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

Master Juwain’s face fell gray as if he had eaten bad meat. He said, ‘If the bear were a man, I would say his actions were those of a ghul.’

I stared at the bear, and it suddenly came to me that the illness I had sensed in him had been not of the body but the mind.

‘A ghul!’ Maram cried out. ‘Are you saying that Mor … ah, that the Lord of Lies had seized his will? I’ve never heard of an animal ghul.’

No one had. With the wind working at the sweat beneath my armor, a deep shiver ran through me. I wondered if Morjin – or anyone except the Dark One himself, Angra Mainyu – could have gained that much power.

As if in answer to my question, Master Juwain sighed and said, ‘It seems that his skill, if we can call it that, is growing.’

‘Well,’ Maram said, looking about nervously, ‘if he can send one bear to kill Val, he can send another. Or a wolf, or a –’

‘No, I think not,’ Master Juwain interrupted. ‘For a man or a woman to be made a ghul is a rare thing. There must be an opening, through despair or hate, into the darkness. And a certain sympathy of the minds. I would think that an animal ghul, if possible at all, would be even rarer.’

‘But you don’t really know, do you?’ Maram pressed him.

‘No, I don’t,’ Master Juwain said. He suddenly shivered, too, and pulled his cloak more tightly about him. ‘But I do know that we should get down from this pass before it grows dark.’

‘Yes, we should,’ I agreed. With some handfuls of snow, I began cleaning the blood off me, and watched Maram do the same. After retying Tanar to Altaru, I mounted my black stallion and turned him up the road.

‘You’re not thinking of going on ?’ Maram asked me. ‘Shouldn’t we return to the keep?’

I pointed at the opening of the Gate. ‘Tria lies that way.’

Maram looked down at the kel keep and the road that led back to the Valley of the Swans. He must have remembered that Lord Harsha was waiting for him there; it occurred to me that he had finally witnessed at first hand the kind of work that a kalama could accomplish, for he rubbed his curly beard worriedly and muttered, ‘No, we can’t go back, can we?’

He mounted his trembling sorrel, as did Master Juwain his. I smiled at Maram and bowed my head to him. ‘Thank you for saving my life,’ I told him.

‘I did save your life, didn’t I?’ he said. He smiled back at me as if I had personally knighted him in front of a thousand nobles. ‘Well, allow me to save it again. Who really wants to go to Tria, anyway? Perhaps it’s time I returned to Delu. We could all go there. You’d be welcomed at my father’s court and –’

‘No,’ I told him. Thank you for such a gracious offer, but my journey lies in another direction. Will you come with me?’

Maram sat on his horse as he looked back and forth between the headless bear and me. He blinked his eyes against the stinging sleet. He licked his lips, then finally said, ‘Will I come with you? Haven’t I said I would? Aren’t you my best friend? Of course I’m coming with you!’

And with that he clasped my arm, and I clasped his. As if Altaru and I were of one will, we started moving up the road together. Maram and Master Juwain followed close behind me. I regretted leaving the bear unburied in a shallow pond of blood, but there was nothing else to do. Tomorrow, perhaps, one of Lord Avijan’s patrols would find him and dispose of him. And so we rode our horses into the dark mouth of the Telemesh Gate and steeled ourselves to go down into Ishka.

Our passage through the Gate proved uneventful and quiet save for Maram’s constant exclamations of delight. For, as he discovered, the walls of rock on both sides of us sparkled with diamonds. The fire of Telemesh’s red gelstei, in melting this corridor through the mountain, had exposed many veins of these glittering white crystals. In honor of his great feat, the proud Telemesh had ordered that they never be cut, and they never had. I thought that the beauty of the diamonds somewhat made up for this long wound in the earth. But many visitors to Mesh – the Ishkans foremost among them – complained of such ostentatious displays of my kingdom’s wealth. King Hadaru had often accused my father of mocking him thusly. But my father turned a stony face to his plaints; he would say only that he intended to respect Telemesh’s law even as he would the Law of the One.

‘But can’t we take just one stone?’ Maram asked when we were almost through the Gate. ‘We could sell it for a fortune in Tria.’

Maram, I thought, didn’t know what he was saying. Was anyone more despicable than a diamond seller? Yes – those who sold the bodies of men and women into slavery.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Who would ever know?’

‘ We would know, Maram,’ I told him. I looked down at the corridor’s smooth stone floor, which glittered with more than one diamond beneath patches of wind-blown grit and the occasional droppings of horses. ‘Besides, it’s said that any man who steals a stone will himself turn into stone – it’s a very old prophecy.’

For many miles after that – after we debouched from the pass and began our descent into Ishka – Maram gazed at the rock formations by the side of the road as if they had once been thieves making their escape with illicit treasure in their hands. But as dusk approached, his desire for diamonds began to fade with the light. His talk turned to fires crackling in well-tended hearths and hot stew waiting to be ladled out for our evening meal. The sleet, which turned into a driving rain on the heavily wooded lower slopes of the mountain, convinced him that he didn’t want to camp out that night.

It convinced me as well. When we reached the Ishkans’ fortress that guarded their side of the pass, we stopped to ask if there were any inns nearby. The fortress’s commander, Lord Shadru, told us that there were not; he offered his apologies that he couldn’t allow a Meshian knight within the walls of his fortress. But then he directed us to the house of a woodcutter who lived only a mile farther down the road. He wished us well, and we continued plodding on through the icy rain.

A short time later, we turned onto a side road, as Shadru had directed us. And there, in the middle of a stand of trees dripping with water, we found a square chalet no different than ones that dot the mountains of Mesh. Its windows glowed orange with the light of a good fire burning within. The woodcutter, Ludar Narath, came out to greet us. After ascertaining who we were and why we had come to his door on such a stormy night, he offered us fire, bread and salt. He seemed determined that Ishkan hospitality should not suffer when compared to that of Mesh.

And so he invited us to share the spare bedroom that had once belonged to his eldest son, who had been killed in a war with Waas. Ludar’s wife, Masha, served us a small feast. We sat by the fire eating fried trout and a soup made of barley, onions and mushrooms. There was bread and butter, cheese and walnuts, and a stout black beer that tasted little different than the best of Meshian brews. We sat at his huge table with his three daughters and his youngest son, who eyed me with great curiosity. I sensed that the boy wanted to come over to me, perhaps to pull at the rings of my mail or tell me a bad joke. But his forbearance overruled the natural friendliness bubbling up inside him. As it did with Ludar and the rest of his family. It didn’t matter that I had spent my childhood in forests little different than theirs and had listened to the same after-dinner stories told before a warm fire; in the end, I was a knight of Mesh, and someday I might have to face Ludar in battle – and his remaining son as well.