David Zindell - The Lightstone

Master Juwain, ever the student of history, caught Kane's eyes and said, 'You've recounted that Kalkin and his band of brothers came to Tria early in the Age of Swords. But the first quest took place late in that age, didn't it?'

'So,' Kane said, his eyes flashing, 'so.'

'Hundreds of years later,' Master Juwain said. 'But if Kaikin and Morjin, and the others as well, lived all that time, then they didn't gain their immortality by touching -'

'The Lightstone has no such power!' Kane suddenly shouted, cutting him off.

'Haven't I made that clear?'

'Then how,' Master Juwain asked, 'did Kalkin become immortal?'

'The way that men do,' Kane told htm. 'By becoming more than men.'

It was as if a cold wind had fallen down from the nighttime sky and found the flesh along the back of my neck. A shiver, like a lightning bolt made of ice, ran up and down my spine. I stood staring at Kane waiting for him to say more.

'It was the Galadin who sent us here to recover the Lightstone,' he told us. 'For them, who were immortal and could not be killed, Ea was deemed too perilous. For us, who were merely immortal, this world proved to be perilous enough, eh?'

How was it possible, I wondered? How was it possible that this man who stood before us grim, angry, pained and still dripping with the blood of those whom he had slain – could be one of the blessed Elijin?

'Five men Kalkin put to the sword, eh? But we were forbidden to kill men. And so in breaking with the Law of the One, Kalkin broke with the One, perhaps forever.'

Kane stared at the cup in my hand, and there was an immense and endless blackness inside him waiting to be filled with light. How long he had been waiting, I thought!

For he, who had once held the Lightstone and had beheld its perfect radiance even as I had, had been cast into a lightless void and had endured a dark night of the soul that had lasted nearly seven thousand years.

Maram, suddenly understanding this, gazed at Kane in awe. 'No wonder you fought so hard to bring us here to recover the Lightstone.'

'Ha!' Kane called out. 'I never thought we would find the Lightstone here. I never believed the account of Master Aluino's journal. I knew Sartan Odinan, and I never thought it possible that his greed would have permitted him simply to drop the Lightstone down on top of Morjin's damn throne.'

Maram looked at him nervously and said, 'If that's true, then you must have wanted

– '

'Revenge!' Kane cried out. He raised up his bloody sword and swept it about the hall. 'I came here to put this into Morjin's treacherous heart! Does anyone deserve death more? What's one more murder against all those I have slain?'

'Perhaps,' I said, remembering Atara's warning, 'one too many.'

"You say that?' growled at me, looking at my sword. 'How many have you slain with that today?'

'Too many,' I said as I looked about the hall. Then I held Alkaladur out toward him and said, 'If you are really Kalkamesh, then you forged this sword. And so it is yours.'

'No, it's yours now. You're better at killing with it than I ever was,'

'But if you were to take it back, the silver gelstei might -'

'It's not your damn bloody sword I want!' he thundered at me. There was a strange, faraway look in his eyes – and the faint fire of madness, too. 'It's not the silver gelstei that I want.'

Now the red flames in his eyes built hotter as he stared at the Lightstone. His voice filled with anger and a choking desire as he pointed at the cup and called out 'So, Morjin has escaped me, eh? But it seems that fate has put the Lightstone in my hands.'

'In Val's hands,' Maram said, stepping forward. 'That was the rule we made in Tria, that whoever found the Lightstone would have final say as to what would be done with it.'

'So,' Kane said, taking a step closer to me. His knuckles were white around the hilt of his sword. 'So.'

'You pledged your sword to Val's service!' Maram reminded him.

'So I did,' Kane said. 'I pledged it only so long as he sought the Lightstone. Well, the Lightstone has been found, and so he seeks it no longer.'

I didn't know if Kane had fallen so far that he would kill me to claim the Lightstone; I didn't know if I could kill him, even in its defense. I doubted that I could kill him.

Despite his words of praise as to my prowess with the Bright Sword that he had forged, he was an angel of death who gripped in his hands a killing sword of his own.

'Kalkin,' I said to him.

'Don't call me that!'

'No matter how many you kill, even Morjin, even Angra Mainyu himself, it will never bring back the light.'

'Damn you!'

We met eyes suddenly, and the anguish that I saw in him cut open my heart. I knew then that I could never kill this brave blessed man whom I loved.

Without a further glance at my sword, I quickly sheathed it. I looked deep into Kane's black eyes, so like my own. As the Valari were sons and daughters of the Star People, so were the Elijin – in transcendence and immortality. Kane, I thought, was Valari in his soul, and something more.

I held the Lightstone out to him then. I said, 'Take it. If you will promise to guard and keep it for the Maitreya, then I would have the Lightstone go with you.'

Kane stepped forward and reached out to grasp the Lightstone with his left hand.

My hand, suddenly freed from this slight weight, suddenly, felt a thousand times heavier.

'So,' he whispered, 'so.'

He stood looking back and forth between the cup in his left hand and the sword in his right. He blinked his eyes in rhythm with the beating of my heart. His belly tightened into a hard knot, and his hands, first the left and then the right, began to tremble. 'Kalkin,' I said.

With a great effort, he broke off gazing at the Lightstone and looked at me. His grim mouth could make no words, but his heart spoke to me all the same. In the quiet deep thunder of the blood that we shared, in the touching of each other's unfathomable suffering and pain, his soul cried out that I had offered him something more precious than a small, golden cup, and that was friendship and trust What is it to love a man? This above all: that you want with all the polished silver of your being to show him the glory of his own.

Now Kane's jaws clamped shut as if he were trying to bite back the worst of pains. I felt him swallowing against a hard knot in his throat that would not be dislodged. A great pressure built in his chest and burned up through his eyes. He took a long, deep look at the Lightstone.

'Valashu,' he gasped.

He suddenly cast his sword clanging down upon the bare rock floor. I felt tears burning in my eyes a moment before his filled as well. And then, at last, the storm broke. He lifted the Lightstone up high and threw back his head. His mouth opened wide as he let loose a terrible sound: 'KALKIN!' No torture of Morjin's could have torn such a cry of agony and despair from a man. He fell down to his knees before me, weeping for himself and the world. In his wracking sobs was all his grief at losing Alphanderry to death – and much, much else that he had held inside for years beyond counting. His breath burst out so violendy that the stone of the hall seemed to shake and the very heavens open up even through miles of rock and ice. For a moment his tears, and my own, flowed so freely that they seemed almost to wash away the blood spilled here this terrible day.

I rested my hand on top of his thick, white hair as he reached his hand behind my leg and pressed his forehead against the hard rings of steel covering my knee. The tremors ripping through his powerful body took a long time to subside. At last, when he had grown quiet again, as I listened to Atara's pained breaths breaking out into the air behind me and to Maram weeping like a child, he looked up at me. He pulled away from me, slightly, and pressed the Lightstone back into my hand.