Lord of Lies

'So,' he told me. 'So it was with Morjin — and Angra Mainyu, too.'

I thought of Morjin as he once had been and perhaps still imagined himself to be: a man with golden eyes and a smile like the sun, beautiful in form and face. And now he was little more than sack of sickly flesh surrounding a core of corruption, foul dreams and a will to destroy his enemies that took its power from his terrible hate. The waste of it all made me want to weep. The anguish of his life built inside my chest with a sharp, pulsing pain that would not go away. And I hated myself for pitying, even for a moment, this dreadful man.

'I've been so close,' I said to Kane, 'too often, so terribly close.'

'So have I,' he told me.

'Why?' I said to him. 'Why do we choose what we choose?'

Although it was falling colder, with many stars now stabbing their bright, twinkling swords through the sky's blackness, he plunged his fingers down through the crusty old snow and seized a handful of it to hold it against his forehead. Then he stared down into the Valley of the Swans as if listening to all the sounds of the world.

And he said to me, 'Two wolves fight within your heart now. One wolf is vengeful and howls with hate. The other wolf is compassionate and wise.'

'Yes, that is true,' I said, pressing my palm against my chest 'But which wolf will win the fight?'

'The one you feed.'

I, too, gazed down into the valley that had given me birth. The light of the stars and the rising moon showed a gentle and peaceful land of farm houses, fields and silent forests.

'So many dead,' I murmured, repeating these words like a chant. 'So many dead.'

Kane looked back at me and said, 'Sometimes the worst defeats open the door to the greatest victories.'

I rubbed the scar on my forehead against the hot; angry pain that burned into me there. 'You can say that because it wasn't your family that was lost.'

'All people are my family, Val.' Starlight rained down upon him, and his face seemed as sad and distant as the moon. 'And I've list them a thousand times a thousand generations.'

His dark eyes drank me in, and I gasped to behold the unfathomable depths inside him. Everything was there: whirling constellations and blazing suns and worlds without end. The growling of a lion devouring his prey half-alive and the scream of a woman giving birth to her son. The song of a child singing to a butterfly. He grabbed my hand of a sudden, hard, and smiled as he held on to me with all his might. Something passed into me then. Not his unquenchable will to life, but a calling and quickening of my own.

I did not know if suffering could truly leave the soul open to more joy. But, like fire, it could burn away all of a man's conceits, desires and delusions so that only a greater and deeper will remained. Somewhere, in the charred ruins inside me, in the deepest chamber of my heart, there was a light. It blazed with all my will toward the beautiful, the good, the true. And, unless I let it, it could never go out.

'So many stars,' I said, looking up at the sky.

Their soft radiance bathed the cairn and all its rings in a silvery shimmer. Light poured down upon the mountain and touched its luminous fingers to the white granite of the Elahad castle and the white stones marking the place along the Kurash River where we had put my mother and grandmother, and everyone else Morjin had slaughtered, into the earth.

'So many stars.'

If I did feed the compassionate wolf, I wondered, what would it be. Only love.

'Father,' I whispered. 'Mother.'

As softly as I could, I spoke the names of Nona, Karshur, Yarashan, Jonathay, Mandru and Ravar. And Asaru. I listened for their voices in the rising wind. And then, far below, a wolf called out its strange and beautiful song, and all my hatred left me.

I drew my sword then, and held it up toward the sky. It came alive with a light of its own, and it seemed both to feed the fire in the diamonds of the thousands of rings and to gather it back into itself. Alkaladur, the Sword of Sight, suddenly blazed as bright as the moon, the snow and the stars. And I saw, clearly, the whole design of my life, what I should have seen all along: tomorrow or the day following that, I would leave the Morning Mountains to seek the one they called the Lord of Light. My friends would come with me — all of them. As Kasandra had foretold, Estrella would show this Shining One to me, wherever he was. And then, some day, somehow, I would win back the Lightstone and place it in his hands.

We know, I thought, we always know.

And that was the great mystery of it all, that no matter our confusions and the lies we told ourselves, we always knew good from evil, right actions from wrong. And if only we had the courage to listen and follow our hearts, we might suffer or die, but we would never betray the great promise of life.

When I told this to Kane, he let loose a great howl of laughter and pressed the bag of astor seeds back into my hand. He leapt up, pulling me to my feet along with him. And he pointed above his head and told me, 'An eagle flies only as high as the sky. But a silver swan, reborn from its funeral pyre, flies to the stars.'

I could not share his joy at my decision. Tomorrow, I knew, or soon, in the days that were to come, I would hate again. I would kill, in fury, with my sacred sword. I would weep and rage and gnash my teeth at the terrible pain that would never go away. For that, too, was the mystery of life. But now I stood in the cold snow on top of a mountain in the deep of night. I felt the sighing of the fir trees below me and the very breath of the world rise in both mourning and exalta-tion. And then, for a moment, the souls of the dead bore me up like a great and beautiful swan toward the stars, and that was enough.

'Come,' Kane said to me, pulling at my hand. 'It's late and it's cold, and we've half a mile of a mountain to get down in the dark — it will go badly for us if we get lost.'

It was hardly dark, I thought. The moon illuminated Telshar's upper reaches and showed the track back down to our hut.

'We won't get lost,' I told him.

I bent to pick up the rope and tie it around my waist again. Then I turned to walk back down the mountain. I would wander my mother earth, always seeking my master, my brother, my other self who could hold the secret light in his hands. I would wander for a year or all the days of my life, never lost, knowing that the fiery and brilliant stars would always point the way.