David Zindell - The Lightstone

Ymiru held in his hands what seemed a pair of lacquered boards, square in shape and inlaid with various dark woods. With great care Ymiru suddenly pulled away the top board, which was set neatly against the bottom board's rune-carved frame so as to protect its interior surface. This was a smaller square within a square, wrought of a reddish-brown substance that looked much like clay. Indeed Ymiru called it living clay, and said that his great-grandfather had crafted it nearly ninety years before.

'This be one thing my people haven't lost,' Ymiru said. 'Almost every Ymanir family has such a map.'

Maram suddenly reached out his finger to run it over the clay's smooth, unbroken surface. And then Ymiru's great voice suddenly bellowed out and froze him motionless: 'Don't touch that! The living clay must never be touched, or else you'll ruin the map!'

Maram jerked back his hand as if from a heated iron. He said, 'I don't understand how you can call this a map.'

'Watch, little man,' Ymiru said to him. 'If I be steady of hand and clear of mind, you'll see something you've never seen.'

As Ymiru oriented his father's map toward the mountains of the Nagarshath, we all gathered in as close as we could. We watched at Ymiru closed his eyes and slowly shifted the position of his furry feet about the bare ground. He seemed to draw strength from it and something else. Almost as slowly as the turning of the earth, he rotated the clay-laden board, apparently seeking to position it along lines that only he could apprehend.

And then without warning, the map's living day began moving about as if being molded by invisible hands. In places, fissures and furrows marked its rippling surface even as bits of day formed themselves into ridges and crests, and thrust upward in long, jagged lines that looked like miniature mountain ranges. It took very little time for this transformation to occur. But when it was completed, as I saw to my amazement, Ymiru held in his hands an exact replica of the mountains that lay before us.

'This be a map of the nearer mountains of the Nagarshath,' Ymiru said, opening his eyes. He pointed down with his chin. 'Do you see the valley behind the front range?'

Of course, we all could make out the deep groove in the clay behind the map's front mountain. s But when I looked out at the world, through the cold- air that hung heavy beneath the blue sky, all I could see was a vast, white wall of rocky peaks edging Sakai's umber plateau. If a valley lay beyond these very real mountains, the map could see it but I couldn't.

'If the map is true,' Master Juwain said, pointing his finger at the gleaming clay, 'then it seems the valley runs for many miles.'

'The map be true,' Ymiru said, looking down at it proudly. 'And the valley be nearly eighty miles long. It will take us a third of the way to Argattha.'

'But what is the magic of this map?' Maram asked him. 'I've never heard of such magic.'

Ymiru's eyes warmed as he looked out upon Sakai. And then to Maram, he said,

'The world be a great and glorious place. And through it, along its valleys and rivers and within its hills, pulses the currents of the earth – much as your blood pulses through your big nose and follows its contours. The living clay resonates with these currents. And so it hrolds within its form the forms of the earth.'

Master Juwain s clear gray eyes fixed on the map. And then he said, 'But not all the earth, it seems.'

'No, there be a limit to what the map can model,' Ymiru said. 'If it be oriented with the greatest skill, it will show the terrain ahead to a distance of a hundred miles but no more.'

Then,' I said, pointing at the edge of the map, 'there is no way for us to know what lies beyond this valley.'

'No, not until we've covered some further distance,' Ymiru said. 'But it be my hrope that we'll find other valleys paralleling this one. The line of Nagarshath runs toward Argattha, and so must its valleys.'

'And this Wailing Way of yours?' Kane asked him. 'Does it follow the Nagarshath's valleys, too?'

'It be said that it does.'

'Do you think you can find it?'

Ymiru looked down at the map as he nodded his head. 'That be my hrope.'

With his marvelous map revealing a possible way through the moun-tains, it seemed that we might not have to brave Sakai's plateau after all. But I was reluctant to commit to this new course. At least on the plateau below us, there would be abundant grass for the horses.

'There be grass in the mountains' valleys, I think,' Ymiru said. 'At least the lower valleys.'

As he pointed out, the horses' packs were still full of the oats that we had gathered for our journey. 'And if the worst befalls and the horses starve, you can always eat them and continue the journey afoot.'

Just then Altaru nickered nervously, and I looked at Ymiru as if he had suggested eating my own brother. Ymiru, who had watched in horror as we savored the taste of our salted pork, could not quite understand the different kind of love that we held for our horses.

'Come, Val,' Kane said to me. 'There are risks in whatever path we take.'

After a quick council it was decided that the greater risk was in riding straight across Sakai's plateau with barely a rock for cover. And so, as Ymiru turned his attention away from his map and its surface molded itself back into a flat sheet of clay, we steeled ourselves to cross over the Nagarshath's great mountains and approach Argattha along the Wailing Way.

And so we went into Sakai. It was the work of the rest of the day to fight our way over the nearest pass in this towering front range. We had a bad time of it. Atara slipped on an ice-glazed rock and nearly broke her leg. The horses suffered grievously in the thin air, panting and sweating until their fur froze in the cold. We put blankets over them to ease their shivering, but it didn't seem to help very much.

When the wind rose to a screaming howl as we crested the pass, whipping up flurries of snow, it seemed that our great, white coats didn't help us much, either.

'I'm cold, I'm tired,' Maram complained as he drove himself into the wind and pulled at Iolo's reins. To either side of us were towers of rock and clouds of snow; beneath the powder at our feet was a mat of old snow made hard as ice by a season of melting and refreezing. 'In fact, I'm very cold,' Maram called out into the bitter air.

I'm so cold that I'm… frozen! Oh, my Lord, my fingers are frozen! I can't feel them!'

I hastened to his side and helped him pull off the mittens that Audhumla had knitted him. The tips of his fingers were hard and white. I placed them between my hands and blew on them to warm them. Then Master Juwain came over to take a look.

'I was afraid of this,' Master Juwain said, gently pressing hid knotty fingers against Maram's.

Dread cut through Maram like a shark's fin breaking cold waters. He said, 'Is there anything you can do? Never to touch a woman again, never to feel -'

'I think,' Master Juwain said, 'we can save the arm.'

He winked as he said this, and his obvious care and confidence reassured Maram somewhat. He told me to keep working on Maram's fingers until I had completely thawed them; he told Maram to keep his hands in his pockets close to his body until we made camp that night and he could heal Maram's savaged flesh with his varistei.

'All right,' Maram said. 'But if this is Sakai, I've had enough of it already.' :

So had I. So, I thought, had all of us – except perhaps Ymiru, who consented to take Iolo's reins and lead the descent down into the valley that his map had showed.

Here, in this windy groove in the earth tens of miles long, we found a few stunted dead trees that provided us wood for a fire. There was a little grass for the horses, too, and water that ran down its center in a little brown stream. The valley seemed too high to shelter much life beyond some marmots and a few rock goats. Blessedly, we seemed the only people to have set foot here for a thousand years.