The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two. David Zindell

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СКАЧАТЬ your own counsel, and I approve of that. But I must ask your trust in three things in order that you might have mine. First: If you find here anything of note or worth, you will bring it to me. Second: You will take great care not to harm any of the books, many of which are ancient and all too easy to harm. Third: You will remove nothing from the Library without my permission.’

      I touched the medallion hanging from my neck and told him, ‘When a knight takes refuge in a lord’s castle, he doesn’t dispute his rules. But you must know that we’ve come to claim the Lightstone and take it away to other lands.’

      The Lord Librarian bristled at this. His bushy eyebrows pulled together as his hand found the hilt of his sword. ‘Does a knight in your land then enter his lord’s castle to claim his lord’s most precious possession?’

      ‘The Lightstone,’ I told him, remembering my vows, ‘is no one’s possession. And we seek it not for ourselves but for all Ea.’

      ‘A noble quest,’ he sighed, relaxing his hand from his sword. ‘But if you found the Cup of Heaven here, don’t you think it should remain here where it can best be guarded?’

      I managed to climb out of bed and walk over to the window. There, below me, I could see the many houses of Khaisham, with their square stone chimneys and brightly painted shutters. Beyond the city streets was Khaisham’s outer wall, and beyond it, spread out over the green pastures to the south of the city, the thousands of tents of Count Ulanu’s army.

      ‘Forgive me, Lord Librarian,’ I said, ‘but you might find it difficult guarding even your own people’s lives now.’

      Lord Grayam’s face fell sad and grave, and lines of worry furrowed his brow as he looked out the window with me.

      ‘What you say is true,’ he admitted. ‘But it is also true that you won’t find the Lightstone here. The Library has been searched through every nook and cranny for it for most of three thousand years. And so here we stand, arguing over nothing at a time when there’s much else to do.’

      ‘If we’re arguing over nothing,’ I said, ‘then surely you won’t mind if we begin our search?’

      ‘So long as you abide by my rules.’

      If we abided by his rules, as I pointed out to him, we would have to bring the Lightstone to him should we be so fortunate as to find it.

      ‘That’s true,’ he said.

      ‘Then it would seem that we’re at an impasse.’ I looked at Master Juwain and asked, ‘Who has the wisdom to see our way through it?’

      Master Juwain stepped forward, gripping his book, which Lord Grayam eyed admiringly. Master Juwain said, ‘It may be that if we gain the Lightstone, we’ll also gain the wisdom to know what should be done with it.’

      ‘Very well then, let that be the way of it,’ Lord Grayam said. ‘I won’t say yea or nay to your taking it from here until I’ve held it in my hands and you in yours. Do we understand each other?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said, speaking for the others, ‘we do.’

      ‘Excellent. Then I wish you well. Now please forgive me while I excuse myself. I’ve the city’s defenses to look to.’

      So saying, the Lord Librarian bowed to us and strode from the room.

      I counted exactly three beats of my heart before Maram opened his mouth and said, ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’

      I drew my sword again and watched the light play about its gleaming contours.

      ‘You must follow where your sword leads you,’ Master Juwain told me, clapping me on the shoulder. Then he picked up a large book bound in red leather. ‘But I’m afraid I must follow where this leads me.’

      He told us that he was off to the Library’s stacks to look for a book by a Master Malachi.

      ‘But, sir,’ Maram said to him, ‘if we find the Lightstone in your absence –’

      ‘Then I shall be very happy,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘Now why don’t we meet by the statue of King Eluli in the great hall at midday, if we don’t meet wandering around the other halls first? This place is vast, and it wouldn’t do to lose each other in it.’

      Liljana, too, admitted that she wished to make her own researches among the Library’s millions of books. And so she followed Master Juwain out the door, each of them to go separate ways, and leaving Maram, Kane, Atara and me behind.

      The infirmary, as I soon found, was a rather little room off a side wing connected by a large hall to an off-wing leading to the Library’s immense south wing. Upon making passage into this cavernous space, I realized that it would be easy to become lost in the Library, not because there was anything mazelike about it, but simply because it was huge. In truth, the whole of this building had been laid out according to the four points of the world with a precise and sacred geometry. Everything about its construction, from the distances between the pillars holding up the roof to the great marble walls themselves, seemed to be that of cubes and squares. And of a special kind of rectangle, which, if the square part of it was removed, the remaining smaller rectangle retained the exact proportions of its parent. What these measures had to do with books puzzled me. Kane believed that the golden rectangle, as he called it, symbolized man himself: no matter what parts were taken away, a sacred spark in the image of the whole being always remained. And as with man, even more so with books. As any of the Librarians would attest, every part of a book, from its ridged spine to the last letter upon the last page, was sacred.

      There were certainly many books. The south wing was divided into many sections, each filled with long islands of stacks of books reaching up nearly three hundred feet high toward the stone ceiling with its great, rectangular skylights. Each island was like a mighty tower of stone, wood, leather, paper and cloth; stairs at either end of an island led to the walkways circling them at their different levels. Thirty levels I counted to each island; it would take a long time, I thought, to climb to the top of one should a desired volume be shelved there. Passing from the heights of one island to another would have taken even longer but for the graceful stone bridges connecting them at various levels. The bridges, along with the islands stacked with their books, formed an immense and intricate latticework that seemed to interconnect the recordings of all possible knowledge.

      As I walked with my friends down the long and seemingly endless aisles, I breathed in the scents of mildew and dust and old secrets. Many of the books, I saw, had been written in Ardik or ancient Ardik; quite a few told their tales in languages now long dead. By chance, it seemed, we passed by shelves of many large volumes of genealogies. Half a hundred of these were given over to the lineages of the Valari. Because my curiosity at that moment burned even brighter than my sword, I couldn’t help opening one of them that traced the ancestry of Telemesh back son to father, generation to generation, to the great Aramesh. This gave evidence to the claim that the Meshian line of kings might truly extend back all the way to Elahad himself. My discovery filled me with pride. It renewed my determination to find the golden cup that the greatest of all my ancestors had brought to earth so long ago.

      Alkaladur’s faintly gleaming blade seemed to point us into an adjoining hall that was almost large enough to hold King Kiritan’s entire palace. Here were collected all the Library’s books pertaining to the Lightstone. There must have been a million of them. It seemed impossible that each of them had been searched for any mention of where Sartan Odinan might have hidden the golden cup after he had liberated it СКАЧАТЬ