David Zindell - The Lightstone

Our camp that night was a cold one. Master Juwain, his green crystal in hand, accomplished the minor miracle of fully restoring Maram to himself. Maram vowed to exercise more caution on the long journey that still lay ahead of us. I knew that he would. No man, I thought, had a greater fondness for his various appendages.

For the next four days we worked our way down the valley. I didn't like it that we had so little cover here. But there seemed no one to see us, except the occasional vultures circling on the mountain thermals high above us. We made good time and good distance. The horses held steady and so did we. By the afternoon of our fifth day in Sakai, with the valley abruptly coming to an end in a great massif that blocked our way, we were all gathering our strength for yet another foray into the grim, mountain heights.

Ymiru's map showed a pass off to our right, hidden by a great buttress of the massif ahead of us. We climbed up the rocky slope at the valley's very end, praying that the map proved true. And so it did. After an hour of hard, panting work, we came upon a break in the massif, the highest pass yet that we had tried to cross. Master Juwain took his first look at this huge saddle of snow and ice, and thought it was too high to cross. And so, for a moment, did I. And then, at the very center of the pass, I noticed what seemed a cleft cut straight through it. It looked much like the Telemesh Gate that we had passed through from Mesh into Ishka.

'So,' Kane said to Ymiru, looking at him strangely, 'your people once used firestones against the earth.'

As Ymiru stared up at the pass, I sensed some deep, dark thing devour ing his insides. There was great doubt in him, and great sadness, too.

'Yes, we used firestones,' he said, pointing upward. Thus we made the Wailing Way.'

Liljana shifted about uneasily, as if trying to gain respite from the fierce wind pounding against the shawl she had wrapped around her head. I felt within her the same dread that crept up my legs into my spine: that here it wasn't just the wind that wailed but the very earth itself.

If ever there had been a road leading up to the pass, snow and the relentless work of the seasons had long since obliterated it. But the cleft through the pass itself remained much as the Ymanir's firestones had burned it long ago. And on the other side, below some of the deepest snowfields we had plowed through yet, we found an ancient track leading down from the heights.

We followed this band of packed earth and stone for many miles, all that afternoon and for the next ten days. It wound its way toward the southeast through the furrows between great ice-capped prominences. In places, where it led across a mountain's slope, it was cunningly cut so as to be hidden behind rock and ridgeline from the vantage of the valleys farther below. In other places it disappeared altogether, and there Ymiru had to trust his instinct, following the logic of the land around pinnacles, across basins, until he found the track again. It was a high road, this Wailing Way that the Ymanir had built. In most of the valleys through which it ran, we could find only a little grass for the horses; a few were altogether barren and seemed nothing more than chutes of rocky earth.

This starkness of Sakai appalled us all. But it was nothing, I thought, against the much deeper ugliness that had been worked into the land by the hand of man. The occasional tunnels – through icy ridges too high to cross – seemed like holes cut through the flesh of the earth into her very bones. And worse, by far, were the open pits scooped out the high meadows or basins, sometimes out of the sides of the mountains themselves. They were like sores in the earth, like festering wounds that hadn't healed after even thousands of years. Something in their making, perhaps the piles of slag torn up from the ground, seemed to have poisoned the earth currents that Ymiru had spoken of, for near them nothing would grow. I was given to understand that other parts of Sakai were much more devastated and blighted than this.

'This must be the work of the Beast,' Ymiru explained to us, pointing at a circular pock in the valley far below us. 'It be told that his men have dug such pits all across Sakai.'

'But why?' Maram asked him. 'Are there diamonds here? Gold?'

I had my sword drawn and pointing east to see if the Lightstone still lay in that direction. In the reflected sunlight off its silvery surface, a sudden thought flashed through my mind.

'The Red Dragon does seek gold,' I said. 'The true gold, from which he hopes to forge another Lightstone.'

Ymiru looked at me strangely, with a deep sadness. 'So it be, so it be.'

This mark of the Beast disturbed me, and all of us, for if Morjin's men had once come here, they might come again. I felt his presence all around me, in the jagged knifeblades of the ridgelines, in the pinnacles' icy spears, and most of all, in the bitter wind. As promised, it swept across the Nagarshajh as through a dragon's teeth and wailed without relief. It bit at my bones, it carried in its icy gusts whispers of torment and death. As we drew closer to Morjin and the seat of his power on earth, it seemed that he was seeking me even as I sought the Lightstone, calling me as always to surrender up my will and dreams and kneel before him.

I doubted that he could perceive my actual physical presence in these terrible mountains he claimed as his own. But the kirax still poisoned my blood and connected us in ways that chilled me with a growing dread. I knew that he could sense my soul. The howling wind told me this, as did the silent screaming of my lungs. In the icy wastes through which we passed for many days, he sent illusions to confuse and break me. In many of these, I saw myself chained to the face of some rock and being tortured with fire and steel; in others, the frozen ground beneath me suddenly gave way, and I found myself plunging into a black and bottomless abyss.

But the hardest illusion for me to bear was the one in which I had regained the Lightstone and used it to restore the tormented lands of Ea. The imagined pleasure of simply touching this golden cup nearly overwhelmed me. It seduced me into covetousness and pride, and made me want to possess the Lightstone for myself alone and never suffer another even to behold it. So great was the greed for the golden light that Morjin aroused in me that I made for myself illusions of my own. In the dazzling whiteness of Sakai's snows, in the glare and glister of the sun off glacier ice, I began seeing the Lightstone everywhere: on rocky ledges, dropped down into frozen drifts or even floating in the air. It was there, in the nearly blinding fastness of the White Mountains, that I began the fiercest battle yet for my sanity and my very soul.

I drew great strength to join it from my friends, of course, particularly Atara. But they each had battles of their own. And in the end, one must journey far out into the icy wastes of despair to face one's demons alone. I did have a mighty weapon with which to fight. Alkaladur's silustria, like a perfect mirror, threw Morjin's deceits back at him and shielded me from his hideous golden eyes and the worst of his hate. And more, as I attuned to it, it helped me cut through all illusion to see the world as it really is. My whole being began opening to the numinous and the true: in the stark, snowy landscapes of the White Mountains and in the shimmering stars above them, but also within myself. For there shone the bright sword of my soul. I saw that it was indeed possible to polish it more brilliantly than even the silustria itself. And with every bit of rust that I rubbed from it, as I cleansed myself of pride and fear, I felt this sword gleaming brighter and brighter and pointing me on toward my fate.

One night, just past the ides of loj, we made camp at the foot of a glacier. Maram got a fire going out of the last of our wood, and there Ymiru sat with a huge chunk of ice between his legs as he chiseled it with his knife. He worked with a quick, fierce concentration. It was as if he were trying to bring forth the image of some perfect thing that he longed to create. He would not tell us what this was. He did not speak to us, for he had fallen deep into one of his glooms. He even refused the tea that Master Juwain made him. He was, I thought, a man who held onto the dark side of his feelings, afraid that if the demons of his melancholy were driven from him, the angels of his ecstasies would be, too.