All of us, even Kane, bowed to the women one by one. And then Mithuna looked at Kane with her dark eyes and said, 'As you can see. the oracle of the Tur Solonu is not dead,'
'Ha – I see a broken towers and scattered stones,' Kane said. 'And six women dressed up in white robes.' .'It's said that men and women see what they want to see,' Mithuna told him. 'Which is why they don't truly see.'
'Scryer talk,' Kane muttered. 'So it is with all the oracles now.'
'We speak as we speak,' Mithuna said. 'And you hear what you will hear.'
'Once,' Kane said, 'this oracle spoke the wisdom of the stars.'
'And you doubt that it still speaks this wisdom. So it is that the wind must blow; so the sun must rise and fall and the ages pass.'
She told us then what had happened in this very place in an age long past. After Morjin had destroyed the Tower of the Sun with the very crystal that Maram held in his hands, he had ordered the scryers who served the oracle to be crucified. But a few of them had eluded Morjin's murderous priests and had escaped into the surrounding mountains. There they had built a refuge in secret. And when Morjin and his men had finally abandoned the Tur-Solonu, the scryers had returned to the ruins to stand beneath the stars. The scryers grew old and died as all must do, but as the years passed, others had joined them. Thus had Mithuna's predecessors established a true and secret oracle in the ruins of the Tur-Solonu. And so, century after century, age after age, scryers from across Ea had come to this sacred site to seek their visions and listen for the voices of the Galadin on the stellar winds.
'But how would they know to come here?' I asked her.
'How did you know to come, Valashu Elahad?'
A savage look in Kane's eyes warned me to say nothing of our quest, and so for the moment I kept my silence.
'Surely,' she said, 'you came because you were called.'
I closed my eyes and listened to my heart beating strongly. Deeper, beneath my feet, the very earth seemed to beat like a great drum calling men to war.
'There is something about this place,' I said as I looked at her.
'Something, indeed,' she said. 'There is no other like it in all Ea.'
Here, she said, beneath the ground upon which we stood, the fires of the earth whirled in patterns that burned away time. Nowhere else in the world did the telluric currents well so deeply and connect the past to the future.
'This is why the standing stones were set into the ground,' she told us. 'This is why the Tur-Solonu was built, to draw up the fires from the earth.'
As Mithuna told of this, Master Juwain rubbed his bald head thought-fully, then said,
'The Brotherhoods have suspected for a long time that there was a great earth chakra in the Blue Mountains. We should have sent someone to search it out long ago.'
'And now they have sent you,' Mithuna said. 'But I'm sorry to tell you that only scryers ever see visions here. Many are called but few are chosen.'
Here she smiled at Atara and her eyes were like windows to other worlds. 'Thank you for making the journey. We can only hope that it is the One who has sent you to us.'
Atara looked at me, and I looked at her, and then to Mithuna she said, 'But I'm no scryer!' 'Aren't you?'
'No, I'm a warrior of the Manslayer Society! I'm Atara Ars Narmada daughter of King-'
'It's all right,' Mithuna said, reaching out to grasp Atara's hand. 'Few know who they really are.'
A wild look flashed across Atara's face then. Her eyes fell upon me for reassurance as she said, 'I saw the spider spinning her web, and there were the gray men, too, but that must have all been chance. It must have been, mustn't it?'
I said nothing as I looked for the diamonds of her eyes in the failing light.
'And even if it wasn't chance,' she went on, 'I've seen so very little. That doesn't make me a scryer, does it?'
Maram, who was laughing softly to himself as he gripped his red crystal, said to her,
'Now I understand how you always win at dice.' 'But I'm just lucky!' Atara protested.
Mithuna stroked Atara's hand and told her, 'You have seen so very little of what there is to see. If you had been trained… Oh, dear child, you've sacrificed much to forsake such training.'
Atara withdrew her hand and then looked at it as if trying to understand her fate from its many lines.
'It's dangerous to look into the future without being trained,' Mithuna said.
'Dangerous to look at all And that is why you've come to us, so that we can help you.'
'No,' Atara said, 'I came here to look for the Lightstone. We all did.'
She touched the gold medallion that King Kiritan had given her; she spoke of the great quest upon which many knights had set out. Then she nodded toward Alphanderry and told Mithuna what his dead friend had heard in the Singing Caves.
'The lightstone,' Mithuna said. She traded quick looks with Ayanna, who had white hair and a deeply lined face, and was the oldest of the scryers. 'Always the Lightstone.'
Here Kane smiled savagely and said, 'Ha – you didn't see that eh?
'No scryer has ever seen the Lightstone,' she said, staring back at him. 'At least, not in our visions.'
'But why not?' Atara asked her.
Now Mithuna favored the young and almond-eyed Songlian with one of her faraway gazes before turning back to Atara. 'Because, dear child, all that is or ever will be flows out of a single point in time, and there the Lightstone always is. To look there is like looking at the sun.'
'Paradoxes, mysteries,' Kane spat out. 'You scryers make a mystery of everything.'
'No, it is not we who have made things so,' Mithuna reminded him.
In the light given off by Flick's twinkling form, Kane's face filled with both resentment and longing.
'The Singing Caves,' Alphanderry said to Mithuna, 'spoke these words: 'If you would know where the Gelstei was hidden, go to the Blue Mountains and seek in the Tower of the Sun.'
'The Singing Caves always speak the truth,' Mithuna said. She pointed at Maram's red crystal and smiled. 'There is the gelstei.'
'Hoy, there it is,' Alphanderry agreed. 'But it is not the Gelstei.'
'It is difficult, isn't it, to know of which gelstei the Caves spoke?'
'But when one speaks of the Gelstei, what is always meant is the Lightstone.'
'Always?'
Kane, who was growing angrier by the moment, scowled as he looked about the starlit ruins and the dark mountains that towered above us.
'Are you saying that the Lightstone wasn't hidden here?' I asked.
'No,' Mithuna said, shaking her head, 'I wouldn't say that. Morjin hid it here long ago.'
'But it is not hidden here now?'
'No, I wouldn't say that either,' she said mysteriously. 'The Lightstone still is here.
But if you truly want to recover it and hold it in your hands, you'll have to journey somewhere else.'
'So,' Kane muttered to the wind. 'Scryers.'
But I wasn't about to give up so easily. I said to Mithuna, 'So the Lightstone is here, somewhere, somehow – but it isn't here, as well?'
'Is the Tur-Solonu here?' she asked pointing at the broken tower above us. 'Are you here, Valashu Elahad? What would a scryer have said to this ten thousand years ago? What would she say ten thousand years hence?'
I took a deep breath as I asked, 'If the Lightstone is here, have you seen it, with your eyes?'
'No one sees the Lightstone with just the eyes,' Mithuna said. 'The eyes won't hold it anymore than hands will light.'
'But how do you know it isn't somewhere among these ruins, then?
'Because,' she said, 'although I cannot see where it is, I can see where it is not.'
'But I thought you said it was everywhere.'
'That is true – it is everywhere and nowhere' I was beginning to see why Kane hated scryers. Was Mithuna I
