Her gaze lowered to fix upon my sheathed sword, and she slowly shook her head.
Because Surya and Zoreh were staring at me, too, I gave them a quick account of the battle. I said nothing, however, of my sword’s burning or my failure to kill Morjin.
‘We must go, then,’ Surya told us. ‘Six of our sisters are dead, and we must go.’
She turned to Atara and gazed at her blindfolded face as if trying to understand a puzzle. Then she embraced her, kissing her lips. ‘Farewell, my imakla one. We shall all sing to the owls, that your other sight returns soon. But if it does not, who will care for you? Must you go off with these kradaks?’
‘Yes, I must,’ Atara told her, squeezing my hand in hers.
‘Then we shall sing to the wind, as well, that fate will blow you back to us.’
And with that, she and Zoreh gathered up their horses and turned to begin the walk back down the gorge. We watched them disappear around the rocks of one of its turnings.
We decided to go no farther that day. We were all too tired, from battle and from too many miles of hard traveling. Surya had found a place that we could defend as well as any. Four archers, I thought, firing arrows quickly at the bend where the gorge narrowed behind us, could hold off an entire company of Red Knights. We had here good, clear water, even if it was little more than a trickle. Above the stream, the ground between the trees was flat enough to lay out our sleeping furs in comfort. There was grass for the horses, too, and plenty of deadwood for a fire.
Despite our exhaustion, we fortified our camp with stones and a breastwork of logs. Liljana brought out her pots to cook us a hot meal, while Atara and Estrella took charge of washing the blood from our garments in the stream and mending them in the places where an arrow or a sword had ripped through them. We gathered around the fire to eat our stew and rushk cakes in the last hour of the day. But here, at the bottom of the gorge where the stream spilled over rocks, it was already nearly dark. The sunlight had a hard time fighting its way down to us, and the walls of the gorge had fallen gray with shadow.
Although we had much to discuss and I desired Kane’s counsel, this ancient warrior stood alone behind the breastwork gazing down the stream in the direction from which our enemies would come at us, if they came at all. His strung bow and quiver full of arrows were close at hand as he ate his stew in silence.
‘Ah, what I would most like to know,’ Maram said as he licked at his lips, ‘is what will become of Morjin?’
He sat with the rest of us around the fire. From time to time, he poked a long stick into its blazing logs.
‘Unless he bled to death, which seems unlikely,’ Master Juwain said, ‘he will recover from his wound. A better question might be: what has become of him? If Val is right that it really was Morjin.’
‘It must have been Morjin,’ I said. ‘Changed, somehow, yes. He is something more … and something less. There was something strange about him. But I know it was he.’
‘Unless he has an evil twin, it was he,’ Maram agreed.
‘But how do we really know that?’ Master Juwain asked. ‘He is the Lord of Illusions, isn’t he? Perhaps he has regained the power to put into our eyes the same images with which he fools other people.’
Liljana shook her head at this. ‘No, what we faced earlier was no illusion. Morjin’s mind is powerful – so horribly powerful, as none know better than I. But he cannot, from hundreds of miles away in Argattha, cast illusions that fool so many through the course of an entire battle. And he cannot have fooled me.’
‘No,’ I said, fingering my cloak, spread out on a rock near the fire to dry. I had felt the blood from Morjin’s severed arm soak into it, and the red smear of it still stained the collar. ‘No, he has a great strength now. I felt this in his arms, when we were locked together sword to sword.’
‘Could this not, then, have been the old Morjin drawing strength from the Lightstone?’ Master Juwain asked. ‘And drawing from it as well the means to deceive you about his form?’
‘No,’ I said, touching the hilt of my sword, ‘I know that he has lost the power of illusion over me. And the Lightstone is all beauty and truth. There is nothing within it that could help engender illusions and lies.’
For the span of a year, after my friends and I had rescued the Lightstone out of Argattha, the golden bowl had been like a sun showering its radiance upon us. I missed the soft sheen of it keenly, nearly as much as I did my murdered family. Since the day that Morjin had stolen it back, I had known no true days, only an endless succession of moments darkened as when the moon eclipses the sun.
‘Then,’ Master Juwain sighed out, ‘we have dispensed with several hypotheses. And so we must consider that Morjin has indeed found a way to rejuvenate himself.’
‘I didn’t think the Lightstone had that power,’ Maram said.
‘Neither did I,’ Master Juwain admitted.
‘But what of the akashic crystal?’ Atara asked. ‘Was there no record within it of such things?’
Master Juwain sighed again as his face knotted up in regret. With the breaking in Tria of the great akashic crystal, repository of much of the Elijin’s lore concerning the Lightstone, Master Juwain’s hope of gaining this great knowledge had broken as well.
‘There might have been such a record within it,’ Master Juwain said. ‘If only I’d had more time to look for it.’
‘Then you don’t really know,’ Atara said, pressing him.
Master Juwain squeezed the wooden bowl of stew between his hands as if his fingers ached for the touch of a smoother and finer substance. ‘No, I suppose I don’t. But I spent many days searching through the akashic stone, following many streams of knowledge. One gets a sense of the terrain this way, so to speak. And everything I’ve ever learned about the Lightstone gives me to understand that it cannot be used to make one’s body and being young again. In truth, it is quite the opposite.’
‘What do you mean, sir?’ I asked him.
‘Consider what we do know about the Lightstone,’ he said, looking at me and the others. ‘Above all, that it is to be used by the Maitreya, and by him only. But used how? Of this, we still have barely a glimmer. “In the Shining One’s hands, the true gold; in the Cup of Heaven, men and women shall drink in the light of the One.” Indeed, indeed – but what does this really mean? We know that the Maitreya is thus to help man walk the path of the Elijin and Galadin, and so on to the Ieldra themselves, ever and always toward the One. And in so doing, the Maitreya will be exalted beyond any man: in grace, in vitality, in the splendor of his soul. But now let us consider what befalls when the Lightstone is claimed by one who is not the Maitreya. Let us consider Morjin. Clearly, he has used the Lightstone to try to gain mastery over all the other gelstei – even as he has tried to enslave men’s souls and make himself master of the world. He searches for the darkest of knowledge! And so he holds in his hands not the true gold but something rather like a lead stone that pulls him ever and always down into a lightless chasm. And so he has utterly debased himself: in his body, in his mind, in his soul. He is immortal, yes, and so he cannot die as other men do. But we have all seen his scabrous flesh, the deadness of his eyes, the rot that slowly blackens his insides. All his lusting for the Lightstone and struggle to master it has only withered him. And so how can he use this cup to make himself young again?’
I considered long and deeply what Master Juwain had said as I looked through the fire’s writhing flames and gazed at the darkening walls of the chasm called the Kul Kavaakurk. How close had