David Zindell - The Lightstone

With the healing of the discord between Alphanderry and Kane, our company began working as a whole. Do the fingers of one's hand fight over which holes of a flute to cover when making music? No, and neither could we dispute with one another if we were to complete our quest. That we might be nearing the end of our journey, I didn't want to doubt. Already, since leaving my father's castle, we had been on the road some fifty days. And for most of them, I had been growing more and more homesick. The coming into our company of Alphanderry, with his quick smiles and playfulness, reminded me of my brother, Jonathay. My six companions, who every day were growing closer to my heart, reminded me of my six brothers left behind in Mesh. They would have been proud, I thought, to see us riding forth into the wilds of Alonia, united in our purpose like a company of knights.

As we drew closer to the mountains, the land through which we rode rose into a series of low hills running north and south. Kane told us that we had entered the ancient realm of Viljo; some seventy miles to the southwest he said, Morjin had begun his rise to tyranny among the headwaters of the Istas River. There, in the year 2272 of the Age of Swords, he had founded the Order of the Kallimun. He had attracted six disciples to him, and then many more. Only ten years before this, he had made off with the Lightstone from the island where Aryu had hidden it; after that he used it in secret to attract converts at an astonishing rate. He persuaded many of Viljo's nobles to join him. But most took up arms against him – only to be defeated at the Battle of Bodil Fields. There, on that defiled ground, the Red Dragon had ordered the captured nobles slaughtered and had instituted the blood-drinking rites meant to lead to immortality.

'It's said that Morjin himself gained immortality from the Lightstone,' Kane told us.

'But he wouldn't suffer anyone else to behold it. So, he was afraid someone would steal it from him.'

And there had been those who almost did. A rebellion led by outcast knights had nearly succeeded in defeating him. For a time, Morjin had brought the Lightstone to the Tur-Solonu and had gone into hiding. But the scryers who dwelt at the oracle there had betrayed him; Morjin had barely escaped the Tur-Solonu fighting for his life. In revenge, four years later, when he had crushed the rebellion and captured the Tur-Solonu he had ordered the scryers to be crucified and the Tower of the Sun destroyed.

'It's said that the scryers' blood poisoned the laid about the Tur-Solonu, that nothing would ever grow there again,' Kane told us.

We had paused to eat a quick lunch on the side of a hill. From its grassy slopes, we had a good view of the mountains, now quite close to us in the west. Only a few miles away, one of the tributaries of the Istas ran down from them through the forest like a blue snake slithering through a sea of green. Just to the north was a spur of low peaks. If we followed the line of this spur, Kane said, we would find the ruins of the Tur-Solonu in the notch where it jutted out from the main body of the Blue Mountains.

'It can't be more than forty miles from here,' Kane said. 'If we ride steady, we should reach the ruins by sunset tomorrow.'

'Sunset!' Maram cried out as he drew a mug of beer from one of the casks. 'Just in time to greet the scryers' ghosts when they come out to haunt the ruins at night!'

We rode hard that day and the next into the notch in the mountains. Their wooded slopes rose to our right and left; in places bare rock shone in the sun to remind us of their bones, but they were mostly covered with trees and bushes all the way up their slopes. Like a huge funnel of granite and green, they directed us toward the notch's very apex, where the Tur-Solonu had been built late in the Age of the Mother, nearly a whole age before its destruction. I kept looking for the remnants of this tower through the canopies of the trees around us. All I saw, however, was a wild forest that might someday swallow up the very mountains themselves. If men and women had ever lived in this country, there was no sign of them, not even a fallen-in hut or gravestone to mark their lives and deaths.

And then, through a break in the trees, we saw it: the Tower rose up above the notch's floor like a great chess piece broken in half. Even in its destruction, it was still a mighty work, its remains standing at least a hundred and fifty feet high. The white stone facing us was cracked and scarred with streaks of black; in places, it seemed to have been melted and fused into great, glistening flows that hung down its curved sides like drips of wax. I wondered immediately if Morjin had used a firestone to destroy it. But the first firestones, I thought, had been created only a thousand years later in the Age of Law.

'I'm afraid that is true,' Master Juwain said as we looked out at the ancient Tower of the Sun. 'Petram Vishalan forged the first of the red gelstei in Tria in the year 1319.'

The first red gelstei that anyone knew about,' Kane muttered to us, 'Don't forger that it was Morjin, as Kadar the Wise,, who spread the relb over the Long Wall and melted it for Tulumar's hordes to overrun Alonia long before that.'

'Are you saying that the Red Dragon forged a firestone and told no one of it?'

Master Juwain in asked.

'So – how else to explain what we see?' Kane said, pointing at the tower.

'Perhaps an earthquake,' Master Juwain said. 'Perhaps the eruption of a volcano would -'

'No – it's told that Morjin destroyed the Tur-Solonu,'

Master Juwain removed his leather-bound book from his cloak and patted it reassuringly. 'But it is not told in the Saganom Elu.'

'Books!' Kane snarled out with a sudden savagery. 'Books can tell whatever the damn fools who write them believe. Most books should be burned!'

Kane stood glaring at the book that Master Juwain held in his strong, old hand. The look of horror on Master Juwain's face suggested that he might as well have called for the burning of babies.

'If the Red Dragon forged firestones during the Age of Swords,' Master Juwain said,

'then why didn't he use them in his conquest of Alonia? And later, against Aramesh at the Battle of Sarburn?'

'I didn't say that he forged firestones,' Kane said. 'Perhaps he made only one – the one that destroyed this Tower.'

For a while, he stood arguing with Master Juwain in plain sight of the Tur-Solonu.

The first red gelstei, he said, were known to be very dangerous to use: sometimes their fire turned against the one who wielded them, or the stones even exploded in their faces. Thus had Petram Vishalan died in 1320 – a fact that Kane gleefully pointed out was recorded in the Saganom Elu.

'Perhaps we'll never know what destroyed the Tower,' I said, looking at its jagged shape through the woods. 'But perhaps we should complete our journey and search there before it grows too late.'

And so we rode through the woods straight for the Tur-Solonu. The trees again obscured it from view, but soon we crested a little hill and there the trees gave way to barren ground. We came out onto a wedge-shaped desolation some three miles wide – but growing ever narrower toward the point of the notch where the spur met the main mountains. Walls of rock rose up on either side of us; the Tur-Solonu was now a great broken mass directly to the north at the middle of the notch. I wondered if the scorched-looking land about us was truly poisoned after all, for little grew there except a few yellowish grasses and some lichens among the many rocks. As we drew closer to the Tower, waves of heat seemed to emanate from the ground; Flick flared more brightly while Altaru suddenly whinnied, and I felt a strange tingling run up his trembling legs and into me. I had a sense that we were coming into a place of power and treading over earth that was both sacred and cursed.