Lord of Lies (55 page)

I wished him well, too, and mounted Altaru. Estrella, Maram, Atara and my other friends, with the Guardians, formed up behind me. Ahead, Sajagax and his blond warriors were already waiting on the road. The Kurmak nudged their horses to a quick walk, and so did we. Duke Malatam led his thirty knights in the opposite direction, back toward Tiamar.

We rode in silence for most of two miles as the air began heating up and our horses' hooves rattled the worn paving stones of the road. I looked past the green, checkerboard country behind us, and the Duke and his knights were nowhere to be seen. Ahead of us, the road seemed to curve north and west through a steaming land of canals and farms.

Sajagax confirmed this a few minutes later when he rode back to have a word with me. He pulled at the gold wire twining his mustache and said, 'I remember this from my last journey through this country, more than twenty years ago now. The
kradaks
built their cursed road as close to the river as they could. But it bends back to the west ahead of us, to avoid the hills to the north. If we rode straight toward the northwest, we could cut across this bend - and cut a few miles from our journey.'

He left it unsaid that we could also leave the cultivated strip along the river for the more open land of the Wendrush.

Lord Harsha's single eye surveyed the rolling country to the left of us, and he said, 'Duke Malatam seemed too keen to delay us. It won't hurt for us to take a path that he might not anticipate.'

'All right,' I said, agreeing to this proposal. 'Let us then keep a watch behind us as well as ahead.'

And so we left the road. Sajagax, almost gleefully, led the way through a cabbage field, and he didn't care if his warriors' horses kicked to pieces what the Sarni considered to be a stinking vegetable. After a few miles of trampling black dirt and splashing through shallow canals, the farms gave out, and we came to the open steppe. Even I breathed a sigh of happiness at the sight of the sea of grass opening before us.

But we had not ventured very far out upon it when a familiar feeling began eating at my spine. A sharp sensation like pinpricks horripilated the flesls at the back of my neck. I knew, with a sudden dread, that someone was following me.

Sajagax seemed to know this, too. Perhaps he possessed something of my gift of
valarda.
Perhaps the cries of the hawks above us alerted him to approaching dangers or the wind carried faint scents to his nostrils, for more than once he paused and sniffed the air behind him as might an old lion. His clear blue eyes fixed on me as I too often turned in my saddle to look across the undulating acres of grass behind us. He sent scouts to ride back along the line of our route. And then, once again, he urged his horse back to me and my columns of Valari knights. He suggested that we ride off a dozen yards so that we might confer together.

'You're as nervous as antelope,' he said to me as we walked our horses parallel to the columns of Guardians. 'I haven't seen you like this.'

'We're being followed,' I said to him. 'By whom remains uncertain.'

Sajagax nodded his head and glanced behind us. 'I think it is Duke Malatam. To behold the Lightstone is to love it like life itself, but he loved it
more
than anyone should, if you know what I mean.'

I stopped for a moment and tried to feel through Altaru's sturdy legs for any shaking of the earth; I looked behind us for any sign of a dust plume rising into the clear blue sky. To Sajagax, I said, 'Do you ever grow tired of battle?'

Sajagax seemed to swell like a bellows ready to deliver a blast of air into a furnace. 'Ask me if I grow tired of living. Should I want to give up that which stirs the greatest life within me? I love battle as all men should: as the sun loves the world, as a man does a woman.'

At this, I looked off at Atara riding next to Karimah as the columns of my knights passed by us. The beating of my heart was a deep pain inside me. Sajagax followed the line of my eyes, and he breathed out a heavy sigh.

'Sometimes I
do
grow tired,' he admitted. For a moment he sat slumped on his horse, deflated and spent like an old man. 'There's been so much slaughter. Eleven of my sons. Seventeen grandsons. My first wife.'

'Isn't Freyara your first wife?'

'No, when I was a young man like you, I took a bride from the Haukut clan. Her name was Aliaqa.'

Sajagax wiped the sweat stinging his eyes, and a great sadness came over him.

'Was she killed in battle, then?'

'No, a Marituk warrior stole her from my tent,' He sighed again and then forced himself to sit up straight as a red rage began building inside him. 'Torok was his name. I swam the Poru and then followed his track a hundred miles to where his family had their camp. Four days I spent waiting for my moment. And then I took my Aliaqa back.'

'And Torok, his family - they didn't follow you?'

'No, I had driven off their horses. But when Torok saw me riding off with Aliaqa, he fired an arrow into her back. To spite me. To take from me my greatest treasure. He could have fired his arrow at me.'

I reached out and clasped his hard hand in mine. Tears filled his eyes. He squeezed back with such a fierce grip that I feared my hand might break.

'After I gave Aliaqa back to the world,' he continued, 'I waited four more days. I returned to their camp. When everyone was sleeping, I cut through their tent, which belonged to Torok's brother. His name I never learned, but I put my sword through him first. I woke up Torok so that he knew who it was that killed him. The noise woke everyone else up, too. The brother's wife was like a she-wolf: she could have been a Manslayer. She came at me with a knife, and I had to cut her down, too.'

Now the old rage that had tormented him for so long turned inward and began eating at his insides like a ravening lion. I sensed that he wanted to tell me more, so I said, 'And then?'

'And then I killed the brother's children, too. The oldest boy couldn't have been more than five; the youngest was a baby, a girl with milk on her mouth. I told myself that it was a mercy, that they couldn't have survived the jackals and wolves with their elders dead, thirty miles from any other Marituk encampment. But I know not, Valashu, I know not.'

Sajagax bowed his head as he stared at the grass. It was a terrible thing that he had told me. He sat beneath the hot sun sweating and blinking his eyes. Then he looked at me. In a deep, angry voice, he forced out, 'I didn't make the world! Battles all true men must fight. We try to work our will on the world, but it may be that the world works its will on us. Who can see the end of it all?'

Again, I looked off toward Atara, who now rode a couple of hundred yards ahead of us. Seeing this, Sajagax's fierce, old face suddenly softened. 'If battle should find us here, I want you to stay by my granddaughter's side. She's a warrior, the greatest of the Manslayers, but she is still the woman you love, and you must protect her.'

He clasped hands with me yet again as if to seal an agreement. Then he dug his heels into his horse and galloped back to where his warriors made their way across the steppe. I rejoined my company, riding side by side with Atara. Thus we proceeded for perhaps an hour before one of Sajagax's scouts came pounding over a rise behind us. He galloped straight past our columns and cried out, 'The Alonians! They have betrayed us!'

At this news, Sajagax turned his warriors and waited for us to catch up to him. Then he rode forward, with Thadrak and Orox. I joined them there, on a grass-covered knoll, accompanied by Atara, Lord Raasharu, Lord Harsha, Baltasar, Maram and Master Juwain. Then the scout, nearly breathless from his dash across the steppe, gasped out: 'Duke Malatam leads a great many knights - I saw his standard with the rose flowers!'

'How far behind us?' Sajagax asked.

'Five miles.'

'How many knights?'

'Nearly five hundred. And thrice as many remounts.'

At these numbers, Maram's face paled as if a demon had drained him of blood. And Lord Raasharu said, 'Duke Malatam could not have assembled such a force this quickly, not since breakfast.'

'No,' I agreed. 'The call must have gone out when he first had word that we had passed through the Long Wall.'

'Then he
did
try to delay us outside of Tiamar,' Baltasar said. My hot-blooded friend's face filled with all the color that Maram's lacked. 'He would have waylaid us there - like a filthy brigand!'

'He'll waylay us here if we don't ride!' Maram called out.

Atara, who had remained silent, faced back toward the line of our march, to the southeast. We all faced that way, too. The sun was bright above the wavering, golden grasses, and hurt all our eyes. We had to squint to make out the plume of dust rising from the earth into the sky.

'Let's ride,' I said. 'We have a good lead. Perhaps we can outdistance them.'

I turned my black warhorse toward the cloudless sky in the northwest. I looked at Atara sitting so peacefully on hers. Despite my hopeful words, I feared that battle
would
find us here, and that soon I would have to slay many man to protect her, as she would me.

S
ajagax and I led our warriors in a race across this vast, open country. The Sarni set a pace that would soon exhaust our horses, and our remounts, too, which pounded and panted behind us.

After while, as the sun rose higher and poured down its orange fire upon us, we saw that no matter how fast we rode, Duke Malatam's knights drew closer and the dust plume behind us grew larger above the horizon. We stopped by a small stream for a little water. As quickly as we could, we unbuckled our saddles from our sweating horses and slapped them onto the backs of our remounts. Altaru hated me riding another horse, but seemed to sense that he had to preserve his strength for greater exertions still to come. The Kurmak warriors who joined us by the stream likewise exchanged horses. Sajagax chose a gray stallion and rode up to me as I mounted my new horse.

'You Valari ride well,' he said to me, 'but you ride slowly.'

'Yes,' I told him as I sweated inside my casing of diamond armor. It seemed as hot and heavy as molten lead, 'Slower, at least, than your Kurmak warriors. Why don't you escape, while you still can?'

'You mean, forsake you?'

'This is not your affair,' I said to him. 'You haven't taken vows to protect the Lightstone.'

'No, we haven't,' he said to me. Then his heavy face split wide with a grin as he looked at Baltasar, Sar Jarlath and others of my knights. 'But you have told me that we
should
protect the weak.'

I smiled back at him, and clapped him on his bare shoulder. Then we resumed our flight across the wide, rolling plains of Tarlan. It grew even hotter. Our horses snorted and panted and coughed. They beat their hooves into the sun-baked turf and sent up dust devils of their own. The dry air sucked the moisture from our sweating bodies, parching us and cracking our lips and tongues. I worried that my knights who had been wounded in the battle with the Adirii would not be able to keep up this killing pace - much less Estrella and Behira. But Behira, schooled by her father, rode determinedly and well. And Estrella surrendered to the torment of this long chase. Her slight body seemed to merge with her charging horse; as we sped along mile after mile, she rode near me, and her dark, wild eyes showed distress but no complaint.

And still the small army pursuing us gained on us, by inches, it seemed. I turned in my saddle many times to look behind us; I scanned the endless grasslands ahead of us, trying to calculate distances and time. Maram, panting almost as loudly as his horse as he rode beside me, suggested that we might last out ail the day and flee into the cover of darkness. But unless some clouds came up, it seemed that the rising moon would give Duke Malatam enough light to keep after us - especially once he and his men gained a clear line of sight as to our long lances and sparkling armor. And I did not want to be caught in the open at night.

'Atara!' I called out as she sat beside me urging on her horse. The pounding of hundreds of hooves was nearly deafening. 'Do you know what lies ahead of us?'

She shook her head back and forth. The cloth wrapped around it was powdered brown with dust?. She said, 'I've never been this way before.'

'Of course - but what can you
see?'

She fell silent for a couple of hundred yards as we continued our jarring journey across the steppe. And then she said, 'What would you want me to see?'

'Is there any broken country about?'

'Yes,' she gasped out, coughing against the dust.

'Can you describe it?'

'Yes. Seven miles ahead of us - or eight - there is a line of hummocks, exposed rock and . . .'

Her voice died into the hot wind whipping at our faces.

'That might be perfect,' I told her. 'Tell me more of what you see.'

She patted the neck of her lunging horse and shook her head. 'It would be better if you saw for yourself.'

With all the skill of the Sarni warrior that she was, she gripped her bow in one hand while unbuckling her saddlebag with the other. She brought out her scryer's sphere and held it sparkling in the sun.

I called for a halt then. As Atara gave the kristei to me, the Guardians sat on their horses behind me, fighting to breathe against the cloud of dust enveloping us. Sajagax and his Kurmak warriors halted, too. He led them back to us as I peered into the clear crystal.

'What witchery is this?' he shouted out to me.

But this was no time for explaining the mysteries of the white gelstei. I stared into its shimmering substance. And there, preserved within like an ant inside amber, was a perfect image of the kind of topography that I had been seeking.

'We'll fight!' I called out. 'On the ground ahead of us, we'll stand and fight - if that's what Duke Malatam truly wants.'

'We'll fight with you!' Sajagax said, nodding at Orox and his other warriors. 'But tell me what you're thinking?'

'We'll set a trap within a trap,' I told him. 'Lead your warriors back the way we came. Ride past Duke Malatam's knights, keeping a good distance from them. Let the Duke believe that we have quarreled.'