David Zindell - Black Jade

He might as well, I thought, have tried to grasp a heated iron. 'I'm afraid you might have to abandon it,' Master Juwain said.

'Abandon my gelstei? No, no — I can't do that.'

'You can't carry it with you, either.'

Maram stared at the burning stone. 'It will cool — you'll see. It must.'

We waited a few minutes, but the firestone lost none of its torridness. Neither, it seemed, did it grow any hotter. 'We must ride,' I said to Maram. 'Ride now.'

'No, I can't leave it behind. What if some boy wandering through these woods found it? What if Morjin did?'

This objection persuaded all us that we could not simply leave his gelstei burning on the ground here. As we had been told, it might be the last remaining firestone on Ea.

'We won't leave it,' Kane called out. He went over to one of the packhorses and lifted off a waterskin. And emptying its contents on the ground, he went over to the stream, where he bent down to scoop into the skin handfuls of sandy mud. He laid the waterskin on the ground next to the firestone, and he used a rock from the stream to push the firestone point-first down into the opened neck of the mud-filled skin. We waited a while longer, and although the leather skin grew warm, it seemed that the firestone was not hot enough to burn through sand and consume its container. Kane stowed it back on the horse, and he said to Maram: 'If it gets any worse, it will burn the beast and not you.'

His assurance, however, did not console Maram, or any of the rest of us. Maram said, 'I always hoped that if I faced Morjin again, I might burn him with my stone's fire. But now I'm afraid he's coming to burn me.'

I was afraid of this, too. I began to sweat as a familiar and dreaded sensation stabbed through my spine into my belly. It was like being devoured inside by a ravenous snake.

Maram looked straight at me then, and so did Kane and Master Juwain. Bemossed did, too. His soft eyes filled with a grave knowing as he said to me, 'This poison that Morjin put in your blood burns you and bonds you to him, doesn't it, Valashu?'

'Yes,' I said, 'it does.'

Bemossed stepped up close to me; he set his hand upon the scar on my forehead as if to cool the fever that always tormented me. 'He is drawing nearer, now, isn't he?'

I nodded my head as everyone looked at me. I felt Morjin's desire to destroy me driving through my navel, even as the point of Maram's firestone had pierced Kane's waterskin. A terrible pressure inside me bruised my organs and built hotter and hotter.

'He has found me,' I said. 'Either he or his droghul.'

'Then let us ride,' Kane said, 'and see if we can reach the mountains before him.'

There was nothing to do then but mount our horses and try to outdistance the enemy I felt pursuing us. Whether this might be a single droghul hunting by himself or Morjin riding with Lord Mansarian and two hundred Red Capes, I could not say. Neither could I tell how far behind us they might be.

'All right,' I said to Kane, 'let us ride.'

And so we set out up the road leading north, toward the great, snowcapped peaks of the Crescent Mountains that shone in the distance many miles away.

The horses' hooves beat a thudding tattoo against the earth as the trees along the narrow road flew by. I soon saw, however, that Bemossed could not hold this pace. Twice his foot popped out of his stirrup, which confused and angered his usually gentle horse. As we were bounding down a rough, turning stretch of road, he lost the reins altogether and in desperation threw his arms around Littlefoot's neck to hold on for his life. I called for a halt then. I waited while Bemossed collected his senses and his breath. I rode over to help him reposition himself and take up the reins again. Then I set forth at a slower pace.

I heard Maram mutter to Atara, 'Ah, but it's going to be a long day.'

For two hours we rode through the forest, until it gave out onto an expanse of farmland. The road turned toward the northwest; as the Khal Arrak lay to the northeast, we had to ride off the road to find little lanes between the fields and sometimes cut straight across them. More than one farmer shook his hoe at us and shouted curses at us for trampling his cabbages. I worried that we attracted too much attention. I felt our enemy drawing ever closer — even as the pressure inside me built ever more painful, and hotter and hotter.

'We must ride faster,' I turned to tell Bemossed. 'You must try.'

He nodded his head at this and said, 'It still seems wrong to burden this beast this way, but I will try.'

'Your horse is named Littlefoot,' I told him. 'And he is no beast but a great being who is proud to bear you. If you do your part, he will do his.'

He grasped his reins and patted Littlefoot's neck with a new resolve. And for the next hour of the day, beneath the hot noon sun, he managed to hold a canter without once losing his stirrups or reins.

And then we came into a torn, treeless country of poor soil that looked to have been overfarmed. Hesperus sometimes torrential rains had eroded the slopes of the hills rising up toward the mountains. We had to cross many gullies and slips of silt and stones. This demanded skillful horsemanship, but as we were riding over a particularly broken patch of ground, Bemossed clenched his reins too tightly and caused Littlefoot to whinny and rear up. He lost his balance then and flew off onto the ground. Although he took no injury from this fall, he barely managed to roll out of the way in a frantic effort to keep Uttlefoot's driving hooves from crushing him. After that, he did not want to ride anymore. I felt him, however, steeling himself to climb back into his saddle and master this difficult art.

Master Juwain, I saw, was having a hard time of things, too. The work of getting across the gullies caused him to gasp, as if drawing in breath was a strain. This surprised and worried me. He had always seemed to me as tough as tree bark. Even in the heights of the Nagarshath range of the White Mountains, where the air is the thinnest on earth, he had climbed up through a terrible terrain as if he possessed the lungs of a much younger man.

When we stopped by a stream to refill our waterskins, I saw him take out his green gelstei and stare at it. Then I finally understood. I said to him, 'It is Morjin, isn't it?'

He nodded his head, then gasped out, 'He has.. found his way … again… into this crystal.'

Maram came up and looked at it. 'I never felt a fire so terrible as that which came out of your stone when you tried to heal me. Morjin is burning you with it, isn't he?'

'No… it isn't like … that,' Master Juwain said again. He waited to catch his breath. 'The varistei, I think … is making my blood sick. Making it so that it can't… hold the air I breathe in.'

Liljana stepped over to look at the beautiful emerald crystal in his hand. She said, 'Then you must get rid of it.'

'I will,' Master Juwain said, closing his hand around his crystal. 'If things get worse, I will bury it.'

I did not want to pause any longer to hold an argument. None of us, I knew, would readily abandon his gelstei. I told myself that

if we could flee far enough from Morjin, he would lose whatever power he might be gaining over the stones.

'Let us ride,' I said. I looked at the mountains, now standing out sharply in stark gray and white lines perhaps only twenty-five miles away. 'Let us leave this dreadful country behind us.'

We set out again, and the terrain became even worse: rockier along the steeply cut slopes of the hills, and filled with dense vegetation in their troughs. Much grass grew here, and we saw a few herders grazing their sheep and goats upon it. But a tough, rubbery plant called hape also sprouted from the poor soil, in large patches through which the horses had a hard time driving their hooves. Littlefoot stumbled twice here, and I didn't know how Bemossed was able to keep from being thrown. Even Fire, the most surefooted of our horses, nearly broke her leg in a tangle of hape that concealed a rocky hole.