The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom

by David Zindell

  ‘I will make you King of Mesh and all the Nine Kingdoms,’ he told me. ‘Kings I have as vassals, too, but a king of kings who comes to me with an open heart and a righteous sword – that would be a wondrous thing.’

  I gazed at the light pouring from his hands, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Help me find the Lightstone, Valashu, and you will live forever. And we will rule Ea together, and there will be no more war.’

  Yes, yes, I wanted to say. Yes, I will help you.

  There is a voice that whispers deep inside the soul. All of us have such a voice. Sometimes it is as clear as the ringing of a silver bell; sometimes it is faint and far-off like the fiery exhalations of the stars. But it always knows. And it always speaks the truth even when we don’t want to hear it.

  ‘No,’ I said at last.

  ‘No?

  ‘No, you lie,’ I told him. ‘You’re the Lord of Lies.’

  ‘I’m the Lord of Ea and you will help me!’

  I gripped the hilt of the sword that my father had given me as I slowly shook my head.

  ‘Damn you, Elahad! You damn yourself to death, then!’

  ‘So be it,’ I told him.

  ‘So be it,’ he told me. And then he said, ‘I will tell you the true secret of the valarda: the only way you will ever expiate your fear of death is to make others die. As I will make you die, Elahad!’

  The hate with which he said this was like lava pouring from a rent in the earth. I realized then that fear of death leads to hatred of life. Even as my fear of Morjin led me to hate him. I hated him with black bile and clenched teeth and red blood suddenly filling my eyes; I hated him as fire hates wood and darkness does light. Most of all, I hated him for lying to me and playing on my fears and making me sick to my soul with a deep and terrible hate.

  It took only a moment for his dragon’s head to grow out from his body and for his claws to emerge. But before his jaws could open, I whipped my kalama from its sheath. I plunged the point of it through the dragon embroidered on his tunic, deep into his heart. It was as if I had ripped out my own heart. The incredible pain of it caused me to scream like a wounded child even as my sword shattered into a thousand pieces; each piece lay burning with an orange-red light on the ground or hissed into the stream and sent up plumes of boiling water. I watched in horror as Morjin screamed, too, and his face fell away from the form of a dragon and became my own. Clots of twisting red worms began to eat out his eyes, my eyes, and his whole body burst into flames. In moments his face blackened into a rictus of agony. And then the flames consumed him utterly, and he vanished into the nothingness from which he had come.

  For what seemed a long time, I stood there by the stream waiting for him to return. But all that remained of him was a terrible emptiness clutching at my heart. My fever left me; in the darkness of the dawn, I was suddenly very cold. Inside me beat the words to another stanza of Morjin’s poem that I could never forget:

  The stealing of the gold,

  The evil knife, the cold –

  The cold that freezes breath,

  The nothingness of death.

  13

  A few moments later, Atara and Master Juwain, with Maram puffing close behind them, came running into the clearing by the stream. Atara held her strung bow in her hand, and Maram brandished his sword; Master Juwain had a copy of the Saganom Elu that he had been reading, but nothing more. The thought of him reciting passages or throwing his book at a man such as Morjin made me want to laugh wildly.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked me. ‘We heard you cry out.’

  Maram, who was more blunt, added, ‘Ah, we heard you talking to yourself and shouting. Who were you shouting at, Val?’

  ‘At Morjin,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps it was just an illusion–it’s hard to say.’

  I looked at the steel gleaming along the length of my sword, and I wondered how it had been remade.

  ‘Morjin was here?’ Atara asked. ‘How could he be? Where did he go?’

  I pointed toward the faint glow of the sun rising in the east. Then I pointed at the woods, north, west and south. Finally I flung my hand up toward the sky.

  ‘Take Val back to camp,’ Atara said to Master Juwain. She nodded at Maram, too, as if issuing a command. Then she started off toward the woods.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked her.

  ‘To see,’ she said simply.

  ‘No, you mustn’t!’ I told her. I took a step toward her to stop her, but my body felt as if it had been drained of blood. I stumbled, and was only saved from falling by Maram, who wrapped his thick arm around me.

  ‘Take him back to camp!’ Atara said again. And then she moved off into the trees and was gone.

  With my arms thrown across Maram’s and Master Juwain’s shoulders, they dragged me back to camp as if I were a drunkard. They sat me down by the fire, and Maram covered me with his cloak. While he rubbed the back of my neck and my cold hands, Master Juwain found a reddish herb in his wooden chest. He made me a tea that tasted like iron and bitter berries. It brought a little warmth back into my limbs. But the icy nothingness with which Morjin had touched my soul still remained.

  ‘At least your fever is gone,’ Maram told me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s much better to die of the cold.’

  ‘But you’re not dying, Val! Are you? What did Morjin do to you?’

  I tried to tell both Maram and Master Juwain something of my dream–and what had happened by the stream afterwards. But words failed me. It was impossible to describe a terror that had no bottom or end. And I found that I didn’t want to.

  After a while, with the hot tea trickling down my throat, my head began to clear and I came fully awake. Dawn began to brighten into morning as the sun’s light touched the trees around us. I listened to the shureet shuroo of a scarlet tanager piping out his song from the branch of an oak; I gazed at the starlike white sepals of some goldthread growing in the shade of a birch tree. The world seemed marvelously and miraculously real, and my senses drank in every sight, sound and smell.

  Just as I was steeling myself to strap on my sword and go look for Atara, she suddenly returned. She stepped out from behind the cover of the trees as silently as a doe. In the waxing light, her face was ashen. She came over and sat beside me by the fire.

  ‘Well?’ Maram asked her. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Men,’ Atara said. With a trembling hand, she reached for a mug of tea that Master Juwain handed her. ‘Gray men.’

  ‘What do you mean, gray men?’ Maram said.

  ‘There were nine of them,’ Atara said. ‘Or perhaps more. They were dressed all in gray; their horses were gray, too. Their faces were hideous: their flesh seemed as gray as slate.’

  She paused to take a sip of tea as beads of sweat formed upon Maram’s brow.

  ‘It was hard to see,’ Atara said. ‘Perhaps their faces were only colored by the grayness of the dawn. But I don’t think so. There was something about them that didn’t seem human.’

  Master Juwain knelt beside her and touched her shoulder. He told her, ‘Please go on.’

  ‘One of them looked at me,’ she said. ‘He had no eyes–no eyes like those of any man I’ve ever seen. They were all gray as if covered with cataracts. But he wasn’t blind. The way that he looked at me. It was as if I was naked, like he could see everything about me.’

  She took another sip of tea, then grasped my hand to keep her hand from shaking.

  ‘I shouldn’t have looked into his eyes,’ she said. ‘It was like looking into nothing. So empty, so cold–I felt the cold freezing my body. I felt his intention to do things to me. I… have no words for it. It was worse than the hill-men. Death I can face. Perhaps even torture, too. But this man–it was like he wanted to kill me forever and suck out my soul.’

  We were all silent as we looked at her. And then Maram asked, ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I tried to draw on him,’ she said. ‘But it was as if my arms were frozen. It to
ok all my will to pull my bow and sight on him. But it was too late–he rode off to join the others.’

  ‘Oh, excellent!’ Maram said, wiping his face. ‘It seems that Val was right after all. Men are after us–gray men with no souls.’

  As the sun rose higher, we sat by the fire debating who these men might be. Maram worried that the man who had faced down Atara might be Morjin himself–how else to explain the terrible dream and illusion I had suffered? Master Juwain held that they might be only in Morjin’s employ; as he told us: ‘The Lord of Lies has many servants, and none so terrible as those who have surrendered to him their souls.’ I wondered if Kane might have hired them to murder me; I wondered if he was waiting for me farther along the road with a company of stone-faced assassins.

  ‘But if they wanted to kill you,’ Maram said, ‘why didn’t they just ride you down by the stream?’

  I had no answer for him; neither could I say why the gray man and his companions hadn’t charged Atara.

  ‘Well, whoever they are,’ Maram said, ‘they know where we are. What are we going to do, Val?’

  I thought for a moment and said, ‘So long as we keep to the road, we’ll be easy prey.’

  ‘Ah, do you mind, my friend, if you don’t refer to us as prey?’

  ‘My apologies,’ I said, smiling. ‘But perhaps we should take to the forest again.’

  I said that according to a map I had studied before leaving Mesh, the Nar Road curved north between the gap in the Shoshan Range and Suma, where the great forest ended and the more civilized reaches of Alonia began.

  ‘We could cut through the forest straight for Suma,’ I said. There will be hills to hide us and streams in which to lose our tracks.’

  ‘You mean, rivers to drown us. Hills to hide them.’ Maram thought a moment as he stroked his thick beard. Then he said, ‘It worries me that the road should curve to the north. Why does it? Did the old Alonians build it so as to avoid something? What if the forest hides another Black Bog–or something worse?’

  ‘Take heart, my friend,’ I said, smiling again. ‘Nothing could be worse than the Black Bog.’

  On this point, Master Juwain, Maram and I were all agreed. After some further argument, we also agreed–as did Atara–that the cut through the forest offered our best hope.

  Soon after that we broke camp and set out through the trees. We moved away from the road, bearing toward the west. I guessed that Suma must lie some thirty or forty miles to the northwest. If we journeyed too far in our new direction, we would pass by it much to the south. This prospect didn’t discourage me, however, for we could always turn back north and cut the Nar Road when we were sure that we had eluded the men hunting us. In truth, I wanted to get as far away from the road as I could, and the deeper the woods through which we rode the better.

  As the day warmed toward noon, the ground rose away from the stream. The trees grew less thickly, though they seemed taller, with the oaks predominating over the poplars and chestnuts. I could find no track through them. Still, the traveling wasn’t difficult, for the undergrowth was mostly of lady fern and maidenhair, and the horses had no trouble finding footing. We rode in near-silence beneath the great, leafed archways of the trees. I took the lead followed by Master Juwain and the two remaining pack horses. Maram and Atara brought up the rear. All of us–except Master Juwain–rode with bows strung and swords close at hand.

  We saw a few deer munching on leaves, and many squirrels, but no sign at all of the Stonefaces, as Maram named the gray men. I never doubted that they were somehow tracking us through the woods. With the sun high above the world, my fever came raging back, and my blood felt heavy as molten iron. It seemed that someone was aiming arrows of hate at me, for I could almost feel a succession of razor-sharp points driving into my forehead.

  ‘I’m sorry I have no cure for what ails you,’ Master Juwain said as he rode up beside me. He watched me rubbing my head, and looked at me with great concern.

  ‘Perhaps there is no cure,’ I told him. Then I said, ‘The Red Dragon is so evil–how can anyone be this evil?’

  ‘Only out of blindness,’ Master Juwain said, ‘so that he can’t see the difference between evil or good. Or only out of the delusion that he is doing good when actually bringing about the opposite.’

  The Red Dragon, he said, was certainly not evil by his own lights. No one was. But I wasn’t as sure of this. Something in Morjin’s voice seemed to delight in darkness, and this still haunted me.

  ‘He spoke to me,’ I told Master Juwain. ‘And I listened to him. Now his words won’t leave my head.’

  How, I asked myself, could I know what was the truth and what was a lie if I didn’t listen?

  To the rough walking gait of his horse, Master Juwain began thumbing rhythmically through the pages of the Saganom Elu. When he had found the passage he wanted, he cleared his throat and read from the Healings.

  ‘I would advise you to meditate, if you can,’ he told me. ‘Do you remember the Second Light Meditation? It used to be your favorite.’

  I nodded my head painfully because I remembered it well enough: I was to close my eyes and dwell on the dread brought on by the fall of night. And then, after gazing upon the blackness of the sky there as long as I could, I was to envision the Morning Star suddenly blazing as brightly as the sun. This fiery light I would then hold inside me as I would the promise that day would always follow night.

  ‘It’s hard,’ I told him after some long moments of trying to practice this meditation. ‘The Lord of Illusions has made light seem like darkness and darkness light.’

  ‘The worst lie,’ Master Juwain said, ‘is that which misuses truth to make falseness. You’ll have to look very hard for the truth now, Val.’

  ‘You mean now that I’ve listened to Morjin’s lies?’

  ‘Please don’t say his name,’ he reminded me. ‘And yes, I do mean that. You had to test your courage, didn’t you? But you must never listen to him, not even in your dreams.’

  ‘Are my dreams mine to make, then? Or are they his?’

  ‘Your dreams are always your dreams,’ he told me. ‘But you must fight to keep them for yourself even more fiercely than you would to keep an enemy’s sword from piercing your heart.’

  ‘How, then?’

  ‘By learning to be awake and aware in your dreams.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Of course it is. Even in your dream, you weren’t completely without will, were you?’

  ‘No–or else the Red Dragon would have kept me in his room.’

  Master Juwain nodded his head and smiled. ‘You see, it’s our will to life that quickens awareness. And our awareness that seeks our awakening. There are exercises in the dreamwork that you would have been taught if you hadn’t left our school.’

  ‘Can you teach me them now?’

  ‘I can try, Val. But the art of dreaming at will takes a long time to learn.’

  As we rode deeper into the woods, he explained some of the fundamentals of this ancient art. Every night while falling asleep, I was to resolve to remain aware of my dreams. And more, I was to create for myself an ally, a sort of dream self who would remain awake and watch over me while I slept.

  ‘Do you remember the zanshin meditation I taught you before your duel with Lord Salmelu?’

  ‘Yes–it’s impossible to forget.’

  ‘You may make use of that, then,’ he said. ‘The key is in the self looking at the self. You must continually ask yourself the question: Who am I? When you think you know, ask yourself: Who is doing the knowing? This “who,” this one who knows–this is your ally. It is he who remains always beside you, and is awake even as you sleep.’

  He suggested that I practice an ancient exercise that could be found in the Meditations. I was to visualize in my throat a beautiful, soft lotus flower. The lotus should have light-pink petals which curled slightly inwards, and in the center there should be a luminous red-orange flame. He told me to visualize the top of the
flame as long as possible, for the flame represented consciousness and the whole lotus was a symbol of awakening the consciousness of the self.

  ‘Ultimately,’ he explained, ‘you’ll learn to control and shape your own dreams even as they unfold.’

  ‘Even if the Lord of Illusions is attacking me?’

  ‘Especially then. Your dreams are sacred, Val; you must never let anyone steal your dreams.’

  That night we made camp on a hill beneath the tall oaks. There was little enough cover to hide us–nothing more than some thickets of laurel and virburn–but at least we would have a more or less clear line of sight should the gray men try to charge at us up the hill. I fell asleep with Master Juwain’s lotus blazing inside me. His exercises did me little good, however, for I had terrible dreams all night long. My cries kept the others awake. They were true allies, of flesh and blood, and they kept watch over me where Master Juwain’s more ethereal ally did not.

  Our next day’s journey took us farther into the forest to the west. We covered only a few miles, though, because we spent most of the day attempting to elude our pursuers. We walked our horses for hours in shallow streams to leave no hoofprints; we walked them in circles around the tops of hills to confound anyone trying to read our tracks. We rode through blackberry thickets with sharp thorns. More than once, we doubled back across our track. But if the sharp pain piercing my head was any sign, all such tactics failed.

  ‘Whoever is following us,’ Master Juwain said, ‘is very likely reading more than the tracks that we leave in the mud.’

  ‘Who are these Stonefaces, then?’ Maram asked.

  ‘Who knows?’ Atara said. ‘But if we can’t escape them, then we should find a place to face them and kill them with arrows.’

  ‘As you faced them by the stream?’ Maram said to her. ‘As you killed their leader with your arrow that you couldn’t shoot?’

  It was his revenge for her mocking his archery skills during the battle with the hill-men. Atara, whose freezing-up at the sight of the gray men still shamed her, looked off at the gray-green shapes of the sumac bushes hiding deeper in the woods. Then she said, ‘I don’t understand these Stonefaces. If they are many and we are few, why don’t they just attack us and be done with it?’