The Diamond Warriors. David Zindell

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СКАЧАТЬ – and from my insides, as if it could look out at me through my very soul.

      ‘But what is it?’ Daj asked yet again. He turned toward Alphanderry who had remained almost rooted to the clearing’s floor during the whole time of our battle. ‘You called it the Ahrim. What does that mean?’

      ‘Hoy, the Ahrim, the Ahrim – I do not know!’

      ‘I suppose the name just came to you?’ Maram said, glaring at him.

      ‘Yes, it did. Like –’

      ‘Drops of blood on a cross!’ Maram snapped. ‘That thing is evil.’

      ‘So are all of Morjin’s illusions,’ Liljana said. ‘But that was no illusion.’

      ‘No, certainly not,’ Master Juwain said. Now he, too, touched his hand to my hands. He touched my face and told me, ‘Your fingers are frozen – and your nose and cheeks are frostbitten.’

      I would have looked at myself in Alkaladur’s shimmering surface, but the silustria was an ugly black and I could see nothing.

      ‘It was so cold,’ I said. ‘So impossibly cold.’

      I watched as the sun’s rays fell upon my sword and the blade slowly brightened to a soft silver. So it was with my dead-white flesh: the warm spring air thawed my face and hands with a hot pain that flushed my skin. Master Juwain held his green crystal over me to help the healing along. Soon I found that I could open and close my fingers at will, and I did not worry that they would rot with gangrene and have to be cut off. But forever after, I knew, I would feel the Ahrim’s terrible coldness burning through me, even as I did the kirax in my blood.

      A sudden gleam of my sword gave me to see a truth to which I had been blind. And I said to Alphanderry, with much anger, ‘You do know things about the Ahrim, don’t you? It has something to do with the Skadarak, doesn’t it?’

      At the mention of this black and blighted wood at the heart of Acadu, Alphanderry hung his head in shame. And then he found the courage to look at me as he said, ‘It was there, waiting, Val. During our passage, it attached itself to you. It has been following you ever since.’

      ‘Following!’ I half-shouted. ‘All the way to Hesperu, and back, to the Brotherhood’s school? And then here, to my home? Why could I not see it? And why could Abrasax not see it – he who can see almost everything?’

      Again, Alphanderry shrugged his shoulders.

      ‘But how is it,’ I demanded, ‘that you can see it?’

      It was Daj who answered for him. He passed his hand through Alphanderry’s watery-like form, and said, ‘But how not, since they are made of the same substance!’

      Master Juwain regarded the glimmering tones that composed Alphanderry’s being. He said, ‘Similar, perhaps, but certainly not the same.’

      I waved my hand at such useless speculations, and I called out to Alphanderry, ‘But why did you never tell me of this thing?’

      The look on his face was that of a boy stealing back to his room after dark. He said to me simply, ‘I didn’t want to worry you, Val.’

      ‘Oh, excellent, excellent!’ Maram muttered, shaking his head. ‘Well, I am worried enough for all of us, now. What I wonder is why that filthy Ahrim, whatever it is, attacked us here? And more important, what will keep it away?’

      But none of us, not even Alphanderry, had an answer to these questions. As it was growing late, it seemed the best thing we could do would be to leave these strange woods behind us as soon as possible.

      ‘Come,’ I said, clapping Maram on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go get some of that roast beef and beer you’ve been wanting for so long.’

      After that, I pulled myself up onto Altaru’s back, and my friends mounted their horses, too. I pointed the way toward Lord Harsha’s farm with all the command and assurance that I could summon. But as we rode off through the shadowed trees, I felt the dark thing called the Ahrim still watching me and still waiting, and I knew with heaviness in my heart that it would be no easy task for me to become king.

       2

      We came out of the woods with the late sun touching the farmland of the Valley of the Swans with an emerald blaze. To the west, the three great mountains, Telshar, Arakel and Vayu, rose up as they always had with their white-capped peaks pointing into the sky. Lord Harsha’s large stone house stood framed against the sacred Telshar: a bit of carved and mortared granite almost lost against the glorious work of stone that the Ieldra had sung into creation at the beginning of time. We caught Lord Harsha out weeding his wheatfield to the east of his house. When he heard the noise of our horses trampling through the bracken, he straightened up and shook his hoe at us as he peered at us with his single eye. He called out to us: ‘Who is it who rides out of the wildwood like outlaws at this time of day? Announce yourselves, or I’ll have to go and get my sword!’

      Lord Harsha, I thought, would prove a formidable opponent against outlaws – or anyone else – with only his iron-bladed hoe to wield as a weapon. Despite a crippled leg and his numerous years, his thick body retained a bullish power. And even though he wore only a plain woolen tunic, he bore on his finger a silver ring showing the four brilliant diamonds of a Valari lord. A black eyepatch covered part of his face; twelve battle ribbons had been tied to his long, white hair, and in all of Mesh, there were few warriors of greater renown.

      ‘Outlaws, is it?’ I called back to him. ‘Have our journeys really left us looking so mean?’

      So saying, I threw back the hood of my cloak and rode forward a few more paces. I came to the low wall edging Lord Harsha’s field. Once, I remembered, I had sat there with Maram, my brother Asaru and his squire, Joshu Kadar, as we had spoken with Lord Harsha about fighting the Red Dragon and ending war – and other impossible things.

      ‘Who is it?’ Lord Harsha called out again. His single eye squinted as the sun’s slanting rays burned across my face. ‘Announce yourself, I say!’

      ‘I am’ I called back to him, ‘the seventh son of Shavashar Elahad, whose father was King Elkamesh, who named me –’

      ‘Valashu Elahad!’ Lord Harsha shouted. ‘It can’t be! But surely it must be, even though I don’t know how!’

      I dismounted and climbed over the wall. Lord Harsha came limping up to me, and he embraced me, pounding my back with his hard, blunt hands. Then he pulled back to fix me with his single, bright eye.

      ‘It is you,’ he said, ‘but you look different, forgive me. Older, of course, but not so much on the outside as within. And something else. Something has lit a fire in you, like that star you were named for. At last. When you skulked out of Mesh last year, you did seem half an outlaw. But now you stand here like a king.’

      I bowed my head to him, and he returned this grace, inclining his head an inch lower than mine. And he said to me, ‘You have his look, you know.’

      ‘Whose look?’ I asked him.

      ‘King СКАЧАТЬ