David Zindell - The Lightstone

'Look,' Daj said to me, pointing out of the shop's doorway. I followed the line of his finger toward some men who were sitting around a table outside of the tavern next door. 'I know that man – he's one of Lord Morjin's spies.'

The man he had indicated, tall and blond like the Thalunes and dressed in a plain tunic and mail like many mercenaries, had his chair positioned facing the doorway to the waterseller's shop. His cruel blue eyes swept the street no doubt looking for a way that he could transmute his betrayal of others into gold. It would be impossible, I knew, for us to walk past him without him seeing us.

'What should we do?' Maram whispered to me.

'Wait,' I whispered back.

And so wait we did. We ordered more glasses of water and sat drinking them around a table at the rear of the shop. There was a chess set there, too, and Kane and I set up the pieces and began a game in the most desultory of ways. Maram chided mc for losing my knight in vain effort to forestall an attack upon my queen.

But I had no mind for a game at such a time, when my heart beat out like thunder at every round of laughter or curses that sounded from the tavern next door.

It took most of an hour for the spy and his friends to finish their ale and leave. We waited another quarter of an hour before daring to leave ourselves; the spy, we feared, might be skulking somewhere on the street nearby. Maram thanked the stars that we didn't see him anywhere in the crowds that streamed past us as we hurried along. But that didn't mean anything, as Kane pointed out. It was the essence of spying, he said, to seek out others without being seen.

But luck, I thought, had finally turned our way. We reached the central stairs without further incident. These great steps, a hundred feet wide, opened onto the boulevard exactly as the old woman had said. Streams of people poured down them on the left, while many others puffed laboriously up them on the right. We waited a few moments at the foot of them, hoping we might catch sight of Atara, Ymiru and Master Juwain in the throngs about us. But if they had kept to our plan, they had no doubt reached this spot before us and had gone on ahead.

And so with a final glance at the street, we began our climb up to Argattha's seventh level. With five levels to ascend and five hundred feet per level, we had to work our way up a distance of almost a half mile, straight up through the heart of the mountain. It took us a long time to make this climb. The stairs drove up toward the east until giving way to a great landing, before turning back west on their rise again.

And so it went, with many, many turnings as the seemingly endless stairs took us through the black rock past the openings to the third, fourth, fifth and sixth levels. At last, with Maram fairly wheezing and dripping sweat from his thick, brown beard, we came out onto one of the boulevards of the seventh level.

'Ah, here it is,' Maram said, puffing as we stepped out onto the huge street. 'Well, it doesn't look like much.'

Indeed, the street looked like every other tunnel in this unnatural city, save that it was even larger: it was a great, square-cut channel through black rock that was lit with foul-smelling oil lamps and pitted with doorways that were the openings to dank living spaces and shops. Although we were close to Morjin's throne room, as Daj told us, no vistas of magnificent domed buildings or soaring arches were to be seen, for Morjin's 'palace' was just another series of rat holes in a mountain gnawed with thousands of such dark places.

'The palace is that way,' he said, pointing almost due south at a wan of stone.

To the west of the palace, he said, was the great Gardens: a huge hall where flowering plants were bathed in the light of the thousands of glowstones on the walls.

To the east of the palace was a passage that only Morjin was permitted to use. This led past a series of private stairs to the lower levels, a mile and a half straight toward an opening cut onto Skartaru's east face. Daj called it Morjin's Porch, and there the Red Dragon liked to sit each morning to watch the rising of the sun. There, too, long ago, on the naked rock face, he had nailed the immortal Kalkamesh and tortured him for ten long years.

'I'd like to see this porch of his,' Maram said, looking about the dim street. 'I'd give anything to feel real light on my face again.'

'Don't be a fool!' Kane snapped at him. 'You won't be seeing it anytime soon unless Morjin puts you there.'

'He may put all of us there,' Maram said bravely. 'And it may be that someday the poets will sing of us and what we tried to do here. Do you think so, Val?'

'Perhaps,' I said to him. 'But it would please me more if Alphanderry were here to sing of the stars.'

The boulevard led us a quarter mile toward the east, where it intersected another running from north to south – directly toward the throne room of Morjin's Palace. In the great square where these two streets came together had been built a fountain.

Men and women sat around it in the spray of a great plume of water, red as rust, as if it had been forced through ancient iron pipes.

We sat there by this crimson pool, too, waiting for our friends. We watched carts full of silks and wine barrels roll past; one cart, stacked with glowstones that reminded me of the skulls in the dragon's hall, was clearly being taken outside of Argattha so that these gelstei could be refilled with the light of the sun. Hundreds of people from the boulevards poured in streams of living flesh around the fountain.

Many of these wore red robes embroidered with golden dragons: the vestments of the Red Priests of the Kallimun. These men – and they were almost all men – strode along with an air of rectitude and dominion, as if all things and peoples about them were their province. More than one of them cast us suspicious looks. And we were, I thought, a suspicious company: three men dressed like mercenaries, a noble-looking woman and a ragtag child. It was very good, I thought, that only we could see Flick.

After a while, it became clear that there were few mercenaries on this level of the city

– but many captains and lords of Morjin's armies. One of these, dressed in an ice-blue tunic with a broadsword buckled at the waist, swaggered up to us and demanded that we identify ourselves. Only the medallions that we had lifted off the dead knights kept us from being taken and bound in chains.

'That was close,' Maram said, after the captain had stalked off. We had hinted that we were spies, and that Morjin would be very displeased if the captain interfered with our mission. 'Too, too close.'

Liljana sat with her arms thrown protectively around Daj as might his mother. But there was something fierce and unyielding in her watchful gaze, as if she would reluctantly sacrifice him or any of us – or herself – in order to gain the Lightstone.

'We can't wait here much longer,' she whispered against the fountain's splatter.

I looked up and down the boulevards, praying that I might catch sight of Atara and the others.

'With our delay at the waterseller's, likely they're already come,' Kane said. 'And likely they've already gone on to the throne room.'

He pointed down the boulevard toward the south. According to Daj, it gave out onto Morjin's Palace little more than a quarter mile from the fountain.

'Perhaps we should wait just a few minutes longer,' I said. I looked for Atara's flowing blond mane among the mostly darker-haired women who seemed to populate Argattha.

'We agreed not to wait,' Kane reminded me. 'Likely they're trying to find their way into the throne room even as we waste our time here. And likely they'll need our help with the guards.'

Here Liljana fingered her blue figurine while Kane rested his hand on the haft of his dagger.