The Diamond Warriors Read online

  ‘Valashu,’ he whispered again, ‘I wish you had seen your mother’s eyes when we crucified and ravished her in your father’s hall.’

  A dark fire leaped in my heart then, and I fought with all my will to keep it from burning out of my arms and hands into my sword. But my restraint availed me nothing. Salmelu roared out in triumph, and then he was Salmelu no more. The blackness of his being metamorphosed yet again, this time into a thing of scales, wings and a savagely swaying tail.

  ‘The dragon!’ Daj cried out from beside me. ‘The dragon returns!’

  I set my hand on Daj’s shoulder, and shouted to Liljana, ‘Take the children into the trees!’

  I could not spare a moment to watch Liljana gather up Daj and Estrella and carry out my command. The Ahrim, now shaped as a dragon, even as Daj had said, hung in the air before me with an almost delicate poise. It seemed to feed on the fire inside me, and make it its own; in mere moments it grew into a raging, red beast fifty feet in length. I recognized this terrible dragon as Angraboda, into whose belly I had once plunged my sword in the deeps of Argattha. And now Angraboda regarded me with her fierce, cold, vengeful eyes. Then her leather wings beat at the air in a thunder of wind as she flew straight up toward the sun. She grew vaster and vaster and ever darker, and her bloated body blocked out the sun’s light and seemed to fill all the sky. She opened her mighty jaws to spit down fire at me and burn me into nothingness. And I felt the hateful fire building inside me, inciting me into a madness to destroy her.

  ANGRABODA!

  From a thousand miles and years away, I heard myself cry out this name as I readied myself to slay this beast yet again. But dragons cannot be harmed by such fire; only the fulgor of the red gelstei or the stars can pierce through their iron-like scales to a dragon’s heart. And so I drew in a deep breath and willed the fire within me to blaze hotter, purer and brighter until I could not hold it anymore, and it poured out into my sword. For one perfect moment, Alkaladur flared with all the brilliance of a star. Maram and Master Juwain cried out in pain at this fierce light. And so did the dragon. Then her jaws closed, and so did her great, golden eyes, and for a moment I thought that I had slain her. But the Ahrim, I sensed, might be unkillable. All at once the dragon’s immensity dissolved again into a blackness that sifted down through the air like soot. And as it fell to earth, the powdery-like particles of its essence reassembled themselves into the form of yet another man – or rather, a once-bright being who was something more than a man.

  ‘Elahad,’ he called out to me in a strong, beautiful voice that carried all the command of death. ‘The common murderer who would be king.’

  Morjin, for such the Ahrim had now become, stood before me and bowed his gold-haired head to me. His golden eyes twisted screws of hate into my eyes, and I could not look away from him, nor could I lift my sword to block his fearful gaze. From somewhere off in the trees, Daj shouted out in detestation and dread of his old master. Atara, to my right, fitted an arrow to her bowstring and loosed it at him. But the arrow sailed right through his shadowed substance as if it were a cloud.

  He paid her no attention, but only continued to stare at me. He appeared as he had been in his youth before his fall: fine of feature, golden-skinned and graceful in his bearing. The compassion in his eyes gleamed almost like gold.

  ‘Morjin!’ I shouted out. At last, I managed to raise up my sword.

  His smile chilled me. Then he opened his mouth and breathed at me, almost as if he were blowing a kiss. No fire shot forth to scorch me, but only a bit of blackness from which he was made. I lifted my sword still higher, but I moved in vain, for it flowed around my bright blade as oil would a stick. And then his breath fell upon my head and arms, smothering me, blinding me. An unbearable cold burned through my skin deep into my bones. I stood as for an hour inside a lightless and airless cavern, gasping and coughing for breath.

  ‘Valashu Elahad, look at me!’ his hateful voice commanded. All at once, the black fog cleared from around my head, and I could not keep myself from staring at him. ‘You cannot defeat me.’

  My fingers seemed frozen around the hilt of my sword, with all my joints locked and shrieking in pain. I could not even blink my eyes. My heart, though, still beat within me, quick and hard and hurtful, almost as with a will of its own. At last I found my will, and I raised back my sword.

  ‘Val, do not!’ Atara called out from somewhere near me. ‘Do not!’

  I could not listen to her. I looked on in loathing as Morjin smiled at me and his features took on their true cast to reveal the hideous man that he had become: sagging flesh all pale with rot, stringy white hair and bloodshot eyes raging with hate. I struck out with my sword then, driving the gleaming point straight into his face. Nothing stopped this murderous thrust; it was as if I drove my sword through pure black air. And yet I felt a resistance to my sword’s silustria and its cutting edges, not of flesh and bone, but of spite and pain and cold. I fought this piercing numbness, and pulled back my sword. I stared at it in fury, for somehow the Ahrim’s substance had turned it black, like frozen iron. Then I stared at Morjin in horror, for even as I watched, his face became as my own, only blackened and twisted with hate.

  ‘You cannot defeat me,’ he said to me again.

  Or perhaps it was the Ahrim that spoke these words to me, or myself – I could not tell. But some irresistible force moved the features of the thing standing before me.

  There is a fear so terrible and deep that it turns one’s insides into a mass of sickened flesh and makes it seem that life cannot go on another moment. I stood there shaking and sweating and wanting to vomit up my very bowels. I knew that the dark thing standing before me had the power to kill me – and worse. But I seemed to have no power over it.

  ‘Val, fight!’ Maram shouted out from my left.

  I was vaguely aware that he had sheathed his sword and taken out his firestone, for the long ruby crystal caught the sun’s rays in a glint of red light. And then, guided by Maram’s hand and heart, the crystal drank up the sun’s blaze and gave it out as a bolt of pure fire that streaked straight into the Ahrim. I felt the heat of this blast, but the Ahrim felt nothing. The face that seemed so very much my own just smiled at Maram as the black cavern of its mouth seemed ready to drink up more of Maram’s fire and his very life – and the lives of Master Juwain and Atara, too.

  ‘Yes, Val, fight!’ Atara called out to me, as she stood in a spray of crushed flowers by my side.

  I stared at the dreadful thing wearing my face, and I wanted to fight it with every beat of my heart and down to my last breath. But how could I destroy something that was already nothing?

  ‘You know the way!’ Atara called to me again. ‘As it was at the farmhouse with the droghul!’

  I glanced off into the trees, where Estrella stood looking at me. She seemed to have no fear of the Ahrim, but a great and terrible concern for me. I could feel her calling out to me in silence that I must always remember who I really was.

  Then the Ahrim moved nearer to me – drawn, I sensed, by my blood and the kirax burning through it. Burning, yes, always hot and hateful, but something in this bitter poison seemed to awaken me to the immensity of pain that was life. And not just my own, but that of the trees standing around me tall and green, and the birds that made their nests among them, and the bees buzzing in the flowers, and everything. But life is much more than suffering. In all the growing things around me, I felt as well a wild joy and overflowing delight in just being alive. This was my gift, to sense in other creatures and people their deepest passions; Kane had once named this magic connection of mine as the valarda.

  ‘Valashu,’ the Ahrim seemed to whisper to me as it raised up its arm and opened out its fingers to me. ‘Take my hand.’

  But Atara’s words sounded within me, too, as did Estrella’s silence and the song of the tanager piping out sweet and urgent from somewhere nearby. I finally caught sight of this little bird across the clearing to my right, perched high in th
e branches of a willow tree. It was a scarlet tanager, all round and red like the brightest of flowers. In the way it cocked its head toward me and sang just for me, it seemed utterly alive. Its heart beat even more quickly than did my own, like a flutter of wings, and it called me to take joy in the wild life within myself. There, too, I remembered, blazed a deep and unquenchable light.

  ‘Valashu Elahad.’

  The Ahrim, I sensed, like a huge, blood-blackened tick, wanted my life. Very well, then I would give it that, and something more.

  ‘Val!’ Maram cried out to me. ‘Do what Atara said! What are you waiting for?’

  At the farmhouse, Morjin had been unable to bear my anguish of love for my murdered family. What was it, I wondered, that the Ahrim could not bear? Its immense and terrifying anguish seemed to pour out through its black eyes and outstretched hand.

  ‘Now, Val!’ Master Juwain called to me. He stood staring at the Ahrim as he lifted his glowing, emerald crystal toward me in order to quicken the fires of my life.

  Kane had told me, too, that I held inside my heart the greatest of weapons. It was what my gift became when I turned my deepest passion outward and wielded the valarda to open others’ hearts and brighten their souls. As I wielded it now. With Master Juwain feeding me the radiance of his green gelstei, and my other friends passing to me all that was beautiful and bright from within their own beings, I struck out at the Ahrim. Master Juwain believed that darkness could never be defeated by the sword, but he meant a length of honed steel and destruction, and not a sword of light.

  ELAHAD!

  For what seemed an age, all that was within me passed into the Ahrim in a blinding brilliance. But it was not enough. The Ahrim did not disintegrate into a shower of sparks, nor shine like the sun, nor did it disappear back into the void, like a snake swallowing its own tail. I sensed that I had only stunned it, if that was the right word, for it suddenly shrank into a ball of blackness and floated over toward an oak tree at the edge of the clearing. It seemed still to be watching me.

  ‘You have no power over me!’ I shouted at it. But my angry words seemed to make it grow a bit larger and even blacker, if that was possible.

  Atara came up to me then, and laid her hand on my ice-cold hands, still locked onto the hilt of my sword. And she said to me, ‘Do not look at it. Close your eyes and think of the child that someday we’ll make together.’

  I did as she asked, and my heart warmed with the brightest of hopes. And when I opened my eyes, the Ahrim had disappeared.

  ‘But where did it go?’ Maram asked, coming over to me. ‘And will it return?’

  Daj came running out of the trees toward me, followed by Liljana and Estrella. All my friends gathered around me. And I told them, ‘It will return. In truth, I am not sure it is really gone.’

  As I stood there trying to steady my breathing, I still felt the dark thing watching me, from all directions – and from my insides, as if it could look out at me through my very soul.

  ‘But what is it?’ Daj asked yet again. He turned toward Alphanderry who had remained almost rooted to the clearing’s floor during the whole time of our battle. ‘You called it the Ahrim. What does that mean?’

  ‘Hoy, the Ahrim, the Ahrim – I do not know!’

  ‘I suppose the name just came to you?’ Maram said, glaring at him.

  ‘Yes, it did. Like –’

  ‘Drops of blood on a cross!’ Maram snapped. ‘That thing is evil.’

  ‘So are all of Morjin’s illusions,’ Liljana said. ‘But that was no illusion.’

  ‘No, certainly not,’ Master Juwain said. Now he, too, touched his hand to my hands. He touched my face and told me, ‘Your fingers are frozen – and your nose and cheeks are frostbitten.’

  I would have looked at myself in Alkaladur’s shimmering surface, but the silustria was an ugly black and I could see nothing.

  ‘It was so cold,’ I said. ‘So impossibly cold.’

  I watched as the sun’s rays fell upon my sword and the blade slowly brightened to a soft silver. So it was with my dead-white flesh: the warm spring air thawed my face and hands with a hot pain that flushed my skin. Master Juwain held his green crystal over me to help the healing along. Soon I found that I could open and close my fingers at will, and I did not worry that they would rot with gangrene and have to be cut off. But forever after, I knew, I would feel the Ahrim’s terrible coldness burning through me, even as I did the kirax in my blood.

  A sudden gleam of my sword gave me to see a truth to which I had been blind. And I said to Alphanderry, with much anger, ‘You do know things about the Ahrim, don’t you? It has something to do with the Skadarak, doesn’t it?’

  At the mention of this black and blighted wood at the heart of Acadu, Alphanderry hung his head in shame. And then he found the courage to look at me as he said, ‘It was there, waiting, Val. During our passage, it attached itself to you. It has been following you ever since.’

  ‘Following!’ I half-shouted. ‘All the way to Hesperu, and back, to the Brotherhood’s school? And then here, to my home? Why could I not see it? And why could Abrasax not see it – he who can see almost everything?’

  Again, Alphanderry shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘But how is it,’ I demanded, ‘that you can see it?’

  It was Daj who answered for him. He passed his hand through Alphanderry’s watery-like form, and said, ‘But how not, since they are made of the same substance!’

  Master Juwain regarded the glimmering tones that composed Alphanderry’s being. He said, ‘Similar, perhaps, but certainly not the same.’

  I waved my hand at such useless speculations, and I called out to Alphanderry, ‘But why did you never tell me of this thing?’

  The look on his face was that of a boy stealing back to his room after dark. He said to me simply, ‘I didn’t want to worry you, Val.’

  ‘Oh, excellent, excellent!’ Maram muttered, shaking his head. ‘Well, I am worried enough for all of us, now. What I wonder is why that filthy Ahrim, whatever it is, attacked us here? And more important, what will keep it away?’

  But none of us, not even Alphanderry, had an answer to these questions. As it was growing late, it seemed the best thing we could do would be to leave these strange woods behind us as soon as possible.

  ‘Come,’ I said, clapping Maram on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go get some of that roast beef and beer you’ve been wanting for so long.’

  After that, I pulled myself up onto Altaru’s back, and my friends mounted their horses, too. I pointed the way toward Lord Harsha’s farm with all the command and assurance that I could summon. But as we rode off through the shadowed trees, I felt the dark thing called the Ahrim still watching me and still waiting, and I knew with heaviness in my heart that it would be no easy task for me to become king.

  2

  We came out of the woods with the late sun touching the farmland of the Valley of the Swans with an emerald blaze. To the west, the three great mountains, Telshar, Arakel and Vayu, rose up as they always had with their white-capped peaks pointing into the sky. Lord Harsha’s large stone house stood framed against the sacred Telshar: a bit of carved and mortared granite almost lost against the glorious work of stone that the Ieldra had sung into creation at the beginning of time. We caught Lord Harsha out weeding his wheatfield to the east of his house. When he heard the noise of our horses trampling through the bracken, he straightened up and shook his hoe at us as he peered at us with his single eye. He called out to us: ‘Who is it who rides out of the wildwood like outlaws at this time of day? Announce yourselves, or I’ll have to go and get my sword!’

  Lord Harsha, I thought, would prove a formidable opponent against outlaws – or anyone else – with only his iron-bladed hoe to wield as a weapon. Despite a crippled leg and his numerous years, his thick body retained a bullish power. And even though he wore only a plain woolen tunic, he bore on his finger a silver ring showing the four brilliant diamonds of a Valari lord. A black eyepatch co
vered part of his face; twelve battle ribbons had been tied to his long, white hair, and in all of Mesh, there were few warriors of greater renown.

  ‘Outlaws, is it?’ I called back to him. ‘Have our journeys really left us looking so mean?’

  So saying, I threw back the hood of my cloak and rode forward a few more paces. I came to the low wall edging Lord Harsha’s field. Once, I remembered, I had sat there with Maram, my brother Asaru and his squire, Joshu Kadar, as we had spoken with Lord Harsha about fighting the Red Dragon and ending war – and other impossible things.

  ‘Who is it?’ Lord Harsha called out again. His single eye squinted as the sun’s slanting rays burned across my face. ‘Announce yourself, I say!’

  ‘I am’ I called back to him, ‘the seventh son of Shavashar Elahad, whose father was King Elkamesh, who named me –’

  ‘Valashu Elahad!’ Lord Harsha shouted. ‘It can’t be! But surely it must be, even though I don’t know how!’

  I dismounted and climbed over the wall. Lord Harsha came limping up to me, and he embraced me, pounding my back with his hard, blunt hands. Then he pulled back to fix me with his single, bright eye.

  ‘It is you,’ he said, ‘but you look different, forgive me. Older, of course, but not so much on the outside as within. And something else. Something has lit a fire in you, like that star you were named for. At last. When you skulked out of Mesh last year, you did seem half an outlaw. But now you stand here like a king.’