The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One

‘Come in,’ Master Juwain’s voice croaked out after I had knocked at the door to his chamber.

I opened this great, iron-shod slab of oak and stepped into a large room. It was well-lit, with the shutters of its eight arched windows thrown open. In most other rooms of the castle, this would have let in gusts of cold air along with sunlight. But the windows here were some of the few to be fitted with glass panes. Even so, the room was rather cool, and Master Juwain had a few logs burning in the fireplace along the far wall. This, I thought, was an extravagance. As were the chamber’s other appointments: the tiled floor, covered with Galdan carpets; the richly-colored tapestries; the shelves of books set into the wall near the great, canopied bed. As far as I knew, there was only one other true bed in the castle, and there my father and mother slept. The whole of the chamber bespoke a comfort at odds with the Brotherhoods’ ideal of restraint and austerity, but the great Elemesh had proclaimed that these teachers of our people should be treated like kings, and so they were.

Valashu Elahad – is that you?’ Master Juwain called out as I entered the room. He was as short and stocky as I remembered, and one of the ugliest men I had ever seen.

‘Sir,’ I said, bowing. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

He was standing by one of the windows and looking up from a large book that he had been reading; he returned my bow politely and then stepped over to me. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said. ‘It’s been almost two years.’

To look upon Master Juwain was to be reminded at first of vegetables – and not the most attractive ones at that. His head, large and lumpy like a potato, was shaved smooth, the better to appreciate the puffy ears that stood out like cauliflowers. His nose was a big, brown squash, and of his mouth and lips, it is better not to speak. He clasped me on the shoulder with a hand as tough as old tree roots. Although he was first and foremost a scholar – perhaps the finest in all of Ea – he liked nothing better than working in his garden and keeping close to the earth. Although he might advise kings and teach their sons, I thought he would always be a farmer at heart.

‘To what honor,’ he asked, ‘shall I attribute this visit after being ignored for so long?’

His gaze took in the rain-stained cloak that Asaru had lent me as he looked at me deeply. The saving feature of his face, I thought, were his eyes: they were large and luminous, all silver-gray like the moonlit sea. There was a keen intelligence there and great kindness, too. I have said that he was an ugly man, and ugly he truly was. But he was also one of those rare men transformed by a love of truth into a being of great beauty.

‘My apologies, sir,’ I told him. ‘But it was never my intention to ignore you.’

Just then Maram came wheezing and panting into the room. He bowed to Master Juwain and then said, ‘Please excuse us, sir, but we needed to see you. Something has happened.’

While Master Juwain paced back and forth rubbing his bald head, Maram explained how we had fought for our lives in the woods that afternoon. He conveniently left out the part of the story in which he had shot the deer, but otherwise his account was reasonably accurate. By the time I had spoken as well, the room was growing dark.

‘I see,’ Master Juwain said. His head bowed down in deep thought as he dug his foot into the priceless carpet. Then he moved over to the window and gazed out at Telshar’s white diamond peak. ‘It’s growing late, and I want to get a good look at this arrow you’ve brought me. And your wounds as well. Would you please light the candles, Brother Maram?’

While I tightly gripped the black arrow, still wrapped in my torn shirt, Maram went over to the fireplace where he stuck a long match into the flames to ignite it. Then he went about the room lighting the many candles in their stands. As the soft light of the tapers filled the room, I reflected on the fact that some two thousand candles would be burned throughout the castle before the night was through.

‘Here, now,’ Master Juwain said as his hand closed on Maram’s arm. He pulled him over to the writing table, which was covered with maps, open books and many papers. There he sat him down in the carved, oak chair. ‘We’ll look at your head first.’

He went over to the basin by one of the windows and carefully washed his hands. Then, from beneath the bed, he retrieved two large wooden boxes which he set on the writing table. In the first box, as I saw when he opened it, were many small compartments filled with unguents, bottled medicines and twists of foul-smelling herbs. The second box contained various knives, probes, clamps, scissors and saws – all made of gleaming Godhran steel. I tried not to look into this box as Master Juwain lifted out a roll of clean white cloth and set it on the table.

It didn’t take him very long to clean Maram’s wound and wrap his head with a fresh dressing. But for me, standing by the window and looking out at the night’s first stars as I tried not to listen to Maram’s groans and gasps, it seemed like an hour. And then it was my turn.

After pulling back Asaru’s cloak, I took Maram’s place on the chair. Master Juwain’s hard, gnarly fingers gently probed my bruised chest and then touched my side along the thin red line left by the arrow.

‘It’s hot,’ Master Juwain said. ‘A wound such as this shouldn’t be so hot so soon.’

And with that, he dabbed an unguent on my side. The greenish cream was cool but stank of mold and other substances that I couldn’t identify.

‘All right,’ Master Juwain said, ‘now let’s see the arrow.’

As Maram crowded closer and looked on, I unwrapped the arrow and handed it to Master Juwain. He seemed loath to touch it, as if it were a snake that might at any moment come alive and sink its venomous fangs into him. With great care he held it closer to the stand of candles burning by the table; he gazed at the coated head for a long time as his gray eyes darkened like the sea in a storm.

‘What is it?’ Maram blurted out. ‘Is it truly poison?’

‘You know it is,’ Master Juwain told him.

‘Well, which one?’

Master Juwain sighed and said, ‘That we shall soon see.’

He instructed us to stand off toward the open window, and we did as he bade us. Then, from the second box, he produced a scalpel and a tiny spoon whose bowl was the size of a child’s fingernail. With a meticulousness that I had always found daunting, he used the scalpel to scrape off a bit of the bluish substance that covered the head of the arrow. He caught these evil-looking flakes with a sheet of white paper, then funneled them into the spoon.

‘Hold your breath, now,’ he told us.

I drew in a draft of clean mountain air and watched as Master Juwain covered his nose and mouth with a thick cloth. Then he held the spoon over one of the candles. A moment later, the blue flakes caught fire. But strangely, I saw, they burned with an angry, red flame.

Still holding the cloth over his face, Master Juwain set down the spoon and joined us by the window. I could almost feel him silently counting the seconds to every beat of my heart. By this time, my lungs were burning for air. At last Master Juwain uncovered his mouth and told us, ‘Go ahead and breathe – I think it should be all right now.’

Maram, whose face was red as an apple, gasped at the air streaming in the window, and so did I. Even so, I caught the faintness of a stench that was bitter beyond belief.

‘Well?’ Maram said, turning to Master Juwain, ‘do you know what it is?’

‘Yes, I know,’ Master Juwain said. There was a great sadness in his voice. ‘It’s as I feared – the poison is kirax.’

‘Kirax,’ Maram repeated as if he didn’t like the taste of the word on his tongue. ‘I don’t know about kirax.’

‘Well, you should,’ Master Juwain said. ‘If you weren’t so busy with the chambermaids, then you would.’

I thought Master Juwain was being unfair to him. Maram was studying to become a Master Poet, and so couldn’t be expected to know of every esoteric herb or poison.

‘What is kirax, sir?’ I asked him.

He turned to me and grasped my shoulder. There was a reassuring strength in his hand and tenderness as well. And then he said, ‘It’s a poison used only by Morjin and the Red Priests of the Kallimun. And their assassins.’

He went on to say that kirax was a derivative of the kirque plant, as was the more common drug called kiriol. Kiriol, of course, was known to open certain sensitives to others’ minds – though at great cost to themselves. Kirax was much more dangerous: even a small amount opened its victim to a flood of sensations that overwhelmed and burned out the nerves. Death came quickly and agonizingly as if one’s entire body had been plunged into a vat of boiling oil.

‘You must have absorbed a minuscule amount of it,’ Master Juwain told me. ‘Not enough to kill but quite sufficient to torment you.’

Truly, I thought, enough to torment me even as my gift tormented me. I looked off at the candles’ flickering flames, and it occurred to me that the kirax was a dark, blue, hidden knife cutting at my heart and further opening it to sufferings and secrets that I would rather not know.

‘Do you have the antidote?’ I asked him.

Master Juwain sighed as he looked at his box of medicines. ‘I’m afraid there is no antidote,’ he said. He told Maram and me that the hell of kirax was that once injected, it never left the body.

‘Ah,’ Maram said upon hearing this news, ‘that’s hard, Val – that’s too bad.’

Yes, I thought, trying to close myself from the waves of pity and fear that poured from Maram, it was very bad indeed.

Master Juwain moved back over to the table and gingerly picked up the arrow. ‘This came from Argattha,’ he said.

At the mention of Morjin’s stronghold in the White Mountains, a shudder ran through me. It was said that Argattha was carved out of the rock of a mountain, an entire city built underground where slaves were whipped to work and dreadful rites occurred far from the eyes of civilized men.

‘I would guess,’ Master Juwain told me, ‘that the man you killed was sent from there. He might even be a full priest of the Kallimun.’

I closed my eyes as I recalled the assassin’s fiercely intelligent eyes.

‘I’d like to see the body,’ Master Juwain said.

Maram wiped the sweat from his fat neck as he pointed at the arrow and said, ‘But we don’t know that the assassins are Kallimun priests, do we? Isn’t it also possible that one of the Ishkans has gone over to Morjin?’

Master Juwain suddenly stiffened with anger as he admonished Maram: ‘Please do not call him by that name.’ Then he turned to me. ‘It worries me even more that the Lord of Lies has made traitor one of your own countrymen.’

‘No,’ I said, filling up with a rare anger of my own. ‘No Meshian would ever betray us so.’

‘Perhaps not willfully,’ Master Juwain said. ‘But you don’t know the deceit of the Lord of Lies. You don’t know his power.’

He told us then that all men, even warriors and kings, knew moments of darkness and despair. At such times, when the clouds of doubt shrouded the soul and the stars did not shine, they became more vulnerable to evil, most especially to the Master of Minds himself. Then Morjin might come for them, in their hatred or in their darkest dreams; he would send illusions to confuse them; he would seize the sinews of their will and control them at a distance as with a puppeteer pulling on strings. These soulless men were terrible and very deadly, though fortunately very rare. Master Juwain called them ghuls; he admitted to his fear that a ghul might be waiting in the great hall to take meat with us that very night.

To steady my racing heart, I stepped over to the window to get a breath of fresh air. As a child, I had heard rumors of ghuls, as of werewolves or the dreaded Gray Men who come at night to suck out your soul. But I had never really believed them.

‘But why,’ I asked Master Juwain, ‘would the Lord of Lies send an assassin – or anyone else – to kill me with poison?’

He looked at me strangely, and asked, ‘Are you sure the first assassin was shooting at you and not Asaru?’

‘Yes.’

‘But how could you be sure? Didn’t Asaru say that he felt the arrow pass through his hair?’

Master Juwain’s clear, gray eyes fell upon me with the weight of twin moons. How could I tell him about my gift of sensing what lay inside another’s heart? How could I tell him that I had felt the assassin’s intention to murder me as surely as I did the cold wind pouring through the window?

‘There was the angle of the shot,’ I tried to explain. There was something in the assassin’s eyes.’

‘You could see his eyes from a hundred yards away?’

‘Yes,’ I said. And then, ‘No, that is, it wasn’t really like seeing. But there was something about the way he looked at me. The concentration.’

Master Juwain was silent as he stared at me from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows. Then he said, ‘I think there’s something about you, Valashu Elahad. There was something about your grandfather, too.’

In silence I reached out to close the cold pane of glass against the night.

‘I believe,’ Master Juwain continued, ‘that this something might have something to do with why the Lord of Lies is hunting you. If we understood it better, it might provide us with the crucial clue.’

I looked at Master Juwain then and I wanted him to help me understand how I could feel the fire of another’s passions or the unbearable pressure of their longing for the peace of the One. But some things can never be understood. How could one feel the cold light of the stars on a perfect winter night? How could one feel the wind?

‘The Lord of Lies couldn’t know of me,’ I said at last. ‘He’d have no reason to hunt the seventh son of a faraway mountain king.’

‘No reason? Wasn’t it your ancestor, Aramesh, who took the Lightstone from him at the Battle of Sarburn?’

‘Aramesh,’ I said, ‘is the ancestor of many Valari. The Lord of Lies can’t hunt us all.’

‘No? Can he not?’ Master Juwain’s eyebrows suddenly pulled down in anger. ‘I’m afraid he would hunt any and all who oppose him.’

For a moment I stood there rubbing the scar on my forehead. Oppose Morjin? I wanted the Valari to stop fighting among ourselves and unite under one banner so that we wouldn’t have to oppose him. Shouldn’t that, I wondered, be enough?

‘But I don’t oppose him,’ I said.

‘No, you’re too gentle of soul for that,’ Master Juwain told me. There was doubt in his voice, and irony as well. ‘But you needn’t take up arms to be in opposition to the Red Dragon. You oppose him merely in your intelligence and love of freedom. And by seeking all that is beautiful, good and true.’

I looked down at the carpet and bit my lip against the tightness in my throat. It was the Brothers who sought those things, not I.

As if Master Juwain could read my thoughts, he caught my eyes and said, ‘You have a gift, Val. What kind of gift, I’m not yet sure. But you could have been a Meditation Master or Music Master. Or possibly even a Master Healer.’

‘Do you really think so, sir?’ I asked, looking at him.

‘You know I do,’ he said in a voice heavy with accusation. ‘But in the end, you quit.’

Because I couldn’t bear the hurt in his eyes, I turned to stare at the fire, which seemed scarcely less angry and inflamed. Of all my brothers, I had been the only one to attend the Brotherhood school past the age of sixteen. I had wanted to study music, poetry, languages and meditation. With great reluctance my father had agreed to this, so long as I didn’t neglect the art of the sword. And so for two happy years, I had wandered the cloisters and gardens of the Brotherhood’s great sanctuary ten miles up the valley from Silvassu; there I had memorized poems and played my flute and sneaked off into the ash grove to practice fencing with Maram. Though it had never occurred to my father that I might actually want to take vows and join the Brotherhood, for a long time I had nursed just such an ambition.

‘It wasn’t my choice,’ I finally said.

‘Not your choice?’ Master Juwain huffed out. ‘Everything we do, we choose. And you chose to quit.’

‘But the Waashians were killing my friends!’ I protested. ‘Raising spears against my brothers! The king called me to war, and I had to go.’

‘And what have all your wars ever changed?’

‘Please do not call them my wars, sir. Nothing would make me happier than to see war ended forever.’

‘No?’ he said, pointing at the dagger that I wore on my belt. ‘Is that why you bear arms wherever you go? Is that why you answered your father’s call to battle?’

‘But, sir,’ I said, smiling as I thought of the words from one of his favorite books, ‘isn’t all life a battle?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a battle of the heart and soul.’

‘Navsa Adami,’ I said, ‘believed in fighting with other weapons.’

At the mention of the name of the man who had founded the first Brotherhood, Master Juwain grimaced as if he had been forced to drink vinegar. Perhaps I shouldn’t have touched upon the old wound between the Brotherhoods and the Valari. But I had read the history of the Brotherhoods in books collected in their own libraries. In Tria, the Eternal City, in the 2,177th year of the Age of the Mother, which ever after would be called the Dark Year, Navsa Adami had been among those who suffered the first invasion of the Aryans. The sack of Tria had been terrible and swift, for in that most peaceful of ages, the Alonians possessed hoes and spades for digging in their gardens but no true weapons. Navsa Adami had been bound in chains and forced to watch the violation and murder of his own wife on the steps of the Temple of Life. The Aryan warlord had then razed the great Temple and destroyed the Garden of the Earth as the slaughter began. And Navsa Adami, along with fifty priests, had escaped and fled into the Morning Mountains, vowing revenge.

This exile became known as the First Breaking of the Order. For the Order had been founded to use the green gelstei crystals to awaken the lands of Ea to a greater life whereas Navsa Adami now wished to bring about the Aryans’ death. And so, in the mountains of Mesh, he founded the Great White Brotherhood to fight the Aryans by any means the Brothers could find. With him he brought a green gelstei meant to be used for healing and furthering the life forces; Navsa Adami, however, had planned to use it to breed a race of warriors to fight the Aryans and overthrow their reign of terror. But he found in Mesh men who were already warriors; it became his hope to unite the Valari and train us in the mystic arts so that we would one day defeat the Aryans and bring peace to Ea. And this, at the Battle of Sarburn, we had nearly done. As a consequence of this the Brotherhoods, early in the Age of Law, had forever renounced violence and war. They had pleaded with the Valari to do the same. The Valari knights, though, fearing the return of the Dragon, had kept their swords sharpened and close to their hands. And so the bond between the Brotherhoods and the Valari was broken.

I had thought to score a point by invoking the name of Navsa Adami. But Master Juwain let his anger melt away so that only a terrible sadness remained. Then he said softly, ‘If Navsa Adami were alive today, he would be the first to warn you that once the killing begins, it never ends.’

I turned away as his sadness touched my eyes with a deep, hot pain. I suddenly recalled the overpowering wrongness that I had sensed earlier in the woods; now a bit of this wrongness, in the form of kirax and perhaps something worse, would burn forever inside me.

I wanted to look at Master Juwain and tell him that there had to be a way to end the killing. Instead, I looked into myself and said, There’s always a time to fight.’

Master Juwain stepped closer to me and laid his hand on mine. Then he told me, ‘Evil can’t be vanquished with a sword, Val. Darkness can’t be defeated in battle but only by shining a bright enough light.’

He looked at me with a new radiance pouring out of him and said, ‘This is truly a dark time. But it’s always darkest just before the dawn.’

He let go of me suddenly and walked over to his desk. There his hand closed on a large book bound in green leather. I immediately recognized it as the Saganom Elu, many passages of which I had memorized during my years at the Brotherhood’s school.

‘I think it’s time for a little reading lesson,’ he announced, moving back toward Maram and me. His fingers quickly flipped through the yellow, well-worn pages, and then he suddenly dropped the book into Maram’s hands. ‘Brother Maram, would you please read from the Trian Prophecies. Chapter seven, beginning with verse twenty-six.’

Maram, who was as surprised as I was at this sudden call to scholarship, stood there sweating and blinking his eyes. ‘You want me to read now, sir. Ah, shouldn’t we be getting ready for the feast?’

‘Indulge me if you will, please.’

‘But you know I’ve no talent for ancient Ardik,’ Maram grumbled. ‘Now, if you would ask me to read Lorranda, which is the language of love and poetry, why then I would be delighted to –’

‘Please just read us the lines,’ Master Juwain interrupted, ‘or we will miss the feast.’

Maram stood there glowering at him like a child asked to muck out a stable. He asked, ‘Do I have to, sir?’

‘Yes, you do,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘I’m afraid that Val never had the time to learn Ardik as well as you.’

Truly, I had left the Brotherhood’s school before mastering this noblest of languages. And so I waited intently as Maram took a deep breath and ground his finger into the page of the book that Master Juwain had set before him. And then his huge voice rolled out into the room: ‘Songan erathe ad valte kalanath li galdanaan … ah, let me see … Jin Ieldra, song Ieldra –’

‘Very good,’ Master Juwain broke in, ‘but why don’t you translate as you read?’

‘But, sir,’ he said, pointing at a book on the writing table, ‘you already have the translated version there. Why don’t I just read from that?’

Master Juwain tapped the book that Maram was holding and said, ‘Because I asked you to read from this.’

‘Very well, sir,’ Maram said, rolling his eyes. And then he swallowed a mouthful of air and continued, ‘When the earth and stars enter the Golden Band … ah, I think this is right … the darkest age will end and a new age –’

‘That’s very good,’ Master Juwain interrupted again. ‘Your translation is very accurate but …’

Yes, sir?’

‘I’m afraid you’ve lost the flavor of the original. The poetry, as it were. Why don’t you put the words to verse?’

Now sweat began pouring down Maram’s beard and neck. He said, ‘Now, sir? Here?’

‘You’re studying to be a Master Poet, aren’t you? Well, poets make poems.’

‘Yes, yes, I know, but without time to make the music and to find the rhymes, you can’t really expert me to –’

‘Do your best, Brother Maram,’ Master Juwain said with a broad smile. ‘I have faith in you.’

Strangely, this immensely difficult prospect seemed suddenly to please Maram. He stared at the book for quite a long while as if burning its glyphs into his mind. Then he closed his eyes for an even longer time. And suddenly, as if reciting a sonnet to a lover, he looked toward the windows and said:

When earth alights the Golden Band,

The darkest age will pass away;

When angel fire illumes the land,

The stars will show the brightest day.

The deathless day, the Age of Light;

Ieldra’s blaze befalls the earth;

The end of war, the end of night

Awaits the last Maitreya’s birth.

The Cup of Heaven in his hand,