Lord of Lies (23 page)

From far away, it seemed, I heard the sound of swords being drawn from their sheaths. And then someone called out: 'It came from the pavilion! It must be Lord Valashu!'

The knight above me at last succeeded in pushing the mace into my throat. I slid my hand down toward the mace's wooden shaft and latched onto it. But I couldn't quite rip it from his grasp, and he pressed the mace downward with a sickening force. I choked and gasped for breath, even as the knight tried to rip the Lightstone from my hand. But I gripped onto the little cup with the last of my strength.

'Lord Valashu, we're coming!'

Suddenly, this murderous knight let go both my hand and the mace He sprang up and lunged for the opening of the tent. Through the red haze of my stunned senses, as I struggled to breathe, I saw him open his mouth and call out: 'He's getting away!'

Then he rushed from my tent even as Sunjay Naviru and two other Guardians rushed in. They came right up to the side of my sleeping furs. While one of the Guardians held up an oil lamp, Sunjay began checking me for wounds. I struggled to sit up; I struggled to speak, but for a moment I could not. I pointed toward the tent's opening. Sunjay laid his hand on my chest and said, 'It's all right, Val. You'll be all right - whoever did this to you won't get away.'

Sunjay, I suddenly realized, believed that the knight who had tried to murder me was in hot pursuit of a would-be assassin. The two other Guardians in my tent, and the many others in the camp, must have believed this, too, for I heard a dozen voices pick up the cry: 'He's getting away!'

I shook my bleeding head back and forth as hard as I dared. I finally found my voice and croaked out,
'He
tried to murder me!'

'Who did, Val?'

'The one .. . who was here.' I realized with a start that I recognized the man who had left me holding his mace - and the Lightstone. 'The one you let get away: it was Sivar of Godhra.'

Sunjay burned with anger and shame to learn that he had been fooled by such a ruse. I burned with disbelief that one of my own, the faithful Sivar, could have betrayed me and then had the cleverness to fool Sunjay in order to make his escape.

I shook off the pain in my pounding head. I sat up and pulled on my diamond-studded boots. And then I ran from my tent, out into the camp which had come alive with men holding torches and shouting while others were ripping open their teat flaps to see if we had been attacked in the middle of the night. To the east, from the nearby encampment of King Hadaru and the Ishkans, came the flash of torches being lit and the cries of knights fearing a plot against their king.

'Search the camp!' I called out as I drew my sword. 'Find Sivar!'

It didn't take long for the Guardians to fulfill this command for the camp was small and there was no place to hide except inside the tents or underneath them. A quick search turned up only one surprising thing: that Maram seemed to have fallen asleep outside his tent. Not

even the clamor of a hundred and twenty knights hurrying about

sufficed to awaken him.

And then one of the sentries to the north remembered seeing Sivar near the stockade just after all the shouting had begun. An examination of this wooden fence revealed some displaced branches where someone must have climbed over it. The sentry, Omaru Tarshan, was aghast that he had failed in his duty. But I eased his shame, pointing out that the stockade and the sentries had been meant to keep enemies from infiltrating the camp and not murderous Guardians from escaping.

Then King Hadaru and his knights arrived to reinforce us. King Hadara made his way into our camp and called out to me, 'What has happened?'

'One of my knights fell mad,' I said. 'He tried to steal the Lightstone.'

After that, I ordered a search of the surrounding pasturage. Men holding bright torches spread out in a widening circle across the still-dark grass. A short while later, from a copse of mulberry to the north, one of the Guardians cried out that he had found Sivar. I led a charge toward these trees with twenty of the Guardians and King Hadaru close behind me. I followed the torchlight of the first Guardian into the copse. And there, fallen on his back next to one of the trees, I saw Sivar. He clutched a bloody dagger and stared at nothing because his throat had been cut from ear to ear. It seemed that he had died by his own hand.

'Here, now - what's this?' King Hadaru cried out as he came up to me. 'Look, then, a
Meshian
has turned traitor!'

'No,' I said, 'he was no traitor - not exactly.'

Asaru and Yarashan, with Lansar Raasharu, Baltasar and Sunjay joined me beneath the mulberry trees, with their darkly fluttering and coarsely-toothed leaves. Then Master Juwain came panting up to us followed by Lord Harsha, who limped along as quickly as he could. When his single eye looked past the light of the torches to take in Sivar's fallen form, he called out, 'This is terrible! My grand-nephew, whom I recommended as Guardian myself - how can this be?

'Because he as a ghul,' I said. My heart ached with a sharp pain because there could no longer be any doubt of this. 'It must have been Sivar who used the sleep stone on the Guardians at the castle. He must have waited for this night, for a second chance to steal the Lightstone.'

I brought forth the golden cup to show everyone that it remained safe. But neither it nor anything, it seemed to me, would ever be safe again.

Lansar Raasharu's noble face was now a mask of anger. He pointed down at Sivar and said 'But if this man was a creature of Morjin's why did he kill himself!'

'To keep from being captured and questioned,' I said. 'In any case, once I had recognised him, he was useless to Morjin.'

'Yes, but hy kill himself
here
? Could not the accursed Cruecifier simply have commanded him to cut his own throat in your tent?'

We all looked at each other then. It seemed that the hand of Morjin lay heavy about us even from a thousand miles away, pressing down like a mailed fist upon this little stand of trees and reaching out to rip open the fabric of our tents in the encampments below us.

It was Master Juwain who had an answer for Lord Raasharu. He nodded his bald head toward him and said, 'Sometimes a ghul retains enough of his soul to hate his master, even to break free, for a few moments. It may have been so with Sivar. Until the Red Dragon found him hiding here in these trees.'

I held up my hand as if to ward off Morjin's evil eye. With Sivar dead I knew that Morjin had no way to perceive this place or anywhere else nearby. But in that dark moment, with the blood filling the dark opening in Sivar's throat, it seemed that Morjin could look into any part of the world that he willed.

'A ghul,' Master Juwain said, his voice heavy with sadness. He turned to examine the gash that Sivar's mace had torn along the side of my head. 'It's a miracle he didn't kill you, Val.'

'He ,.. was so powerful,' I said.

I didn't add that Sivar, moving to Morjin's will, had been possessed by all of his sorcerous strength.

'Here, Val,' Master Juwain said to me. 'Let me look at your eyes.'

As one of the Guardians held up a torch, a bright lancet of light stabbed straight through my eyes into my head. The kirax with which Morjin had once poisoned me seemed to flare up in my blood as if Moriin himself had breathed his fiery breath into me. It was like acid eating into every nerve in my body, making this pain a hundred times worse.

'Damn him!' Lansar called out as if my hatred of Morjin had becone his own. 'Damn Morjin for doing this!'

After Master Juwain had finished testing me to concussion. Lansar Raasharu looked at me in thankfulness that I would be all right. I wondered if he might have possessed some part of my gift. His devotion to me was like a shield held up to protect me, leaving himself uncovered, and I loved him for that.

'And damn Sivar for betraying us!' he added.

I looked down at Sivar's body and said; 'No, let's not damn him for he has damned himself. It might be so with any man.'

'With any man who is weak, perhaps. With any man who is faithless and turns away from the Law of the One.'

I said nothing as I looked down into Sivar's dead eyes. Even great angels such as Angra Mainyu, I thought, had turned away from the One.

'What shall we do now, Lord Valashu?' Lansar asked me.

'Let's bury him,' I said. 'Before Sivar was a ghul, he was Sar Sivar, whom many of us loved.'

After that, one of Sivar's friends wrapped his body in his cloak, and six of the Guardians bore him back to camp to prepare for burial. King Hadaru and his knights went back to the Ishkan encampment, there to take a little rest in what remained of the night. I retired into my lent. Master Juwain met me there with some hot tea to soothe my savaged throat. Then he went to work stitching up the gash along the side of my head while I spoke with Asaru and Yarashan about the night's calamity. After a little while, Maram poked his head inside and joined us, too. Yarashan tore into him for failing asleep on his watch and nearly getting me killed. But Maram had kept many long watches through many long nights on our quest across Ea; I knew that he hadn't simply allowed himself to nod off. Maram confirmed this, filling in another piece of the puzzle of how Morjin had nearly worked my doom.

'I didn't
fall
asleep,' he huffed at Yarashan. 'Near the end
of
my watch, Sivar approached me with a cup of brandy. He said that he couldn't sleep, either, with all the excitement of the tournament beginning the day after tomorrow. He asked if he could join me in a little nightcap before sleeping. And why not, I thought, since I had only a few minutes left before I was to wake up Lord Asaru? Sivar was really a kind man, everyone said that about him, and I was grateful for this little kindness. But the brandy must have been poisoned with a sleeping potion. I remember talking with him about the lance-throwing competition ... and then there was nothing.'

His suspicions were proved when he retrieved his cup for Master Juwain's examination. Master Juwain took one sniff of the still-moist brandy residue and pronounced, 'Nightstalk. The Kailimun use such potions. Probably Salmelu or one of the Red Priests supplied Sivar with it - along with the sleep stone that dropped the Guardians in King Shamesh's hall,'

For a while Master Juwain, with Maram and Asaru, speculated as to how Morjin had made a ghul of Sivar. Did Morjin have spies in Mesh who had somehow marked out Sivar as weak in the will? Had Sivar delved into the dark mysteries of the mind only to find the Red Dragon waiting for him in the deepest and most desolate of caverns? Nobody knew. After a while, Yarashan gave up trying to fathom the unfathomable and said to me, 'At least the ghul has been exposed and killed - we can be thankful for that.'

But Maram, who understood me better than almost anyone, looked at me and said, 'Ah, Val, the prophecy, too bad.'

'The prophecy? Which prophecy?' Yarashan asked. Although he was an intelligent man, he was not a particularly sensitive one. 'The scryer said that a ghul would undo Val's dreams. Well, she was wrong. Val fought him off, like a true Elahad, and so the ghul was made to undo himself.'

'No, Yarashan,' I said. The night's events had nearly ripped out my insides. 'I. . . was so certain of Sivar. Of all the Guardians. Their hearts, their beings: so bright.
This
was the dream. But how can I be certain of anything ever again?'

How could I, I wondered, ever claim the mantle of the Maitreya if I couldn't be certain even of myself?

Yarashan, of course, had no answers for me. And neither did Maram or Asaru, or even Master Juwain. We stayed up talking for the rest of the night. At last, with the sun rising like a ball of fire over the green hills to the east, it came time to break camp. A burial remained to be made. Tournament competitions must be faced, and if possible, won. And above all, Morjin, the Crucifier, the Lord of Lies, must be opposed at all moments with all the force and purity of our hearts - or else we might end up as had Sivar of Godhra, a man without a soul who was doomed to wander lost among the stars until the end of time.

N
ar was the largest city in the Nine Kingdoms; it spread out across the rolling, green country to the west and north of the Iron Hills, where its founders had delved for ore and built forges to make steel. To this day plumes of smoke rise over the shops of the Smithy District along the hills; there could be found the Street of Shields and the famous Street of Swords that was the ancient heart of Nar. We made our way east toward this oldest part of the city for the King's Road took us straight toward a juncture there with two other highways: the Adra Straight, which led north out of the city across Taron's tree-covered plains, and the great Nar Road running from Tria all the way into Delu and bisecting Nar from the northwest to the southeast. It was said that once a wall had surrounded the city, but we saw no sign of it. The Narangians boasted that their swords were their walls. No enemy had beleaguered Nar since Athar had conquered much of Taron in the ninth century of the Age of Swords.

Word that the Lightstone was being brought into the city must have preceded us, for the people of Nar lined the road from the very outskirts to the west and on into the Valari District, where many knights and lords had fine stone houses. That morning, I had given the Lightstone to Tavar Amadan; as we rode along, he held high the shining cup for all to see. Great lords such as Siravay Jurshan stood in front of the shops with carpenters and bakers and other tradesmen, all of whom wore on their fingers the diamond rings of knights or simple warnors. And all of them - and many women and children, too - cheered as we passed by. And that was a rare and beautiful thing in this kingdom, for the thousands of Taroners to shower their accolades upon an armed company of Ishkans and Meshians riding into their midst.

After a while, we passed the old Tournament Grounds, which long ago had been abandoned and given over as a greenway. The road took us between the Knight's District to the north and the King's Palace, all the way to the great square in the heart of Nar. There, beneath the steep hills on which perched an ancient castle, the white Tower of the Sun rose up toward the sky. Although it was not nearly so great as the towers in Tria or Delarid - or even in Khevaju, Nazca, Ar and other cities of other lands - people came from across the Nine Kingdoms to view this shining wonder, for the Valari have never been great builders and nothing like it could be seen in all the Morning Mountains. There, too, at the edge of the square, we came to the intersection of the Nar Road and the Adra Straight, a finely made road that led past the smithies close to the hills along a district full of fine eateries and inns. Smells of roasting chicken and hot bread mingled with coal smoke and steaming dung which the many horses clopping down this thoroughfare left behind them. The Narangians crowding the street on either side seemed not to notice or mind this effluvia that tainted their air, as in any large city. They loosed their cheers upon us from mouths wide open at the marvel of the Lightstone. But the Ishkans riding ahead of us and many of Mesh pulled their scarves up over their noses; thus did they try to protect themselves from the dust of old, dried dung that the horses' hooves pounded into powder and kicked up into choking brown clouds.