David Zindell - The Lightstone

There is a voice that whispers deep inside the soul. All of us have such a voice.

Sometimes it is as clear as the ringing of a silver bell; sometimes it is faint and far-off like the fiery exhalations of the stars. But it always knows. And it always speaks the truth even when we don't want to hear it.

'No,' I said at last.

'No?'

'No, you lie,' I told him. 'You're the Lord of Lies.'

'I'm the Lord of Ea and you will help me!'

I gripped the hilt of the sword that my father had given me as I slowly shook my head.

'Damn you, Elahad! You damn yourself to death, then!'

'So be it,' I told him.

'So be it,' he told me. And then he said, 'I will tell you the true secret of the valarda: the only way you will ever expiate your fear of death is to make others die. As I will make you die, Elahad!'

The hate with which he said this was like lava pouring from a rent in the earth, I realized then that fear of death leads to hatred of life. Even as my fear of Morjin led me to hate him. I hated him with black bile and clenched teeth and red blood suddenly filling my eyes; I hated him as fire hates wood and darkness does light.

Most of all, I hated him for lying to me and playing on my fears and making me sick to my soul with a deep and terrible hate.

It took only a moment for his dragon's head to grow out from his body and for his claws to emerge. But before his jaws could open, I whipped my kalama from its sheath. I plunged the point of it. through the dragon embroidered on his tunic, deep into his heart. It was as if I had ripped out my own heart. The incredible pain of it caused me to scream like a wounded child even as my sword shattered into a thousand pieces; each piece lay burning with an orange-red light on the ground or hissed into the stream and sent up plumes of boiling water. I watched in horror as Morjin screamed, too, and his face fell away from the form of a dragon and became my own. Clots of twisting red worms began to eat out his eyes, my eyes, and his whole body burst into flames. In moments his face blackened into a rictus of agony.

And then the flames consumed him utterly, and he vanished into the nothingness from which he had come.

For what seemed a long time, I stood there by the stream waiting for him to return.

But all that remained of him was a terrible emptiness clutching at my heart. My fever left me; in the darkness of the dawn, I was suddenly very cold. Inside me beat the words to another stanza of Morjin's poem that I could never forget: The stealing of the gold.

The evil knife, the cold.

The cold that freezes breath

The nothingness of death.

A few moments later, Atara and Master Juwain, with Maram puffing close behind them, came running into the clearing by the stream. Atara held her strung bow in her hand, and Maram brandished his sword; Master Juwain had a copy of the Saganom Elu that he had been reading, but nothing more. The thought of him reciting passages or throwing his book at a man such as Morjin made me want to laugh wildly.

'What is it?' he asked me. 'We heard you cry out.'

Maram, who was more blunt, added, 'Ah, we heard you talking to yourself and shouting. Who were you shouting at, Val?'

'At Morjin,' I said. 'Or perhaps it was just an illusion – it's hard to say.'

I looked at the steel gleaming along the length of my sword, and I wondered how it had been remade.

'Morjin was here?' Atara asked. 'How could he be? Where did he go?'

I pointed toward the faint glow of the sun rising in the east. Then I pointed at the woods, north, west and south. Finally I flung my hand up toward the sky.

'Take Val back to camp,' Atara said to Master Juwain. She nodded at Maram, too, as if issuing a command. Then she started off toward the woods.

'Where are you going?' -I asked her.

'To see,' she said simply.

'No, you mustn't!' I told her. I took a step toward her to stop her, but my body felt as if it had been drained of blood. I stumbled, and was only saved from failing by Maram, who wrapped his thick arm around me.

Take him back to camp!' Atara said again. And then she moved off into the trees and was gone.

With my arms thrown across Maram's and Master Juwain's shoulders, they dragged me back to camp as if I were a drunkard. They sat me down by the fire, and Maram covered me with his cloak. While he rubbed the back of my neck and my cold hands, Master Juwain found a reddish herb in his wooden chest. He made me a tea that tasted like iron and bitter berries. It brought a little warmth back into my limbs. But the icy nothingness with which Morjin had touched my soul still remained.

'At least your fever is gone,' Maram told me.

'Yes,' I said, 'it's much better to die of the cold.'

'But you're not dying, Val! Are you? What did Morjin do to you?'

I tried to tell both Maram and Master Juwain something of my dream – and what had happened by the stream afterwards. But words failed me. It was impossible to describe a terror that had no bottom or end. And I found that I didn't want to.

After a while, with the hot tea trickling down my throat, my head began to clear and I came fully awake. Dawn began to brighten into morning as the sun's light touched the trees around us. I listened to the shureet shuroo of a scarlet tanager piping out his song from the branch of. an oak; I gazed at the starlike white sepals of some goldthread growing in the shade of a birch tree. The world seemed marvelously and miracu-lously real, and my senses drank in every sight, sound and smell.

Just as I was steeling myself to strap on my sword and go look for Atara, she suddenly returned. She stepped out from behind the cover of the trees as silently as a doe. In the waxing light, her face was ashen. She came over and sat beside me by the fire.

'Well?' Maram asked her. 'What did you see?'

'Men,' Atara said. With a trembling hand, she reached for a mug of tea that Master Juwain handed her. 'Gray men.'

'What do you mean, gray men?' Maram said.

'There were nine of them,' Atara said. 'Or perhaps more. They were dressed all in gray; their horses were gray, too. Their faces were hideous: their flesh seemed as gray as slate.'

She paused to take a sip of tea as beads of sweat formed upon Maram's brow.

'It was hard to see,' Atara said. 'Perhaps their faces were only colored by the grayness of the dawn. But I don't think so. There was something about them that didn't seem human.'

Master Juwain knelt beside her and touched her shoulder. He told her, 'Please go on.'

'One of them looked at me,' she said. 'He had no eyes – no eyes like those of any man I've ever seen. They were all gray as if covered with cataracts. But he wasn't blind. The way that he looked at me. It was as if I was naked, like he could see everything about me.'

She took another sip of tea, then grasped my hand to keep her hand from shaking.

'I shouldn't have looked into his eyes,' she said. 'It was like looking into nothing. So empty, so cold – I felt the cold freezing my body. I felt his intention to do things to me. I… have no words for it. It was worse than the hill-men. Death I can face.

Perhaps even torture, too. But this man – it was like he wanted to kill me forever and suck out my soul.'

We were all silent as we looked at her. And then Maram asked, 'What did you do?'

'I tried to draw on him,' she said. 'But it was as if my arms were frozen. It took all my will to pull my bow and sight on him. But it was too late – he rode off to join the others.'

'Oh, excellent!' Maram said, wiping his face. 'It seems that Val was right after all.

Men are after us – gray men with no souls.'

As the sun rose higher, we sat by the fire debating who these men might be. Maram worried that the man who had faced down Atara might be Morjin himself- how else to explain the terrible dream and illusion I had suffered? Master Juwain held that they might be only in Morjin's employ; as he told us: 'The Lord of Lies has many servants, and none so terrible as those who have surrendered to him their souls.' I wondered if Kane might have hired them to murder me; I wondered if he was waiting for me farther along the road with a company of stone-faced assassins.