David Zindell - Diamond Warriors

My companions and I kept busy during this period of waiting. While Master Juwain and Liljana tried to further the children's education, contending with each other as to exactly which subjects they should teach Daj and Estrella, and how, I greeted the arriving warriors one by one. The most distinguished of them joined Lord Avijan, Lord Harsha and other great knights in taking council where we discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar. Although I asked Mararn to attend these meetings, he insisted on attending to the matter of exploring the capaciousness of Lord Avijan's beer cellars. As he put it, 'These countrymen of yours drink like an army of parched bulls, and I'd at least like a little taste of beer before it's all gone.'

Although Master Juwain had practically given up lecturing him about the evils of strong drink, Liljana kept scolding him whenever she had the chance. On the third day of our stay at Lord Avijan's castle, she took Maram aside and said to him, 'We all know that bad times are coming. You should spend your days helping Val, as we all try to do — either that or learning more about your firestone.'

Now that Bemossed kept Morjin from using the Lightstone, or so we prayed, those of us possessing gelstei found ourselves free to discover new depths and powers of these ancient crystals.

'Bad times are coming,' Maram said to Liljana, 'and that is exactly the point. The only way to fight the bad is with the good, and right now I can think of nothing better than to fortify myself against the evils of the future with some good Meshian beer.'

He might have added that beautiful young women would have served best of all to drive back his fears, but in the overcrowded castle he never knew when Lord Harsha might come around the corner of some cold stone corridor and take him to task for mocking his professed love for Behira.

Of all of us, I thought, Atara had the hardest work with her gelstei, for the kristei's deepest virtue was said to be not merely the seeing of the future but its creation. But how could a single woman, through the force of her will alone, contend with Morjin's great fury to destroy all who defied him, to say nothing of his master, Angra Mainyu?

At one of our councils, after she had told Lord Manthanu of her grandfather, Sajagax's, strategy to persuade a few Sarni tribes to oppose Morjin, Lord Manthanu asked her to give the assembled warriors a good omen. They had talked that evening of cutting apart Morjin's best knights with their fearsome kalamas, and their spirits were running high. Atara did not wish to discourage these brave men, but neither would she speak anything but the truth. And so, in her scryer's way, she told them: 'Then it will be as you wish, and your swords will cleave the armor of even the best knights of Morjin's Dragon Guard.'

She did not, however, reveal how many of them might live to fulfill this gruesome prophecy, and they could not bring themselves to ask her.

But it is not the way of fortune to progress in one direction forever: the cresting wave crashes into sand even as day passes into night. On the seventh of Soldru, after a long day of hunting, sword practice, councils and feasting on roasted venison, I retired to the rooms that Lord Avijan had appointed for me in the southern corner of the keep. They gave out into a small garden full of herbs, roses and bushes heavy with lilac blossoms. I sat on one of the stone benches there to listen to the crickets chirping and watch the stars come out. It was the only place in Lord Avijan's castle where I could find a space of solitude and listen to the whisperings of my soul.

Some time before midnight, with the moon waxing all silvery and full, Liljana found me there walking along the lilac hedges. Although she had brought me some tea, I could tell at once that serving me a soothing drink had little to do with the purpose of her visit. As she set out the pot and cups on one of the tables near the garden's great sundial, I could almost feel her willing her hand not to tremble. Even so the cups rattled against the hard stone with such force that it seemed they might break.

'What is wrong?' I asked her, taking her by her arm and urging her to sit down with me.

'Does there have to be anything wrong,' she said, 'for me to bring you a little fresh chamomile tea?'

'No, of course not,' I told her. 'But something is troubling you, isn't it?'

She nodded her head as she took out her gelstei. In the light of the moon, I could barely make out the blue tones of this little whale-shaped figurine. And then she said to me, 'I have terrible tidings.'

Something in her voice pierced me like an icy wind.

'What tidings?' I asked her. Without thinking, I grabbed hold of her arm. 'Are the children all right? Is Master Juwain?'

'They are fine,' she told me, 'but — '

'Is it Kane, then? Has word come of his death?'

It did not seem possible, I thought, that this invincible warrior who had survived countless wars in every corner of the world over thousands of years had finally gone back to the stars. Nor did I wish to believe that Maram, in a drunken stupor, had stumbled down the stairs after exiting some young woman's bedchamber and broken his neck. Most of all I could not bring myself to think of any violence harming even a single hair of Atara's head.

'No, we're all safe here tonight,' Liljana said to me. 'But others, in places that we had thought were safe, are not. Or so I think.'

Her round, pretty face could hide a great deal when she wished, and she could hold herself calm and careful even when delivering the most disastrous of news. Such was her training as the Materix of the Maitriche Telu. It occurred to me for the thousandth time how glad I was to have this wise and relentless woman as my companion and not my enemy.

I sat on my hard stone seat breathing deeply and waiting for her to say more. I looked around at the roses and lilacs of the starlit garden for sign of the Ahrim — and then back at Liljana to see if she might tell me that this terrible thing had gained some dreadful new power. I reininded myself that if I would rule over Mesh, I must first and always rule myself.

'I came to tell you tidings,' she said to me again as she rotated her little figurine between her fingers, 'but I cannot tell you with absolute certainty that these tidings are true.'

'You speak more mysteriously,' I told her, 'than does a scryer.'

She would have laughed at this, I thought, if she had been able to laugh. Instead she said to me, 'Perhaps I should have just spoken of what I know, with my very first breath, but I wanted to prepare you first. I don't want you to give up hope.'

My heart seemed to be having trouble pushing my blood through my veins. Finally I said to her, 'Just tell me, then.'

'All right,' she said, drawing in a deep breath. 'I believe that the Brotherhood school has been destroyed.'

I gazed straight at her, trying to make out the black centers of her eyes. I felt as bereft of speech as Estrella.

'It would have happened around the end of Ashte,' she told me.

I continued gazing at her, then I finally found the will to say: 'You mean the Brotherhood school of the Seven, don't you? But no place the world is safer! Morjin could not have found it!'

I thought of the magic tunnels through the mountains surrounding the Valley of the Sun, and I shook my head.

'But he has found it,' she told me as she covered my hand with hers. 'Somehow, he has.'

'But the Seven, and those that came before them, have kept the school a secret for thousands of years. And Bemossed has had scarcely half a year of sanctuary there. How could Morjin suddenly have found it?'

The answer, I thought, was built into the very words of my question. Bemossed, contending with Morjin for mastery of the Lightstone over a distance of a few hundred miles, touching upon the very filth of Morjin's soul, must somehow have drawn down Morjin upon him.