Black Jade

'Would you venture into the Skadarak to disprove that it could capture a man as a spider's web does a fly?'

Master Juwain said nothing as he looked me and rubbed the back of his bald head.

'We keep well away from that part of the mountains and the westernmost reaches of the woods,' Graybuck told us. 'And you will too unless you want to stand like a statue for the rest of your days. Now it's late, and I've an acre of weeds to pull up tomorrow. And so I'll say goodnight.'

Later that evening, after Maram returned from the barn and helping Roseen to milk the cows, as he put it, we held council at the edge of Graybuck's apple orchard, where we had made our encampment. All the way from the Brotherhood's school we had argued as to our course toward Hesperu, and it had come time to make our final decision.

'So, nothing has changed,' Kane said to us, 'We've two routes to Hesperu: through the Dragon lands or across the Red Desert.' 'Six hundred miles through Sunguru the long way?' Master

Juwain sighed out, shaking his head. 'It's bad enough that we have to venture into Hesperu.'

We all agreed to this. However fierce the heat of the Red Desert, it could not be so dangerous as exposing ourselves at every village and town in the heavily populated Sunguru along a course of six hundred miles.

'Then if we're to go into the desert,' Kane said, 'we still have two choices: across the mountains or around them.'

But to go around them, as Graybuck had said, we might very well have to fight our way past the garrison at Nayland. And worse, at the point of the Yorgos range of the White Mountains, where they gave out upon the border between Uskudar and Sunguru, we would find fortresses and yet more garrisons of the armies of both King Orunjan and King Angand.

'But couldn't we just slip around them?' Maram said. 'Better the danger that we do know than this stonemaking Yaga that Graybuck told of.'

'But it might turn out to be no danger at all,' Master Juwain said. His gray eyes fairly glowed with curiosity. 'The Brotherhoods have investigated many other reports of people being turned to stone, and they all proved false.'

'Ah, I don't know, I don't know,' Maram muttered. 'Perhaps there's another pass that Graybuck is unaware of.'

We all looked at Berkuar as he rubbed at his heavily bearded jaw then spat into the fire. He said, 'Graybuck is right: there are no passes through the mountains other than the gap.'

Maram gazed at Berkuar and asked, 'Are you sure?'

'As sure as you are of your nose on your fat face.'

'Ah,' Maram said, 'you know this country well, don't you? What is your belief about this Stonemaker?'

'I've never gone into the gap, so I can't say truly,' Berkuar told us. 'But my grandfather once saw something at the mouth of the gap that might have been a man of stone — he came within a quarter mile of it before he turned away.'

Master Juwain offered his opinion that this was likely some natural rock configuration or even a stone carving that the ancients had made. He restated his desire to explore this mystery.

'I know the way to the gap,' Berkuar told us. 'I'll take you there, if that is what you decide.'

He turned to look at me then, and so did Master Juwain and Maram. I drew my sword and watched as the silustria glowed glorre when I pointed it toward the west. I said, 'Surely Master

Juwain is right that this Yaga is only a legend. But even if he's wrong, I'd rather venture through the gap than fight our way south. I'm tired of killing.'

Atara and Liljana agreed with this, and so did Kane, and even the children. Finally, Maram bowed his head to the consensus of our company and groaned out, 'Well, we survived the damn Stonefaces and so I suppose we can slip past this Stonemaker, whatever it really is. But I have a bad feeling about this.'

In the morning we said our farewells to Graybuck and his family and set out again toward the mountains. For the first few miles we bushwacked through a wood thick with buckthorn, sumac and many flowers. Then we came to a road that led north and slightly west. For the rest of the day, as the ground rose before us, we slowly rode up this deserted road through an archway of great elms, oaks and sycamores. We passed an old woodcutter and a couple of hunters, but saw no sign of the Dragon's men or any other people. We made camp that night on the bank of a stream that cut the road. For dinner that night we ate part of a boar that Berkuar had killed. Maram downed nearly an entire ham by himself. It was astonishing how much my friend could eat when one of his hungers came upon him.

The morning found us working our way up along the stream. The ground rose ever higher and grew rockier, as well. The tall trees mostly blocked our view of the mountains, but we could almost smell the snow and ice of these great peaks in the cooling and freshening of the wind that blew down from them. At last we came to a granite mantle of ground where only a few shrubs and a single black locust grew out of the cracks in the rock. We stood beside the rushing stream looking at the wall of mountains before us; they were so close it seemed that we should be able to reach out and touch them.

'There's the gap,' Berkuar said, pointing at a place where the mountains' contour seemed broken in two. 'The stream leads up into it.'

'What's its name, then?' Maram asked him.

'It has none that I know,' Berkuar said.

'Then I shall name it the Kul Kharand,' Maram said. 'Unless anyone objects?'

I smiled at this because kharand was the ancient Ardik word meaning the fulfillment of one's dreams. I loved Maram for fighting so hard to remain hopeful.

It took us two more hours to climb up to the Kul Kharand. We walked our horses along the stony north bank of the stream. Then iron-shod hooves rang out against hard granite. If anyone guarded this pass, I thought, they would hear us coming a mile away.

At last we came out into a great bowl of stone-strewn ground where the trees grew thin and far between. Berkuar was the first of us to espy the statue set there, sculpted with his arm lifted and his hand cupped back toward the gap as if beckoning travellers toward it.

'That must have been the man that your grandfather saw,' Maram said to Berkuar.

He did not add what his rigid face said so plainly: that Berkuar's grandfather had possessed the good sense to refuse the statue's invitation.

We advanced toward the statue under the cover of Kane and Berkuar, who stalked up the rocky slope gripping strung bows nocked with arrows. It was a statue in smooth stone of a young man of medium height, rendered naked, with exquisitely fine muscles carved about a slender frame. A smile almost as lovely as Alphanderry's graced the features of the statue's face which was wonderfully expressive and lifelike.

'Remarkable,' Master Juwain said, examining the statue. He held out his hand toward it. 'Truly remarkable work.'

The stone was unusual, as dark as obsidian and as smooth as marble, with strange reddish striations running along its grain.

'Look,' he said, 'not a chisel mark upon it!'

'Is that supposed to encourage me?' Maram asked him.

'Only the ancients could have made such a sculpture,' Master Juwain declared.

'I don't know,' Berkuar said, spitting a gout of red barbark juice toward the base of the statue. 'It could be possible.'

'Yes, it could be,' Maram said. 'But there's another possibility, isn't there?'

'Your stonemaking Yaga?' Master Juwain asked him.

'Yes, my Yaga, if you want to call it that. Do you remember Ymiru's purple gelstei? What if this Yaga keeps a purple gelstei and uses it to turn men into stone?'

So saying, he smacked his hand against the statue's face, and then immediately cringed back from it as if fearing that it might come to life.

'I've never heard of the purple gelstei,' Master Juwain said, 'being used this way.'

He looked toward Kane, who said, 'So, I'm not sure that it could be used this way.'

He paused to draw in a deep breath, and the look of relief on Maram's face instantly gave way to dread as