David Zindell - The Lightstone

He looked at Ymiru suspiciously, as he might a street magician who has been given a bauble to play with. I did not think that he would ever be willing to lend Ymiru a gold coin for fear that Ymiru would return to him only a lump of lead.

'There's your silk purse,' Atara said, pointed at the newly-formed quartz crystals.

'It's good work – they're lovely, Ymiru.'

'So small,' he said, holding the crystals up to the light of the fire. 'And stived with flaws. But it be a beginning.'

Master Juwain had his own crystal in his hand as he looked at Ymiru approvingly.

He couldn't have helped noticing, I thought, that just as Ymiru's knowledge and will had brought out the power of the purple stone, the stone had also brought out his power and exalted him.

'It is a beginning,' Master Juwain said, to Ymiru and to all of us. 'Or, I should say, a completion. Now, for perhaps the first time since the Age of Law, seven of the greater gelstei have been brought together.'

He explained that the seven greater gelstei were each emanations of the gold gelstei and held something of its virtue. Used together, they were much more powerful than all of the stones used separately. They were like the fingers of a hand gripping the cup of fate that is also called the Lightstone.

'And as with the gelstei, so with us,' he said, looking at Ymiru. 'For we are only emanations of the One. Each of us – all have some seeds of the great gifts. It's the gelstei's purpose to quicken these gifts.'

Maram let loose a loud belch and said, 'You seem happy, sir.'

'I am happy, Brother Maram. Do you see? It's as I've always said -there is only one pattern to everything, a single tapestry. And we are its threads.'

Maram, still trying to wake up, rubbed his eyes and said, 'Ah, I don't quite understand.'

'One pattern,' Master Juwain said to him again. 'And the Lightstone holds the secret of its making. Its making. And I've sought just the opposite. All my life, looking for the knowledge to cut through and understand, the way to unravel the tapestry – all my life. And now, when perhaps there is not much left of it, I see that I was mis guided.'

He turned to look at Liljana and Atara, and then at Kane and me. He said, 'We've been seeking to quicken our gifts and use the gelstei in order to find the Lightstone.

But perhaps we should seek the Lightstone in order quicken our gifts.'

He went on to tell us that our work with the gelstei had great merit, as did our lives, even if we failed in our quest.

'Alphanderry said it best,' he reminded us. 'Do you remember his words?'

We are the songs that sing the world into life, I thought. And then I said them aloud for all to hear.

I sat staring up at the stars, wondering if Alphanderry's music had ever found its way toward these eternal lights. And then Kane's gruff voice brought me back to earth.

'Our lives are our lives, and we shouldn't give them up too easily,' he said to Master Juwain. 'So, I'll sing better when we hold the Lightstone in our hands.'

I fell off to sleep that night holding the hilt of Alkaladur in my hand. I prayed for the thousandth time that I might never again use this sword to take others' lives in defense of mine, but only to find my way through to the Lightstone.

The next day we had our first sight of Sakai. After a breakfast of fried eggs and toasted rye bread, we set out and soon pushed our way between the two hills where we had encamped. A line of low mountains lay ahead of us. We found a pass cutting through this chain, and worked our way over it. And when we crossed over to the other side, we found that we had come to the end of the Yrnanir's country.

By chance, it seemed, Ymiru had led us to the exact spot on earth that we had first sought. For here was the great hinge in the White Mountains. To our right, toward the south, the line of mountains that we had just crossed quickly gained elevation as they built toward a wall of white peaks running off into the distance. These were the mountains of the Yorgos Range, and most of Elivagar was spread across their ridges and valleys. To our left, toward the south and east, rose the rocky masses of the Nagarshath. It chilled me merely to look up the unbroken chain of these vast upthrustings of the earth, with their jagged, white, ice-frozen crests. There was no way, I thought, that either man or beast could survive in such great heights. Surely our only hope, as we had discussed, was to pass through Sakai by way of the broad plateau opening out between the two mountain ranges straight ahead of us.

'So that is Sakai,' Maram said as we stood by the horses on the side of the mountain. The wind was out of the west, at our backs, and threatened to push us down its slopes. 'Well, I don't like the look of it.'

Neither did I. The land below was windswept and sere, its brown grasses and patches of bare earth already showing occasional shags of snow. It went on and on toward the gray haze of the horizon. I thought I could make out, off in the distance, outcroppings of dark rock marking the face of this forbidding plateau. It did not seem a place where people would live. And yet I knew that when we went down into it, we would likely find nomads herding their flocks – or the Red Dragon's cavalry riding the borders of his dread-ful realm.

'So.' Kane said as the wind whipped up his snowy hair. 'So.'

Atara stood near me, staring down into Sakai as if she had seen it before in her crystal sphere.

Maram looked at Ymiru doubtfully. 'You said that you've led raids down into that?'

'No, not here,' Ymiru said. 'Our battles with the Beast's armies were almost a hundred miles to the south.'

'But you still propose to lead us across it?'

'No,' Ymiru said, 'I don't.'

We all looked at him in surprise, even as did Maram, who said, 'But you were to lead us through Sakai. Has seeing it changed your mind?'

'I will lead you through Sakai,' Ymiru said. His hard blue eyes looked to the left as he pointed at the mountains of the Nagarshath. 'That, too, be Sakai.'

Although the wind was burning Maram's face bright red, for a moment the color drained from his cheeks. 'But there's no way through those mountains!'

'No, there be a way,' Ymiru said. The coldness of his eyes made me want to shiver.

'An ancient way – we call it the Wailing Way.'

He told us that long ago his ancestors had built a system of roads, tunnels and bridges through the Nagarshath in order to help them fight their wars against Morjin.

There, along the icy peaks of these high mountains, the wind wailed almost continually. And there, too, the mothers of the Ymanir had wailed for many hundreds of years to see so many of their sons and daughters slain.

'It took the Beast a long, long time to drive us from the Nagarshath,' Ymiru told us.

'But the mountains were too vast, and we were too few to defend them. So in the end we had to retreat to Elivagar.'

'But surely, then,' Maram said, 'the Red Dragon's men now guard this Wailing Way of yours.'

'No, they would have no reason to – none of my people has been that way for a thousand years.'

'You haven't either?'

'No, I haven't.'

'Then how do you know it still exists?'

'It must still exist,' Ymiru said. 'You've seen how my people build things.'

'But what if the Red Dragon has destroyed it?'

'It is my hrope that he has not,' Ymiru said. 'You see, it was a secret way, and it may be that his men never found it.'

We all stood wondering if Ymiru could find his way through these terrible mountains and so lead us to Argattha through Sakai's back door. In answer, he took off his pack and removed the paper-wrapped package that Burri had given him. It took him only a moment to open it and take out his fathers map.

'What is that?' Maram said crowding close to look at it.