The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One. David Zindell
jaws onto my shoulder with a crushing force. He snarled and shook his head furiously and tried to pulp me with his deadly paws. And then Maram closed with him. Unbelievably, he had managed to wheel his horse about yet again and urge him forward in a desperate charge at the bear. He had his lance drawn and couched beneath his arm like a knight. But although trained in arms, he was no knight; the point of the lance caught the bear in the shoulder instead of the throat, and the shock of steel and metal pushing into hard flesh unseated Maram and propelled him from his horse. He hit the ground with an ugly slap and whooshing of breath. But for the moment, at least, he had succeeded in fighting the bear off of me.
‘Val,’ Maram croaked out from the blood-spattered road, ‘help me!’
The bear snarled at Maram and moved to rend him with his claws in his determination to get at me. And in that moment, I finally slid my sword free. The long kalama flashed in the uneven light. I swung it with all my might at the bear’s exposed neck. The kalama’s razor edge, hardened in the forges of Godhra, bit through fur, muscle and bone. I gasped to feel the bear’s bright lifeblood spraying out into the air as his great head went rolling down the road into a drift of snow. I fell to the road in the agony of death, and I hardly noticed the bear’s body falling like an avalanche on top of Maram.
‘Val – get this thing off me!’ I heard Maram call out weakly from beneath the mound of fur.
But as always when I had killed an animal, it took me many moments to return to myself. I slowly stood up and rubbed my throbbing shoulder. If not for my armor and the padding beneath it, I thought, the bear would surely have torn off my arm. Master Juwain, having collected and hobbled the frightened horses, came over then and helped me pull Maram free from the bear. He stood there in the driving sleet checking us for wounds.
‘Oh, my Lord, I’m killed!’ Maram called out when he saw the blood drenching his tunic. But it proved only to be the bear’s blood. In truth, he had suffered nothing worse than having the wind knocked out of him.
‘I think you’ll be all right,’ Master Juwain said as he ran his gnarly hands over him.
‘I will? But what about Val? The bear had half his body in his mouth!’
He turned to ask me how I was. I told him, ‘It hurts. But it seems that nothing is broken.’
Maram looked at me with accusation in his still-frightened eyes. ’You told me that the bear would leave us alone. Well, ‘he didn’t, did he?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t.’
Strange, I thought, that a bear should fall upon three men and six horses with such ferocious and single-minded purpose. I had never heard of a bear, not even a ravenous one, attacking so boldly.
Master Juwain stepped over to the side of the road and examined the bear’s massive head. He looked at his glassy, dark eye and pulled open his jaws to gaze at his teeth.
‘It’s possible that he was maddened with rabies,’ he said. ‘But he doesn’t have the look.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ I agreed, examining him as well.
‘What made him attack us then?’ Maram demanded.
Master Juwain’s face fell gray as if he had eaten bad meat. He said, ‘If the bear were a man, I would say his actions were those of a ghul.’
I stared at the bear, and it suddenly came to me that the illness I had sensed in him had been not of the body but the mind.
‘A ghul!’ Maram cried out. ‘Are you saying that Mor … ah, that the Lord of Lies had seized his will? I’ve never heard of an animal ghul.’
No one had. With the wind working at the sweat beneath my armor, a deep shiver ran through me. I wondered if Morjin – or anyone except the Dark One himself, Angra Mainyu – could have gained that much power.
As if in answer to my question, Master Juwain sighed and said, ‘It seems that his skill, if we can call it that, is growing.’
‘Well,’ Maram said, looking about nervously, ‘if he can send one bear to kill Val, he can send another. Or a wolf, or a –’
‘No, I think not,’ Master Juwain interrupted. ‘For a man or a woman to be made a ghul is a rare thing. There must be an opening, through despair or hate, into the darkness. And a certain sympathy of the minds. I would think that an animal ghul, if possible at all, would be even rarer.’
‘But you don’t really know, do you?’ Maram pressed him.
‘No, I don’t,’ Master Juwain said. He suddenly shivered, too, and pulled his cloak more tightly about him. ‘But I do know that we should get down from this pass before it grows dark.’
‘Yes, we should,’ I agreed. With some handfuls of snow, I began cleaning the blood off me, and watched Maram do the same. After retying Tanar to Altaru, I mounted my black stallion and turned him up the road.
‘You’re not thinking of going on?’ Maram asked me. ‘Shouldn’t we return to the keep?’
I pointed at the opening of the Gate. ‘Tria lies that way.’
Maram looked down at the kel keep and the road that led back to the Valley of the Swans. He must have remembered that Lord Harsha was waiting for him there; it occurred to me that he had finally witnessed at first hand the kind of work that a kalama could accomplish, for he rubbed his curly beard worriedly and muttered, ‘No, we can’t go back, can we?’
He mounted his trembling sorrel, as did Master Juwain his. I smiled at Maram and bowed my head to him. ‘Thank you for saving my life,’ I told him.
‘I did save your life, didn’t I?’ he said. He smiled back at me as if I had personally knighted him in front of a thousand nobles. ‘Well, allow me to save it again. Who really wants to go to Tria, anyway? Perhaps it’s time I returned to Delu. We could all go there. You’d be welcomed at my father’s court and –’
‘No,’ I told him. Thank you for such a gracious offer, but my journey lies in another direction. Will you come with me?’
Maram sat on his horse as he looked back and forth between the headless bear and me. He blinked his eyes against the stinging sleet. He licked his lips, then finally said, ‘Will I come with you? Haven’t I said I would? Aren’t you my best friend? Of course I’m coming with you!’
And with that he clasped my arm, and I clasped his. As if Altaru and I were of one will, we started moving up the road together. Maram and Master Juwain followed close behind me. I regretted leaving the bear unburied in a shallow pond of blood, but there was nothing else to do. Tomorrow, perhaps, one of Lord Avijan’s patrols would find him and dispose of him. And so we rode our horses into the dark mouth of the Telemesh Gate and steeled ourselves to go down into Ishka.
Our passage through the Gate proved uneventful and quiet save for Maram’s constant exclamations of delight. For, as he discovered, the walls of rock on both sides of us sparkled with diamonds. The fire of Telemesh’s red gelstei, in melting this corridor through the mountain, had exposed many veins of these glittering white crystals. In honor of his great feat, the proud Telemesh had ordered that they never be cut, and they never had. I thought that the beauty of the diamonds somewhat made up for this long wound in the earth. But many visitors to Mesh – the Ishkans foremost among them – complained of such ostentatious displays of my kingdom’s wealth. King Hadaru had often accused my father of mocking him thusly. But my father turned a stony face to his plaints; he would say only that he intended to respect Telemesh’s law even as he would the Law of the One.
‘But can’t we take just one stone?’ Maram asked when we were almost through the Gate. ‘We could sell it for a fortune in Tria.’
Maram, I thought, didn’t