The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom

by David Zindell

  ‘I didn’t say that he forged firestones,’ Kane said. ‘Perhaps he made only one – the one that destroyed this Tower.’

  For a while, he stood arguing with Master Juwain in plain sight of the Tur-Solonu. The first red gelstei, he said, were known to be very dangerous to use: sometimes their fire turned against the one who wielded them, or the stones even exploded in their faces. Thus had Petram Vishalan died in 1320 – a fact that Kane gleefully pointed out was recorded in the Saganom Elu.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll never know what destroyed the Tower,’ I said, looking at its jagged shape through the woods. ‘But perhaps we should complete our journey and search there before it grows too late.’

  And so we rode through the woods straight for the Tur-Solonu. The trees again obscured it from view, but soon we crested a little hill and there the trees gave way to barren ground. We came out onto a wedge-shaped desolation some three miles wide – but growing ever narrower toward the point of the notch where the spur met the main mountains. Walls of rock rose up on either side of us; the Tur-Solonu was now a great broken mass directly to the north at the middle of the notch. I wondered if the scorched-looking land about us was truly poisoned after all, for little grew there except a few yellowish grasses and some lichens among the many rocks. As we drew closer to the Tower, waves of heat seemed to emanate from the ground; Flick flared more brightly while Altaru suddenly whinnied, and I felt a strange tingling run up his trembling legs and into me. I had a sense that we were coming into a place of power and treading over earth that was both sacred and cursed.

  The first ruins we came upon occupied an area about a half-mile south of the Tower. Much of the blasted stone there lay upon the ground in rectangular patterns or still stood as broken walls. We guessed it to be the remains of buildings, perhaps dormitories and dining halls and other such structures that the ancient scryers must have used. We dismounted, and began walking slowly among the mounds of rattling rock.

  If the Lightstone lay buried beneath it, I thought, we might dig for a hundred years before uncovering it.

  ‘But there is no reason that Sartan Odinan would have hidden it here,’ Master Juwain said. He pointed straight toward the Tur-Solonu to the north, and then due east a quarter of a mile where stood the scorched columns of what must have been the scryers’ temple. ‘Surely he would have hidden it there. Or perhaps inside the Tower itself.’

  Atara, standing with her hand shielding her eyes from the sun, pointed at another fallen-in structure a quarter-mile due west of the Tower. It stood – if that was the right word – next to a swift stream running down from the mountains. ‘What is that?’ she asked.

  ‘Probably the ruins of the baths,’ Kane said. ‘At least, that was my guess the first time I came here.’

  ‘You never did tell us why you came here,’ Atara said, fixing her bright eyes upon him.

  ‘No, I didn’t, did I?’ Kane said. He gazed at the Tower, and it seemed he might retreat into one of his deep, scowling silences. And then he said, ‘When I was younger, I wanted to see the wonders of the world. So, now I’ve seen them.’

  Maram was now walking slowly among the shattered buildings; he paused from time to time as he looked back and forth toward the Tower as if measuring angles and distances with his quick brown eyes. After a while, he said, ‘Well, there’s still much of the ruins we haven’t seen. It’s growing late – why don’t we begin our search before it grows too late?’

  ‘But where should we begin?’ Master Juwain asked.

  ‘Surely in the Temple,’ Liljana said. Although her face remained calm and controlled as it usually was, I knew that she was tingling inside with a rare impatience.

  ‘But what about the Tower?’ Master Juwain asked. ‘Shouldn’t we climb it and see what is there?’

  For a time, as the sun dropped quickly behind the mountains, the two of them argued as to where we should direct our efforts. Finally, I held up my hand and said, ‘Such explorations will likely take longer than the hour of light we have left. Why don’t we leave them until tomorrow?’

  These were some of the hardest words I had ever spoken. If the others were trembling inside to find the Lightstone that very day, I was on fire.

  ‘Why don’t we walk around the Tower first,’ I said, ‘and see what we can see?’

  The others reluctantly agreed to this, and so we began leading the horses in a wide spiral around the Tower. Soon we came to a circle of standing stones about four hundred yards from it. That is, some of the stones were still standing, while most were scorched and lying flat on the grass as if some impossibly strong wind had blown them over. Each stone was cut of granite, and twice the height of a tall man.

  The entire area was also peppered with smaller stones, likewise melted, which we took to be the broken remains of the Tower. There were many of them, all of a white marble nowhere visible in the rock of the surrounding mountains.

  ‘Look!’ Maram said, pointing at the ground closer to the Tower. ‘There are more stones over there.’

  A hundred yards closer in toward the Tower, we found another circle of the larger stones half-buried in the grass. Only a few of these were still standing. They were covered with splotches of green and orange lichens that seemed to have been growing for thousands of years.

  No sooner had we begun walking around these stones, than Maram descried yet a third circle of them fallen down closer still to the Tower. We moved from stone to stone around toward the east in the direction of the temple. Neither I nor any of the others was sure what we might be looking for among them if not the Lightstone itself. But their configuration was intriguing. Master Juwain believed they had been set to mark the precession of the constellations or some other astrological event. Liljana, however, questioned this. With one of her mysterious smiles that hid more than it revealed, she said, ‘The ancient scryers, I think, cared more about the earth than they did the stars.’

  Maram, who was in no mood for learned disputes, continued leading the way around the circle. Soon we found ourselves to the north of the Tur-Solonu, directly along the line leading toward the apex of the notch. Without warning, Maram began walking toward the second circle as he studied the fallen stones and the scorch marks on the few standing ones with great care. When he reached the wide ring of stones, he stopped to point at a huge stone overturned and sunken into the ground. It lay by itself exactly at the midpoint between the second and third circles. It was thrice as long as any of the other stones and must have once stood nearly forty feet high.

  ‘Look, there’s something about this stone!’ he said. Again, he stood measuring distances with his eyes. He was breathing hard now, and his face was flushed. Inside, he was all pulsing blood and pure, sweet fire. ‘This is the place – I know it is!’

  So saying, he hurried over to one of the pack horses and unslung the axe that it carried. With the axe in his hands and a wild gleam in his eyes, he rushed back to the end of the great stone and there fell upon it with a fury of motion most unlike him.

  ‘Hold now! What are you doing?’ Kane yelled at him. He rushed over and grabbed Maram from behind. ‘You fat fool – that’s good steel you’re ruining!’

  Maram managed one last swipe with the axe before Kane’s grip tightened around him. By then it was too late: the axe’s edge was already notched and splintered from chopping into cold, hard stone.

  ‘Let me go!’ Maram shouted, kicking at the ground like a maddened bull. ‘Let me go, I said!’

  And then the impossible happened: he broke free from Kane’s mighty armlock. He raised the axe above his head, and I was afraid he might use it to brain the astonished Kane.

  ‘It’s here!’ Maram shouted. ‘A couple more good blows ought to free it!’

  ‘What is here?’ Kane growled at him.

  ‘The gelstei,’ Maram said. The firestone. Can’t you see that when this stone was still standing, the Red Dragon must have mounted the red gelstei on top of it to burn down the Tower?’

  Suddenly,
we all did see this. Looking south toward the Tur-Solonu and all the other structures and stones in the notch, we could all see in our minds the blasts of fire that must have once erupted from this spot.

  ‘Well, even if you’re right,’ Kane said to him, ‘why should you think the firestone is still here?’

  ‘How do I know my heart is here?’ Maram said, thumping the flat of the axe against his chest. Then he pointed at the end of the stone, which was all bubbled and fused as if it had once been touched by a great heat. ‘It is here. Can’t you see it must have melted itself into the stone?’

  Again, he raised up the axe, and again Kane called to him, ‘Hold, now! If you must have at it, don’t ruin our axe beyond all repair.’

  ‘What should I use then – my teeth?’

  Kane strode over to the second pack horse, where he found a hammer and one of the iron stakes we used to picket the horses. He gave them to Maram and said, ‘Here, use these.’

  With his new tools, Maram set to work, panting heavily as he hammered the stake’s iron point against the stone. Little gray chips flew into the air as iron rang against iron; dust exploded upward and powdered Maram all over. Twice, he missed his mark, and the hammer’s edge bloodied his knuckles. But he made no complaint, hammering now with a rare purpose that I had seen in him only in his pursuit of women.

  We all moved in close to see what this furious work might uncover. But it was growing dark, and Maram was bent close to the stone, using his large body for leverage. So that we wouldn’t be blinded by the flying stone chips – as we were afraid Maram might be – we stepped back to give him more room to work and wait for him either to give up or announce that he had found the fabled firestone.

  ‘Ha – look at him!’ Kane said as he pointed at Maram. ‘A starving man wouldn’t work so hard digging up potatoes.’

  All at once, with a last swing of the hammer and a great cry, Maram freed something from the rock. Then he held up a great crystal about a foot long and as red as blood. It was six-sided, like the cells of a honeycomb, and pointed at either end. It looked much like an overgrown ruby – but we all knew that it must be a firestone.

  ‘So,’ Kane said, staring at it. ‘So.’

  ‘It is one of the tuaoi stones,’ Master Juwain said as he gazed at it in wonder. ‘It would seem that the Lord of Lies really did make a red gelstei.’

  Alphanderry, ducking as Maram carelessly swung the point of the crystal in his direction, laughed out, ‘Hoy, don’t point that at me!’

  I stood beneath the night’s first stars and watched as Flick appeared and described a fiery spiral along the length of the gelstei. With such a crystal, I thought, Morjin had once burned Valari warriors even as he had destroyed the Tur-Solonu.

  ‘The seven brothers and sisters of the earth,’ Liljana said quietly. ‘The seven brothers and sisters with the seven stones will set forth into the darkness.’

  The words of Ayondela Kirriland’s prophecy hung in the falling darkness like the stars themselves. Seven gelstei Ayondela had spoken of, and now we had three: Master Juwain’s varistei, Kane’s black stone and a red crystal that might burn down even mountains.

  ‘Prophecies,’ Kane muttered. ‘Who could ever know what hasn’t yet happened? Why should we believe the words of this dead scryer?’

  Despite his bitterness, the light in his eyes told me that he desperately wanted to believe them.

  ‘Is this,’ he asked, pointing at the firestone, ‘the reason we’ve journeyed half the way across Ea to a dead oracle?’

  His deep voice rolled out as if he were speaking his doubts to the wind. And it seemed that the wind answered him. A different voice, deeper in its purity if not tone, poured down the mountain slope to the west and floated across the field of stones: ‘And who is it who has journeyed half the way across Ea to tell us that our oracle is dead?’

  We all whirled about to see six white shapes appear in the darkness from behind the standing stones. Kane and I whipped free our swords even as Maram shouted, ‘Ghosts! This place is haunted with ghosts!’

  His eyes went wide, and he held out his crystal in front of him as he might a short sword.

  Then the ‘ghosts’ began moving toward us. In the twilight, they seemed almost to float over the grass. Soon we saw that they were women, each with long hair of varying color; they each wore plain white robes that gleamed faintly: the robes, I saw, of scryers.

  ‘Who are you?’ their leader said again to Kane. She was a tall woman with dark hair and a long, sad face. ‘What are your names?’

  ‘Scryers,’ Kane spat out. ‘If you’re scryers, you tell me, eh?’

  Kane’s rudeness appalled me, and I quickly stepped forward and said, ‘My name is Valashu Elahad. And these are my companions.’

  I presented each of my friends in turn. When I came to Kane, he practically cut me off and asked the scryer, ‘So, what is your name, then?’

  ‘I’m called Mithuna,’ she said. She turned to the five women who accompanied her and said, ‘And this is Ayanna, Jora, Twi, Tiras and Songlian.’

  All of us, even Kane, bowed to the women one by one. And then Mithuna looked at Kane with her dark eyes and said, ‘As you can see, the oracle of the Tur-Solonu is not dead.’

  ‘Ha – I see a broken tower and scattered stones,’ Kane said. ‘And six women dressed up in white robes.’

  ‘It’s said that men and women see what they want to see,’ Mithuna told him. ‘Which is why they don’t truly see.’

  ‘Scryer talk,’ Kane muttered. ‘So it is with all the oracles now.’

  ‘We speak as we speak,’ Mithuna said. ‘And you hear what you will hear.’

  ‘Once,’ Kane said, ‘this oracle spoke the wisdom of the stars.’

  ‘And you doubt that it still speaks this wisdom. So it is that the wind must blow; so the sun must rise and fall and the ages pass.’

  She told us then what had happened in this very place in an age long past. After Morjin had destroyed the Tower of the Sun with the very crystal that Maram held in his hands, he had ordered the scryers who served the oracle to be crucified. But a few of them had eluded Morjin’s murderous priests and had escaped into the surrounding mountains. There they had built a refuge in secret. And when Morjin and his men had finally abandoned the Tur-Solonu, the scryers had returned to the ruins to stand beneath the stars. The scryers grew old and died as all must do, but as the years passed, others had joined them. Thus had Mithuna’s predecessors established a true and secret oracle in the ruins of the Tur-Solonu. And so, century after century, age after age, scryers from across Ea had come to this sacred site to seek their visions and listen for the voices of the Galadin on the stellar winds.

  ‘But how would they know to come here?’ I asked her.

  ‘How did you know to come, Valashu Elahad?’

  A savage look in Kane’s eyes warned me to say nothing of our quest, and so for the moment I kept my silence.

  ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you came because you were called.’

  I closed my eyes and listened to my heart beating strongly. Deeper, beneath my feet, the very earth seemed to beat like a great drum calling men to war.

  ‘There is something about this place,’ I said as I looked at her.

  ‘Something, indeed,’ she said. ‘There is no other like it in all Ea.’

  Here, she said, beneath the ground upon which we stood, the fires of the earth whirled in patterns that burned away time. Nowhere else in the world did the telluric currents well so deeply and connect the past to the future.

  ‘This is why the standing stones were set into the ground,’ she told us. This is why the Tur-Solonu was built, to draw up the fires from the earth.’

  As Mithuna told of this, Master Juwain rubbed his bald head thoughtfully, then said, ‘The Brotherhoods have suspected for a long time that there was a great earth chakra in the Blue Mountains. We should have sent someone to search it out long ago.’

  ‘And now they have sent you,’ Mithuna sai
d. ‘But I’m sorry to tell you that only scryers ever see visions here. Many are called but few are chosen.’

  Here she smiled at Atara, and her eyes were like windows to other worlds. ‘Thank you for making the journey. We can only hope that it is the One who has sent you to us.’

  Atara looked at me, and I looked at her, and then to Mithuna she said, ‘But I’m no scryer!’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I’m a warrior of the Manslayer Society! I’m Atara Ars Narmada, daughter of King –’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Mithuna said, reaching out to grasp Atara’s hand. ‘Few know who they really are.’

  A wild look flashed across Atara’s face then. Her eyes fell upon me for reassurance as she said, ‘I saw the spider spinning her web, and there were the gray men, too, but that must have all been chance. It must have been, mustn’t it?’

  I said nothing as I looked for the diamonds of her eyes in the failing light.

  ‘And even if it wasn’t chance,’ she went on, ‘I’ve seen so very little. That doesn’t make me a scryer, does it?’

  Maram, who was laughing softly to himself as he gripped his red crystal, said to her, ‘Now I understand how you always win at dice.’

  ‘But I’m just lucky!’ Atara protested.

  Mithuna stroked Atara’s hand and told her, ‘You have seen so very little of what there is to see. If you had been trained … Oh, dear child, you’ve sacrificed much to forsake such training.’

  Atara withdrew her hand and then looked at it as if trying to understand her fate from its many lines.

  ‘It’s dangerous to look into the future without being trained,’ Mithuna said. ‘Dangerous to look at all. And that is why you’ve come to us, so that we can help you.’

  ‘No,’ Atara said, ‘I came here to look for the Lightstone. We all did.’

  She touched the gold medallion that King Kiritan had given her; she spoke of the great quest upon which many knights had set out. Then she nodded toward Alphanderry and told Mithuna what his dead friend had heard in the Singing Caves.