The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One

‘Val!’ I heard Maram calling me as from far away. ‘Run, now – oh, Lord, oh, Lord!’

The bear would certainly have fallen upon me then if not for Altaru’s courage. As I struggled to stand and regain my breath, the great horse reared again and struck a glancing blow off the bear’s head. His sharp hoof cut open the bear’s eye, which filled with blood. The stunned bear screamed in outrage and swiped at Altaru with his long black claws. He grunted and brayed and shook his sloping white head at me. I smelled his musty white fur and felt the growls rumbling up from deep in his throat. His good eye fixed on mine like a hook; he opened his jaws to rip me open with his long white teeth.

‘Val, I’m coming!’ Maram cried out to the thunder of hooves against stone. ‘I’m coming!’

The bear finally closed with me, locking his jaws onto my shoulder with a crushing force. He snarled and shook his head furiously and tried to pulp me with his deadly paws. And then Maram closed with him. Unbelievably, he had managed to wheel his horse about yet again and urge him forward in a desperate charge at the bear. He had his lance drawn and couched beneath his arm like a knight. But although trained in arms, he was no knight; the point of the lance caught the bear in the shoulder instead of the throat, and the shock of steel and metal pushing into hard flesh unseated Maram and propelled him from his horse. He hit the ground with an ugly slap and whooshing of breath. But for the moment, at least, he had succeeded in fighting the bear off of me.

‘Val,’ Maram croaked out from the blood-spattered road, ‘help me!’

The bear snarled at Maram and moved to rend him with his claws in his determination to get at me. And in that moment, I finally slid my sword free. The long kalama flashed in the uneven light. I swung it with all my might at the bear’s exposed neck. The kalama’s razor edge, hardened in the forges of Godhra, bit through fur, muscle and bone. I gasped to feel the bear’s bright lifeblood spraying out into the air as his great head went rolling down the road into a drift of snow. I fell to the road in the agony of death, and I hardly noticed the bear’s body falling like an avalanche on top of Maram.

‘Val – get this thing off me!’ I heard Maram call out weakly from beneath the mound of fur.

But as always when I had killed an animal, it took me many moments to return to myself. I slowly stood up and rubbed my throbbing shoulder. If not for my armor and the padding beneath it, I thought, the bear would surely have torn off my arm. Master Juwain, having collected and hobbled the frightened horses, came over then and helped me pull Maram free from the bear. He stood there in the driving sleet checking us for wounds.

‘Oh, my Lord, I’m killed!’ Maram called out when he saw the blood drenching his tunic. But it proved only to be the bear’s blood. In truth, he had suffered nothing worse than having the wind knocked out of him.

‘I think you’ll be all right,’ Master Juwain said as he ran his gnarly hands over him.

‘I will? But what about Val? The bear had half his body in his mouth!’

He turned to ask me how I was. I told him, ‘It hurts. But it seems that nothing is broken.’

Maram looked at me with accusation in his still-frightened eyes. ’You told me that the bear would leave us alone. Well, ‘he didn’t, did he?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t.’

Strange, I thought, that a bear should fall upon three men and six horses with such ferocious and single-minded purpose. I had never heard of a bear, not even a ravenous one, attacking so boldly.

Master Juwain stepped over to the side of the road and examined the bear’s massive head. He looked at his glassy, dark eye and pulled open his jaws to gaze at his teeth.

‘It’s possible that he was maddened with rabies,’ he said. ‘But he doesn’t have the look.’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ I agreed, examining him as well.

‘What made him attack us then?’ Maram demanded.

Master Juwain’s face fell gray as if he had eaten bad meat. He said, ‘If the bear were a man, I would say his actions were those of a ghul.’

I stared at the bear, and it suddenly came to me that the illness I had sensed in him had been not of the body but the mind.

‘A ghul!’ Maram cried out. ‘Are you saying that Mor … ah, that the Lord of Lies had seized his will? I’ve never heard of an animal ghul.’

No one had. With the wind working at the sweat beneath my armor, a deep shiver ran through me. I wondered if Morjin – or anyone except the Dark One himself, Angra Mainyu – could have gained that much power.

As if in answer to my question, Master Juwain sighed and said, ‘It seems that his skill, if we can call it that, is growing.’

‘Well,’ Maram said, looking about nervously, ‘if he can send one bear to kill Val, he can send another. Or a wolf, or a –’

‘No, I think not,’ Master Juwain interrupted. ‘For a man or a woman to be made a ghul is a rare thing. There must be an opening, through despair or hate, into the darkness. And a certain sympathy of the minds. I would think that an animal ghul, if possible at all, would be even rarer.’

‘But you don’t really know, do you?’ Maram pressed him.

‘No, I don’t,’ Master Juwain said. He suddenly shivered, too, and pulled his cloak more tightly about him. ‘But I do know that we should get down from this pass before it grows dark.’

‘Yes, we should,’ I agreed. With some handfuls of snow, I began cleaning the blood off me, and watched Maram do the same. After retying Tanar to Altaru, I mounted my black stallion and turned him up the road.

‘You’re not thinking of going on?’ Maram asked me. ‘Shouldn’t we return to the keep?’

I pointed at the opening of the Gate. ‘Tria lies that way.’

Maram looked down at the kel keep and the road that led back to the Valley of the Swans. He must have remembered that Lord Harsha was waiting for him there; it occurred to me that he had finally witnessed at first hand the kind of work that a kalama could accomplish, for he rubbed his curly beard worriedly and muttered, ‘No, we can’t go back, can we?’

He mounted his trembling sorrel, as did Master Juwain his. I smiled at Maram and bowed my head to him. ‘Thank you for saving my life,’ I told him.

‘I did save your life, didn’t I?’ he said. He smiled back at me as if I had personally knighted him in front of a thousand nobles. ‘Well, allow me to save it again. Who really wants to go to Tria, anyway? Perhaps it’s time I returned to Delu. We could all go there. You’d be welcomed at my father’s court and –’

‘No,’ I told him. Thank you for such a gracious offer, but my journey lies in another direction. Will you come with me?’

Maram sat on his horse as he looked back and forth between the headless bear and me. He blinked his eyes against the stinging sleet. He licked his lips, then finally said, ‘Will I come with you? Haven’t I said I would? Aren’t you my best friend? Of course I’m coming with you!’

And with that he clasped my arm, and I clasped his. As if Altaru and I were of one will, we started moving up the road together. Maram and Master Juwain followed close behind me. I regretted leaving the bear unburied in a shallow pond of blood, but there was nothing else to do. Tomorrow, perhaps, one of Lord Avijan’s patrols would find him and dispose of him. And so we rode our horses into the dark mouth of the Telemesh Gate and steeled ourselves to go down into Ishka.

7 (#ulink_2c98fb57-af18-550c-a324-be18239460b4)

Our passage through the Gate proved uneventful and quiet save for Maram’s constant exclamations of delight. For, as he discovered, the walls of rock on both sides of us sparkled with diamonds. The fire of Telemesh’s red gelstei, in melting this corridor through the mountain, had exposed many veins of these glittering white crystals. In honor of his great feat, the proud Telemesh had ordered that they never be cut, and they never had. I thought that the beauty of the diamonds somewhat made up for this long wound in the earth. But many visitors to Mesh – the Ishkans foremost among them – complained of such ostentatious displays of my kingdom’s wealth. King Hadaru had often accused my father of mocking him thusly. But my father turned a stony face to his plaints; he would say only that he intended to respect Telemesh’s law even as he would the Law of the One.

‘But can’t we take just one stone?’ Maram asked when we were almost through the Gate. ‘We could sell it for a fortune in Tria.’

Maram, I thought, didn’t know what he was saying. Was anyone more despicable than a diamond seller? Yes – those who sold the bodies of men and women into slavery.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Who would ever know?’

‘We would know, Maram,’ I told him. I looked down at the corridor’s smooth stone floor, which glittered with more than one diamond beneath patches of wind-blown grit and the occasional droppings of horses. ‘Besides, it’s said that any man who steals a stone will himself turn into stone – it’s a very old prophecy.’

For many miles after that – after we debouched from the pass and began our descent into Ishka – Maram gazed at the rock formations by the side of the road as if they had once been thieves making their escape with illicit treasure in their hands. But as dusk approached, his desire for diamonds began to fade with the light. His talk turned to fires crackling in well-tended hearths and hot stew waiting to be ladled out for our evening meal. The sleet, which turned into a driving rain on the heavily wooded lower slopes of the mountain, convinced him that he didn’t want to camp out that night.

It convinced me as well. When we reached the Ishkans’ fortress that guarded their side of the pass, we stopped to ask if there were any inns nearby. The fortress’s commander, Lord Shadru, told us that there were not; he offered his apologies that he couldn’t allow a Meshian knight within the walls of his fortress. But then he directed us to the house of a woodcutter who lived only a mile farther down the road. He wished us well, and we continued plodding on through the icy rain.

A short time later, we turned onto a side road, as Shadru had directed us. And there, in the middle of a stand of trees dripping with water, we found a square chalet no different than ones that dot the mountains of Mesh. Its windows glowed orange with the light of a good fire burning within. The woodcutter, Ludar Narath, came out to greet us. After ascertaining who we were and why we had come to his door on such a stormy night, he offered us fire, bread and salt. He seemed determined that Ishkan hospitality should not suffer when compared to that of Mesh.

And so he invited us to share the spare bedroom that had once belonged to his eldest son, who had been killed in a war with Waas. Ludar’s wife, Masha, served us a small feast. We sat by the fire eating fried trout and a soup made of barley, onions and mushrooms. There was bread and butter, cheese and walnuts, and a stout black beer that tasted little different than the best of Meshian brews. We sat at his huge table with his three daughters and his youngest son, who eyed me with great curiosity. I sensed that the boy wanted to come over to me, perhaps to pull at the rings of my mail or tell me a bad joke. But his forbearance overruled the natural friendliness bubbling up inside him. As it did with Ludar and the rest of his family. It didn’t matter that I had spent my childhood in forests little different than theirs and had listened to the same after-dinner stories told before a warm fire; in the end, I was a knight of Mesh, and someday I might have to face Ludar in battle – and his remaining son as well.

Still, our hosts were as polite and proper as they could be. Masha saw to it that we had a good bath in the huge cedarwood tub that Ludar had made; while we soaked our battered bodies in the hot water that her son kept bringing us, Masha took away our bloodstained garments to clean them. She sent her daughters to lay out our sleeping furs on top of mattresses freshly stuffed with the cleanest of straw. And when we were finally ready for bed, she brought us cups of steaming ginger tea to warm our hearts before sleeping.

We spent a very comfortable night there in those wet woods on the wrong side of the mountains. With morning came the passing of the storm and the rising of the sun against a blue sky. We ate a quick meal of porridge and bacon as we listened to the sparrows chirping in the trees. Then we thanked Ludar and his family for the grace of their house; we saddled our horses and urged them down the path that led to the North Road.

That morning we rode through a misty countryside of high ridges and steep ravines. Although I had never passed this way before, the mountains beyond Raaskel and Korukel seemed strangely familiar to me. By early afternoon we had made our way through the highest part of them; stretching before us to the north, was a succession of green-shrouded hills that would eventually give way to the Tushur River valley. With every mile we put behind us, these hills grew lower and less steep. The road, while not as well paved as any in Mesh, wound mostly downhill, and the horses found the going rather easy. By the time we drew up in a little clearing by a stream to make camp that night, we were all in good spirits.