Black Jade (76 page)

The 'Lord of the Caves' turned to look at me in a way that I did not like. And I told him, 'We are no thieves.'

'No, of course not - anyone could see that.' Sylar's dark, inquisitive eyes studied my face, and then fell upon my sword, strapped to my back. I had wrapped a strip of plain leather around its hilt to conceal the diamond pommel and the seven diamonds set into the black jade. 'You are no doubt a hired sword engaged to protect these good pilgrims, and perhaps even a pilgrim yourself?'

The scorn in his voice made my ears burn, and I wanted to shout out that I was no mercenary but a knight and a prince of Mesh. Instead, I kept my silence.

'A hired sword ... from where?' he asked me. 'You have the look of the Valari, I think. A couple of Valari visited the caverns not two years ago, during the great Quest. I think they said they were Waashians.'

'I call no land my home,' I told him.

'I see.' Then Sylar's eyes turned to Atara's unstrung bow, which she tapped against the ground, seeming to feel her way. I was glad that Liljana had sewn the three arrows that Atara had brought with her within the lining of her cloak.

'A woman, bearing a bow without arrows,' Sylar said, 'and a blind one at that. I am not sure if I've ever seen a stranger sight.'

'I was a warrior before being blinded in battle,' Atara told him. 'My bow is sacred to me, and makes a good enough staff.'

'A warrior woman,' Sylar mused. 'I think I have heard of such, in Thalu - you must be Thalune, then? Well, many of the blind come here hoping to ease their suffering. It's said that the blind gain keener hearing to make up for what was lost. If that is true, then very soon, when you hear the songs of the angels, you will not regret your misfortune.'

He went on to explain to us that the deepest caverns held the most beautiful songs as well as the loveliest crystals, adding, 'Now, it is the way of things here for honored pilgrims such as yourselves to show their devotion, as the sun does its gold. The more gold, the greater the honor, do you understand? And the deeper the devotion, the deeper the songs that the good pilgrim will hear.' . Kane growled out, 'Are you telling us that the lower caverns are open only to those who'll pay to see them?'

The look in Kane's black eyes just then alarmed the two guards leaning against the table, for they stood up straight and ground the iron-shod butts of their spears against the cavern's rocky floor. And Sylar, in a voice as smooth as silk, said, 'No, good pilgrim - of course not! That would go against the King's decree. All the caverns are open to all who come here. But so many come, and so many wish to linger in the lower caverns that unfortunately we must limit the time of their visits. Of course, we like to reserve the greatest spans of time for those who are most deeply devoted.'

Liljana, who could haggle the scales off a dragon, bowed her head to him and asked, 'And how much devotion do you think a pilgrim should show in order to spend as long inside the caverns as she pleases?' So sweetly and yet compellingly did her voice sound out that Sylar forget the first rule of negotiating, and he was the first to name a price, saying, 'Surely six ounces would not be too much.'

'All right - six silver ounces,' Liljana said, reaching for the coins bulging out her purse.

'No, madam - six
gold
ounces,' Sylar smiled at her and added, 'Alonian archers would be good - that is one currency, at least, that hasn't been debased. You
are
Alonian, aren't you? A poor knight's widow, I heard you say, though I think you have the look of a queen.'

His smile, as fluid as heated oil, produced no like response in her. Her gaze fixed on him as she said. 'Three gold archers seems to me a very great devotion.'

Sylar's smile widened as he snapped at her offer and said, 'Very well, then - three archers for each of the seven of you. Twenty-one altogether.'

'Three archers apiece!' Liljana cried out. 'Why didn't you say so from the first? We're only poor pilgrims - and even poorer for having come so far.'

'Two archers apiece, then. Let it not be said that Sylar of the Caves takes advantage of blind women and grandmothers.'

Liljana appeared to consider this. She gathered Estrella and Daj close to her, then asked, 'Have you children. Lord Steward? You wouldn't wish to impoverish ours, would you?'

And so the haggling continued untill the end Sylar raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness and agreed to accept five gold ounces, total, for our admission to the caverns: one for each adult, and none at all for the children. I watched Liljana count the coins out of her purse. They were full-weight, Alonian ounces, with the face of the deceased King Kiritan stamped into one side and the image of an archer drawing a longbow on the other.

'Very well,
grandmother
,' Sylar said to Liljana after he had put away the coins. He glared at her as if he had lost the ability to smile then waved us toward the opened iron doors.

'You played him like a hooked fish,' I whispered to her as I walked beside her.

I heard my words less as a compliment than an accusation. Not often did Liljana allow anyone to see the skills in manipulating men that had made her Materix of the Maitriche Telu.

'The signs were written on his face for anyone to read,' she whispered back to me. 'Still, that is one fish who is more slippery than I would like. Let us not be any longer about our business than we must.'

I nodded my head, and looked over at the blue-eyed demon behind us. Then I turned to lead the way into the Singing Caves.

The first thing I noted upon entering the next cavern was not sound but light. A soft, variously-hued radiance seemed to pour forth from the curving cavern walls and ceilings from no single source. A closer inspection revealed that the crystals studding the cavern's smooth rock each glowed from within. There were millions of them. Some were nearly as tiny as grains of sand; the largest were the size of Master Juwain's varistei, which nearly fit into his opened palm. They glittered through the whole of the cavern in a rainbow of colors: carmine; orange; citron; emerald; azure; indigo and violet. Most of the crystals were clear, like precious jewels, though many swirled with piebald or iridescent patterns, more like opals or pearls. Among these. Master Juwain identified many music marbles, touch stones and thought stones, all of the same family of gelstei. He guessed that the other crystals in this chamber were of some sort of related gelstei, but he did not really know.

The cavern had been shaped like a bubble of blown glass, only pinched-in and elongated as it opened down into the earth. We made our way slowly toward its center. This required us to move down steps that had been cut into the floor of the cavern long ago, a rather difficult feat since the cavern's splendor drew the eye not downward but out and up. A few crystals did sprout up from the floor like glowing mushrooms, but we guessed that most there had long since been broken off or chiseled out to make room for the pathways and open spaces upon which pilgrims might stand. There was nothing to do here, I thought, but to stand and stare in awe - and to listen.

As Kane had promised, thousands, perhaps millions, of voices filled the air. Not all of them, or even most of them, sang. I heard wails and laments, chants, thanksgivings, cries of joy and invoca-tions. The bray of an old warrior telling of his victories vied with the shrillness of a bereft woman wondering why plague and war had taken the lives of her nine children. At first this cacophony nearly drowned me like an ocean's wave slamming my body underwater against hard sand. The raw emotion in the multitude of voices, all speaking with passion and truth, nearly crushed the blood from my chest. I threw my hands over my ears to block out [this immense Sound. It helped only a little, for I could feel my flesh and my very hand bones vibrating in harmony with the voices filling up the cavern, and pushing the sound only deeper into me. I saw Master Juwain put his finger to one of the wall's vibrating crystals, which he had named as a touch stone. I remembered that the lovely, variegated touch stones recorded and played people's sentiments, instead of music, for others to feel.

'This
is
madness!' I cried out, looking at Kane. 'I cannot even hear myself think!'

Kane's jaws ground together as he glared back at me and slowly nodded his head.

'How do you bear it?' I asked him. My words seemed lost into the great noise about us. My other companions, however, did not seem as troubled by it as I was. Master Juwain told me that he could make out a voice reciting in ancient Ardik the long lost epic of Azariel - as well as another speaking in Marouan of the forging of the first of the blue gelstei. He did not pause to await my response, for two streams of sound sufficed to fill him to overflowing. I marveled that he seemed able to concentrate his awareness on only two, to the exclusion of the many others. So it seemed with Daj, who would not tell of what sounds enchanted him. He only stared at a cluster of aquamarine crystals as if soaring through a dream. Liljana asked if I could hear the voice of Seki the First telling of the building of the Temple of Life in the Age of the Mother. And of a boy asking after his missing father and a young woman singing of her love for a man named Seasar - and a dozen other threads of utterances that she somehow sorted out within herself and wove into a pattern making sense to her. Atara likewise shared this gift, and so, perhaps did Estrella. This slender girl seemed to open herself to the thousands of voices echoing through the cavern as if she somehow could hold each of

them inside her.

'If I remember aright,' Kane shouted at me, 'it gets better in the lower caverns. So, let's get on with things, then.'

He turned to walk down the steps where they cut through a particularly steep stretch of the cavern's floor. I followed him gladly, and so, less gladly, did the others. The deepest part of the cavern narrowed into a tube, as of a corridor connecting two parts of a castle. Here, no crystals arose from the smooth rock encasing us, and the voices died almost to a murmur. I breathed out a sigh of relief. I felt myself building stony walls inside my heart against the surge of sound and people's passions that would surely assault me upon our entrance to the next cavern.

The third cavern proved much smaller than the second: barely the size of a serving woman's chambers, with great, inward bulges in its crystal-lined walls that made it feel even smaller. The seven of us crowded in together only with difficulty, and we did not long remain. I noted, though, that the crystals in this cavern grew larger, some reaching nearly a foot in length. Strangely, the voices grew fewer in number and less strident, though perhaps I was learning to block out the sounds and words that most vexed me.

In the fourth cavern, deeper still, pink and silvery crystals grew out of the walls and floor like swords. The path through them cut steep and narrow, and we had to move with care lest we impale ourselves on their glittering points. Atara took my hand, and asked me if I could make out the voice of a minstrel singing in Old High Lorranda the
Gest of Nodin and Yurieth.
I could not. I wondered that we each seemed to apprehend different voices. I had a strange sense that the crystals here possessed desires of their own. Somehow the crystals, I thought, as of a gosharp's strings resonating with each other, attuned themselves to something deep and individual inside each of us and directed the sounds that pleased them into our ears and hearts.

Daj hadn't yet learned Lorranda, which Maram had called the language of love. He lifted his face toward the ceiling, hung with long, amethyst-like pendants and pulsing golden crystals. And in his high, piping boy's voice, he called out: 'I have a song for you! It's called the
Gest of Eleikar and Ayeshtan,
Princess of Khalind. It tells of how Eleikar slew the wicked King Ivar and gained Khalind's throne.'

Upon the sound of his bold words, Alphanderry appeared out of the cavern's close air. He stood in the radiance pouring down from the thousands of gelstei gleaming upon the cavern's ceiling and walls. He smiled at Daj, and said, 'Hoy, the song - let's hear the song!' Master Juwain, however, was not so pleased by Daj's enthusiasm, nor did he appear eager to listen to the story that Daj, Estrella and Alphanderry had nearly finished making. He turned his lumpy face toward the boy, and chastened him, saying, 'Your story still incomplete.'

Daj shrugged his shoulders as he cocked his ear toward a particularly large ruby crystal pointing down from the ceiling thirty feet above our heads. He said, 'Other stories are incomplete, too. Other songs are. The story of the whole world ... has yet to be finished.'

'There is a time for singing, and a time for listening.'

'But I just want to sing of Eleikar, and listen to these stones sing back! Maybe the next people passing through will hear it and know how to complete the story if we don't - and if Eleikar himself doesn't, or even dies before he has the chance.'

'Dajarian,' Master Juwain said to him, 'Eleikar
cannot
really die.' 'That's just it, sir - we can't
let
him die.'

'He cannot die because he is not real.'

'He's real to me, sir.'

Master Juwain sighed as he rubbed the back of his shiny head and regarded Daj. Not two years ago, when we had rescued Daj from the Dragon's clutches, the horrors of Argattha had killed something precious and innocent in him, and he had been more callous of countenance and soul than a battle-hardened warrior. Now, the boy lived within him again, and a world of beauty and hope, and it gladdened my heart to see that.

'It is said,' Master Juwain explained to him, 'that only words spoken truly and with deep conviction can be recorded here.'

'I will speak the truth,' Daj assured him.

'But your story is an invention.'

'But what of Nodin and Yurieth, then?'

'Well,
they
are real. It is almost certain that they lived in the vanished kingdom of Osh, during the Age of Swords.'

'But Eleikar and Ayeshtan live inside me! A story doesn't have to be
really
real to be true.'