Master Juwain sighed as he rested his gnarled hand on a small purple crystal sprouting out of a rocky rise in the floor. It would have been an easy thing, I saw, for him to snap it off and put it in his pocket.
'All right,' he said to Daj. 'Speak as you will, and let us hear if these stones speak back.'
Daj stood up straight, and without hesitation, in a voice as steady and full of fire as the desert sun, recited the first verses into which he and Alphanderry, with Estrella's assent, had rendered their story:
In Khalind, once upon a time,
A boy's revenge, upon a crime...
We all stood listening as Daj sang out his story. After he had completed the first three stanzas, he fell into a silence. He stared at the lacy, white crystals adorning the wall before him. He waited lor them to begin sparkling like diamonds.
An echo, reflected back from a mountain's rock, reaches the ear faster than any bird can fly. We waited for a good ten count, and then thrice that long, and the only voices that any of us heard belonged to departed wanderers, minstrels, merchants and queens, but not to boys barely ten years old. And then, with a suddenness that froze the breath in my throat, the space about us fell dead quiet. The cavern itself seemed to be listening. And then Daj's words, in Daj's earnest voice, fell out of the air like perfectly formed jewels:
In Khalind, once upon a time,
A boy's revenge, upon a crime
So dark the demons shriek and sing
The torment of a wicked king ..
.
When the song stones had finished speaking back Daj's verses. Master Juwain rested his hand on top of Daj's tousled hair and smiled at him. 'Well, lad, I must admit that I was wrong. Very wrong. There is truth, and then there is
truth.'
'I
told
you,' Daj said, beaming at him.
'And then there is that which we came here to find,' Master Juwain said. He looked from Daj to Liljana, and then at Atara and me. 'Well-made verses, whether old or new, are always a delight to hear. But has anyone heard tell of the Shining One?'
We all had. Over the centuries, many had come into the caverns to sing of Ea's Maitreyas. Most of their songs were ancient and told of miracles of healing: In the third cavern, I had listened intently as a nameless woman gave praise to Godavanni the Glorious, relating how he had laid his hands upon her son's withered leg and made it whole again. A master of the Brotherhood -a man who called himself Navarran - told of his reverence for Alesar Tal's powers of soul and uplifting others' spirits. He had wondered if Alesar might be the Maitreya foretold for the end of the Age of the Mother, but. he had never determined this, for Alesar had never caught sight of the lost Lightstone and had died in obscurity, just another healer who lived out his life in one of the Brotherhood's schools. Liljana, as she informed us, had heard a song praising a Maitreya known simply as the Erikur. As the Maitreyas born near the endings of the known ages were accounted for, Liljana concluded that the Erikur had worked his wonders during one of the Lost Ages, after Aryu had slain Elahad and men and women lived nearly wild in lands whose names were lost to time.
And then there was Issayu. Born in the year 2261 of the Age of the Swords on the island of Maroua, he had grown into manhood talking to the dolphins and healing the blind. Of him it was sung that 'his hands were like the ocean's waters and his eyes like the sun'. Thaddariam, the Grandmaster of the Brotherhood, upon testing Issayu, had proclaimed him as the Shining One. Many looked to Issayu to end the terror of that age and bring a time of peace and healing. But after Morjin had conquered the Elyssu in 2284, he had captured and seduced Issayu, promising to bestow upon him the Lightstone and the gift of immortality. Of course Morjin had never actually allowed Issayu to hold the Cup of Heaven in his hands. The Lord of Lies had slowly perverted Issayu by requiring him to do darker and darker deeds in hope someday of becoming a great Wielder of Light. In the end, when Issayu had discovered how Morjin had twisted his heart and poisoned his soul, he had despaired and had killed himself by throwing himself out of a tower upon the rocks overlooking the sea.
All these accounts, and there were thousands of them, were ancient. But others seemed less old. Many people had come into the caverns to sing of their hope for the
coming
Maitreya, the Cosmic Maitreya - the last of the Shining Ones who would bring an end to the dark ages of Ea and herald in the Age of Light. Their many prayers and chants were variations of these words:
Hail Maitreya, Lord of Light,
Open up our deepest sight.
Shine like sun, forever bright.
Bring an end to darkest night.
At least fifty voices were new, for they told of King Kiritan's calling of the great Quest and how the Lightstone had been found. Soon, it was sung, the Cup of Heaven would find its way into the hands of the Maitreya. Indeed, this great-souled being might already have come forth: in the person of a blacksmith's son in Alonia or a fisherman on one of the Islands off Thalu or a Galdan healer - or even in the unlikely form of a prince of Mesh named Valashu Elahad. As I stood beneath purple and white crystals vibrating like a mandolet's wrings, I tried to take in the dozens of hints as to where the Maitreya might have been born and who he might be. So, I thought did Master Juwain and Liljana and my other friends. We listened most intently for accounts of healings and other miracles out of the lands in the north of Hesperu.
'Let us go deeper,' Kane finally said as he looked toward the passage to the next cavern. 'Let us hope that as the songs grow deeper, we will hear what we came to hear.'
We followed his lead. The fifth cavern twisted off sharply to the right, and down, many more feet into the earth. Virescent crystals the length of spears stuck up from the floor and hung down from the ceiling above our heads. A few of these flowed from the celling to the floor like delicate, translucent pillars. As I made my way through this narrow chamber, I seemed able to pick out single songs and concentrate my awareness upon them. In the sixth cavern, full of pendants, plumes and other lovely rock formations glistering with the fire of opals, individual verses and words became ever clearer even as the thousands of distracting voices faded to a murmur. It seemed that I had the power to let live within myself only those songs that touched me most deeply.
'I wonder,' Alphanderry said, 'if this is where Venkatil heard the voice telling him to seek for the Lightstone in the Tower of the Sun. I wonder if he also knew where the Maitreya might have been born.'
At last we came into the seventh cavern, nearly as round and vast as King Kiritan's hall in faraway Tria. The air fell quiet as over a field just before a battle. A hundred feet above our heads, amethyst, turquoise and rose crystals hung silent and still. Great pinnacles, jacketed in some pearly white substance, pointed up from the floor. They caught the glittering greens, reds and blues pouring off the cavern's curving walls; they caught the light of our eyes and seemed to drink in our breath and the sound our beating hearts,
'Why can't I
hear
anything here?' Daj whispered to Master Juwain.
Master Juwain, however, stood staring up at the brilliant dome above us and rubbing at his jaw in deep concentration, and so it was Alphanderry who answered Daj's question.
'What do you
want
to hear?' he asked Daj. 'This is the seventh cavern, and it's said that here a man may apprehend anything he wishes, as long he truly
wishes
it.'
'I don't know what I want to hear,' Daj told him. He watched, as did I as Alphanderry's form glittered with scarlet and silver lights. 'Something about the Maitreya?'
'You don't sound very certain.'
'Well that's what I
should
want to hear, shouldn't I?'
'Only you know that,' Alphanderry told him. His luminous eyes seemed to look right through Daj's hard-set face. 'Is there someone you'd rather hear about?'
Daj stared off at ohe of the opalescent pillars connecting the floor to the domed ceiling high above us, and he nodded his head.
'Who, then?'
And Daj whispered, 'My mother.'
Alphanderry thought about this and told him, 'Then you must listen deeply, and you will hear of her.'
'But how is that possible? No one who knew her . . .could have come here to sing of her.'
'No, Daj, many have come: minstrels from across Ea for thou-sands of years. This chamber is known as the Minstrels' Cavern. Here they have sung of everything that can be sung.'
'But my mother -'
'She still lives, in the songs the minstrels have sung of
their
mothers. Listen, and you will hear.'
As Daj fell silent, casting his eyes down upon the marbled stones about us, Alphanderry turned to Liljana and asked, 'What song would most brighten your spirits?'
Without hesitation Liljana told him, 'A song of
the
Mother.'
Alphanderry slowly nodded his head, then looked at Master Juwain.
'What do
you
wish to hear?'
And Master Juwain told him, That which cannot be heard.'
'And you, Kane?' Alphanderry asked, peering over at our grim-faced friend.
But Kane stared at him in silence, answering him only in the fury of his blazing eyes.
'Atara?' Alphanderry asked, looking away from him. Atara smiled as she said, 'Why, a love song, of course.' Alphanderry paused regard Estrella, who gazed right back at him with a soft radiance lighting up her face. I thought she might be happy listening to, any song, or to all of them. And then Alphanderry turned toward me.
'Val - what do you most want to hear?'
What
did
I wish to hear, I wondered? The location and identity of the Maitreya? The secret of life and death? Words assuring me that Daj and Estrella would somehow grow up in safety and that Atara would have all the love that she could bear? Or did I wish even more to learn of a cure for the poison burning up my soul?
I drew in a deep breath of the cavern's cool air, and I said, 'I want to hear how Morjin might be defeated.'
At this, Kane smiled savagely, baring his glittering white teeth. Atara's hand reached out to grip mine. Liljana and my other companions looked at me quietly. Finally, Alphanderry said to me, 'I do not know what minstrel would have sung of that, but why don't we all listen, even so?'
And so we did. We found a clear place on the cavern's floor near its center, and positioned ourselves facing whatever part of the cavern called to us. And then we waited.
At first, there was nothing to hear - nothing more than the susurrus of our breaths and a faint drumming that sounded almost like the Heartbeat of the earth. I set my hand upon the leather wrapped around the hilt of my sword; I could smell the sweat and oils worked into it, as I could the moistness of stone. There was a strange taste to the air. Across the cavern from me, where its walls gleamed with silver swirls, the light pouring out of the crystals grew suddenly stronger. The crystals themselves rang out like chimes, and voices fell out all around us.
As before, there were many of them. But here, in the seventh cavern deep in the earth, they did not resound as a multitudinous noise or even as chords, but rather progressed like the notes of a melody, one by one. I listened as the rich baritone of one minstrel gave way to the booming bass of another, only to be followed by an even deeper voice trolling out in verse or song, and then yet another. Many of the minstrels had not put their names to their compositions or the ancient ballads and epics they recited; others had: Agasha, Mingan, Kamilah, Hauk Eskii Mahamanu and Azureus. In the Minstrels' Cavern, I thought names mattered less than the virtue of the voices that spoke them. I sensed that minstrels from across Ea had come to this place, century after century, age after age, to vie with one another in singing the most beautiful song. No gold medallion would be given to the winner of this age-old competition, for it remained ongoing, and living minstrels might always hope to outsing even the greatest of the ancients. It was enough, I thought, that their words would live on long after they themselves had died, perhaps to the very ending of the world.
For an hour, it seemed, I stood nearly as still as one of the cavern's stone pillars, listening. I thought it would be impossible ever to single out any one minstrel's song as being the most beautiful or true. Some of their voices trilled out high and sweet, like the piping of birds, and soared up to the sky; other voices rang out low and long like gongs or bells that resonated with something deep inside my heart. Once or twice the minstrels attained to the truly angelic, and in the rhymes they intoned and the rhythms of their strange words, I caught hint of the grace of the language of the Galadin.
It was the singing of one of these ancient minstrels that most drew me. I couldn't help listening, for his voice was clear and strong, and rang out with the brightness of struck silver: In his heart-piercing song, I heard much that seemed lovely, but even more that was plaintive and pained. The immense suffering of this nameless minstrel made my throat hurt. His words cut open my soul, and burned with a terrible beauty that drove deep into me and filled my blood with fire.
At first, I took little sense from these blazing words, for the minstrel sang them in ancient Ardik, a language that I never translated easily. But the more he chanted out his verses, the more I could apprehend. I found myself drawing my sword nearly a foot out of its sheath. Alkaladur's shimmering silver gelstei seemed to resonate with something in the minstrel's music, and within the minstrel himself. A strange thing happened then: the meaning of the minstrel's words suddenly became utterly clear to me, as though light shone through a diamond. And the mystery of the minstrel's identity stood revealed.
His name was Morjin. But he was not the Morjin that I had battled in Argattha and had hated ever since, nor did his voice sound the same as that of the man who had taken on the mantle of the Red Dragon. No, I thought, this was a different Morjin, a younger Morjin not yet completely corrupted by the evils he had wrought upon the world. His voice was sweeter, gentler and less sure of itself. It reverberated with a different pitch and tone. In its plangent insistence on trying to uncover the truth, I heard almost as much-love as I did hate.