Diamond Warriors by David Zindell Page A

father, and I said to Lord Noldashan, 'You had another son, didn't you? Did he fall at the Commons?'
    'He fell before the Great Battle,' Lord Noldashan told me. 'If that is the right word. For in truth, Morjin's men crucified him.' Many standing in the hall knew the story that Lord Noldashan now told me: that when Morjin's army had invaded and laid waste the Lake Country, Lord Noldashan's two sons had been out on a hunting trip in the mountains to the north. After waiting as long as he could for them to come home, Lord Noldashan finally rode off to join the gathering of the warriors. But Televar and Sar Jonavar had never received my father's call to arms. They returned to find that Morjin's army had swept through the Lake Country, and that Morjin's men were about to burn their farm to the ground. The two brothers then fell mad. In the ensuing battle, Morjin's soldiers captured both of them - along with Lord Noldashan's wife and two daughters. They crucified all of them, and left them for the vultures. Two days later, after Morjin's army had moved on, a neighbor had found Lord Noldashan's family nailed to crosses. Miraculously, Sar Jonavar still lived. The neighbor then summoned help to pull Sar Jonavar down from his cross and tend his wounds until Lord Noldashan could return.
    As Lord Noldashan finished recounting this terrible story, his raspy voice choked up almost to a whisper. I did not know what to say to him. I did not want to look at him just then.
    'Once they called you the Maitreya,' he said to me. 'But can you bring back the dead? Can you keep my remaining son from joining the rest of my family?'
    He doubts, I thought, feeling my heart moving inside me like a frightened rabbit, because I doubt - and that is the curse of the valarda. But how can I not doubt?
    How could I, I wondered, ever defeat Morjin if I first must accomplish an impossible thing? The most dreadful thing in all the world that I could not quite bring myself to see?
    I finally managed to make myself face Lord Noldashan. In the anguish filling up his moist, black eyes, I saw my own life. Then a brightness blazed within me again. In truth, it had never gone out. I remembered how, in Hesperu, in the most terrible of moments, Bemossed had clasped my hand in his and looked deep inside me as if he could behold the brightest light in all the universe.
    'You have spoken of the dead,' I said to Lord Noldashan. 'And we have walked with the dead, you and I.'
    I looked around at the hall's stone walls, hung with banners and shields and the heads of various animals that Lord Avijan and his family had hunted: lions, boars and elks with great racks of antlers spreading out like the limbs of a tree. Above an arch of one of the corridors giving out onto the hall, Lord Avijan had mounted the head of a white bear. It looked exactly like the beast whose will Morjin had seized and sent to murder Maram, Master Juwain and me in the pass between Mount Korukel and Mount Raaskel: the great ghul of a bear that I had killed with my old sword.
    'There are the dead, and there are the truly dead,' I told Lord Noldashan. 'When Morjin would have turned me into a ghul, the man I call the Maitreya gave me his hand and pulled me back into life. There, I found my mother and grandmother - my brothers, too. And my father, the King.'
    I stepped over to him and his son, and I felt his whole being wincing inside even as his back stiffened and he stared at me.
    'So long as we don't forget,' I said to him, 'so long as we live, truly and deeply, with passion, they cannot really die. And neither can we.'
    I laid my hand on the gauntlet covering Sar Jonavar's hand, and eased it off. A circle of reddish scar marred the back of his hand and his palm, which seemed slightly misshapen, as if the bones had been pushed apart. I grasped his hand then, gently, and I felt something warm and bright pass from me into him, and from him into me. He looked at me with tears in his eyes as he said, 'My apologies