Diamond Warriors

after tomorrow, supposing that we can get down off this damn mountain, we'll have to face the Waashians. And then. .'

He did not finish his sentence. His words died into the pounding of the torrential rain.

Somehow we did all survive that bitterly cold night. In the morning, still freezing in the pouring rain, my men marched onward again with nothing more to put into their bellies than a little dried beef and cold battle biscuits. I led the way along the treacherous track. We had to go much slower, especially around the slopes of Mount Ihsan's great buttresses, for the track in many places became little more than slips of mud hiding stones that could turn a man's ankle or lame a horse's hoof. Lord Zandru did not have a good memory of this route, but he offered his anticipation that the track would dip down into more level country after only a couple more miles of snaking through some of the mountain's steepest terrain.

I placed much hope in this, for our delay had already put to the question our timely arrival on the battlefield south of Harban. And then, after I had ridden Altaru up and around another sparsely wooded saddle, I came out suddenly upon one of Mount Ihsan's steepest slopes. And my hope washed away. For I saw ahead me, for a stretch of about half a mile, that the entire side of the mountain had come down in a rockslide that had completely buried the track.

I dismounted and stood on a large shelf of earth gazing in despair ahead at me. Lord Zandru dismounted, too, and came up to me; so did Lord Avijan, Lord Noldashan, Kane, Liljana and my other friends.

'This is the end, then,' Lord Zandru sighed out. He was one of those men who are quick to see in any event the worst possible outcomes. 'We have taken a chance and lost.'

'No, there must be a way,' I said. 'There is always a way.'

The rain seemed suddenly to beat down even harder. It did not take much of an eye to see that even a mountain goat would not have dared the mud and rocks spread out above and below the track — or rather, where the track had once been.

'I can't see any other way,' Master Juwain said to me, scanning the steep and rugged side of the mountain. 'Unless you turn the army around and go back a few miles and try bushwhacking across the ground lower down. But that would take another day, at least, and the horses could not negotiate such terrain in any case.'

'No, we can't go back now,' I told him. I grasped the hilt of my sword to give strength to my trembling hand and stop the shivering ripping through me. And then a thought came to me. 'Perhaps we can clear a path.'

'Through that?' Lord Zandru said, pointing at the mass of sodden earth churned up ahead of us. 'It would take a thousand men working with picks and shovels for three days. And then who is to say another slide wouldn't bury your army as it marched past?'

My men, I thought, could build a good route along this slope, for my father had well-trained them to such work, as he had me. But Lord Zandru was right about one thing: we did not have enough time.

'Maram!' I called out. 'Could you clear a way? With your firestone?'

Maram, always eager for a chance at heroics that did not cost him too much effort or risk of his life, strode over to stand beside me. He took out his great red gelstei, nearly a foot long. Raindrops broke like a waterfall against the ruby crystal.

'I don't know,' he shouted through the rain. 'I haven't used it very much since Argattha — and never for so great a work as this.'

He glanced back at the dull diamond gleam of ten thousand men spread out in a line for three miles across the rocky buttresses of Mount Ihsan. Then he glanced up at the dark, closed-in sky.

'In any case,' he said, 'there is too little light. I'd be lucky to get a few sparks out of my stone, let alone the fire needed to melt through rock.'

'You could try,' I said to him. 'With a firestone no bigger than yours, Telemesh built the way between Mesh and Ishka.'

Maram must have clearly remembered the day that we had passed through the mile-long Telemesh Gate, melted out of the rock between Mounts Raaskel and Korukel, for he smiled hugely. Then he said, 'But it took Telemesh six days to cut his channel, or so it is said.'

'Telemesh,' I told him, 'boiled into the air a good part of a mountain. You have much less to do: merely to clear away a little mud and a few rocks.'

Again, he looked out at the collapsed slope ahead of us. Then he nodded his head and called out: 'Very well — I shall try! Stand back, now! Stand back as Maram Marshayk makes a new path!'

Maram stood at the edge of the shelf, perhaps four hundred yards from the place where the track disappeared into the mass of the rockslide. He gathered in all his concentration as he pointed his crystal at the collapsed slope. Then he let loose a stream of fire at it.

The flames that he summoned from his gelstei, however, while much more than a few sparks, were much less than was needed to melt anything larger than a pebble. After half an hour of such fruitless work, he threw up his hands in frustration.

'There is too little light,' he said again, looking up at the sky. 'This is hopeless.'

Master Storr, the Master Galastei, stepped up to Maram then. He had his sopping cloak pulled tightly around his old, freckled face. He told him, 'I have made a study of the firestones. Although I have not been so fortunate as to have one to work with, much is written about them in the old texts. You say it is too dark, that your crystal cannot drink in the sun's fires, and so give them back-But what of the fires of the earth?'

He spoke, of course, of the telluric currents that burned most heatedly beneath Ea's mountains — the very same earth fires that Morjin would use to free Angra Mainyu.

'I'm sure,' Master Storr told Maram, 'that you could learn to summon them, with our help.'

He explained to Maram that the 'feel' of the telluric currents would be more subtle than that of the sun's blazing rays. And so Maram would have to open himself to these deep flames and pass them up through his body into his firestone.

'Now is the time,' Abrasax added, moving closer to Maram. 'You must not let the currents get caught up in that overly-worked second chakra of yours.'

Maram rested his hand just above his belt: the very place in his body from which he had summoned those fires that had too often gotten him into trouble. Then I remembered lines from a verse that he had composed:

But 'low the belly burns sweet fire,

The sweetest way to slake desire.

In clasp of woman, warmth of wine

A honeyed bliss and true divine.

I am a second chakra man;

I take my pleasure where I can;

At tavern, table or divan -

I am a second chakra man.

'This is surely a day,' Abrasax told him, 'for opening all your chakras. And we shall help you.'

As at the Brotherhood's school, the Seven positioned themselves around Maram. With Master Okuth dead, Abrasax asked Master Juwain to stand in his place. He gave him Master Okuth's old gelstei: the emerald crystal that was one of the seven Great Gelstei. Each of the other Masters held one of these ancient stones toward Maram.

What followed was no exercise or mere discipline designed toward the perfection of Maram's body and being. The whole world, it seemed, depended on what now transpired. I watched as the various gelstei came alive in the Seven's hands; their radiating colors, I imagined, found a perfect resonance inside each of Maram's chakras. I wondered if Abrasax could perceive a river of light, like a rainbow, flowing inside him? Whatever invisible fires filled Maram, the flames that suddenly erupted from his red crystal split the air for all to see. The heat of this lightning burned the very rain into steam.