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

For seven miles between Ki and the kel keep situated near Raaskel and Korukel, the Kel Road ran contiguous with the North Road. Here, as the horses’ hooves strove for purchase against the worn paving stones, the road rose very steeply. Thick walls of oak trees, mixed with elms and birch, pressed the road from either side, forming an archway of green leaves and branches high above it. But after only a few miles, the forest began changing and giving way to stands of aspen and spruce growing at the higher elevations. The mountains rose before us like steps leading to the unseen stars.

In many places, the road cut the sides of these fir-covered foothills like a long, curved scar against the swelling green. I knew that we were drawing close to the pass, although the lower peaks blocked the sight of it. As Maram complained, travel in the mountains was disorienting, and one could easily become lost. He had other fears as well. After I had recounted my conversation with Lansar Raasharu, he wondered aloud who the second assassin might be if he wasn’t one of the Ishkans. Might this unknown man, he asked, stalk us along the road? And if he did, what were we doing venturing into Ishka where he might more easily finish what he had begun in the woods? With every step we took closer to this unfriendly kingdom, these unanswered questions seemed to hang in the air like the cold mist sifting down from the sky.

Around noon, just as we crested a low rise marked with a red standing stone, we had our first clear view of the pass. We stood resting the horses as we gazed out at the masses of Korukel and Raaskel that rose up like great guardian towers only a few miles to the north. The North Road curved closer to Raaskel, the smaller of these two mountains. But with its sheer granite faces and snowfields, I thought, it was forbidding enough. Korukel, whose twin peaks and great humped shoulders gave it the appearance of a two-headed ogre, seemed all too ready to pelt us with spears of ice or roll huge boulders down upon us. If not for the diamonds buried within its bowels, it hardly seemed like a mountain worth fighting for.

‘Oh, my Lord, look!’ Maram said, pointing up the road. ‘The Telemesh Gate. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Few people had. For there, across the barren valley just beyond the massive fortress of the kel keep, cutting the ground between the two mountains, was the great work of my ancestors and one of the wonders of Ea: it seemed that a great piece of mountain a fifth of a mile wide and a mile long had simply been sliced out of the earth as if by the hand of the Galadin themselves. In truth, as Maram seemed to know, King Telemesh had made this rectangular cut between the two mountains with a firestone that he had brought back from the War of the Stones. According to legend, he had stood upon this very hill with his red gelstei and had directed a stream of fire against the earth for most of six days. And when he had finished and the acres of ice, dirt and rock had simply boiled off into the sky, a great corridor between Mesh and Ishka had been opened. Indeed, until Telemesh had made his gate, this ‘pass’ between our two kingdoms had been considered unpassable, at least to armies marching along in their columns or travelers astride their weary horses.

‘It’s too bad the firestones have all perished,’ Maram said wistfully. ‘Else all the kingdoms of Ea might be so connected.’

‘It’s said that Morjin has a firestone,’ I told him. ‘It’s said that he has rediscovered the secret of forging them.’

At this, Master Juwain looked at me sharply and shook his head. Many times he had warned Maram – and me – never to speak the Red Dragon’s true name. And with the utterance of these two simple syllables, the wind off the icy peaks suddenly seemed to rise; either that, or I could feel it cutting me more closely. Again, as I had in the woods with Raldu and later in the castle, I shivered with an eerie sense that something was watching me. It was as if the stones themselves all about us had eyes. It consoled me not at all that my countrymen here in the north called Raaskel and Korukel the Watchers.

For a half a mile we walked our horses down to the kel keep at the center of the valley. Maram wondered why the makers of the fortress hadn’t built it flush with the Gate, as of a wall of stone defending it. I explained to him that it was better sited where it was: on top of a series of springs that could keep the garrison well watered for years. It had never been the purpose of the keeps, I told him, to stop invading armies in the passes. They were intended only to delay the enemy as long as it took for the Meshian king to gather up an army of his own and destroy them in the open field.

We stopped at the keep to pay our respects to Lord Avijan, the garrison’s commander. Lord Avijan, a serious man with a long, windburnt face, was Asaru’s friend and not much older than I. He had been present at the feast, and he congratulated me on my knighthood. After seeing that we were well fed with pork and potatoes brought up from Ki, he told me that Salmelu and the Ishkans had gone up into the pass early that morning.

‘They were riding hard for Ishka,’ Lord Avijan told me. ‘As you had better do if you don’t want to be caught in the pass at nightfall.’

After I had thanked him and he wished me well on my quest, we took his advice. We continued along the North Road where it snaked up the steeply rising slopes of the valley. About two miles from the keep, as we approached the Telemesh Gate, it grew suddenly colder. The air was thick with a moisture that wasn’t quite rain nor mist nor snow. But there was still snow aplenty blanketing the ground. Here, in this bleak mountain tundra where trees wouldn’t grow, the mosses and low shrubs in many places were still covered in snow. Against boulders as large as a house were gathered massive white drifts, a few of which blocked the road. If Lord Avijan hadn’t sent out his warriors to cut a narrow corridor through them, the road would still have been impassable.

‘It’s cold,’ Maram complained as his gelding drove his hooves against the road’s wet stone. ‘Perhaps we should return to the keep and wait for better weather.’

‘No,’ I said, laying my hand on Altaru’s neck. Despite the cold, the hard work in the thin air had made him start sweating. ‘Let’s go on – it will be better on the other side of the pass.’

‘Are you sure?’

I looked off through the gray air at the Telemesh Gate now only a hundred yards farther up the road. It was a dark cut through a wall of rock, an ice-glazed opening into the unknown.

‘Yes, it will be better,’ I reassured him, if not myself. ‘Come on.’

I touched Altaru’s flanks to urge him forward, but he nickered nervously and didn’t move. As Master Juwain came up to join us, the big horse just stood there with his large nostrils opening and closing against the freezing wind.

‘What is it, Val?’ Master Juwain asked me.

I shrugged my shoulders as I scanned the boulders and snowfields all about us. The tundra seemed as barren as it was cold. Not even a marmot or a ptarmigan moved to break the bleakness of the pass.

‘Do you think it could be a bear?’ Maram asked, looking about, too. ‘Maybe he smells a bear.’

‘No, it’s too early for bears to be up this high,’ I told him.

In another month, the snow would be gone, and the slopes around us would teem with wildflowers and berries. But now there seemed little that was alive save for the orange and green patches of lichen that covered the cold stones.

Again, I nudged Altaru forward, and this time he whinnied and shook his head angrily at the opening to the Telemesh Gate. He began pawing at the road with his iron-shod hoof, and the harsh sound of it rang out into the mist-choked air.