The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One

‘Not successfully,’ I agreed. ‘But why should we invite an invasion at all?’

‘If anyone invades Mesh,’ Asaru said, ‘we’ll cut them to pieces. The way the Kaashans cut Morjin’s priests to pieces.’

He was referring to the grisly events that had occurred half a year before in Kaash, that most mountainous and rugged of all Valari kingdoms. When King Talanu discovered that two of his most trusted lords had entered Morjin’s secret order of assassin-priests, he had ordered them beheaded and quartered. The pieces of their bodies he had then sent to each of the Nine Kingdoms as a warning against traitors and others who would serve Morjin.

I shuddered as I remembered the day that King Talanu’s messenger had arrived with his grisly trophy in Silvassu. Something sharp stabbed into my chest as I thought of worse things. In Galda, thousands of men and women had been put to the sword. Some few survivors of the massacres there had found their way across the steppes to Mesh, only to be turned away at the passes. Their sufferings were grievous but not unique. The rattle of the chains of all those enslaved by Morjin would have shaken the mountains, if any had ears to hear it. On the Wendrush, it was said, the Sarni tribes were on the move again and roasting their captured enemies alive. From Karabuk had come stories of a terrible new plague and even a rumor that a city had been burned with a firestone. It seemed that all of Ea was going up in flames while here we sat by a small green field drinking beer and talking of yet another war with the Ishkans.

‘There’s more to the world than Mesh,’ I said. I listened to the twittering of the birds in the forest. ‘What of Eanna and Yarkona? What of Alonia? The Elyssu? And Delu?’

At the mention of his homeland, Maram stood up and grabbed his bow. Despite his renunciation of war, he shook it bravely and said, ‘Ah, my friend is right. We defeated Morjin once. And we can defeat him again.’

For a moment I held my breath against the beery vapors wafting out of Maram’s mouth. Defeating Morjin, of course, wasn’t what I had suggested. But uniting against him so that we wouldn’t have to fight at all was.

‘We should send an army of Valari against him,’ Maram bellowed.

I tried not to smile as I noted that in demanding that ‘we’ fight together against our enemy, Maram meant us: the Meshians and the other Valari.

I looked at him and asked, ‘And to where would you send this army that you’ve so bravely assembled in your mind?’

‘Why, to Sakai, of course. We should root out Morjin before he gains too much strength and then destroy him.’

At this Asaru’s face paled, as did Lord Harsha’s and, I imagined, my own. Once, long ago, a Valari army had crossed the Wendrush to join with the Alonians in an assault on Sakai. And at the Battle of Tarshid, Morjin had used firestones and treachery to defeat us utterly. It was said that he had crucified the thousand Valari survivors for twenty miles along the road leading to Sakai; his priests had pierced our warriors’ veins with knives and had drunk their blood. All the histories cited this as the beginning of the War of the Stones.

Of course, no one knew if the Morjin who now ruled in Sakai was the same man who had tortured my ancestors: Morjin, Lord of Lies, the Great Red Dragon, who had stolen the Lightstone and kept it locked away in his underground city of Argattha. Many said that the present Morjin was only a sorcerer or usurper who had taken on the most terrible name in history. But my grandfather had believed that these two Morjins were one and the same. And so did I.

Asaru stood staring at Maram, and said, ‘So then, you want to defeat Morjin – do you hope to recover the Lightstone as well?’

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said, his face falling red, ‘the Lightstone – now that’s a different matter. It’s been lost for three thousand years. Surely it’s been destroyed.’

‘Surely it has,’ Lord Harsha agreed. The Lightstone, the firestones, most of the other gelstei – they were all destroyed in the War of the Stones.’

‘Of course it was destroyed,’ Asaru said as if that ended the matter.

I wondered if it was possible to destroy the gold gelstei, greatest of all the stones of power, from which the Lightstone was wrought. I was silent as I watched the clouds move down the valley and cover up the sun. I couldn’t help noticing that despite the darkness of these monstrous gray shapes, some small amount of light fought its way through.

‘You don’t agree, do you?’ Asaru said to me.

‘No,’ I said. The Lightstone exists, somewhere.’

‘But three thousand years, Val.’

‘I know it exists – it can’t have been destroyed.’

‘If not destroyed, then lost forever.’

‘King Kiritan doesn’t think so. Otherwise he wouldn’t call a quest for knights to find it.’

Lord Harsha let loose a deep grumbling sound as he packed the uneaten food into his horse’s saddlebags. He turned to me, and his remaining eyed bore into me like a spear. ‘Who knows why foreign kings do what they do? But what would you do, Valashu Elahad, if you suddenly found the Lightstone in your hands?’

I looked north and east toward Anjo, Taron, Athar, Lagash and the other kingdoms of the Valari, and I said simply, ‘End war.’

Lord Harsha shook his head as if he hadn’t heard me correctly. He said, ‘End the wars?’

‘No, war,’ I said. ‘War itself.’

Now both Lord Harsha and Asaru – and Joshu Kadar as well – looked at me in amazement as if I had suggested ending the world itself.

‘Ha!’ Lord Harsha called out. ‘No one but a scryer can see the future, but let’s make this prediction anyway: when next the Ishkans and Meshians line up for battle, you’ll be there at the front of our army.’

I smelled moisture in the air and bloodlust in Lord Harsha’s fiery old heart, but I said nothing.

And then Asaru moved close to me and caught me with his brilliant eyes. He said quietly, ‘You’re too much like Grandfather: you’ve always loved this gold cup that doesn’t exist.’

Did the world itself exist? I wondered. Did the light I saw shining in my brother’s eyes?

‘If it came to it,’ he asked me, ‘would you fight for this Lightstone or would you fight for your people?’

Behind the sadness of his noble face lingered the unspoken question: Would you fight for me?

Just then, as the clouds built even higher overhead and the air grew heavy and still, I felt something warm and bright welling up inside him. How could I not fight for him? I remembered the outing seven years ago when I had broken through the thin spring ice of Lake Waskaw after insisting that we take this dangerous shortcut toward home. Hadn’t he, heedless of his own life, jumped into the black, churning waters to pull me out? How could I ever simply abandon this noble being and let him perish from the earth? Could I imagine the world without tall, straight oak trees or clear mountain streams? Could I imagine the world without the sun?

I looked at my brother, and felt this sun inside me. There were stars there, too. It was strange, I thought, that although he was firstborn and I was last, that although he wore four diamonds in his ring and I only one, it was he who always looked away from me, as he did now.

‘Asaru,’ I said, ‘listen to me.’

The Valari see a man as a diamond to be slowly cut, polished and perfected. Cut it right and you have a perfect jewel; cut it wrong, hit a flaw, and it shatters. Outwardly, Asaru was the hardest and strongest of men. But deep inside him ran a vein of innocence as pure and soft as gold. I always had to be gentle with him lest my words – or even a flicker in my eyes – find this flaw. I had to guard his heart with infinitely more care than I would my own.

‘It may be,’ I told him, ‘that in fighting for the Lightstone, we’d be fighting for our people. For all people. We would be, Asaru.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said, looking at me again.

Someday, I thought, he would be king and therefore the loneliest of men. And so he needed one other man whom he could trust absolutely.

‘At least,’ I said, ‘please consider that our grandfather might not have been a fool. All right?’

He slowly nodded his head and grasped my shoulder. ‘All right.’

‘Good,’ I said, smiling at him. I picked up my bow and nodded toward the woods. Then why don’t we go get your deer?’

After that we helped Lord Harsha put away the remains of our lunch. We slipped on our quivers full of hunting arrows. I said goodbye to Altaru, my fierce, black stallion, who reluctantly allowed Joshu Kadar to tend him in my absence. I thanked Lord Harsha for his hospitality, then turned and led the way into the woods.

2 (#ulink_7d7ad193-b7aa-5a71-8fa2-84442605d830)

As soon as we entered this stand of ancient trees, it grew cooler and darker. The forest that filled the Valley of the Swans was mostly of elm, maple and oak with a scattering of the occasional alder or birch. Their great canopies opened out a hundred feet above the forest floor, nearly blocking out the rays of the cloud-shrouded sun. The light was softened by the millions of fluttering leaves, and deepened to a primeval green. I could almost smell this marvelous color as I could the ferns and flowers, the animal droppings and the loamy earth. Through the still air came the tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker and the buzzing of bees; I heard a pair of bluebirds calling to each other and the whispering of my own breath.

We walked deeper into the woods across the valley almost due east toward the unseen Mount Eluru. I was as sure of this direction as I was of the beating of my heart. Once a sea captain from the Elyssu, on a visit to our castle, had shown me a little piece of iron called a lodestone that pointed always toward the north. In my wandering of Mesh’s forests and mountains, I had always found my way as if I had millions of tiny lodestones in my blood pointing always toward home. And now I moved steadily through the great trees toward something vast and deep that called to me from the forest farther within. What was calling me, however, I didn’t quite know.

I felt something else there that seemed as out of place as a snow tiger in a jungle or the setting of the sun in the east. The air, dark and heavy, almost screamed with a sense of wrongness that chilled me to the bone. I felt eyes watching me: those of the squirrels and the cawing crows and perhaps others as well. For some reason, I suddenly thought of the lines from The Death of Elahad – Elahad the Great, my distant ancestor, the fabled first king of the Valari who had brought the Lightstone to Ea long, long ago. I shuddered as I thought of how Elahad’s brother, Aryu, had killed Elahad in a dark wood very like this one, and then, ages before Morjin had ever conceived of such a crime, claimed the Lightstone for his own: