Black Jade

Darakul Elu.'

Morjin glared at me in confusion. I did not recall ever seeing him so unsure of himself. 'What do you know about that, Elahad?'

'I know about Iojin.'

'You … what?'

'I know you stabbed him in the back with your own knife. And I know you loved him.'

The cloaked man standing less than twenty yards from me seemed unable to speak, and I wondered after all if he might be Morjin's droghul. He glared at me with a bottomless hate. Then he shouted, 'Be silent! You know not what you say!'

His face flushed bright red from the blood burning through him, and I suddenly knew that he had long ago poisoned himself with the kirax, to remind himself of what Iojin had suffered and to atone for this terrible crime.

I said to him, 'You have never gone a single day, have you, without wishing that he could live again?'

'Be silent! Damn you, Elahad!'

I remembered Kane, high on top of a mountain, telling me that there were no evil men, only evil deeds. And I said to Morjin, 'No one is damned. There is a way out.'

Now Morjin turned his terrible golden eyes and all his spite upon Bemossed.

'Let us go free,' Bemossed said to him. 'And let yourself go free.'

'Don't speak to me that way!'

Bemossed only smiled at him, in defiance, but in deep understanding, too. He fairly blazed with a deep desire that the world, and all that lived within it, should be made whole again.

'Don't look at me that way, Hajarim!'

I let go of Bemossed's hand, and grasped my sword's hilt again. And I told Morjin, 'It can all end, right here and now.'

Hot acids seemed to burn Morjin's throat, choking him, and he pointed at me as he called out to Lord Mansarian, 'Kill him! Kill the Elahad!'

Two of the knights standing near Morjin looked to Lord Mansarian in consternation. I took them as captains of the Red Capes, and I had overhead their names as Roarian and Atuan. The tall, muscular one, Atuan, nodded at Lord Mansarian. Then Lord Mansarian turned to Morjin and said, 'But, my lord, we are met here in truce!'

'How can there be truce with such as this?' Morjin said, hissing at me. 'Kill him, I say!'

He cannot bear it, I thought. That which he most desires, he cannot abide.

I saw that Morjin could withstand very well my killing fury but not my compassion. And what, after all, was true compassion, this valarda that connected men soul to soul? Only suffering with. Suffering each other's joys, or suffering agonies, but always being joined as one in the great experience of life. As with love, it was a force and not a feeling.

'Morjin!' I called out.

My eyes met his, and a shock of love ran through me. Not love for him: only a Maitreya, I thought, could possess the grace to love such a loathsome being. My love for my family, however, blazed within me like starfire. I could not contain it. I could not keep to myself the anguish of wanting to talk to them again, to cross swords with my brother, Asaru, in a friendly practice duel, and to feel my grandmother's soft, wrinkled hand on mine as we walked together through the halls of my father's castle. I wanted to smell my mother's hair again and the spice of peppermint and honey as she made for me hot tea.

'Morjin!' I cried. 'You kill too easily! Know, then, what it was like for me when you killed my family!'

I drew my sword and pointed it at him. Its silver blade flared with a brilliant flame. If the valarda was the gift of empathy, I thought, then Alkaladur was the weapon of compassion. Not this length of silustria, sharper than any razor, whose diamond-bright polish drove the sunlight into Morjin's eyes. But the true Alkaladur, wrought of a purer substance, as radiant as the stars. The Sword of Light shone within me, as yet only half-forged. All that I had suffered had gone into its making. All that my friends had suffered with me infused its essence as well. Even now, as Liljana, Master Juwain and the children looked on from behind the wall of the cottage, and Kane, Maram and Atara stood by my side, I felt all their courage, kindness and great will toward life. They seemed to pass these fundamental forces to me through their eyes and in their throbbing hearts, in flames of red, orange and yellow, green and blue, indigo and violet. The whole world seemed to pass its fire to me. Somehow, Bemossed seemed to weave it all together into a pure, white blaze that streaked through my sword and me straight up into the sky. Hotter and brighter, it built, until it flared a brilliant glorre. Then this perfect color gave way to a single, clear, indestructible light. And so at the last, Bemossed's love for me, no less Morjin's hate, had put into my hand the greatest weapon in the universe.

'Damn you, Elahad!'

All the fire and force of my soul I poured into this sword. Alkaladur blazed like the sun. Across the distance between us, it struck into Morjin's heart. He gasped and grabbed his chest; he raged and cursed and wept. He stared at me with his golden eyes, now wild and maddened with anguish. I almost couldn't bear it. He had told me once that the only way I would ever free myself from suffering would be to inflict even greater suffering upon another. It was not so. As I drove the Sword of Light deeper and deeper into Morjin, my agony burned through me, and all of Morjin's incredible pain, too. I thought that it might kill me. It killed something in Morjin. I felt him longing desperately for some impossible thing: perhaps that he and the world could somehow be different. I felt him longing for something even more. He looked at me strangely. He cringed away from me as a black, bottomless terror took hold of him. I knew then that there was one thing that he feared above all else.

'Elahad!' he screamed out to me.

He continued screaming until his voice grew hoarse. He ranted and bit his tongue, and spat out a bloody froth. He sweated; from nearly twenty yards away, I could smell his foulness and fear. He told of how he would torture me in a dozen hideous ways. The debasement of this powerful man to a snarling, suffering, craven beast stunned all of us looking on.

And then Morjin returned to himself — or perhaps he found sustenance and strength in the being of his droghul. He drew in a deep breath, and stood up straight. He wiped the blood from his mouth. He turned to Lord Mansarian, and said, 'The truce is over. You have heard the Elahad say that they will not surrender. Therefore you will attack, and kill them all.'

'All except the Hajarim,' Lord Mansarian said, looking at Bemossed.

Morjin looked at him, too. But Bemossed's bright face seemed only to drive him to a new- fury. 'Especially the Hajarim! You are to kill him outright, or deliver him, bound in chains, to me!'

'That was not what you promised!' Lord Mansarian rasped out.

Arch Uttam turned toward this grim, red-caped man in astonishment. So did Atuan and Roarian, and Lord Mansarian's other captains. It seemed that they had never dared to think that any soldier of Hesperu would openly contradict the great Red Dragon.

'You must have misunderstood me,' Morjin said to Lord Mansarian. His silver voice trembled with dismissal and undertones of threat, too.

'I misunderstood nothing,' Lord Mansarian said. 'The Hajarim was to be given to me, for whatever corrective that I might contrive.'

'He will be crucified!' Morjin snarled out. 'Alive or dead.'

'But Hajarim are never crucified!' Lord Mansarian reminded him.

'This one,' Morjin said, pointing at Bemossed, 'will be crucified. You have my promise.'

Lord Mansarian looked at me, and I sensed that some part of my suffering over my family's death called him to remember the slaughter of his own. He met eyes with Bemossed, and I felt his intense gratitude for what this man had done. And something more. As Bemossed smiled at him. Lord Mansarian's dark, doomed soul began to sparkle with hope once again.

'No,' Lord Mansarian told Morjin.

'No? You say this to me?'