The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two. David Zindell
Juwain held the bowl firmly in his hands, I drew the sword across the curve of the bowl. And there, cut into the gold, was the faintest of scratches.
‘I don’t understand!’ I said. The sudden emptiness in the pit of my belly felt as if I had fallen off a cliff.
‘I’m afraid you’ve found one of the False Gelstei,’ he told me. ‘Once upon a time, more than one such were made.’
He went on to say that in the Age of Law, during the hundred-year reign of Queen Atara Ashtoreth, the ancients had made quests of their own. And perhaps the greatest of these was to recapture in form the essence of the One. And so they had applied all their art toward fabricating the gold gelstei. After many attempts, the great alchemist, Ninlil Gurmani, had at last succeeded in making a silver gelstei with a golden sheen to it. Although it had none of the properties of the true gold, it was thought that the Lightstone might take its power from its shape rather than its substance alone. And so this gold-seeming silustria was cast into the form of bowls and cups, in the likeness of the Cup of Heaven itself. But to no avail.
‘I’m afraid there is only one Lightstone,’ Master Juwain told me.
‘So,’ Kane said, glowering at the little bowl that he held. ‘So.’
‘But look!’ I said, pointing my sword at the bowl. ‘Look how it brightens!’
The silver of my sword was indeed glowing strongly. But Master Juwain looked at it and slowly shook his head. And then he asked me, ‘Don’t you remember Alphanderry’s poem?’
The silver sword, from starlight formed,Sought that which formed the stellar light,And in its presence flared and warmedUntil it blazed a brilliant white.
‘It warms,’ he said, ‘it flares, but there’s nothing of a blazing brilliance, is there?’
In looking at my sword’s silvery sheen, I had to admit that there was not.
‘This bowl is of silustria,’ Master Juwain said. ‘And a very special silustria at that. And so your sword finds a powerful resonance with it. It’s what pointed you toward this room, away from where the Lightstone really lies.’
The hollowness inside me grew as large as a cave, and I felt sick to my soul. And then the meaning of Master Juwain’s words and the gleam in his eyes struck home.
‘What are you saying, sir?’
‘I’m saying that I know where Sartan Odinan hid the Lightstone.’ He set the bowl back on its stand and smiled at Liljana. ‘We do.’
I finally noticed Liljana holding a cracked, leather-bound book in her hands. She gave it to him and said, ‘It seems that Master Juwain is even more of a scholar than I had thought.’
Beaming at her compliment, Master Juwain proceeded to tell us about his researches in the Library that day – and during the days that I had lain unconscious in the infirmary.
‘I began by trying to read everything the Librarians had collected about Sartan Odinan,’ he said. ‘While I was waiting for Val to return to us, I must have read thirty books.’
A chance remark in one of them, he told us, led him to think that Sartan might have had Brotherhood training before he had fallen into evil and joined the Kallimun priesthood. This training, Master Juwain believed, had gone very deep. And so he wondered if Sartan, in a time of great need, seeking to hide the Lightstone, might have sought refuge among those who had taught him as a child. It was an extraordinary intuition which was to prove true.
Master Juwain’s next step was to look in the Librarian’s Great Index for references to Sartan in any writings by any Brother. One of these was an account of a Master Todor, who had lived during the darkest period of the Age of the Dragon when the Sarni had once again broken the Long Wall and threatened Tria. The reference indicated that Master Todor had collected stories of all things that had to do with the Lightstone, particularly myths as to its fate.
It had taken Master Juwain half a day to locate Master Todor’s great work in the Library’s stacks. In it he found mention of a Master Malachi, whose superiors had disciplined him for taking an unseemly interest in Sartan, whom Master Malachi regarded as a tragic figure. Master Juwain, searching in an off-wing of the north wing, had found a few of Master Malachi’s books, the titles of which had been indexed if not their contents. In The Golden Renegade, Master Juwain found a passage telling of a Master Aluino, who was said to have seen Sartan before Sartan died.
‘And there I was afraid that this particular branch of my search had broken,’ Master Juwain told us as he glanced at the False Gelstei. ‘You see, I couldn’t find any reference to Master Aluino in the Great Index. That’s not surprising. There must be a million books that the Librarians have never gotten to – with more collected every year.’
‘So what did you do?’ Maram asked him.
‘What did I do?’ Master Juwain said. ‘Think, Brother Maram. Sartan escaped Argattha with the Lightstone in the year 82 of this age – or so the histories tell. And so I knew the approximate years of Master Aluino’s life. Do you see?’
‘Ah, no, I’m sorry, I don’t.’
‘Well,’ Master Juwain said, ‘it occurred to me that Master Aluino must have kept a journal, as we Brothers are still encouraged to do.’
Here Maram looked down at the floor in embarrassment. It was clear that he had always found other ways to keep himself engaged during his free hours at night.
‘And so,’ Master Juwain continued, ‘it also occurred to me that if Master Aluino had kept a journal, there was a chance that it might have found its way into the Library.’
‘Aha,’ Maram said, looking up and nodding his head.
‘There is a hall off the west wing where old journals are stored and sorted by century,’ Master Juwain said. ‘I’ve spent most of the day looking for one by Master Aluino. Looking and reading.’
And with that, he proudly held up the fusty journal and opened it to a page that he had marked. He took great care, for the journal’s paper was brittle and ancient.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘this is written in Old West Ardik. Master Aluino had his residence at the Brotherhood’s sanctuary of Navuu, in Surrapam. He was the Master Healer there.’
No, no, I thought, it can’t be. Navuu lay five hundred miles from Khaisham, across the Red Desert in lands now held by the Hesperuks’ marauding armies.
‘Well,’ Atara asked, ‘what does the journal say?’
Master Juwain cleared his throat and said, ‘This entry is from the 15th of Valte, in the year 82 of the Age of the Dragon.’ Then he began reading to us, translating as he went:
Today a man seeking sanctuary was brought to me. A tall man with a filthy beard, dressed in rags. His feet were torn and bleeding. And his eyes: they were sad, desperate, wild. The eyes of a madman. His body had been badly burned from the sun, especially about the face and arms. But his hands were the worst. He had strange burns on the palms and fingers that wouldn’t heal. Such burns, I thought, would drive anyone mad.
All my healings failed him; even the varistei had no virtue here, for I soon learned that his burns were not of the body alone but the soul. It is strange, isn’t it, that when the soul decides to die, the body can never hold onto it.
I believe that he had come to our sanctuary to die. He claimed to have been taught at one of the Brotherhood schools in Alonia as a child; he said many times that he was coming home. Babbled this, he did. There was much about his speech that was incoherent. And much that was coherent but not to be believed. For four days I listened to his rantings and fantasies, and pieced together a story which he wanted me to believe – and which I believe he believed.
He said his name was Sartan Odinan, the very same Kallimun priest who had burned Suma to the ground with a firestone during the Red Dragon’s invasion of Alonia. Sartan the