Black Jade

I considered long and deeply what Master Juwain had said as I looked through the fire's writhing flames and gazed at the darkening walls of the chasm called the Kul Kavaakurk. How close had I been to claiming the Lightstone for myself? As close as the curve of my fingers or the whispering of my breath — as close as the beating of my heart.

Maram cast a glance at the silent, motionless Kane standing like a stone carving above us, and he said, 'Didn't our grim friend tell us in Argattha that the Lightstone had no power to make one young again?'

I touched the hilt of my sword, and I recalled exactly what Kane had told us in Morjin's throne room when he stood revealed as one of the Elijin: that the Lightstone did not possess the power to bestow immortality. I told this to Maram, and to the others, who sat around the fire quietly eating their dinner.

Then Maram nodded at Master Juwain and said, 'Then it might be possible that Morjin has rejuvenated himself.'

'It is possible,' Master Juwain allowed. 'No man knows very much about the Lightstone.'

He looked up at Kane, and so did everyone else. But still Kane said nothing.

'We know,' Liljana said, 'that Morjin can draw a kind of strength from the Lightstone, as he does in feeding off others' fear or adulation I or even in drinking their blood. And so I suppose we must assume he has found a way to renew himself, if only for a time.'

'I suppose we must,' Master Juwain said with another sigh. 'Unless we can find another explanation.'

The fading sunlight barely sufficed to illuminate Kane's fathomless black eyes. He seemed, in silence, to explain to us a great deaclass="underline" above all that the distance between the Elijin and mortal men was as vast as the black spaces between the stars. As always, I sensed that he knew much more than he was willing to reveal about the world and about himself — even to himself.

'Ah, well,' Maram said, looking up at Kane, 'Morjin fought like a much younger man, didn't he? In truth, like no man I have ever seen except Val — or Kane. He has a power now that he didn't have in Argattha. Perhaps many powers. He pointed at Atara, and struck her blind!'

Atara paused in eating her stew to hold up her spoon I front of the white cloth covering her face. She said, 'But I am already blind.'

'You know what I mean.'

She brought out her scryer's sphere and sat rolling it between her long, lithe ringers. 'Morjin has power over my gelstei now, nothing more.'

'But your second sight — '

'My second sight comes and goes, like the wind, as it always has. Surely it was just evil chance, what happened on the battlefield.'

'Evil, indeed,' Maram said, looking at her. 'But what if it was more than chance?'

Atara shook her head violently. Then she clapped her hands over her blindfold and said, 'Morjin took my eyes and with them my first sight. Isn't that enough?'

Because there was nothing to say to this, we sat around the fire eating our stew. The knock and scrape of our spoons against our wooden bowls seemed as loud as thunder.

And then I took her hand and said to her, 'Please promise me that if the next battle comes upon us with the wind blowing the wrong way, you'll find a safe place and remain there.'

'I should have, I know,' she said to me, pressing her hand into mine. 'But I was sure that my sight would return, at any moment, so sure. Then, too, they were so many and we so few. I heard you calling out, to me it seemed. I thought you needed my sword.'

'I need much more than your sword,' I told her.

In the clasp of her fingers around mine was all the promise that I could ever hope for.

Maram, sitting nearby, cast us a wistful look as if he might be to thinking of his betrothed, Behira. And he said, 'It vexes me what Morjin said about the Baaloch. Can it be true that he is so close to freeing Angra Mainyu?'

'He would lie,' said, 'just to vex me. And to strike terror into you, and everyone else.'

'He would,' Master Juwain agreed. 'But as we have seen before, he has no need of lies when the truth will serve him better.'

'But how can we know the truth about this?' I asked. 'Didn't you once teach me that Morjin possessed the Lightstone for thirty years at the end of the Age of Swords? And then for nearly ten times as long when the Age of Law fell to the Age of the Dragon? If he didn't free Angra Mainyu then why should we fear that he

will now?'

'Because,' Master Juwain told me, 'that was then, and this is now. The first time he claimed the Lightstone, he used it in desperate battle to conquer Alonia. And the second time, to overthrow the order of the Age of Law, which everyone had thought eternal. Now that he has nearly conquered all of Ea, he will surely use it to bring his master here from Damoom.'

'If he can, he will,' I said, still not wanting to believe the worst. 'But why should we think that he can?'

Atara's hand suddenly tightened around mine as she said, 'But, Val, I have seen this, and have spoken of it before!'

What Atara had 'seen' we all knew to be true: that beneath the buried city of Argattha, far beneath the mountain, Morjin had driven his slaves to digging tunnels deep into the earth. And there, through solid rock, as with the lightning-like pulses that coursed along a man's nerves and through the chakras along his spine, ran the fires of the earth. Master Juwain called them the telluric currents. Their power was very great: if Master Juwain was right, the Lightstone could be used to direct them, as with the flames of a blacksmith's furnace, to touch upon the currents of the world of Damoom. And then the door behind which Angra Mainyu was bound, tike an iron gate, might be burnt open. And then Angra Mainyu, the Dark One, would be set free from his prison and loosed upon Ea.

'Morjin is close,' Atara told me, 'so very close to cutting open the right tunnel The wrong tunnel. Now that he has the Lightstone, it will be months, not years, before he sees clear where to dig.'

Daj, who had been a slave in the mines below Argattha's first level, nodded his head at this. 'It might be even sooner. I once heard Lord Morjin tell one of his priests that the Baaloch would be freed within a year. And that was before he took back the Lightstone.'

'Well, then, Morjin either was wrong or he lied,' Maram said to Daj. 'It's been more than a year since we freed you from Argattha.'

'Morjin didn't lie,' Liljana said, 'when I touched minds with him. He couldn't lie, then. He believes that he will free Angra Mainyu, and soon,'