whose five points were Kane, Liljana, Maram, Ymiru and I, Master Juwain stood with his green gelstei blazing and pouring new life into our tired limbs and souls. And as we inched slowing toward the door leading to Morjin's rooms, Daj suddenly darted out from behind a pillar and grabbed up a cast-off spear. He went forth mercilessly finishing off the wounded and dying where they lay sprawled and groaning on the floor. One guard, outraged at his temerity, closed and swung his halberd at his head. Daj dropped low, beneath the blow even as he thrust up with the spear. It drove straight into the guard's groin. In the wrath of his awful scream, the guard's backstroke would have split open Dai's brains if Ymiru hadn't come up and brained him with his terrible club.
'Val!' Kane called out to my right. His sword flashed and a hand flew though the air nearby. 'Don't let Morjin escape!'
I was closer to him than was Kane. Now, through the mass of men in front of me, I caught glimpses of Morjin's golden tunic. He still crouched low, taking cover behind his frantically battling guards. But as Atara fired off the last of her arrows and her mighty bow fell silent, he stood up straight and drew his sword. His eyes found mine across ten yards of the blood-slick floorstone. His hatred poured out of them and something more: he tried to murder me with a sudden blast of the valarda. The shining silustria of my sword, however, shielded me from this deadly assault – as it did my companions. And as I raised Alkaladur high above my head, he looked upon it and saw his death.
I fought with a rare fury to kill him then. But this came not from a desire for vengeance. The only way for me to guard the Lightstone was to slay my enemies, not in fear, anger or hate, but only in knowledge, prowess and necessity, even out of love – a vast and terrible love beyond love that would destroy such diseased beings as Morjin so that new and greater life could be. He was a poisonous serpent who must be slain if I was to protect others. And more, he was a cracked vessel who could not hold light but only darkness. He had lived ages too long, and it was long past time that the One made a new cup out of this particular day.
It was the destroying wrath of the One itself that fell upon me and blazed forth through the lightning strokes of my sword. I swung Alkaladur and struck off a guard's head; I lunged and drove its point through the mail covering a guard's chest, clean through his body and into the chest of the guard pressed up close behind him.
In wrenching its blade free, I killed two more. A few moments later, another guard tried to parry a quick blow. My sword cut the steel of his – and then cut straight down through his shoulder, cleaving his body in two. The terror of my sword caused the guards behind him to panic. But they were bunched around Morjin too close simply, to flee.
At last, I understood the Valari ideal of fearlessness, flawlessness and flowingness, not just with my head, but in the exquisite pressure of the black jade of my sword's hilt against my hands, and in the surging of my heart and deep in my soul.
Fearlessness: I was at one with the death that I dealt out, and so with the wild joy of life that poured into me. If I saw that a guard's spear thrust might be taken square upon my armor, I didn't flinch from it, but rather trusted to the strength of its steel rings forged by the master armorers of Mesh. Thus I was free to thrust and cut myself, like a whirlwind whipping a silver blade among my foes, lunging and parrying and killing – all the time dancing the wild and delicate dance of death.
Flawlessness: In the grace bestowed upon me, nothing could pierce the perfect diamond clarity of my awareness and will to fulfill my fate. All of my soul was in my sword, and my sword was in me, and so I cut my way through steel and flesh straight toward Morjin.
Flowingness: This desperate fight of guards screaming and hacking and spinning about had a logic and pattern that was not mine to control. But as in a storm at sea, there was a still point around which all the winds of violence whirled, and this quiet place was inside of me. And so I became one with the pattern of the battle, moving among men like water, always flowing down the red channels of death toward the great Red Dragon whose name was Morjin.
As Kane and my other, friends battled beside me and guarded my back, I fought my way closer to him. Now only two tall guards, aiming spears at me, stood between us.
I looked past them and locked eyes with him; he waited to slash his sword into me.
His snarl of rage promised endless torments, but he no longer had the power of illusion to make me feel them, nor would he ever again. His hideousness stunned me.
Now that we were so near each other, I knew that he didn't really smell roses as his illusions suggested. Rather, he gave off the sick reek of fear, fouler than a bloody flux, putrid as death. It hit like the blow of a war hammer deep into my belly. My bones ached with the urge to destroy this twisted being. From the circle of the carved stone beneath us came the gurgle of me blood of many dead men being sucked down the drain of the dragon's mouth; grounded out like a roaring from deep inside the mountain itself.
'Morjin!' I cried out even as I cut my way through these last two guards.
And his cry joined mine in echoing from the cold stone of the hall, 'Valari!'
We crossed swords then, and my greater fury bore him back into the guards massed about him. The sharp edge of a halberd slammed into the mail covering my side, but I scarcely felt it. A spear thrust at my face, and I pulled back my head to let it slip harmlessly past a couple of inches from my eyes. I raised back my sword.
'Val!' From on top of the throne, Atara's strong, clear voice rang out like a bell through the hall. 'You mustn't kill him!'
I suddenly remembered the prophecy that the death of Morjin would be the death of Ea.
'Val.'
It was said by some that Morjin was the finest swordsman on Ea. And perhaps he was. But now his hatred of me and the rigidness of his lust to take my head betrayed him. I felt his murderous intentions deep in my throat, and ducked beneath the vicious slash of his sword at the last moment. And then, rising quickly, I saw my chance. I thrust my sword over the shoulder of a quickly closing guard into Morjin's neck. It was a terrible wound, a mortal wound – but it failed to kill him.
'His fate is yours,' Atara called to me. 'If you kill him, you kill yourself!'
'I don't care!' I cried out.
I knew what she said was true. I stood in the land of death with all the men I had slain. If I now killed Morjin, this great immortal being with whom I was connected by the poison in my blood and the dark weave of fate, I would never leave it. Already, with the muscles and veins of Morjin's neck ripped open into a bloody hole, I could barely stand, barely see. Again, I raised back my sword.
'Val, if you kill yourself, you kill me!'
Atara's warning seemed to crack the stone of the mountain and stop the earth itself from turning. I suddenly knew something else: that Atara's blinding had shocked her to a wholly new level of scrying. Thus, even though eyeless, she had been able to
'see' to fire her arrows into Morjin's guards. I sensed that she was seeing things both far and near in space and time. And now she fired a different kind of arrow into me.
Even as I hesitated and Morjin's guards closed in and came between us, she called out that she loved me more than life. If I died, she told me, she would die, too.
Her words tore open my heart. How much more must this beautiful, tortured woman be made to lose? I looked through the ring of guards to see Morjin choking on his blood and gasping for breath. His eyes closed even as his guards tried desperately to bear him back away from me.
'Atara,' I whispered.
My sword lowered as I cast a terrible look at the nearby guards to warn them away from me. I knew that I couldn't kill Morjin. It was the strangest and bitterest turning of fate that out of compassion for the one I most loved, I must spare Morjin's life.
'Damn it Val!' Kane thundered from my right. 'You're letting him get away!'
He started after the mass of guards, many fewer in number now who were bearing Morjin's gravely wounded body toward the southwest corner of the room. There, one of his guards had finally managed to open the door to his chambers. I suddenly grabbed Kane's arm and looked into his furious black eyes. I'd had enough of killing for one day.
'Damn you!' Kane said again. 'If you can't kill him, I will!'
He wrenched his arm free from my grip to pursue Morjin. He ran across the hall, savagely cutting down the few guards who tried to stop him. I ran after him. By the time I reached his side, however, the guards and remaining priests had succeeded in dragging Morjin through the open doorway. A dozen guards stood in front it,
