Maram's ruddy face blanched at this. 'But how, Val? You cannot defeat him in battle.'
'We defeated him in Argattha, when we were outnumbered a hundred against nine,' I told him. 'And on the Culhadosh Commons when he sent three armies against us. And we defeated his droghuls
and
his forces in the Red Desert - and in Hesperu, too.'
'But that was different, and you know it!' Maram's face now heated up with anger - and fear. 'If you seek battle, none of the Valari kings will stand with you. And even if they did, Morjin will call up
all
his armies, from every one of his filthy kingdoms. A million men, Val! Don't tell me you think Mesh's ten thousand could prevail against
that
!'
Did
I truly think that? If I didn't, then I must at least act as if I did. I looked at Atara, whose face turned toward me as she waited for me to speak. Then it came to me that bravura was one thing, while truly believing was another. And knowing, with an utter certainty of blood and breath that I could not fail to strike down Morjin, was of an entirely different order.
'There must be a way,' I murmured.
'But, Val,' Master Juwain reminded me, 'it has always been
your
dream to bring an end to these endless battles - and to war, itself.' For a moment I closed my burning eyes because I could not see how to defeat Morjin other than through battle. But neither could I imagine any conceivable force of Valari or other free people defeating Morjin
in
battle. Surely, I thought, that would be death.
'There
must
be a way,' I told Master Juwain. I drew my sword then. My hands wrapped around the seven diamonds set into its black jade hilt while I gazed at Alkaladur's brilliant blade. 'There is always a way.'
The silver gelstei of which it was wrought flared with a wild. white light. Somewhere within this radiance, I knew, I might grasp my fate - if only I could see it.
'You will never,' Master Juwain said, 'bring down Morjin with your sword.'
'Not with
this
sword, perhaps. Not just with it.'
'Please,' Master Juwain said, stepping closer to lay his hand on my arm, 'give Bemossed a chance to work at Morjin in
his
way. Give it time.'
A shard of the sun's light reflected off my sword's blade, and stabbed into my eyes. And I told Master Juwain, 'But, sir - I am afraid that we do not have much time.'
Just then, from out of the shadows that an oak cast upon the raspberry bush, a glimmer of little lights filled the air. They began whirling in a bright spray of crimson and silver, and soon coalesced into the figure of a man. He was handsome of face and graceful of body, and had curly black hair, sun-browned skin and happy eyes that seemed always to be singing. We called him Alphanderry, our eighth companion. But we might have called him something other, for although he seemed the most human of beings, he was in his essence surely something other, too. At times, he appeared as that sparkling incandescence we had known as Flick; but more often now he took shape as the beloved minstrel who had been killed nearly three years previously in the pass of the Kul Moroth. None of us could explain the miracle of his existence. Master Juwain hypothesized that when the great Galadin had walked the earth ages ago, they had left behind some shimmering part of their being. But Alphanderry, I thought, could not be just pure luminosity. I could almost feel the breath of some deep thing filling up his form with true life; a hand set upon his shoulder would pass through him and send ripples through his glistening substance as with a stone cast into water. Day by day, as the earth circled the sun and the sun hurtled through the stars, it seemed that he might somehow be growing ever more tangible and real.
'Hoy!' he laughed out, smiling at Master Juwain and me. As it had once been with my brother, Jonathay, something in his manner suggested that life was a game to be played and enjoyed for as long as one could, and not taken too seriously. But today, despite his light, lilting voice, his words struck us all with their great seriousness: 'Hoy, time, time! - it runs like the Poru river into the ocean, does it not? And we think that, like the Poru, it is inexhaustible and will never run out.'
'What do you mean?' Master Juwain asked, looking at him.
Alphanderry stood - if that was the right word - on a mat of old leaves and trampled ferns covering the ground. And he waved his lithe hand at me, and said, 'Val is right, and too bad for that. We don't have as much time as we would like.'
But how do you know?' Master Juwain asked him. 'I just
know,'
he said. 'We can't let Bemossed bear the entire burden of our hope.'
'But our hope, in the end, rests upon the Lightstone. And the Maitreya. As you saw, Bemossed
has
kept Morjin from using it.'
'I did see that, I did,' Alphanderry said. 'But what
was
will not always be what
is.'
Atara, I saw, smiled coldly at this, for Alphanderry suddenly sounded less like a minstrel than a server.
'Did you think it would be so easy?' he asked Master Juwain.
'Easy? No, certainly not,' Master Juwain said. 'But I believe with all my heart that as long as Bemossed lives, Morjin will never be able to use the Cup of Heaven to free the Dark One.'
The hot Soldru sun burned straight down through the clearing with an inextinguishable splendor. And yet, upon Master Juwain's mention of the Dark One - also known as Angra Mainyu, the great Black Dragon - something moved within the unmovable heavens, and I felt a shadow fall over the sun. It grew darker and darker, as if the moon were eclipsing this blazing orb. In only moments, an utter blackness seemed to devour the entire sky. I believed with all
my
heart that if Angra Mainyu, this terrible angel, were ever freed from his prison on Damoom, then he would destroy not only my world and its bright star, but much of the universe as well.
Master Juwain's brows wrinkled in puzzlement as he looked up at the sky to wonder what I might be gazing at. So did my other friends, who seemed not to be afflicted by my wild imaginings.
'The Seven,' Master Juwain said, turning back towards Alphanderry. 'aid Bemossed with all their powers. And so Bemossed's power grows.'
'So does Morjin's,' Alphanderry said. 'For Angra Mainyu aids
him.'
'Even so, I believe that Bemossed will resist Morjin's lies and his vile attacks.'
'I pray he will: I fear that he may not. For Angra Mainyu himself has lent all his spite toward assaulting Bemossed's body, mind and soul.'
Master Juwain's brows pulled even tighter with worry. 'But how do you know this? And how can that be? The greatest of the Galadin have bound him on Damoom, and have laid protections against such things.'
'No shield is proof against all weapons,' Alphanderry said. 'Angra Mainyu has had ages of ages to battle those who bind him. The shield you speak of has cracked. And things will only get worse.'
'What do you mean?'
'Some time this autumn,' Alphanderry said, 'there will be a great alignment of planets and stars. Damoom and
its
star will perfectly conjunct the earth. Toward that day, Angra Mainyu's malice will rain down upon Ea ever more foul and deadly. And
on
that day, if Morjin should prevail and cripple Bemossed, or kill him, he will loose the Dark One upon the universe, and ail will be destroyed.'
The sun blazed down upon us, and from somewhere in the woods, the tanager continued trilling out its sweet song. We stood there in silence staring at Alphanderry. And then Master Juwain asked him again, 'But how
could
you know this?'
'I do not know... how I know,' Alphanderry said. 'As I stand here, as I speak, the words come to my lips, like drops of dew upon the morning grass - and i do not know what it will be that I must tell you. But my words are true.'
So it had been, I thought, in the Kul Moroth, when Alphanderry had recreated the perfect and true words of the angels - and for a few glorious moments had sung back an entire army bent on killing us all.
'And
these
words, above all others,' he said to us in his beautiful voice. 'Listen, I know this must be, for it is the essence of all that we strive for;
The Lightstone must be placed in the Maitreya's hands.
In the end, of course, there is no other way.'
He had said a simple thing, a true thing, and as with all such, it seemed obvious once it had been spoken. My heart whispered that it must be
I
who delivered the golden cup to the Maitreya. But how
could
I, I wondered, unless I first wrested it from Morjin in that impossible battle I could not bear to contemplate?
I held my sword up to the sun, and I felt something within its length of bright silustria align perfectly with other suns beyond Ea's deep blue sky. My fate, shaped like the dark world of Damoom, seemed to come hurtling out of black space straight toward me. In the autumn, I knew, it would find its way here and drive me down against the hard earth. Despite all my hopes and dreams, I could no more avoid it than I could the blood burning through my eyes or taking my next breath.
'Val - what is wrong?' Maram asked me. 'What do you see?'
I saw the forests of Mesh blackened by fire, and her mountains melted down into a hellish, glowing slag. I saw Maram fallen dead upon a vast battlefield, and my other companions, too. Atara lay holding her hands over her torn, bleeding belly, from which our child had been taken and ripped into pieces. I saw myself: as cold as stone upon the reddened grass, unmoving and waiting for the carrion birds. And something else, the worst thing of all. As I stood there beneath the trees staring into my sword's mirrored surface, I gasped at the dread cutting through my innards like an ice-cold knife, and I wanted to scream out against the horror that I could not bear.
And at that moment, in the air near the center of the clearing, a dark thing appeared. Altaru, my great, black warhorse, whinnied terribly and reared up to kick his hooves at the air. I jumped back and swept my sword into a ready posture, for I feared that Morjin
had
somehow sent a vulture or some kind of deadly creature to devour me - either that or I had fallen mad.
'Oh, my Lord!' Maram cried out, drawing out his sword, too. 'What is
that?'
Daj asked, hurrying to my side. 'Hoy!' Alphanderry cried out in alarm. 'Hoy! Hoy!' Once, Morjin had sent illusions to torment me, but the darkness facing me seemed as real as a river's whirlpool. It hovered over the ferns and flowers like a spinning blackness. My eyes had trouble holding onto it. It shifted about, and seemed to have no definite size or shape, for at one moment it appeared as a smear of char and at the next as a mass of frozen ink. I felt it fixing its malevolence on me. I took a step closer to it and positioned my sword, and it floated closer and seemed to mirror my movements as it positioned itself before me. A vast and terrible cold emanated from it, and seized hold of my heart. It called to me in a dark voice that I could not bear to hear.
'What
is
it?' Daj shouted again.
And Alphanderry, in a voice filled with awe, told him, 'It is the Ahrim.'
I did not have time to speculate on this strange name or wonder at the dark thing's nature, for it suddenly shot through the air straight toward me. I whipped my sword up to stop it. The gleam of my bright blade seemed to give it pause. Like a whirl of smoke, it spun slowly about in the air three feet from my face. Somehow, I thought, it watched and waited for me. I felt sick with hopelessness and a mind-numbing dread. Although it did not seem to bear for me any kind of human hate, I hated it, for I sensed that the Ahrim was that soul-destroying emptiness which engendered pure hate itself. 'Valashu Elahad,' it seemed to whisper to me.
I gripped my sword and shook my head. The dark thing had no form nor face nor lips with which to move the air, and yet I heard its voice speaking to me along a strange and sudden wind. And then, in a flash, it shifted yet again, and its secret substance took on the lineaments of a face
I
knew too well: that of Salmelu Aradar. It was an ugly face, nearly devoid of a chin or any redeeming feature. His great beak of a nose pointed at me, as did his black and headike eyes. I hated the way he looked at me, deep into
my
eyes, and so I brought up my sword to block his line of sight. And his head, like a cobra's swayed to the right, and I repositioned my sword, and then again to the left as he seemed to seek access in that direction to the dark holes in my eyes. And so it went, our motions playing off each other, almost locked together, faster and faster as it had been during our duel of swords in King Hadaru's hall when Salmelu had nearly killed me, and I had nearly killed him.
'Valashu,' he whispered again, 'I wish you had seen your
mother's
eyes when we crucified and ravished her in your father's hall.'
A dark fire leaped in my heart then, and I fought with all my will to keep it from burning out of my arms and hands into my sword. But my restraint availed me nothing. Salmelu roared out in triumph, and then he was Salmelu no more. The blackness of his being metamorphosed yet again, this time into a thing of scales, wings and a savagely swaying tail.
'The dragon!' Daj cried out from beside me. 'The dragon returns!'
I set my hand on Daj's shoulder, and shouted to Liljana, 'Take the children into the trees!'
I could not spare a moment to watch liljana gather up Daj and Estrella and carry out my command. The Ahrim, now shaped as a dragon, even as Daj had said hung in the air before me with an almost delicate poise. It seemed to feed on the fire inside me, and make it its own; in mere moments it grew into a raging, red beast fifty feet to length. I recognized this terrible dragon as Angraboda, into whose belly I had once plunged my sword in the deeps of Argattha. And now Angraboda regarded me with her fierce, cold, vengeful eyes. Then her leather wings beat at the air in a thunder of wind as the flew straight up toward the sun. She grew vaster and vaster and ever darker, and her bloated body blocked out the sun's light and seemed to fill all the sky. She opened her mighty jaws to spit down fire at me and burn me into nothingness. And I felt the hateful fire building inside me, inciting me into a madness to destroy her.