The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom

by David Zindell

  ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I suppose he’s dancing upon this needle?’

  And lo, in a flash, with perfect equipoise, Flick spun wildly about the point of the needle.

  ‘Hoy, yes, and now, of course, he’s spinning on my nose!’

  To emphasize the foolishness of what he had said, his eyes suddenly crossed as if fixing on a fly on the tip of his nose. And there, unseen by him, Flick appeared doing his wild, incandescent dance.

  This last proved too much for Kane. The crack in his obduracy suddenly widened into a bottomless chasm. His face broke into the widest smile I had ever seen as he let loose a great howl of laughter. He couldn’t stop himself. He fell to his knees, laughing hard and deeply, tears in his eyes, his belly heaving in and out as he sweated and gasped and his whole body shook. I thought the earth itself cracked open then, for the laughter that shook his soul was more like an earthquake than any human emotion. Out of him erupted blasts of smoke and fire, thunder and lightning – or so it seemed. He lay on the ground laughing for a long time as he held his belly, and we were all so awed by this sudden outburst that we didn’t know what to do. In truth, there was nothing to do except laugh along with him, and this we did.

  Finally, however, Kane grew quiet as he sat up breathing hard. Through his tears, his bright, black eyes seemed to shine with great happiness. I saw in him, for a moment, a great being: joyful, open, radiant and wise. He smiled at Alphanderry and said, ‘Foolish minstrel – perhaps you are good for something.’

  And then he regained much of his composure. The harsh, vertical lines returned to his face; flesh gave way before stone. He stared at Flick, who was now wavering in the air a few feet from Alphanderry.

  Then came a time for explanations. While the fire burned down and the great constellations wheeled about the heavens, we took turns telling of our stay in the Lokilani’s wood. Alphanderry came to see that we were not having a joke with him after all. I spoke to him of my first glorious vision of the many Timpum lighting up the forest, and he believed me; trust came easy to him. When Atara, with tears in her eyes, told of how she had almost died upon eating the timana, Alphanderry looked at me and said, ‘You saved her life, then. With this gift that Kane calls the valarda. Is that why your Flick followed you out of the vild?’

  Flick came over to me and hovered above my shoulder. I could almost feel the swirls of fire that made up his being. ‘Who knows why he followed me?’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps for the same reason we all do,’ Alphanderry said thoughtfully. ‘Well, perhaps someday I’ll be able to see him with you.’

  All this time, Liljana had remained silent when she hadn’t been laughing. Now, as it became clear that a great mystery had been set before her, she said simply, ‘I’d like a taste of this timana, too.’

  The following morning we made our way through a forest wide and thick enough to hide ten of the Lokilani’s vilds. But we found neither another tribe of them nor their sacred fruit, and I thought that Liljana would have to wait a long time to be granted her wish. As we moved away from Old Alonia deeper into Iviunn, the gentle hills gave out onto a great forested plain. We made good progress along the track through the trees. Although it sometimes turned and narrowed as such tracks do, it mostly led straight toward the west. If we continued as we did, I calculated that we would reach the Blue Mountains in only seven more days.

  And then the following day, great gray clouds moved in from the sea, and it began to rain. By late afternoon, our track had turned into a slip of mud. Although the deluge didn’t slow us very much, it made the going miserable, for it was a cold, driving rain that soaked our cloaks and found its way into our undergarments. It didn’t stop that day, nor even on the next or the one following that. By the fourth day of this weather, we were all a little on edge. We had all lost sleep, twisting and turning and shivering on the sodden earth.

  ‘I’m cold, I’m tired, I’m wet,’ Maram complained. ‘But at least I’m not hungry – and we have Liljana to thank for that. Oh, my Lord, no one else could prepare such delicious meals in such foul weather!’

  Liljana, riding her tired gelding who practically dragged his hooves through the squishing mud, beamed at his compliment. I noticed that just as she thrived on sacrificing herself and serving others, she relished their appreciation at least as much.

  Her selflessness was an example to us all. She never minded being roused from even the deepest of sleeps and taking her turn standing watch. Twice, she even stayed awake in the exhausted Alphanderry’s place to let him sleep; as she put it, some people needed more rest than others, and we had all observed that Alphanderry’s talent for sleeping was almost as great as for making music and song.

  As for myself, I often liked wandering about the camp when the hours grew darkest. On clear nights, I had a chance to be alone with the stars – or what I could see of them through the thick cover of the trees. And on rainy nights, I turned my marveling toward Flick. It almost seemed that he could sense my fervor to reach the Tur-Solonu, for with each passing day of the quest, his fiery form grew brighter as if to give me hope. The most bitter of rains passed right through him, dimming his light not even a little. In truth, he seemed to burn the brightest at precisely those moments when either rain or kirax or fear of the evils we faced damped my spirits and touched me with its cold.

  On the fourth night of rain, I was awakened well before it was my turn to stand watch. I heard Kane shouting, and immediately grabbed for my sword. I sprang up from my wet furs, as did Atara and Liljana, followed more slowly by Maram and Master Juwain. We all rushed to the edge of our camp, where Kane had piled some brush. He stood glowering above Alphanderry, who sat in the drizzling rain looking bewildered. If not for the fire that Maram had made earlier – and the radiance pouring out of Flick – it was so dark that we wouldn’t have been able to see them at all.

  ‘He fell asleep!’ Kane accused as he pointed at Alphanderry. His eyes were coals glowing like those of the fire. ‘He couldn’t even make it through an hour of his watch!’

  ‘I don’t know what happened,’ Alphanderry said as he rose to his feet. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and then looked at Kane as he smiled sheepishly. ‘It was so dark, and I was so tired, so I sat down, only for a moment. I just wanted to rest my eyes, and so I closed them and –’

  ‘You fell asleep!’ Kane thundered again. ‘While you rested your damn eyes, we might have all been killed!’

  His whole body tensed then, and I was afraid he might raise his arm to Alphanderry. So I clamped my hand around his elbow. He turned toward me and glared at me; again his body tensed with a wild power. I knew that if he chose to break free, I couldn’t stop him. Could I hold a tiger? And yet, for a moment, I held him with my eyes, and that was enough.

  ‘So, Val,’ he said to me. ‘So.’

  As I let go of him, Liljana came up to Kane and poked her finger into his chest. Her pretty face had now grown as hard as Kane’s. In her most domineering voice, she told him, ‘Don’t you speak to Alphanderry like that! We’re all brothers and sisters here – or have you forgotten?’

  Her admonishment so startled Kane that he took a step backward and then another as her finger again drove into his chest. Her zeal to defend Alphanderry completely over-whelmed Kane’s considerable anger. I was reminded of something I had once seen near Lake Waskaw, when a wolverine, through the sheer force of ferocity, had driven off a much larger mountain lion trying to take one of her cubs.

  ‘Brothers and sisters of the earth!’ Liljana said again. ‘If we fight with each other, how can we ever hope to find the Lightstone?’

  Kane looked to me for rescue as he took yet another step backward. But for a few moments I said nothing while Liljana scolded him.

  ‘All right, all right!’ Kane said at last, smiling at her. ‘I’ll mind my mouth, if it bothers you so. But something must be done about what happened.’

  He nodded toward Alphanderry, then looked at me. ‘What befalls a Valari warrior caught sleeping
on watch in the land of the enemy?’

  Alphanderry ran his hand through his curly hair as he looked about the dark forest. ‘But there are no enemies here!’

  ‘You don’t know that!’ Kane snapped.

  ‘Well, at least I don’t see any enemies,’ Alphanderry said, looking Kane straight in the eye.

  I thought that the usual punishment meted out to overly sleepy warriors – being made to stay awake all night for three successive nights beneath the stinging points of his companions’ kalamas – would do Alphanderry little good. He would likely wind up looking like a practice target – and then fall asleep in exhaustion during his next watch anyway. And yet something had to be done.

  ‘It’s not upon me to punish anyone,’ I said. ‘Even so, if everyone is agreeable, we might change the watches.’

  I turned to Kane and said, ‘You never have trouble staying awake, no matter the hour of your watch, do you?’

  ‘Never,’ he growled. ‘I’ve had to learn how to stay awake.’

  ‘Then perhaps you can teach this wakefulness to our friend. For the next few nights, why doesn’t Alphanderry join you on your watch?’

  Truly, it was my hope that, like a stick held to a furnace, Alphanderry might ignite with something of Kane’s fire.

  ‘Join me, eh?’ Kane growled again. ‘Punish him, I said, not me.’

  With a bow of his head, Alphanderry accepted what passed for punishment. Then he smiled at Kane and said, ‘I haven’t had Flick’s company to help keep me awake, but I’d welcome yours.’

  The yearning in his voice as he spoke of Flick must have touched something deep in Kane, for he suddenly scowled and muttered, ‘So, I suppose you can’t see him, can you?’

  Alphanderry shook his head sadly then said, ‘I’m sorry I fell asleep – it won’t happen again.’

  The utter sincerity in his voice disarmed Kane. It seemed impossible for anyone to remain angry with Alphanderry very long, for he was as hard to pin down as quicksilver.

  ‘All right, join me then,’ Kane said. ‘But if I catch you sleeping on my watch, I’ll roast your feet in the fire!’

  True to his word, Alphanderry kept wide awake during his watches after that. But his attention slipped from other chores that should have been simple: set him loose in the woods to find some raspberries, and he might wander about for hours before returning with a handful of pretty flowers instead. It was as if he couldn’t hold on to anything in this world for very long. He was a dreamy man meant for the stars and for magical lands told of in songs.

  It surprised us all that he and Kane became friends. None of us saw very much of what passed between them during Kane’s nightly watches. But it seemed certain that Alphanderry was in awe of Kane’s strength and immense vitality. He hinted that Kane was teaching him tricks to stay awake: walking, watching the stars, keeping the eyes moving, and composing music inside his head. As for Kane, he listened closely whenever Alphanderry sang his songs, especially those whose words were of a strange and beautiful language that we had never heard before. And it gladdened all our hearts to hear Kane laughing in Alphanderry’s presence – more and more frequently, it seemed, with every day and night that passed.

  On the morning following Alphanderry’s failed watch, the rain finally stopped, and we had our first glimpse of the Blue Mountains. Through a break in the trees, we beheld their dark outline above the haze hanging over the world. They were old mountains, low to the earth with rounded peaks. But in that moment, I thought they were the most beautiful and magnificent mountains I had ever seen. The sight of them made me want to forget Alphanderry’s flaws; it was he, after all, who had caused us to journey these many miles. Another two days’ march, perhaps, would bring us to the ancient Tur-Solonu. And if the words that Alphanderry had heard in the Caves of Senta proved true, there, among the ancient ruins, we would find at last the golden cup that held so many of our hopes and dreams.

  21

  With the healing of the discord between Alphanderry and Kane, our company began working as a whole. Do the fingers of one’s hand fight over which holes of a flute to cover when making music? No, and neither could we dispute with one another if we were to complete our quest. That we might be nearing the end of our journey, I didn’t want to doubt. Already, since leaving my father’s castle, we had been on the road some fifty days. And for most of them, I had been growing more and more homesick. The coming into our company of Alphanderry, with his quick smiles and playfulness, reminded me of my brother, Jonathay. My six companions, who every day were growing closer to my heart, reminded me of my six brothers left behind in Mesh. They would have been proud, I thought, to see us riding forth into the wilds of Alonia, united in our purpose like a company of knights.

  As we drew closer to the mountains, the land through which we rode rose into a series of low hills running north and south. Kane told us that we had entered the ancient realm of Viljo; some seventy miles to the southwest, he said, Morjin had begun his rise to tyranny among the headwaters of the Istas River. There, in the year 2272 of the Age of Swords, he had founded the Order of the Kallimun. He had attracted six disciples to him, and then many more. Only ten years before this, he had made off with the Lightstone from the island where Aryu had hidden it; after that he used it in secret to attract converts at an astonishing rate. He persuaded many of Viljo’s nobles to join him. But most took up arms against him – only to be defeated at the Battle of Bodil Fields. There, on that defiled ground, the Red Dragon had ordered the captured nobles slaughtered and had instituted the blood-drinking rites meant to lead to immortality.

  ‘It’s said that Morjin himself gained immortality from the Lightstone,’ Kane told us. ‘But he wouldn’t suffer anyone else to behold it. So, he was afraid someone would steal it from him.’

  And there had been those who almost did. A rebellion led by outcast knights had nearly succeeded in defeating him. For a time, Morjin had brought the Lightstone to the Tur-Solonu and had gone into hiding. But the scryers who dwelt at the oracle there had betrayed him; Morjin had barely escaped the Tur-Solonu fighting for his life. In revenge, four years later, when he had crushed the rebellion and captured the Tur-Solonu, he had ordered the scryers to be crucified and the Tower of the Sun destroyed.

  ‘It’s said that the scryers’ blood poisoned the land about the Tur-Solonu, that nothing would ever grow there again,’ Kane told us.

  We had paused to eat a quick lunch on the side of a hill. From its grassy slopes, we had a good view of the mountains, now quite close to us in the west. Only a few miles away, one of the tributaries of the Istas ran down from them through the forest like a blue snake slithering through a sea of green. Just to the north was a spur of low peaks. If we followed the line of this spur, Kane said, we would find the ruins of the Tur-Solonu in the notch where it jutted out from the main body of the Blue Mountains.

  ‘It can’t be more than forty miles from here,’ Kane said. ‘If we ride steady, we should reach the ruins by sunset tomorrow.’

  ‘Sunset!’ Maram cried out as he drew a mug of beer from one of the casks. ‘Just in time to greet the scryers’ ghosts when they come out to haunt the ruins at night!’

  We rode hard that day and the next into the notch in the mountains. Their wooded slopes rose to our right and left; in places bare rock shone in the sun to remind us of their bones, but they were mostly covered with trees and bushes all the way up their slopes. Like a huge funnel of granite and green, they directed us toward the notch’s very apex, where the Tur-Solonu had been built late in the Age of the Mother, nearly a whole age before its destruction. I kept looking for the remnants of this Tower through the canopies of the trees around us. All I saw, however, was a wild forest that might someday swallow up the very mountains themselves. If men and women had ever lived in this country, there was no sign of them, not even a fallen-in hut or gravestone to mark their lives and deaths.

  And then, through a break in the trees, we saw it: the Tower rose up above the notch’s
floor like a great chess piece broken in half. Even in its destruction, it was still a mighty work, its remains standing at least a hundred and fifty feet high. The white stone facing us was cracked and scarred with streaks of black; in places, it seemed to have been melted and fused into great, glistening flows that hung down its curved sides like drips of wax. I wondered immediately if Morjin had used a firestone to destroy it. But the first firestones, I thought, had been created only a thousand years later in the Age of Law.

  ‘I’m afraid that is true,’ Master Juwain said as we looked out at the ancient Tower of the Sun. ‘Petram Vishalan forged the first of the red gelstei in Tria in the year 1319.’

  ‘The first red gelstei that anyone knew about,’ Kane muttered to us. ‘Don’t forget that it was Morjin, as Kadar the Wise, who spread the relb over the Long Wall and melted it for Tulumar’s hordes to overrun Alonia long before that.’

  ‘Are you saying that the Red Dragon forged a firestone and told no one of it?’ Master Juwain asked.

  ‘So – how else to explain what we see?’ Kane said, pointing at the Tower.

  ‘Perhaps an earthquake,’ Master Juwain said. ‘Perhaps the eruption of a volcano would –’

  ‘No – it’s told that Morjin destroyed the Tur-Solonu.’

  Master Juwain removed his leather-bound book from his cloak and patted it reassuringly. ‘But it is not told in the Saganom Elu.’

  ‘Books!’ Kane snarled out with a sudden savagery. ‘Books can tell whatever the damn fools who write them believe. Most books should be burned!’

  Kane stood glaring at the book that Master Juwain held in his strong, old hand. The look of horror on Master Juwain’s face suggested that he might as well have called for the burning of babies.

  ‘If the Red Dragon forged firestones during the Age of Swords,’ Master Juwain said, ‘then why didn’t he use them in his conquest of Alonia? And later, against Aramesh at the Battle of Sarburn?’