The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two. David Zindell
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 from the dungeons of Argattha. But a passing Librarian, hastily buckling on his sword as he hurried through the stacks to Lord Grayam’s summons, assured us that they had. There were many Librarians, he told us, and there had been many generations of them since the Lightstone had become lost at the beginning of the Age of the Dragon long ago. That his generation might be the last of these devout scholar-warriors seemed not to enter his mind. And so he turned his faith from his pens to the steel of his sword; he excused himself and marched off toward his duty atop the city’s walls.
Our search took us through this vast hall, with its even vaster silences and echoes of memory, into an eastern off-wing. And then into a side wing, where we found hall upon hall of nothing but paintings, mosaics and friezes depicting the Lightstone and scenes from its long past. And still my sword seemed to point us east. And so we passed into a much smaller, cubical chamber filled with vases from the Marshanid dynasty; these, too, showed the Lightstone in the hands of various kings and heroes out of history.
At last, however, we came to an alcove off a small room lined with painted shields. We determined that we had reached this wing’s easternmost extension. We could go no farther in this direction. But I was sure that the Lightstone, wherever it was hidden, lay still to the east of us. Alkaladur gleamed like the moon when pointed toward the alcove’s eastern window, and not at all when I swept it back toward the main body of the Library or any of the room’s artifacts.
‘So, we must try another wing,’ Kane said to me. Maram and Atara, standing near him above an ancient Alonian ceremonial shield, nodded their heads in agreement. ‘If your sword still shows true, then let’s find our way to the east wing.’
Our search thus far had taken up the whole morning and part of the afternoon. Now we spent another hour crossing the Library’s centermost section, also called the great hall. It dwarfed even the south wing, and was filled with so many towering islands of books and soaring bridges that I grew dizzy looking up at them. I was grateful when at last we passed into the east wing; in its cubical proportions, it was shaped identically to the others. One of its off-wings led us to a hall giving out on a side wing where the Librarians had put together an impressive collection of lesser gelstei. These were presented in locked cabinets of teak and glass. Atara gasped like a little girl to see so many glowstones, wish stones, angel eyes, warders, love stones and dragon bones gathered into one place. We might have lingered there a long time if Alkaladur hadn’t pointed us down a long corridor leading to another side wing. The moment that we stepped into this chamber, with its many rare books of ancient poetry, my sword’s blade warmed noticeably. And when we crossed into an adjoining room filled with vases, chalices, jewel-encrusted plates and the like, the silustria flared so that even Atara and Maram noticed its brightness.
‘Is it truly here, Val?’ Maram said to me. ‘Can it be?’
I swept my sword from north to south, behind me and past the room’s four corners. It grew its brightest whenever I pointed it east, toward a cracked marble stand on which were set two golden bowls, to the left and right, on its lowest shelves. Two more crystal bowls gleamed on top of the next higher ones, and at the stand’s center on its highest square of marble sat a little cup that seemed to have been carved out of a single, immense pearl.
‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram cried out. ‘Oh, my Lord!’
Being unable to restrain himself – and wishing to be the first to lay his hands on the Lightstone and thus determine its fate according to our company’s rules – he rushed forward as fast as his fat legs would carry him. I was afraid that in his excitement and greed, he would crash into this display. But he drew up short inches from it. He thrust out his hands and grasped the golden bowl to his right. Without even bothering to examine it, he lifted it high above his head, a wild light dancing in his eyes.
‘Be careful with that!’ Kane snapped at him. ‘You don’t want to drop it and dent it!’
‘Dent the gold gelstei?’ Maram said.
Atara, whose eyes were even sharper than her tongue, took a good look at the bowl in his hands and said, ‘Hmmph! If that’s the true gold, then a bull’s nose ring is more precious than my mother’s wedding band.’
Much puzzled, Maram lowered the bowl and turned it about in his hands. His brows narrowed suspiciously as he finally took notice of what was now so easy to see: the bowl was faintly tarnished and scarred in many places with fine scratches and wasn’t made of gold at all. As Atara had hinted, it was only brass.
‘But why display such a common thing?’ Maram asked, embarrassed at his gullibility.
‘Common, is it?’ Kane said to him.
He walked closer to Maram and took the bowl from him. Then he picked up a much-worn wooden stick still lying on the shelf near where the bowl had been. With the bowl resting in the flat of one callused hand, he touched the stick to the rim of the bowl and drew it round and round in slow circles. It set the bowl to pealing out a beautiful, pure tone like that of a bell.
‘So, it’s