Lord of Lies

perhaps our lives.

'Do you think they want to parlay?' Maram asked. 'Surely they'd want to parlay before giving battle. Wouldn't they?'

I scanned the rise ahead of us. I saw no white flag raised, only standards embroidered with various animals that might be emblems of various clans. To the west, the clouds along the horizon broke apart, and the sun's rays streamed low and glinted from the Sarni's two hundred and twenty helmets. I did not know what they were waiting for.

'Perhaps they're only the vanguard,' Maram said. 'Perhaps more of them are coming. Should we retreat?'

We could not retreat. With the cold, rushing river to our back and to either side of us, we had no escape in those directions. Escape, in any case, out on the steppe, was impossible. The lithe and swift Sarni ponies could overtake our heavy warhorses even as the Sarni warriors, at full gallop, fired arrows at us and picked us off one by one.

'If only we'd had time to finish making camp,' Maram muttered.

'Then we'd be safe enough, wouldn't we? Ah, well, if they wait much longer, it will fall dark, and perhaps we can raise up a stockade against their arrows.'

But this hope, too, was futile. Surely our enemy, if they were indeed our enemy, would not allow us simply to go about our business of fortifying our camp. And even if they did, what would we do then? Cower behind our flimsy breastworks while the Sarni besieged us and waited for our food to run out? It seemed that I had led my men into a trap, though I couldn't see how I could have done otherwise; for us Valari, the entire steppe of the Wendrush was one enormous trap, from the Morning Mountains to the white peaks of the Nagarshath four hundred miles away. At no time in my life, except in Argattha, had I felt so helpless.

'What should we do, Val?' Maram asked me. Two hundred silent knights along the lines to my right and left looked my way, and their black, blazing eyes seemed to ask me the same question. They were the finest of Valari warriors, and yet they were still men whose insides churned with dread as if they had swallowed whole bellyfuls of writhing worms.

There is always a way, I told myself, remembering how we had fought our way out of Argattha. Always a way toward victory.

I nudged Altaru out a few paces before turning right to ride down our line and then back to the left. I spoke no brave words to my men. But I looked at each of them eye to eye. I opened my heart to them. And so I passed to them the flaming torch that blazed inside me. An understanding passed back and forth between us, growing brighter and brighter, driving away fear and doubt.

'Champion!' they seemed to shout at me. 'Champion! Champion!' A radiance lit up the center of my being with all brilliance and sound of a thunderbolt.

'Lord of Light! Lord of Light! Lord of Light!' And then, as I remembered my purpose and who I really was, another thought came over me: And there must be a way to end war.

1 returned to my place at the center of our line. To Maram, I said, 'What we will do is to fight like angels, if fight we must. But first we will seek peace.'

I called for a white flag of truce then. Sar Artanu brought the banner forward, and I took it from his hand.

'No, Val!' Baltasar called out as I made ready to ride forward. 'You forget yourself — your place is here, in command. Let me go instead.'

I considered giving the banner to him. But just then, from the rise before us, a harsh tattoo blared out from one of the Sarni's battle horns. The entire host of blue-faced warriors let loose a long and terrible battle cry. And then perhaps a hundred of them spurred their horses forward and charged down upon us.

'Oh, Lord!' Maram called out to me. 'It seems we'll have to fight after all.'

In my haste to draw my sword, I dropped the white flag to the ground beneath us. Alkaladur's blade flared bright silver in the setting sun's light. I dreaded the thought of reddening it in the bodies of these screaming savages. My stomach tightened into a hard knot of pain; although it was not a warm day, sweat slicked my body beneath my diamond armor. My sword arm burned with a sick heat even as the shake and shudder of Altaru's trembling body beneath me filled mine with a rage to ride down our enemies and trample them into the grass.

Our archers began loosing their arrows before the Sarni did, for their longbows, cut of mountain yew, slightly outranged the Sarni's bows. The whine of feathered shafts split the air like huge insects flying furiously to drink blood. Three of the arrows found targets, but their companions all had bows of their own, and they were more than a hundred to our twenty archers. As they thundered closer, they began firing off arrows of their own. Hundreds of them hissed forth in a hazy cloud. The Sarni were the finest archers on earth. Even the difficulty of aiming at distant targets from on top of bounding ponies, it seemed, would not keep them very long from decimating us.

As I struggled to slow the wild beating of my heart, a great many arrows struck straight into us. Only our armor saved us. Arrow points broke against the rows of diamonds encasing our chests and limbs or glanced off altogether. The clacking of steel against these sparkling crystals was horrible to hear. And even more horrible to bear. An arrow bounced off my shoulder, bruising it. Another slammed into my belly, and nearly knocked the wind from me. A third pinged against my helmet. It was like being caught in the open in a hailstorm of death.

'Oh, Lord!' Maram called out next to me. 'Oh, Lord, oh, Lord!'

The Sarni drew.closer, and I held my shield over my face. Five arrows struck against it; four of them pierced the silver swan and stars etched into its black steel and stuck there, rendering it useless. I cast it down on top of the white flag beneath me. Then Lansar Raasharu nudged his horse over to me and extended me his shield. 'Damn them! They've singled you out, Lord Valashu. Please take this and keep your face covered!'

'No, this is too much,' I said to him. 'You'll have nothing to cover yourself.'

'They're not concentrating on me. Now, please, take it and remember to angle it so that the arrows glance off.'

I nodded my head as more arrows whined past me. I strapped on his shield and said, 'Thank you.'

Down the line from me, Aivar of Taron cried out as an arrow pierced his eye. Other arrows found chinks in the diamond armor of other knights, killing or wounding them. An arrow tore into the flank of Sar Eladaru's horse, which screamed out its agony. In despair, one of the younger knights, Sar Shivalad cried out, 'Why don't they just kill all our horses and be done with us?'

But the Sarni do not kill horses; they would rather kill their mothers or wives. Any warrior who knowingly took aim at a horse in battle would be seized by his fellow warriors and staked out on the grass for the lions to eat. Even so, in any battle, even the finest of Sarni archers sometimes missed their marks.

'This is too much!' Maram muttered against the whine and clacking of the arrows and the Sarni warriors' terrible screams. 'What should we do, Val?' 'Wait,' I told him. 'But it's hopeless! If they don't kill us all on this charge, they will the next — or the one after that.'

'No!' I told him, remembering what Kane had said to me in Argattha. 'There might yet be a chance!'

With every yard that the hundred Sarni gained toward us, their arrows found their targets with ever greater accuracy and frequency. Three of my knights cried out as they fell from their horses, and then four more. I sensed that this emboldened the Sarni, even as our archers struck down three of them. Closer and closer they galloped, yelling at us and firing arrows with an almost drunken frenzy.

'Too close,' I whispered to myself as I peered over the rim of the shield that Lord Raasharu had given me. I studied the grassy undulations of the rapidly shrinking ground between our lines and the rampaging Sarni. And then called out, 'First line! Lances ready! Charge!'

Not a single knight in the first line of the Guardians hesitated in spurring his horse forward. In truth, after the horrible helplessness of enduring the arrow storm, my knights exploded into action with a violent joy. Horses whinnied out their fury as my sixty knights drove them to a full gallop. The Sarni, it seemed, had been expecting just such a maneuver. For their tactics in battle were almost as old as the steppe itself: torment or tantalize the enemy into breaking ranks and charging — and then quickly retreat in order that they and their brethren might shoot their arrows from a safe distance. But the commander of these Sarni, I thought, had miscalculated the distances here. Either that or he had no experience in battle against Valari knights.

Seeing us now thundering down upon them with our steel-pointed lances, the Sarni reined in their horses and wheeled about with amazing skill. Like a flock of birds suddenly changing direction, they began racing back toward