The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One. David Zindell

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СКАЧАТЬ fear that a ghul might be waiting in the great hall to take meat with us that very night.

      To steady my racing heart, I stepped over to the window to get a breath of fresh air. As a child, I had heard rumors of ghuls, as of werewolves or the dreaded Gray Men who come at night to suck out your soul. But I had never really believed them.

      ‘But why,’ I asked Master Juwain, ‘would the Lord of Lies send an assassin – or anyone else – to kill me with poison?’

      He looked at me strangely, and asked, ‘Are you sure the first assassin was shooting at you and not Asaru?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘But how could you be sure? Didn’t Asaru say that he felt the arrow pass through his hair?’

      Master Juwain’s clear, gray eyes fell upon me with the weight of twin moons. How could I tell him about my gift of sensing what lay inside another’s heart? How could I tell him that I had felt the assassin’s intention to murder me as surely as I did the cold wind pouring through the window?

      ‘There was the angle of the shot,’ I tried to explain. There was something in the assassin’s eyes.’

      ‘You could see his eyes from a hundred yards away?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. And then, ‘No, that is, it wasn’t really like seeing. But there was something about the way he looked at me. The concentration.’

      Master Juwain was silent as he stared at me from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows. Then he said, ‘I think there’s something about you, Valashu Elahad. There was something about your grandfather, too.’

      In silence I reached out to close the cold pane of glass against the night.

      ‘I believe,’ Master Juwain continued, ‘that this something might have something to do with why the Lord of Lies is hunting you. If we understood it better, it might provide us with the crucial clue.’

      I looked at Master Juwain then and I wanted him to help me understand how I could feel the fire of another’s passions or the unbearable pressure of their longing for the peace of the One. But some things can never be understood. How could one feel the cold light of the stars on a perfect winter night? How could one feel the wind?

      ‘The Lord of Lies couldn’t know of me,’ I said at last. ‘He’d have no reason to hunt the seventh son of a faraway mountain king.’

      ‘No reason? Wasn’t it your ancestor, Aramesh, who took the Lightstone from him at the Battle of Sarburn?’

      ‘Aramesh,’ I said, ‘is the ancestor of many Valari. The Lord of Lies can’t hunt us all.’

      ‘No? Can he not?’ Master Juwain’s eyebrows suddenly pulled down in anger. ‘I’m afraid he would hunt any and all who oppose him.’

      For a moment I stood there rubbing the scar on my forehead. Oppose Morjin? I wanted the Valari to stop fighting among ourselves and unite under one banner so that we wouldn’t have to oppose him. Shouldn’t that, I wondered, be enough?

      ‘But I don’t oppose him,’ I said.

      ‘No, you’re too gentle of soul for that,’ Master Juwain told me. There was doubt in his voice, and irony as well. ‘But you needn’t take up arms to be in opposition to the Red Dragon. You oppose him merely in your intelligence and love of freedom. And by seeking all that is beautiful, good and true.’

      I looked down at the carpet and bit my lip against the tightness in my throat. It was the Brothers who sought those things, not I.

      As if Master Juwain could read my thoughts, he caught my eyes and said, ‘You have a gift, Val. What kind of gift, I’m not yet sure. But you could have been a Meditation Master or Music Master. Or possibly even a Master Healer.’

      ‘Do you really think so, sir?’ I asked, looking at him.

      ‘You know I do,’ he said in a voice heavy with accusation. ‘But in the end, you quit.’

      Because I couldn’t bear the hurt in his eyes, I turned to stare at the fire, which seemed scarcely less angry and inflamed. Of all my brothers, I had been the only one to attend the Brotherhood school past the age of sixteen. I had wanted to study music, poetry, languages and meditation. With great reluctance my father had agreed to this, so long as I didn’t neglect the art of the sword. And so for two happy years, I had wandered the cloisters and gardens of the Brotherhood’s great sanctuary ten miles up the valley from Silvassu; there I had memorized poems and played my flute and sneaked off into the ash grove to practice fencing with Maram. Though it had never occurred to my father that I might actually want to take vows and join the Brotherhood, for a long time I had nursed just such an ambition.

      ‘It wasn’t my choice,’ I finally said.

      ‘Not your choice?’ Master Juwain huffed out. ‘Everything we do, we choose. And you chose to quit.’

      ‘But the Waashians were killing my friends!’ I protested. ‘Raising spears against my brothers! The king called me to war, and I had to go.’

      ‘And what have all your wars ever changed?’

      ‘Please do not call them my wars, sir. Nothing would make me happier than to see war ended forever.’

      ‘No?’ he said, pointing at the dagger that I wore on my belt. ‘Is that why you bear arms wherever you go? Is that why you answered your father’s call to battle?’

      ‘But, sir,’ I said, smiling as I thought of the words from one of his favorite books, ‘isn’t all life a battle?’

      ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a battle of the heart and soul.’

      ‘Navsa Adami,’ I said, ‘believed in fighting with other weapons.’

      At the mention of the name of the man who had founded the first Brotherhood, Master Juwain grimaced as if he had been forced to drink vinegar. Perhaps I shouldn’t have touched upon the old wound between the Brotherhoods and the Valari. But I had read the history of the Brotherhoods in books collected in their own libraries. In Tria, the Eternal City, in the 2,177th year of the Age of the Mother, which ever after would be called the Dark Year, Navsa Adami had been among those who suffered the first invasion of the Aryans. The sack of Tria had been terrible and swift, for in that most peaceful of ages, the Alonians possessed hoes and spades for digging in their gardens but no true weapons. Navsa Adami had been bound in chains and forced to watch the violation and murder of his own wife on the steps of the Temple of Life. The Aryan warlord had then razed the great Temple and destroyed the Garden of the Earth as the slaughter began. And Navsa Adami, along with fifty priests, had escaped and fled into the Morning Mountains, vowing revenge.

      This exile became known as the First Breaking of the Order. For the Order had been founded to use the green gelstei crystals to awaken the lands of Ea to a greater life whereas Navsa Adami now wished to bring about the Aryans’ death. And so, in the mountains of Mesh, he founded the Great White Brotherhood to fight the Aryans by any means the Brothers could find. With him he brought a green gelstei meant to be used for healing and furthering the life forces; Navsa Adami, however, had planned to use it to breed a race of warriors to fight the Aryans and overthrow their reign of terror. But he found in Mesh men who were already warriors; it became his hope to unite the Valari and train СКАЧАТЬ