Diamond Warriors (63 page)

'Surrender the Lightstone to me!' Morjin shouted. 'Surrender, Elahad, and I will spare all who followed you here!'

The thousands of Red Knights, those my warriors and I hadn't killed, massed behind Morjin and deployed around the curves of the hill. When it came to combat again, I did not see how we could defeat them.

The man for whom I should have guarded the Lightstone could do nothing against Morjin or the atrocities he had wrought. But
I
could. I could use the Lightstone as Morjin had, to bend men to my will and force them to give me their allegiance. I would persuade some of our enemy's captains and kings to come over to me, and to fall against those who did not. I might even wield the golden cup to strike death into the most willful of my enemies, as Morjin would have done his - but for Bemossed; I would certainly slay Morjin. I would put to the sword all who remained to stand against me, here on this battlefield and across Ea. I would claim dominion over the world, and I would become the King of Swords and Lord of War. But men would call me the Silver Swan, and that name would become more dreaded than the Red Dragon. And all that I did to reorder the realms of men and women to make a paradise on earth, no matter how terrible, would be for those I loved and for Ea. I told myself that I
might
not fall so far into evil as Morjin had.

NO!

The hardness of the Lightstone hurt my fingers; its brilliance burned my eyes. I ached to keep a grip on it and force from it all that was good and bright and beautiful. Aryu, I thought, must have told himself the same thing when he had slain Elahad and stolen it so long ago.

'Val!' It was Atara's voice. She shouted out my name and jotted me free of the Lightstone's spell. Thirty Manslayers came charging up the hill with the stout Karimah riding in front of Atara, holding the reins of her horse.

How had she come to be here? with a broken-off arrow embedded in the leather armor near her shoulder and a half dozen feathered shafts sticking out of her horse, it seemed that, she must have fought her way behind the enemy's line to this hill. Could it be that the three thousand woman warriors of the Manslayer Society had been reduced to the thirty riding with her?

'Estrella!' she called to me.
'She
is the Maitreya!'

I stared at her in astonishment. Her words made no sense to me.

'I have come here to tell you this!' she said, pushing her horse up to me. She fumbled through the air and finally managed to lay her hand on my arm. 'I have
seen
Estrella, with the Lightstone!' 'But no scryer has ever seen the Lightstone in any vision!
Or
the Maitreya.'

'But
I
have!' Atara said. 'But all the Maitreyas have been male. All the prophecies speak of the Maitreya as "he."'

'I don't care about the prophecies! Estrella
is
the Shining One!'

Morjin, from behind the wall of Red Knights protecting him, glared at Atara with a strange silence. His face seemed a mask of corruption and hate.

'He knows!' Atara suddenly cried out.
'He
can see her, and it burns his mind!'

I sat on Altaru, holding my sword in one hand and the Lightstone in the other. Once a time, before I had lost the cup to Morjin, Estrella had often stood in its presence and had even held it in her hands. She had seemed to take as little interest in it as she might a teacup. My sword suddenly flared a bright glorre, and lines from the ancient verse flashed through my mind:

The Shining One

In innocence sleeps

Inside his heart

Angel fire sleeps

And when he wakes

The fire leaps

About the Maitreya

One thing is known:

That to himself

He always is known

When the moment comes

To claim the Lightstone.

A dying scryer had told me that Estrella would show me the Maitreya. Was it possible, I wondered, that a thousand times she had? I felt in my heart that it was true, and all at once it seemed the hardness of the Lightstone that had hurt my fingers fell away; its brilliance that had burned my eyes became an exquisite light that bathed them. The ache of my grip vanished as the image came to me of another hand reaching out with unique power to bring forth from the Lightstone all that was good and bright and beautiful.

'Estrella is coming,' said Atara, 'to claim the Lightstone.' I felt in my heart that it was true, and so did Morjin.

NOOOOO!

From behind the protection of his knights, Morjin screamed at the sky.

Kane had once told me that Morjin kept a black gelstei. But this dark angel kept inside himself dark fires as well, and he now unleashed upon us all the force of his black and bottomless hate:

VALARI! DIE VALARIIII!

Morjin's droghul had assaulted my companions and me with a voice that chilled the blood and froze the limbs unmoving with terror - and killed. This Morjin, it seemed, the real Morjin who had come to earth so long ago, wielded this weapon with an even greater rage. He bellowed out in a voice of death:

DIEIIII! AIYIYARIII!

Something hard as iron struck a blow to my forehead; blood spurted from my nose, and, I feared, my very brains. I felt an acid eating through my stomach into my heart, and I could not breathe. Images came to me, not as memories but as sights and sounds and smells assaulting all my senses and my deepest self: the anguish in my grandmother's eyes as she pulled at the spikes that Morjin's men had driven through her hands; the screams of men dying at the Culhadosh Commons; the stench of hundreds of corpses rotting in the hot Yarkonan sun. I knew that I had to fight off the burning poison of Morjin's malice - either that, or die.

AIYIYARIII!

But others proved more vulnerable to Morjin's murderous voice. In Hesperu, his droghul had been able to direct it at only one man at any moment; now I feared that the real Red Dragon might find a way to strike down half my army. His breath seemed to burn out like thunder and fire. It fell upon Sar Kanshar, Sar Iandru and Jurald Evar, formed up in front of me. Sar Kanshar, maddened, threw himself onto the lance of Jessu the Lion-Heart, sitting next to him. Then Sar Iandru and Jurald Evar pluged from their horses to the ground, screaming as they grabbed at their chests. So did Manathar the Bold and Sar Jurgarth and a dozen other knights. And all the while Morjin's voice built louder, deeper and even more full of spite.

AIYIYARIII!

Soon I thought, as I sweated and bled and fought to breathe, Morjin would slay all of us. His army, I feared,
must
be about to break mine. How long could Maram stand against a great dragon that could turn circles in the air and swoop down upon him vomiting out fire? How long could my knights bear up, here at the top of the hill once the Red Knights had completed their encirclement of us and added the killing power of their swords and lances to Morjin's voice of death? I suddenly despaired that I
could
not use the Lightstone to slay our enemies . . .

And then, as from another world, I heard Alphanderry's voice rising in song above the crucifier's howl, filling the air above the hilltop. While we had stood tortured by the power of Morjin's black gelstei, Estrella and Daj had ridden up between my massed knights toward me, followed by Liljana and Alphanderry, and the Seven. They appeared to be untouched by the killing sound of Morjin's hatred. Alphanderry sat on top of his horse facing Morjin, and this strange, beautiful being who had been born in Galda and reborn in one of the earth's Vilds, chanted out a beautiful music.

Kane moved his horse closer to Alphanderry. His face had lost its savage lines and taken on almost an innocence. He seemed to drink in Alphanderry's song with his ears and his heart as if it were elixir recalling him to his youth. Something, with the weight of the whole world, moved inside him.

Alphanderry's throat and golden lips formed no words, but only the most pure and powerful of tones. His song rang out like millions of perfectly attuned bells. It resonated with the varicolored crystals that Abrasax and the Seven held vibrating in the palms of their hands; the great gelstei picked up the sound of Alphanderry's voice and gave it back to the world, amplified a thousandfold. The melody that he summoned from some shimmering and infinite source built ever higher, deeper and sweeter until it drowned out Morjin's death voice and utterly negated it. For Morjin screamed out all his hate of the world, while Alphanderry poured forth precisely the opposite. And so, as Morjin glared at Alphanderry in a wrath of bitterness, the golden minstrel sang out joyously, even as I imagined the Ieldra must once have sung the planets and stars into creation.
There is a chance
! I thought as Morjin fell silent.
There must always be a way.

'Now, Val,' Atara called out to me. 'Give the Lightstone to Estrella.'

Estrella had ridden up close to me but she sat frozen in her saddle, gazing at Bemossed. The way she looked at him nearly tore out my heart. I felt her longing and love, and something more, a deep, driving desire that he should return to life. And even deeper, a kind of dream that a part of Bemossed always
would
live, as did some inextinguishable essence within the rippling grasses and the bloodstained rocks beneath the cross, for that was how she saw the world. I wondered then if the Lightstone
could be
used to revive Bemossed? Could the Seven, through their gelstei, find their way into the center of the Cup of Heaven and release its nearly infinite powers?

I called to her, and Estrella tore her gaze from away from her murdered friend. A great change had come over her. It was as if she stood fearless before a burning, infinite sea.

When the moment comes To claim the Lightstone.

Inside
her
heart, I thought,
she
wakes. In looking at Estrella then, she seemed to exult in all life's beauty - and in its horror, too. I suddenly remembered thousands of impressions and acts, like seeds of light, that Estrella had planted in me over long years of struggle, terror and war, her quick, wild eyes which saw so much and so deeply. On top of her little pony next to me, she radiated a beauty like that of a star. For the first time, I saw her not as a girl but a lovely young woman. I could almost feel her calling the Lightstone to her. In this silent song of her soul, as clean and natural as the wind, I sensed no hunger for fame or power, or even any desire, for herself. Rather, I thought, she saw the Lightstone as a
part
of herself, like an arm or an eye or a hand.

'So,' Kane said, his eyes blazing. 'So.'

Then Master Juwain, for once dwelling in the knowingness of his heart rather than the strife of his head, nodded to me.

'I agree,' Abrasax said from behind him.

'And I,' Master Matai said. 'Give her the cup.'

An incandescence of flame filled the sky above the Hill of Fire. What, I wondered, could even a Maitreya do against a dragon and all the forces of the Great Beast who had unleashed it?

As I reached out to set the Lightstone into Estrella's hand, it seemed that all time and history was an arrow streaking straight toward one moment and one place.

NOOOOOO!

The moment that her fingers touched the golden cup, a dazzling radiance began pouring from it. Like a fountain it streamed straight up into the sky. It fell into the whirling blackness as water into a hole, and suddenly the great vault of the heavens grew clear and blue again.

Then the radiance began pouring from Estrella. It swelled out like a ball of fire that did not burn, until both Estrella and the cup itself seemed to disappear within. Brighter and hotter it grew, like the sun, until I thought it might incinerate the whole top of the hill and all who stood upon it.

And then the blazing splendor grew utterly clear, like the air on top of a mountain. Estrella came back into view, sitting quietly on her horse. She seemed the same happy being that she had always been, but something more, too, for her face and every particle of her radiated a deep and inextinguishable light. With her eyes so bright and open, she seemed utterly awake, utterly aware - and at one with the whole world and even all the terrible things taking place on the battlefield.

Kane suddenly cried out to me, 'Val! Your sword!'

He pointed at Alkaladur, which I held shining in my hand. His eyes lit up as if he suddenly remembered why he had been born.

'Look!' he shouted. 'Look - and you will see the lines that I inscribed there!'

The fiery glyphs burned into my sword appeared exactly the same as I had seen them in the Vild:

With his eye of compassion

He saw his enemy

Like unto himself

Then, in the brilliance streaming out of the cup in Estrella's hand, the last three lines suddenly flared out and burned themselves into my mind:

And he knew love

And his enemy

Was vanquished

'No!' I shouted out. 'It cannot be!'

Morjin, thirty yards from me and protected by lines of his Red Knights, raised his sword as if to signal someone. On the east side of the hill, Count Ulanu signaled back to him that his Yarkonan cavalry was almost ready.

'It
must
be!' Kane shouted back to me. 'And you must find the way.'

'No - there is no way! How can you, of all men, ask this of me?'

Kane made no answer to this. He nudged his horse close to Estrella. He gazed at her for an endless moment and at the Lightstone she held close to her chest. Then she reached out to touch her fingers to the lids above Kane's black, blazing eyes. I felt the golden cup's radiance pouring into him like a river of light. It seemed to soothe the burning deeps of him and yet also to vasten him, his eyes and his hands and his great heart, every fiber of his body and the very sinews of his soul. I could almost hear the chains that had bound him for so long, with an unbearable pressure, suddenly burst. Then a man who was much more than a man turned his shining face toward me. He had wings, this being did, and he laughed out with a wild joy that shook the very sky because at last he was free.