David Zindell - The Lightstone - The Ninth Kingdom - Part One

‘Hold your breath, now,’ he told us.

I drew in a draft of clean mountain air and watched as Master Juwain covered his nose and mouth with a thick cloth. Then he held the spoon over one of the candles. A moment later, the blue flakes caught fire. But strangely, I saw, they burned with an angry, red flame.

Still holding the cloth over his face, Master Juwain set down the spoon and joined us by the window. I could almost feel him silently counting the seconds to every beat of my heart. By this time, my lungs were burning for air. At last Master Juwain uncovered his mouth and told us, ‘Go ahead and breathe – I think it should be all right now.’

Maram, whose face was red as an apple, gasped at the air streaming in the window, and so did I. Even so, I caught the faintness of a stench that was bitter beyond belief.

‘Well?’ Maram said, turning to Master Juwain, ‘do you know what it is?’

‘Yes, I know,’ Master Juwain said. There was a great sadness in his voice. ‘It’s as I feared – the poison is kirax.’

‘Kirax,’ Maram repeated as if he didn’t like the taste of the word on his tongue. ‘I don’t know about kirax.’

‘Well, you should,’ Master Juwain said. ‘If you weren’t so busy with the chambermaids, then you would.’

I thought Master Juwain was being unfair to him. Maram was studying to become a Master Poet, and so couldn’t be expected to know of every esoteric herb or poison.

‘What is kirax, sir?’ I asked him.

He turned to me and grasped my shoulder. There was a reassuring strength in his hand and tenderness as well. And then he said, ‘It’s a poison used only by Morjin and the Red Priests of the Kallimun. And their assassins.’

He went on to say that kirax was a derivative of the kirque plant, as was the more common drug called kiriol. Kiriol, of course, was known to open certain sensitives to others’ minds – though at great cost to themselves. Kirax was much more dangerous: even a small amount opened its victim to a flood of sensations that overwhelmed and burned out the nerves. Death came quickly and agonizingly as if one’s entire body had been plunged into a vat of boiling oil.

‘You must have absorbed a minuscule amount of it,’ Master Juwain told me. ‘Not enough to kill but quite sufficient to torment you.’

Truly, I thought, enough to torment me even as my gift tormented me. I looked off at the candles’ flickering flames, and it occurred to me that the kirax was a dark, blue, hidden knife cutting at my heart and further opening it to sufferings and secrets that I would rather not know.

‘Do you have the antidote?’ I asked him.

Master Juwain sighed as he looked at his box of medicines. ‘I’m afraid there is no antidote,’ he said. He told Maram and me that the hell of kirax was that once injected, it never left the body.

‘Ah,’ Maram said upon hearing this news, ‘that’s hard, Val – that’s too bad.’

Yes, I thought, trying to close myself from the waves of pity and fear that poured from Maram, it was very bad indeed.

Master Juwain moved back over to the table and gingerly picked up the arrow. ‘This came from Argattha,’ he said.

At the mention of Morjin’s stronghold in the White Mountains, a shudder ran through me. It was said that Argattha was carved out of the rock of a mountain, an entire city built underground where slaves were whipped to work and dreadful rites occurred far from the eyes of civilized men.

‘I would guess,’ Master Juwain told me, ‘that the man you killed was sent from there. He might even be a full priest of the Kallimun.’

I closed my eyes as I recalled the assassin’s fiercely intelligent eyes.

‘I’d like to see the body,’ Master Juwain said.

Maram wiped the sweat from his fat neck as he pointed at the arrow and said, ‘But we don’t know that the assassins are Kallimun priests, do we? Isn’t it also possible that one of the Ishkans has gone over to Morjin?’

Master Juwain suddenly stiffened with anger as he admonished Maram: ‘Please do not call him by that name.’ Then he turned to me. ‘It worries me even more that the Lord of Lies has made traitor one of your own countrymen.’

‘No,’ I said, filling up with a rare anger of my own. ‘No Meshian would ever betray us so.’

‘Perhaps not willfully,’ Master Juwain said. ‘But you don’t know the deceit of the Lord of Lies. You don’t know his power.’

He told us then that all men, even warriors and kings, knew moments of darkness and despair. At such times, when the clouds of doubt shrouded the soul and the stars did not shine, they became more vulnerable to evil, most especially to the Master of Minds himself. Then Morjin might come for them, in their hatred or in their darkest dreams; he would send illusions to confuse them; he would seize the sinews of their will and control them at a distance as with a puppeteer pulling on strings. These soulless men were terrible and very deadly, though fortunately very rare. Master Juwain called them ghuls; he admitted to his fear that a ghul might be waiting in the great hall to take meat with us that very night.

To steady my racing heart, I stepped over to the window to get a breath of fresh air. As a child, I had heard rumors of ghuls, as of werewolves or the dreaded Gray Men who come at night to suck out your soul. But I had never really believed them.

‘But why,’ I asked Master Juwain, ‘would the Lord of Lies send an assassin – or anyone else – to kill me with poison?’

He looked at me strangely, and asked, ‘Are you sure the first assassin was shooting at you and not Asaru?’

‘Yes.’

‘But how could you be sure? Didn’t Asaru say that he felt the arrow pass through his hair?’

Master Juwain’s clear, gray eyes fell upon me with the weight of twin moons. How could I tell him about my gift of sensing what lay inside another’s heart? How could I tell him that I had felt the assassin’s intention to murder me as surely as I did the cold wind pouring through the window?

‘There was the angle of the shot,’ I tried to explain. There was something in the assassin’s eyes.’

‘You could see his eyes from a hundred yards away?’

‘Yes,’ I said. And then, ‘No, that is, it wasn’t really like seeing. But there was something about the way he looked at me. The concentration.’

Master Juwain was silent as he stared at me from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows. Then he said, ‘I think there’s something about you, Valashu Elahad. There was something about your grandfather, too.’

In silence I reached out to close the cold pane of glass against the night.

‘I believe,’ Master Juwain continued, ‘that this something might have something to do with why the Lord of Lies is hunting you. If we understood it better, it might provide us with the crucial clue.’

I looked at Master Juwain then and I wanted him to help me understand how I could feel the fire of another’s passions or the unbearable pressure of their longing for the peace of the One. But some things can never be understood. How could one feel the cold light of the stars on a perfect winter night? How could one feel the wind?

‘The Lord of Lies couldn’t know of me,’ I said at last. ‘He’d have no reason to hunt the seventh son of a faraway mountain king.’

‘No reason? Wasn’t it your ancestor, Aramesh, who took the Lightstone from him at the Battle of Sarburn?’

‘Aramesh,’ I said, ‘is the ancestor of many Valari. The Lord of Lies can’t hunt us all.’

‘No? Can he not?’ Master Juwain’s eyebrows suddenly pulled down in anger. ‘I’m afraid he would hunt any and all who oppose him.’

For a moment I stood there rubbing the scar on my forehead. Oppose Morjin? I wanted the Valari to stop fighting among ourselves and unite under one banner so that we wouldn’t have to oppose him. Shouldn’t that, I wondered, be enough?