The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom Page 28

  ‘But how can a man steal what is his?’

  ‘What do you mean? The Lightstone belongs to all of Ea.’

  ‘It belongs to him who made it.’

  I searched his face for the truth and his golden eyes seemed so bright and compelling that I didn’t know what to think.

  ‘The Lightstone,’ I finally said, ‘was brought here by Elahad and the Star People ages ago.’

  At this, Morjin laughed softly. But there was no mockery in his voice, only irony and sadness. He said, ‘You must know, Val – can I call you that? – you must know that is only a myth. I made the Lightstone myself late in the Age of Swords.’

  ‘But all the histories say that you stole it, and that Aramesh won it back at the Battle of Sarburn!’

  ‘The victors of that battle wrote the histories they wanted to write,’ he said. ‘And Aramesh was victorious – until death took him in its claws.’

  Here I couldn’t help staring at the claws of the dragon embroidered on his tunic.

  ‘The Lightstone belongs to me,’ he told me. ‘And you must help me regain it.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  ‘You will,’ he told me. ‘Scrying isn’t the greatest of my talents, but I’ll tell you this: someday you’ll deliver it into my hands.’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘You owe me your life,’ he told me. ‘A man who doesn’t repay his debts is a thief, is he not?’

  ‘No – there is no debt.’

  ‘And still you deny me!’ he thundered. Suddenly, he smacked his fist into his open hand. His face grew red and hard to look at. ‘Just as you still shelter one who is worse than a thief.’

  “What do you mean?’

  Who is that standing behind you?’ he said, pointing his finger at me.

  ‘What do you mean – there’s no one behind me!’

  But it seemed that there was. I turned to see a boy standing in the shadow that I cast upon the carpet. He was about six years old, with bold face bones, a shock of wild black hair and a scar shaped like a lightning bolt cut into his forehead.

  ‘There,’ Morjin said, stabbing at him with his long finger. ‘Why are you trying to protect him?’

  Morjin tried to step around me then to get at the boy. When I raised my arm to stop him, he touched my side with something sharp. I looked down to see that his finger had grown a long black claw tipped with a bluish substance that looked like kirax. My whole body began burning, and I suddenly couldn’t move.

  ‘Come here, Valashu,’ Morjin said. Quick as a snapping turtle, he grabbed up the boy and stood shaking him near the wall. But the boy spat in his face and managed to bite off his clawlike finger. Morjin looked at the gaping wound in his hand and said to me, ‘You’ll have to help me now.’

  ‘No, never!’ I said again through my clenched teeth.

  ‘Give me the arrow!’ Morjin told me.

  With one hand pinning the struggling boy against the wall, he reached out his other hand to me. I saw then that I really wasn’t holding Master Juwain’s book in my hand but an arrow fletched with raven feathers and tipped with a razor-sharp steel. It was the arrow that the unknown assassin had shot at me in the forest.

  ‘Thank you,’ Morjin said, taking it from me. He suddenly plunged it into the boy’s side, and we both screamed at the burning pain of it. In moments, the kirax froze the boy’s limbs so that he couldn’t move.

  ‘Do you have the hammer?’ Morjin said to me. ‘Do you have the nails?’

  He turned from the boy, and took from me the three iron spikes that I held in my left hand and the heavy iron maul in my right. I saw then that I had been mistaken, that there really was a door giving out into the room: it was a thick slab of oak set into the wall just next to the boy. Morjin used the hammer to nail his hands and legs to it. I couldn’t hear the ringing of iron against iron, so loud were the boy’s screams.

  ‘There,’ he said when he had finished crucifying him. He smiled sadly at me and continued, ‘And now you must give me what is mine.’

  ‘No!’ I cried out. ‘Don’t do this!’

  ‘A king,’ he said to me, ‘must sometimes punish, even as your father punished you. And a warrior must sometimes slay in pursuit of a noble end even as you have slain.’

  ‘But the boy! He’s done nothing – he’s innocent!’

  ‘Innocent? He’s committed a crime worse than treason or murder.’

  ‘What is this crime?’ I gasped.

  ‘He coveted the Lightstone for himself,’ he said simply. ‘He couldn’t bear the gift that the One bestowed upon him, and so when he heard his grandfather speak of the golden cup that heals all wounds, he dreamed of keeping it for himself.’

  ‘No – that’s not true!’

  Morjin moved closer to the boy and let the blood streaming from his pierced hand run into his open mouth.

  ‘No, don’t,’ I said.

  ‘You must help me,’ he said to me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You must do me homage, Valashu Elahad, son of kings. You must surrender to me what is mine.’

  The whole of my body below my neck couldn’t move, but I could still shake my head.

  ‘You must open your heart to me, Valashu. Only then will you find peace.’

  His eyes now began to burn like two golden suns. Long black claws like those of a dragon grew from his hands in place of fingers.

  ‘Don’t hurt him!’ I cried out. ‘You can’t hurt him!’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  ‘No, you can’t – this is only a dream.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ he asked. ‘Then see if you can wake up.’

  So saying, he turned to the terrified boy and made cooing sounds of pity as he tore him apart. When he was finished, he held the boy’s still-beating heart in his claws so that I could see it.

  You killed him! I wanted to scream. But the only sound that came from my ravaged throat was a burning sob.

  ‘It’s said that if you die in your dreams,’ he told me, ‘you die in life.’

  He looked at the throbbing heart and said, ‘But no, Val, I haven’t killed him, not yet.’

  And with that, he placed the heart back into the boy’s chest and sealed the wound with a kiss from his golden lips. The boy opened his eyes then and stared at Morjin hatefully.

  ‘Do you see?’ he said to me with a heavy sigh. ‘I can’t demand that you open your heart to me. Such gifts must be truly given.’

  I bit my lip then and tasted blood. The dark, salty liquid moistened my burning throat, and I cried out, ‘That will never happen!’

  ‘No?’ he asked me angrily. ‘Then you will truly die.’

  Now his head grew out from his body, huge and elongated and red and covered with scales. His eyes were golden-red and glowed like coals. His forked tongue flicked out once as if tasting the fear in the air. Then he opened his jaws to let out a gout of fire that seared the boy from his head to his bloody feet. The boy screamed as his flesh began to char; Morjin screamed out his hatred in his fiery roar. And I screamed too as I pleaded with him to stop.

  But he didn’t stop. He let the fire pour out of his fearsome mouth as if venting ages of bitterness and hate. I felt my own skin beginning to blister; I knew that Morjin would soon renew it with the touch of his lips so that he could burn me again and again until I finally surrendered to him or died. I sensed that if I fought against this terrible burning, it would go on forever. And so I surrendered to it. I let its heat burn deep into my blood; I felt it burning the kirax in my blood. And suddenly I found myself able to move again. I swung my fist like a mace at the side of Morjin’s head; it was like striking iron. But it stunned him long enough so that I could rush through the flames streaming from his mouth to the blackened, bloody door. The boy was now all black and twisted and screaming for me to help him. I somehow wrenched him free from the door with a great tearing of flesh and bones. And then, holding him close to me where I could feel as my own the wild beating of his heart and his screams, I opened
the door.

  I opened my eyes then to see Atara bending over me and pressing a cool, wet cloth against my head, which she held cradled in her lap. I was lying back against my sweat-soaked sleeping furs near the fire. It took me a moment to realize that I was screaming still. I closed my mouth then and bit my bloody lip against the burning in my body. Master Juwain, brewing up some more tea, held my hand in his, testing my pulse. Maram sat beside me pulling at his thick beard in concern.

  ‘We couldn’t wake you,’ he told me. ‘But you were screaming loud enough to wake the dead.’

  I squeezed Atara’s hand to thank her for watching over me, and then I sat up. I found that I was still clutching my other hand against my heart, but the wounded boy I thought to find there was gone.

  ‘Are you all right now?’ Maram asked me.

  I blinked my eyes against the burning there. I looked out at the trees, which were immense gray shapes in the faint light filtering through the forest. The crickets were chirping in the bushes, and a few birds were singing the day’s first songs. It was that terrible time between death and morning when the whole world struggled to fight its way out of night.

  I stood up, wincing against the flames that still scorched my skin. I took a step away from the fire.

  ‘It’s still night,’ Atara said. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Down to the stream, to bathe,’ I said. I wanted to wash away the charred skin from my hands and let the stream’s rushing waters cool my burning body.

  ‘You shouldn’t go alone,’ she told me. ‘Here, let me get my bow –’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘It will be all right – I’ll take my sword.’

  So saying, I bent to grab up my kalama, which I always kept sheathed next to my bed when I was sleeping. And then I walked off by myself toward the stream.

  It was eerie moving through the gray-lit woods. I imagined I saw dark gray shapes watching me through the trees. But when I looked more closely I saw that they were only bushes or shrubs: arrowwood and witch hazel and others whose names I couldn’t quite remember. I plodded along the forest floor and crunched over twigs and old leaves. I smelled animal droppings and ferns and the sweaty remnants of my own fear.

  And then suddenly I broke free from the trees and came upon the stream. It gurgled along its rocky course like a silver ribbon beneath the stars. I looked up at the glowing sky in deep gratitude that I could see these blazing points of light. In the east, the Swan constellation was just rising over the dark rim of the forest. Near it shone Valashu, the Morning Star – so bright that it was almost like a moon. I kept my eyes fixed upon this familiar star that gave me so much hope even as I bent to lave the stream’s cool water over my head.

  And then I felt a cold hand touch my shoulder. For a moment I was angry because I thought that Maram or Atara had followed me. But when I turned to tell them that I really did want to be alone, I saw that the man standing beside me was Morjin.

  ‘Did you really think you could escape me?’ he asked.

  I stared at his golden hair and his great golden eyes, now touched with silver in the starlight. The claws were gone from his hands, and he was wearing a wool traveling cloak over his dragon-emblazoned tunic.

  ‘How did you come here?’ I gasped.

  ‘Don’t you know? I’ve been following you since Mesh.’

  I gripped the hilt of my sword as I stared at him. Was this still a dream? I wondered. Was it an illusion that Morjin had cast like a painter covering a canvas with brightly colored pigments? He was the Lord of Illusions, wasn’t he? But no, I thought, this was no illusion. Both he and the fiery words that hissed from his mouth seemed much too real.

  ‘I must congratulate you on finding your way out of my room,’ he said. ‘It surprises me that you did, though it pleases me even more.’

  ‘It pleases you? Why?’

  ‘Because it proves to me that you’re capable of waking up.’

  He gave me to understand that much of what had passed in my dream had been only a test and a spur to awaken my being. This seemed the greatest of the lies that he had told me, but I listened to it all the same.

  ‘I told you that I was kind,’ he said. ‘But sometimes compassion must be cruel.’

  ‘You speak of compassion?’

  ‘I do speak of it because I know it better than any man.’

  He told me that my gift for feeling others’ sufferings and joys had a name, and that was valarda. This meant both the heart of the stars and the passion of the stars. Here he pointed up at the Morning Star and the bright Solaru and Altaru of the Swan constellation. All the Star People, he said, who still lived among these lights had this gift. As did Elahad and others of the Valari who had come to Ea long ago. But the gift had mostly been lost during the savagery of many thousands of years. Now only a few blessed souls such as myself knew the terrible beauty of valarda.

  ‘I know it, too,’ he told me. ‘I have suffered from the valarda for a long time. But there is a way to make the suffering end.’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  He cupped his hands in front of his heart then, and they glowed with a soft golden radiance like that of a polished bowl. He said, ‘Do you burn, Valashu? Does the kirax from my arrow still torment you? Would you like to be cured of this poison and your deeper suffering as well?’

  ‘How?’ I asked again. Despite the coolness spraying up from the stream, my whole body raged with fever.

  ‘I can relieve you of your gift,’ Morjin told me. ‘Or rather, the pain of it.’

  Here he pointed at the kalama that I still held sheathed in my hand. ‘You see, the valarda is like a double-edged sword. But so far, you’ve known it to cut only one way.’

  He told me that a true Valari, which was his name for the Star People, could not only experience others’ emotions but make them feel his own.

  ‘Do you hate, Valashu? Do you sometimes clench your teeth against the fury inside you? I know that you do. But you can forge your fury into a weapon that will strike down your enemies. Shall I show you how to sharpen the steel of this sword?’

  ‘No!’ I cried out. ‘That is wrong! It would be twisting the bright blade that the One himself forged. The valarda may be double-edged, as you say. But I must believe that it is sacred. And I would never pervert it by turning it inside-out to harm anyone. No more than I would use my kalama to kill anyone.’

  ‘But you will kill again with that sword,’ he said, pointing at my kalama. ‘And with the valarda, as well. You see, Valashu, inflicting your own pain on others is the only way not to feel their pain – and your own.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment as I looked inside for this terrible sword that Morjin had spoken of. I feared that I might find it. And this was me worst torment I had ever known.

  ‘What you say, all that you say, is wrong,’ I gasped out. ‘It’s evil.’

  ‘Is it wrong to slay your enemies, then? Isn’t it they who are evil for opposing your noblest dream?’

  ‘You don’t know my dream.’

  ‘Don’t I? Isn’t it your dearest hope to end war? Listen to me, Valashu, listen as you’ve never listened before: there is nothing I desire more than an end to these wars.’

  I listened to the rushing of the stream and the words from his golden lips. I was afraid that he might be telling me the truth. He went on to say that many of the kings and nobles of Ea loved war because it gave them the power of life and death over others. But they, he said, were of the darkness while dreamers such as he and I were of the light.

  ‘It’s death itself that’s the great enemy,’ he said. ‘Our fear of it. And that is why we must regain the Lightstone. Only then can we bring men the gift of true life.’

  ‘It is written in the Laws,’ I said, ‘that only the Elijin and the Galadin shall have such life.’

  Morjin’s eyes seemed to blaze out hatred into the dim gray light of the dawn. He told me, ‘All the Galadin were once Elijin even as the Elijin were once men. But they have grown jealous of our ki
nd. Now they would keep men such as you from making the same journey that they once did.’

  ‘But I don’t seek immortality,’ I told him.

  ‘That,’ he said softly, ‘is a lie.’

  ‘All men die,’ I said.

  ‘Not all men,’ he told me, smoothing the folds from his cloak.

  ‘It’s no failing to fear death,’ I said. ‘True courage is –’

  ‘Lie to me if you will, Valashu, but do not lie to yourself.’ He grasped my arm, and his delicate fingers pressed into me with a frightening strength. ‘Death makes cowards of us all. You may think that true courage is acting rightly even though afraid. But you act not according to what is right but because you are afraid of your fear and wish to expunge it by facing it like a wild man.’

  I didn’t know what to say to this, so I bit my lip in silence.

  ‘True courage,’ he said, ‘would be fearlessness. Isn’t this what you Valari teach?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘it is.’

  He smiled as if he knew everything about the Valari. And then he spoke the words to a poem I knew too well:

  And down into the dark,

  No eyes, no lips, no spark.

  The dying of the light,

  The neverness of night.

  ‘There is a way to keep the light burning,’ he told me as he gently squeezed my shoulder. ‘Let me show you the way.’

  His eyes were like windows to other worlds from which men had journeyed long ago – and on which men who were more than men still lived. I felt his longing to return there. It was as real as the wind or the stream or the earth beneath my feet. I felt his immense loneliness in the bittersweet aching of my own. Something unbearably bright in him called to me as if from the wild, cold stars. I knew that I had the power to save him from a dread almost as dark as death even as I had saved Atara from the hill-men. And this knowledge burned me even more terribly than had his dragon fire or the kirax in my veins.

  ‘Let me show you,’ he said, forming his hands into a cup again. A fierce golden light poured out of them, almost blinding me.

  ‘Servants I have many,’ he told me. ‘But friends I have none.’

  I felt him breathing deeply as I drew in a quick, ragged breath.