Liljana, who could haggle the scales off a dragon, bowed her head to him and asked, 'And how much devotion do you think a pilgrim should show in order to spend as long inside the caverns as she pleases?' So sweetly and yet compellingly did her voice sound out that Sylar forget the first rule of negotiating, and he was the first to name a price, saying, 'Surely six ounces would not be too much.'
'All right — six silver ounces,' Liljana said, reaching for the coins bulging out her purse.
'No, madam — six gold ounces,' Sylar smiled at her and added, 'Alonian archers would be good — that is one currency, at least, that hasn't been debased. You are Alonian, aren't you? A poor knight's widow, I heard you say, though I think you have the look of a queen.'
His smile, as fluid as heated oil, produced no like response in her. Her gaze fixed on him as she said. 'Three gold archers seems to me a very great devotion.'
Sylar's smile widened as he snapped at her offer and said, 'Very well, then — three archers for each of the seven of you. Twenty-one altogether.'
'Three archers apiece!' Liljana cried out. 'Why didn't you say so from the first? We're only poor pilgrims — and even poorer for having come so far.'
'Two archers apiece, then. Let it not be said that Sylar of the Caves takes advantage of blind women and grandmothers.'
Liljana appeared to consider this. She gathered Estrella and Daj close to her, then asked, 'Have you children. Lord Steward? You wouldn't wish to impoverish ours, would you?'
And so the haggling continued untill the end Sylar raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness and agreed to accept five gold ounces, total, for our admission to the caverns: one for each adult, and none at all for the children. I watched Liljana count the coins out of her purse. They were full-weight, Alonian ounces, with the face of the deceased King Kiritan stamped into one side and the image of an archer drawing a longbow on the other.
'Very well, grandmother,' Sylar said to Liljana after he had put away the coins. He glared at her as if he had lost the ability to smile then waved us toward the opened iron doors.
'You played him like a hooked fish,' I whispered to her as I walked beside her.
I heard my words less as a compliment than an accusation. Not often did Liljana allow anyone to see the skills in manipulating men that had made her Materix of the Maitriche Telu.
'The signs were written on his face for anyone to read,' she whispered back to me. 'Still, that is one fish who is more slippery than I would like. Let us not be any longer about our business than we must.'
I nodded my head, and looked over at the blue-eyed demon behind us. Then I turned to lead the way into the Singing Caves.
Chapter 30
The first thing I noted upon entering the next cavern was not sound but light. A soft, variously-hued radiance seemed to pour forth from the curving cavern walls and ceilings from no single source. A closer inspection revealed that the crystals studding the cavern's smooth rock each glowed from within. There were millions of them. Some were nearly as tiny as grains of sand; the largest were the size of Master Juwain's varistei, which nearly fit into his opened palm. They glittered through the whole of the cavern in a rainbow of colors: carmine; orange; citron; emerald; azure; indigo and violet. Most of the crystals were clear, like precious jewels, though many swirled with piebald or iridescent patterns, more like opals or pearls. Among these. Master Juwain identified many music marbles, touch stones and thought stones, all of the same family of gelstei. He guessed that the other crystals in this chamber were of some sort of related gelstei, but he did not really know.
The cavern had been shaped like a bubble of blown glass, only pinched-in and elongated as it opened down into the earth. We made our way slowly toward its center. This required us to move down steps that had been cut into the floor of the cavern long ago, a rather difficult feat since the cavern's splendor drew the eye not downward but out and up. A few crystals did sprout up from the floor like glowing mushrooms, but we guessed that most there had long since been broken off or chiseled out to make room for the pathways and open spaces upon which pilgrims might stand. There was nothing to do here, I thought, but to stand and stare in awe — and to listen.
As Kane had promised, thousands, perhaps millions, of voices filled the air. Not all of them, or even most of them, sang. I heard wails and laments, chants, thanksgivings, cries of joy and invoca-tions. The bray of an old warrior telling of his victories vied with the shrillness of a bereft woman wondering why plague and war had taken the lives of her nine children. At first this cacophony nearly drowned me like an ocean's wave slamming my body underwater against hard sand. The raw emotion in the multitude of voices, all speaking with passion and truth, nearly crushed the blood from my chest. I threw my hands over my ears to block out [this immense Sound. It helped only a little, for I could feel my flesh and my very hand bones vibrating in harmony with the voices filling up the cavern, and pushing the sound only deeper into me. I saw Master Juwain put his finger to one of the wall's vibrating crystals, which he had named as a touch stone. I remembered that the lovely, variegated touch stones recorded and played people's sentiments, instead of music, for others to feel.
'This is madness!' I cried out, looking at Kane. 'I cannot even hear myself think!'
Kane's jaws ground together as he glared back at me and slowly nodded his head.
'How do you bear it?' I asked him. My words seemed lost into the great noise about us. My other companions, however, did not seem as troubled by it as I was. Master Juwain told me that he could make out a voice reciting in ancient Ardik the long lost epic of Azariel — as well as another speaking in Marouan of the forging of the first of the blue gelstei. He did not pause to await my response, for two streams of sound sufficed to fill him to overflowing. I marveled that he seemed able to concentrate his awareness on only two, to the exclusion of the many others. So it seemed with Daj, who would not tell of what sounds enchanted him. He only stared at a cluster of aquamarine crystals as if soaring through a dream. Liljana asked if I could hear the voice of Seki the First telling of the building of the Temple of Life in the Age of the Mother. And of a boy asking after his missing father and a young woman singing of her love for a man named Seasar — and a dozen other threads of utterances that she somehow sorted out within herself and wove into a pattern making sense to her. Atara likewise shared this gift, and so, perhaps did Estrella. This slender girl seemed to open herself to the thousands of voices echoing through the cavern as if she somehow could hold each of
them inside her.
'If I remember aright,' Kane shouted at me, 'it gets better in the lower caverns. So, let's get on with things, then.'
He turned to walk down the steps where they cut through a particularly steep stretch of the cavern's floor. I followed him gladly, and so, less gladly, did the others. The deepest part of the cavern narrowed into a tube, as of a corridor connecting two parts of a castle. Here, no crystals arose from the smooth rock encasing us, and the voices died almost to a murmur. I breathed out a sigh of relief. I felt myself building stony walls inside my heart against the surge of sound and people's passions that would surely assault me upon our entrance to the next cavern.
The third cavern proved much smaller than the second: barely the size of a serving woman's chambers, with great, inward bulges in its crystal-lined walls that made it feel even smaller. The seven of us crowded in together only with difficulty, and we did not long remain. I noted, though, that the crystals in this cavern grew larger, some reaching nearly a foot in length. Strangely, the voices grew fewer in number and less strident, though perhaps I was learning to block out the sounds and words that most vexed me.
In the fourth cavern, deeper still, pink and silvery crystals grew out of the walls and floor like swords. The path through them cut steep and narrow, and we had to move with care lest we impale ourselves on their glittering points. Atara took my hand, and asked me if I could make out the voice of a minstrel singing in Old High Lorranda the Ge
st of Nodin and Yurieth. I could not. I wondered that we each seemed to apprehend different voices. I had a strange sense that the crystals here possessed desires of their own. Somehow the crystals, I thought, as of a gosharp's strings resonating with each other, attuned themselves to something deep and individual inside each of us and directed the sounds that pleased them into our ears and hearts.
Daj hadn't yet learned Lorranda, which Maram had called the language of love. He lifted his face toward the ceiling, hung with long, amethyst-like pendants and pulsing golden crystals. And in his high, piping boy's voice, he called out: 'I have a song for you! It's called the Gest of Eleikar and Ayeshtan, Princess of Khalind. It tells of how Eleikar slew the wicked King Ivar and gained Khalind's throne.'
Upon the sound of his bold words, Alphanderry appeared out of the cavern's close air. He stood in the radiance pouring down from the thousands of gelstei gleaming upon the cavern's ceiling and walls. He smiled at Daj, and said, 'Hoy, the song — let's hear the song!' Master Juwain, however, was not so pleased by Daj's enthusiasm, nor did he appear eager to listen to the story that Daj, Estrella and Alphanderry had nearly finished making. He turned his lumpy face toward the boy, and chastened him, saying, 'Your story still incomplete.'
Daj shrugged his shoulders as he cocked his ear toward a particularly large ruby crystal pointing down from the ceiling thirty feet above our heads. He said, 'Other stories are incomplete, too. Other songs are. The story of the whole world … has yet to be finished.'
'There is a time for singing, and a time for listening.'
'But I just want to sing of Eleikar, and listen to these stones sing back! Maybe the next people passing through will hear it and know how to complete the story if we don't — and if Eleikar himself doesn't, or even dies before he has the chance.'
'Dajarian,' Master Juwain said to him, 'Eleikar cannot really die.' 'That's just it, sir — we can't let him die.'
'He cannot die because he is not real.'
'He's real to me, sir.'
Master Juwain sighed as he rubbed the back of his shiny head and regarded Daj. Not two years ago, when we had rescued Daj from the Dragon's clutches, the horrors of Argattha had killed something precious and innocent in him, and he had been more callous of countenance and soul than a battle-hardened warrior. Now, the boy lived within him again, and a world of beauty and hope, and it gladdened my heart to see that.
'It is said,' Master Juwain explained to him, 'that only words spoken truly and with deep conviction can be recorded here.'
'I will speak the truth,' Daj assured him.
'But your story is an invention.'
'But what of Nodin and Yurieth, then?'
'Well, they are real. It is almost certain that they lived in the vanished kingdom of Osh, during the Age of Swords.'
'But Eleikar and Ayeshtan live inside me! A story doesn't have to be really real to be true.'
Master Juwain sighed as he rested his gnarled hand on a small purple crystal sprouting out of a rocky rise in the floor. It would have been an easy thing, I saw, for him to snap it off and put it in his pocket.
'All right,' he said to Daj. 'Speak as you will, and let us hear if these stones speak back.'
Daj stood up straight, and without hesitation, in a voice as steady and full of fire as the desert sun, recited the first verses into which he and Alphanderry, with Estrella's assent, had rendered their story:
In Khalind, once upon a time,
A boy's revenge, upon a crime…
We all stood listening as Daj sang out his story. After he had completed the first three stanzas, he fell into a silence. He stared at the lacy, white crystals adorning the wall before him. He waited lor them to begin sparkling like diamonds.
An echo, reflected back from a mountain's rock, reaches the ear faster than any bird can fly. We waited for a good ten count, and then thrice that long, and the only voices that any of us heard belonged to departed wanderers, minstrels, merchants and queens, but not to boys barely ten years old. And then, with a suddenness that froze the breath in my throat, the space about us fell dead quiet. The cavern itself seemed to be listening. And then Daj's words, in Daj's earnest voice, fell out of the air like perfectly formed jewels:
In Khalind, once upon a time,
A boy's revenge, upon a crime
So dark the demons shriek and sing
The torment of a wicked king...
When the song stones had finished speaking back Daj's verses. Master Juwain rested his hand on top of Daj's tousled hair and smiled at him. 'Well, lad, I must admit that I was wrong. Very wrong. There is truth, and then there is truth.'
'I told you,' Daj said, beaming at him.
'And then there is that which we came here to find,' Master Juwain said. He looked from Daj to Liljana, and then at Atara and me. 'Well-made verses, whether old or new, are always a delight to hear. But has anyone heard tell of the Shining One?'
We all had. Over the centuries, many had come into the caverns to sing of Ea's Maitreyas. Most of their songs were ancient and told of miracles of healing: In the third cavern, I had listened intently as a nameless woman gave praise to Godavanni the Glorious, relating how he had laid his hands upon her son's withered leg and made it whole again. A master of the Brotherhood — a man who called himself Navarran — told of his reverence for Alesar Tal's powers of soul and uplifting others' spirits. He had wondered if Alesar might be the Maitreya foretold for the end of the Age of the Mother, but. he had never determined this, for Alesar had never caught sight of the lost Lightstone and had died in obscurity, just another healer who lived out his life in one of the Brotherhood's schools. Liljana, as she informed us, had heard a song praising a Maitreya known simply as the Erikur. As the Maitreyas born near the endings of the known ages were accounted for, Liljana concluded that the Erikur had worked his wonders during one of the Lost Ages, after Aryu had slain Elahad and men and women lived nearly wild in lands whose names were lost to time.
And then there was Issayu. Born in the year 2261 of the Age of the Swords on the island of Maroua, he had grown into manhood talking to the dolphins and healing the blind. Of him it was sung that 'his hands were like the ocean's waters and his eyes like the sun'. Thaddariam, the Grandmaster of the Brotherhood, upon testing Issayu, had proclaimed him as the Shining One. Many looked to Issayu to end the terror of that age and bring a time of peace and healing. But after Morjin had conquered the Elyssu in 2284, he had captured and seduced Issayu, promising to bestow upon him the Lightstone and the gift of immortality. Of course Morjin had never actually allowed Issayu to hold the Cup of Heaven in his hands. The Lord of Lies had slowly perverted Issayu by requiring him to do darker and darker deeds in hope someday of becoming a great Wielder of Light. In the end, when Issayu had discovered how Morjin had twisted his heart and poisoned his soul, he had despaired and had killed himself by throwing himself out of a tower upon the rocks overlooking the sea.
All these accounts, and there were thousands of them, were ancient. But others seemed less old. Many people had come into the caverns to sing of their hope for the coming Maitreya, the Cosmic Maitreya — the last of the Shining Ones who would bring an end to the dark ages of Ea and herald in the Age of Light. Their many prayers and chants were variations of these words:
Hail Maitreya, Lord of Light,
Open up our deepest sight.
Shine like sun, forever bright.
Bring an end to darkest night.
At least fifty voices were new, for they told of King Kiritan's calling of the great Quest and how the Lightstone had been found. Soon, it was sung, the Cup of Heaven would find its way into the hands of the Maitreya. Indeed, this great-souled being might already have come forth: in the person of a blacksmith's son in Alonia or a fisherman on one of the Islands off Thalu or a Galdan healer — or even in the unlikely form of a prince of Mesh named Valashu Elahad. As I stood beneath purple and white crystals vibrating like a mandolet's wrings, I tried to take in the dozens of hints as to wh
ere the Maitreya might have been born and who he might be. So, I thought did Master Juwain and Liljana and my other friends. We listened most intently for accounts of healings and other miracles out of the lands in the north of Hesperu.
'Let us go deeper,' Kane finally said as he looked toward the passage to the next cavern. 'Let us hope that as the songs grow deeper, we will hear what we came to hear.'
We followed his lead. The fifth cavern twisted off sharply to the right, and down, many more feet into the earth. Virescent crystals the length of spears stuck up from the floor and hung down from the ceiling above our heads. A few of these flowed from the celling to the floor like delicate, translucent pillars. As I made my way through this narrow chamber, I seemed able to pick out single songs and concentrate my awareness upon them. In the sixth cavern, full of pendants, plumes and other lovely rock formations glistering with the fire of opals, individual verses and words became ever clearer even as the thousands of distracting voices faded to a murmur. It seemed that I had the power to let live within myself only those songs that touched me most deeply.
'I wonder,' Alphanderry said, 'if this is where Venkatil heard the voice telling him to seek for the Lightstone in the Tower of the Sun. I wonder if he also knew where the Maitreya might have been born.'
At last we came into the seventh cavern, nearly as round and vast as King Kiritan's hall in faraway Tria. The air fell quiet as over a field just before a battle. A hundred feet above our heads, amethyst, turquoise and rose crystals hung silent and still. Great pinnacles, jacketed in some pearly white substance, pointed up from the floor. They caught the glittering greens, reds and blues pouring off the cavern's curving walls; they caught the light of our eyes and seemed to drink in our breath and the sound our beating hearts,
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