The Lightstone: The Silver Sword Read online

  ‘What wonders would we behold,’ he asked us, ‘if only we had the eyes to see them?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Maram said as he yawned and drank the last of his brandy, ‘I’m afraid my eyes have seen enough of day for one day, if you know what I mean. While I don’t expect anyone’s sympathy, I must tell you that Lailaiu didn’t allow me much sleep. But I’m off to bed to replenish my store of it. And to behold her in my dreams.’

  He stood up, yawned again, rubbed his eyes and then patted Alphanderry’s head. ‘And that, my friend, is the only part of this wonderful tapestry of yours I care to see tonight.’

  Because we were all quite as tired as he, we lay back against our furs and wrapped ourselves with our cloaks against the chill drizzle – everyone except Kane who had the first watch. I fell asleep to the sight of Flick fluttering about the fire like a blazing butterfly, even as I rested my hand on the hilt of my sword, which I kept at my side. Although I dreaded the dreams the Lord of Lies might send me, I slept well. That night, in my dreams, when I was trapped in a cave as black as death itself, I drew forth Alkaladur. The sword’s fierce white light fell upon the dragon waiting in the darkness there, with its huge, folded wings and iron-black scales. Its radiance allowed me to see the dragon’s only vulnerability: the knotted, red heart which throbbed like a bloody sun. And in seeing my seeing of his weakness, the dragon turned his great, golden eyes away from me in fear. And then, in a thunder of wings and great claws striking sparks against stone, he vanished down a tunnel leading into the bowels of the earth.

  The next morning, after a breakfast of porridge and blackberries fortified with some walnuts that Liljana had held in reserve, we set out in good spirits. We rode across fallow fields and little dirt roads, neither seeking out the occasional farmhouses we came across or trying to avoid them. This part of Surrapam, it seemed, was not the most populated. Broad swaths of forest separated the much narrower strips of cultivated land and settlements from each other. Although the roads through the giant, moss-hung trees were good enough, if a little damp, I wondered what it would be like when we reached the mountains, where we might find no roads at all.

  Maram, too, brooded about this. As we paused to make a midmorning meal out of the clumps of blackberries growing along the roadside, he pointed ahead of us and said, ‘How are we to take the horses across the mountains if there are no roads for them? The Crescent Mountains, Val?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘we’ll find a way.’

  Kane, whose face was so covered with berry juice that he looked as if he had torn apart a deer with his large teeth, grinned at him and said, ‘If we find the mountains impassable, we can always go around them.’

  He pointed out that this great mountain chain, which ran in a broad crescent from the southern reaches of the Red Desert up Ea’s west coast through Hesperu and Surrapam, thinned and gave out altogether a hundred and fifty miles to the north of us in Eanna. We could always journey in that direction, he said, before rounding the farthermost point of the mountains and turning back south and east for Khaisham.

  ‘But that would add another three hundred miles to our journey!’ Maram groaned. ‘Let’s at least try crossing the mountains first.’

  At this, Atara laughed and said, ‘Your laziness is giving you courage.’

  ‘It would give me more if you could see a road through the mountains. Can you?’

  But in answer, Atara popped a fat blackberry into her mouth and slowly shook her head.

  As we set out again, I wondered at the capriciousness of each of our gifts and the various gelstei that quickened them. Among us, we now had six; only Alphanderry lacked a stone, and so great were our hopes after my gaining Alkaladur that we were sure he would find a purple gelstei somewhere between Surrapam and Khaisham. Although Master Juwain brought forth his varistei with greater and greater frequency, he admitted that drawing upon its deepest healing properties might be the work of a lifetime. Kane, of course, kept his black stone mostly hidden and his doubts about using it secret as well. Liljana’s blue figurine might indeed aid her in mindspeaking, but there were no dolphins or whales to be found in Ea’s interior, and none among us with her talent. As she had promised to look away from the running streams of each of our thoughts unless invited to dip into them, she had little opportunity to gain any sort of mastery of her stone. As for Atara, she gazed into her scryer’s sphere as often as I searched the sky for the sun. What she saw there, however, remained a mystery. I gathered that her visions were as uncertain as blizzards in spring, and blew through her with sometimes blinding fury.

  Maram’s talent proved to be the most fickle of any of ours – and the most neglected. Where he should have been growing more adept in using his firestone, he seemed almost to have forgotten that he possessed it. As he had said, his dreams were now of Lailaiu; at any one time, I thought, he was able to pour his passions into one vessel only. At the end of the day, after we had covered a good twenty-five miles through a gradually deepening drizzle, he tried to make a fire for us with his gelstei. But the red crystal brightened not even a little and remained dead in his hands.

  ‘The wood is too wet,’ he said as he knelt over a pile of it that he had made. ‘There’s too little light coming through these damn clouds.’

  ‘Hmmph, you’ve gotten a fire out of your crystal before with as little light,’ Atara chided him. ‘I should think the test of it is at times such as these rather than in waiting for perfect conditions.’

  ‘I didn’t know I was being tested,’ Maram fired back.

  ‘Our whole journey is a test for all of us,’ Atara told him. ‘And all our lives may someday depend on your firestone.’

  Her words cut deep into me and remained in my mind as I fell asleep that night. For I had a sword that I must learn to wield – and not by crossing blades with Kane every night during our fencing practice. Although Alkaladur might indeed be hard enough to slice through the hardest steel, it had more vital powers that I was only beginning to sense. It would take all my will, I thought, all my awareness and concentration of my lifefire to find myself in the silvery substance of the sword and it in me.

  Morning brought with it a little sun, which lasted scarcely long enough for us to saddle the horses and break camp. It began to rain again, but much of its sting was taken away by the needles of the towering trees above us. Here were hemlocks and spruce two hundred feet high, and great King Firs perhaps even higher. They formed a vast shield of green protecting against wind and water, and sheltering the many squirrels, foxes and birds that lived here. I might have been content to ride through this lovely forest another month, for its smells of mosses and wildflowers pleased me greatly. Soon, however, the trees gave way to more farmland, cut with numerous streams running down from the mountains. In this more open country, the rain found us easy targets, and pelted us with icy drops that streaked down through the sky like silver arrows. It soaked our garments, making a misery of what should have been an easy ride. By late afternoon, with the ground rising steeply toward the mountains’ foothills, we were all of us considering knocking on the door of some stout farmhouse and asking refuge for the night.

  ‘But if we do that,’ I said to my friends as we stopped to water the horses by a stream, ‘these poor people will have to feed us, and they’ve nothing to spare.’

  ‘Perhaps we could feed them,’ Atara suggested. ‘We’ve plenty to spare.’

  Liljana cast her a troubled look and said, ‘If travelers came through the Wendrush offering food to their hosts, what would they think?’

  ‘Ha,’ Kane said, ‘if travelers came through the Wendrush offering food to the Kurmak, they’d likely be put to the sword for the insult of it.’

  Although Atara didn’t respond to this remark about her people, her grim face suggested it might be true.

  ‘I have an idea,’ Maram said. ‘It’s time we began inquiring if anyone hereabouts knows of a road through the mountains. If anyone happens also to offer us shelter and also ha
s enough food, we’ll accept. Otherwise we’ll ride on.’

  It was a good plan, I thought, and the others agreed. We spent the next few hours riding from farmhouse to farmhouse, even as the rain grew stronger. But none of the Surrapamers knew of the road we sought. Most of them did offer us lodgings for the night, even though their sunken faces and bony bodies told us that this was an act of pride and politesse they could ill afford. It amazed me that they were willing to succor us at all, for we were strangers from distant lands of which few had heard; we were girt for war and riding across their fields at a time when many of their kinsmen had been taken by war – and many more might soon be. I thanked our stars that all their knights and warriors had ridden off, and so left these brave people little more than goodwill, and faith in our goodwill, with which to face us.

  But as the day faded toward a gray, rainy evening, it seemed that I had given my thanks too soon. Just after we had knocked on the door of yet another farmhouse, a company of armed men came thundering down the road from the east and turned onto the farm’s muddy lane. There were twenty of them, and they all wore rusted mail with no surcoat to cover it or identify their domains or houses. Shabby knights they seemed, and yet their lances appeared sharp enough and their swords ready at hand. Although they were quite as gaunt as the rest of their countrymen, they sat straight in their saddles and rode with good discipline.

  ‘Who are you?’ their leader called out to us as his large war horse kicked up clots of mud and came to a halt ten yards from us. He himself was a large man, with a thick gray beard and braided gray plaits hanging down from beneath his open-faced helmet. ‘What are you doing in our land?’

  The door of the house having been shut behind us, I stood by Altaru as he stomped about and eyed this man’s horse ferociously. My companions had already mounted their horses; Atara was fingering her strung bow while Kane cast his black eyes on the men before us.

  I gave the knight our names, and asked him his. He presented himself as Toman of Eastdale; he said that he and his men had been riding off to join King Kaiman at Azam.

  ‘We’d heard there were strange knights about,’ Toman said, studying my surcoat and other accouterments. ‘We were afraid you might be Hesperuk spies.’

  ‘Do we look like spies?’ I said to him.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ he admitted graciously. ‘But not everyone is who they seem. The Hesperuks haven’t won half our kingdom through force of arms alone.’

  I pulled myself on top of Altaru and patted his neck to steady him. To Toman, I said, ‘We’re not Kallimun priests, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ he said, ‘but that is for the King to decide. I’m afraid you’ll have to lay down your arms and come with us.’

  At a nod from him, four of his knights rode up by his side with their lances held ready. Toman looked from Atara to Maram and then back at me. ‘Please give me your sword, Sar Valashu.’

  ‘I’ll give you mine,’ Kane growled as his eyes flashed and his hand moved quick as a snake’s to draw his sword.

  ‘Kane!’ I said. With almost miraculous control, Kane caught himself in mid-motion and stared at me. ‘Kane, don’t draw on him!’

  But all of Toman’s knights had now drawn their swords. Unlike their armor, they showed no spot of rust.

  ‘You must understand,’ Toman said to me, ‘that we can’t allow you to go armed about our land – not with the Hesperuks knocking on our doors, too.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘but we’ve no desire to go riding about Surrapam at all – only to find a way to leave it.’

  I explained that we were journeying to the Library at Khaisham; I told him that we had made vows to seek the Lightstone along with a thousand others in King Kiritan’s hall in Tria.

  ‘We’ve heard of this quest,’ he said, pulling at his beard. ‘But how do we know that you have truly set out upon it?’

  I nudged Altaru forward, then drew forth the medallion that King Kiritan had given me. At the sight of this circle of gold, Toman’s eyes held wonder but no greed. Then, at my bidding, my companions approached to show their medallions as well. Toman’s knights, gathering around us, suddenly put away their swords at his bidding.

  ‘We must honor the impulse behind this quest, even if we do not believe in it,’ Toman said. ‘If you truly oppose the Crucifier, you’d do better to come to battle with us.’

  ‘That appears to be the thought of most of your countrymen,’ I said. Then I told him of meeting Thaman at Duke Rezu’s castle in Anjo, and his plea to the Valari.

  ‘You know Thaman of Bear Lake?’ one of Toman’s men asked in surprise. He was scarcely eighteen years old, and proved to be Toman’s grandson.

  ‘It seems you do,’ I said to him.

  ‘He’s my betrothed’s cousin,’ the man said, ‘and a great warrior.’

  Our acquaintance with Thaman finally decided Toman. He smiled grimly at us and said, ‘Very well, you’re free to go, then. But please leave our land before you frighten anyone else.’

  ‘We’d leave it faster if we knew of a road through the mountains.’

  Toman pointed off through the rain and dense greenery surrounding the farm and said, ‘There is a road – it’s about ten miles southeast of here. I would show it to you, but we’ve another hour before it’s dark and must ride on. But my other grandson, Jaetan, will take you to it if you tell him of our meeting and my wishes.’

  He proceeded to give us directions to his estate. Then he said, ‘Well, we’re off to the assembly at Iram. Are you sure you won’t join us?’

  ‘Thank you, no – we have our road, and it leads east.’

  ‘Then farewell, Sar Valashu. Perhaps we’ll meet in better times.’

  And with that, he and his men turned their horses and rode off down the road to the west.

  Toman’s ‘estate’, when we found it an hour later, proved to be nothing more than a rather large, fortified house overlooking a barn and fields surrounded by a high fence of sharpened wooden poles. As he had promised, his family provided us shelter for the night. Toman’s daughter and two grandsons were all that was left to him, his son having died in the battle of the Maron and two granddaughters taken by fever last winter. Toman’s second grandson, Jaetan, was a freckle-faced redhead about thirteen years old – too young to ride off with his brother to war. And yet, I thought, I had gone to war at that age. It gladdened my heart, even as I filled with not a little pride, that even in the hour of their greatest need, the Surrapamers were not so war-loving as we Valari.

  After we had laid our sleeping furs on the dry straw in the barn, Jaetan’s mother, Kandra, insisted on calling us into the house for a meal, even as we had feared. But as they had nothing more than a few eggs, some blackberry jam and flour to be baked into bread, our dinner was a long time in coming. Kane solved the problem of our eating up Toman’s family’s reserves in the most spectacular manner: as he had with Meliadus, he grabbed up his bow and stole off into the darkening woods. A half hour later, he returned with a young buck slung across his broad shoulders. It was a great feat of hunting, Kandra exclaimed, especially so considering that the forest hereabouts had been nearly emptied of deer.

  And so we had a feast that night and everyone was happy. Kandra kept the remains of the deer, which more than made up for the bread that she baked us. In the morning, we set out well fed, with Jaetan leading the way on a bony-looking old nag that was a little too big for him.

  After a couple of hours of riding up a gradually ascending dirt road, we came to a notch between two hills where the road seemed to disappear into a great, green wall of vegetation. Jaetan pointed into it and told us, ‘This is the old East Road. It’s said to lead into Eanna. But no one really knows because no one goes that way anymore.’

  ‘Except us,’ Maram muttered nervously.

  Jaetan looked at him and told him, ‘The road is good enough, I think. But you should be careful of the bears, Master Maram. It’s said that there are still many be
ars in the mountains.’

  ‘Oh, excellent,’ Maram said, staring into the woods. ‘Bears, is it now?’

  We thanked Jaetan for his hospitality, and then he turned to Kane and asked, ‘If you ever come back this way, will you teach me to hunt, sir?’

  ‘That I will,’ Kane promised as he reached out to rumple the boy’s hair. ‘That I will.’

  With a few backward glances, Jaetan then rode back toward his grandfather’s house and the warmth of the hearth that awaited him.

  ‘Well,’ Maram said, ‘if the old maps are right, we’ve sixty miles of mountains to cross before we reach Eanna. I suppose we’d better start out before the bears catch our scent.’

  But we saw no sign of bears all that day, nor the next nor even the one following that. The woods about us, though, were thick enough to have hidden a hundred of them. As the hills to either side of us rose and swelled into mountains, the giant trees of western Surrapam gave way to many more silver firs and nobles. These graceful evergreens, while not so tall as their lowland cousins, grew more densely. If not for the road, we would have been hard pressed to fight our way through them. This narrow muddy track had been cut along a snakelike course. And it turned like a snake, now curving south, now north, but always making its way roughly east as it gradually gained elevation. And with every thousand feet higher upon the green, humped earth on which we stood, it seemed that the rain poured down harder and the air fell colder.

  Making camp in these misty mountains was very much a misery. The needles of the conifers, the bushes, the mosses and ferns about our soaked sleeping furs – everything the eye and hand fell upon was dripping wet. That Maram failed yet again with his fire dispirited us even more. When the day’s first light fought its way through the almost solid grayness lying over the drenched earth each morning, we were glad to get moving again, if only because our exertions warmed our stiff bodies.

  Three times the road failed us, vanishing into a mass of vegetation that seemed to swallow it completely. And three times Maram complained that we were lost and would never see the sun again, let alone Khaisham.