Diamond Warriors

Lightstone. But he waited. Why?'

'Isn't that obvious?' Atara asked him. She patted the grass beneath Bemossed's headstone. 'How else could he have drawn Val into the trap upon this hill?'

'But Morjin hesitated even once Val had fought his way up here. Why did he not strike sooner?'

I waited to see who might respond to this. The answer, I thought, shone out as clear as starlight from Estrella's lovely face. But because she remained mute, I had to speak for her.

'Morjin,' I said, 'should never even have touched his hand to the Lightstone. It truly is like a star, as Atara has told. I can feel... how it burned him. How its brilliance blinded him to many things. And rather than nourishing his soul and illuminating him, his soul fed it. I do not think he could bear the darkness. And the emptiness. And that is why he could not quite bear to murder Bemossed. He hoped, until the very end, that Bemossed might find a way to heal him.'

'But he did murder Bemossed!' Maram said. 'And would have murdered Estrella. Why? Since he recognized, before anyone else, that she was the Maitreya, too?'

'Because,' I told him, 'Morjin was also the Red Dragon, and that one did not want Morjin to be healed.'

At least, I went on to say, the great Red Dragon, missing scales over his heart, would never expose that tender place to such as Estrella or Bemossed. Then I admitted one of my worst fears of the Beast that I had fought for so long: that Morjin would have tried to torture out of Bemossed the mystery of what it meant to be the Maitreya. But one might as well torture a flower to reveal the secret of its beauty.

'Morjin,' I told everyone, 'could have chosen life. But that was his deepest flaw, that he always found it so painful to live.'

I did not add that in this, if nothing else, Morjin and I were as brothers.

'And that is what we have always taught,' Abrasax said. 'That in the end, our hearts are free.'

Master Storr nodded his head at this. 'And freely it was that Morjin chose not to unbind the Dark One. The door to Damoom stood almost open. We all saw that. Another moment and. .'

He sighed as he looked up at the sky above the Detheshaloon. If Morjin hadn't seethed with a fury to be lord of all creation, one who was vastly more powerful than he would have destroyed half the universe in pursuit of just such an insane ambition.

'Morjin could have won,' I said. 'But in wanting to win so much more than the world, he lost everything.'

I stared across the hill at the small stone marking Morjin's grave. Did he, I wondered, now walk the land of the dead as I had? Did some bright part of him dwell with the infinite splendor beyond death, forever?

Maram, who always sensed so much about me, looked at me and said, 'He lost his soul. But you would have helped him find it again, wouldn't you, Val? With your heart of compassion. Though I still don't see how it is possible that you could have loved him.'

'I didn't, Maram — not as I love you,' I told him. 'In truth, I never stopped hating him. But in the end, I did see that he and I are not so different from each other, and that is a kind of love.'

I noticed Maram staring at my sword where I had set it down beside me on the grass. I drew the blade from its scabbard then. Alkaladur's silver gelstei, so near the Lightstone, blazed a deep and fiery glorre.

'And in the end,' Maram said, gazing at it, 'you killed him with that sword. As in a way, if I understand things right, you killed a part of Morjin just before the end with that other sword of yours. But I still don't see the connection between the two. Daj said that Kane told you that the two swords are one and the same.'

Maram looked up at Kane as if hoping he might shed more light on this matter. But our mysterious friend stood unmoving and staring at the granite cross above Bemossed's grave as if his bright black eyes could bore through solid stone.

'Kane!' Maram called out to him. 'What did you mean by that?'

There came no answer from this greatest of all swordsmen who would never take up a steel sword again.

'Kane!' Maram said once more.

And then a deep and powerful voice cracked out like a bolt of thunder: 'Do not say that name!'

The one we had called Kane edged into the circle between Estrella and me. The late sun caught his torn diamond armor, and seemed to set it — and him — on fire.

'I am Kalkin!' he shouted out. His hand pointed at Bemossed's gravestone and then swept out around the top of the Owl's Hill. 'Kane died here — and long, long past his time. You will not find his body, but you must bury him all the same.'

He stomped his boot, hard, against the earth. Then he reached out toward Estrella and held his hands over the Lightstone as if warming them before a fire. Without asking my permission, he took my sword from me, though with grace and gentleness, as if he knew that I would not mind.

'This,' he said, pointing Alkaladur at the Lightstone, 'Kalkin forged so as to focus the power of that. I made it so, long ago, as a spectacle focuses light.'

In his hands, my sword's silver gelstei blazed brilliantly — though in truth, no more so than it had at my touch, many times. Kane or Kalkin, as I must now call him, suddenly gave the sword back to me. He rested his hand on top of Estrella's head, then told us:

'Once, long, long ago, from, the end of the Ardun Satra through the Valari and Elijin Satras and even into the present great age, the Maitreyas brought the Lightstone to the universe's worlds. Ashvar, we called the first of these Shining Ones, and the first of the ancient Valari to act as the Maitreya's and Lightstone's Guardian was named Adar. The Maitreyas, through the Lightstone, brought illumination to people and helped them overcome their fear if death. And so helped them to walk the path of the angels. Liljana has spoken of how things were meant to unfold. But what should have happened, in Eluru, as in other universes, was that men and women would awaken to our purpose as stewards of the earth and heavens. Then, through time, even the dirt beneath our feet would shimmer as through an enchantment and the very stars would come alive.'

Kalkin paused to drink in the Lightstone's radiance through his deep, black eyes. Then he sighed and went on: 'Asangal's fall overturned the natural order of things. When he became Angra Mainyu, he brought a darkness to match the Maitreya's light. To overmatch it, almost — or so I feared for too long. We tried to heal Asangal once, in the time leading to the Battle of Tharharra. We failed. The Amshahs did. Solajin and Set, Varkoth and Varshan and Iojin: all the Galadin, Elijin and Valari led by Ashtoreth and Valoreth. And with them, the Maitreya of that time, Dawud Mansur. Thousands and thousands of years before I made the blade that Valashu holds, we tried to strike the true Alkaladur into Angra Mainyu. Through Dawud, we tried. But Angra Mainyu twisted the Sword of Light into the Fire of Death, and turned it back upon the Amshahs to slay millions.'

Kalkin stood close to Estrella, looking into the golden cup in her hands as if looking down through countless ages, dark and bright. Then Daj asked the question to which I thought my life must prove the answer: 'But so many angels — and a Maitreya! Why did they fail?'

'Because,' Kalkin said, 'although most people who stand before the Maitreya and Lightstone are ravished by their radiance, Angra Mainyu has made himself as impenetrable as stone. And so with Yama and Kadaklan and Zun. And Morjin. These, who will not open themselves to the light, must be pierced by it — straight to the heart. And that is why I forged the sword that Valashu holds, to strike Alkaladur true and deep.'

As I raised up my bright sword to the sun, Kalkin told of what had happened here at the top of the Owl's Hill: at a crucial moment in history, millions of beings across the stars — including even the Seven and my companions — had fired the furnaces of their hearts and forged anew the Sword of Love. This great soul force they had passed to Estrella, who gathered it within the infinite golden hollow of the Lightstone and then poured it into me.

'On the day of the battle,' he said. 'Master Matai tells us that the stars and planets perfectly aligned with Ea. But this world had to await another conjunction, too: the Lightstone had to find its way into the hands of the Great Maitreya — and one who could wield the Silver Sword had to find the way to strike Morjin.'

Daj thought about this for a moment, then asked 'But why couldn't Estrella wield the Lightstone and Val's sword? She is the Maitreya! If Val found a way to love Morjin, couldn't she?'