Lord of Lies

‘No, it is not,’ Lord Raasharu agreed. His long face seemed to darken with a sudden shadow. ‘And yet Salmelu betrayed his people – and of his own free will.’

My father, standing above the sleeping Guardians with his sword in hand, suddenly swept it in a broad arc from east to west. ‘We’ll search the castle, then. Let us see if anyone is where he shouldn’t be, or if an intruder hides close to the hall.’

As he commanded, so it was done. My father summoned his private guard, and they joined his knights in searching not only the castle’s keep, but the Swan Tower and the other towers, too, as well as north, middle and west wards. The sleep stone was given into the charge of three Guardians, who removed it for safekeeping to Master Juwain’s rooms in the Adami Tower. The remaining Guardians joined my father and me – and all the rest of us – in watching as Master Juwain tried to rouse the thirty knights who remained sleeping.

After perhaps a half hour had elapsed, one of my father’s men entered the hall bearing more dreadful news. This sad-faced squire, whose name was Amadu Sankar, hurried up to my father and gasped out, ‘The servants of the Red Priests – they’ve all been murdered! They lie dead in Lord Salmelu’s rooms!’

‘More defilement!’ my father called out. ‘Is there no end to this man’s crimes?’

Karshur, the thickest of my brothers in body as well as mind, rubbed his solid jaw and cried out, ‘But why would he do such a thing?’

My father, who had already sent knights in pursuit of Salmelu and the other priests, said to him, ‘His servants would have slowed him. If my knights ride him down before he escapes from Mesh …’

My father did not finish his sentence. There was death in his dark eyes as he slowly shook his head.

I suddenly remembered Kasandra’s last words to me: The slave girl will show you the Maitreya. Could she have meant, I wondered, one of Salmelu’s slaves?

I turned to Amadu Sankar and asked, ‘Are you sure all the servants were dead?’

‘They … must have been, Lord Valashu,’ Amadu said. His young face was full of horror. ‘They were all gutted like rabbits.’

A dreadful hope surged inside me. I stepped over to Master Juwain and said, ‘It may be with the servants as it was with Kasandra. Will you come with me to their rooms, sir?’

‘If I must,’ Master Juwain agreed, nodding his head.

‘And you, Maram?’ I said, turning to my best friend.

‘Must I?’ he said as he looked at me. And then, upon perceiving the fire in my eyes, he grumbled, ‘Ah, well, then – I suppose I must.’

I took my leave of my father, and led Master Juwain and Maram back into the keep. Salmelu and his party had been given rooms on the fifth floor. We hurried as quickly as we could back up the stairs to this great height. Maram complained that his heart hurt from such an exertion, while Master Juwain saved his breath and worked at the spiral of steps in quiet determination.

Two doors down from the large room at the fifth floor’s northwest corner and the smaller one adjoining it, where Salmelu and the six other priests had taken residence, we found the room of their servants. There were eight of them, all girls, ranging in age from about nine to thirteen. And, even as Amadu had told us, they were all dead. It looked as if they had been roused off their straw pallets and driven into the corner of the room, and there slaughtered. They lay almost in a heap, some of them on top of others, their arms stretched this way and that, their long hair – black and brown and blonde – soaked in the blood that had been torn from their young bodies. Screams had been torn from their throats, too, and this desperate sound of the dying still hung in the air.

While Master Juwain went among the girls’ bodies with his green crystal, Maram stood by the door questioning the guards posted there. I walked about the room, careful not to step in the pools of blood staining the cold stone floor. I stepped over the stand of an overturned brazier; I gazed at a tapestry that one of the girls must have pulled off the wall in a frantic effort to find escape from Salmelu and his murderous priests. But in this room of death, stark and narrow, there was nowhere to hide.

‘The squire was right,’ Master Juwain said, kneeling over one of the girls. With great weariness, he shook his head. ‘There’s nothing to be done here, Val.’

Maram walked over to me and laid his hand upon my shoulder. ‘Let’s leave these poor lambs to be buried, my friend.’

‘Wait,’ I told him, shaking my head. It seemed that I could still hear one of the girls screaming in agony – or rather, crying out for help.

I turned toward the room’s only window, along the north wall. It was small and square, and open to the night wind blowing down from the mountains. I hurried over to it. Outside, the great, dark shape of Telshar stood outlined against the black and starry sky. I grasped the window’s sill, and stuck my head out into the cool air to look out over it. Along the north side, the keep was built flush with the castle’s great walls; it was a straight drop down more than a hundred feet to the rocks forming the steep slope upon which the castle was built. No one, I thought, could survive a fall from such a height. And no one, not even a young girl frantic to escape from a priest’s evil knife, could climb so far down the castle’s smooth granite walls.

‘Here, Val,’ Maram said to me as he joined me by the window. ‘Such a sight would make any man sick.’

He placed his hand on my shoulder again. When he saw that I was in no danger of losing my dinner, he said, ‘Let’s get away from here.’

‘Wait!’ I said again. ‘Give me a moment.’

The smell of pine trees and fear stirred something inside me. A soft voice, urgent yet sweet, seemed to be calling me as if from the stars. I pushed my head outside the window again, and twisted about to gaze up through the darkness. And there, some twenty feet higher up toward the tooth-like battlements, a small shape seemed fastened to the wall.

‘A torch!’ I cried out. ‘Someone bring me a torch!’

One of the guards went out into the hallway and returned a few moments later bearing a torch in his hand. He gave this oily, flaring length of wood to me, and I thrust it out the window as I again craned my neck about to gaze up the castle’s wall. And now I could see, faintly, what my heart had known to be true: by some miracle, a young girl had managed to climb out the window and claw her way up the windswept wall.

‘What is it, Val?’ Maram said to me. ‘What do you see?’

The girl, perhaps nine years old, stood with her bare, bloody feet wedged into a narrow joint between the wall’s white stones. Her hands had found a vertical crack and were jammed inside it. It seemed unbelievable that she had remained stuck to the wall thus for more than an hour. She was trembling, from cold and exhaustion, and was near the end of her strength. She looked straight down at me, the black curls of her hair falling about her frightened face. Through the dark, her eyes found mine and called to me with the last desperate fire of hope. Her certainty that I would not leave her to die here touched me deep inside and brought the burn of tears to my eyes. The wild beating of her heart was a sharp pain that stabbed into my own.

‘The priests are gone!’ I called up to her. ‘Can you climb down?’

She shook her head slowly as if fearful that a more strenuous motion would loosen her precarious hold upon the wall. I felt the cold, rough knurls of the cracked granite through her sweating hands; I felt the slight muscles along her forearms bunching and burning and growing weaker with each of her quick, painful breaths. I knew that she could not climb back down toward the window, not even an inch.

‘Let me see!’ Maram called to me. He pulled me back into the room and tore the torch from my hand. And then it was his turn to look outside. I heard him mutter, ‘Ah, poor little lamb – too bad, too bad.’

He pushed back from the window, careful not to let the wind blow the torch’s flames into his face. He turned to look at me as he shook his head. ‘Ah, Val, what can we do?’

Master Juwain and the two guards had now joined us by the window. I looked at them, and at Maram, and said, ‘We have to bring her down.’

‘Ah, Val – but how?’

One of the guards suggested sending for a rope and lowering it to the girl from the battlements high above.

‘No, there is no time,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to climb up to her.’

‘Climb this wall?’ Maram said. ‘Who will climb it?’

In answer, I unbuckled my sword and pressed it into his hand. It was the first time since it had been given to me that I allowed it out of my reach.

‘Are you mad?’ Maram said to me. ‘Let us at least search for a rope first before you –’

‘No, there is no time!’ I said again. I knew that the girl outside who had looked straight into my soul would soon lose her hold. ‘Help me, Maram.’

I reached to pull at the rings of steel encasing me, but the sudden and silent plaint that sounded inside me told me that I didn’t even have time to remove my armor. I moved over to the window again and gripped the cold sill.

‘But, Val!’ Maram protested, ‘she’s a slave. And you are … who you are.’

But who was I, really? While the guard held the torch for me, I again stuck my head out the window to descry my route up to the girl. She gazed down at me. And her dark, wild eyes showed me that I was a man who couldn’t let a young girl simply fall to her death.

With everyone’s help, I backed up and out the window, gripping the edge of the casement above it as I pushed my feet against the sill. The darkness of night fell upon me; the cold wind rattled my hair against the wall’s ancient stone. Through empty space I stared down at the rocks far below. My belly tightened, and for a moment it seemed I might lose my dinner after all. How could I climb this naked wall? How could any man? Once each spring, I knew, my father walked around the entire castle inspecting it for any crack or exposed joint in its stones. Such flaws in the masonry were always mended, making it impossible for an enemy to scale the walls. But here, a hundred feet up, it seemed that no such repairs had been made for a hundred years. Who could have thought to prevent a simple slave girl, in blinding fear, from climbing out a window upon cold, cracked stone?

I drew in a quick breath and turned my gaze upward. The guard held the torch out the window, and its fluttering yellow light revealed a crack above my head. I reached up and thrust my fingers into it. I found another crack with my left hand. And then, as I fit the toe of my boot into a narrow joint in the stone to the right of the window, I slowly pulled myself up. Two feet I gained this way, and then a couple more as I pulled and pushed against other cracks and other joints.

It was desperate hard work in the dead of the night, and a single slip would kill me. My hands were slick with sweat; the rough granite soon abraded the flesh from my knuckles and left them bloody. I suddenly remembered the story of how Telemesh had fought his way up the face of Skartaru, the black mountain, to rescue an ancient warrior bound there. Lines of verse came unbidden into my mind:

Through rain and hail he climbed the wallStill wet with bile, blood and gall …

I fought my way up another foot and then another. The torch’s light soon weakened so that I could barely make out the features of the stonework above me. I nearly slipped, and tore my fingernails to the quick on a little lip of granite. The immense black weight of the sky seemed to lie upon my shoulders and push me back toward the earth.