The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two. David Zindell
him, holding our cloaks over our noses against the awful smell. I forced myself to look up at these husks of once-proud men, which iron nails and the iron-hard beaks of the vultures had reduced so pitifully. To Kane, I said, ‘You didn’t tell us that the Blues learned the defilements of the Crucifier.’
‘I never heard that they did,’ he said, looking at the crosses. ‘This may be the work of some lord who has gone over to the Kallimun.’
‘What lord?’ Liljana asked, nudging her horse closer to Kane. ‘Rinald said that the lords of Virad looked to Khaisham for leadership.’
‘So, it seems that some of them may look to Aigul.’
I dismounted Altaru and walked over to the center cross. I reached out and touched the foot of the man who had been nailed to it. His flesh was soft, swollen and hot – as hot as the burning air itself.
‘We should bury these men,’ I said.
Kane stuck his sword down into the rock-hard earth. ‘We should bury them, Val. But it would take us a day of digging, eh? Whoever put them here may come back and find us.’
Maram, whose hand was trembling as he held his cloak tightly covering his face, said, ‘Come, please, let’s go before it’s too late!’
And then Kane, always a man of oppositions, snarled out, ‘He’s right, we should go. Let’s leave these birds their meal. Even vultures must eat.’
And so, after saying a prayer for the three men who had ended their lives in this desolate place, we mounted our horses and resumed our journey. But as we rode over the hot, tormented earth, Alphanderry wet his throat with a little blood from his cracked lips and gave us a song to hearten us. He made a hauntingly beautiful music in remembrance of the dead men, singing their souls up to the stars behind the deep blue sky. Despite the terrible thing we had just seen, his words were in praise of life:
Sing ye songs of glory,Sing ye songs of glory,That the light of the OneWill shine upon the world.
‘Too loud,’ Kane muttered as he scanned the low hills about us.
But Alphanderry, perhaps concentrating on an image of the Lightstone that lay somewhere before us, raised up his voice even louder. He sang strongly and bravely, with a reckless abandon, and his voice filled the countryside. Even the grasses, I thought, sere and stunted here, would want to weep at the sound of it.
‘Too damn loud, I say!’ Kane barked out, flashing an angry look at Alphanderry. ‘Do you want to announce us to the whole world?’
Alphanderry, however, seemed drunk on the beauty of his own singing. He ignored Kane. After a while, strange and wonderful words began pouring from his lips in a torrent that seemed impossible to stop.
‘Damn you, Alphanderry, come to your senses, will you?’
As Kane glowered at Alphanderry, he finally fell quiet. The look on his face was that of a scolded puppy. To Kane, he said, ‘I’m sorry, but I was so close. So very close to finding the words of the angels.’
‘If the crucifiers come upon us here,’ Kane said, ‘not even the angels will be able to help us.’
Even as he said this, Atara pointed at a far-off hill. I looked there and thought I saw a hazy figure vanish behind it.
‘What is it?’ Kane asked, squinting.
Atara, who had the best eyes of any of us, said, ‘It was a man – he seemed dressed in blue.’
At this news, Maram sat swallowing against the fear in his throat as if he could so easily make it go away.
‘I’m sorry,’ Alphanderry said again. ‘But maybe the blue man didn’t see us.’
‘Foolish minstrel,’ Kane said softly. ‘Let’s ride now, and hope he didn’t.’
And so we set out again, riding as swiftly as we dared for half an hour. And with each mile we covered, the air grew hotter so that it fairly roiled, and the stench of death stayed with us. We entered a country of rolling swells of earth like the waves of the sea; some were a hundred feet high and broken with rocky outcroppings. We kept a reasonably straight course, winding our way down their troughs. After a while, I felt a sick sensation along the back of my neck as if the vultures were watching me. I stopped and turned toward the left; I looked toward the top of the rise even as Atara did, too.
‘What is it?’ Maram said, reining up behind us. ‘What do you see?’
We had been told to avoid Aigul, and so we had. But Aigul hadn’t avoided us. Just as Maram swallowed another mouthful of air and belched in disquiet, a company of cavalry broke over the rise and thundered down the slope straight toward us. There were twenty-three of them, as I saw at a glance. Their mail and helms gleamed in the sun. And holstered and upraised from a horse near their leader was a long pole from which streamed their standard: a bright yellow banner showing the coils and fiery tongue of a great red dragon.
‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram cried out. ‘Oh, my Lord!’
Liljana, who had drawn her sword, looked about with her calm, penetrating eyes and said to me, ‘Do we flee or fight, Val?’
‘Perhaps neither,’ I said, trying to keep my voice calm for Maram’s sake – and my own. I turned, pointing toward the right, where a hummock stood like a grass-covered castle. ‘Up there – we’ll face them up there.’
‘That’s very right,’ Master Juwain said reassuringly as he looked at the men bearing down on us. ‘This is probably just some wayward lord and his retainers. If we flee, he’ll think we’re thieves or afraid of them.’
‘Well, we are afraid of them!’ Maram pointed out. He might have said more, but we had already turned to gallop up the hummock, and the shock of his horse’s heaving muscles drove the wind from him.
It took us only a few moments to gain what little protection the hummock’s height provided us. Its top was nearly flat, perhaps fifty yards across; we sat on our horses there as we watched the men approach. I didn’t remark what we could now see quite plainly: that next to this great lord, who bore upon his yellow surcoat another red dragon, rode three naked men whose bodies seemed painted blue. Their little mountain ponies carried them up our hummock with greater agility than did the war horses of their more heavily armored companions. Each of the three men was short and immensely muscled, and they each brandished in their knotted fists an immense steel axe.
‘I’m sorry,’ Alphanderry said to Kane, who had his sword drawn as his black eyes stared down at the approaching company.
‘It’s not your sorrow that we need now, my young friend,’ Kane said with a grim smile, ‘but your strength. And your courage.’
The company drew up in a crescent on the slope below us. And then their leader, along with the standard-bearer and one of the blue men, rode forward a few paces. He was a quick-eyed man with a vulpine look to his hard face, which seemed all angles and planes, like pieces of chipped flint. Many would have called him handsome, a grace that he seemed to relish as he sat up straight on his horse in all his vanity and pride. His eyes were almost as dark as his well-trimmed beard; they fixed upon me like poisoned lances that pierced my heart with all the darkness of his.
‘Who are you?’ he called out to me in a raspy voice. ‘Come down and identify yourselves!’
‘Who are you,’ I said to him, ‘who rides upon us in surprise like robbers?’
‘Robbers, is it?’ he said. ‘Be careful how you speak to the lord of this domain!’
I traded a quick look with Kane and then Atara, who held her strung bow down against her saddle. Rinald had told us that Virad’s lord was Duke Vikram, an old man with scars along his white-bearded face. To this much younger man below us, I said, ‘We had heard that the lord of this domain is Duke Vikram.’
‘Not anymore,’ the man said with glee. ‘Duke Vikram is dead. I’m the lord of Virad now. And