David Zindell - The Lightstone

We walked back through the Library as we had come. We crossed the courtyard along the southern wall until we came to the western wall where Lord Grayam had his post. He climbed up to the tower guarding the wall's gate, and Atara and Maram joined him there Kane and I stood with the grim-faced knights beneath them along the wall where the fighting would be the fiercest.

As on the preceding day, the enemy's drums pounded out their promise of death, and Count Ulanu's steel-clad battalions marched in their gleaming lines toward the walls. The siege towers and battering rams rolled forward; the catapults hurled great stones crashing against the walls and the smooth marble of the Library itself. Arrows fell like rain, though not so many as before when the archers had more of them to shoot. The screams rang out as men began dying.

I was still safe behind the walls that I built for myself; Alkaladur, flashing brilliantly in the morning sun, gave me the strength to endure the deaths of those whom I would soon kill and those whom I had so recently sent on to the stars. Kane stood next to me with his sword held ready to drink the enemy's blood. He drew part of his strength from his hate. He stared down at the empty cross where Count Ulanu had put Alphanderry. I saw him scowling at the hands and feet that remained nailed to it.

Lightning flashed in his eyes then. Thunder tore open his heart. A dark and terrible storm built inexorably inside him, awaiting only the advance of Count Ulanu and his men for its fury to be unleashed.

During the first assault, Count Ulanu sent a battalion of Blues against our part of the wall. Kane and I, no less Maram and Atara, had become familiar figures to the enemy. Many of them shrank back from facing us. But the bravest of them vied for the honor of slaying us, and none were so brave as the Blues. Atara killed them with her arrows and Maram with his fire, but it was not enough. Too many of them hurled themselves howling over the battlements to meet Kane's sword and mine with their murderous axes. Their rage seemed bottomless; they attacked us without fear.

Alkaladur made a carnage of their frenzied, naked bodies, as did Kane's bloody blade. Even so, they came at us in twos and tens, and worked their way behind us.

Twice I saved Kane from an axe splitting open his back, and three times he saved me. Thus our flashing swords forged deep bonds of brotherhood between us. For a few golden moments we fought back to back as if we were one: a single, black-eyed Valari warrior with four arms and two swords guarding both front and back.

The Blues could not overcome us. I killed many of them. And each time my sword opened up one of them, I myself was opened. Although they did not feel pain as did other men, their death agonies were strangely even more unbearable. For the very numbness of these half-dead men was itself a deeper and more terrible kind of suffering. The Soulless Ones, people called them, but I knew well enough they had souls, as all men do. It was just that the essence of what made them human seemed lost, damned in life to wander that gray and misty realm that lies between life and death. To feel no pain is to be robbed of joy as well. And so I found that I must not envy their invulnerability to that to which I was most vulnerable. I found, too, that I could not hate them. It was not the One but only Morjin who had originally called their kind into life.

At last Count Ulanu's buglers sounded the retreat, and the Blues and the rest of the enemy pulled back from the walls. Teams of pallbearers worked all up and down the battlements to dispose of the many enemy who had fallen there – and the bodies of the slain Librarians, too. Others came up to us with mops and buckets of water to dean the ramparts so that the remaining defenders wouldn't slip on all the blood spilled there or become disheartened at the sight of it. But it seemed that nothing could now lift the spirits of the Librarians. There were simply too many of the enemy and too few of them. Even the fire from Maram's crystal brought them little warmth of hope.

'It is difficult to use this in batlle,' he said to me, holding up his gelstei and coming down from his tower to pay Kane and me a visit before the next assault. 'Difficult to aim. And the more fire I bring forth from it, the longer it takes to gather in the sun's rays for the next burst.'

'It's an old crystal,' Kane muttered. 'It's said that firestones of ages past were more powerful.'

I looked out to the left at the smoking ruins of the second siege tower that Maram had managed to set aflame. His firestone seemed fearsome enough. But fire was only fire, and the enemy was growing used to it. Death was only death, too, and what did it matter whether a warrior was killed by shooting flames or by boiling oil and red-hot sand poured down upon him from the hoardings above the gates?

Maram turned his red crystal about in his hands and said, 'I don't believe this will be enough to win the battle.'

'No, perhaps not,' Kane said. 'But it's kept us from losing it so far.'

'Do you think so?' 'I think that if any survive to sing of the deeds that were done here, your name will be mentioned first.'

Such praise, coming from Kane, surprised Maram and pleased him greatly. After a few moments of thought however, he looked down at the lines of the enemy gathering at the edge of the barren ground, and he said, 'But there will be another assault, won't there? They have so many men.'

It was not yet noon when the day's second assault began. This time Count Ulanu sent his finest knights against our part of the wall. They were almost harder to beat back than were the Blues, for they fought with greater skill, and their armor gave good protection against arrow and sword 1 all swords except Kane's kalama and Alkaladur.

There came a moment during the fiercest part of the attack when a dozen of these knights of Aigul fought their way over the battlements and won a bridgehead on the wall. Kane and I found ourselves separated, with the knights between us. They killed two Librarians standing near me, and a few more fighting near Kane. They had beards as black as Count Ulanu's and looked enough like him to have been his cousins; I thought they were some of the same knights that had pursued us into the Kul Moroth. They taunted Kane, telling him that soon they would capture him and have the pleasure of nailing him to a cross as they had Alphanderry.

It was the wrong thing to do. For Kane fell mad then. And so did I. Working along the wall toward the south, I wielded my sword with all the fury of the blazing Soal sun that poured down upon us. And Kane fought like a demon from hell, slashing and thrusting and rending his way north. Together, our flashing swords were like the teeth of a terrible beast closing upon our enemy. They died one by one, and then suddenly, the three knights still alive lost heart before our terrible onslaught Two of them hurled themselves over the battlements, taking their chances with broken legs or backs in their plummet to the hard ground below. The remaining knight, seized with terror, threw down his sword. He knelt before Kane, placed his hands together over his chest and cried out, 'Quarter! I beg quarter of you!'

Kane raised his sword high to finish this hated enemy knight.

'Mercy, please!' the knight begged.

'So, I'll give you the same mercy your Count showed those he crucified!'

The madness suddenly left me. I called out, 'Kane! A warriors code!'

'Damn the code!' he thundered. 'Damn him!'

'Kane!'

'Damn his eyes! Damn his soul!'

Kane's sword lifted higher as the knight looked at me, his dark eyes pleading like a trapped fawn's. There was a great pain inside him, the same bitter anguish I felt gnawing at my own heart. He burned for Me; all of us do. In such circumstances, how could I allow it to be taken away from him?