Black Jade

could be light again.'

I tried to lift her fingers toward my lips but she pulled her hand away from me. The coldness that flowed out of her would have frozen the very rays of the sun. 'Atara,' I whispered.

'No, don't say anything,' she whispered back. 'Go to bed and gather some strength for tomorrow. Let me be alone.'

As she wished, I said goodnight to her, but I could not go to sleep. I left her sitting silently by the fire, eyeless in eternity.

As I paced about near the quiet forms of Daj and Estrella, I brooded over all the ways that I might kill Morjin. Once, Atara had warned me that his death would be my own. My fate seemed to be hurtling toward me like a great black stone cast by a cata-pult. I could not step aside to save myself. It made me sweat with a sick, black fear, but I almost didn't care.

Much later my pacing carried me over to the western edge of our encampment where Kane stood leaning out over the fence. He faced the black forest to the west. Where Master Juwain had stared at the same verses in his book, Kane simply stared — at nothing.

'Valashu,' he finally said to me. His voice rolled like a deep and distant thunder. 'Why are you here?'

'I keep thinking of Morjin,' I confessed to him. So do I,' he told me. 'And of Asangal.'

'Why do you speak of the Dark One by that name?'

'I was trying to remember what he was like before … before.'

I listened to the sound of a drunken Maram snoring by the fire, and I asked, 'What was he like, then?'

'I think he was much like you,' He turned so that the flames of the fire licked at the centers of his black eyes. 'He thought about death too much, too.'

He stood staring at me as the world upon which we stood pulled us even deeper into night. His dark gaze seemed to grab hold of me and pull me into a flight of stairs that twisted down and down through a hole in the black earth, on and on, and deeper and deeper, forever.

'Asangal feared it,' he told me in a deep and almost dreamy voice. 'So, and fearing it, he denied it.'

And in denying it, as Kane said, Asangal had gone on to fight what he called the Great Lie with every breath in his body. The results we could see and feel all around us, in the poisoned earth of the Skadarak and in our souls.

'But Valashu,' he said to me, 'a man, before he becomes one of the Elijin, must overcome his fear of death — do you understand?'

The Elijin, he went on to say, were destined to become Galadin, even as the Galadin themselves were doomed to die into greater beings. Some, such as Ashtoreth and Valoreth, found glory in this becoming. But for others this distant fate, if feared, would fester and grow over the ages into a crushing torment.

'Do you understand why?' Kane said to me.

I thought I understood very well why. And so I spoke to him Morjin's words to me — now my words to myself: 'Because who can bear the thought of being erased? Who can bear the never-ness of night without end?'

'So, who can bear that?' he snarled out. 'But that is not the worst of things — no, neither the deepest dread nor the worst.'

'What could be worse than that?'

In answer, he bent down and scooped up a handful of moist earth. His hand tightened around it and he said, 'As a man lives, on and on, he takes more and more of the world into himself. If he lives truly, he opens himself to great beauty, all the glories of the earth. So, he creates these glories, eh? And in creating, as a father with a child, he comes to love what he puts his hand to, more and more deeply. And so he hates being sundered from it in death.'

I thought of Atara's beautiful blue eyes and the children that Morjin had taken from us when he had gouged them out. Worms of fire ate at my own eyes, and I said, 'He killed her, a part of her, even as he killed my mother and grandmother, forever. Damn him — and damn death then, too!'

Kane shook his head at this as he took my hand and pressed a clod of earth into it. 'Morjin speaks thus, and so Angra Mainyu, but you must not.'

'How should I speak, then?'

He shook his head again and said to me, 'So, the One means death to be a gift, not a curse. Why? Because in living forever, a man would want to behold all things, taste all things, drink in the whole of the world and create his own. But man, even though he be a Galadin, is only ever a finite being, eh? And so this lust for the infinite would grow vaster and vaster in a sick heat and consume him in a terrible flame. Then, despite his love for the world, that which was sweet would become bitter; the new would too-quickly grow old; things of light would fade in darkness, and the bright, green shoots of love turn into a twisted and blackened hate. Then a man will say 'no' to all of creation, and most of all to himself.'

He looked about our encampment at the reclining forms of our friends. In a low voice, he told me, 'So, Val, so — there are a thousand ways to hate life, but only one way to truly love it.'

And with that, he clasped his hand around the clod of dirt cupped in mine, then returned to his vigil, staring out at the dark and silent woods.

The morning came only a few more hours after that, but it seemed to take forever for the trees around us to brighten to a sort of blackish-gray. Maram groaned upon being awakened, and complained of a terrible headache; we all moved as if we had drunk wine poisoned with poppy. Setting out into the woods was a torment of heavy limbs nearly drained of purpose, and spirits as confused as a flock of birds at an eclipse of the sun. Here, I knew, the very earth was sick and had gone mad. Soon it became clear that we were hopelessly lost. I drew my sword in order to light our way, but its silustria gleamed only dully in whatever direction I pointed it, and then faded with the miles so that it seemed it would never gleam again. My sense of direction, strangely remained strong, and I led us on and on, five miles across the poisoned earth and then two more. Due west called to me through the sodden gray woods as clearly as a bell. Why, I wondered, did it seem that we were only working our way deeper and deeper into the Skadarak?

Because here, a voice inside me whispered, your sense of direction has been twisted.

For a long while, I did not want to heed this deep voice. But then, around noon, with Atara stumbling over tree roots and the children staring out at the stunted oaks with dark, empty eyes, I called for a halt. While Pittock and Gorman went off to look for sign of direction, I turned to Berkuar and said, 'This wood is cursed. Here, north seems west, and west turns south and then east. And all directions, it seems, lead ever and only one way.'

'Toward the Black Jade,' he muttered.

'It is calling me,' I told him.

'It's calling all of us,' he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He moved his jaw as if to spit, and then swallowed a gout of barbark juice instead.

Just then a great, bellowing shout sounded from farther in the woods. I turned to look past the blackened trunks of the trees at Pittock and Gorman. Gorman stood backed up to an old elm; Pittock had thrust his long knife into his belly, and stood there beside him, pushing and twisting the knife in deeper.

'Pittock!' Berkuar cried out. 'Damn you, Pittock!'

He drew his own knife and set out bounding through the woods straight toward them.

I followed him a moment later, and so did Kane. But we could do nothing. Before we could draw within ten yards, Pittock ripped his knife free from Gorman's body and let him fall dying to the ground. He shook his bloody knife at the forest and shouted out, 'He killed my cousin, so damn him, and his father and mother — and damn the whole world for whelping them and all their line!'

And with that he turned his long knife upon himself, thrusting it up beneath his ribs into his heart. He died slumping down toward the ground, and leaving bloody marks as he clawed at the bark of the elm tree.

'It was their old quarrel,' Berkuar said, going forward to stand over his two men. He spoke these words with an acceptance of the inevitability of murder, and I hated him for that. 'Let's bury them then.'

Only Estrella wept for these two ill-fated woodsmen or had the kindness to look for flowers to put on their graves. In the blighted forest, she found none.

It took all our will to get out shovels and dig two long holes and lay Gorman and Pittock in the earth. There