Lord of Lies (40 page)

Darkness smothered me and stole the light from my eyes. For what seemed a million years, I was blind. And then 1 felt myself once again holding in my hand a small crystal sphere. A glimmer of its white gelstei broke through the blackness enveloping me. And then there were stars once more: the bright lights of the Swan and the Seven Sisters and all the other constellations filled the sky above the steppe. The leaves of the cottonwoods along the river fluttered in their radiance. Atara's white cloth reflected the dancing red flames of the fire. She still sat holding the Lightstone in her cupped hands. Her face was white and grave. 'Do you see?' she said to me softly. 'Do you see?'

I coughed at the dryness in my throat as I shivered. I gripped the kristei in my hand and stared into its clear depths.

'Did I see?' asked her. 'Did I see the same vision you saw?

'One of them - there are millions of others. Millions of millions.'

'But how is that possible?'

'It seems that the white gelstei not only quickens a scryer's visions but records them.'

'I didn't know it had that power.'

'Few do, even scryers. I didn't
know
myself until tonight. Until I quickened it with the Lightstone.'

I gazed at the golden cup gathering in the lights of the heavens. Who knew what other wonders this little vessel might work? Who knew
how
it could be made to work them?

'This future you showed me,' I said to her. 'Is this what I am supposed to fear if I fail to heal you?'

'Oh, no,' she said. 'It is what will befall if you
succeed
- and are then led to believe you are the Maitreya when you are not.'

I looked down into the crystal again, and I gasped to see Atara looking back at me. Her lovely face filled the whole of the spheres luminous interior. Her blindfold was gone. In its place were two eyes as clear and sparkling as blue diamonds. And then my exaltation blazed out from deep inside me. It fell upon her like a dragon's red
relb
and burst into flame. The screaming of her eyes was worse than any sound I had ever heard. It took only a moment for the fire to burn her flesh down to the bone so all that remained was skull encased in char.

'Enough!' I cried out as I thrust the sphere away from me. One of the Guardians posted by the river looked my way, but I held up my hand to signal that everything was all right - even if it really wasn't. 'Take back your crystal, Atara. I would see no more.'

I gave the kristei back into her hand, and she returned the Lightstone to me. For a while we sat facing each other, saying nothing.

'You were right about one thing,' I finally said. 'These visions of yours, this way of seeing - it's too dear, too cold.'

Something of this terrible cold, I knew, would remain with me It bit into my bones and recalled the ice mountains of the Nagarshath.

'You
do
see,' she said to me. 'This is the world where I live now.'

'But, Atara, there's another world.'

'Your
world,' she said bitterly. 'And whether you're the Maitreya or not, you must do what you can save it.'

All the coldness inside her seemed to come pouring out all at once. She
made
herself cold, toward me. And then she was no longer a woman of golden skin and warm breath and dreams; she was a scryer encased in the eternal freeze of glacier ice. 'Atara, Atara,' I said to her.

'No, Val - we will not speak of this again!'

I bowed my head to her, and then tucked the Lightstone back inside my armor. Perhaps she was fight, after all. For we both knew that if either of us weakened, I might risk all the fires of the heavens and hell to make her whole again.

'It's growing late,' she said to me.

The frigid tone of her voice was almost more than I could bear; it was more than she could bear, for I felt in her an intense desire to fall weeping against me - if only she'd still had tears with which to weep. I wept then to see this noble being hold herself so straight and still. Her restraint made me love her all the more. I longed for a sword to swing and crack open the icy tomb of this sacrifice that had stolen her away from me.

'Tomorrow we'll have to rest here,' I said. 'But the next day, we'll journey on to the lake.'

'To find this akashic crystal of yours?'

'Yes.'

If not a sword, I thought, then perhaps this great thought stone that might hold the key toward apprehending my fate.

'It's growing late,' she said again. 'We should go to bed.' She stood up abruptly and started off in the direction of the Manslayers' camp. But she tripped over a fresh log, and it was all I could do to rise up and catch her, to keep her from falling face-first into the fire. I took her cold hand in mine, and she said to me, 'It seems that I might need help after all.'

And so we walked away from the fire around the rows of the sleeping Guardians, out into the steppe. We passed the dark, mounded graves of other Guardians who had fallen in battle only hours before. Their sleep was much deeper, and they would not arise to greet the new day. We had not been able to inscribe stones and set them into the places on earth where they lay. And so I silently whispered their names: Karashan and Aivar, Jushur and Jonawan, and those of their eighteen companions. I promised them that their sacrifice in risking the wilds of the Wendrush should not be in vain. I promised myself, and Atara, that I would find the akashic crystal and make it yield its secrets. I knew no other way. For as she had told me, it was upon me, and me alone, to pierce through to the heart of the mystery of my life.

I
had hoped that all the wounded would be able to ride when we set out two days later. But despite Master Juwain's best efforts, the four Guardians who bore the worst wounds would have to remain here at least a few days while they recuperated. I saw to it that they were well-provisioned, and I appointed four others to nurse them and guard them against wolves and lions - or the return of vengeful Adirii. They were to follow us to the lake, if they could. But if we failed to rendezvous there, they were to return to their respective kingdoms in the Morning Mountains. It would not do for wounded knights to go trotting off after us across the endless miles of the Wendrush.

Thus our company was reduced to 165 Guardians. With the sun caught like a knot of fire in a notch in the mountains behind us, we formed up as we had before. I rode at the head of our center column, with Maram and Lord Raasharu to either side, and Estrella right behind me. It pained me that she had to endure the dangers of our journey. But during the battle, she had evidenced no sign of terror or panic. I attributed this to an inner strength that I was only beginning to understand. To see her sitting on her horse so peacefully in the morning's quiet, with the long grass swaying in the breeze and sparkling with dew, one might have thought that she was hardened to suffering and death. I knew she wasn't. As we passed the graves of the fallen Guardians, a dew of tears filled her eyes, and she wept in silence.

The ninety Manslayers, on their rugged steppe ponies, rode a hundred yards ahead of us as a vanguard. That morning, Atara did not lead them. Indeed, it was Karimah who led her, for Atara's blindness did not evaporate with the rising of the sun. Karimah held a string tied to Fire's bridle, and this fine mare seemed to understand that she must trail after Karimah and bear Atara patiently. Atara, 1 sensed, had little patience with the darkness embracing her. 1 dreaded that the Adirii might return and catch her in such a helpless state. But neither Atara nor the other Manslayers seemed to fear this. As Atara had told me the day before, 'The Adirii took a great enough risk in hunting you. But to seek battle against Valari
and
Sarni - well, that would be madness.'

In truth, although the battle had cost us dearly, I had learned in my bones a great and agonizing lesson: that the only way the Valari could defeat the Sarni on the steppe was with the help of other Sarni.

Later that morning, when we took a break by the river to water the horses, I rode up to Atara and spoke of this. We found a place of privacy beneath a gnarly old cottonwood, and I remarked the wonder of our two peoples riding as one, I asked her if it was possible that her grandfather, Sajagax, might be persuaded to attend the conclave in Tria. For if Morjin could behold the greatest Sarni chieftain sitting peacefully at table with the sovereigns of the Free Kingdoms, then he might truly fear an alliance.

'Sajagax detests cities,' she said to me, 'but it
is
possible.'

'Is it likely?' I asked her. 'Have you
seen
this, then?'

'I mustn't speak to you any more about what I have or haven't seen.'

'But there's so much that I
must
know,' I said to her. 'This prophecy of Kasandra's. What did she mean that a man with no face would show me my own? And that Estrella would show me the Maitreya?'

Atara fell silent as she leaned back against the deep creases of silver bark. Then she said, 'A scryer shouldn't speak of another scryer's visions.'

'Please, Atara. For Estrella's sake, if not mine. It torments me to have to take her into danger.'

'It can't be helped,' she told me. 'What will be will be. The girl will be with you to the end.'

'To the end of
what?'
My life? Until I claimed the Lightstone or reached the darkest of places, wherever and whatever that was?

But Atara would say no more; indeed she had told me too much already. For a few minutes, as our hundreds of horses up and down the stony banks of the river lowered their heads and drank up belly-fuls of sweet, clear water, we spoke of other things. She gave me news of our companions on the Quest. Liljana continued to reside in Tria and plot the downfall of Morjin. As head of the Maitriche Telu, she was gathering Sisters from all across Ea to their secret sanctuary there. And against thousands of years of tradition, she had begun to instruct Daj in their witches' ways. The little boy that we had rescued out of Argattha had flourished under Liljana's care. His starved body had filled out from the nourishing foods that Liljana cooked him; and his starved mind had filled up with knowledge that the Maitriche Telu had preserved and kept secret ever since the Age of the Mother.

'And what of Kane?' I asked.

'Kane left Tria in great urgency five months ago.'

'Business with this Black Brotherhood of his?'

'I don't know - he wouldn't say.'

'Did he say when he might return?'

'I don't know that either. I hope in time for the conclave.'

I hoped this, too. There were many questions I wished to ask this strange, immortal man. He might have answers for me that not even the akashic crystal could tell me. It was with the thought of this fantastical gelstei, and him, that I ended our little sojourn by the river and climbed onto my horse. We still had many miles to go.

We reached the lake early that afternoon, cresting a rise to behold an expanse of glittering blue beneath a perfectly clear and deep blue sky. The lake seemed to be many miles wide, but we could not see very far out into it, for a wall of mist rose up from its surface in a thick swathe of gray.

'The Lake of Mists,' Baltasar called out from behind me. 'Surely this must be it.'

Surely it was. At least, that is what the men and women who lived near the lake called it. They were short and thick set with curly black hair and skins nearly as dark as burnt grass. They made their village of little huts hewn of cottonwood; they used the lake's water to irrigate fields won in bitter battle with their hoes against the steppe. It seemed that they grew only one crop: a yellow grain called rushk. Atara called them the Dirt Scrapers; she said that they had come up from the south, perhaps from Uskudar, two thousand years before at the time of the Great Death. The Kurmak allowed them to live here in exchange for a tribute paid in sacks of rushk, which was said to be nearly as sustaining as meat. The Kurmak also protected them from the Adirii and other enemies.

'Ah, they don't seem very grateful of their protectors,' Maram said to me as we rode across the narrow band of their fields. Several of the lake men, stripped to the waist and sweating in the sun, paused in their labor to watch the Manslayers ride past them. They glared at these warrior women with their dark eyes and gripped their hoes as if wishing they might put their blades into the Manslayers instead of hacking at weeds in their fields.

Some of these people, to our good fortune, did not scrape dirt at all, but were fishermen. Following the Manslayers, we rode straight down to lake's shore where an old man bent over caulking his beached boat. The joints of his hands were swollen with a lifetime of grinding work, and were much-scarred - probably from the many fishhooks that had caught in them. Karimah, quirt in hand, demanded his name and he said that he was called Tembom.

'Well, Tembom,' she told him, 'we have need to borrow your boat for the day, and perhaps more.'

Tembom straightened up his creaky body and stared at me - and the men that I led - as if he had never seen Valari knights before, which he undoubtedly hadn't.

'But why would you need my boat, Mistress?' he asked her.

'Why would you ask me
why?'
Karimah said, snapping the quirt against her hand.

While the Manslayers edged the shore and sat haughtily on their horses and my knights waited behind me to see what would transpire, Tembom looked out at the lake's quiet blue waters and the mist that rose up from it perhaps a mile away. He said, 'If it's fish you want, we have a good catch of carp, Mistress.'

Karimah's blue eyes flashed at him and she snapped, 'My lady and her friends are going fishing after more than carp. Now we'll need your boat.'

I, of course, had told Karimah nothing of my purpose in seeking a boat, and neither had Atara. But Karimah must have guessed much, for her eyes were like glittering gelstei as she stared out into the lake.

Maram liked boats even less than I did, and he dismounted to come up close and take a better look at this one. 'Well, she seems sturdy enough to hold up even if we're lost in that mist for a few hours.'