would give birth to the Cosmic Maitreya who would lead all worlds everywhere to a glorious destiny, or else it would descend into the darkest of worlds and bring forth a dark angel who would free the Baaloch, thus loosing upon the entire universe a great evil and possibly destroying it.
'The Galadin,' Ymiru told us, 'took a terrible chance in sending the Lightstone to Ea.
And the dice they shook six ages ago are tum bling still.'
I felt my heart beating in rhythm with Ymiru's and with the deeper pulsing of the earth. My sword gleamed in my hand as the distant stars called to me. I saw in their shimmering lights a grand design that had long awaited completion. Some great event, I sensed, had been coming for untold years, set into motion ages of ages ago with the force of whole worlds tumbling through space. I knew then that I and my friends, must face Morjin in Argattha. For that, too, was one of the virtues of the silver gelstei, that it let me see the way that my fate was aligned with the much greater fate of the world and the whole universe itself
'You should have told us,' Atara said to Ymiru. 'You should have told us before this.'
'I'm sorry,' Ymiru said, 'I should have. But I didn't want to crush your hrope.'
Maram was now drunk on the potent kalvaas – but not quite drunk enough to suit him. He took another swallow of it, belched and sighed out, 'Ah, to think we've come this far for nothing.'
'What do you mean, little man?'
'Well, surely in light of what you've told us, the risk of entering Argattha is too great.
Surely you can see that. If we should find the Lightstone, and Morjin finds us, then. .. ah, I don't like to think about then.'
'I can't see that,' Atara said, squeezing her white gelstei in her hand. 'We've known for many miles that we were taking a great risk.'
Master Juwain nodded his lumpy head, agreeing with her. To Maram, and all of us, he said, 'The Galadin, in their wisdom, sent the Lightstone to Ea, hoping for the best.
So we should hope, too.'
'So we should,' Liljana added. 'It's not upon us to weigh this risk down to the last grain. Only to take it.'
Maram took yet another pull of his drink. He looked at me and asked, 'Does that mean we are still going to Argattha?'
'Ha!' Kane said, clapping him on the back, 'it means just that.'
'Does it, Val?' Maram asked me.
'Yes,' I said, 'it does.'
With the exception of Ymiru, who insisted on staying awake to take the first watch, we all retired to our furs. But I, at least, could not sleep. Great things had been told that night. Far beneath Skartaru's pointed summit, in the bowels of the earth, Morjin labored long and deep to free the Dark Lord from his prison on the world of Damoom. And now we must labor to find the door into Argattha. What we would find on the other side, I thought, not even the Galadin themselves could know.
Chapter 40
We were all quiet when we set out the next morning. Our breath steamed out into the bitter air, and our boots crunched against the cold, squeaking snow. It was enough, I thought, to avoid trpping and tumbling down some steep slope, enough merely to keep placing one foot ahead of the other and continue plowing through Sakai's frozen wastes. But I couldn't help thinking of Angra Mainyu, this great, fallen Galadin whose dreadful face could darken whole worlds. I knew that somehow, through Morjin, he, too, sensed my defiance and trembled to crush me in his wrath.
And so for two days we worked our way closer to Argattha. Our approach led us through a wild, broken country where we lost the thread of our road. Finally, following Ymiru's map and the lines of the land, we came to a great gorge running for forty miles to either side of us, north and south. It was hundreds of feet wide and very deep: standing at the lip of it, we looked down and saw a little river winding its way past layers of rock far below. Ymiru had hoped to find a bridge here, but it seemed that the only way across the gorge was to fly.
'Is there no way down it?' Atara asked, looking over the edge. I think she knew there wasn't. A very agile man, perhaps, might be able to climb down such a forbidding wall but no horse ever could.
Liljana looked up and down the gorge, at the Mountains framing it, and then at the map which Ymiru held out before him. She said, 'It would be hard work to walk around this. I should think it would add a hundred miles to our journey.'
'That's too far,' Master Juwain said. 'The horses would starve.'
As we stood with the horses on the narrow shelf of land above the gorge, I felt Altaru's belly rumbling with hunger – as I did my own. We had run out of oats for the horses and had little enough food for ourselves.
'Perhaps the bridge you seek is farther up the gorge,' Liljana said to Ymiru. Then she turned to look at the rent earth toward the right and said, 'Or perhaps that way.'
'I had thought the bridge would be right here,' Ymiru said despond ently.
He walked away from us, along the ragged lip of the gorge, looking down at the rocks below for any sign of a fallen bridge. Then he sat down on a rock and bent his head low as he stared down at the ground in silence.
'So,' Kane said, 'seeking for non-existent bridges up and down this gorge would be as futile as trying to walk around it.'
'Then we will have to turn back,' Maram said.
'Turn back?' Kane said to him. 'To what?'
After a while, I gave Altaru's reins to Atara, and went over to Ymiru where he sat fifty yards away, now staring down into the gorge as if he were contemplating throwing himself into it.
'I was sure the bridge would be here,' he said, not even bothering to look up at me.
'Now I've put us in a hrorrible spot.'
'You can't blame yourself,' I said, sitting down beside him. 'And you can't give up hope, either.'
'But, Val, what are we to do?' he asked as he pointed at the gorge. 'Walk across this on air? You might as well put your hropes into old wives' legends.'
Something sparked in me as he said this. And so I asked him, 'What legends are these?'
He finally looked up at me and said, There are stories told that the ancients built invisible bridges. But no one believes them.'
'Perhaps you should believe them,' I said, gazing at the sun-filled spaces of the gorge. 'What else is there to do?'
'Nothing,' he said. 'There be nothing to do.'
'Are you sure?'
He smiled at me sadly and said, 'That be what I love about you, Val – you never give up hrope.'
'That's because there always is hope.'
'In you, perhaps, but not in me.'
Inside him, I sensed, was a whole, dark, turbid ocean of self doubt and despair. But there, too, was the sacred spark: the ineffable flame that could never be quenched so long as life was in life. And in Ymiru this flame burned much brighter than it did in other men. How was it that he, who could feel so much, couldn't feel this?
'Ymiru,' I said, grasping his huge hand. It was much warmer than mine, and yet as my heart opened to him, I felt a knife-like heat passing from me into him. 'You've led us this far. Now take us the rest of the way toward Argattha or else the work of your father and all your grandfathers will have been in vain.'
His ice-blue eyes suddenly lit up as he squeezed my hand almost hard enough to break it. He looked across the gorge and said, 'But Val, even if there were such a bridge here, how would I ever find it?'
'Your people are builders,' I said to him. 'If you were to build a bridge across this ditch, where would you put it?' A fire seemed to flare inside him then. He gathered up a great handful of stones and leapt to his feet. His hard eyes darted this way and that measuring distances, assessing the lay of the great, columnar buttresses of rock along the length of the gorge. He began walking along it with great strides and great vigor. Here and there, he paused a moment to hurl a stone far out into the gorge and watch it plunge through the air down towards the river below.
