David Zindell - Diamond Warriors

Liljana, sitting next to Estrella, rested her hand on her leg and smiled as if she, too, had long looked forward to this fulfillment of the ancient prophecies. Then her face fell sad and thoughtful as she looked at me.

'We should all be amazed at the way things have unfolded. We all wondered if the world would have been better if the Lightstone had remained buried in Argattha for another thousand years. How many times, Val, have you regretted that you recovered the Lightstone — only to lose it back to Morjin? And then lost your whole family? And so many of your people? Of course, nothing can ever justify such murders or take the pain of them away — how could it? But if what Abrasax says is true, then everything depended on our rescuing the Lightstone out of Argattha — everything. And so I have to wonder if things happened just as they were meant to happen.'

It was a strange thing for her to say. I considered her words as I gazed out at the thousands of headstones pushing up from the grass all around us. For the moment, I found myself transported back to another battlefield, upon which my father and brothers had died.

Then Maram, looking past me at the greatest of all the carved stones adorning the Detheshaloon, called out: 'But what I still don't understand is Bemossed. He was the Maitreya, too, wasn't he? A true Maitreya, and not just another man of talents who wanted to be more than he was.'

'I am sure that he was,' Master Matai said. His golden-hued face pointed past Bemossed's stone cross, up toward the sky. 'Just as I am sure that more than one Maitreya was born at the end of the Age of the Dragon. But here, too, language has misled us. We speak, most often, of the Maitreya, prophesied for this time. But, of course, there have been many Maitreyas throughout the ages. In the ancient Ardik, there is no distinction between the definite and indefinite article. And so we might reasonably translate the prophecies as referring to a Maitreya, who will bring in the new age.'

Abrasax nodded his hoary head at this, and told us: 'I, too, am sure that Bemossed was a Maitreya. As time went on, his aura flared like that of no other man I have ever seen. But it did not blaze, as Estrella's now does. I think we asked too much of him. It is most logical to assume that he never quite reached the moment of his quickening, when he would come into his full power.'

'And yet,' Master Storr said, tapping his finger against his freckled cheek, 'he found power enough to keep Morjin from using the Lightstone until almost the very end.'

'And that is another thing I don't understand,' Maram broke in, 'Once Bemossed had gone to Morjin, Morjin might have killed him whenever he pleased — and so gained full control of the Lightstone. But he waited. Why?'

'Isn't that obvious?' Atara asked him. She patted the grass beneath Bemossed's headstone. 'How else could he have drawn Val into the trap upon this hill?'

'But Morjin hesitated even once Val had fought his way up here. Why did he not strike sooner?'

I waited to see who might respond to this. The answer, I thought, shone out as clear as starlight from Estrella's lovely face. But because she remained mute, I had to speak for her.

'Morjin,' I said, 'should never even have touched his hand to the Lightstone. It truly is like a star, as Atara has told. I can feel. .. how it burned him. How its brilliance blinded him to many things. And rather than nourishing his soul and illuminating him, his soul fed it. I do not think he could bear the darkness. And the emptiness. And that is why he could not quite bear to murder Bemossed. He hoped, until the very end, that Bemossed might find a way to heal him.'

'But he did murder Bemossed!' Maram said. 'And would have murdered Estrella. Why? Since he recognized, before anyone else, that she was the Maitreya, too?'

'Because,' I told him, 'Morjin was also the Red Dragon, and that one did not want Morjin to be healed.'

At least, I went on to say, the great Red Dragon, missing scales over his heart, would never expose that tender place to such as Estrella or Bemossed. Then I admitted one of my worst fears of the Beast that I had fought for so long: that Morjin would have tried to torture out of Bemossed the mystery of what it meant to be the Maitreya. But one might as well torture a flower to reveal the secret of its beauty.

'Morjin,' I told everyone, 'could have chosen life. But that was his deepest flaw, that he always found it so painful to live.'

I did not add that in this, if nothing else, Morjin and I were as brothers.

'And that is what we have always taught,' Abrasax said. 'That in the end, our hearts are free.'

Master Storr nodded his head at this. 'And freely it was that Morjin chose not to unbind the Dark One. The door to Damoom stood almost open. We all saw that. Another moment and. .'

He sighed as he looked up at the sky above the Detheshaloon. If Morjin hadn't seethed with a fury to be lord of all creation, one who was vastly more powerful than he would have destroyed half the universe in pursuit of just such an insane ambition.

'Morjin could have won,' I said. 'But in wanting to win so much more than the world, he lost everything.'

I stared across the hill at the small stone marking Morjin's grave. Did he, I wondered, now walk the land of the dead as I had? Did some bright part of him dwell with the infinite splendor beyond death, forever?

Maram, who always sensed so much about me, looked at me and said, 'He lost his soul. But you would have helped him find it again, wouldn't you, Val? With your heart of compassion. Though I still don't see how it is possible that you could have loved him.'

'I didn't, Maram — not as I love you,' I told him. 'In truth, I never stopped hating him. But in the end, I did see that he and I are not so different from each other, and that is a kind of love.'

I noticed Maram staring at my sword where I had set it down beside me on the grass. I drew the blade from its scabbard then. Alkaladur's silver gelstei, so near the Lightstone, blazed a deep and fiery glorre.

'And in the end,' Maram said, gazing at it, 'you killed him with that sword. As in a way, if I understand things right, you killed a part of Morjin just before the end with that other sword of yours. But I still don't see the connection between the two. Daj said that Kane told you that the two swords are one and the same.'

Maram looked up at Kane as if hoping he might shed more light on this matter. But our mysterious friend stood unmoving and staring at the granite cross above Bemossed's grave as if his bright black eyes could bore through solid stone.

'Kane!' Maram called out to him. 'What did you mean by that?'

There came no answer from this greatest of all swordsmen who would never take up a steel sword again.

'Kane!' Maram said once more.

And then a deep and powerful voice cracked out like a bolt of thunder: 'Do not say that name!'

The one we had called Kane edged into the circle between Estrella and me. The late sun caught his torn diamond armor, and seemed to set it — and him — on fire.

'I am Kalkin!' he shouted out. His hand pointed at Bemossed's gravestone and then swept out around the top of the Owl's Hill. 'Kane died here — and long, long past his time. You will not find his body, but you must bury him all the same.'

He stomped his boot, hard, against the earth. Then he reached out toward Estrella and held his hands over the Lightstone as if warming them before a fire. Without asking my permission, he took my sword from me, though with grace and gentleness, as if he knew that I would not mind.

'This,' he said, pointing Alkaladur at the Lightstone, 'Kalkin forged so as to focus the power of that. I made it so, long ago, as a spectacle focuses light.'