came over him then -or came howling out of him like a tiger who hunts at night. It knew little of fellowship and nothing at all of the conventions of a friendly fencing match. I stood before Kane with drawn sword, and that was the only thing that mattered to him. In the madness of the moment, in the wildness of his black eyes that I could barely see, I had somehow become his enemy. And I wondered if he had become mine: had Morjin somehow suborned him? Had the Red Dragon's lies finally found their way to his heart? His sudden and utter viciousness terrified me, for I knew that he would destroy me, if he could.
'Ha!' he cried out gleefully. 'Ha – again!'
If not for my gift of sensing his movements – and the skills that my father had taught me – he might well have killed me then. He struck out with his sword straight toward me again and again, and I managed to dance out of his way or parry his ferocious blows only by the narrowest of distances.
'Again!' he called to me. 'Again!'
And again we circled each other, watching and waiting and exchanging slashes of our swords in a flurry of motion. We dueled thus for a very long time – so long that sweat soaked through my mail and the cool air that I gasped burned my lungs like firee. I lunged about the starlit earth looking for an opening that I couldn't find. At last, I retreated toward the fire where the others sat watching us. I held up my hand as I shook my head and leaned forward to catch my breath.
'Again!' Kane cried out. The fire cast its red light over his closely cropped white hair and harsh face.
'What are you doing?' Atara asked him. She was now dearly alarmed and gripped the hilt of her curved sword in her hand.
'Fight, Valashu!' Kane roared at me. 'Don't hide behind others! Now fight, damn it – fight, I say!'
I had no choice but to fight. If I hadn't raised my sword to parry his blow, he would have sent me on to the otherworld. Not even Atara could have moved quickly enough to stop him. The fury of his renewed attack caught me up like a whirlwind.
His black eyes flashed in the fire's glow to the lightning strokes of his sword, and I felt my eyes flashing, too. I felt something else. His whole being burned with one purpose: to cut, to thrust, to tear and rend, to survive – no, to thrive, always and only to live deeply and completely, exultantly, destroying with joy anything that stood ready to destroy him. To know with uncertainty that he couldn't fail, that a light beyond light would always showihim where his sword must strike and an infinite fire pooled always ready to fill his wild heart. His sword touched mine, and I suddenly felt this terrible will blazing inside me. I knew then that the light of it could always drive away any darkness that I feared. This was his first lesson to me, and the last.
'Good!' he cried out. 'Good!'
Zanshin's timeless calm in the face of extreme danger, I thought, was one thing; but this was quite another. I suddenly found the strength to spring forward and attack him with all the fury he had directed at me. The steel of my kalama caught up the starlight as I whirled the long blade at him. For a moment, it seemed that I might cut through his defenses. But he had more cunning and was better with the sword than I.
He slipped beneath my blow and leaped forward with an unbelievable speed. And I suddenly found the point of his sword almost touching my throat.
'Good!' he cried out again. 'Very good, Valashu! That's enough for one night, eh?'
After that, he put away his sword and came forward to embrace me. Then I stood back looking at him.
'You would have killed me, wouldn't you?' I asked him.
'Would I have?' Kane said, almost to himself. Then his gaze hardened, and he growled, 'So – I would have, if you hadn't fought with all your heart. This quest of ours is no practice session, you know. We may only have one chance to gain the Lightstone, and we'd damn well better be ready to take it.'
I went to sleep thinking about what he had said to me – and taught me. I awoke the next morning strangely eager to crow blades with him again. But it was a day for travel into an unknown land. Kane promised another round of swordplay that evening if I were willing, and I had to content myself with that, And so we went down into the Vardaloon. The path we had been following took us into a hilly country at the very edge of it. But soon the ground leveled out into a lowland of little streams and still ponds.
Although the forest was rather thick here, we had no trouble making our way through it. The elms and oaks were familiar friends; birds sang in their branches, while beneath them shrubs such as lowbush blueberries were heavy with fruit and promised a welcome addition to our meals.
And yet, there was something disquieting about these woods. The air was too warm and close, and too little light found its way through the unbroken cover of leaves.
The squirrels who made their home here were rather sluggish in their motions and seemed too thin. A doe that crossed our path bounded out of the way too slowly; neither were her eyes as bright as they should have been. That there should have been a path at all in woods where no one had lived or gone for thousands of years disturbed us all. Perhaps, I thought, it was only an ancient game trail.
'Perhaps,' Maram said as we stopped to catch our breath, 'it is used by people.'
'I doubt that,' Kane said. 'I've never heard of people living in the Vardaloon.'
'They must,' Maram said as he slapped a mosquito that had landed on the side of his sweating neck. And then he waved his hand at another hovering near his ear. 'How else are these bloodsuckers fed?'
We resumed our journey, riding in order along the path as it wound its way west through the trees. We saw no people but there were plenty of mosquitoes, even in the full warmth of the day. They dung to the leaves of the bushes and took to the air in whining swarms as we brushed by them. They bedevilled our mounts as well, biting their ears and choking their nostrils. The dark woods soon filled with the sounds of slapping hands and horses snorting.
'I was wrong, Val,' Maram called from behind me. His big voice filled the spaces between the tall trees around us; it almost drowned out the whumph of Altaru's hooves and the whine of the mosquitoes biting us. 'People couldn't live here. And neither can we. Perhaps we should turn back.'
'Be quiet!' Kane called from behind him farther down the path. 'No one ever died from a few mosquitoes!'
'Then I'll be the first,' Maram complained. He sighed and said 'Well at least they can't get any worse.'
But that evening, as we made camp near some pretty poplars at least a hundred feet high, they got worse. With the bleeding away of the thin sunlight from the forest, the mosquitoes came out of the bushes like demons from hell. They sought us out in swarms of swarms, and now I began to fear that they might really kill us draining us of blood or filling our noses and mouths so that we couldn't breathe. If not for an ointment made of yusage that Master Juwain found in his wooden chest, we might have been helpless before their onslaught. We lathered the reddish ointment over our faces, hands and necks, quickly exhausting Master Juwain's supply. While it didn't keep the mosquitoes from biting us and certainly didn't drive them off, it seemed that they attacked us in somewhat fewer numbers and with slightly less viciousness.
'I've never seen mosquitoes like these!' Maram said, waving his firestone and slapping at his face. 'They can't be natural!'
He sat with the rest of us between three smoky fires that he had built. We were all hunched over with our cloaks pulled tightly around our faces as we now choked on the thick streams of smoke that wafted this way and that. But it was better than being stung by the mosquitoes.
'They're just hungry,' Kane muttered to Maram. 'If you were that hungry, you'd carve up your own mother for dinner.'
At any other time, Maram might easily have found a riposte to Kane's jibe. But now it seemed to drive him into a sullenness and self-pity that he couldn't shake. Master Juwain tried to cheer him by reading an uplift-ing verse from the Book of Ages, but Maram waved his hand at his too-blithe words as if warding off yet another assault of mosquitoes. Liljana made him some mint tea sweetened with honey the way he liked it, but he said that the evening was too hot for tea. He even refused the cup of brandy that Atara brought him. And when Alphanderry brought out his mandolet and struck up a song, Maram complained that he couldn't hear the music against the whining of the mosquitoes' wings in his ears.
'We're all miserable,' I said as I came over and knelt by his side. 'Don't make it worse.'
'What shall I do, then?'
I walked off toward the stream and returned a few moments later with a large, round rock. I handed it to Maram and said, 'This is a beautiful thing, don't you think?'
'It's a rock, Val,' he said, looking at it dubiously.
