Lord of Lies

Early the next morning we set out through a frost that sparkled the forest's fallen leaves. Just before breaking out of the treeline, we gathered some wood, and slung these cumbersome bundles on our backs. I put a few stones in my rucksack as well. Half a mile farther on we came out upon naked rock, cold wind and brilliant sunshine. We climbed all that day, past the second hut, into air that grew thinner and thinner, and here we worked very hard, sweating in the sun and gasping for breath. Our route up the mountain's rocky slope was long but not particularly dangerous, and so we did not make much use of Kane's rope. When we found the third and last hut, rising up from the snowfields of Telshar's upper reaches, we unburdened ourselves of the wood and lightened our rucksacks of almost everything except a few apples and shelled nuts, and the six flat stones I carried. The weather held true, with clear skies and little bitterness to the air, and that was good, for already our feet were cold inside our stiff leather boots from crunching through old crusts of snow. And so we decided to finish our ascent in what remained of the afternoon.

I reached the summit first, with Kane only a few steps behind me. I unroped and stood staring at the beautiful thing that my people had built there. On Telshar's very highest point, many stones had been piled into a cairn, nearly half again my height and shaped like a pyramid. And on each stone rested a silver ring. Into many of them was set a single diamond; other bands showed two or three of these sparkling gems, and a few gleamed with the four diamonds of a lord. The rays of the setting sun fell upon this cairn so that the whole of it shimmered like a small mountain of brilliant lights.

I edged up dose to it, blinking my eyes against the diamonds' fire. I opened my rucksack and took out the six stones. Careful not to dislodge any of those already piled there, I reached high above my head and set them in place at the top of the cairn. Then I brought out my brothers' rings. Ravar's and Mandru's I set on two of the stones, and so with those of Jonathay, Yarashan and Karshur. I rested Asaru's ring, with its four shining diamonds, on the highest stone at the top of the cairn. From mountains these slips of silver and gems had been mined, and to the sacred mountain we called Telshar they had returned.

'You Valari,' Kane said, gazing at the cairn, 'are a strange people And a beautiful one.'

We laid our rucksacks on the snow, and sat down on them to eat some apples and nuts and take a little rest. After a while, I brought out the silken bag of astor seeds that Ninana had given me. Would the time ever come, I wondered, to plant them? I shook my head, and gave the seeds into Kane's hand for safekeeping.

He clenched the bag in his fist. Then he sniffed at the air and said, 'We'd better not linger. If a storm comes up, it would go badly for us.'

Soon enough, I thought, winter's storms would sweep down from the north and heap snow upon Telshar's summit, and bury the diamond-encrusted cairn, until spring uncovered it again. But now, here, at the top of the world, the sky was perfectly clear in every direction. Although it wasn't yet dark enough for the stars to come out, already in the east, above the mountains along the Culhadosh River, a great and glowing moon rose into the immense blue dome of the sky. To the south, far beyond Silvassu and the shining white granite of the castle, the verdant Lake Country opened up toward the Shoshan range, which curved fifty miles west and north around Lake Marash, forming a purple and white wall against the sweeps of the grassland beyond lost into the haze of the darkening distances. It seemed that from this great height, I could look down upon all of Mesh. The beauty of my land made we want to weep. Great swathes of color burst across the hills and valleys below: bands of yellow where the aspen trees edged up the mountains, and blazes of red, orange and green lower down. Scarely a stone's throw from Telshar, the deep cut in the earth of the Gorgeland showed the Arashar River's silvery sheen. I couldn't help wondering if I was seeing it for the last time.

'It's all so lovely,' Kane said, looking out toward the west. 'All of Ea, so lovely.'

I munched on an apple as I followed the line of his gaze. Beyond the mountains of my home, the Wendrush reached out into that part of the world where it seemed it was always night. For beyond the grasslands, nearly six hundred miles away, rose the Black Mountain called Skartaru.

'Some places on Ea,' I said to him, 'are less lovely than others.'

He smiled, showing his long, white teeth. Then he said, 'Surely you know that you haven't even a slim chance of slaying Morjin?'

'I know,' I told him. 'But before I die, I want him to feel what is inside me.'

'Then you hate him that much, eh?'

'Yes — don't you?'

'Hate him?' he cried out. He made a fist around a handful of snow, and his eyes burned like coals. 'So, I hate him as fire does wood, as steel does flesh. If I could, I'd cut off his head and crush it between stones like grain beneath a gristmill — then put a torch to the wound so that he couldn't grow another. I'd cut his bodv into pieces and feed them to the rats that infest his foul hole in the earth. I'd burn every book that mentions his name. No man deserves death more than he. And yet. And yet. He is a man, even as you are. He has hopes and dreams and a sense of how he might have been good and might still be. You cannot defeat him. If you can't under-stand this.'

I sat upon my lumpy rucksack as I dug my heels into the snow of Telshar's summit and listened to the wind. It was an incredible thing for him to tell me.

'Defeat him?' I said as I looked at him. 'I just want to fight him.'

'So, Val — so do I. To fight him and win.'

'But there is no winning,' I said. 'Once I thought there was, but I was wrong.'

'Were you? You nearly killed Morjin in his hall, and the day may come when you have that chance again.'

'No, he is too powerful now. And soon Angra Mainyu will stand beside him. No, there is no winning, not that way.'

'Then why fight at all?' he asked me

'Because in just fighting,' I said, 'we win something. There's never a final victory, only the struggle to attain it. And that is the only virtue. It's the only way in which good can triumph.'

Kane lifted back his head and looked up at the night's first start. A sudden coldness fell over him, and 1 felt his whole being trembling with longing for distant lights that would always remain just out of his reach.

'I believe,' he said to me in a strange, deep voice, 'in a victory so final and complete that even the stones buried miles down to the muck of the earth will sing with joy and light.'

I shook my head at this, not quite wanting to credit what I had just heard. And I blurted out: 'But evil can't be defeated!'

And he smiled and told me, 'Neither can good.'

Far below us, as night stole the light from the world and darkness crept across Mesh, the houses of Silvassu were beginning to glow a soft orange from candles and fires lit within. All across my beautiful land, mothers would be serving meals and weeping at the absence of their sons, and fathers would be raging at the fate of daughters carried away to Argattha.

'Morjin,' I said to Kane, 'is so evil.'

Again he surprised me, saying in a soft voice, 'But there are no evil men, Val. Only evil deeds.'

'Truly,' I said, 'but some men choose, again and again, to do the worst of deeds.'

'So — just so. And that is why we must strive, again and again, every moment, to do good.'

I looked past the castle and then toward the south at the darkening green of the Culhadosh Commons. I said, 'I've failed, too often.'

'So have I,' he told me.

'In Tria, I wanted so terribly to defeat him. And so I lied.'

'Morjin's whole life is a lie.'

'Yes,' I said. 'But we can't fight lies with lies, or hate with hate. Not unless we are to become like Morjin. And that is why he'll win.'

'No, he won't. He mustn't. Don't give up.'

'Sometimes,' I said, 'I don't care. I think of my grandmother and my mother, Estrella, too. And Atara — Atara. Suffering is. It's way the world will always be. And in the end, we all lose … everything. And so why should I care if I lie to gain advantage over our enemies or stab them in the back with a poisoned knife? Or torture them as they have me? Why should I care about anything at all?'

'Because if you don't,' he said, looking at me, 'you'll lose your soul.'

'Sometimes, I'm not sure I care about that, either.'