Lord of Lies (74 page)

At the mention of this little cup that had caused so much trouble, I drew it forth and sat staring into its golden hollows.

'The Beast meant to destroy you, Val,' Kane said to me. 'And not just your life but your honor - the legend that has grown around you.'

'Well,' I said, squeezing the Lightstone's hard gelstei, 'at least my life still remains. And this.'

But my self-pity seemed only to anger Kane. If I expected him to tell me, as Sajagax had, that I shouldn't blame myself for what had happened, then I would have been a fool. As a volcano trembles with fire, Kane fairly seethed with blame for me - and for himself.

'What
in all the blazes of heaven were you thinking?' he suddenly shouted at me. So violent was the pent-up passion that erupted from him that two of the Guardians at the edge of the camp turned to regard him in alarm. But Kane ignored them; he sat facing me as his black eyes glistered with a barely-controlled fury. 'Valashu Elahad, the great Shining One - the Maitreya! Ha!
You
were supposed to guard the Lightstone
for
him! It was this realization, wasn't it, that rendered the Lightstone visible to you in the first place? How could you have been so wrong?'

As he continued glaring at me, Master Juwain rattled the ragged bones of his ruined crystal in his hands, and he said, 'I'm afraid that I encouraged Val to believe that he was the Maitreya. You see, there were so many signs: Aos and Niran at the midheaven, conjuncting the sun. Siraj in the Ram constellation, the stars . . .'

His voice died into the crackling of the fire and into Kane's thunderous silence. And then Liljana leaned forward and shook her finger at Kane. 'Don't you speak that way to Val! If you knew that he couldn't have been the Maitreya, why didn't
you
warn him?'

With Kane fixing his brightblack eyes upon me as a tiger might stare down another of his kind, it seemed that he had heard nothing of what our friends had said. He seemed to be asking me, in a howl of outrage, again and again: how could I have been so wrong? And so I finally held the Lightstone out toward the Hill of the Dead as I told him, 'I wanted to end war. The suffering. . . of everyone. Even death.'

Kane's breath suddenly burst from him as if a sword had pierced his lungs. His face softened, and so did the light in his eyes.

'Yes, of course you would have wanted that,' he said at last. 'I should have known you would. I should have spoken of this before. Perhaps Maram is right that
I do
keep too many secrets.'

He took a sip of brandy and held it in his mouth a moment before swallowing. I could almost feel the dark liquor burning all the way down his throat. And then he said, 'That ghost told truly. Ghost, ha! He is one of the Urudjin who dwell in the realm of the Alama Almithral. They are the keepers of memory and time. So, there is a story that comes out of the beginning of time. An old, old story that goes back to the Ardun Satra before the mountains were born. There was a world, it's said. Erathe was its name. And there the Lightstone was sent and came to Ashvar, who was the first Maitreya. He used it to raise up Erathe's people to the order of the Valari. The greatest of these, their king, was named Adar. And it was he who became the Lightstone's first guardian.'

He took another sip of brandy as he stared at the golden cup that I held. 'Adar was the first man to walk the stars. Man, ha! You Valari have always been something more. So. So. After Ashvar finished his work on Erathe, Adar led a host of Valari knights to other worlds -and they brought the Lightstone with them. Theirs it was to find other Maitreyas and set it into their hands. And so they did. Adar finally died, as men do, but the guardianship of the Lightstone passed to his firstborn, Shakhad, then to
his
son, on and on, through the great ages and the small, as the Elijin were raised up from the Valari and the Galadin from them. And always the Lightstone passed to one of Adar's descendants - as
guardians,
never Maitreyas. His line has never failed. Elahad was of it. And so are you, Valashu.'

The little cup in my hand suddenly seemed as heavy as the moon. I could hardly believe what Kane had told me. And so I said to him, 'All those millennia of millennia, father to son, son to grandson - it seems impossible.'

'We're all miracles of creations,' Kane said, sweeping his blunt hand around the circle. 'Each of us was born of a mother and grandmother, going back in an unbroken line to the first days when the Ardun arose from Eluru's many earths.'

'Yes, it must be so,' I said, thinking of
my
mother and grandmother, 'But you must be wrong that the Lightstone passed always to one of Adar's descendants. There was Angra Mainyu. There was Morjin.'

'Must
I be wrong?' Kane said to me as dark lights flashed inside him. 'So. So. You must be told. Mainyu, too, was of the line of Adar.'

I drew in a sharp, quick breath. In King Kiritan's hall, Ashtoreth's messenger had said this to me:
Angra Mainyu once held the same dream as do you. He, too, wanted to end death, suffering itself. He deceived himself, as have you, Valashu.

'No, no,' I murmured. 'It's not possible. Angra Mainyu was the greatest of the Galadin.'

'So he was before he fell. But before that, long, long ago, he was of the Elijin. And before
that
he was born of the Valari, even as you were.'

'But he
stole
the Lightstone - so you told me!'

'That he did.' Kane eyed the gleaming golden cup that I held. 'You see, he gave up any claim to its guardianship when he became an Elijin. So it must be. The highest orders are not permitted to use the Lightstone, nor even to touch it.'

I noticed that the fingers of both his hands had drawn into fists. I could feel the muscles trembling in his arms up through his tense shoulders and quick, savage body.

'But
you
have touched the Lightstone yourself,' I whispered to him. 'More than once!'

'Yes, I have.'

'But you are yourself of the Elijin! Your true name is -'

'Be quiet now!' he snarled, cutting me off. He glanced over his shoulder at the knights keeping watch on the Hill of the Dead. 'We will not speak that name - so you promised me!'

'My apologies,' I said, looking at him. The veins along his muscular neck stood out as if they could not bear the pressure of the blood beating through them. I wanted to take away the torment of his fierce, pounding heart. 'But the ghost - he of the Urudjin - he told us of the Battle of Tharharra. It was you, wasn't it, who defeated Angra Mainyu? And then took the Lightstone from Marsul?'

I looked into Kane's black, unfathomable eyes. As the light of the crackling fire played in their liquid centers, his gaze fell cold and strange. I felt inside him a vast distance, like the ocean of space between the earth and the stars.

'
Was
it I?' he said in a low, mournful voice. He opened his hands and stared down in them. 'Was it truly I? It was so long ago, you can't imagine the years, working at him I wind and water do the face of a mountain. What remains of the child you once were, Valashu? What was the shape of
your
face before you were born? I have a memory of the one you speak of, I think. A memory of memory. He was one of the great ones, once. He dwelled on other worlds, beyond the stars.' Kane sighed as he clapped his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes. Then he brought out the dark, oval stone that he had cut from the forehead of the leader of the Grays who had once pursued us through the nearby country. And he told us, 'I didn't defeat Angra Mainyu. He is not defeated. I used a black gelstei similar to this one to suck the life from him, for a moment only while Manwe and others bound him on Damoom.'

I tapped my fingernail against the rim of the Lightstone, and I said, 'But in the end, you
did
surrender this to Valakam?'

'Yes,' he said, gazing at the golden cup.

'And on the first Quest, in the Age of Swords, you regained this for one of Elahad's descendants to guard?'

'Yes.'

'And in Argattha, you might have claimed this for yourself, yet you gave it back to me?'

'So. So I did,' he murmured, looking at me. 'You are its rightful guardian.'

'No,' I said, shaking my head. 'I should give this to my father for safe-keeping. Or perhaps Asaru - one of my brothers.'

Kane edged between Maram and the fire, and knelt before me. He grasped my wrist then. His hand bruised me like iron, like some evil device that one might find in a dungeon. And he told me, 'I won't hear such talk from you! Do you understand? This is no time for that!' He sighed again as he let go of me. And then he said, 'Do you remember the story of the eagle and the sun?'

'No,' I said, 'that story is not told in Mesh.'

He returned to his place between Maram and Master Juwain, and retrieved his cup of brandy. He took a sip from it. And then he drew in a deep breath and said, 'Once there was an eagle, one of the sky lords of the Crescent Mountains, whose gift it was to fly higher than any of his kind. He hated night, as all eagles do, for then he could not hunt or even see to fly. And so one day he set forth to soar up to the sun, to sink his talons into the golden orb and bring it back to earth so that there would never be night again. But the sun set his feathers on fire. And like a shooting star, he fell burning back to earth.' He took another drink of brandy, and then continued the story: 'As fate would have it, he fell in with a flock of ducks. His shame was so great that he did not want even to look toward the sky. And so he resolved to learn to swim like a duck. He waddled like a duck he quacked like a duck. Even after his feathers grew back, he flew like a duck, low over lakes and marshes.'

Kane stopped speaking suddenly as his bright eyes blazed into mine

'And is that the end of the story?' I asked.

'No, it is not - you know it is not. You see, the eagle was
not
a duck, and never could be. One day he woke up and heard the far-off cry of his kind, and he remembered who he really was. And he flew back to the mountains to take his place in the aeryies there, among the rocks shining in the sun.'

He paused to pick up the bottle of brandy and refill his mug. And then he gazed at me.

'Ah,' Maram said, holding out his own mug, 'I suppose the moral of the story is that if we're not careful, we'll all wind up as dead ducks.'

'Fat fool!' Kane said, grinning savagely. Then he looked at me and said. 'In the end, it doesn't matter how far we fall - only how high we rise again.'

I thought about this for a moment, then said to him, 'Are you speaking of me or yourself?'

'Perhaps both of us,' he admitted. He looked at me so intently that I could hardly hold his gaze. 'So, you must decide if you are an eagle or a duck. And you must decide soon. I've news for you that you won't want to hear.'

'What news, then?' I asked him.

'I learned this only last week: on the 11th of Marud, an army bearing the standards of the Red Dragon marched east out of Argattha.'

'East!' I cried out. 'East! But we had thought that Morjin would strike out
west,
against the Ymanir!'

'So we did. But that was before you set out to Tria to claim the Lightstone.'

'But Morjin couldn't have hoped to intercept me on the Wendrush!'

'No, he was too late for that, and his army is mostly foot. They could never have caught you.'

'Then why march at all? What is his objective?'

'So, east of Sakai is the land of the Niuriu. They've opposed Morjin for many years. If he could defeat them, he could move against the main Urtuk clans, and the whole center of the Wendrush might collapse.'

My eyes tore into him as I said, 'You do not believe that Morjin has led an army east at this time solely to attack the Niuriu.'

'No, not solely,' he told me. 'East of the Niuriuland lies Mesh.'

My heart beat inside me like one of the great war kettles that my kingdom's drummers struck when marching into battle 'How many are his men?'

'That is uncertain. Perhaps twenty-five thousand.'

'Twenty-five thousand,' I repeated. 'And is it certain that Morjin leads them?'

'No, that also is unknown.'

'He could not defeat my people with such an army,' I said 'Not
Valari
.'

'Perhaps not, but he could slay many.'

'But he would risk losing everything. Would he do that, truly?'

'He might if one of the slain was Valashu Elahad.'

As Kane caught me with a blazing look, I listened to the wood hissing and popping in the fire.

'Think of this as a game of chess,' he said to me. 'Morjin could not have known what would happen in Kiritan's hall.'

'No,' I said, thinking of Ravik Kirriland and Baltasar. 'What if Noman had failed to murder King Kiritan and I
had
claimed the Lightstone? What if the kings had pledged themselves to the Alliance?'

'In that case,' Kane said, 'Morjin would have done well to spend an army in order to weaken what would have been the core of the forces arrayed against him. And in order to unsettle you.'

'Then that,' I said, 'only betrays his desperation.'

'So, desperate the Dragon has been ever since you nearly killed him and made off with that little trinket you're holding.'

I looked down at the golden cup that it seemed I could not let go.

'But he's something more than desperate,' Kane went on. 'Or something less. It was always likely that the Alliance would fail. What if it did?'

'Then,' Maram said, stating the obvious, 'it would be as it is now.'

'Just so,' Kane said, looking at me. 'The question is, what should be our next move in this little game we've been playing with Morjin?'

I wrapped my hands tightly around the lightstone and I said, 'Everything depends upon this "trinket". We must hurry back to Mesh and keep it safe there.'

At this, Maram's face blanched as if a demon had drained him of blood. 'Go back to Mesh? Ride right into the jaws of the Dragon? Are you mad?'

'My home stands to be invaded, Maram. My duty lies there.'