The Silver Sword

Excerpt The angels, it is written, at the beginning of time sang into creation the stars. With the aid of the Lightstone, their golden voices brought forth out of the black void Solaru, Aras, Varshara, and a million other bright bursts of fire. I have heard the stars sing back. All men and women can apprehend the heavens' music as well as the angels, but who can hold inside such blazing, infinite songs? Only one, I believe, who finds the golden Cup of Heaven in which to contain their light, in whatever place on earth this greatest of all gelstei has been lost. At the western edge of the world, the stars shine the same as those of the Morning Mountains of my home. Having called my six companions and me across the length of Ea on a great quest, these bright points of light put a song in each of our hearts and led us back east. Bright hopes we held, and bright gelstei, too: a ruby firestone, a bit of black jade, a scryer's clear sphere that gave visions of the future. Other ancient crystals we had gained on our long journey; into my hands had come the legendary silver sword, Alkaladur. Must I, I wondered, use this Sword of Fate to fight the Red Dragon named Morjin as we had for so many months and milesperhaps even to the death? Or would my blade's shining silustria point the way toward the Lightstone as told in the ancient songs? In the warmest days of Marud in the year 2812, as we sailed across the Dragon Channel from the Island of the Swans to Surrapam on a stout bilander called the Snowy Owl, these questions burned through my mind. Through my blood still burned the kirax that one of Morjin's assassins had struck into me with a poisoned arrow. The pain of this foul substance would always torment me, even as in some mysterious way it connected me to the foulness of Morjin's mind and heart. Miraculously, though, whenever I gripped my newly acquired sword and pointed it toward the stars, the fire of the kirax seemed to go away. "So, that sword seems almost to have been made for you." Kane, the fiercest of my friends, spoke these words to me on the last night of our voyage. We stood on the deck of the Snowy Owl, looking for warships on the glistening black waters to the east. "And even as it now belongs to you, you belong to it." It was a strange thing for him to say, but then Kane was a strange man. He was tall, like the Valari people from which I came, and he had the same bright, black eyes as did my brothers and my father, King Shavashar Elahad. But his hair had turned white, and he wore it cropped short instead of long and black and tied with brightly colored battle ribbons. And where the bold faces of my people most often recalled those of hawks or eagles, Kane's grim visage brought to mind the wildness and fury of a tiger. He moved, too, with all the power of such a beast. At times, though, as when we stood together looking up at the stars, he came alive with a terrible beauty, and then he seemed the most graceful and glorious of men. "Well, I am a Valari warrior, aren't I?" I told him. "And isn't it said that a warrior's sword is his soul?" I looked down the length of Alkaladur's blade, double-edged and sharp enough to cut steel. Its silustria, hardest of all substances except the gold gelstei of the Lightstone, caught the starlight and cast it back with a silvery sheen. The sword's maker had set seven diamonds into its black jade hilt, carved with swans like unto those of my family's emblem. A great round diamond formed the sword's pommel stone. When I pointed the sword to the east, the silustria filled with a bright white radiance as it flared in resonance with the lost Lightstone. &Zindell, David is the author of 'The Silver Sword', published 2008 under ISBN 9780765355928 and ISBN 0765355922.