The Dark Crystal Read Free Page A

labored and noisy. His eyes seemed cloudy and unable to focus clearly on Jen. His face was pale.

    “Master, what is wrong?”

    UrSu panted for breath before he could answer. “I was born…” he said, and the rest of the sentence was a mumble.

    Jen cocked his head to indicate that he had not understood. His Master waved his hand to ask for patience. He struggled to bring his breathing under control.

    “I was born under a shattered sky,” he finally got out.

    Jen swallowed hard, forcing himself to remain calm. “Please,” he said, “it’s me, Jen.”

    Again the Ancient One waved his hand with impatience. His mouth moved, shepherding the words. “A Crystal sang …” He breathed heavily in. “A Crystal sang to the three made one. The dark column, the rose column, and … and the radiance … itself.”

    Jen moved closer, leaning down to speak.

    His Master muttered, “Listen. You must understand. You must … After nine hundred and ninety-nine trine plus one trine … The Great Conjunction, the Crystal sang … I was born, ah, Skeksis, too… .”

    Jen stood there quite wretched, afraid of the changes in his life, and bewildered by the responsibility that he felt his Master’s laborious muttering was imposing on him. He had no idea what he was to do with these fragments of knowledge – if knowledge they were and not merely the pointless ravings of someone mortally sick – any more than he could imagine what he ought to do to help his Master now.

    “You are ill,” Jen said. “You must rest.”

    If he could calm his Master, he would go fetch urlm the Healer, who, with his sense of an aura, could lay on hands, and perhaps everything would be right again.

    UrSu took no notice. “Thrice times six were the urSkeks,” he went on, with a kind of chanting rhythm to conserve his breath. “Dark the Crystal, oh … Shattered the sky, great pain, the Skeksis, they … Evil, dark, their rule …”

    Jen was trying to concentrate on the torn words, in obedience to his Master’s injunction to understand, but at the same time he was miserable with the realization that urlm, whom he had seen outside the cave, must already have visited the Master and left because there was nothing more he could do there.

    “Great power,” urSu continued, with a new access of breath, “not again, not renewed, not Skeksis, not if Gelfling, you, ah …” He groaned with the pain of his sickness. “You, make it whole, you must, you must, all whole, Gelfling. Again.”

    Drawing on his last reserves of strength, urSu raised his arm and held it over a copper bowl of liquid that was on the floor beside his sleepframe. His three long fingers and thumb pointed at the surface of the liquid, which at once turned cloudy. Outside the cave, a bolt of lightning struck with such force that Jen felt the ground shudder beneath him. Then, bemused, he watched the bowl of liquid, for it was forming itself into a shape, an image, a picture of a mountain. On top of the mountain he could plainly see a curiously domed building.

    UrSu’s eyes were shut fast. All his remaining energy was now concentrated into forming the picture in the bowl and the words he still struggled to speak. “A wanderer may come,” he muttered. His voice was faint, but by now Jen’s ears had attuned themselves. “Come from under the mountain bringing murder and birth.”

    “Master …” In Jen’s voice was bewilderment and tenderness. He was close to tears.

    UrSu clenched his fingers and released them with an alacrity that was out of keeping with the rest of his inert body. The clouded picture in the bowl changed. What took its place was the image of a piece of crystal, a dagger-shaped fragment, which glinted in the cloudy liquid below the urRu’s pointing fingers.

    “Mark this crystal shard,” urSu intoned in a faint, distant chant. “An orphan must restore it. Heal the wound at the core of being. Wanderer, orphan, Gelfling, Jen, with this tool you may