Lord of Lies

Where dread and dark devour light, He climbed alone into the night.

But I was not alone. As if in answer to my silent supplication, Flick joined me there beneath the stars. His whirling, fiery form showed a crack about three feet above me that I would have missed. And the girl kept looking at me with wild hope. She called no encouragement, with her lips. But her eyes, clear and deep, kept calling me and urging me upward. They reminded me that I had a greater strength than I ever knew. This connection of sight and soul was like an invisible rope tied between us and joining our fates together as one.

At last I drew up by her side. My fingers clawed a little crack; the tips of my boots had bare purchase on a broken joint of stone. The trembling of my body was almost as great as the girl’s. I felt her heart beating wildly a couple of feet from mine. The wind carried her scent of fear and freshly-soaped hair over my face. Through the dark I looked at her and said, ‘Grab onto me!’

She shook her head. I knew that she didn’t have the strength to let go her hold without falling.

‘Wait a moment!’ I said.

I looked about and espied a wider and deeper crack a little above me. I jammed my whole hand into it. Its sharp knurls bruised my bones. When I was sure of my hold, I reached out with my other hand to wrap it around the girl’s narrow waist. Then, in one carefully coordinated motion, I helped her up and onto my back, even as she threw her arms around my neck and locked her bare legs around my waist. In this way, carrying her piggyback like the little sister I had never had, I began climbing back toward the window.

‘Val!’ Maram called up to me as he stuck his head out the window and held the torch high. ‘Careful now! Only a little farther and I’ll have you!’

It was much harder climbing downward. I had trouble seeing where to put my feet and finding holds for my hands. Although the girl was as slight as a swan, her weight, added to that of my armor, was a crushing force that burned my tormented muscles and pulled me ever down toward the hard and waiting earth. Twice, I nearly slipped. If not for Flick’s guiding light, I would never have found holds in time to keep us from plunging to our deaths.

‘Val! Val!’

And yet there was something about the girl that was not a grief but a grace. Her breath, quick and sweet, was like a whisper of warm wind in my ear. In it was all the hope and immense goodness of life. It poured out of her depths like a fountain of fire that connected both of us to the luminous exhalations of the stars. In the face of such a strong and beautiful will to live, how could I ever lose my own strength and let us fall? And so there, beneath the black vault of the heavens, for many moments that seemed to have no end, we hung suspended in space like two tiny particles of light.

As promised, when we reached the window Maram grabbed onto us, and he and the others helped us back into the room. The girl stood facing me as we regarded each other in triumph. Then she cast a long look at her murdered friends in the corner of the room. She burst into tears, and buried her face against my chest. I wrapped one arm around her back as I covered her eyes with my other hand, and I began weeping, too.

Master Juwain touched my shoulder and said, ‘Val, this is no place to linger.’

I nodded my head. I was now trembling as badly as the girl. I looked down at her and asked, ‘What is your name?’

But she didn’t answer me. She just stood there looking at me with her sad, beautiful eyes.

One of the guards came up to me as I was buckling on my sword. He said, ‘It seems that the Red Priests’ servants were all mute, Lord Valashu.’

‘No doubt so that they couldn’t tell of their masters’ filthy crimes,’ Maram added.

I bit my lip, then asked the girl, ‘Was it Salmelu – Igasho – who did all this?’

The sudden dread that seized her heart told me that it was.

‘Do you know if Salmelu kept company with a ghul? Might he have secreted such a man in the castle to steal the Lightstone?’

But in answer, she only shrugged her shoulders.

‘Come, Val,’ Master Juwain said to me again.

I started moving the girl toward the door, but then stopped suddenly. I said to her, ‘Your name is Estrella, isn’t it?’

She smiled brightly at me, and nodded her head.

‘I must ask you something.’ I bent over and whispered in her ear, ‘Do you know who the Maitreya is? Is it I?’

It seemed a senseless thing to ask a nine-year-old slave girl who could not even speak. And she looked at me with her dark, almond eyes as if my words indeed made no sense.

Master Juwain cast me a sharp look as if to ask me why I still doubted what was almost certainly proven. And I said to him, ‘I must know, sir.’

‘Very well, but do you have to know it right now?’

The sight of the murdered girls was like a poisoned knife cutting open my belly. Around my neck I felt an invisible noose, fashioned by Morjin, inexorably tightening. My whole being burned with the desire to have answered a single question.

‘There’s so little time,’ I said to him. ‘Will you come with me, now, sir, to see what wisdom your gelstei might hold?’

Master Juwain nodded his assent, and so I went out into the hall. The guards remained behind to wait for those who would prepare the dead girls for burial. I did not know what to do with Estrella. When I mentioned giving her over to the care of a nurse, she threw her arms around my waist and would not let go until I promised not to leave her.

‘All right then,’ I said to her. ‘If you’re to show me the Maitreya, perhaps you can show me other things as well.’

And so I took her hand in mine, and led her and my friends back down to the great hall to stand before the Lightstone.

6 (#ulink_1f71e1e9-3444-5047-b785-3bbf64afc70d)

When we reached this room of feasts and councils, more people were gathered there. The sleeping Guardians had been moved off the dais and laid beneath it on the cold stone floor. Baltasar had deployed forty of the new Guardians to posts near the steps at either end of the dais. The remaining Guardians stood watch on the dais as usual, fifteen of them to either side of the Lightstone. Their hands gripped their swords, and they showed no sign of wanting to fall asleep.

My mother, hastily dressed in a simple tunic and shawl, stood over the sleeping Guardians talking with my father. Lord Tanu prowled about with his hand on his sword and looked very crabby from the loss of sleep. It seemed that the night’s events had roused the entire castle.

I presented Estrella and gave a quick account of how she had escaped from Salmelu and his priests. My mother began weeping, whether from relief that I was still alive or from her sorrow for Estrella it was hard to tell. She came over to us and smiled at Estrella. She gently laid her hand on her shoulder.

But Lord Raasharu was not so kind. He came over to us and looked at Estrella, saying, ‘Could this be the ghul, then?’

His question outraged me. I held out my hand to warn him back as I said, ‘She’s just a girl!’

‘Forgive me, Lord Valashu, but might not the Lord of Lies make use of one so young even more easily?’

‘No!’ I said. And then, ‘Yes, perhaps he could – but not this one, Lord Raasharu. She’s no more a ghul than you are.’

The fire in my eyes just then must have convinced him of what my heart knew to be true. He bowed and took a step back, even as the awe with which he had earlier regarded me returned to his face. He seemed ashamed to have doubted me. ‘Forgive me, Lord Valashu, but it was my duty as your father’s seneschal to ask.’

‘It’s all right, Lord Raasharu,’ I said, clapping him on his arm. ‘This has been a long night, and we’re all very tired.’

But this, it seemed, was not good enough for Lord Tanu. He marched straight up to us as his suspicious old eyes fixed on Estrella. ‘If she’s not a ghul, then perhaps she’s a spy that Salmelu left behind. She came out of Argattha! How do we know that her true loyalties won’t always lie with the Kallimun priests and the Red Dragon?’

My mother slipped her shawl around Estrella’s bare shoulders. Then she gathered her closer, and stood holding her protectively. ‘If this girl is a spy, then fair is foul and I’m as blind as a bat.’

Lord Tanu opened his mouth as if to gainsay her, but my father suddenly stepped forward and called out, ‘Enough! The Red Dragon has set traps for us tonight, but it’s not to be believed that this girl is one of them. Now, haven’t we other concerns?’

We did have. For it seemed that there was still a ghul hiding somewhere in the castle. The thirty Guardians continued their unnatural sleep. And I still struggled to solve the great mystery of my life.

While the search continued, my father sent one of his fastest riders to the Brotherhood’s sanctuary to retrieve a book about the lesser gelstei that Master Juwain requested. Master Juwain believed the sleeping men sprawled below the dais would awaken naturally in good time. But if they did not, he wanted to search in his book for mention of some tonic or tea that would rouse them.

‘There must be some specific that will counteract the effects of the sleep stone,’ he said. ‘Just as there must be some specific sequence of thoughts that will open this.’

So saying, he drew out the opalescent little thought stone that he had brought from Nar. In the presence of the Lightstone, its colors seemed to swirl more vividly.

‘Try, sir,’ I said, urging him toward the dais.