Lord of Lies (32 page)

As he made his way from the stands and out of the pavilion, many people followed him. Many more, however, came down to congratulate me To Yarashan and Baltasar, to Lord Raasharu, Skyshan and Sunjay Naviru, I showed my champion's medallion. It was a great moment made poignant only by Asaru's absence. But Maram's hand thumping on my back and the deep quiet of Estrella's dark eyes gave me to hope that I would fulfill all my dreams, and soon.

I
spent most of the next day in my tent with Asaru, tending his wound and recounting the events of the tournament, especially the sword competition which he had not been able to watch. With Master Juwain filling his torn body with the green gelstei's magic light, he seemed to gain strength every hour. By the time the following morning dawned clear and bright, Master Juwain felt confident of my brother's recovery.

'I've done all I can for Asaru,' he said to me as he took me outside. 'Now he'll have to heal of his own light - and by the One's grace.'

'Thank you,' I said to him as I looked off at the rising sun.

'And now we should go up to the school. With King Waray's prohibition, it might take many days to search through the thought stones.'

King Waray, even as I had feared, had forbidden Master Juwain to remove any artifact from the Brotherhood's sanctuary.

'We don't have
many
days,' I said to him. 'We should leave for Tria as soon as we can.'

With time pressing at us, Master Juwain and five others of his Brotherhood organized a little expedition to reopen their school in the hills above Nar. The Guardians and I joined them, for it seemed certain that the Lightstone would be needed to open any gelstei Master Juwain might find. To our numbers was added a company of Taron knights under the command of a Lord Evar. They would escort us to the school and make certain that King Waray's wishes were obeyed.

And so later that day we left Yarashan, Lord Harsha, Behira and Estrella behind with Asaru, and we rode out from the Tournament Grounds. With the fifty Taroners in the lead, we made our way through the smoky Smithy District up into the green hills overlooking the city. The Brotherhood school - a collection of old stone buildings spread out across the top of one of these broad hills - rose up before us as if the very bones of the earth had been exposed by wind and weather and the relentless wear of time. I liked the feeling of this ancient site. As with other Brotherhood schools, there was a quiet magnificence here and a harmony with heaven and earth that suggested an eternal quest for mysteries. The library formed the center part of the Brother's sanctuary. It was fronted by perfectly proportioned columns beyond which loomed its great wooden doors. Lord Evar, a tall man almost as gaunt and grim as King Sandarkan, drew forth a great iron key and made a show of formally unlocking these ancient doors.

While the five other masters went off to attend to various duties and the Guardians stood watch before the doors, Master Juwain showed Maram and me into the library. It was nothing so grand as the immense Library of Khaisham and collection of books that had perished in flames. But with its many aisles and shelves of musty, leather-bound volumes and manuscripts resting in the quiet beneath its great dome, I guessed that it held more books than all of Silvassu. Along its curved walls were many cabinets containing relics that the Brothers had rescued over the ages. Master Juwain, with a key that a Master Tavian had given him, approached one of these cabinets and unlocked one of its long, flat drawers. He slid it out halfway to reveal many opalescent stones which rested in pockets scooped into the wood. In front of each pocket was inscribed a number. Each stone ran with shifting colors that ranged from ruby to bright violet; each of them seemed nearly identical to the stone that Master Juwain had opened in my father's castle and which he now drew forth.

'Do you see?' he told Maram and me as he turned the stone between his fingers. 'It's as I said: there were too many to remove to Mesh.'

I looked deeper into the drawer and saw that there were ten rows of ten stones - or should have been, for near the back of the drawer, one stone was missing from the ninth row.

'But how did you choose
this
stone?' Maram asked him.

'By chance,' Master Juwain said. He tapped his finger against the three drawers below the opened one. 'These, too, contain gelstei believed to hold knowledge of the Lightstone. 1 had to pick one of them and test it.'

'Four hundred stones,' I said, shaking my head.

'Three hundred and fifty-three, to be precise,' Master Juwain told me. 'The fourth drawer is only half full.'

'Even so, to open and read all of them would be like reading as many books, wouldn't it?'

'Yes, but it may be that the knowledge in the stones is indexed and cross-referenced, as in the books of the better libraries. If so, then I might be able to follow a stream of knowledge to the: one we seek.'

'Any
knowledge about the Lightstone, you should seek,' I said to him. 'About the Maitreya. Now, if you will, please begin.'

As in the great hall of my father's castle, Master Juwain used his varistei to prepare his head and heart for the task before him. Then I brought forth the Lightstone. Master Juwain set his thought stone back into its place in the drawer and removed another one. His gnarled fingers squeezed it tightly as he held it before the Lightstone. This time, he had much less trouble opening it. The Lightstone flared with a sudden radiance as the thought stone's colors seemed to catch fire. I saw these colors swirling in bright patterns in the black circles at the centers of Master Juwain's eyes. So intently did he stare at this little gelstei that it seemed he might never move again.

'I see, I see,' he whispered. And then, after some moments, while my heart beat quickly, he said, 'Brother Maram, please give me number nineteen.'

Without turning his head, he handed Maram the little stone, which Maram set back in its place before retrieving the one that Master Juwain had requested. He pressed it into Master Juwain's hand. And for what seemed a long time, Master Juwain stared at this thought stone, too.

'Number eighty-two!' Master Juwain finally called out. 'Third drawer!'

And so it went for the rest of the day and far into the night, Master Juwain calling for specific thought stones and Maram delivering them faithfully - even as I stood in front of Master Juwain holding up the brilliant Lightstone.

At last, Maram patted his rumbling belly and suggested that we should take our evening meal. Master Juwain then broke off his researches. He looked across the large, circular room at the blazing candles that he had only grudgingly permitted Maram to light. And then he told us, 'The thought stones
were
indexed, perhaps thousands of years ago. But the system has been lost - until today.'

He began to explicate this system but I held up my hand to stop him. 'Excuse me, sir, but we've little time. What did you discover?'

'Much less than we'd hoped, I'm afraid,' he said. 'That is, the thought stones
do
contain a great deal of knowledge. But most of this is recorded in the
Saganom Elu
.'

'Is there nothing new, then? Nothing that might be able to help us?'

'Only bits and pieces,' he said. 'Only hints.'

'Tell me, then.'

'Well, there
this
,' he said. 'There are passages indicating that the Maitreya is one who must make a great sacrifice.'

'Of his life?' I asked.

Master Juwain's news did not accord with the
Saganom Elu's Book of Remembrance,
where it was written that: 'The Maitreya will gain the greatest prize; he will reach out and take the whole world in his hands.'

Master Juwain shook his head and told me, 'No, I had no sense that the Maitreya must
die for
others, not exactly. Only that he must forsake some great thing.'

'Is it love, then? Marriage?'

'No, I don't think so. It has something to do, rather, with the Lightstone.'

I squeezed the golden cup that I still held In my hand. 'But the Lightstone was
meant
for the Maitreya. How, then, should he give it up?'

'I'm not sure he must. I'm not sure he can.'

'What do you mean?'

'Do you remember the passage from the
Beginnings?
' "The Ughtstone is the perfect jewel within the lotus found inside the human heart." '

'A beautiful metaphor,' I said.

'Beautiful, yes - and perhaps something more.' Master Juwain gazed above us at the dome's clear windows that let in the light of the stars. 'You see, there are the infinities.'

'Sir?'

He looked back at me and showed me the thought stone. He said, 'This little gelstei is a finite thing, as is the knowledge it contains - as are all
things.
The One, of course, is infinite. But the Lightstone, somehow, is both.'

Now all of us, even Maram, stared at the golden contours of the Lightstone as if seeing it for the first time.

'And as with the Lightstone,' Master Juwain continued, 'so with the Maitreya. We know that he is the one who has a perfect resonance with it. There is a sense that in order for this to be so, he must sacrifice his finiteness - his very humanity.'

I gripped the Lightstone so tightly that it hurt my fingers. I shook my head because I did not know what Master Juwain s words could mean. I said, 'If only there was more.'

'I'm afraid that's all I gleaned from this first pass. But if I'd had more time .. .'

His voice died off into the library's half-light.

'Yes?' I said to him.

'Well you see,' he said, 'there
was
one stream of recordings, more like a rill, actually, that I might have followed. A hint of a hint about some great store of knowledge concerning the Lightstone.'

I looked out the window at the great constellations wheeling slowly about the heavens. I said to him, 'We have all of tonight - and tomorrow, too, if need be. If you are willing, sir.'

The gleam in Master Juwain's luminous eyes told me that he was more than willing. When Maram groaned that we could not possibly go on without sustenance, I sent him to retrieve a loaf of barley bread and some goat's cheese from the stores that the Guardians had shared out for their dinner. And then, after we had eaten, Maram returned to retrieving thought stones for Master Juwain as our old friend set to work.

Thus we passed the rest of the night. As Master Juwain gained proficiency at opening and reading the stones, this strange business went more quickly. At times he called out the numbers of new stones so suddenly that Maram was hard put to replace the old one before drawing forth the new. He puffed and sweated as drawers slid open and slammed shut and the marble-like thought stones rattled in their wooden pockets. Finally, near dawn, Master Juwain gave back to Maram the last of a long sequence of stones. He looked at us and smiled. Although his eyes were red with weariness, he was almost hopping with excitement.

'I believe,' he told us, 'that there is a gelstei containing the true knowledge of the Lightstone. A gelstei unlike any other. It's called an akashic crystal.'

'That name is unfamiliar to me,' I said.

'Akashic is a word meaning "great memories". It seems that the knowledge contained in this crystal, compared to an ordinary thought stone, is as an ocean to a pond.'

I considered this as I gazed at the little stone that Maram had yet to put away.

'It may be,' Master Juwain continued, 'that the akashic crystal holds the wisdom of the Elder Ages.'

The ancient stones of which the library was made suddenly seemed small and cold. The Brotherhood school, built in the Age of the Mother, was many thousands of years old - almost as old as any building on Ea. And yet it was said that even this great span of time was really very little. As a year is to an age, so is an entire age of Ea to one of the Elder Ages, before Elahad and the Star People bore the Lightstone to earth.

'But how could it?' I asked. 'The knowledge that Elahad and his kindred brought with them perished with them. This is known. This you taught me, even when I was a boy.'

Master Juwain sighed and said, 'It would seem that some of what is known is known wrongly.'

'Then how do you know,' I asked, pointing at Maram's thought stone 'that the knowledge contained in
this
gelstei and the others, is true?'

'I don't,' Master Juwain said. 'It must be tested, as all knowledge and supposition must be. But it
has
been tested, many times, by the ancients who placed it there. And I have tested it against all that I know and have experienced, and through reason. There is a certain flavor to that which is fact and another to wild fancies.'

I bowed my head to him that this was so. I told him, 'If you believe it's true, that's good enough for me.'

'I
believe
that the wisdom of the Elder Ages was preserved. Somehow. And that, once a time, this akashic crystal did exist. The question is, does it still? And where might it be found?'

'Not in Khaisham, I hope,' Maram put in. 'When I think of all the books that burned there, the people, too ... and the gelstei, so many, too many, too bad.'

For a moment, Maram lost himself in memories of that horrible night in which Count Ulanu the Cruel had ordered the destruction of one of Ea's greatest wonders. But Master Juwain, I saw, was looking toward the future instead of the past. His eyes were bright with dreams.

'It would seem,' I said to him, 'that you believe the akashic crystal
does
still exist. And that you know where it might be found.'

We smiled at each other then, and he said, 'Well, Val, I admit that here knowledge must yield to supposition. But late in the Age of Law, a Master Savon recorded that the akashic crystal was hidden away to keep it safe. There are verses that tell of this. Do you remember the famous one about Ea's vilds?'

I remembered very well the Lokilani's magic wood which Master Juwain called a vild and the verse that described it: