The Diamond Warriors. David Zindell

had brought me some tea, I could tell at once that serving me a soothing drink had little to do with the purpose of her visit. As she set out the pot and cups on one of the tables near the garden’s great sundial, I could almost feel her willing her hand not to tremble. Even so the cups rattled against the hard stone with such force that it seemed they might break.

      ‘What is wrong?’ I asked her, taking her by her arm and urging her to sit down with me.

      ‘Does there have to be anything wrong,’ she said, ‘for me to bring you a little fresh chamomile tea?’

      ‘No, of course not,’ I told her. ‘But something is troubling you, isn’t it?’

      She nodded her head as she took out her gelstei. In the light of the moon, I could barely make out the blue tones of this little whale-shaped figurine. And then she said to me, ‘I have terrible tidings.’

      Something in her voice pierced me like an icy wind.

      ‘What tidings?’ I asked her. Without thinking, I grabbed hold of her arm. ‘Are the children all right? Is Master Juwain?’

      ‘They are fine,’ she told me, ‘but –’

      ‘Is it Kane, then? Has word come of his death?’

      It did not seem possible, I thought, that this invincible warrior who had survived countless wars in every corner of the world over thousands of years had finally gone back to the stars. Nor did I wish to believe that Maram, in a drunken stupor, had stumbled down the stairs after exiting some young woman’s bedchamber and broken his neck. Most of all, I could not bring myself to think of any violence harming even a single hair of Atara’s head.

      ‘No, we’re all safe here tonight,’ Liljana said to me. ‘But others, in places that we had thought were safe, are not. Or so I think.’

      Her round, pretty face could hide a great deal when she wished, and she could hold herself calm and careful even when delivering the most disastrous of news. Such was her training as the Materix of the Maitriche Telu. It occurred to me for the thousandth time how glad I was to have this wise and relentless woman as my companion and not my enemy.

      I sat on my hard stone seat breathing deeply and waiting for her to say more. I looked around at the roses and lilacs of the starlit garden for sign of the Ahrim – and then back at Liljana to see if she might tell me that this terrible thing had gained some dreadful new power. I reminded myself that if I would rule over Mesh, I must first and always rule myself.

      ‘I came to tell you tidings,’ she said to me again as she rotated her little figurine between her fingers, ‘but I cannot tell you with absolute certainty that these tidings are true.’

      ‘You speak more mysteriously,’ I told her, ‘than does a scryer.’

      She would have laughed at this, I thought, if she had been able to laugh. Instead she said to me, ‘Perhaps I should have just spoken of what I know, with my very first breath, but I wanted to prepare you first. I don’t want you to give up hope.’

      My heart seemed to be having trouble pushing my blood through my veins. Finally I said to her, ‘Just tell me, then.’

      ‘All right,’ she said, drawing in a deep breath. ‘I believe that the Brotherhood school has been destroyed.’

      I gazed straight at her, trying to make out the black centers of her eyes. I felt as bereft of speech as Estrella.

      ‘It would have happened around the end of Ashte,’ she told me.

      I continued gazing at her, then I finally found the will to say: ‘You mean the Brotherhood school of the Seven, don’t you? But no place in the world is safer! Morjin could not have found it!’

      I thought of the magic tunnels through the mountains surrounding the Valley of the Sun, and I shook my head.

      ‘But he has found it,’ she told me as she covered my hand with hers. ‘Somehow, he has.’

      ‘But the Seven, and those that came before them, have kept the school a secret for thousands of years. And Bemossed has had scarcely half a year of sanctuary there. How could Morjin suddenly have found it?’

      The answer, I thought, was built into the very words of my question. Bemossed, contending with Morjin for mastery of the Lightstone over a distance of a few hundred miles, touching upon the very filth of Morjin’s soul, must somehow have drawn down Morjin upon him.

      ‘Is he dead, then?’ I asked Liljana. ‘Have you come to tell me that Bemossed is dead?’

      ‘I came to tell you not to give up hope,’ she said, squeezing my hand. ‘And so if I knew the Shining One was dead, how could there be hope?’

      I considered this for a moment as I looked at her. ‘But you cannot tell me that he is not dead.’

      She sighed as she held up her crystal to the lanterns’ light. ‘I cannot tell you very much for certain at all.’

      She went on to say more about her personal quest to explore the mysteries of her blue gelstei and gain mastery over it. In the Age of the Mother, she told me, in the great years, the whole continent of Ea had been knitted together by women in every land speaking mind to mind through the power of the blue gelstei. The Order of Brothers and Sisters of the Earth had trained certain sensitive people to attune to the lapis-like crystals, cast into the form of amulets, pendants, pins and figurines. Some had gained the virtue of detecting falseness or veracity in others’ words, and these were called truthsayers. Others found themselves able to speak in strange languages or remember events that had occurred long before their birth or give others great and beautiful dreams. Only the rarest and most adept in the ways of pure consciousness, however, learned to hear the whisperings and thoughts of another’s mind. No one knew why those most talented at mindspeaking had always been women. With the breaking of the Order into the Brotherhood and that secret group of women that became the Maitriche Telu, men had almost completely lost knowledge of the blue gelstei while any woman possessing even a hint of the ability to listen to another’s thoughts was reviled as a witch.

      ‘I know that the time is coming,’ Liljana said to me, ‘when the whole world will be one as it was in the Age of the Mother. We will make it so: those who still keep the blue gelstei or have the will to try to attune themselves to one, whether they hold the sacred blestei in hand, or not. I have not spoken to you of this, but I have been trying to seek out these women. If we could pass important communications from city to city and land to land at the speed of thought, we would gain a great advantage over Morjin.’

      I nodded my head at this, then said, ‘Assuming that he himself does not have this power.’

      ‘He is a man,’ she huffed out with a wave of her hand as if that said everything.

      ‘He is a man,’ I said, ‘who somehow managed to control his three droghuls’ every thought and motion from a thousand miles away.’

      ‘Yes, droghuls,’ she said. ‘Creatures made from his own mind and flesh.’

      ‘Kane,’ I said to her, ‘believes that Morjin keeps a blue gelstei.’

      ‘Even if he does, and is able to project his filthy illusions through it, that does not mean that he can speak mind to mind with other men.’

      Some deep tension in her throat made me look at her more closely as I said to her, ‘Only men dwelled at the Brotherhood’s school. How, then, did you come by your knowledge of its destruction?’

      ‘It was Master Storr,’ she told me. ‘I believe he kept a blestei.’

      I remembered very well the Brotherhood’s Master Galastei: a stout, old man with fair, liver-spotted skin and wispy white hair. A suspicious man, who spent his life in ferreting out secrets, whether of men and women or ancient crystals forged ages ago.

      ‘I was casting my thoughts in that direction,’ she continued. ‘I know I touched minds with him – it was only an hour ago!