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

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СКАЧАТЬ them. While Kalkamesh turned to fight them, he said, he grabbed the Cup of Heaven and fled back through the Red Dragon’s throne room whence they had come. For this man, who claimed to have once been a High Priest of the Kallimun, had again fallen and was now moved with a sudden lust to keep the Cup for himself.

      And now he reached the most incredible part of his story. He claimed that upon touching the Cup of Heaven, it had flared a brilliant golden white and burned his hands. And that it had then turned invisible. He said that he had then set it down in the throne room, glad to be rid of it – this hellishly beautiful thing, as he called it. After that, he had fled Argattha, abandoning Kalkamesh to his fate. The story that he told me was that he made his way into the Red Desert and across the Crescent Mountains and so came here to our sanctuary.

      It is difficult to believe his story, or almost any part of it. The myth of an immortal man named Kalkamesh is just that; only the Elijin and Galadin have attained to the deathlessness of the One. Also, it would be impossible for anyone to enter Argattha as he told, for it is guarded by dragons. And nowhere is it recorded that the Cup of Heaven has the power to turn invisible.

      And yet there are those strange burns on his hands to account for. I believe this part of his story, if no other: that his lust for the Lightstone burned him, body and soul, and drove him mad. Perhaps he did somehow manage to cross the Red Desert. Perhaps he saw the image of the Lightstone in some blazing rock or heated iron and tried to hold onto it. If so, it has seared his soul far beyond my power to heal him.

      I am old now, and my heart has grown weak; my varistei has no power to keep me from the journey that all must make – and that I will certainly make soon, perhaps next month, perhaps tomorrow, following my doomed patient toward the stars. But before I go, I wish to record here a warning to myself, which this poor, wretched man has unknowingly brought me: the very great danger of coveting that which no man was meant to possess. Soon enough I’ll return to the One, and there will be light far beyond that which is held by any cup or stone.

      Master Juwain finished reading and closed his book. The silence in that room of ancient artifacts was nearly total. Flick was spinning about slowly near the False Gelstei, and it seemed the whole world was spinning, too. Atara stared at the wall as if its smooth marble was as invisible as Master Aluino’s patient had claimed the Lightstone to be. Kane’s eyes blazed with frustration and hate, and I couldn’t bear to look at him. I turned to see Maram nervously pulling at his beard and Liljana smiling ironically as if to hide a great fear.

      And then, as from far away, through that little room’s smells of dust and defeat, came a faint braying of horns and booming of war drums: Doom, Doom, Doom. I felt my heart beating out the same dread rhythm, again and again.

      Maram was the first to break the quiet. He pointed at the journal in Master Juwain’s hands and said, ‘The story that madman told can’t be true, can it?’

      Yes, I thought, as I listened to my heart and the pulsing of the world, it is true.

      ‘Ah, no, no,’ Maram muttered, ‘this is too, too bad, to think that the Lightstone was left in Argattha.’

      DOOM! DOOM! DOOM!

      I looked at the False Gelstei sitting on its stand. I gripped the hilt of my sword as Maram said, ‘Then the quest is over. There is no hope.’

      I looked from him to Master Juwain and Liljana, and then at Atara and Kane. No hope could I see on any of their faces; there was nothing in their hearts except the beat of despair.

      We stood there for a long time, waiting for what we knew not. Atara seemed lost within some secret terror. Even Master Juwain’s pride at his discovery had given way to the meaning of it and a deepening gloom.

      And then footfalls sounded in the adjoining chamber. A few moments later, a young Librarian about twelve years old came into the room and said, ‘Sar Valashu, Lord Grayam bids you and your companions to take shelter in the keep. Or to join him on the walls, as is your wish.’

      Then he told us that the attack of Count Ulanu’s armies had begun.

       5

      We retreated through the Library’s halls and chambers to the infirmary, where I retrieved my helmet and Atara her bow and arrows. There we said goodbye to Master Juwain and Liljana. Master Juwain would be helping the other healers who would tend the Librarians’ inevitable battle wounds, and Liljana decided that she could best serve the city by assisting him. I tried not to look at the saws, clamps and other gleaming steel instruments that the healers set out as I embraced Master Juwain. He told me, and all of us, ‘Please don’t let me see that any of you have returned to this room until the battle is won.’

      The young page who had found us earlier escorted Kane, Maram, Atara and me out of the Library and through the gates of the inner wall. He led the way through the narrow city streets, which were crowded with anxious people hurrying this way and that. Many were women clutching screaming babies, with yet more children in tow, on their way to take refuge in the Library’s keep or grounds behind its inner wall. But quite a few were Librarians dressed as Kane and I were in mail, and bearing maces, crossbows and swords. Still more were Khaisham’s potters, tanners, carpenters, papermakers, masons, smiths and other tradesmen. They were only poorly accoutered and armed, some bearing nothing more in the way of weaponry than a spear or a heavy shovel. At need, they would take their places along the walls with the Librarians – and us. But they would also keep the fighting men supplied with food, water, arrows and anything else necessary to withstanding a siege.

      The flow of these hundreds of men, with their carts and braying donkeys, swept us down across the city to its west wall. This was Khaisham’s longest and most vulnerable, and there atop a square mural tower near its center stood the Lord Librarian. He was resplendent in his polished mail and the green surcoat displaying the golden book over his heart. Other knights and archers were with him on the tower’s ledge, behind the narrow stone merlons of the battlements that protected them from the enemy’s arrows and missiles. We followed the page up a flight of steps until we stood at the top of the wall behind the slightly larger merlons there. And then we walked up another flight of steps, adjoining and turning around and up into the tower itself.

      ‘I knew you would come,’ the Lord Librarian said to us as we crowded onto the tower’s ledge.

      ‘Yes,’ a nearby Librarian with a long, drooping mustache said, ‘but will they stay?’

      He turned to look down and out across the pasture in front of the wall, and there was a sight that would have sent even brave men fleeing. Three hundred yards from us, across the bright green grass that would soon be stained red, Count Ulanu had his armies drawn up in a long line facing the wall. Their steel-jacketed shields, spears and armor formed a wall of its own as thousands of his men stood shoulder to shoulder slowly advancing upon us. To our left, half a mile away where Khaisham’s walls turned back toward Mount Redruth, I saw yet more lines of men marching across the pasture to the south of the city. And to the right, in the fields across the Tearam, stood companies of Count Ulanu’s cavalry and other warriors. These men, blocked by the river’s rushing waters, would make no assault upon the walls, but they would wait with their lances and swords held ready should any of Khaisham’s citizens try to flee across it. Behind us to the east of the city, Lord Grayam said, between the east wall and Mount Redruth on ground too rough for siege towers or assaults, yet more of the enemy waited to cut off the escape of anyone trying to break out in that direction.

      ‘We’re surrounded,’ Lord Grayam told us. СКАЧАТЬ