David Zindell - The Lightstone - The Silver Sword - Part Two

Maram staggered over to me, and touched my head to see if I had a fever. He had never heard me speak like this before; neither had I.

‘Ah, my friend, you’re drunk,’ he said, looking down at Alkaladur. ‘Drunk on brandy or drunk on the fire of this sword – it’s all the same.’

Master Juwain looked back and forth between the sword and me. ‘No, I don’t think he’s quite drunk yet. I think he’s just beginning to see.’

He went on to tell us that everyone had three eyes: the eye of the senses; the eye of reason; and the eye of the soul. This third eye did not develop so easily or naturally as the others. Meditation helped open it, and so did the attunement of certain gelstei.

‘All the greater gelstei quicken the other sight,’ he said, ‘but the silver is especially the stone of the soul.’

The silustria, he said, had its most obvious effects on that part of the soul we called the mind. Like a highly polished lens, the silver crystal could reflect and magnify its powers: logic, deduction, calculation, awareness, insight and ordinary memory. In its reflective qualities, the silver gelstei might also be used as a shield against energies: vital, physical and particularly mental. Although not giving power over other minds, it could be used to quicken the working of another’s mind, and was thus a great tool for teaching. A sword made of silustria, he thought, could cut through all things material as the mind cuts through ignorance and darkness, for it was far harder than diamond. In fact, in its fundamental composition, the silver was very much like the gold gelstei, and was one of the two noble stones.

‘But its most sublime power is said to be this seeing of the soul that Val has told of. The way that all things are interconnected.’

Alphanderry, who seemed to have a song ready for any topic or occasion, sang an old one about the making of the heavens and earth. Its words, written down by some ancient minstrel long ago, told of how all of creation was woven of a single tapestry of superluminal jewels, the light of each jewel reflected in every other. Although only the One could ever perceive each of the tapestry’s shimmering emeralds, sapphires and diamonds, a man, through the power of the silver gelstei, might apprehend its unfolding pattern in all its unimaginable magnificence.

‘“For we are the eyes through which the One beholds itself and knows itself divine,”’ Alphanderry quoted.

And by ‘we’, he explained, he meant not only the men and women of Ea, but the Star People, the Elijin, and the great Galadin such as Arwe and Ashtoreth, whose eyes were said to be of purest silustria in place of flesh.

‘What wonders would we behold,’ he asked us, ‘if only we had the eyes to see them?’

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said as he yawned and drank the last of his brandy, ‘I’m afraid my eyes have seen enough of day for one day, if you know what I mean. While I don’t expect anyone’s sympathy, I must tell you that Lailaiu didn’t allow me much sleep. But I’m off to bed to replenish my store of it. And to behold her in my dreams.’

He stood up, yawned again, rubbed his eyes and then patted Alphanderry’s head. ‘And that , my friend, is the only part of this wonderful tapestry of yours I care to see tonight.’

Because we were all quite as tired as he, we lay back against our furs and wrapped ourselves with our cloaks against the chill drizzle – everyone except Kane who had the first watch. I fell asleep to the sight of Flick fluttering about the fire like a blazing butterfly, even as I rested my hand on the hilt of my sword, which I kept at my side. Although I dreaded the dreams the Lord of Lies might send me, I slept well. That night, in my dreams, when I was trapped in a cave as black as death itself, I drew forth Alkaladur. The sword’s fierce white light fell upon the dragon waiting in the darkness there, with its huge, folded wings and iron-black scales. Its radiance allowed me to see the dragon’s only vulnerability: the knotted, red heart which throbbed like a bloody sun. And in seeing my seeing of his weakness, the dragon turned his great, golden eyes away from me in fear. And then, in a thunder of wings and great claws striking sparks against stone, he vanished down a tunnel leading into the bowels of the earth.

The next morning, after a breakfast of porridge and blackberries fortified with some walnuts that Liljana had held in reserve, we set out in good spirits. We rode across fallow fields and little dirt roads, neither seeking out the occasional farmhouses we came across or trying to avoid them. This part of Surrapam, it seemed, was not the most populated. Broad swaths of forest separated the much narrower strips of cultivated land and settlements from each other. Although the roads through the giant, moss-hung trees were good enough, if a little damp, I wondered what it would be like when we reached the mountains, where we might find no roads at all.

Maram, too, brooded about this. As we paused to make a midmorning meal out of the clumps of blackberries growing along the roadside, he pointed ahead of us and said, ‘How are we to take the horses across the mountains if there are no roads for them? The Crescent Mountains, Val?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘we’ll find a way.’

Kane, whose face was so covered with berry juice that he looked as if he had torn apart a deer with his large teeth, grinned at him and said, ‘If we find the mountains impassable, we can always go around them.’

He pointed out that this great mountain chain, which ran in a broad crescent from the southern reaches of the Red Desert up Ea’s west coast through Hesperu and Surrapam, thinned and gave out altogether a hundred and fifty miles to the north of us in Eanna. We could always journey in that direction, he said, before rounding the farthermost point of the mountains and turning back south and east for Khaisham.

‘But that would add another three hundred miles to our journey!’ Maram groaned. ‘Let’s at least try crossing the mountains first.’

At this, Atara laughed and said, ‘Your laziness is giving you courage.’

‘It would give me more if you could see a road through the mountains. Can you?’

But in answer, Atara popped a fat blackberry into her mouth and slowly shook her head.

As we set out again, I wondered at the capriciousness of each of our gifts and the various gelstei that quickened them. Among us, we now had six; only Alphanderry lacked a stone, and so great were our hopes after my gaining Alkaladur that we were sure he would find a purple gelstei somewhere between Surrapam and Khaisham. Although Master Juwain brought forth his varistei with greater and greater frequency, he admitted that drawing upon its deepest healing properties might be the work of a lifetime. Kane, of course, kept his black stone mostly hidden and his doubts about using it secret as well. Liljana’s blue figurine might indeed aid her in mindspeaking, but there were no dolphins or whales to be found in Ea’s interior, and none among us with her talent. As she had promised to look away from the running streams of each of our thoughts unless invited to dip into them, she had little opportunity to gain any sort of mastery of her stone. As for Atara, she gazed into her scryer’s sphere as often as I searched the sky for the sun. What she saw there, however, remained a mystery. I gathered that her visions were as uncertain as blizzards in spring, and blew through her with sometimes blinding fury.

Maram’s talent proved to be the most fickle of any of ours – and the most neglected. Where he should have been growing more adept in using his firestone, he seemed almost to have forgotten that he possessed it. As he had said, his dreams were now of Lailaiu; at any one time, I thought, he was able to pour his passions into one vessel only. At the end of the day, after we had covered a good twenty-five miles through a gradually deepening drizzle, he tried to make a fire for us with his gelstei. But the red crystal brightened not even a little and remained dead in his hands.