David Zindell - The Lightstone

'What is it you're carving there?' Maram asked, sidling closer. 'It almost looks like Val's mother.'

It looked like, I thought, the great carving of the Galadin Queen I had seen passing through the Ashtoreth Gate on our entrance to Tria.

But Ymiru didn't answer him. He just set his sculpture down into the snow and then took up a flaming brand from the fire. He held it so that it melted the ice of the sculpture's surface. Then he brought out his purple gelstei, positioning it in front of the sculpture's face.

'What are you doing?' Maram asked him.

None of us knew. But we were all curious, so we gathered around to watch.

And then, as the starlight flickered off the blade of my drawn sword, a sudden thought came to me. I said, 'He's trying to turn his carving to stone.'

'Turn ice to stone?' Maram said. 'Impossible!'

Ymiru suddenly looked up from his work, staring at me in amaze ment. 'How did you know that?' he asked me.

How did I know, I wondered? I looked down at the star-sparkled length of my sword. Its silver geistei gave me to know many things from the slightest hint.

'It be impossible to turn ice to stone, truly,' Ymiru said. 'But to turn water to stone – this be one of the powers of the lilastei.'

'But how?' Maram asked.

Ymiru ran his finger over the sculpture's dripping surface. 'When water falls cold, it wants to turn to ice. This be its natural crystallization. But there be another, too, and that is the clear stone called shatar. The purple galastei makes water want to freeze into this stone. And stone it truly be shatar be as hard as quartz and never thaws.'

As he moved to put away his violet stone, Maram said, 'What are you doing? Aren't you going to show us this shatar of yours?'

'No,' Ymiru said, 'I can't make the lilastei make the water want to freeze this way. I haven't the power.' 'Perhaps not yet.'

Ymiru said nothing as he stared at his sculpture's wet face, now freezing in the wind like that of a spurned lover. 'But what else can the lilastei do?' Maram asked.

'You've told us so little about them, or your people.'

The silence into which Ymiru now fell seemed greater than the expanse of all the mountains of the Nagarshath. He looked east along the line toward which my gleaming sword pointed.

'The lilastei,' I said, gasping at the images that flooded into my mind, 'can mold rock, as the firestones can burn it. That was how the Ymanir made Argattha.'

As Kane's eyes went wide with wonder, everyone looked at me in astonishment. And Ymiru thundered at me, 'Who told you that?'

I felt Alkaladur's bright blade almost humming in the starlight, I said, 'Is it true, Ymiru?'

Ymiru suddenly slumped back, his great chest deflating like a bellows emptied of air.

And then he sighed out, 'Yes, it be true.'

'But how?' Maram asked. 'How can it be?'

Ymiru rubbed his broken nose for a few moments and sighed again. 'How? How, you ask? You see, there was a time when we Ymanir thought that Morjin was our friend.'

The story he now told us was a sad one. Long, long ago, he said, during Morjin's first rise at the end of the Age of the Swords, he had gone to Sakai to win the Ymanir to his cause. At this time his evil deeds were mostly unknown. Morjin was fair of form and graceful with his words; he flattered the ancient Ymanir and brought them gifts: of diamonds and gold, but greatest of all, the purple gelstei.

'It was the Beast himself,' Ymiru said, 'who gave us the first lilastei and taught us to use them. It was he who suggested that we seek beneath Skartaru for the true gold that we might use it to forge a new Lightstone.'

Toward this end, Morjin had called his Red Priests into Sakai to teach the Ymanir and aid in the excavations beneath Skartaru that would come to be the city called Argattha. They remained as counselors when Morjin went off to conquer Alonia and eventually be defeated at the Sarburn. it was they who poisoned the ancient Ymaniris' minds and seduced them into believing terrible lies: that Morjin only wished to unite Ea under one banner to bring peace to its torn lands; that his fall had been brought by treachery and the evil of his enemies. And so, when Morjin had been imprisoned on Damoom for all the Age of Law, Ymiru's ancestors had worked hard and long to prepare Argattha for Morjin's return.

'We built a city fit for kings,' Ymiru said. 'Argattha was a great and glorious place, as we may yet live to see.'

Maram, sipping a mug of kalvaas as he listened to Ymiru speak, said, 'I don't care what we see there – I just want to live to come back out.'

'Tell us,' Kane said, watching Ymiru with his dark eyes, 'what hap-pened when the Lord of Lies did return.'

'That be easy to tell,' Ymiru said sadly. 'Easy, but the hardest of tales: in the time that followed Morjin's second coming to Argattha, we discovered that the Lord of Light, as he called himself, was really the Lord of Lies. He had taken back the Lightstone then, but he kept us digging beneath Skartaru all the same. He used it to try to bend us to his will and tried to make us slaves. But no one will rule the Ymanir – not even other Ymanir. And so began our war with the Beast that has lasted until this day.'

After he had finished speaking, Atara sat listening to the wind as she stared into her white crystal. Master Juwain gripped his old book and looked at Liljana, who had taken out her blue whale. Kane, crouching near Ymiru like a tiger ready to spring, growled, 'Damn his golden eyes.'

Maram was nearly drunk, but he had a clear enough wit to appreciate that as far as we were concerned, Ymiru's story might not be wholly tragic. 'If your people made Argattha,' he said, 'did they keep any maps of its streets?'

'No,' Ymiru said, 'all such perished in the wars.'

'Ah, too bad, too bad,' Maram said. 'I had hoped, for a moment, that there might be a way into the city other than through one of its gates.'

For a hundred miles, at least, we had discussed the problem of entering Argattha and finding our way to Morjin's throne room. I had thought that our knowledge of the city was scarcely more than anyone's: that Argattha had been built up through the black mountain on seven levels, with Morjin's palace and throne room at the highest.

And that five gates, named in mockery of Tria's, opened upon its streets. Each gate, it was said, was guarded by ferocious dogs and a company of Morjin's men. And perhaps, as Kane suggested, by the mind-reading Grays as well.

'There be another way into Argattha,' Ymiru said. 'A dark way, an ancient way.'

We all looked at him, waiting for him to say more.

'When Morjin came to Argattha with the Lightstone,' he explained, 'he feared that his enemies would assault the mountain and trap him inside. And so my people built escape tunnels for him. Secret tunnels, and the knowledge of all of them has been lost to us – except one.'

'Do you know where this tunnel is?' Maram asked.

'Ho, I don't know,' Ymiru said, to Maram's bitter disappointment. 'But I know where it might be found.'

Maram's face immediately brightened again as Ymiru brought out his map arid oriented it toward the east. For quite a few days now, we had used it to set our course on the greatest of the mountains to show through the clay along the map's eastern edge. This was Skartaru, whose shape was famous across Ea: as seen from the east, from across the Wendrush, its twin peaks thrust like the points of pyramids high into the sky. And now, as Ymiru told us of a secret way into this dread mountain, we studied the model of it in the map that he held in his huge, furry hands.

'I can't see anything here,' Maram said, peering at the living clay in the fire's flickering light.

'No, the scale be much too small,' Ymiru said. 'The map shows only the mountain's greater features.'