again,' Kane told us.
We had paused to eat a quick lunch on the side of a hill. From its grassy slopes, we had a good view of the mountains, now quite close to us in the west. Only a few miles away, one of the tributaries of the Istas ran down from them through the forest like a blue snake slithering through a sea of green. Just to the north was a spur of low peaks. If we followed the line of this spur, Kane said, we would find the ruins of the Tur-Solonu in the notch where it jutted out from the main body of the Blue Mountains.
'It can't be more than forty miles from here,' Kane said. 'If we ride steady, we should reach the ruins by sunset tomorrow.'
'Sunset!' Maram cried out as he drew a mug of beer from one of the casks. 'Just in time to greet the scryers' ghosts when they come out to haunt the ruins at night!'
We rode hard that day and the next into the notch in the mountains. Their wooded slopes rose to our right and left; in places bare rock shone in the sun to remind us of their bones, but they were mostly covered with trees and bushes all the way up their slopes. Like a huge funnel of granite and green, they directed us toward the notch's very apex, where the Tur-Solonu had been built late in the Age of the Mother, nearly a whole age before its destruction. I kept looking for the remnants of this tower through the canopies of the trees around us. All I saw, however, was a wild forest that might someday swallow up the very mountains themselves. If men and women had ever lived in this country, there was no sign of them, not even a fallen-in hut or gravestone to mark their lives and deaths.
And then, through a break in the trees, we saw it: the Tower rose up above the notch's floor like a great chess piece broken in half. Even in its destruction, it was still a mighty work, its remains standing at least a hundred and fifty feet high. The white stone facing us was cracked and scarred with streaks of black; in places, it seemed to have been melted and fused into great, glistening flows that hung down its curved sides like drips of wax. I wondered immediately if Morjin had used a firestone to destroy it. But the first firestones, I thought, had been created only a thousand years later in the Age of Law.
'I'm afraid that is true,' Master Juwain said as we looked out at the ancient Tower of the Sun. 'Petram Vishalan forged the first of the red gelstei in Tria in the year 1319.'
The first red gelstei that anyone knew about,' Kane muttered to us, 'Don't forger that it was Morjin, as Kadar the Wise,, who spread the relb over the Long Wall and melted it for Tulumar's hordes to overrun Alonia long before that.'
'Are you saying that the Red Dragon forged a firestone and told no one of it?'
Master Juwain in asked.
'So – how else to explain what we see?' Kane said, pointing at the tower.
'Perhaps an earthquake,' Master Juwain said. 'Perhaps the eruption of a volcano would -'
'No – it's told that Morjin destroyed the Tur-Solonu,'
Master Juwain removed his leather-bound book from his cloak and patted it reassuringly. 'But it is not told in the Saganom Elu.'
'Books!' Kane snarled out with a sudden savagery. 'Books can tell whatever the damn fools who write them believe. Most books should be burned!'
Kane stood glaring at the book that Master Juwain held in his strong, old hand. The look of horror on Master Juwain's face suggested that he might as well have called for the burning of babies.
'If the Red Dragon forged firestones during the Age of Swords,' Master Juwain said,
'then why didn't he use them in his conquest of Alonia? And later, against Aramesh at the Battle of Sarburn?'
'I didn't say that he forged firestones,' Kane said. 'Perhaps he made only one – the one that destroyed this Tower.'
For a while, he stood arguing with Master Juwain in plain sight of the Tur-Solonu.
The first red gelstei, he said, were known to be very dangerous to use: sometimes their fire turned against the one who wielded them, or the stones even exploded in their faces. Thus had Petram Vishalan died in 1320 – a fact that Kane gleefully pointed out was recorded in the Saganom Elu.
'Perhaps we'll never know what destroyed the Tower,' I said, looking at its jagged shape through the woods. 'But perhaps we should complete our journey and search there before it grows too late.'
And so we rode through the woods straight for the Tur-Solonu. The trees again obscured it from view, but soon we crested a little hill and there the trees gave way to barren ground. We came out onto a wedge-shaped desolation some three miles wide – but growing ever narrower toward the point of the notch where the spur met the main mountains. Walls of rock rose up on either side of us; the Tur-Solonu was now a great broken mass directly to the north at the middle of the notch. I wondered if the scorched-looking land about us was truly poisoned after all, for little grew there except a few yellowish grasses and some lichens among the many rocks. As we drew closer to the Tower, waves of heat seemed to emanate from the ground; Flick flared more brightly while Altaru suddenly whinnied, and I felt a strange tingling run up his trembling legs and into me. I had a sense that we were coming into a place of power and treading over earth that was both sacred and cursed.
The first ruins we came upon occupied an area about a half mile south of the tower.
Much of the blasted stone there lay upon the ground in rectangular patterns or still stood as broken walls. We guessed it to be the remains of buildings, perhaps dormitories and dining halls and other such structures that the ancient scryers must have used. We dismounted, and began walking slowly among the mounds of rattling rock.
If the Lightstone lay buried beneath it, I thought, we might dig for a hundred years before uncovering it.
'But there is no reason that Sartan Odinan would have hidden it here,' Master Juwain said. He pointed straight toward the Tur-Solonu to the north, and then due east a quarter of a mile where stood the scorched columns of what must have been the scryers' temple. 'Surely he would have hidden it there. Or perhaps inside the Tower itself.'
Atara, standing with her hand shielding her eyes from the sun, pointed at another fallen-in structure a quarter mile due west of the Tower. It stood – if that was the right word – next to a swift stream running down from the mountains. 'What is that?' she asked.
'Probably the ruins of the baths,' Kane said. 'At least, that was my guess the first time I came here.'
'You never did tell us why you came here,' Atara said, fixing her bright eyes upon him.
'No, I didn't, did I?' Kane said. He gazed at the Tower, and it seemed he might retreat into one of his deep, scowling silences. And then he said, 'When I was younger, I wanted to see the wonders of the world. So, now I've seen them.'
Maram was now walking slowly among the shattered buildings; he paused from time to time as he looked back and forth toward the tower as if measuring angles and distances with his quick brown eyes. After a while, he said, 'Well, there's still much of the ruins we haven't seen. It's growing late – why don't we begin our search before it grows too late?'
'But where should we begin?' Master Juwain asked.
'Surely in the Temple,' Liljana said. Although her face remained calm and controlled as it usually was, I knew that she was tingling inside with I a rare impatience.
'But what about the Tower?' Master Juwain asked. 'Shouldn't we climb it and see what is there?'
For a time, as the sun dropped quickly behind the mountains, the two of them argued as to where we should direct our efforts. Finally, I held up my hand and said,
'Such explorations will likely take longer than the hour of light we have left. Why don't we leave them until tomorrow?'
These were some of the hardest words I had ever spoken. If the others were trembling inside to find the Lightstone that very day, I was on fire.
'Why don't we walk around the Tower first,' I said, 'and see what we can see?'
The others reluctandy agreed to this, and so we began leading the horses in a wide spiral around the Tower. Soon we came to a circle of standing stones about four hundred yards from it. That is, some of the stones were still standing, while most were scorched and lying flat on the grass as if some impossibly strong wind had blown them over. Each stone was cut of granite, and twice the height of a tall man.
The entire area was also peppered with smaller stones, likewise melted, which we took to be the broken remains of the Tower, There were many of them, all of a white marble nowhere visible in the rock of the
