The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One. David Zindell
was watching me. It was as if the stones themselves all about us had eyes. It consoled me not at all that my countrymen here in the north called Raaskel and Korukel the Watchers.
For a half a mile we walked our horses down to the kel keep at the center of the valley. Maram wondered why the makers of the fortress hadn’t built it flush with the Gate, as of a wall of stone defending it. I explained to him that it was better sited where it was: on top of a series of springs that could keep the garrison well watered for years. It had never been the purpose of the keeps, I told him, to stop invading armies in the passes. They were intended only to delay the enemy as long as it took for the Meshian king to gather up an army of his own and destroy them in the open field.
We stopped at the keep to pay our respects to Lord Avijan, the garrison’s commander. Lord Avijan, a serious man with a long, windburnt face, was Asaru’s friend and not much older than I. He had been present at the feast, and he congratulated me on my knighthood. After seeing that we were well fed with pork and potatoes brought up from Ki, he told me that Salmelu and the Ishkans had gone up into the pass early that morning.
‘They were riding hard for Ishka,’ Lord Avijan told me. ‘As you had better do if you don’t want to be caught in the pass at nightfall.’
After I had thanked him and he wished me well on my quest, we took his advice. We continued along the North Road where it snaked up the steeply rising slopes of the valley. About two miles from the keep, as we approached the Telemesh Gate, it grew suddenly colder. The air was thick with a moisture that wasn’t quite rain nor mist nor snow. But there was still snow aplenty blanketing the ground. Here, in this bleak mountain tundra where trees wouldn’t grow, the mosses and low shrubs in many places were still covered in snow. Against boulders as large as a house were gathered massive white drifts, a few of which blocked the road. If Lord Avijan hadn’t sent out his warriors to cut a narrow corridor through them, the road would still have been impassable.
‘It’s cold,’ Maram complained as his gelding drove his hooves against the road’s wet stone. ‘Perhaps we should return to the keep and wait for better weather.’
‘No,’ I said, laying my hand on Altaru’s neck. Despite the cold, the hard work in the thin air had made him start sweating. ‘Let’s go on – it will be better on the other side of the pass.’
‘Are you sure?’
I looked off through the gray air at the Telemesh Gate now only a hundred yards farther up the road. It was a dark cut through a wall of rock, an ice-glazed opening into the unknown.
‘Yes, it will be better,’ I reassured him, if not myself. ‘Come on.’
I touched Altaru’s flanks to urge him forward, but he nickered nervously and didn’t move. As Master Juwain came up to join us, the big horse just stood there with his large nostrils opening and closing against the freezing wind.
‘What is it, Val?’ Master Juwain asked me.
I shrugged my shoulders as I scanned the boulders and snowfields all about us. The tundra seemed as barren as it was cold. Not even a marmot or a ptarmigan moved to break the bleakness of the pass.
‘Do you think it could be a bear?’ Maram asked, looking about, too. ‘Maybe he smells a bear.’
‘No, it’s too early for bears to be up this high,’ I told him.
In another month, the snow would be gone, and the slopes around us would teem with wildflowers and berries. But now there seemed little that was alive save for the orange and green patches of lichen that covered the cold stones.
Again, I nudged Altaru forward, and this time he whinnied and shook his head angrily at the opening to the Telemesh Gate. He began pawing at the road with his iron-shod hoof, and the harsh sound of it rang out into the mist-choked air.
‘Altaru, Altaru,’ I whispered to him, ‘what’s the matter?’
There was something, I thought, that he didn’t like about this cut between the mountains. There was something I didn’t like myself. I felt a sudden, deep wrongness entering my bones as from the ground beneath us. It was as if Telemesh, the great king, the grandfather of my grandfathers, in burning off the tissues of the mountain with his firestone, had wounded the land in a way that could never be healed. And now, out of this open wound of fused dirt and blackened rock, it seemed that the earth itself was still screaming in agony. What man or beast, I wondered, would ever be drawn to such a place? Well, perhaps the vultures who batten on the blood of the suffering and dying would feel at home here. And the great Beast who was called the Red Dragon – surely he would find a twisted pleasure in the world’s pain.
He came for me then out of the dark mouth of the fire-scarred Gate. He was, even as Maram feared, a bear. And not merely a Meshian brown bear but one of the rare and very bad-tempered white bears of Ishka. I guessed that he must have wandered through the Gate into Mesh. And now he seemed to guard it, standing up on his stumpy hind legs to a height of ten feet as he sniffed the air and looked straight toward me.
‘Oh, Lord!’ Maram called out as he tried to steady his horse. ‘Oh, Lord, oh, Lord!’
Now Altaru, seeing the bear at last, began snorting and stomping at the road. I tried to steady him as I said to Maram, ‘Don’t worry, the bear won’t bother us if –’
‘– if we don’t bother him,’ he finished. ‘Well, I hope you’re right, my friend.’
But it seemed that I couldn’t leave the bear alone after all. The wind carried down from the mountain, and I smelled his rank scent which fairly reeked with an illness that I couldn’t identify. I couldn’t help staring at his small, questing eyes as my hand moved almost involuntarily to the hilt of my sword. And all the while, he kept sniffing at me with his wet black nose; I had the strange sense that even though he couldn’t catch my scent, he could smell the kirax in my blood.
And then suddenly, without warning, he fell down onto all fours and charged us.
‘Oh, Lord!’ Maram cried out again. ‘He’s coming – run for your life!’
True to his instincts, he wheeled his horse about and began galloping down the road. I might have done the same if Altaru hadn’t reared just then, throwing back his head and flashing his hooves in challenge at the bear. This move, which I should have anticipated, caught me off guard. For at that moment, as Altaru rose up with a mighty surge of bunching muscles, I was reaching toward my pack horse for my bow and arrows. I was badly unbalanced, and went flying out of my saddle. Tanar, my screaming pack horse, almost trampled me in his panic to get away from the charging bear. If I hadn’t rolled behind Altaru, his wildly flailing hooves would surely have brained me.
‘Val!’ Master Juwain called to me, ‘get up and draw your sword!’
It is astonishing how quickly a bear can cover a hundred yards, particularly when running downhill. I didn’t have time to draw my sword. Even as Master Juwain tried to get control of his own bucking horse and the two pack horses tied behind him, the bear bounded down the snowy slope straight toward us. Tanar, caught between them and the growling bear, screamed in terror, all the while trying to get out of the way. And then the bear closed with him, and I thought for a moment that he might tear open his throat or break his back with a blow from one of his mighty paws. But it seemed that this stout horse was not intended to be the bear’s prey. The bear only rammed him with his shoulder, knocking him aside in his fury to get at me.
‘Val!’ I heard Maram calling me as from far away. ‘Run, now – oh, Lord, oh, Lord!’
The bear would certainly have fallen upon me then if not for Altaru’s courage. As I struggled to stand and regain my breath, the great horse reared again and struck a glancing blow off the bear’s head. His sharp hoof cut open the bear’s eye, which filled with blood. The stunned bear screamed in outrage and swiped at Altaru with his long black claws. He grunted and brayed and shook his sloping white head at me. I smelled his musty white fur and felt the growls rumbling up from deep in his throat. His good eye fixed on mine like a hook; he opened his jaws to rip me open with his long white