The War of the Lance

II

But before the towers fell to abandonment, before the fire, the incense of destruction, when the Tower at Istar blossomed in magic and durable light, the parapets shone in the lonely notions of Lorac Caladon, Speaker of Stars.

Restless in Silvanost, drawn by cold light, by the intricate forest of magic, to the North he came, to glittering Istar where the tests of High Sorcery awaited his judgment, his ordained mathematics, and the first test past, and the second surmounted, he stood as if satisfied high on the parapets in doubtful, striated light, the vaunt of his intellect over the globe of the city, where the green luminescence of the dangered orb called to him out of the Tower's heart.

In the pathless forest at the end of all centuries, he would hear the song as it tumbled from thought into faceted memory, singing, perpetually singing,

After the second

There is no other. o the tests are behind you

Speaker of suns and the song of the orb

Is the song of your mind in this ancient tower

Hollow and loveless with long departures.

O the tests are behind you speaker of suns

As history folds in these flourishing walls

As the tower crumbles and with it the mind

The first high battlements the house of the Gods

But I shall lie here as the forest withers

As the plains descend into winter and nothing

Unless the song of your thoughts which is everything, is the world,

Controls and subdues and informs the mystery.

Take me to silvanost speaker of suns,

Take me to freedom to the country of green on green.

Perhaps it was love in the crystal heart, in the refraction of light and beguiling light, love meeting love in his long belief, in dire mathematics, in the mapped parabola of the trining moons, but there in the Tower six reasons converged the hand of the prophet the nesting heart of his will the hurdling thought the summoning crystal and always the ruinous moment, all of them settling in grim alignment, the orb the sixth like a heart in his hand, like a fluttering light a firebrand he carried to ignited Silvanost in the numbered days.

I am bringing them fire, he said to himself, I am bringing them

Light in the old gods' story. I am the first

I will save them in the rising earth

I will save them and the old world pivots away from my guiding hand.

So he said to himself, and the shapeless horizon shaded to green and redoubling green as out of his last dreams arose Silvanesti, tangible, fractured in light.