David Zindell - The Lightstone

Ymiru held the gelstei up to the sun. Its bright rays passed through it and fell upon the ground. The stone there seemed to soften in the deep violet light.

'Thank you,' Ymiru said.

Maram came forward then and took Ymiru's free hand. 'This is a lucky day for us.

With you by our side, we'll be more like seventeen than seven.'

Atara was the next to welcome Ymiru into our company, followed by Liljana and Master Juwain. And then Kane stepped up to him. He clasped hands with Ymiru, fiercely, like a tiger testing the strength of a bear. He said nothing to him. But the fire of fellowship in his bright eyes said more than words ever could.

Hrothmar swept his hand toward the seven of us and said, 'Your courage in undertaking this journey cannot be questioned. But we must ask you to find an even greater courage within yourselves: that should fate fall against you, you will seek death before revealing to the Beast the secrets of Alundil.'

Ymiru agreed to this grim demand with a bow of his head. As did Master Juwain, Liljana and I. Atara smiled with a chilling acceptance of what must be. And Maram, his face flushed with fear, looked at Hrothmar and said, 'Set your mind at ease. I'll gladly seek death before torture.'

Hrothmar turned to Kane and asked, 'And you, keeper of the black stone?'

Kane looked toward the east in the direction that we soon must travel. In his black eyes was death and defiance. He said, 'No torture of Morjin's will ever make me speak.'

So great was the will that steeled his being that Hrothmar did not question him further.

'Very good,' Hrothmar said, to him and to us. Then he embraced us one by one and gave us his blessing. Hramjir, with his one arm, did likewise as well as he could, followed by Audhumla, Yvanu and the other Urdahir. Burri was the last to approach us. After wrapping me up in a mound of living fur, he took out the cup that I had given him. He looked down at me and said, 'Thank you for your gift, Sar Valashu.

We have lost our last lilastei only to gain one of the greatest of the silver galastei.'

Then he turned to Ymiru and told him, 'I was wrong about the little people. And about you.'

He embraced Ymiru with an unexpected tenderness. Then shocked us all, saying,

'I'm sorry, my son.'

From the mist that gathered in Burri's blue eyes, and Ymiru's, I knew that even the hardest ice could melt and be broken.

To direct my attention elsewhere, Burri suddenly pointed above the square toward Alumit. There, limned against the last patch of glorre to light up the mountain, Flick danced ecstatically through the air, whirling and diving, describing incendiary arcs.

His being blazed with silver, scarlet and gold – and now, too, with glorre. I must have been blind, I thought, never to have beheld this dazzling color within him. As others were now beholding it as well. At least a hundred of the Ymanir nearby had their long fingers aimed at him, and their large eyes seemed suddenly larger with wonder.

And Burri, perhaps, held the most wonder of all.

'I think you did tell one lie, Sar Valashu,' he said to me. 'You told that the Timpum twinkled. But these lights – they be a glorious thing.'

Glorious indeed, I thought, watching Flick spin beneath the shining mountain that the Galadin had made. As Burri and the other Elders began wishing usigfell on our journey, it gave me hope to enter another mountain whose faces were as hard as iron and whose color was as black as death.

It took us four days to set out from Alundil. Much of this was spent in gathering supplies for our journey: rations such as cheeses and dried fruit, pine nuts and potatoes and the Ymanir version of the inevitable battle biscuits. To Maram's delight, Ymiru laid in a few small casks of a fermented goat's milk called kalvaas. I thought it a foul, rancid-smelling brew, but Maram announced that drinking it gave him visions of the angels or beautiful women – to him, it seemed, the same thing.

'Now take these Ymanir women,' he said to me one night after we had worked very hard to reshoe the horses. 'Now it's true, they are, ah, rather large. But they have a certain comeliness of form and face, don't you think? And, oh my Lord, they would keep a man warm at night.'

As it happened, the Ymanir women were working very hard to keep us all warm on our journey. It took Hrothmar's daughters – along with Audhumla, Yvanu, Ulla and others – most of four days to make for us long coats that covered us from head to ankle. They were wonderfully soft and thick, woven from the long fur that the Ymanir women had sheared from their own bodies. Their whiteness, like that of snow, would help hide us against the frozen slopes of the mountains to the east.

The Ymanir men were equally clever at the making of things. They filled Atara's empty quivers with arrows, a few of which were tipped with diamond points for piercing the hardest plate armor. One of their smiths presented Liljana with a new set of cookware, forged from a very light but very strong goldish metal that he called galte. Burn himself, on this last night of our stay in Alundil, brought Ymiru a map that one of their ancestors had fashioned some generations before. He kept this gift wrapped in brown paper and string, and admonished Ymiru not to reveal its secrets to us until we were well away from the city.

'For the time, this be for your eyes only,' he said to Ymiru. 'And for your hands only

– only the fathers and sons of our line have ever touched this.'

The mystery that he made of the map aroused our curiosity. There was much, as well that we wished to know about Ymiru and his family. After Burn had gone, we asked Ymiru why he hadn't told us outright that he was his father. And Ymiru, staring at the paper-covered package in his hands, fell into a deep, brooding silence.

And then he said, 'I thought I did.

In truth, he had told us only that he had lost his children to the Red Dragon, and Burri his grandchildren – and this was his way of making known to us certain truths that tormented him. Clever he might be in shaping things with his huge hands, but he was not very good at bringing forth memories and sadnesses from the gloom inside him.

We did learn, however, one of the reasons that the Urdahir had chosen him to show us the way toward Argattha: when he was younger, it seemed, he had led raids into Sakai in a fierce effort to beat back the encroachments of the Red Dragon's armies.

Although he and the other Ymanir had killed many with their borkors, in the end they were too few, and much of the East Reach had been lost.

'The Dragon grows ever stronger while we weaken,' he told us. 'Burri and Hrothmar, all of the Urdahir, know that we can hrold Elivagar for another generation, perhaps two – but not forever. And so they were willing to take the dreadful chance of sending' me with you to Argattha.'

Evil omens, he said, were everywhere: in the stars, in the fall of Yarkona, in the rumor of a fire-breathing dragon that Morjin held ready to unleash upon those who opposed them. Even the new color of Alumit, he admitted, was not wholly a good thing, for in the wisdom that the Elders gleaned from the Star People there was not only hope but the murmurings of doom.

'Elivagar might be the last place on Ea to fall,' he said to us. 'But fall it finally will.

And so the Star People will never come.'

'No, don't speak so,' I told him. 'There's always hope.'

'Hrope,' he said bitterly. 'I have had none since the Beast took my children from me.

And now -'

I gripped his massive forearm, wondering if he could feel the incred ible strength there that I did.

'And now, tomorrow,' he said, 'the seven of us will leave for Argattha. Be there really any hrope in this quest? I suppose we must at least act as if there be.'