The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom Read online

  It was the Lightstone, I believe, that kept me going. I held the image of this golden cup close to my heart. From its deep hollows welled a cool, clear liquid that seemed to flow into me and give my body a new strength. It woke me up, at least enough so that my eyes didn’t close in darkness.

  It awakened me, too, to the sorry state of my friends, for they were nearly as tired as I was. And they were even more fearful of the unknown lands ahead. Their plight struck to my heart, and I vowed to do all that I could for them so long as any strength remained to me.

  I rode side by side with them over the silver hills. And then, around midnight, just as we topped a hill crowned with many sharp rocks, I caught a moist, disturbing scent that jolted me wide awake. I stopped Altaru as I gazed at a depression in the generally rising terrain that seemed out of place. Patches of mist hung over it as of cotton balls floating in a great bowl. On the east side of it, the range of mountains along which we had been riding came to a sudden end. On the west side farther ahead of this dark scoop in the earth was the mountainous wall of the great Shoshan Range. Here, at last, was the hinge in the mountains that I had been seeking. And as I had hoped, the hinge was broken at its very joint, and the way into Anjo lay open before us.

  “What is it?’ Master Juwain said as he stared down across the moonlit land.

  Now a whiff of decay fell over me, and the air seemed suddenly colder. And then I said, ‘It’s a bog – and not a large one, either.’

  I went on to tell both him and Maram what I knew about this unseemly break in the mountains. Indeed, it was more than unseemly, I said, it was an evil wound upon the land. For once, in the Age of Law, a mountain had stood upon this very spot. The Ishkans of old had named it Diamond Mountain in honor of the richest deposits of these gems ever to be found in the Morning Mountains. In their lust for wealth, they had used firestones to burn away layers of useless rock and uncover the veins of diamonds. Such wasteful mining, over hundreds of years, had burned away the entire mountain. It had left a poorly drained depression that filled with silt and sand so that now, a whole age later, only a foul-smelling bog remained.

  Maram, staring in horror at this miles-wide patch of ground, took me by the arm and said, ‘You can’t mean to ride down into that, can you? Not at night?’

  If my father had taught me anything about war, it was that a king should never rely on mountains, rivers or forests – or even bogs – for protection. Such seemingly impenetrable natural barriers are often quite penetrable, sometimes much more readily than one might suspect. Often, hard work and a little daring sufficed for forcing one’s way through them.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Maram, ‘it won’t be so bad.’

  ‘Oh no?’ he said. ‘Why do I suspect that it will be worse than bad?’

  As we were debating the perils of bogs – Maram held that the quicksands in them could trap both man and horse and suck them down into a dreadful death – the Ishkans came riding up to us. Lord Issur and Lord Nadhru led eighteen grim-faced knights who seemed nearly as tired as we were. They sat shifting about uneasily in their saddles as the line of their horses stretched across the top of the hill.

  ‘Sar Valashu!’ Lord Issur called out to me. He pressed his horse a few paces closer to me and pointed down into the bog. ‘As you can see, there is no way out of Ishka in this direction. Now you must return as you have come, and set out through one of the passes to the north.’

  ‘No,’ I said, looking down the line of his outstretched finger, ‘we’ll go this way.’

  ‘Through the Black Bog?’ he asked as his countrymen laughed uneasily. ‘No, I think not.’

  Maram wiped the sweat from his bulging forehead. ‘The Black Bog, is it called? Excellent – now there is a name to inspire courage.’

  ‘It will take more than courage,’ Lord Nadhru put in, ‘for you to cross it.’

  ‘How so?’ Maram asked.

  ‘Because it is haunted,’ Lord Nadhru said. ‘There’s something in there that devours men. No one who has ever gone into it has ever come out again.’

  Now Master Juwain looked at me as I felt his belly suddenly tighten. But his steely will kept his fear from overcoming him; I smiled at him to honor his courage, and he smiled back.

  To Lord Issur I said, ‘Nevertheless, we will go into it.’

  ‘No, you mustn’t,’ he said.

  Your father,’ I told him, ‘has said that we must leave Ishka. But surely the choice of our route out of it is ours to make.’

  ‘Go back,’ he urged me. There was a tightness in his own voice which I suspected he didn’t like. ‘It is death to go into this bog.’

  ‘It is death for me to go into any of the passes if you follow so closely behind me.’

  ‘There are worse things than death,’ he said.

  I stared down into the misty depression but said nothing.

  ‘At least,’ Lord Issur went on, nodding at Master Juwain and Maram, ‘it will be your own death only. And you may die fighting with a sword in your hand.’

  Just then, Altaru let out a whinny of impatience, and I patted his trembling neck to steady him. ‘No, there’s been enough fighting,’ I said.

  ‘Master Juwain?’ Lord Issur called out. ‘Prince Maram Marshayk – what will you do?’

  In a voice as cool as the wind, Master Juwain affirmed that he would follow me into the bog. Maram looked at me for a long moment as our hearts beat together. And then, after taking a deep breath, he said that he would go with me, too. And then he muttered to the sky, ‘Ah, the Black Bog indeed – why don’t you just kill us here and save us the misery?’

  For a moment it seemed that the Ishkans might do exactly that. The eighteen knights each gripped their lances more tightly as they looked at Lord Nadhru and Lord Issur and waited for their command.

  You must understand,’ Lord Issur said to me, ‘that it would be death as well for me to lead my men into the bog.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘And that I will not do,’ he told me.

  I listened to the far-off howling of a wolf as I waited to see what he would do. Many miles before, I had foreseen that he might kill me on this very spot – and kill as well Master Juwain and Maram as witnesses to such a crime. But I had counted on him honoring Salmelu’s promise that I wasn’t to be harmed while on Ishkan soil. In the end, one is either a Valari or not.

  ‘We won’t follow where you’re going,’ he said. ‘There’s no need.’

  At this, many of his knights sighed gratefully. But Lord Nadhru edged his horse closer to us and let his hand rest upon the hilt of his sword. To Lord Issur, he said, ‘But what of the King’s command that Sar Valashu and his friends leave Ishka?’

  Again, Lord Issur pointed down into the bog. ‘That is no longer part of Ishka. It belongs to no kingdom on earth.’

  He turned to me and said, ‘Farewell, Valashu Elahad. You’re a brave man, but a foolish one. We’ll tell your countrymen, as we will our own, that you died in this accursed place.’

  There was nothing to do then but go down into the bog. I said farewell to Lord Issur, then urged Altaru down the hill. Master Juwain and Maram, with the pack horses tied behind their sorrels, followed behind me. And so, for a few hundred yards, did the Ishkans. They watched us through the wavering moonlight to make sure that we did as we had said we would.

  The slope of the hill gradually gave way to more even ground as we rode down into the depression. And the heather beneath our horses’ hooves gave way to other vegetation: sedges and grasses and various kinds of moss. There was no clear line demarcating the bog from the land around it. But there came a point where the air grew suddenly colder and smelled even more pungently of decay. There Altaru suddenly planted his hooves in the moist ground and let out a great whinny. He shook his head at the mist-covered terrain before us, and would not go any farther.

  ‘Come on, boy,’ I said as I patted his neck. ‘We have to do this.’

  Master Juwain and Maram came up to us, and thei
r horses pawed the ground uneasily, too.

  ‘Come on,’ I said again. ‘It won’t be so bad.’

  I tried to clear my feverish head as Master Juwain had taught me. Some part of the calm I achieved must have passed into Altaru, for he turned his head to look back at me with his great, trusting eyes. And then he began moving slowly forward, into the bog.

  The other horses followed him, and their hooves made moist squishing sounds in the cold ground. It was strange, I thought, that although the ground over which we rode oozed with water, it seemed solid enough to look at. In few places were there actually patches of standing water. These almost black meres we avoided easily enough as we kept pressing forward. Our path through the bog, while not perfectly straight, was direct enough that I was sure we would soon be out of it.

  I tried to keep us oriented toward the north so that we wouldn’t lose direction in this trackless waste. After a while, I looked back to fix our position by the hill where we had left the Ishkans. Although it was hard to see very far, even in the bright moonlight, I thought I could make out their forms far off as they watched us from the top of the hill. And then a mist came up, covering us as it obliterated all sight of them. When it pulled back a few minutes later, the hill seemed barren of knights, or, indeed, of any living thing. I couldn’t even perceive the jagged rocks along the hill’s crest. The hill itself seemed flatter and wider; it was as if the heavy air over the bog were like a spectacle maker’s lens that distorted the world around us.

  Val,’ Maram called out from behind me, ‘I feel sick – it’s like I’m falling.’

  I, too, felt a strange, sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. It was something like the time Asaru and I had jumped off the cliffs above Lake Silash into the dark, freezing waters. It seemed that the bog was pulling at us, pulling us down into the inconstant earth, even though at no point did its seeping water rise much above the horses’ fetlocks.

  ‘It will be all right,’ I said as the mist slid along the ground and wrapped its gray-black tendrils around us. ‘If we keep moving, it will be all right.’

  And then, even as the mist opened slightly and I looked up at the sky, I knew that it would not be all right. For something about this accursed opening in the earth was distorting the sight of the very stars. The brightest of them – Solaru, Aras and Varshara – seemed strangely dulled and slightly out of place. I blinked my eyes and shook my head in disbelief. And the feeling of falling down into an endless dark hole grew only stronger.

  ‘Maram,’ I said. ‘Master Juwain – there’s something wrong here!’

  I turned to tell them that we should stay close together. But when I peered through the swirling mist, I couldn’t see either of them. And that was very strange because I had thought they were no more than ten yards behind me.

  ‘Maram!’ I called out. ‘Master Juwain – where are you?’

  I stopped Altaru and listened as carefully as I could. But the bog was quiet and deathly still. Not even a cricket chirped.

  ‘Maram! Master Juwain!’

  The shock of being suddenly alone was like a hammer striking me beneath my ribs. For many moments, I had trouble breathing the dank, stifling air. Had both Maram and Master Juwain, I wondered, plunged into a quicksand that had instantly sucked them down without a sound? Had they simply vanished from the earth?

  I felt the sweat beading along my skin beneath my layers of armor and clothing. My whole body felt icy cold even as I shivered uncontrollably. For a moment, I covered my forehead and rubbed my fevered eyes. Was I mad? I wondered. Was I ill to my death and forever lost in this choking mist?

  ‘Altaru,’ I whispered as I stroked the coarse, long hair of his mane, ‘where are they? Can you smell them?’

  Altaru nickered nervously, then turned his head right and left. He pawed the sodden ground and waited for me to tell him what to do.

  ‘Maram! Master Juwain!’ I shouted. ‘Why can’t you hear me?’

  There came a booming sound then as if the whole earth was shaking. It took me a while to realize that it was only the beating of my heart and not some gigantic drum. And then Maram called to me – but not from behind me as I had expected. A moment later, the mist parted again, and I could see him and Master Juwain riding their horses barely twenty yards ahead of me.

  Why did you leave me?’ I called out as I rode up to them.

  ‘Leave you?’ Maram said. He leaned over on his horse and grasped my good arm with his as if to reassure himself that I was really there. ‘It was you who left us.’

  ‘Don’t play games, Maram,’ I said. ‘How did you get ahead of me?’

  ‘How did you get behind us?’

  Because I had no strength to argue, I just sat astride Altaru looking at him in relief. I had never thought that the sight of his thick, brown beard and weepy eyes could please me so greatly.

  Then Master Juwain came over to us and said, ‘There is something wrong with this place. I’ve never heard of anything like it. Why don’t we tie the horses together and stay closer to each other now?’

  Both Maram and I agreed that this was an excellent idea. With some rope that we found in one of the horses’ packs, we tied the sorrels close behind Altaru, and the pack horses behind them.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said, not wanting to spend another minute there. We must have come at least a couple of miles. It can’t be much more than that to drier ground.’

  Again, with me in the lead, we moved off toward what I thought was due north. In places, the mist was so thick that we couldn’t see more than ten feet in any direction. The ground beneath us now was mostly of large, spongy mosses that made sucking sounds as the horses trampled over them. The air was cold and wet and smelled of dark scents that were strange to me. There were no animals to be seen or to be heard either. Even so, as we made our way across the drowned sedges and grasses and muck, I felt something following us. Although I thought that it couldn’t be an animal – and certainly nothing like a wolf or a bear – I had an uneasy sensation that it could smell me from miles away even through the thickest of mists. And then I closed my eyes for a moment, and I was certain of nothing at all. For in my mind, I could see gray shapes on horseback riding hard in our pursuit. I was afraid that Lord Issur had changed his mind after all, and was coming to murder us.

  I pressed Altaru more urgently then; the other horses, tied to my saddle with short lengths of rope, quickened their paces. We rode in near-silence for what seemed a long time. I couldn’t guess how many miles we covered, for both time and distance in this terrible bog seemed to be different from that of the mountains and valleys in which I had spent my whole life. With every bit of sodden ground that we passed over, the sense that something or someone was following us grew stronger. I couldn’t understand why we hadn’t found the bog’s northern edge and the safety of Anjo. And then, even as the mist thinned a little, Maram let out a cry of terror because he had found something else.

  ‘Look!’ he said as he pointed at the ground ahead of us. ‘Oh, my – oh, my Lord!’

  Now the moonlight seemed to wax stronger for a moment as it fell upon a form half-sunken into the mosses and muck. It was a man, I saw, or rather the remains of one. His bones, gleaming a dull white, were spread out along the ground. His eyeless skull seemed to stare straight at us, and his finger joints were wrapped around the hilt of a great, rusted sword. Almost the whole of his skeleton was encased in a suit of slowly rotting, diamond-studded armor. Its hundreds of stones, although smeared with mud, still had some fire to them. They caught my eye with their sparkle even as Maram and Master Juwain drew up beside me.

  ‘Look!’ Maram said again. He pointed to the nearby skeleton of a horse lying down among the mosses. ‘How long do you think this knight has been here?’

  I looked at the style of the armor, particularly at the aventail that hung down from the back of the knight’s helmet, and I said, ‘Perhaps a hundred years – perhaps more.’

  ‘Why do you think he came here?’

>   ‘That’s hard to say.’

  ‘What do you think killed him, then?’

  I studied the knight’s armor, looking for any sign that it had been pierced or crushed. I shrugged my shoulders, then shook my head.

  ‘Do you think he got lost?’ Maram asked. ‘Do you think he ran out of food and starved to death?’

  There was a note of near-panic in his voice, and Master Juwain took hold of his arm and gently shook him. He said, ‘There are some things it’s better not to ask and better not to know. Now let’s leave this place before we unnerve each other completely.’

  Although Maram quickly agreed to that, he was already so unnerved that he didn’t even suggest looting the knight of his armor, as I feared he might. We rode hard then for an hour or so. At those rare moments when I could see the sky, I tried to steer by the stars. But they kept shifting about in strange new patterns that didn’t make sense to me. Master Juwain suggested trying to fix our position by the bright disk of the moon, and this I tried to do. But then, some miles from the spot where we had left the knight, I looked up to see half the moon missing as if some great beast had taken a bite out of it. I shook my head in disbelief, and sat there on top of Altaru blinking my eyes.

  ‘Perhaps it’s only an eclipse,’ Master Juwain said to encourage me.

  I looked at him and smiled as I shook my head. And then, as Maram let out a shriek of terror, I looked up at the sky again, and the moon was completely gone.

  ‘Let’s ride,’ I said. ‘Let’s find a way out of here before we all lose our minds.’

  And so yet again we set out in a direction that might have been north, south, east or west – or some entirely new direction that would take us nowhere forever. We rode hard for what seemed many hours. There was nothing to do but listen to the splashing that the horses made and breathe the chill air. Once, the stars returned to their familiar positions within their ancient constellations, and more than once, the full moon again burned a silvery circle through the black sky. We might have taken comfort from this bright disk, but then, as we were gazing up at it, a dark shape like that of a dragon or an impossibly huge bat flew straight across it. And then a moment later the moon vanished, and the mist closed around us like a wet, gray shroud.