The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two

‘There’s something about this bowl,’ I said. I took a step closer, and now Alkaladur began to hum in my hands.

Atara picked up the iridescent bowl and wrapped her long fingers around it. She said, ‘It’s heavy – much heavier than I would think a pearl of this size would be.’

‘Have you ever seen a pearl so large?’ Maram asked her. ‘My Lord, it would take an oyster the size of a bear to make one so.’

Atara set this beautiful bowl back in its place. She stared at it with a penetrating sight that seemed to arise from a source much deeper than her sparkling blue eyes. And so did Kane.

‘Can it be?’ Maram said. Then he turned his head back and forth as if shaking sense into himself. ‘No, of course it can’t be. The Lightstone is of gold. This is pearl. Can the gold gelstei shimmer like pearl?’

‘Perhaps,’ Atara said, ‘the Gelstei shimmers as one wishes it to.’

The silence that filled the chamber then was as deep as the sea.

‘This must be it,’ I said, staring into Alkaladur’s bright silver and listening to the pearl bowl sing. ‘But how can it be?’

My heart beat seven times in rhythm with Atara’s, Maram’s and Kane’s. And then Atara, staring at the bowl as if transfixed by its splendor, whispered to me, ‘Val, I can see it! It’s inside!’

As we kept our eyes on the gleaming bowl, she told us that the pearl formed only its veneer; somehow, she said, the ancients had layered over this lustrous substance like enamel over lead.

‘But it’s no base metal that’s inside,’ she said. ‘It’s gold or something very like gold – I’m sure of it.’

‘If it’s gold, then it must be the true gold,’ I said.

Kane’s eyes were now black pools that drank in the bowl’s light.

‘So, we must break it open,’ he told me. ‘Strike it with your sword, Val.’

‘But what about the Lord Librarian’s second rule?’ I asked.

Maram wiped the sweat from his flushed face. ‘We weren’t to harm any of the books, Lord Grayam said.’

‘But surely the spirit of his rule was that we weren’t to harm anything here.’

‘Ah, surely,’ Maram said, ‘this is the time to abide by the letter of his rule?’

‘Perhaps we should bring the cup to him and let him decide.’

Atara, who had a keener sense of right and wrong than I, nodded at the cup and told me, ‘If you were Lord of Silvassu and your castle was about to fall by siege, would you want to be troubled by such a decision?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Then shouldn’t we abide by the highest rule?’ she asked. And then she quoted from Master Juwain’s book: ‘“Act with regard to others as you would have them act with regard to you.”’

I was quiet while I gripped my sword, looking at the bowl.

‘Strike, Val,’ Kane told me. ‘Strike, I say.’

And so I did. Without waiting for doubt to freeze my limbs, I swung Alkaladur in a flashing arc toward the bowl. Kane had taught me to wield my sword with an almost perfect precision; I aimed it so that its edge would cut the pearl to a depth of a tenth of an inch, but no more. The impossibly sharp silustria sliced right into the soft pearl. This thin veneer split away more easily than the shell of a boiled egg. Pieces of pearl fell with a tinkle onto the marble stand. And there upon it stood revealed a plain, golden bowl.

‘Oh, my Lord! Oh, my Lord!’

Kane, ignoring the stricken look on Maram’s face, picked it up. It took him only a moment to peel away the pieces of pearl that still clung to the inside of the bowl. Its gleaming surface was as perfect and unmarked as the silustria of my sword.

‘It is the Lightstone!’ Maram cried out.

A strangeness fell over Kane then. His face burned with wonder, doubt, joy, bitterness and awe. After a very long time, he handed the bowl to me. And the moment that my hands closed around it, I felt something like a sweet, liquid gold pouring into my soul.

‘I wish Alphanderry was here to see this,’ I said.

The coolness of the bowl’s gold seemed to open my mind; I could hear inside myself each note of Alphanderry’s last song.

As Atara next took the bowl, I saw Flick whirling above us as he had at the sound of Alphanderry’s music. His exaltation was no less than my own. Then Maram’s fat fingers closed around the bowl and he cried out again, louder now: ‘The Lightstone! The Lightstone!’

We held quick council and decided that we must find Liljana and Master Juwain. But it was they who found us. At the sound of footsteps in the adjoining chamber with its poetry books, Maram quickly tucked the bowl into one of his tunic’s pockets and very guiltily began sweeping the shards of pearl off the stand into his other pocket. When Liljana followed Master Juwain into the room, however, he breathed a sigh of relief and broke off hiding the signs of our desecration. He brought out the bowl and told them, ‘I’ve found the Lightstone! Look! Look! Behold and rejoice!’

As Master Juwain’s large gray eyes grew even larger, I again beheld this golden bowl and drank in its beauty. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.

‘So this is what you’ve been shouting about,’ Master Juwain said, staring at the bowl. ‘We’ve been looking all over for you – did you know it’s past midday?’

In this windowless room, time seemed lost in the hollows of the bowl that Maram held up triumphantly. In defense at missing our rendezvous by King Eluli’s statue, he said again, ‘I’ve found the Gelstei!’

‘What do you mean, you found it?’ Atara asked him.

‘Well, I mean, ah, I was the first to pick it up. The first to see it.’

‘Were you the first to see it?’ Atara asked him.

She went on to say that Kane was the first to pick it up after I had cut away the pearl, and who could say who had first laid eyes upon it? Then she told him that it was ignoble to fight over who should receive credit for finding the Lightstone.

‘I don’t think that anyone has found the Lightstone,’ Master Juwain said.

Maram looked at him in such disbelief that he nearly dropped the bowl. Atara and I clasped hands as if to reassure each other that Master Juwain had ruined his sight in reading his books all day. And Kane just stared at the bowl, his black eyes full of mystery and doubt.

Master Juwain took the bowl from Maram as Liljana stepped closer. He looked at us and said, ‘Have you put it to the test?’

‘It is the Gelstei, sir,’ I said. ‘What else could it be?’

‘If it’s the true gold,’ he told me, ‘nothing could harm it in any way. Nothing could scratch it – not even the silustria of your sword.’

‘But Val has already struck his sword against it!’ Maram said. ‘And see, there is no mark!’

In truth, though, Alkaladur’s edge had never quite touched the bowl. Because I had to know if it really was the Lightstone, I now brought out my sword again. And as Master Juwain held the bowl firmly in his hands, I drew the sword across the curve of the bowl. And there, cut into the gold, was the faintest of scratches.

‘I don’t understand!’ I said. The sudden emptiness in the pit of my belly felt as if I had fallen off a cliff.

‘I’m afraid you’ve found one of the False Gelstei,’ he told me. ‘Once upon a time, more than one such were made.’

He went on to say that in the Age of Law, during the hundred-year reign of Queen Atara Ashtoreth, the ancients had made quests of their own. And perhaps the greatest of these was to recapture in form the essence of the One. And so they had applied all their art toward fabricating the gold gelstei. After many attempts, the great alchemist, Ninlil Gurmani, had at last succeeded in making a silver gelstei with a golden sheen to it. Although it had none of the properties of the true gold, it was thought that the Lightstone might take its power from its shape rather than its substance alone. And so this gold-seeming silustria was cast into the form of bowls and cups, in the likeness of the Cup of Heaven itself. But to no avail.

‘I’m afraid there is only one Lightstone,’ Master Juwain told me.

‘So,’ Kane said, glowering at the little bowl that he held. ‘So.’

‘But look!’ I said, pointing my sword at the bowl. ‘Look how it brightens!’

The silver of my sword was indeed glowing strongly. But Master Juwain looked at it and slowly shook his head. And then he asked me, ‘Don’t you remember Alphanderry’s poem?’

The silver sword, from starlight formed,Sought that which formed the stellar light,And in its presence flared and warmedUntil it blazed a brilliant white.

‘It warms,’ he said, ‘it flares, but there’s nothing of a blazing brilliance, is there?’

In looking at my sword’s silvery sheen, I had to admit that there was not.

‘This bowl is of silustria,’ Master Juwain said. ‘And a very special silustria at that. And so your sword finds a powerful resonance with it. It’s what pointed you toward this room, away from where the Lightstone really lies.’

The hollowness inside me grew as large as a cave, and I felt sick to my soul. And then the meaning of Master Juwain’s words and the gleam in his eyes struck home.

‘What are you saying, sir?’

‘I’m saying that I know where Sartan Odinan hid the Lightstone.’ He set the bowl back on its stand and smiled at Liljana. ‘We do.’

I finally noticed Liljana holding a cracked, leather-bound book in her hands. She gave it to him and said, ‘It seems that Master Juwain is even more of a scholar than I had thought.’

Beaming at her compliment, Master Juwain proceeded to tell us about his researches in the Library that day – and during the days that I had lain unconscious in the infirmary.

‘I began by trying to read everything the Librarians had collected about Sartan Odinan,’ he said. ‘While I was waiting for Val to return to us, I must have read thirty books.’

A chance remark in one of them, he told us, led him to think that Sartan might have had Brotherhood training before he had fallen into evil and joined the Kallimun priesthood. This training, Master Juwain believed, had gone very deep. And so he wondered if Sartan, in a time of great need, seeking to hide the Lightstone, might have sought refuge among those who had taught him as a child. It was an extraordinary intuition which was to prove true.

Master Juwain’s next step was to look in the Librarian’s Great Index for references to Sartan in any writings by any Brother. One of these was an account of a Master Todor, who had lived during the darkest period of the Age of the Dragon when the Sarni had once again broken the Long Wall and threatened Tria. The reference indicated that Master Todor had collected stories of all things that had to do with the Lightstone, particularly myths as to its fate.

It had taken Master Juwain half a day to locate Master Todor’s great work in the Library’s stacks. In it he found mention of a Master Malachi, whose superiors had disciplined him for taking an unseemly interest in Sartan, whom Master Malachi regarded as a tragic figure. Master Juwain, searching in an off-wing of the north wing, had found a few of Master Malachi’s books, the titles of which had been indexed if not their contents. In The Golden Renegade, Master Juwain found a passage telling of a Master Aluino, who was said to have seen Sartan before Sartan died.

‘And there I was afraid that this particular branch of my search had broken,’ Master Juwain told us as he glanced at the False Gelstei. ‘You see, I couldn’t find any reference to Master Aluino in the Great Index. That’s not surprising. There must be a million books that the Librarians have never gotten to – with more collected every year.’

‘So what did you do?’ Maram asked him.

‘What did I do?’ Master Juwain said. ‘Think, Brother Maram. Sartan escaped Argattha with the Lightstone in the year 82 of this age – or so the histories tell. And so I knew the approximate years of Master Aluino’s life. Do you see?’

‘Ah, no, I’m sorry, I don’t.’

‘Well,’ Master Juwain said, ‘it occurred to me that Master Aluino must have kept a journal, as we Brothers are still encouraged to do.’

Here Maram looked down at the floor in embarrassment. It was clear that he had always found other ways to keep himself engaged during his free hours at night.

‘And so,’ Master Juwain continued, ‘it also occurred to me that if Master Aluino had kept a journal, there was a chance that it might have found its way into the Library.’

‘Aha,’ Maram said, looking up and nodding his head.

‘There is a hall off the west wing where old journals are stored and sorted by century,’ Master Juwain said. ‘I’ve spent most of the day looking for one by Master Aluino. Looking and reading.’

And with that, he proudly held up the fusty journal and opened it to a page that he had marked. He took great care, for the journal’s paper was brittle and ancient.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘this is written in Old West Ardik. Master Aluino had his residence at the Brotherhood’s sanctuary of Navuu, in Surrapam. He was the Master Healer there.’

No, no, I thought, it can’t be. Navuu lay five hundred miles from Khaisham, across the Red Desert in lands now held by the Hesperuks’ marauding armies.

‘Well,’ Atara asked, ‘what does the journal say?’

Master Juwain cleared his throat and said, ‘This entry is from the 15th of Valte, in the year 82 of the Age of the Dragon.’ Then he began reading to us, translating as he went:

Today a man seeking sanctuary was brought to me. A tall man with a filthy beard, dressed in rags. His feet were torn and bleeding. And his eyes: they were sad, desperate, wild. The eyes of a madman. His body had been badly burned from the sun, especially about the face and arms. But his hands were the worst. He had strange burns on the palms and fingers that wouldn’t heal. Such burns, I thought, would drive anyone mad.

All my healings failed him; even the varistei had no virtue here, for I soon learned that his burns were not of the body alone but the soul. It is strange, isn’t it, that when the soul decides to die, the body can never hold onto it.

I believe that he had come to our sanctuary to die. He claimed to have been taught at one of the Brotherhood schools in Alonia as a child; he said many times that he was coming home. Babbled this, he did. There was much about his speech that was incoherent. And much that was coherent but not to be believed. For four days I listened to his rantings and fantasies, and pieced together a story which he wanted me to believe – and which I believe he believed.

He said his name was Sartan Odinan, the very same Kallimun priest who had burned Suma to the ground with a firestone during the Red Dragon’s invasion of Alonia. Sartan the Renegade, who had repented of this terrible crime and betrayed his master. It was believed that Sartan killed himself in atonement, but this man told a different story as to his fate.

Here Master Juwain looked up from the journal and said, ‘Please remember, this was written shortly after Kalkamesh had befriended Sartan and they had entered Argattha to reclaim the Lightstone. That tale certainly wasn’t widely known at the time. The Red Dragon had only just begun his torture of Kalkamesh.’

The stillness of Kane’s eyes as they fell upon Master Juwain just then made me recall the Song of Kalkamesh and Telemesh that Kane had asked the minstrel Yashku to recite in Duke Rezu’s hall. I couldn’t help thinking of the immortal Kalkamesh crucified to the rocky face of Skartaru, and his rescue by a young prince who would become one of Mesh’s greatest kings.

‘Let me resume this at the critical point,’ Master Juwain said, tapping the journal with his finger. ‘You already know how Kalkamesh and Sartan found the Lightstone in the locked dungeon.’

And so he said that just as he and this mythical Kalkamesh opened the dungeon doors, the Red Dragon’s guards discovered them. While Kalkamesh turned to fight them, he said, he grabbed the Cup of Heaven and fled back through the Red Dragon’s throne room whence they had come. For this man, who claimed to have once been a High Priest of the Kallimun, had again fallen and was now moved with a sudden lust to keep the Cup for himself.

And now he reached the most incredible part of his story. He claimed that upon touching the Cup of Heaven, it had flared a brilliant golden white and burned his hands. And that it had then turned invisible. He said that he had then set it down in the throne room, glad to be rid of it – this hellishly beautiful thing, as he called it. After that, he had fled Argattha, abandoning Kalkamesh to his fate. The story that he told me was that he made his way into the Red Desert and across the Crescent Mountains and so came here to our sanctuary.

It is difficult to believe his story, or almost any part of it. The myth of an immortal man named Kalkamesh is just that; only the Elijin and Galadin have attained to the deathlessness of the One. Also, it would be impossible for anyone to enter Argattha as he told, for it is guarded by dragons. And nowhere is it recorded that the Cup of Heaven has the power to turn invisible.

And yet there are those strange burns on his hands to account for. I believe this part of his story, if no other: that his lust for the Lightstone burned him, body and soul, and drove him mad. Perhaps he did somehow manage to cross the Red Desert. Perhaps he saw the image of the Lightstone in some blazing rock or heated iron and tried to hold onto it. If so, it has seared his soul far beyond my power to heal him.

I am old now, and my heart has grown weak; my varistei has no power to keep me from the journey that all must make – and that I will certainly make soon, perhaps next month, perhaps tomorrow, following my doomed patient toward the stars. But before I go, I wish to record here a warning to myself, which this poor, wretched man has unknowingly brought me: the very great danger of coveting that which no man was meant to possess. Soon enough I’ll return to the One, and there will be light far beyond that which is held by any cup or stone.

Master Juwain finished reading and closed his book. The silence in that room of ancient artifacts was nearly total. Flick was spinning about slowly near the False Gelstei, and it seemed the whole world was spinning, too. Atara stared at the wall as if its smooth marble was as invisible as Master Aluino’s patient had claimed the Lightstone to be. Kane’s eyes blazed with frustration and hate, and I couldn’t bear to look at him. I turned to see Maram nervously pulling at his beard and Liljana smiling ironically as if to hide a great fear.

And then, as from far away, through that little room’s smells of dust and defeat, came a faint braying of horns and booming of war drums: Doom, Doom, Doom. I felt my heart beating out the same dread rhythm, again and again.

Maram was the first to break the quiet. He pointed at the journal in Master Juwain’s hands and said, ‘The story that madman told can’t be true, can it?’

Yes, I thought, as I listened to my heart and the pulsing of the world, it is true.

‘Ah, no, no,’ Maram muttered, ‘this is too, too bad, to think that the Lightstone was left in Argattha.’

DOOM! DOOM! DOOM!

I looked at the False Gelstei sitting on its stand. I gripped the hilt of my sword as Maram said, ‘Then the quest is over. There is no hope.’

I looked from him to Master Juwain and Liljana, and then at Atara and Kane. No hope could I see on any of their faces; there was nothing in their hearts except the beat of despair.

We stood there for a long time, waiting for what we knew not. Atara seemed lost within some secret terror. Even Master Juwain’s pride at his discovery had given way to the meaning of it and a deepening gloom.

And then footfalls sounded in the adjoining chamber. A few moments later, a young Librarian about twelve years old came into the room and said, ‘Sar Valashu, Lord Grayam bids you and your companions to take shelter in the keep. Or to join him on the walls, as is your wish.’

Then he told us that the attack of Count Ulanu’s armies had begun.

5

We retreated through the Library’s halls and chambers to the infirmary, where I retrieved my helmet and Atara her bow and arrows. There we said goodbye to Master Juwain and Liljana. Master Juwain would be helping the other healers who would tend the Librarians’ inevitable battle wounds, and Liljana decided that she could best serve the city by assisting him. I tried not to look at the saws, clamps and other gleaming steel instruments that the healers set out as I embraced Master Juwain. He told me, and all of us, ‘Please don’t let me see that any of you have returned to this room until the battle is won.’

The young page who had found us earlier escorted Kane, Maram, Atara and me out of the Library and through the gates of the inner wall. He led the way through the narrow city streets, which were crowded with anxious people hurrying this way and that. Many were women clutching screaming babies, with yet more children in tow, on their way to take refuge in the Library’s keep or grounds behind its inner wall. But quite a few were Librarians dressed as Kane and I were in mail, and bearing maces, crossbows and swords. Still more were Khaisham’s potters, tanners, carpenters, papermakers, masons, smiths and other tradesmen. They were only poorly accoutered and armed, some bearing nothing more in the way of weaponry than a spear or a heavy shovel. At need, they would take their places along the walls with the Librarians – and us. But they would also keep the fighting men supplied with food, water, arrows and anything else necessary to withstanding a siege.

The flow of these hundreds of men, with their carts and braying donkeys, swept us down across the city to its west wall. This was Khaisham’s longest and most vulnerable, and there atop a square mural tower near its center stood the Lord Librarian. He was resplendent in his polished mail and the green surcoat displaying the golden book over his heart. Other knights and archers were with him on the tower’s ledge, behind the narrow stone merlons of the battlements that protected them from the enemy’s arrows and missiles. We followed the page up a flight of steps until we stood at the top of the wall behind the slightly larger merlons there. And then we walked up another flight of steps, adjoining and turning around and up into the tower itself.

‘I knew you would come,’ the Lord Librarian said to us as we crowded onto the tower’s ledge.

‘Yes,’ a nearby Librarian with a long, drooping mustache said, ‘but will they stay?’

He turned to look down and out across the pasture in front of the wall, and there was a sight that would have sent even brave men fleeing. Three hundred yards from us, across the bright green grass that would soon be stained red, Count Ulanu had his armies drawn up in a long line facing the wall. Their steel-jacketed shields, spears and armor formed a wall of its own as thousands of his men stood shoulder to shoulder slowly advancing upon us. To our left, half a mile away where Khaisham’s walls turned back toward Mount Redruth, I saw yet more lines of men marching across the pasture to the south of the city. And to the right, in the fields across the Tearam, stood companies of Count Ulanu’s cavalry and other warriors. These men, blocked by the river’s rushing waters, would make no assault upon the walls, but they would wait with their lances and swords held ready should any of Khaisham’s citizens try to flee across it. Behind us to the east of the city, Lord Grayam said, between the east wall and Mount Redruth on ground too rough for siege towers or assaults, yet more of the enemy waited to cut off the escape of anyone trying to break out in that direction.

‘We’re surrounded,’ Lord Grayam told us. He ran his finger along his scarred face as he watched the Count’s army march toward us. ‘So many – I had never thought he’d be able to muster so many.’

Out on the plain below us, I counted the standards of forty-four battalions. Ten bore the hawks and other insignia of Inyam and another five the black bears of Virad. There were masses of Blues, too, at least two thousand of them, huddled and naked and holding high their axes – and letting loose their bone-chilling howls.