Ymiru looked at me strangely, with a deep sadness. 'So it be, so it be.'
This mark of the Beast disturbed me, and all of us, for if Morjin's men had once come here, they might come again. I felt his presence all around me, in the jagged knifeblades of the ridgelines, in the pinnacles' icy spears, and most of all, in the bitter wind. As promised, it swept across the Nagarshajh as through a dragon's teeth and wailed without relief. It bit at my bones, it carried in its icy gusts whispers of torment and death. As we drew closer to Morjin and the seat of his power on earth, it seemed that he was seeking me even as I sought the Lightstone, calling me as always to surrender up my will and dreams and kneel before him.
I doubted that he could perceive my actual physical presence in these terrible mountains he claimed as his own. But the kirax still poisoned my blood and connected us in ways that chilled me with a growing dread. I knew that he could sense my soul. The howling wind told me this, as did the silent screaming of my lungs. In the icy wastes through which we passed for many days, he sent illusions to confuse and break me. In many of these, I saw myself chained to the face of some rock and being tortured with fire and steel; in others, the frozen ground beneath me suddenly gave way, and I found myself plunging into a black and bottomless abyss.
But the hardest illusion for me to bear was the one in which I had regained the Lightstone and used it to restore the tormented lands of Ea. The imagined pleasure of simply touching this golden cup nearly overwhelmed me. It seduced me into covetousness and pride, and made me want to possess the Lightstone for myself alone and never suffer another even to behold it. So great was the greed for the golden light that Morjin aroused in me that I made for myself illusions of my own. In the dazzling whiteness of Sakai's snows, in the glare and glister of the sun off glacier ice, I began seeing the Lightstone everywhere: on rocky ledges, dropped down into frozen drifts or even floating in the air. It was there, in the nearly blinding fastness of the White Mountains, that I began the fiercest battle yet for my sanity and my very soul.
I drew great strength to join it from my friends, of course, particularly Atara. But they each had battles of their own. And in the end, one must journey far out into the icy wastes of despair to face one's demons alone. I did have a mighty weapon with which to fight. Alkaladur's silustria, like a perfect mirror, threw Morjin's deceits back at him and shielded me from his hideous golden eyes and the worst of his hate. And more, as I attuned to it, it helped me cut through all illusion to see the world as it really is. My whole being began opening to the numinous and the true: in the stark, snowy landscapes of the White Mountains and in the shimmering stars above them, but also within myself. For there shone the bright sword of my soul. I saw that it was indeed possible to polish it more brilliantly than even the silustria itself. And with every bit of rust that I rubbed from it, as I cleansed myself of pride and fear, I felt this sword gleaming brighter and brighter and pointing me on toward my fate.
One night, just past the ides of loj, we made camp at the foot of a glacier. Maram got a fire going out of the last of our wood, and there Ymiru sat with a huge chunk of ice between his legs as he chiseled it with his knife. He worked with a quick, fierce concentration. It was as if he were trying to bring forth the image of some perfect thing that he longed to create. He would not tell us what this was. He did not speak to us, for he had fallen deep into one of his glooms. He even refused the tea that Master Juwain made him. He was, I thought, a man who held onto the dark side of his feelings, afraid that if the demons of his melancholy were driven from him, the angels of his ecstasies would be, too.
'What is it you're carving there?' Maram asked, sidling closer. 'It almost looks like Val's mother.'
It looked like, I thought, the great carving of the Galadin Queen I had seen passing through the Ashtoreth Gate on our entrance to Tria.
But Ymiru didn't answer him. He just set his sculpture down into the snow and then took up a flaming brand from the fire. He held it so that it melted the ice of the sculpture's surface. Then he brought out his purple gelstei, positioning it in front of the sculpture's face.
'What are you doing?' Maram asked him.
None of us knew. But we were all curious, so we gathered around to watch.
And then, as the starlight flickered off the blade of my drawn sword, a sudden thought came to me. I said, 'He's trying to turn his carving to stone.'
'Turn ice to stone?' Maram said. 'Impossible!'
Ymiru suddenly looked up from his work, staring at me in amaze ment. 'How did you know that?' he asked me.
How did I know, I wondered? I looked down at the star-sparkled length of my sword. Its silver geistei gave me to know many things from the slightest hint.
'It be impossible to turn ice to stone, truly,' Ymiru said. 'But to turn water to stone – this be one of the powers of the lilastei.'
'But how?' Maram asked.
Ymiru ran his finger over the sculpture's dripping surface. 'When water falls cold, it wants to turn to ice. This be its natural crystallization. But there be another, too, and that is the clear stone called shatar. The purple galastei makes water want to freeze into this stone. And stone it truly be shatar be as hard as quartz and never thaws.'
As he moved to put away his violet stone, Maram said, 'What are you doing? Aren't you going to show us this shatar of yours?'
'No,' Ymiru said, 'I can't make the lilastei make the water want to freeze this way. I haven't the power.' 'Perhaps not yet.'
Ymiru said nothing as he stared at his sculpture's wet face, now freezing in the wind like that of a spurned lover. 'But what else can the lilastei do?' Maram asked.
'You've told us so little about them, or your people.'
The silence into which Ymiru now fell seemed greater than the expanse of all the mountains of the Nagarshath. He looked east along the line toward which my gleaming sword pointed.
'The lilastei,' I said, gasping at the images that flooded into my mind, 'can mold rock, as the firestones can burn it. That was how the Ymanir made Argattha.'
As Kane's eyes went wide with wonder, everyone looked at me in astonishment. And Ymiru thundered at me, 'Who told you that?'
I felt Alkaladur's bright blade almost humming in the starlight, I said, 'Is it true, Ymiru?'
Ymiru suddenly slumped back, his great chest deflating like a bellows emptied of air.
And then he sighed out, 'Yes, it be true.'
'But how?' Maram asked. 'How can it be?'
Ymiru rubbed his broken nose for a few moments and sighed again. 'How? How, you ask? You see, there was a time when we Ymanir thought that Morjin was our friend.'
The story he now told us was a sad one. Long, long ago, he said, during Morjin's first rise at the end of the Age of the Swords, he had gone to Sakai to win the Ymanir to his cause. At this time his evil deeds were mostly unknown. Morjin was fair of form and graceful with his words; he flattered the ancient Ymanir and brought them gifts: of diamonds and gold, but greatest of all, the purple gelstei.
'It was the Beast himself,' Ymiru said, 'who gave us the first lilastei and taught us to use them. It was he who suggested that we seek beneath Skartaru for the true gold that we might use it to forge a new Lightstone.'
Toward this end, Morjin had called his Red Priests into Sakai to teach the Ymanir and aid in the excavations beneath Skartaru that would come to be the city called Argattha. They remained as counselors when Morjin went off to conquer Alonia and eventually be defeated at the Sarburn. it was they who poisoned the ancient Ymaniris' minds and seduced them into believing terrible lies: that Morjin only wished to unite Ea under one banner to bring peace to its torn lands; that his fall had been brought by treachery and the evil of his enemies. And so, when Morjin had been imprisoned on Damoom for all the Age of Law, Ymiru's ancestors had worked hard and long to prepare Argattha for Morjin's return.
'We built a city fit for kings,' Ymiru said. 'Argattha was a great and glorious place, as we may yet live to see.'
Maram, sipping a mug of kalvaas as he listened to Ymiru speak, said, 'I don't care what we see there – I just want to live to come back out.'
'Tell us,' Kane said, watching Ymiru with his dark eyes, 'what hap-pened when the Lord of Lies did return.'
'That be easy to tell,' Ymiru said sadly. 'Easy, but the hardest of tales: in the time that followed Morjin's
