to Maram’s complaint that he could find no sign of the bones that littered the tunnel near its entrance. For I had eyes, now, only for its exit. As this circle of light grew larger and brighter, we all broke into a run. Master Juwain was the first of us to breach the tunnel’s mouth and step outside. I followed after him a moment later. And I cried out in awe and delight. The serpent, it seemed, had indeed swallowed its own tail. For spread out below us was not the rugged terrain and long road by which we had originally entered the tunnel but a beautiful green valley. And somewhere, perhaps near its center along the blue river below us, there must stand a collection of old stone buildings that would be the Brotherhood’s ancient school.

8

For a long while, however, we stood on a mantle of ground near the tunnel’s mouth looking in vain for this fabled school. Kane set out along the heights to our left to see what he could see, while Master Juwain picked his way along the rocks to our right. They returned to report that they could descry no sign of the school, or indeed, of any human habitation.

‘Perhaps,’ Master Juwain said, pointing at the folded, forested terrain below us, ‘the school is hidden. The lay of the land might conceal it.’

‘Then let us find a better vantage to look for it,’ Kane said.

‘As long as that vantage lies lower and not higher,’ Maram said. ‘It’s damn cold on these heights.’

We began making our way down the rugged slope into the valley. We found a line of clear patches through the trees that might or might not have been part of an ancient path. After an hour, we came out around the curve of a great swell of ground, and we gathered on a long, clear ridge that afforded an excellent view of almost the entire valley. All we could see were trees and empty meadows and the river’s bright blue gleam.

‘Perhaps your Rhymes misled us after all,’ Maram complained to Master Juwain.

Master Juwain’s jaws tightened as he readied a response to Maram’s incessant faithlessness. And then, from below us, through the trees, there came the faint sound of someone singing. I could make out a pleasant melody but none of the words. Although it seemed unlikely that an enemy would cheerfully alert us, Kane and I drew our swords even so.

A few moments later, a small, old man worked his way up the path into view. He wore plain, undyed woolens and leaned upon a shepherd’s crook as if it were a walking staff. I saw that he had the wheat-colored skin and almond eyes of the Sung. Long, thick white hair framed his wrinkled face. Despite his obvious age, he moved with the liveliness of a much younger man.

‘Greetings, strangers!’ he called to us in a rich, melodious voice. ‘You look as if you’ve come a long way.’

His words caused Master Juwain to rub the back of his head as he scrutinized this old man. He said to him, ‘A stranger’s way is always long.’

‘Unless, of course,’ the old man said, smiling, ‘he is no stranger to the Way.’

Now Master Juwain smiled, too, and he bowed to the old man. Having completed the ancient formula by which those of the Brotherhood recognize and greet others of their order in chance encounters in out of the way places, the two of them strode forward to embrace each other. Master Juwain gave his name and those of the rest of us. And the old man presented himself as Master Virang.

‘You did well,’ he told Master Juwain, bowing back to him, ‘to find your way here. My brethren will be eager to learn why you have brought outsiders to our valley.’

He cast a deep, penetrating look at Kane and me, as we faced him with our swords still drawn. I had a sense that he could peel back the layers of my being and nearly read my mind. And Maram said to him, ‘Then this is the Valley of the Sun? We weren’t sure, for we saw nothing that looked like a school. You don’t dwell underground, do you?’

He shuddered as he said this. Since the Ymanir, who might have carved the mysterious tunnel above us, had also built the underground city of Argattha in these same mountains, it seemed a likely surmise.

His question, though, made Master Virang smile. ‘No, we are men, not moles, and so we dwell as most men do.’

‘Dwell where, then?’ Maram asked. ‘I could swear that there isn’t a hut or even an outhouse in all this valley.’

‘Could you?’

Master Virang kept one of his hands inside his pocket as he looked at Maram strangely. Then he looked at me. The space behind my eyes tingled in a way that seemed both pleasant and disturbing. I found myself, of a sudden, able to make out the trees in the distance with a greater clarity. It was as if I had emerged from a pool of blurry water into cold, crisp air.

‘Ah, I could swear it,’ Maram muttered. ‘We’ve looked everywhere.’

‘Indeed?’ Master Virang asked. ‘But did you look down there?’

So saying, he pointed the tip of his staff straight down the slope below us toward the most open part of the valley, where the river ran through its heart. The air overlaying this green, sunny land began to shimmer. And then I gripped my sword in astonishment, for out of the wavering brilliance a few miles away, along the banks of the river, many white, stone buildings appeared. So distinctly did they stand out that it seemed impossible we had failed to perceive them.

‘Sorcery!’ Maram cried out, even more astonished than I. He shook his head at Master Virang, and took a step back from him. ‘You hide your school beneath the veil of illusion!’

Liljana, too, seemed disquieted by the sudden sight of the school – and even more so by Master Virang. In her most acid of voices, she said to him, ‘We had not heard that the masters of the Great White Brotherhood had learned the arts of the Lord of Illusions.’

But Master Virang only matched her scowl with a smile. He said to her, ‘To compel others to see what is not is indeed illusion, and that is forbidden to us, as it is to all men. But to help them apprehend what is – this is true vision and the grace of the One.’

He bowed his head to Liljana and added, ‘Our school is real enough, after all. You are tired and travel-worn – will you accept our hospitality?’

Although he posed this invitation as a question, politely and formally, there could be no doubting what our answer would be. All of us, I thought, bore misgivings as to how the Brotherhood’s school had been hidden from us. Even more, though, we were curious to learn its secrets and ways.

And so Master Virang twirled his staff in his hand as he led us back along the path. He fairly jumped from rock to rock like a mountain goat. The rest of us, trailing our horses, moved more slowly. It took us most of the rest of the morning to hike down into the valley and to come out of the forest onto the school’s grounds, laid out above the river. We walked through apple orchards, ash groves and rose gardens, and fields of rye, oats and barley. The Valley of the Sun was as warm and bright as its name promised, especially near the ides of Ashte with the full bloom of spring greening the land. A ring of great, white mountains entirely surrounded it and guarded it from the worst winds and snow.

This refuge deep within the Nagarshath range was nothing so splendid and magnificent as the Ymanir’s crystal city, Alundil, beneath the Mountain of the Morning Star. But it shone with a quiet beauty and was pervaded by a deep peace. It seemed to exist out of time and to take no part in the ways and wars of the world. We all sensed that it concealed ancient secrets. The two hundred or so Brothers who dwelled here worked hard but happily in getting their sustenance from the land. We passed these simple men dressed in simple woolen tunics, laying to in the fields with hoes or dipping candles or working hot iron in the blacksmith’s shop. Others tended sheep in pastures on the hillsides or attended to the dozen other occupations necessary for the thriving of what amounted to a small town. But the Brothers’ main occupations, as we would learn, remained the ancient disciplines, or callings, of the Great White Brotherhood. And each of these seven callings was exemplified by a revered master, and indeed, by the Grandmaster of the Brotherhood himself.

Master Virang, who proved to be the Meditation Master, helped us to settle into two of the school’s guest houses just above the river. Liljana, Atara and Estrella took up residence in the smaller of them, while the rest of us set up in the other. There, in these steeply-roofed stone hostels that reminded me of the chalets of my home, we spent hours soaking our cold, bruised bodies in hot water and washing away the grime of our journey. It was good to put on fresh tunics, and even better to sit down to a hot meal. Master Virang saw to it that we were served chicken soup and fresh bread for lunch, and cheese and berries, too. He left us alone to eat these heartening foods, but then returned an hour later to spirit away Master Juwain to a private meeting with the Grandmaster.

What they discussed all during that long afternoon we could only wonder. Master Juwain rejoined us only at the end of the day, when we gathered with the entire community of Brothers for a feast in the Great Hall. We were so busy, however, exchanging pleasantries with the curious Brothers that Master Juwain could not find a moment to confer with the rest of us. His face seemed tight and troubled, and I wondered if the Grandmaster had given him ill tidings or perhaps had chastened him for leading our company here.

I did not have to wait long to find out the answers to these questions – and to others that vexed me even more sorely. After the feast, we were summoned to take tea with The Seven, as the Brotherhood’s masters were called. On a clear, lovely night we adjourned to one of the nearby buildings. Here, from time to time, in a little stone conservatory, the Grandmaster came to dwell in solitude or sit with the Music or Meditation Masters, or others with whom he wished to speak. Indeed, the circular space where we met with them had much the air of a meditation chamber. White wool carpets and many cushions covered the floor across its length and breadth. Vases of fresh flowers had been set into recesses built into the walls. These curves of white granite were carved with various symbols: pentagram, gammadion and caduceus; sun and eagle, swan and star. In various places, some ancient artisan had chiselled the Great Serpent in the form of a lightning bolt – and of a dragon swallowing its tail. The twelve pillars supporting the dome above us also showed cut glyphs. The light from the room’s many candles illumined the shapes of the Archer, Ram, Dolphin, and nine other signs of the zodiac. The dome itself was smooth and featureless save for twelve round windows letting in the light of the stars.

This radiance seemed to gather within the hollows of a goldish bowl, set upon a marble pedestal beneath the northernmost window. In size and shape, if not shimmer, the bowl seemed like unto the Lightstone itself. I sensed immediately that it must be a work of silver gelstei, for I felt the silustria of my sword fairly singing to it. It must be, I thought, one of the False Lightstones forged in the Age of Law. Once, in the Library of Khaisham, my friends and I had come across a similar vessel of silver gelstei, shaped and tinted as the Lightstone in a vain attempt to capture its powers. Like all the silver gelstei, though, this cup would resonate with the true gold, and so was still a very great treasure.

The conservatory’s only items of furniture were three low tea tables, inlaid with tiny triangles of lapis, shell and jet, and set with little round tea cups. As my companions and I entered the room, the Grandmaster and his Brothers stood up from behind them to greet us. In Tria I had sat at table with kings, but these seven masters of the Great White Brotherhood seemed possessed of no less presence and authority.

Tallest of the Seven, and the most striking, was the Grandmaster himself. His name was Abrasax, but because the Brothers found it too much of a mouthful to address him as Grandmaster Abrasax, most of them called him, simply, Grandfather.

His age, I thought, was hard to tell. A corona of curly white hair covered his head and flowed in waves down his cheeks and chin to form a rather magnificent beard. His seamed and weathered skin made for rather a stark contrast with it, for it was as brown as a tanned bull’s hide. According to Master Juwain, Abrasax’s father had been a chieftain of the Tukulak tribe and his mother a Karabuk maiden taken captive as concubine. In Abrasax, I thought, gathered the comeliest features of both the Sarni and Karabuk peoples. He had the long, well-shaped head of the Sarni and a solid and symmetrical face. His muscular hands fairly radiated strength; I could easily imagine them working one of the Sarni’s stiff war bows, if not the great bow of Sajagax himself. But his nose flared like a delicate and perfect triangle, and so, I guessed, it must have been with his mother and her kin. His eyes were large and liquid like a horse’s eyes, full of gentleness and grace. And full of wisdom, too. And something else. In the way he looked at me, with sweetness and fire, I had a deep, disturbing sense that he could perceive things in me that others had never seen – not Atara or Kane, or even my mother, father or my own grandfather.

He motioned for me to sit opposite from him at the centermost table. I lowered myself onto a plump cushion, with Master Juwain to my right and Liljana to my left. Master Virang sat to the right of Abrasax, and Master Matai, the Master Diviner, joined us as well. The two other tables were pulled up close to ours, end to end, making for what seemed one long table. Maram and Kane took places at the one to my right, and so, across from them, did Master Okuth and Master Storr. To my left, Atara, Estrella and Daj sat facing Master Yasul and Master Nolashar, the Music Master. I couldn’t help staring at this middling-old man. His hair was cropped short like that of most of the Brothers, but was as straight and black as my own. Too, he had the long nose and black eyes of many of my people. His name and quiet, alert bearing proclaimed him as a Valari warrior, at least by lineage and upbringing. But now, it seemed, he trained with the flute or mandolet instead of the sword, and made music instead of war.

As soon as we all had settled into our places, the doors opened behind us, and six young Brothers entered bearing big, blue pots of tea. They set them down before us, along with smaller pots of cream and bowls full of honey. I took my tea plain, in the Valari way, and so did Master Nolashar. But most of the others set to pouring in cream and stirring their tea with little silver spoons that tinkled against the sides of their cups. The Brotherhood makes use of scores of teas, blended from hundreds of herbs, and the one I first sipped that night was as sweet as cherries, as fiery as brandy, and as cool and bracing as fresh peppermint.

Abrasax waited for the young Brothers to finish their work and leave. He smiled at Daj and Estrella in a kindly way. Then his face fell stern, and he looked at the rest of us, one by one, and most keenly at Master Juwain as he said, ‘I would like, first and foremost, to welcome you all to our school. It has been nearly a hundred years since anyone outside our order has taken refuge here, for our rules are necessarily strict and we do not usually break them. Master Juwain, however, has explained the need that drove him to lead outsiders here, and I am in agreement with his decision, as are the rest of us. As long as you abide by our rules, you may remain as long as you would like.’

His voice was deep and strong and sure of itself. But there was no pride or veiled threat in it, as with a king’s voice, only curiosity and an insistence on the truth. And so, with all the candor that I could summon, I bowed my head to him and said, ‘Thank you, Grandfather. If we could, we would remain in this beautiful place for a year. But as Master Juwain will have told you, we have urgent business elsewhere, and we would ask of you not only your hospitality but your help.’

Abrasax exchanged a quick look with Master Virang, and then Master Storr, a rather stout man with fair, freckled skin and eyes as blue and clear as topaz gems. And then Abrasax said, ‘You shall certainly have our hospitality; as for our help in your quest, we are met here tonight to decide if we can help you, and more, if such help would be wise.’

His obvious doubt concerning us seemed to pierce Maram like a spearpoint, and my prickly friend took a sip of tea, and then muttered, ‘The whole world is about to burn up in dragon fire, and the Masters of the Brotherhood must sit and debate whether they will help us?’

Abrasax just gazed at him. ‘You must understand, Brother Maram, that a great deal is at stake. Indeed, as you say, the whole world.’

‘Please, Grandfather,’ Maram said, ‘I’m a Brother no longer, and you should call me Sar Maram.’

‘All men are brothers,’ Abrasax reminded him, ‘but it will be as you’ve asked. Sar Maram, then.’

Maram nodded his head as if this name pleased him very well – even if Master Storr and a couple of the other masters present clearly disapproved of it. Maram looked around the table at the pots of tea, and I could almost feel his fierce desire that they should contain brandy or other spirits instead.

‘Few men,’ he told Abrasax as he nodded at me, ‘whether they are Brothers or not, have seen what we’ve seen or fought so hard to free Ea from the Red Dragon’s claws.’

‘You have fought hard, it’s true,’ Abrasax agreed. ‘But ferocity at arms, even of will, can never be enough to defeat the Dragon. Even as we speak, he moves to seize his moment. Has Master Juwain told you the tidings?’

‘No,’ Maram grumbled, shaking his head, ‘he hasn’t had the chance.’

‘Evil tidings we’ve had out of Alonia,’ Abrasax told us. ‘Count Dario Narmada is dead, murdered by one of Morjin’s Kallimun. Baron Maruth has proclaimed the Aquantir’s independence, and so with Baron Monteer in Iviendenhall and Duke Parran in Jerolin. In Tria, Breyonan Eriades has allied with the Hastars to hunt down all Narmadas of King Kiritan’s sept.’

Abrasax looked at Atara and said, ‘I’m sorry, Princess.’

Atara turned her grave, beautiful face toward him. ‘I’m sorry, too. My father’s father reconquered the dukedoms and baronies you speak of and made Alonia great again. Count Dario might have held the realm together. No one else is strong enough.’

‘Not even King Kiritan’s only legitimate child?’

Atara touched the white cloth binding her face and said, ‘A woman, and a blind one at that? No, I am Atara Manslayer, now – no one else.’

‘Then it must be said that Alonia is no more.’

Atara laughed bitterly. ‘Morjin will hardly even need to send an army marching north to reduce her to ashes.’

Abrasax massaged the deep creases around his eyes, then said, ‘Galda has fallen, Yarkona and Surrapam, too. In all lands, our schools are being found out and burned down one by one. Our Brothers, put to the sword. And yet the evilest tidings of all have come out of Argattha.’

His words piqued Liljana’s intense interest, and her plump, round face turned toward him as she asked, ‘And how have these tidings come to you, then?’

Abrasax looked deep into her eyes and told her, ‘We will be as forthcoming with you as we hope you will be with us. You see, for a very long time now, we have kept a secret school within Argattha. But not five months ago, it was discovered, and the last of our order there, Brother Songya, was captured and crucified. We will try to re-establish the school, but …’

A silence fell over the tea tables and spread out into the room. I gazed up at the flowers in the stands and the ancient glyphs cut beneath the stone ceiling. The round windows there glistened with starlight.

‘Before Brother Songya died,’ Abrasax went on, ‘he sent word of the excavations beneath the city. There is, as you know, a great earth chakra there – the greatest on Ea. Morjin’s slaves have nearly driven tunnels straight down into the heart of it. The digging has been stopped only by a great seam of quartz that breaks picks and shovels. If Morjin had a firestone, all would be lost. All is nearly lost, as it is.’

‘Do not speak so, Grandfather,’ Master Yasul said to him. The Master Remembrancer was an old man with skin as dark as mahogany and tight little curls of white hair capping his bald head. He might have hailed from Karabuk or Uskudar, but seemed so at home in this quiet room as to have been born here. ‘We still have hope.’

Abrasax picked up his cup to take a long sip of tea. Then he looked around the tables. ‘We must at least act as if there is hope. But I have said that this is a night for openness, and we cannot turn away from the truth. The Red Dragon needs only to gain a little more mastery of the Lightstone to open the great chakra. When its fires break free …’

His voice choked off as he looked at Master Yasul and Master Juwain. Then he said, ‘The first faint flames have already broken free. It cannot be long before he unleashes the Baaloch upon the world.’

At the mention of Morjin’s master, Angra Mainyu, the Great Beast, we all fell into a deep silence as we sipped our tea. Then Master Juwain said to Abrasax: ‘But what of the Maitreya, Grandfather? Isn’t it clear that he must be found and aided so that he can keep the Red Dragon from using the Lightstone?’

Abrasax pulled at his long beard. ‘No, that is not so clear as you might wish. With your help, Valashu Elahad gained the Lightstone only to lose it to the Red Dragon. If we lost the Maitreya as well, then there truly would be no hope.’

At this, I drew in a quick breath and said, ‘If fate leads us to find the Shining One, we will not lose him.’

I stared at Abrasax as he and the other six masters stared back at me.

Abrasax motioned toward Master Matai. He had the soft curls and golden complexion of many Galdans, and his sharp brown eyes seemed to perceive a great deal. And Abrasax said, ‘Our Master Diviner believes that these are the last days of the age, and that the Valkariad is surely near.’

With reverence and longing he spoke the name of that great moment at the end of history when all men and women would ascend to becoming greater beings: Ardun into Star People, and Star People into Elijin, who would take their rightful places as newly crowned Galadin. And the Galadin themselves would become as gods in the glory of a new creation.

‘The Age of Light must be at hand,’ Abrasax said. ‘Either that or the Skardarak, when all the stars shall be put out and it will grow cold and dark forever.’

He drew in a deep breath, held it and then let it out slowly in a whoof of wind. Then he said, ‘And even as we see two possibilities, and only two, for the world, so we have only two choices open to us now: to entrust Master Juwain and his companions with the quest to find the Maitreya, or not. Let us now speak truthfully with one another so that we might make this choice. Master Yasul?’

The Master Remembrancer pulled at the dark folds of skin beneath his narrow jaw as he regarded me. He said, ‘Valashu Elahad speaks of his desire, and that of his friends, to make a quest to find the Maitreya, but is this their true calling? They are a strange company, and we must be sure of whom Master Juwain has brought to us.’

‘And who is it, then, whom Master Juwain has brought to us?’ Master Storr asked. His blue eyes sparkled in the strong candlelight. I wondered what land had given him birth: Nedu? Thalu? Eanna? The Master Galastei ran his blunt hand through his wispy white hair and coughed out, ‘A claimant to the throne of Delu, an heir to Kiritan’s branch of the House Narmada, and the sole surviving son of the Valari’s greatest king. Beware the pride of princes, I say. Beware their true purpose. And this lordless knight, Kane. All of them, of the sword.’

I rested my hand on the hilt of my sword, which I had set by my side. I looked at Kane who had taught me to wield this terrible weapon with a single-minded will to destroy any and all who stood against me.

‘And then there is Liljana Ashvaran,’ Master Storr said. His cool blue eyes fixed on the woman who was as my mother. ‘Master Juwain has told us little more than that she is a noble of Alonia who joined Valashu and the others on the great Quest. An unusual calling, isn’t it, for one of her age, rank and gender?’

In truth, I knew of no other matron, noble or not, who had set out into the wilds of Ea in pursuit of the Lightstone.

Liljana’s pretty round face grew as intense and reflective as a full moon. To Master Storr, she said, ‘Why should you think that noble impulses are so unusual? Your order, I’ve been told, exists to quicken that which is noblest in everyone.’

Master Storr blinked at Liljana’s riposte. He exchanged pained looks with Master Yasul and the others. I gathered that he wasn’t used to being addressed by women – or anyone – so sharply.

Then he pointed his teaspoon at Liljana. ‘Surely what is noblest is not the keeping of secrets from those who would help you.’

‘And what secrets do you think I keep?’

Master Storr did not respond. His eyes grew even colder, like glacier ice, as he gazed at her with a greater and greater vehemence. Liljana thrust her hand inside the pocket of her tunic, and her jaw tightened in defiance. Finally, she removed her fist from her tunic and shook it at him. ‘You will not,’ she told him. ‘You will not.’

‘Will I not?’ Master Storr said to her.

In answer, her soft brown eyes summoned up such an intense heat that he finally blinked and looked away.

Liljana turned toward Abrasax and said, ‘Your Master Galastei tries to use this to read my mind!’

So saying, she opened her hand to reveal her blue crystal.

‘He tries to seize control of it – and me!’ she said. ‘Like the Red Dragon himself!’

‘No – I only wanted to know what you conceal from us,’ Master Storr called out. ‘As Master Matai has said, we must be sure of you.’

‘Not this way! You have no right.’

‘I am the Master of the Gelstei.’

‘Not my gelstei. Would you steal my journal as well, and force the lock to read its pages?’

‘I will make no apologies,’ Master Storr said. ‘Too much is at stake, and we must do what we must do.’

‘Is that the way of the Masters of the Brotherhood, then? Is that noble?’

They might have contended thus all night if Abrasax hadn’t finally held up his hand and said to Liljana, ‘Master Storr has fought too many battles with the Red Dragon, and is sometimes overzealous in protecting the Brotherhood. You are right, forcing another’s mind is not our way. I do apologize, for all of us. But Master Storr also is right that too much is at stake, and so there can be no secrets within this room.’

Liljana sat facing Abrasax. She must have perceived that of all the Seven, he studied her the most intently. She gazed back at him with all the force of her will, as if commanding him to fix his attention elsewhere. But not even Liljana, it seemed, could stare down the Grandmaster.

‘Your Sisters,’ he said to her, ‘have always kept too much hidden.’

‘My … Sisters?’ Liljana coughed out. It was one of the few times I had ever seen her at a loss for words.

‘Do you deny,’ Abrasax asked her, ‘that you are of the Sisterhood?’

‘But why would you think that?’

‘I am a Master Reader, am I not? Your chakras, each of them, give off flames – how should I not be able to read their colors? And to perceive that your aura shimmers like that of one who has been trained in the ways of the Maitriche Telu?’

Liljana looked at Kane and Master Juwain briefly before glancing at me. She seemed, somewhere inside herself, to cast off a heavy cloak. Then she held her head high as she told Abrasax: ‘I am the Materix of the Maitriche Telu.’

The Seven, all except Abrasax, seemed to draw in a single, hissing breath. Master Yasul leaned over to confer in low tones with Master Nolashar, while Master Matai exchanged resentful looks with Master Virang. And then Master Storr called out: ‘So this is her secret! And a dark one it is, too!’

In silence he stared at Liljana, and so did Master Matai and the others – even the gentle-faced Master Okuth.

But if they thought to intimidate or even shame Liljana, then they did not know her. The more they beamed their disapproval and dread at her, the brighter and stronger she seemed to grow. And then she told them, ‘Others have called my Sisters and me “witch” before.’

‘No one has called you that,’ Master Storr said.

‘Not with your lips, perhaps, but you say it with your eyes.’

Master Storr rubbed at his temples a moment before asking Liljana: ‘Do you deny that in times past you nearly succeeded in inserting one of your Sisters into Morjin’s chambers as a concubine? With the intention of poisoning him, as the Maitriche Telu once poisoned King Daimon and many others?’

‘King Daimon Hastar,’ Liljana said to Master Storr, ‘was nearly as evil as Morjin. After his untimely death, Alonia enjoyed nearly fifty years of prosperity and good rule.’

‘Poisoners,’ Master Storr muttered. And then more softly: ‘Witch.’

‘We did what we had to do! When your ways failed to educate and uplift, we were left to deal with one bloodthirsty tyrant after another!’

I looked to my right to see Kane smiling savagely as his lips pulled back from his long, white teeth.

Master Storr tried to ignore him, and he snapped at Liljana: ‘And your way has been poison, seduction, even the violation of men’s minds!’

‘No, that has not been our way – you know nothing about us!’ Liljana turned toward Abrasax, and for what seemed an hour she gazed at him, and he at her. His understanding seemed to pour out from him and embrace her. Tears filled her eyes. She was the hardest woman I had ever known, but sometimes the softest, too.

Finally Abrasax rose from his cushion and circled the tables until he stood above her. He reached down to grasp her hand and pull her up facing him. With his fingertips, he wiped the tears from her cheek. And then, as we all looked on in astonishment, he bent down to kiss her moist eyelids. To Master Storr and the rest of the Seven, and to all of us, he said, ‘War will come soon enough, but let us not allow it into this room. Once, we of the Brotherhood and the Sisters of the Maitriche Telu were as brothers and sisters. I would have it so again.’

He squeezed Liljana’s hand and bowed his head to her. Then, fixing Master Storr with a stern look, he returned to his place.

The room fell quiet, and for a while, the seven Masters of the Brotherhood sat drinking their tea. Strong sentiments like invisible currents passed between them. At last, Master Storr looked at me and said, ‘War, of the spirit, at the very least, Valashu Elahad and his companions must wage, if they make this new quest. Theirs will be a dangerous journey. And one danger we should speak of now, since Liljana Ashvaran has already hinted of it. I would ask to see the rest of their gelstei.’

I nodded my head at his request, and drew Alkaladur from its sheath. My sword’s silvery silustria gleamed in the starlight. Then Master Juwain brought forth his emerald varistei. Liljana set her little blue whale upon her table while Atara sat cupping her scryer’s sphere inside her hands. Kane scowled as he reached into his pocket and showed Master Storr his baalstei, cut into the shape of a flat, black eye. And then Maram gently laid his firestone, red as a ruby and as long as his forearm, on his table.

‘Ah, my poor, poor crystal,’ he said, gazing at the webwork of fine cracks running through it. ‘Ruined in battle with that damn dragon.’

Abrasax just stared at him. ‘That battle, I think, will prove to be as nothing against the battle you still must fight against the Red Dragon.’

‘Ah, I don’t want to fight at all,’ Maram muttered. Something in Abarasax’s manner seemed to encourage Maram to open himself to him. ‘It’s nearly ruined me, you see. The madness of the world: her stupidities and cruelties. If only I had time enough for love! If only I could heal this beautiful crystal, I might find the way to heal my heart.’

‘I’m not sure,’ Abrasax said to him, looking around the room, ‘that we all see the connection.’

Maram gazed longingly at his crystal. ‘To use the red gelstei is to summon and concentrate fire. Ah, to direct it toward a single target, you see. So with love, and therefore the heart. If my heart were made whole again, I might find the great love I was born for.’

Abrasax smiled as he again stood up from the table. He stretched back his shoulders and drew in a deep breath. Then he walked around Master Okuth and Master Storr sitting at their table with Maram, who turned toward him. Abrasax held his hands above Maram’s head for a moment before bringing them down over his shoulders and then his sides. And he said, ‘You have a great heart, Sar Maram Marshayk. Flames fill it with a bright green radiance. But they would burn brighter – much brighter – if they weren’t so concentrated here, lower down in your svadhisthan chakra.’

With that he rested his hand on Maram’s belly and smiled at him.

‘Ah,’ Maram said, nodding at me, ‘I suppose this isn’t a good time for a recitation of “A Second Chakra Man”?’

‘No,’ I said to him, ‘I suppose it is not.’

Abrasax’s eyebrows pulled together in concern as he pushed against Maram’s belly and told him: ‘Between here and your heart chakra is where your sun makes its orbit. And a great whirl of fire it is, blazing orange with streaks of viridian and crimson.’

As Abrasax’s hand continued pressing against Maram, I could almost see this fiery orb that he spoke of.

‘There is nothing wrong with your heart,’ Abrasax told Maram. ‘And you do have time for love – all the time in the world. But what is it that you love, above all else?’

Maram glanced at me nervously, and then turned back to Abrasax as he said, ‘There is a woman. Somewhere in the world, a woman who can take in my heart and, ah, all of me. The one whose hips and breasts swell like the mountains and seas, like the very curves of the earth: she, whose desire is as boundless as my own. Some men seek the most beautiful of women, others the kindest or the most pure. But I dream of the most passionate.’

At this Abrasax cleared his throat and said to him, ‘You must be careful what you wish for. Careful even of what you whisper inside your mind. The earth listens. There are powers there that no one fully understands. Her fires feed ours, and what we create inside ourselves, we can bring into being.’

He pressed his hand against Maram’s chest, then walked around the tables again to return to his cushions. He sat gazing at Maram, who wrapped his huge hand around his red crystal and lowered his eyes to study the fine cracks marring it.

‘All of them,’ Master Storr said, looking from Maram to Liljana, ‘must be careful with their gelstei. Each time they use the sacred crystals, Morjin will use the Lightstone to find his way farther into them and twist their power toward his will.’

I gazed into the silustria of my sword, and so did my friends study their gelstei.

‘Indeed,’ Master Storr continued, eyeing our crystals, too, ‘I counsel that they surrender their gelstei to us for safekeeping.’

At this, Maram’s hand closed around the cut planes of his firestone while I gripped the hilt of my sword more tightly.

‘Surrender this to you?’ Maram said, holding his long, red crystal pointing at Master Storr. ‘You might as well ask me to cut off, ah, more personal parts of myself so that they don’t lead me into troubles.’

‘I know,’ Atara said, turning her sphere between her hands, ‘that this came to me for a purpose.’

Kane’s response was the simplest and most direct of all of us. He held up his black stone for all to see and then closed his fist around it as he called out, ‘Ha!’

Abrasax sighed as he looked at Master Storr and said, ‘I told you this would be the way of things, as you of all of us should understand.’

Master Storr bowed his head, but said nothing as he turned his attention back to the gleam of our crystals.

And Abrasax said to us, ‘So it goes. Everywhere on Ea, Morjin finds his way into men’s minds, and so gains control of their arms, voices and eyes. And no one is willing to give them up either just to thwart him. But I counsel you: if you use your gelstei, Morjin will slowly seize control of them.’

‘Even my sword?’ I said, holding up its blade so as to catch the room’s candlelight.

‘The silver gelstei,’ Master Storr said to me, ‘would be last of your crystals to be perverted, if indeed it truly can be perverted. It is possible that only the Maitreya, having gained full mastery of the Lightstone, could touch upon the silustria of your sword – and then only for the highest of purposes. But I don’t really know. Therefore I, too, counsel not using it.’

Kane smiled at this as he gripped his large hands together and said, ‘And have you followed your own counsel, then?’

‘What do you mean?’ Master Storr said.

Kane pointed toward the waist of Master Storr, and then at Master Okuth and Abrasax. ‘What is it you keep inside your pockets?’

At this, Abrasax smiled at Master Storr in a knowing way, and then looked at Kane. ‘You have keen perceptions – from where do they come? What is that you keep inside yourself?’

Abrasax’s smile deepened as he studied Kane. I knew that my mysterious friend hated being singled out for scrutiny in this way. His glare fell hot with a barely-contained fury. And then he stood up to face the Grandmaster of the Brotherhood.

It took a brave man to hold Kane’s gaze, as Abrasax did. I didn’t need to be a reader to see the fire that seemed to leap straight out of Kane’s black eyes. As the candles flickered in their stands and the other Masters drew in deep breaths or held them inside, Abrasax continued staring at Kane. The Grandmaster’s eyes grew brighter, like moonlit oceans, and I fancied that I saw this radiance touch his hair and beard and spill down over his tunic in flows of scarlet, orange and other colors. And yet it was nothing against the splendor that enveloped Kane. He stood as beneath a rainbow. Its hues clung to his body like a robe of fire and slowly deepened and brightened into a shimmering brilliance. White light crowned his savage head, and so did flashes of glorre. I stared at him, awestruck. I couldn’t believe what my eyes or some other sensing organ told me must be true. It lasted only a moment, this piercing vision into the heart of Kane’s being. And then I blinked my eyes, and it was gone. I saw my old friend standing before me as he usually did: fiercely, willfully, joyfully – with challenge toward Abrasax or anything in the world that might try to thwart or even contain him.

The others of the Seven, with my companions, sat gazing at Kane in wonderment. Master Storr shook his head as he called out, ‘No, it cannot be! Not this rogue knight!’

Then Abrasax bowed to Kane and said, ‘I never thought to live so long that my path would cross yours, Lord Elijin.’

Again, Master Storr said, ‘It cannot be!’

Abrasax drew in a deep breath. He looked from Master Storr to Master Matai, and then at Kane. ‘It surely is. This man is no rogue knight. It is, as the Master Diviner and I have deduced, now beyond argument that one of the Old Ones of the Elijik Order journeyed with this company into Argattha. And has found the way into our valley. His name, of old, was –’

‘I am,’ Kane growled out, interrupting him, ‘not the one you speak of. Once I was, perhaps, but now I am Kane.’

‘Kane, then,’ Abrasax said to him. ‘But you were, were you not, sent to Ea along with eleven others of your order to find and safeguard the Lightstone for the Maitreya?’

‘So,’ Kane said, glaring at him.

‘And of those eleven, only one other survives – Morjin.’

‘So,’ Kane said again.

Abrasax and the others of the Seven sat staring up at Kane. I noticed Master Storr’s hard blue eyes drilling into him as he regarded him with dread. He called out, ‘If this is that one, then he has fallen nearly as far as the Red Dragon. How can we be sure that if we help him to find the Maitreya, he won’t fall even farther?’

Kane, not deigning to respond to the Master Galastei’s terrible doubt, stood as still as a granite carving.

‘How can we be sure what any man or woman will do, in the end?’ Abrasax asked, looking at his fellows. ‘Master Juwain tells that in Argattha, Kane gave back the Lightstone to Valashu when he might have kept it for himself. Can all of us say that we would have surrendered it so faithfully? Surely Kane has passed the most vital test.’

His reasoning seemed to persuade even Master Storr, who inclined his head toward Kane. And Kane growled out to Abrasax, ‘And what of the Brotherhood’s Masters, then? You speak of keeping no secrets, and yet you keep some very powerful baubles hidden inside your pockets, eh?’

Abrasax smiled at Master Storr. ‘Did I not tell you that we could not conceal things from one of the Elijin?’

And with that he nodded at Master Matai, who reached into his pocket and brought out a small crystal sphere that shone like a ruby. The First, he named it. Master Virang likewise showed us a stone, which he called the Second, which gleamed golden-orange in hue. And so with Master Nolashar and his bright yellow sun stone and Master Okuth’s green heart stone, and then Master Yasul’s and Master Storr’s crystals – colored blue and purple – whose names were the Fifth and the Sixth. And then, finally, Abrasax drew forth a marble-like sphere as clear and brilliant as a diamond. It was, he told us, the Seventh: the last and highest of the crystals called the Great Gelstei.

‘Your crystals,’ he said to us, ‘are powerful and rare, but on all of Ea there are no other gelstei like these, for they were not made on earth.’

He went on to say that only the angels, and the Galadin at that, could possibly possess the art of forging the Great Gelstei. Then he held up his clear stone and showed it to Kane. ‘The Elijin who were sent here brought these with them, didn’t they?’

‘So,’ Kane growled out. ‘Nurijin, Mayin and Baladin were the stones’ keepers. And Manjin, Durrikin, Sarojin – Iojin, too. And all of them killed over the years on this cursed world. I had thought the stones lost.’

He drew in a long, pained breath and said to Abrasax, ‘It must have been a great work to seek these out and bring them here.’

‘The work of ages,’ Abrasax told him. ‘Many Brothers died in this quest.’

‘As you will die if you continue to use them.’

‘The Red Dragon, we believe,’ Abrasax said, ‘does not yet know that we keep them. And use them we must, at least tonight. There are tests still to be made.’

He sat cupping his clear stone in his hand. It shimmered a soft white, even as the crystals of the other Masters radiated colors of crimson and orange, up through a glowing violet.

‘We have questions for the girl,’ Abrasax said, looking at Estrella. Then he turned to me. ‘And for you, Valashu Elahad.’

The room fell quiet, and I nodded at Estrella and then Abrasax. I sat gripping the hilt of my sword as I waited for the seven Masters of the Brotherhood to test me somehow – if not in actual combat, then perhaps in a trial of the soul.

9

Abrasax oriented his long, stately body toward Estrella, sitting almost motionlessly on her cushion by her table. For a long time he regarded her in silence. His liquid brown eyes seemed to empty of all thoughts, even questions, even as they filled with a strange and piercing light. The round crystal resting in his open palm gleamed like a little star. Those of the other masters seemed to resonate with it, gathering radiance from it and feeding it back to Abrasax’s stone, all at once.

At last, the Grandmaster’s eyes regained their normal focus. And in his deep, strong voice, he announced, ‘This girl’s aura is like none I have ever seen. So pure: as if the flames of her chakras flow toward one color, in one direction. And bright it is – so very bright.’

Abrasax continued gazing at Estrella, who sat peacefully on her big red cushion gazing back at him. Estrella’s happy smile seemed to warm Abrasax’s heart, and his whole face pulled into a smile, highlighting the deep lines around his eyes.

‘Strange,’ he murmured as he looked at her. ‘There is indeed something strange about this girl.’

‘Then is it possible,’ Master Storr asked, ‘that she is truly a seard?’

Abrasax nodded his head. ‘I’m certain that she is. Master Juwain has identified her correctly.’

‘But what is a seard?’ Daj asked from his place next to Estrella. It was the first time that evening he had dared to speak. ‘Master Juwain tried to explain it, but I didn’t really understand.’

‘I’m not sure that I fully understand, either,’ Abrasax said. ‘But from the accounts in the Book of Illuminations, it is clear that seards are great and pure souls, gifted with being able to see deeply into all things and all people, and most especially the Maitreya. I believe that Estrella might perceive the Shining One where others could not, perhaps not even himself.’

He went on to say that where I might be the fated guardian of the Lightstone, and therefore of the Maitreya, a seard such as Estrella was his herald.

‘Then, Grandfather,’ Master Matai said, ‘you must believe Kasandra’s prophecy will prove true, that the girl will show the Maitreya?’

‘I believe the prophecy. She would be drawn to him like a fire moth finding its mate across many miles.’

Although I could not behold Estrella’s aura just then as Abrasax did, she seemed the brightest being in the room, and her eyes outshone even the silustria of my sword.

‘It’s a pity,’ Master Matai said, ‘that she cannot speak to us. I would like to know where she was born, and when. A seard’s stars would be close to those of a Maitreya.’

‘It is a pity that she cannot speak,’ Master Okuth said. He was a smallish man who seemed to hold inside his kind green eyes whole rivers of compassion. ‘For pity’s sake, and her own, I would like a chance to heal her of her affliction.’

Master Juwain held up his varistei and said to him, ‘More than once, before the Red Dragon regained the Lightstone, I tried to use this to heal Estrella – in vain. Of course, I am only a Master Healer; you are the Master Healer.’

‘I believe you have done as much as any of us can do,’ Master Okuth told him. ‘At least until the Maitreya is found and comes into his power. My power is now constrained. I am entrusted with a green gelstei, as are you, but the Red Dragon knows that we keep this stone, and I do not dare to use it.’

‘Then how do you propose to heal Estrella?’

‘In truth, I don’t. At least not here, and not tonight. But it may be that through the Great Gelstei, she could speak to us in a way that we can understand, for a short while.’

‘And the cost to the girl? What if she doesn’t want to speak?’

All eyes now turned on Estrella, sitting calmly as she nibbled on a cake crumb and regarded Master Okuth.

‘There should be no cost,’ Master Okuth said.

‘Just the opposite,’ Master Matai said. ‘Those whose chakras have been opened by the Great Gelstei feel strengthened and enlivened.’

‘And you believe that engendering speech,’ Master Juwain said to Master Okuth, ‘is it merely a matter of opening the girl this way?’

‘It is indeed more complicated than that,’ Master Okuth told us. ‘Much more complicated. But let us just say that the power of the seven Openers projects through sound and resonates with the secret music that inheres in all things.’

Kane scowled at this, and looked at me. I knew that my savage friend hated it when the Brothers spoke so esoterically.

‘You have my promise,’ Abrasax assured us, ‘that this test will leave Estrella unharmed. But will she consent to it?’

Estrella looked at him with complete trust. Then she quickly nodded her head.

‘Good,’ Abrasax said. ‘Then why don’t we begin?’

He held his hand, cupping his clear gelstei, out toward Estrella. The other Masters did likewise with their crystals. Estrella sat very straight and still, not knowing what to expect. She seemed at once curious and bemused by the powers of these seven old men and their mysterious crystals.

As we all waited, breathing deeply, the seven Openers began to luminesce. I sensed, rather than saw, the seven wheels of light along Estrella’s spine scintillating in response to the gelstei’s touch. The red of the First, Master Matai’s stone, seemed to give its fire to Estrella’s lowest chakra even as something deep inside Estrella called out to it. And this calling we all heard as a single, clear, plangent note. It played back and forth between Estrella and the gelstei. The other Masters with their stones likewise opened Estrella’s other chakras, and a beautiful music poured out into the chamber’s cool air. I could almost see the colors of this music. Master Storr’s gleaming purple stone, I thought, struck deep chords with some secret organ of speech within Estrella’s head. Master Yasul’s gelstei, the Fifth, as blue as a sapphire, blazed more brightly than did any of the others. It seemed to summon a bright song from within Estrella’s throat. Without warning, she began laughing out loud: a delightful sound like the tinkling of bells. And then her mouth opened as perfectly formed words began pouring from her lips like a silver stream:

‘I’ve wanted to talk so badly, to tell you things, Val, Maram, Atara, everyone, to tell you everything, and now there is all the time in the world, but so little time. Now, I can speak again, and that’s a miracle but it won’t last because nothing does and yet everything …’

She continued chattering on in a like way as we all sat listening in amazement. Her voice was sweet, passionate and perfectly clear. It flowed with a musical quality, bright as the notes of a flute. It partook of Atara’s diction and phrasing, and Liljana’s, too, as if she patterned her speech after that of these two women whom she adored. And yet, this torrent of sound fairly soared with a wild joy that was all her own. It seemed that she wanted to cram the entire world into a few, quick, rushing breaths:

‘… it’s all so beautiful, and I’m so grateful, Val – Val, Val, Val! – so grateful to you for saving my life. For life. I’ve wanted so badly to sing with you, and Kane, our bright, bloody, beautiful Kane, and all of you, to sing and laugh: to laugh at Maram and his silly, stupid, wonderful jokes. To weep with Atara. No eyes, no tears, no hope, it seems, but love – love, love, love! There is so much to say. But so little, really, only one thing, and I should be glad I can speak again, almost as I did inside, not in words but in a kind of music that gives birth to words. Do you know what I mean? It’s like the singing of the birds: so pretty, so pure, so here … and now, and yet always and forever. This beautiful, beautiful thing – it sings me! I am so happy! And so I can’t help singing, too, to the birds and the sky and the world, and everything sings back, in rubies and rainbows, in songs to the sun, and sometimes even in silence. The silence. It’s pulling me back, soon, too soon, but don’t feel sorry for me, please! These fires that the old men’s gelstei lit inside me flare like little suns, but soon they will fade, I can feel it, quickly burning out but never quite out. Because it always blazes, even in dark things: black gelstei and burnt crosses and hate. Val! – even in the dead! In your father and mother, and mine, wherever they are, because no one is ever really dead and there is a light that always shines, the light, the light, the light …

As the candles’ flames cast dancing shadows on the room’s graven walls, we all sat regarding Estrella. At last, she seemed to run out of things to say. She sat peacefully on her cushion with her fingers laced together. I could not tell if she had fallen quiet for a moment or had returned to the deeper silence of the mute.

And then Abrasax nodded his head and said to her, ‘That was remarkable.’

‘Yes, remarkable,’ Master Storr agreed. But his voice swelled with a patronizing tone, and he seemed to regard Estrella as if she might be simpleminded. He said to her, ‘I’m sure that we were all touched by your … enthusiasm. But I’m not sure that any of our questions has been answered.’

‘But you haven’t asked me any questions yet!’ she said to him. She smiled at him, and then laughed softly, and I felt her voice box vibrating like the strings of a mandolet.

‘You must know, child, what we wish to know.’

Estrella looked at the Brotherhood’s seven masters, who studied her every expression. She said, ‘I think you want to know everything.’

Even the sour, serious Master Storr smiled at this. ‘No, not everything – at least not tonight. But we would like to learn more concerning the Maitreya. Can you not tell us anything about him?’

‘But I already did!’

Master Storr rubbed at his eyes and stared at her. ‘To speak once again after so long a silence must be a strain on you. On your throat, on your lungs … even on your mind. I’m not sure that we all understood what you said.’

Her response to this was to smile at him as if she felt very sorry for his inability to apprehend the most simple of things.

‘And so,’ Master Storr continued, as his face reddened, ‘we still have questions that we would –’

‘But why don’t you just ask them, then?’

Master Storr drew in a long breath as he squeezed his fingers around his purple crystal. And he said to Estrella: ‘You are a seard – this seems beyond any doubt. But how is it that a seard can recognize the Maitreya?’

‘How should I know,’ she said, ‘since I haven’t recognized him yet?’

‘But you must have some idea!’

Estrella brushed back the dark curls from around her eyes and glanced at Abrasax. ‘How do you recognize the Grandfather when you meet him walking down a path?’

‘But I know him! I’ve known him, now, for nearly fifty years!’

‘I’ve known the Shining One for fifty thousand years. As long as the stars have shined. Really, forever.’

Master Storr waved his hand in the air, and shook his head. He seemed to give up hope of understanding anything that she told him.

And then Master Matai steered the questioning along a different tack as he asked her, ‘Can you tell me where you were born, and when?’

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t remember. Perhaps it was in the Dark City.’

‘In Argattha? But didn’t anyone ever tell you how old you are?’

‘No, I don’t think they did. Does it matter?’

‘It might help in corroborating the Maitreya’s horoscope.’

‘But if you’ve drawn up his horoscope, you already know how old he is and where he was born!’

Now it was Master Matai’s turn to throw up his hand in frustration.

Then Abrasax said to her, ‘Estrella, do you have any idea where the Maitreya might be found?’

With a quick, glad motion, she nodded her head.

‘Where, then?’

And she told him, ‘Here.’

‘Here?’ Abrasax said. ‘Do you mean, on Ea? In these mountains?’

‘No, here, with us in this room, I hope. He is.’

Abrasax’s eyebrows pulled together. He seemed as mystified by Estrella as were Master Matai and Master Storr. He asked her, ‘But who is the Maitreya, then?’

Without hesitation, she looked at me and said, ‘Val is.’

My heart suddenly pounded inside my chest with hard, painful beats. I did not want to believe what I had heard her say.

And neither, it seemed, did Abrasax. He said to Estrella, ‘You were with Valashu in Tria when it was finally proved that he could not be the Maitreya. And now you are telling us that he is?’

‘Yes, he is,’ Estrella said smiling at me. She turned to look at the table to the right of mine. ‘And so is Maram.’

‘Sar Maram Marshayk!’ Abrasax said.

Maram’s eyes widened in astonishment as he patted his overstuffed belly and belched.

‘Yes, he – he is!’ Estrella said. ‘And Master Storr, too.’

The Master Galastei shook his head as he looked at Abrasax. And then Master Okuth, sitting next to him as he held out his green crystal, announced, ‘The girl is tiring, and so we should conclude the test.’

‘The girl is more than tired,’ Master Storr said. ‘She suffers from delusion.’

‘No, only from confusion, I think,’ Master Okuth said. ‘We know that the Red Dragon, in making her mute, did mischief to her mind. Our gelstei have let her summon up words but it seems have not undone the harm. There is something about her words and our understanding of them, and vice versa, that doesn’t quite go together. It is like oil and water.’

‘Her words,’ Master Storr said, speaking in front of Estrella as if she were only one of the room’s ornaments, ‘are as unreliable as thin ice over a pond. I do not see how we can trust her to recognize the Maitreya.’

Liljana, sitting next to me, had finally had enough of Master Storr’s rudeness. She leaned over to the table next to her, and threw her arm around Estrella as she said, ‘You speak of words, and yet fail to use them precisely. Kasandra prophesied that Estrella would show the Maitreya, not merely recognize him.’

‘I’m not sure I see the difference,’ Master Storr said.

‘I’m not sure you do,’ Liljana said, drawing Estrella closer as she glared at Master Storr. ‘And so who is deluded?’

At this, Abrasax held up his hand as if to ask for peace. He said, ‘And I’m not sure that words, or any understanding of them, will help Estrella fulfill the prophecy. Her mind might or might not have been harmed, but not her eyes and certainly not her heart.’

‘Then why don’t we,’ Master Storr huffed out, ‘conclude the test as we had agreed?’

Abrasax inclined his head at this, and said to Estrella, ‘Are you willing?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Estrella said, nodding back to him. She slumped on her cushion, slightly, and rubbed at her eyes. ‘But I am tired. I’d like to talk and talk all night, and maybe you’d understand, but I’m so so tired, and it was all so bright and warm inside, but now its getting cold, and it hurts, and so will you please give me back the silence?’

‘But there is more,’ Master Storr said, ‘that she might tell us and –’

‘Please – it hurts!’ Estrella said. ‘It hurts, it hurts, it hurts …’

Abrasax regarded her only for a moment before bowing his head to her. Then he closed his fingers around his clear gelstei, which seemed to quiesce and lose its light. The other Masters took this as a cue to put away their stones. Estrella immediately sat up straighter. I felt her plunge into a deep, silent pool. Her face lit up with a smile of contentment that spoke more than entire rivers of words.

Then Abrasax motioned to Master Storr, who reached down by his side. He lifted up a cracked, ebony box and showed it to us. He called for Estrella’s table to be cleared. After Liljana and I helped Masters Nolashar and Yasul move tea cups and plates to our table, Master Storr stood up and stepped over to set the box in front of Estrella. With great reverence, he opened it. One by one, he took out various artifacts: a glass pen, a jade spoon, a chess piece (the white king) carved out of ancient ivory, a plain gold ring. He stood gazing at the items gleaming faintly on the table.

‘One of these things,’ he said to Estrella, ‘once belonged to the last Maitreya, Godavanni the Glorious. Can you recognize which one? Or, that is, show it to us?’

His face hardened into an iron-like mask, so as not to give hint which item this might be. So it was with the other Masters. They hardly dared to breathe as they waited to see what Estrella would do.

As quick as the beating of a bird’s wings, she clapped her hands together. Her face brightened as she smiled with delight. Then, without hesitation, her hands swept forward and closed around the wooden box.

‘Excellent!’ Master Virang cried out. ‘Most excellent!’

‘A seard, indeed,’ Master Nolashar said.

Master Storr’s lips tightened as if someone had forced a sour cherry into his mouth. He looked from Estrella to Liljana, and said, ‘You didn’t, Materix of the Maitriche Telu, teach this girl to read minds, did you?’

In answer, Liljana only glared at him. Master Storr clearly didn’t like what he must have seen in her mind, for he turned away from her and stared at the box cupped in Estrella’s hands.

‘It is known,’ he announced, ‘that Godavanni kept three song stones inside this box. The stones have long since been lost, and perhaps the songs as well, but at least we still have this.’

Estrella set the box back on the table, and smiled at him. And then Abrasax said to Master Storr, ‘This is enough, do you agree? I believe the girl will show us the Maitreya.’

Master Storr rubbed his jaw as he stood eyeing the box. ‘I am coming to believe that, too. But the question that must be answered above all others is: can Valashu Elahad lead her to him?’

And with that, he turned to regard me.

‘Tell me where he might be found,’ I said to Master Storr, ‘and I will lead Estrella there, along with the rest of my friends – and even yourself if you don’t trust me.’

‘Bold words, Prince Valashu,’ Master Storr said. ‘We have heard how you put yourself forward as the Maitreya, with great boldness, and claimed the Lightstone for yourself. To what purpose, we must wonder? You would have made yourself warlord of a grand alliance, commander of a hundred thousand swords, a king of kings – is it your hope now that finding the Maitreya will help you claim this authority?’

The look of scorn on Master Storr’s face made me grind my teeth. Wrath filled my heart then, and to the seven old masters gazing at me I said, ‘What man can say in truth that his purpose is as pure as damask, unstained by any desire for the good regard of other men or influence upon them? Who can declare that every act of his life has flown straight and true as an arrow toward a single target? Did you, Master Storr, Master of the Gelstei, join the Brotherhood solely out of a love for knowledge and service, with no thought at all of excelling and being recognized for your efforts? Do you never doubt if your study of the gelstei conceals a deeper urge to control and wield them? You have heard a great deal about me, it seems, but know very little. I am of the sword, as you have said. I would break it into pieces, if I could. All swords, everywhere. There was a time when I wanted nothing more than to enter the Brotherhood, as you were privileged to do, to play the flute and spend my life making music. But I had duties: to my family, to my father, to my land. To all lands. Fate called me to recover the Lightstone, with the help of my friends, and then to see it stolen by the Crucifier. Was there not one moment when I desired to lead armies against him and see him cut into pieces? Do I never long, now, by force of arms to cut the Cup of Heaven from his bloody hand? If I said no, you would hear the lie in my voice. Hear, then, the truth: six brothers I had, and I would have shouted in gladness if any of them had become king of Mesh before me. A mother, father and grandmother I had, and they are all dead because of me. Four thousand of Mesh’s bravest warriors, too. Everyone knows this. I am an outcast, now. And so I cannot hope to be king of Mesh, let alone lord of a great alliance. All that remains to me is to try to stop the Red Dragon from doing the worst. It is why I think and feel and breathe. I do not dare even to hope that a time may come when I can cast this into the sea and take up the flute once more.’

So saying, I lifted up my sword, and looked at the seven Masters who regarded me. Master Storr stared at me with his cold, blue eyes, and I sensed that he saw only my fury to defeat Morjin.

Abrasax, however, saw other things. He studied me from across our table as he pulled at his beard. ‘We know there were signs that you were the Maitreya.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘there were signs.’

‘But you ignored, didn’t you, the even stronger sign of the truth inside yourself?’

I held my breath in disquiet that he could read me so keenly. Then I said, ‘Yes, I always knew. But I didn’t want to know. I wanted … to make everything right. And so I claimed the Lightstone.’

And upon this crime, destruction and death had followed like an evil wind. Abrasax, I thought, understood this very well, as he understood me. He had no need to act as my accuser and judge when I had already condemned myself so damnably. But he was not ready to see me act as my own executioner. I felt forgiveness pouring out of him, and something else, too: an admonition that hatred of myself could destroy me more surely than any weapon or poison of Morjin’s. Abrasax’s eyes were soft yet unyielding upon my face. Looking into these deep, umber orbs made me want to trust him without question.

‘I didn’t know,’ I told him, ‘who the Maitreya is. Or what he is. And despite what Estrella has told us tonight so beautifully, I still don’t.’

I looked over at Estrella to see if my words disappointed her, but she just smiled at me.

‘Master Juwain,’ Abrasax said, ‘has given an account of the akashic crystal that you found in the little people’s wood. It is too bad that it was broken: you might have gained the knowledge that you sought. But there are other crystals.’

I looked across the room at the golden, False Lightstone resting on its marble pedestal beneath the window; I looked at the seven Masters of the Brotherhood who kept hidden the Great Gelstei. I said, ‘Do you possess an akashic crystal, then?’

‘No, we don’t,’ Abrasax told me. ‘But there is this.’

So saying, he drew forth a book from beneath the pile of cushions behind him and showed it to me. Its cover seemed made of some shiny, hard substance like lacquered wood. Bright golden glyphs shone from it, but I could not read them, for they were of a script unfamiliar to me. Abrasax laid the book on our table. He opened it, and my eyes fairly burned with surprise, for its pages were like none I had ever seen. Abrasax riffled through them, and I thought that there must be thousands of them, each thinner than a piece of rice paper and as clear as a window pane. It seemed that Abrasax’s strong fingers must easily rip or fracture these tinkling, tissue-like wisps. When I expressed my fear of this, he smiled and said, ‘The pages are quite sturdy. Here, try turning them yourself.’

I put my thumb and finger to one of the pages; it felt strangely cool to the touch and as tough as old parchment.

‘I read this long ago,’ Abrasax said. ‘After speaking with Master Juwain earlier, I asked Brother Kendall to retrieve it from the library that we might make reference to it tonight.’

‘You read it how?’ Maram called out. ‘The pages have no letters!’

‘Do they not?’ Abrasax asked him with a smile. ‘Perhaps you are just not looking at them right.’

And with that, he opened the book to a page he had marked, and he held his hand over it. Then Maram gave a little gasp of astonishment, and so did I, for the clear crystal of the page suddenly took on an albescent tone as of the white of an egg being fried. Hundreds of glyphs, like little black worms, popped into view and crowded the page in many columns.

‘Sorcery!’ Maram called out to Abrasax. He thumped his hand down upon our table near the book. ‘I would accuse you of sorcery, as I did Master Virang, but I suppose that you’ll just tell me, ah, that you’re only helping me to see what was already there to see?’

Abrasax exchanged smiles with Master Virang, then turned his attention back to Maram and the book. ‘No, this time the explanation is simpler, for the writing was not there to see. Only one who possesses the key to the book can unlock it and bring the script into sight.’

‘But you made no move to unlock it, unless waving your hand like a conjuror constitutes such. Where is the key?’

Abrasax pointed his finger at his forehead and told Maram, ‘Inside here. Each book is keyed to open to a phrase, which must be memorized and held inside the mind or sometimes spoken.’

‘Like one of the Way Rhymes?’

Abrasax nodded his head at this. ‘The Brotherhood must protect its secrets. And its treasures.’

‘But I never heard that the Brotherhood kept such treasures!’ Maram said as he regarded the book in wonder.

‘Neither,’ Master Juwain said, studying it as well, ‘did I.’

‘But what is its secret?’ Maram asked. ‘Obviously, the pages are made of some sort of gelstei – what sort, and how do you make it?’

‘It is called the vedastei,’ Abrasax informed him as he ran his finger down the page’s glyphs. ‘And I did not say that we made this – only that we protect it. And cherish it for what it contains. It is that knowledge, of the Maitreya, that concerns us now.’

He cleared his throat and pressed his finger at the writing near the middle of the page as he read to us: ‘“He is the Shining One who dwells in two worlds; he is the light inside darkness, and the life that knows no death.”’

Against one of the windows above us, I saw Flick spinning about in a whirl of silver lights. I remembered how, in Tria, the Galadin had sent this luminous being to bring me word of the Maitreya, in verses that I now recited to Abrasax:

The Shining Ones who live and die

Between the whirling earth and sky

Make still the sun, all things ignite –

And earth and heaven reunite.

The Fearless Ones find day in night

And in themselves the deathless light,

In flower, bird and butterfly,

In love: thus dying, do not die.

I finished speaking and nodded at Abrasax. He tapped his book as he said to me, ‘Do not these words concord with your verses and what Estrella has told us tonight?’

Without warning, Maram thumped his hand upon the table, rattling our cups. He looked at Abrasax and grumbled out, ‘Estrella said nothing of two worlds. I, for one, know this world, and that should be enough, shouldn’t it? And yet you of the Brotherhood are never satisfied unless you can speak of another.’

Abrasax’s response to this was to flip through the pages of the book. He must have found the passage that he was seeking, for he suddenly nodded his head. He said to Maram, ‘These words were written by Master Li of the Avasian Brotherhood.’

‘The Avasian Brotherhood? Ah, I’ve never heard of such.’

‘That is because,’ Abrasax said, without further explanation, ‘it existed on another world, that of Varene, many ages ago. Now listen, for this bears most pertinently on the matter of the Maitreya.’

His eyes gleamed as he pulled at his fluffy white beard. Then he read to us:

‘“Two realms there are: the One and the manifold. The first is causeless, inextinguishable, infinite – and some say as blissful as the sun’s light on a perfect spring day. The second realm is created, and all things that dwell there suffer, age and die. It is all nails and fire, beauty that fades, a few moments of sweetness and noble dreams. Some call this the world and others hell. It is man’s path to strive ever upward, toward the heavens, toward the sun. But to go beyond the world toward the One, we must go beyond ourselves. It is almost like dying, is it not? A newborn ceases to exist in becoming a child, as a child does in becoming a man. And as all men must do if they are to walk the path of angels. And then, the greatest death of all when the Galadin perish in their bodies and die into light in the creation of a new universe. Who has utter faith in the goodness of such a sacrifice? Who would not fear that such a path might lead to the utter obliteration of one’s being?”’

Abrasax finished reading and looked at me. ‘And yet we must not fear. Overcoming fear is the cardinal task of any warrior, be he of the sword or the spirit. Many fail. Even the angels.’

He paused to take a drink of tea and moisten his throat. Then he said to me, ‘In Tria, you learned the truth of Angra Mainyu, didn’t you?’

I shrugged my shoulders at this. I glanced at Kane. ‘Can any man know very much about the Galadin?’

‘We know this, I think,’ Abrasax said. ‘Angra Mainyu, and too many of his kind, came to dread the Galadin’s fate. And so he clung to his form as a leech does to living flesh. And so rather than becoming infinitely greater in giving himself to the universe, he tries to suck the blood from all things and take the universe into himself – and so becomes infinitely less.’

I considered this for a moment, then asked him, ‘And the Maitreya?’

‘The Maitreya is sent to heal those such as the Dark One and to keep others from falling as he has.’

I remembered the blood rushing from my father’s lips as he died, and all the thousands of men lying still upon the reddened grass of the Culhadosh Commons. I felt Morjin’s baleful eyes nailing me to a fiery cross, and all the while my heart drummed with a dreadful sickness inside my chest. And I said to Abrasax, ‘Is that possible?’

‘It must be possible.’ He glanced over at Estrella sitting happily at her table. ‘The Maitreya, in great gladness of life, is sent to show all beings the shining depths of themselves that can never die. And that, ultimately, the two realms are one and the same.’

Maram seemed not to like what he was hearing, for he knocked the bottom of his tea cup against the tiled table as if to announce his annoyance. He caught Abrasax’s attention and asked him, ‘Are you saying that when we pass into this infinite realm of yours, that some part of us keeps on shining? And that therefore, there is no true death?’

‘That,’ Abrasax told him, ‘is my belief.’

Maram gazed into his empty teacup as he muttered, ‘And therefore, I suppose, there is nothing to fear.’

‘You understand, then,’ Abrasax said, smiling at him.

‘I understand that there is nothing to fear, and that is precisely what I do fear: the great, black void at the end of life that swallows us all. You say this neverness is full of light. The Shining Ones, if we’re to believe you, say this in their gladness. Ah, all your books say it, too. But who, I ask you, has ever returned from the land of the dead to tell of it?’

Abrasax seemed to have no answer to this; for a moment he turned his attention to sipping his tea. Then his eyes grew hard and bright, and he called out: ‘Master Virang! Master Matai! Master Storr!’

He issued instructions for a repositioning of the tables and of everyone in the room. Atara, Estrella and Daj moved over to join the rest of our company at our two tables, while the Seven took their places with Masters Yasul and Nolashar at theirs. The artifacts still resting there were put back into the treasured ebony box – all except the ivory chess piece. This carved, ancient ‘king’, four inches long, Abrasax set precisely at the center of the table. Then he and the other masters once again brought forth their seven round crystals. They sat in a circle holding out these stones around the chess piece.

‘I must now say more about the Great Gelstei,’ Abrasax told us. ‘Is there anyone who does not remember the account of creation in the Beginnings?’

‘Do you mean,’ Daj piped in, ‘how the Ieldra sang the universe into existence?’

He beamed with pride at his recently acquired knowledge as Abrasax smiled and nodded his head at him. And then Abrasax said, ‘The account in the Saganom Elu is poetic and magisterial, and certainly true. But not all has been told there. Exactly how, we might ask, did the Ieldra bring the One’s design into its full flowering?’

He looked at Kane and added, ‘You must surely know.’

‘So – I have forgotten, if ever I did know.’

Abrasax smiled sadly, and then he told us that many books in the Brotherhood’s library contained knowledge as to this arcane subject. He related an amazing story, part of which had been revealed to my companions and me the year before in the amphitheater of the Urudjin outside of Tria: ‘Seven colors there are, and they create all the beauty of the world and all that we see. And the seven notes that we summon out of trumpet or mandolet ring out the melodies of all music. So with the seven Openers and the creation of the world. The gelstei that crystallized out of the primeval fire were infinitely greater than these little stones that we of the Brotherhood are privileged to keep. And they opened up all the infinite possibilities of life. For as the Ieldra sang, the great crystals vibrated like the strings of a harp, and brought into being and form all things.’

Maram gazed at the gelstei shining in the Masters’ hands. He asked, ‘Are you saying that these stones partake of the power of the mythical gelstei?’

‘They are not mythical,’ Abrasax told him. ‘They exist somewhere, out in the stars, beyond Agathad.’

‘But do they still have the power to create?’

‘Yes – and to uncreate. Even as these stones do.’

He nodded at Master Matai, whose red crystal lit up like a glowing demon’s eye. Then Master Virang’s stone, the Second, flared with an orange fire, and so with the other Masters’ gelstei in a progression of hues. As Abrasax’s clear stone spat out a fierce white light, the crystals all began pouring forth sound as well. It might have been called music, but the harsh tones and shrills that vibrated from the crystals filled the chamber with a terrible stridor more like a wail of death than a song. It built louder and ever more jangling upon ear and nerve until I felt compelled to throw my hands over my ears. I watched in amazement as the ivory of the chess piece seemed to lose its substance and began wavering in the candles’ soft light. And then, suddenly, with a skreak like breaking metal, it vanished into thin air.

‘Sorcery!’ Maram cried out. He moved over to the Masters’ table, and rudely wedged his body between Master Yasul and Master Storr. He ran his hand around the table’s bare surface where the chess piece had sat.

‘It’s gone!’ Daj cried out. ‘The king is gone – but where?’

‘Ah, gone into nothing,’ Maram muttered. ‘Into hell. It would seem it has been annihilated, like a man’s soul when life’s candle blows out.’

The seven Masters seemed to meditate upon their gelstei. And Abrasax said to Daj, and to Maram, ‘Wait.’

A few moments later, with a chiming like that of struck bells, the chess piece winked back into plain view. I sat blinking my eyes. Maram reached out to snatch it up with his fat fingers before it disappeared again.

‘More sorcery!’ he cried out. He gripped the carved ivory hard in his hand as if to reassure himself that it was real.

And Abrasax said to him, ‘Don’t be so sure you know what existence is – or isn’t.’

Maram waved his hand at this. ‘I think you must have somehow hidden from our sight what was there all along. And then caused us to see it once again.’

Abrasax held out his hand to take the chess piece from Maram as he shook his head. He showed us all the gleaming white king.

‘No, that was not the way of things,’ he said. ‘This, for a moment, was truly unmade. But our gelstei, being small, possess only a small power. We of the Seven possess even less. It is not the province of man to unmake things.’

‘So,’ Kane growled out. His black eyes seemed to grow even blacker, like two bits of neverness that might swallow up not only a chunk of carved ivory but entire worlds.

‘And it is not,’ Abrasax said, looking from Kane to Maram, ‘the province of the Elijin, or even the Galadin. To the Ieldra, and only to the Ieldra, is given the power to create and uncreate.’

‘I wish the Ieldra would just uncreate Angra Mainyu,’ Maram said. ‘And Morjin – and every other evil creature in the world.’

‘That is not the way of things, either,’ Abrasax told him, giving him back the chess piece. ‘The Ieldra, according to the One’s design, sing the universe into creation. But once it is created, no single part may be unmade. All is necessary. Nothing may be subtracted just because it seems to be hateful or bad.’

I sat watching Maram twirl the chess piece between his fingers, and I said, ‘If Morjin got his hands on those gelstei of yours, he’d try to use them to subtract us from the world. And much else that he hates.’

Abrasax nodded his head at this. ‘And with Angra Mainyu, it would be much worse. Once freed from Damoom, he would try to use the Lightstone to seize the greatest of the Great Gelstei and unmake the Ieldra themselves. He would, I think, fail. But out of his failure would come cataclysm and fire, and he would cause the Ieldra to have to destroy all things.’

I turned to look out the chamber’s windows up at the faraway stars. And I said, ‘But why? I don’t understand.’

‘I’m not sure I do either,’ Abrasax said with a heavy sigh. ‘At least not completely. It seems to me, though, that the Ieldra abide the evil of the world because out of it, sometimes, comes great good. But once all is fallen into darkness, forever, what would be the purpose of making everything suffer without redemption or end?’

What, indeed? I wondered, as I thought of my mother hanging all broken and bloody from a plank of wood.

As Maram continued playing with the chess piece, Abrasax looked at me and said, ‘I think we have an answer to both Sar Maram’s question and yours. If this king can return from the realm of the unmade, then so can a prince vanquish his fear of death – and so in dying, will not die. But only, I believe, with the help of the Maitreya.’

‘If you do believe that,’ I said to him, ‘then for love of the world help us to find him!’

At this, Master Storr’s fingers closed around his gelstei, and he said, ‘It is for love of the world – and much, much else – that we must be sure of you. Wine poured into a cracked cup not only is wasted but helps destroy the cup.’

‘I will not fail!’ I half-shouted at Master Storr.

‘Bold words,’ he said to me. ‘But what if you do fail?’

The room fell quiet as he and the others of the Seven sat regarding me. And then Master Okuth said, ‘If the Maitreya is slain or falls into Morjin’s hands, then we see no hope of Angra Mainyu ever being healed. And so no hope for Ea and all the other worlds of Eluru.’

‘The risk is great beyond measure,’ Master Virang said to me. ‘And not just to the world, but to yourself. If you fall into Morjin’s hands, or fall as his master did, then –’

‘But we have to take the chance!’ I cried out. ‘Or else we might as well be dead already!’

For a while everyone sat quite still. The smell of various teas steeping in hot water filled the air. Then Abrasax looked at me with unnerving percipience, and said, ‘Your manner, Valashu, the fire of your eyes, all you have dared and done – this bespeaks the attainment of the highest Valari ideal. And yet I think you find your valor in being drawn to that which you most dread.’

I said nothing as I tried to return his relentless gaze.

‘You would wish,’ he continued, ‘for others to see you as fearless, as you would like to see yourself. But you fear this neverness that Prince Maram has told of so terribly, don’t you?’

I could hardly look at him as I nodded my head and said, ‘Yes.’

‘And you fear, too,’ Abrasax said as the others of the Seven bent closer to me, ‘that Morjin will be the one to damn you to exile in this lightless land?’

Yes, yes, yes! And as I feared, so I hated; and as I hated, my heart ached with a black, bitter wrath that poisoned my blood and darkened everything I held inside as beautiful and good. How I longed to take a sword to this dreadful disease that consumed me! But I could not, as I might rid myself of a rotting limb, simply cut it out.

‘And most of all,’ Abrasax said, looking at me deeply, ‘you fear your hatred of Morjin.’

‘It is killing me!’ I called out.

The fury that poured out of me beat against Liljana, Master Juwain and the others sitting close to me with the force of a raging river. It caught up the seven Masters, as well. Their faces fell ashen and sick, and Master Storr gripped the edge of his table as if to keep himself from being swept away. And then Master Juwain placed his hand on the center of my back, and I drew in three long, deep breaths.

‘You see,’ Abrasax said to me, ‘your hate is a terrible thing, and we fear it, too.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I finally gasped out. ‘I would have done better to have been born a lamb or made a gelding!’

Abrasax’s smile was like a cold bucket of water splashed in my face. And he said, ‘Do not mistake lack of passion for virtue. We must celebrate all the passions, as we do life itself.’

‘Even hate?’

‘Yes, even that. The virtuous man is not one who doesn’t hate, but he who is in full control of it, as he is all his passions, directing it toward a good end – and by good means.’

I traded dark looks with Kane then, for Abrasax had pierced to the heart of the conundrum that tormented me. Then I looked back at the Grandmaster and said, ‘Too often it seems that if I don’t give back Morjin evil for evil, he’ll win. And if I do fight this way, evil will still win.’

‘It is difficult, I know,’ he told me. ‘But you must find the way to make use of these blazing passions of yours, even the ugly and evil inside yourself, toward a higher end – even as the One does in creating the world. Pour fire the wrong way against a lump of coal and it will burn up and crumble into ashes. Wield fire as the earth does, however, as the sun and stars do, and you will make a diamond. This self-creation is the path of the angels; it is their fundamental duty and test.’

He came over to my table to pour some tea into my cup, and his steady gaze seemed to remind me that I held the keys to two opposing kingdoms inside my heart: either the wild joy of life or the rage for death.

Master Storr, who had recovered from my carelessness, pointed his finger at me and said, ‘We’ve all felt this passion of Prince Valashu tonight. With it, in Tria, he slew a man. How long before he slays again?’

‘Never!’ I cried out inside the cold castle of my mind. And then, to Master Storr and the others, I said, ‘I have vowed never again to use the valarda this way. And Morjin lives because of this!’

It might have been more accurate to say that Morjin had survived our last battle because of my hesitation – or because I could no more control my gift than I could a thunderstorm.

‘It is strange that Morjin left Argattha at this time,’ Abrasax said to me. ‘Indeed, there is something very strange about your encounter with him. I must believe that it is for the best that you did not slay Morjin with this secret sword of yours. All my understanding of the Law of the One is that the valarda is to be used only for the highest of purposes.’

Yes, I thought, it should be. To sense in others their deepest desires, to dream their dreams, to share with them my own – how I had longed for this! Yet too often the valarda had been a curse. I felt my heart pressing up against my throat as I said, ‘All my life, I have suffered others’ passions. And now, it seems, I have learned to inflict mine upon them – even to slay.’

Abrasax regarded me a moment before saying, ‘Surely you must suspect that your sentiments and passions, as powerful as they are, are not sufficient to kill another person?’

I looked at him in alarm and waited for him to say more.

‘Haven’t you ever wondered,’ he asked me, ‘at the true nature of the valarda?’

‘Only as long as I could think and feel!’ I told him.

‘Then haven’t you ever sensed that your openness to others is only the beginning of openness to much more? Indeed, I believe it leads to the identity with others, ultimately with the entire world. As with the Maitreya.’

‘But I am not the Maitreya!’

‘No, you are not,’ he told me. ‘But already you have wielded some of the power that must be his. Through him would flow the great soul force, the deepest fires of the world. Such a force, Valashu, can be used either for great evil or great good.’

He went on to say that, ultimately, this angel fire could be used to destroy whole universes, as the Ieldra were sometimes forced to do, or to create new ones.

He finished speaking and poured himself yet another cup of tea. And I said, ‘If what you’ve told us is true, then the Maitreya would possess the valarda in much greater measure than I.’

‘Perhaps. But I should say rather than possessing the valarda, the Maitreya, in his essence, is valarda, for he would be as a window letting in the light of all things.’

Above us, the twelve round windows filled with the faint sheen of the stars. The dome above us seemed to catch the exhalations of the Seven as they looked at me.

‘The Maitreya,’ I said to Abrasax, and to everyone, ‘must be able to draw forth the light from the Cup of Heaven. And we must find him before Morjin does.’

Master Virang’s discipline was meditation, not mind-reading, but I sensed that he exactly echoed Abrasax’s thoughts as he asked me, ‘Do you seek the Shining One to keep Morjin from using the Lightstone or for more personal reasons?’

‘Both,’ I told him truthfully.

Two flames, I thought, burned inside my heart. The first was reddish-black, and would destroy me if I let it. The other flame was as blue as the sky and connected me to all the lights of the heavens.

‘If we are to help you, we must be sure of you,’ Master Storr told me again. ‘Sure, at least, that you can use the valarda for good, and not ill. Will you allow us to test this?’

I nodded my head as I looked at him. ‘If you must.’

‘Good,’ Master Storr said. ‘Then please stand up.’

I did as he asked, and moved off to the side of the tables beneath the chamber’s dome. The Seven gathered around me. Each of them held one of the Great Gelstei out toward my chest.

‘Ah, just don’t make him disappear,’ Maram called out from his cushion below me.

Abrasax smiled at this as his open hand showed a little colored sphere. So it was with Master Yasul, Master Matai and the others of the Seven. Each of them, especially Master Storr, gazed at me intently. I felt their eyes pierce me like hot needles at many places through my body. Their hands, now glowing with the radiance of their crystals, seemed to reach inside me and open me to the whirls of light up and down my spine.

‘It burns, does it not?’ Abrasax said to me. His eyes filled with concern for me even as his crystal flared with a white luster. ‘Your belly is where you feel it, isn’t it? All your hatred of the Red Dragon?’

Deep within my belly, down behind my navel, the red flame raged hot as molten stone. For a moment, I perceived it as Abrasax did: as red as burning blood and shot with streaks of orange darkening to black, like smoke. I sensed that it would soon kill me, if I let it.

‘There is a saying,’ Abrasax told me. ‘Words as old as the stars: “If you would be freed from burning, you must become fire.”’

With that, the crystals of the Seven glistened in a rainbow brilliance. Wheels of fiery light whirled along my spine in colors to match the hues pouring from their crystals. The red flame in my deepest part built hotter and hotter. It might, I knew, burn up the whole world with my hellish hate if I let it. It consumed me, now, almost, being drawn up into my chest with every beat of my heart. But there, too, gathered the other flame, pure and blue, like Arras and Solaru and the brightest of the stars.

If you would be freed from burning, you must become fire.

I closed my eyes then, and I felt the hot flickers of the red flame feed the blazing of the blue. I willed this to be. It grew brighter and brighter. I did. My whole being, out from my center into my arms and legs, feet and hands, fairly shimmered and sang with a surging new life. And then, in a rush of joy, a fountain of violet flame seemed to shoot up through my belly, heart and throat, flaring to pure white as it filled the bright, black spaces behind my eyes. For an endless moment I did disappear, into a fire so brilliant that it touched the whole world with an infinite light.

At last, I returned to myself. I sensed a quickness of breath and rushing blood inside Abrasax, and I opened my eyes to see as he did. And I gasped in astonishment. For the auras of the Seven and Atara and Kane, and all those in the room, impinged on each other, and flowed, swirled and shimmered in a cloud of light. This living radiance seemed to be drawn to me as water to an opening in the earth and to change hues as it brightened into a numinous and dazzling glorre. I drew my sword then, and held it pointing up toward the apex of the dome. Alkaladur, too, blazed with this perfect color.

‘Fire, indeed,’ Abrasax said.

Then he put away his gelstei, and so did Master Storr and the others, and the auras of everyone gathered there vanished from my sight. But my sword’s silustria continued burning with an ineffable flame.

‘Do you see?’ Abrasax said, to Master Virang and Master Storr. ‘Do you see? It is as Master Juwain told about Prince Valashu.’

Everyone watched as the glorre illuminating my sword slowly faded to a silvery sheen. I sheathed Alkaladur as I looked at Abrasax.

‘That is enough of testing for one night,’ he said, smiling at me.

Master Storr looked down at Maram swigging his tea and said, ‘But what of the others?’

‘Valashu is their leader,’ Abrasax told him. ‘As he goes, so go they. If he can overcome the worst of himself as he has here tonight, then I believe that they will, too.’

‘You speak of him,’ Master Storr said, eyeing me, ‘almost as if he is the Maitreya!’

‘No, Valashu is not the Shining One,’ he said. ‘But I believe their fates are interwoven, as threads in a tapestry. Surely it is upon the Prince of Elahad to lead the way to him. Do you agree, Master Matai?’

The Master Diviner, standing across from me, smiled at Abrasax. And then, in turn, as Abrasax queried the other masters, each of them gave his assent. Even Master Storr reluctantly nodded his head.

‘I suppose we must trust Valashu and his friends,’ he affirmed.

In the end, I thought, either one has faith in another or not.

‘Yes, we must trust them with all our power to trust,’ Abrasax said. ‘And give them all our help. All the signs point one way.’

‘Ah, but which way?’ Maram asked as he fingered his beard. ‘That is the question of the moment, is it not?’

Abrasax smiled at this, then called out, ‘Master Matai – will you show us the parchment?’

The Seven moved back over to the empty table, and my friends and I gathered around them. Master Matai produced a large, yellowed parchment, which he unrolled and laid upon the table for all of us to examine. On its glossy surface were inscribed a great circle and various symbols marking the position of the planets and stars at the hour of my birth. It was, I saw, a copy of my horoscope, which Master Sebastian of the school in Mesh had prepared scarcely a year before.

Master Matai ran his finger over a hornlike glyph representing the sign of the Ram, and he said, ‘As Master Sebastian and Master Juwain elucidated in Mesh, Valashu’s horoscope is nearly identical with that of Godavanni. Valashu’s stars, as they determined, are those of a Maitreya.’

‘Then you should not blame him,’ Maram half-shouted, ‘for having believed that he might be the Maitreya!’

Master Matai shot him a sharp look and shook his head to silence him. And then he went on: ‘As we say, the stars impel; they do not compel. There are always other signs. And there are other stars.’

‘I’m afraid I still don’t understand,’ Master Juwain said, resting his elbows on the table to examine the horoscope, ‘where Master Sebastian went wrong.’

‘That is because he didn’t,’ Master Matai said. ‘On all of Ea, there is hardly a better diviner, especially when it comes to astrology. No, Master Sebastian made no error, at least of commission. But it must be said that an omission has been made, and a critical one at that.’

So saying, he brought forth a second parchment and unrolled it on top of mine.

‘Always, at the end of ages, the Maitreyas are born,’ he told us. ‘And at the end of this age, the last age that will give birth to the Age of Light, or so we hope, the stars are so strong. I have studied this for years, and for years I believed the Maitreya’s star would rise over the Morning Mountains. But I have found a brighter one that rose in another land. Twenty-two years ago, now, at the same time that the Golden Band flared as it never had before and has done only once since.’

I glanced at the date that Master Matai had inked onto the parchment: the ninth of Triolet in the year 2792 – the same day as my birth.

Master Juwain studied the symbols inscribed in the great circle, and he asked, ‘And for which land has this horoscope been prepared?’

‘Hesperu. In the Haraland, in the north, somewhere below the mountains, to the east of Ghurlan but west of the Rhul River.’

‘Hesperu!’ I wanted to cry out. I could think of few lands of Ea so far away, and none so difficult to reach.

‘But we can’t journey there!’ Maram bellowed. ‘It’s impossible!’

‘So, it would be difficult, not impossible,’ Kane said, his eyes gleaming.

He went on to tell us that we could complete our transit of the White Mountains and cross the vast forest of Acadu. And then choose between two routes: the southern one through the Dragon Kingdoms, or the northern route across the Red Desert.

‘Oh, excellent!’ Maram said. ‘Then we’ll have our choice between being put up on crosses or dying of thirst in the desert.’

I turned to look at Maram. I didn’t want him to frighten the children – and himself.

‘But think, Val!’ he said to me. ‘Even if the Maitreya was born in Hesperu, he might long since have gone elsewhere. Or been taken as a slave or even killed. It’s madness, I say, to set out to the end of the earth solely according to another astrological reckoning.’

I waited for the blood to leave his flushed face, and then I asked him, ‘But what else can we do?’

‘Ah, I don’t really know,’ he muttered. ‘Why must we do anything? And if we do do something, wouldn’t it be enough to work in concert with the Brotherhood? Surely the Grandmaster has alerted the schools in Hesperu to look for the Maitreya. Let them find him, I say.’

Master Juwain looked over his shoulder at Maram and asked him, ‘Have you forgotten Kasandra’s prophecy?’

‘You mean, that Val would find the Maitreya in the darkest of places?’

Hesperu, I thought, under the terror of King Arsu and the Kallimun, no less Morjin, seemed just about the darkest place on Ea.

‘There is more that you should know,’ Master Matai said as he pressed his finger against one of the symbols inked onto the parchment. ‘The Maitreya’s star, I believe, will burn brightly but not long.’

I looked at Maram as he looked at me. Sometimes decisions are made not in the affirmation of one’s lips but in the silence of the eyes.

‘But we’ll die reaching Hesperu!’ he moaned. ‘Oh, too bad, too bad!’

And with that he hammered his fist on the table behind him hard enough to rattle the teacups and to shake from them a few dark, amber drops. ‘Why can’t I have at least one glass of brandy before I’m reduced to worm’s meat? Are there no spirits in this accursed place?’

‘There are those that you carry inside your hearts,’ Abrasax told him with a smile.

Maram waved his thick hand at Abrasax’s attempt to encourage him, and he turned toward me. ‘Can’t you see it, Val? It’s madness, this new quest of ours, damnable and utter madness!’

‘Then you must be mad, too,’ I told him, ‘to be coming with us.’

‘Am I coming with you? Am I?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Ah, of course I am, damn it! And that’s the hell of it, isn’t it? How could I ever desert you?’

We returned to our original tables then. Abrasax began a long account of how one of the ancient Maitreyas, on another world during the age-old War of the Stone, had sung to a star called Ayasha to keep it from dying in a blaze of light. We drank many cups of tea. Finally, it grew late. Through one of the windows, I saw the stars of the Dragon descending toward the west. And yet Kane still sat spellbound as he listened to Abrasax’s flowing voice, and so did Daj and Estrella. But whereas Kane could remain awake for nights on end, and perhaps longer, the children began yawning with their need for sleep.

‘I think that is enough for one night,’ Abrasax said. He closed the crystal-paged book from which he had been reading. I sheathed my sword, and my companions hid away their gelstei. ‘Tomorrow you must begin preparing for a long journey, and we must help you.’

He turned to look at Atara, Daj and Estrella, and all the rest of us, one by one. At last he rested his gaze on me. ‘I believe with all my heart that you will find the Maitreya, as has been prophesied. And I also believe that what will befall then will be ruled by your heart. Remember, Valashu, creation is everything. It is what we were born for.’

He stood up slowly, and stepped over to the pedestal holding up the cup of silver gelstei. After lifting it with great care, he brought it back to our table and set it down. And then he enjoined us: ‘Escort the Shining One back to us, here, and we shall help him, too. We shall place this in his hands, if not the true gold. And then we shall see who is truly master of the Lightstone.’

After that we went back to our hostels to rest. For hours I lay awake with my hand on the hilt of Alkaladur, by the side of my bed. A bright flame still blazed inside me. I wanted to pass it on like a strengthening elixir to Atara, sleeping in the little house next to mine, and to Estrella, Liljana, and everyone. I couldn’t help hoping that we might bring something beautiful into creation, even though I knew that before us lay an endless road of blood, destruction and death.

10

We spent the next days resting and preparing for what Maram kept calling our ‘mad quest’. In the warmth of the brightening spring, we feasted on good, solid food to build up our bodies against the trials that would soon come. We tried to strengthen our minds and spirits as well. Master Juwain passed many hours in the school’s library studying maps and reading accounts of the lands that we must cross. Liljana held counsel with Abrasax in an unprecedented effort to combine the resources of the Sisterhood and Brotherhood. Master Nolashar taught Estrella and me secret songs to play on our flutes and drive evil humors away. We all sat in the stone conservatory with Master Virang, who guided us through meditations so as to enliven our auras. This unseen radiance, like an armor woven of light, might protect us against the malice and lies of the Red Dragon – against even cold and hunger and the depredations of our own despair.

After nearly a week of this practice, the other masters joined us in these meditations, and the Grandmaster, too. The Seven brought forth their crystals and used them to quicken our chakras’ fires. As Abrasax told us, this would help open us to the angel fire and greater life.

‘That is the power and purpose of the Great Gelstei,’ he told us one fine morning with the larks singing in the nearby cherry orchard. ‘At least, the purpose of these small stones that we are privileged to keep. We use them with you as we believe the Star People do: in the creation of angels.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Maram said as he patted his overstuffed belly and let loose a rude belch, ‘I am rather like an angel, aren’t I? Five-Horned Maram will become Maram of the Golden Wings. Soon, soon, I know, lesser men will have to bow to me and address me as “Lord Elijin”.’

Abrasax shook his head in reproach for his sarcasm, and told him, ‘You need not worry about taking on that burden just now. The Way is very long – long even for the Star People, and we have rediscovered only part of it.’

He looked at Kane as if in hope that he might say more about this ancient path that human beings walked toward the heavens. But Kane just stared at the conservatory’s stone walls in silence.

‘I must say,’ Maram grumbled out, as he pressed his hand against his belly, solar plexus, heart and throat, ‘that I feel little different than I did before we began this work.’

‘That is because,’ Master Storr chided him, ‘your fires are blocked and trapped within your second chakra.’

At this, Maram shot Master Storr a belligerent look, and wantonly waggled his hips. Master Storr stared back at him in disdain.

Abrasax, however, was kinder. He smiled at Maram and said, ‘Give it time.’

‘Ah, time,’ Maram muttered. ‘How much of it do I have left before the candle burns out?’

He sighed as he stood up and gazed out the conservatory’s window at the setting sun. Then he turned to Abrasax and said, ‘You seem to have had all the time in the world, Grandfather, and yet that hasn’t kept old age from snowing white hair on you, if you’ll forgive me for speaking so bluntly.’

Abrasax smiled at this. ‘I will forgive you, Sar Maram, but things are not always as they seem. Just how old do you think I am?’

Maram gazed at Abrasax, and I could almost hear him mentally subtracting ten years from his assessment in an effort to repay Abrasax’s kindness: ‘Ah, seventy, I should guess.’

Abrasax’s smile widened. He said, ‘I was born in the year that the Red Dragon destroyed the Golden Brotherhood and captured the False Gelstei. That was –’

‘2647!’ Maram cried out. ‘But that is impossible! That would make you a hundred and forty-seven years old!’

‘Please, Sar Maram – a hundred and forty-six,’ Abrasax said with a grin. ‘I won’t have my next birthday until Segadar.’

‘But that is impossible!’ Maram said again. He looked from Abrasax to Kane. ‘Only the Elijin are immortal and –’

‘We of the Seven,’ Abrasax said, interrupting him, ‘have not gained immortality – only longevity. And other things.’

‘Ah, what things?’ Maram asked with great interest.

In answer, Abrasax stepped over to him, and he laid his long, wrinkled hands on Maram’s sides along his chest. And then he lifted him as he might a child, straight up into the air. Maram, although obviously no angel, did for a moment appear to be flying. He whooped as he beat his arms like wings. I blinked my eyes in disbelief, for with all the eating he had been doing during the past week, he must have weighed twenty stone.

Abrasax set him down, and Maram stared at him as if he, too, couldn’t believe what had just happened. He said to him, ‘You look like an old bird, but you’re as strong as a bear!’

‘Thank you, I think,’ Abrasax told him.

Maram clasped Abrasax’s hand as if to test its strength. Abrasax squeezed back, and Maram winced and coughed out, ‘Did I say a bear? A bull, you are, a veritable old bull. And all this from the work you do with your little crystals? What other, ah, powers have you gained?’

Abrasax smiled at this and said, ‘What powers would you most like to gain?’

‘Do you need to ask? A bull has only two horns, but I have five! A veritable dragon, I am, and oh how I burn! And so I would strengthen those fires that burn the most pleasurably.’

‘There is more to life, Sar Maram, than pleasure. And there is more to pleasure than this little tickle in the loins that you pursue so ardently.’

‘Yes, there is beer and brandy,’ Maram said. ‘And that which bestirs me down there is no little thing – it is more like dragon fire!’

Abrasax said nothing to this as he studied Maram with his keen eyes.

‘Pure dragon fire, I tell you! And I can direct it as I will, no matter what Master Storr says about me being blocked!’

‘Can you? Then perhaps you wouldn’t mind if we put it to the test?’

‘What kind of test?’

‘One that should prove more enjoyable than one of your drinking duels.’

‘Truly? Truly?’ Maram smiled as he considered this. ‘Then when do we begin?’

Abrasax stepped over to Master Okuth to murmur something in his ear. Master Okuth bowed, excused himself, and left the room. We waited with the other Masters around the tea tables for him to go about his business, whatever it was. Half an hour later, he returned. He produced a small vial containing some dark, reddish substance, which he poured into Maram’s cup of tea and stirred with a little silver spoon. Then he gave the cup to Maram to drink.

‘Ah, I must say,’ Maram called out, sniffing his tea, ‘that this potion of yours seems suspiciously like blood.’

‘It is a tincture made from the pineal gland of the adil serpent,’ Master Okuth told him. ‘It will help dissolve your blockage so that the kundala can rise within you.’

Maram sniffed it again. ‘Are you sure it won’t poison me? Ah, like a snake’s venom, paralyzing me?’

‘It will only paralyze your resistance.’

I gazed at Maram, waiting for him to drink, or not – as did Kane, Master Juwain and Liljana. The Masters of the Brotherhood studied him as well. And then Maram, challenged once again to drink as part of a trial, shrugged his shoulders and downed the red-tinged tea.

‘Aach!’ he cried out, coughing. ‘Ohhh – oh, my Lord, that was vile!’

He looked to Master Okuth for sympathy for his sufferings. But Master Okuth just looked at him sternly as he brought out his small, green heart stone. The other Masters held out their gelstei as well, and they beckoned for Maram to stand up and gathered around him.

Then Abrasax instructed Maram: ‘You must try visualizing that which you most love. Hold this image inside yourself, and let it call to you.’

‘Ah, you mean visualize her whom I love. Make her call to me.’

‘No, Sar Maram,’ Abrasax said. ‘I do not mean that. We have other potions and other exercises designed for the realization of fancies and dreams. You have told us that you are a man of this world. There is something in this world – something that you’ve held in hand and heart – that you love above all else. Hold it in your heart now. And in your mind. Let it call to your life’s deepest fire and draw it upward, even as the kundalini strikes upward, toward the heavens.’

Maram smiled at me then, and I understood that he took great satisfaction in keeping secret whatever it was that he found most to love. Was it Behira, I wondered? The Galdan brandy that Vishakan, chief of the Niuriu, had once poured for him? The smell of the earth on the most perfect day of his life? I thought that I would never know.

Then Maram closed his eyes, and the Great Gelstei of the Seven began to sing to Maram in a rainbow of fire. The Masters worked their magic upon Maram for most of an hour. Finally, there came a moment when I felt something inside of Maram break open. I sensed a great gout of flame moving up from his first and second chakras into his third, fourth and higher ones, as with companions passing from hand to hand a bright torch. Hotter and hotter it grew, like the sun in Soldru. At last Maram opened his eyes, and looked straight at me in triumph. He let out a shout of delight that shook the stones of the dome above us. His face seemed to light up as with fireworks as he cried out, ‘It’s as if the ecstasy of my loins is burning throughout my whole body and brain! You were right, Grandfather: this is more enjoyable than beer, or even brandy!’

‘Even more enjoyable,’ Atara prodded him, ‘than women?’

‘Ah, perhaps, perhaps.’ Maram breathed deeply and raggedly as he held his hand over his heart. Then his eyes glazed with doubt. ‘But it’s almost too pleasurable, if you know what I mean.’

Liljana, whose Maitriche Telu possessed other means of igniting the body’s fires, said to him, ‘And now you know why my sisters are dreaded.’

‘Dreaded or desired?’

Liljana pointed her finger at him as she shook her head. ‘It’s good that we’ve taken shelter here rather than at one of our sanctuaries. If you weren’t careful, my sisters would kill you with just such pleasure.’

‘Truly? Well, I must die sometime, I suppose, and I can think of no better way.’

Whatever fate awaited us on our quest, however, during our final days at the Brotherhood’s school, we had only thought and feeling for more life. As the spring quickened and the warm sun poured down its light into the valley – and the Seven continued pouring their gelstei’s radiance into us – we gained strength like the new shoots of the cherry trees fairly singing with sap. My companions and I all felt more vital. We found ourselves needing less sleep, and during our waking hours we seemed more awake. Although we did not gain the miraculous regenerative powers of Kane, whose flesh I had once seen regrow a severed ear, Abrasax told us that we might bear up beneath insults and wounds that would kill lesser beings.

‘But it is your spirits, I believe, that will suffer the greatest trials,’ he told us one fine morning. It was to be our last day in the Valley of the Sun, and we had gathered with the Masters in the cherry orchard beneath a tree covered in snowy blossoms. ‘The Lord of Lies will attack them, and more, try to drink your very souls. We must speak of this now. If your path is to take you through Acadu, there is one danger that you must avoid above all others.’

Maram’s face blanched while Master Juwain sat on the white-petaled grass with his hands folded like a closed book. And Master Juwain said, ‘And what is that, Grandfather?’

Abrasax looked at Master Juwain for a long moment as his lips pressed together. Then he said, ‘I would like to give you a full account of this. Would you be willing to come with me into the library?’

‘Of course,’ Master Juwain told him.

‘Estrella,’ Abrasax said, turning toward the girl, ‘there is a book that I believe will tell more than I can about this danger. It is, in a way, lost in the library’s stacks. Would you help me locate it?’

Estrella smiled as she nodded her head.

The rest of us, curious as to how this new mystery might unfold, stood up and followed Abrasax as he led us toward the library. This building rose up near the center of the Brotherhood’s grounds, and was made of the same white stone as every other building in the valley. Tall pillars fronted it. Its rear wall fairly pushed into the side of a hill. Although larger even than the great hall, it wasn’t nearly so grand as the library of King Kiritan’s palace – to say nothing of the vast, burnt-out Library of Kaisham.

We followed Abrasax and the other masters up the seven stairs leading to the doorway and into the library’s single room. There, sitting at long wooden tables, a dozen Brothers bent over reading old tomes; a dozen more worked hard to preserve the knowledge of the oldest and most fragile of them, transcribing words onto new paper with ink-blackened quills. This scratching sound filled the quiet room. The many dusty, crumbling books stacked on the shelves along the four walls seemed to await renewal at the Brothers’ hands. I counted some seven thousand of them. As we learned, every one of them had been indexed and accounted for. I did not understand how one of them could have been lost.

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