Lord of Lies

All my life, I whispered to myself.

All my life I had longed for one thing above all else. But it was the greatest of ironies that I, whose heart was so open to others, was forced by fate to stand apart from them. For if I did not, their lusts and passions would burn through me and annihilate me utterly. And so I had to climb through a stark and terrible inner landscape to the top of the highest mountain in the world. There the air was cold and thin and bitter. There I breathed the pain of being ever alone. All my life I had known that there must be a cure for the gift that afflicted me, if only I had the courage to find it.

And now, as I stood upon the hard stone dais in my father’s hall, I gazed at a little bowl that seemed to hold within its golden hollows all the secrets of life. I knew that it might be used to touch into life the infinite seeds of brotherhood waiting to burst forth inside all men – and so to touch that infinite tree that shone with the light of the One. And then the pain of being would vanish in a deeper flame, and the promise of life would at last be fulfilled. And no man or woman would ever stand alone again.

‘Lord of Light!’ someone called out as if from far away. Another voice joined his, and then two, ten and a hundred more. In the rawness of their throats was an aching to come together as a great and beautiful force. ‘Lord of Light! Lord of Light! Lord of Light!’

To want to see men and women standing tall as oaks, the sun rising warm upon their faces, whole, happy and unafraid; to see them healed of suffering in the light of that deep joy which pours itself out through their hearts and unites them in glory with all things; to want this for myself and all those I loved, and for everyone – was this so wrong?

‘Claim it, Valashu!’ someone else called to me. ‘Claim the Lightstone!’

Five feet in front of me, on its white granite stand, the little cup of gold gelstei was waiting for me to lay my hands upon it. The thirty Guardians to either side of me were waiting with their eyes grown bright as stars; in the hall behind me, my father and friends and hundreds of others were gazing at me in silent expectation. Even the portraits of my ancestors along the cold stone walls seemed to be looking down at me and demanding that I fulfill my fate.

About the Maitreya one thing is known, I suddenly remembered. That to himself, the Maitreya always is known.

‘I must be he,’ I whispered to myself. ‘I must be.’

And then fear struck me to the core as my hands began to sweat and I remembered other words from the Saganom Elu: If a man comes forth in falseness as the Shining One concealing darkness in his heart, if he claims the Lightstone for his own, then he shall become a new Red Dragon, only mightier and more terrible.

‘So much evil in the world,’ I whispered. ‘So much pain.’

At last, I stepped forward and placed my hands around the curve of the bowl. Its cool golden surface seemed instantly to sear my flesh. It was like trying to grasp the fiery substance of a star. The pain was so great I could hardly hold it. But beneath the pain, a deeper and more beautiful thing.

I turned as I lifted the Lightstone high for all to see. And then I called out into the hall: ‘It is not yet determined who the Maitreya really is. There are tests still to be made. As far as I know, I am only the Lightstone’s Guardian, a Knight of the Swan.’

So saying, I set the Lightstone back on its stand. I looked down at my hands to see if they had been charred black. But the flesh of my palms and fingers showed only its familiar ivory tones and remained untouched.

‘Lord of Light!’ someone below me cried out. ‘Lord of Light!’

Sounds of disappointment and protest now rumbled through the hall. It came to me then that the more I denied that I was the Maitreya, the more that others might interpret this as humility and so be even more inclined to acclaim me as the Shining One.

‘Lord of Light! Lord of Light! Lord of Light!’

I was keenly aware, however, that while I hadn’t claimed to be the Maitreya, I hadn’t denied it, either. It tormented me to remember that Morjin had struck a similar pose before his evil priests in Argattha.

After that, my father announced that the feast had come to an end. The various knights, ladies and lords began standing up from their tables and exited the hall to repair to their chambers. The thirty Guardians remained at their post, the steel rings of their mail reflecting the Lightstone’s abiding radiance. Their bright, black eyes remained ever watchful, ever awake, ever aware – and now aware of me in a way that they hadn’t been before.

So it was with Lansar Raasharu, who was one of last to say goodnight. He seemed not to want to leave my side. The wonder with which he now regarded me filled me with a gnawing disquiet.

I returned to my family’s table, where I retrieved the box that Salmelu had set before me. I resolved to bury its contents deep within the earth. Morjin’s letter I picked up with fevered hands and tucked down inside my armor. I didn’t know how I would find the courage to open it.

I stood for a long time staring up at the Lightstone as the words of Kasandra’s prophecy burned themselves deeper and deeper into my mind: that I would find the Maitreya in the darkest of places; that the blood of an innocent would stain my hands; that a ghul would undo my dreams; that a man with no face would show me my own.

4

My father, before he left the hall, informed me that there was to be a gathering in his rooms. While he walked on ahead with Asaru, Nona and my mother, I proceeded more slowly with Master Juwain and Maram, who had also been invited to this unusual midnight meeting. Maram was in his cups, and in no condition to hurry. I offered my arm around his back to steady him, but he shook me off, saying, ‘Thank you my friend, but I’m not that drunk – not yet. Of course, your father has promised me some of his best brandy. Otherwise, I would have been tempted to find Dasha and recite a few lines that I composed during the feast.’

‘Dasha?’ I said, shaking my head. ‘You mean Behira, don’t you?’

‘Ah, Behira – yes, yes, Behira.’

We made our way down the short corridor connecting the hall to the castle’s keep. There we found another corridor leading straight to my father’s rooms. Most of his guests had already retired for the night, but from the deeps of this great building came sounds of low voices and heavy oak doors creaking and closing. We passed by the infirmary, which was quiet enough, though a stench of medicines and bitter herbs emanated from it, as well as a more ancient odor of anguish of all the sick and dying who had ever lain inside. To me, carrying Salmelu’s wooden box, brooding upon Kasandra’s warning, it seemed to be the very essence of the castle itself, and it overlay other odors of burnt flesh from the kitchens and the centuries of candle smoke that darkened the stone ceiling and walls. I was glad to pass by the empty library and the servants’ quarters and so to come to the great door to my parents’ rooms. For inside, there had always been happier scents: of soap and wax from the well-scrubbed floors; of flowers that my mother arranged in vases and the honey-cakes that she liked to serve with tea and cream; and most of all, the air of safety and steadfastness with which my father ordered all things within his realm.

Asaru opened the door for us and invited us inside. There we removed our boots and joined my father, mother and grandmother, who were sitting around the edge of a fine Galdan carpet. My father disdained chairs, claiming that they weakened one’s back and encouraged poor posture; to suit convention, he filled his hall with many tables and chairs but would allow none in his rooms. I looked around this large chamber as I drank in its familiar contents: the two fireplaces filled with fresh white logs and the six braziers heaped with the coals of fragrant woods that helped drive away the castle’s omnipresent chill; a cherrywood chest that had once belonged to my grandfather and a painting of him, hung on the west wall, that my grandmother had once made; another carpet on which rested a chess board with its gleaming ivory and ebony pieces; a loom where my mother wove colored threads into tapestries. And at the room’s north end, framed by a massive, carved headboard, stood my parents’ bed where twenty-one years before I had come into the world on a warm winter day, with the sun at the midheaven in that bright and fiery constellation of stars that called me ever on toward my fate.

I sat straight across from my father, who poured me a glass of brandy. Maram and Master Juwain sat to my right, while Asaru took his place next to my mother and grandmother on my left. Asaru, it was said, favored my mother, his face cut with the same clean and symmetrical lines in which many found a great beauty. His faithfulness to her, and to all those he honored, could make one cry. He was that rarest of beings: a very intelligent man who saw things simply without ever being simple-minded. His love for me was simple, too – and as strong and bright as a diamond.

‘That was a close thing that happened tonight,’ he said to me as my father passed him a glass of brandy. ‘That traitor nearly got you killed.’

Everyone turned toward my father, who held his face stern. No one seemed to have the courage to ask him if he really would have ordered my death, should I have murdered Salmelu.

‘We’ll speak of the emissary in a moment,’ my father said. ‘But we’ve other things to discuss first.’

‘But what of Karshur and Yarashan?’ I asked. ‘And Jonathay, Ravar and Mandru? Shouldn’t we wait for them?’

‘No, let them sleep. It will be best if we keep this council small.’

‘Ah, sleep,’ Maram said as he yawned, then took a sip of his brandy. ‘Don’t you think we’d all do better, King Shamesh, with a little sleep before discussing anything of importance?’

‘Certainly, we would do better, Sar Maram,’ my father said. ‘But the world won’t always wait while we retreat into sleep, will it?’

I shifted on top of the carpet, with its thick and clean-smelling wool. Sitting on it in my steel armor was almost a comfort. I looked at my father and said, ‘What is troubling you, sir?’

He looked straight back at me, and his eyes fell dark with a terrible sadness. I knew that had he been forced to order my death, he might as well have ordered his own.

‘Many … things are on my mind,’ he said to me. ‘Which is why my family has been called to council at such a late hour – and those who are like unto family.’

He smiled at Master Juwain and Maram, then continued: ‘We’ll begin with the demands of the Alonian emissary. Asaru, what do you think?’

Asaru, sitting straight as the mast of a ship, nodded at my father and said, ‘Like it or not, King Kiritan has finessed us. It seems that the conclave will have to be held in Tria, if anywhere.’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘But the Valari kings will never agree to journey there.’

‘No, not as things stand now,’ my father said.

‘And there would be great trouble in the Nine Kingdoms if the Lightstone were brought into Tria, as King Kiritan has asked.’

‘That is true,’ my father said. ‘Especially if the Lightstone were given into the hands of the blacksmith boy. The Ishkans would make war against us immediately for such a betrayal.’

I again shifted about as I thought of the young Alonian healer named Joakim. And I heard Asaru say to my father, ‘Count Dario hinted that King Kiritan’s barons are calling for war against us – does this concern you?’

‘Do you think it should?’

‘That’s hard to say. It seems impossible that the Alonians would march against us across such a distance. Not over a little piece of gold.’

Although the Lightstone remained on its stand in the great hall, it seemed that its shimmering presence filled the room and added to the soft radiance of its many flickering candles.

‘No, you’re right, we need fear no such invasion,’ my father said. ‘But that Count Dario spoke freely of King Kiritan’s problems with his barons – that does concern me.’

He went on to say that such strife could weaken any kingdom, even Alonia. And with Morjin gathering armies to his bloody red banner, it would not do for any of the Free Kingdoms to fall into disorder – especially Alonia.

‘It would seem,’ my father said to Asaru, ‘that strengthening his realm is the real reason that King Kiritan has demanded your “little piece of gold”. It is probably why he called the Quest in the first place.’

‘To strengthen Alonia or to strengthen himself?’

‘He would think there is no difference,’ my father said.

My mother, sitting next to him, brushed the long, black hair away from her face as she said, ‘King Kiritan’s offer of his daughter’s hand must be considered in this light. And like it or not, it must be considered.’

Her voice was as clear and sweet as the music of a flute, and it seemed to carry out straight toward me. As she smiled at me, I couldn’t help remembering how she had taught me to play that most magical of instruments and had sung me songs of Ramsun and Asha, and the other great lovers who had died for each other in ages past.

‘It’s said that Atara Ars Narmada is very beautiful,’ my mother told me. ‘With hair as gold as your cup. With eyes as blue as stars.’

‘Once they were,’ I said bitterly, squeezing the box that I had set by my side. In barely three heartbeats’ worth of time, Morjin had utterly transformed Atara’s face from one that was open, bright and alive into something other. For now shadows gathered in the dark hollows beneath her brows, and her lips would have frozen the breath of any man who dared try to kiss her.

It might have been thought that my mother, who was the kindest of women, would have done anything to avoid a topic that caused me so much pain. Compassion, I thought, should be like a soft, warm blanket wrapped around those we love to comfort them, and hers usually was. But sometimes, it was like a steel needle that plunges straight into the heart of a boil to relieve the pressure there. My mother seemed always to know what I needed most.

‘You should remember her as she was when you first saw her,’ my mother told me. ‘Don’t you think that is what she would want?’

‘Yes … she would,’ I forced out. And then I added, ‘And as she might be again.’

My mother’s face softened as she searched for something in mine. ‘You’ve never said much about her, you know.’

‘What is there to say, then?’

‘Well, nothing, really – nothing that your eyes haven’t shouted a hundred times.’

I turned to wipe at my eyes as I remembered the way that Atara had once looked at me. Not so long ago, in the flash of her smile, in beholding the boldness of her gaze, my eyes must have filled with the light of that faraway star that fed the fire of our souls.

My mother’s smile reminded me of Atara’s in its promise that she would only ever wish all good things for me. She said to me, ‘You’d never marry another, would you?’

‘Never,’ I said, shaking my head.

She turned to regard my father a moment, and a silent understanding passed between them. My father sighed and said, ‘Then King Kurshan will have to look elsewhere if he wants a match for his daughter.’

He spoke of this fierce king from Lagash who would sail the stars – after first marrying off his daughter, Chandria. Then Asaru nodded at my father and asked him, ‘Do you wish me to make marriage with her, sir?’

‘Possibly,’ my father said to him. ‘Do you think you might ever come to love her?’

‘Possibly,’ Asaru said, smiling at him. ‘By the grace of the One.’

We Valari do not, as a rule, marry for love. But my grandfather had chosen out my grandmother, a simple woodcutter’s daughter, for no other reason. And my father had always said that his love for my mother, and hers for him, was proof of life’s essential goodness. For until the moment of his betrothal to Elianora wi Solaru, daughter of King Talanu of Kaash, my father had never set eyes upon her. And now, thirty years later, his heart still leaped with fire whenever he looked her way.

‘Well,’ he said, taking a sip of brandy, ‘we can speak of marriage another time. We have other kings to worry about now.’

He glanced at Master Juwain and said, ‘There’s an ugly rumor going around that you quarreled with King Waray on your journey to Taron.’

‘I’m afraid that is true,’ Master Juwain said. His lumpy face pulled into a frown as he rubbed the back of his bald head. ‘I’m afraid I have bad news: King Waray has closed our school outside Nar.’

The story that Master Juwain now told, as the logs in the fireplaces burnt down and we all sipped our brandy, was rather long, for Master Juwain strived for completeness in all things. But its essence was this: Master Juwain had indeed gone to Nar to make researches into the horoscope of an ancient Maitreya, as I had discovered earlier that evening. He had also wanted to retrieve relics that the Brothers kept in their collection in the Nar sanctuary. These were thought stones, he said, and therefore lesser gelstei – but still of great value.

‘King Waray allowed me to remove a book about the Shining One from the library, as Val will tell,’ Master Juwain said. ‘But he forbade the removal of any thought stone or gelstei.’

‘A king’s forbiddance does not make a quarrel,’ my father said.

‘No, it does not,’ Master Juwain agreed. ‘But when a certain master of the Brotherhoods very testily reminds that king that his realm ends at the door of the Brotherhood sanctuary, that is the beginning of a quarrel.’

‘Indeed it is, Master Juwain.’

‘And when that king orders all the Brothers to leave the sanctuary and the doors to be locked, some would say that is only the quarrel’s natural development and should have been anticipated.’

‘Some would say that very thing,’ my father said, smiling. ‘And they would be surprised that such an otherwise reasonable and non-quarrelsome master would risk such a disaster over some old gelstei.’

‘Over a principle, you mean, King Shamesh.’

‘Very well, then, but to lose one’s temper and court the failure of one’s mission over the continuation of what is really an ancient quarrel cannot be counted as the act of a wise man.’

‘Did I say I failed?’ Master Juwain asked. Now he smiled as he drew out of his pocket a stone the size of a walnut. Its colors of ruby, turquoise and auramine swirled about in the most beguiling of patterns. ‘Well, I didn’t fail completely. I managed to spirit this away before King Waray locked the doors.’

‘Spirit it away!’ Maram called out, leaning over to examine the thought stone. ‘You mean, stole it, don’t you?’

‘Can one steal from one’s own house?’

‘King Waray,’ my father said, ‘might feel that since it was his ancestors who built the sanctuary and his knights who defend it still, that the house is his – or at least the treasures gathered inside.’

‘You do not feel that way, King Shamesh. You have always honored the ancient laws.’

This was true. My father would never have thought to act as tyrannically as had King Waray. In truth, he honored the Brotherhood even as he did old laws that others had long since repudiated. And so half a year before, when Master Juwain had returned with me bearing the Lightstone, my father had ordered a new building to be raised up at the Brotherhood’s sanctuary in the mountains outside our castle. Master Juwain – and the other masters – were to gather gelstei from across Ea that they might be studied. Master Juwain must have seen that King Waray’s envy of Mesh and the much greater treasure in my father’s hall was the deeper reason that he had closed the sanctuary in Nar.

‘Knowledge must be honored before pride of possession,’ my father said. His bright eyes fixed on the thought stone. ‘Let us hope that this gelstei holds knowledge that justifies incurring King Waray’s ill will.’

‘I believe it to hold knowledge about the Lightstone,’ Master Juwain said. ‘And possibly about the Maitreya.’

My father’s eyes grew even brighter – and so, I imagine, did mine. Everyone except my grandmother now turned toward Master Juwain to regard the little stone in his hand.

‘You believe it to hold this knowledge?’ my father said. ‘Then you haven’t – what is the right word – opened it?’

‘Not yet,’ Master Juwain said. ‘You see, there are difficulties.’

What I knew about the thought stones was little: they belonged to the same family of gelstei as did the song stones and the touch stones. It was said that a thought stone, upon the closing of a man’s hand, could absorb and hold the contents of his mind as a sponge does water. It was also said that in ages past, the stones could be opened and ‘read’ by anyone trained in their use. But few now possessed this art.

‘One would have thought that a master of the Brotherhood would have overcome any difficulties,’ my father said to Master Juwain.

‘One would have thought so,’ Master Juwain agreed with a sigh. ‘But you see, this is not just any thought stone.’

He went on to say that in the Age of Law, the ancients had used the Lightstone to fill certain thought stones with a rarefied knowledge: that of the secrets of the Lightstone itself.

‘If this stone contains such knowledge,’ Master Juwain said to my father, holding up his opalescent little marble, ‘it may be that the only way to open it would be with the aid of the Lightstone.’

‘Do you wish my permission to use the Lightstone this way?’

Master Juwain’s face tightened with dismay. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know how. Perhaps no one now living does.’

My father swirled the brandy around in his glass and watched the little waves of the amber liquor break against the clear crystal. Then he looked at Master Juwain and said, ‘Then you need the Lightstone to open the thought stone, and the thought stone to understand the secrets of how the Lightstone might be used. How are we to solve this conundrum?’

‘I had hoped,’ Master Juwain said, ‘that if I stood before the Lightstone, the answer might come to me.’

He turned toward me and added, ‘I had hoped, too, that the thought stone might tell us more about the Maitreya. About how he is to be recognized and how he might use the Lightstone.’

Now I, too, looked down at the swirls of brandy in my glass. For a long few moments, I said nothing – and neither did anyone else.

And then my father said to Master Juwain, ‘You may certainly make your trial whenever you wish. It’s too bad that you brought back only one such stone. But you say that others remain in Nar?’

‘Hundreds of others, King Shamesh.’

My father smiled at him reassuringly and then nodded at Asaru. He said to him, ‘Do you still plan to journey to the tournament?’

‘If that is still your wish, sir,’ Asaru said. ‘Yarashan will accompany me to Nar next week.’

‘Very good. Then perhaps you can prevail upon King Waray to reopen the Brotherhood’s school.’

‘Can one prevail upon the sun to shine at night?’

‘Does the task daunt you?’

‘No more than Master Juwain’s conundrum must daunt him,’ Asaru said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘In either case, there must be a solution.’

‘Good,’ my father said, smiling at him. ‘Problems we’ll always have many, and solutions too few. But there’s always a way.’

His gaze now fell upon me, and I couldn’t help feeling that he regarded me as both a puzzle to be solved and its solution.

‘Always a way,’ I said to him, thinking of my own conundrum. ‘Sometimes that is hard to believe, sir.’

My father’s gaze grew brighter and harder to bear as he said, ‘But we must believe it. For believing in a thing, we make it be. As you, of all men, must believe this now.’

Strangely, what had happened earlier in the hall with Baltasar had so far gone unremarked, like some family secret or crime, instead of the miracle that Lansar Raasharu proclaimed it to be. But my family and friends knew me too well. Master Juwain and Maram, on our quest, had seen me sweat and weep and bleed. When I was a child, my mother had wiped the milk from my chin, and once, my father had pulled me off Yarashan when I had tried to bite off his ear in one of our brotherly scuffles. They might or might not believe that I was the Maitreya of ancient legend and prophecy – but it was clear that they did not intend to speak of me in hushed tones or to forget that whatever mantle I might claim, I would always remain Valashu Elahad.