Lord of Lies

that spread across the heavens and covered the earth like a shroud. Soon it would be too dark to see our companions where they lay in the long grass. We must find them and bury them before the wolves and other scavengers swarmed around them. And, it seemed, we must also bury the bodies of our enemy.

'We must have slain a hundred of them,' Lord Harsha said, 'so it will be hard work. But the dead are dead, Sarni or no. and they must be buried.'

'No, they must not he buried,' Atara called out to him. She nudged her mare, whose name was Fire, closer to us. It unnerved Lord Harsha, I sensed, to see the blind Atara unerringly guide her horse around the bodies of the slain Sarni, 'At least, they must not be buried as you Valari bury men. Here we have different ways.'

The Sarni, in fact, do not dig graves in the very tough turf of the steppe, instead, they divest their dead of all weapons, ornaments and clothing, and lay them on the grass with their eyes open to the sky and their arms opened outward as an offering to any beast who would take them. Naked a man came into the world, and naked he must go out of it.

'Barbaric,' Lord Harsha said to Atara when he discovered this. 'It's wrong to let your companions be devoured by wolves.'

'Is it better,' Atara asked him, 'to let them be devoured by the worms?'

Lord Harsha, who was unused to being faced down by women, particularly not one so young as Atara, allowed his hand instinctively to rest on the hilt of his sword. And almost instantly, the bows of ninety of Atara's sister Manslayers were raised and their arrows pointed at him.

'Come,' I said, riding over to Lord Harsha, I rested my hand on his arm and watched as he relaxed his fingers. 'We've enough burying to do already, however we're to do it. Let the Valari bury the Valari, and the Sarni attend the Sarni.'

We worked far into the night. While Atara and her Manslayers rode about the steppe looking for the enemy we had killed and six of their own, we of the Morning Mountains located our companions and bore them across our horses back toward the river. There, in hard soil bound with many roots, we began digging graves: twenty-one altogether, for two more knights had died from their wounds. We drew the arrows from the bodies of our companions. We bathed them and anointed them in oil. After placing their hands around their swords, we wrapped them in their cloaks and laid them in the ground. Then we gathered and gave voice to songs of mourning, to exalt and remember and sing their souls up toward the stars.

And all this we had to accomplish in the deepness of night with wood fires blazing so that we could see, with Guardians posted in case our enemy should return. The Manslayers made camp fifty yards from ours. Our own camp that night we had to lay out without the tradi-tional moat and stockade. With the sky clearing toward midnight, we erected only one tent: the pavilion where Master Juwain went to work on the wounded. He drew many arrows, and filled many holes in flesh, with his healing powders and the light of his green gelstei. It was a miracle that no more of my men died. But in addition to the twenty-one Guardians who would remain here forever by the river's bend, at least four more would keep them company until they were well enough to ride again. When it finally came time for sleeping, it seemed that many of us needed company and talk even more. I sat with Atara and a middling-old woman named Karimah by a fire stoked with logs of deadwood. lord Raasharu and Baltasar joined us there, with Sunjay Naviru, Lord Harsha and Maram. Lord Harsha held an old bottle of brandy, which he poured into cups and gave out to us. Baltasar watched with amaze-ment as Atara reached her hand straight out and grasped her cup with all the precision of a diamond cutter. But his wonder at this feat quickly gave way to anger, for he was was still wroth over the death of Sar Viku, who had been as a brother to him.

'Alter we've visited this lake of yours, Val,' he said to me, 'we should lay waste Trahadak's encampment and slay those who escaped us today.'

Atara laughed at this in a voice that was clear and clean and sweet. She said to Baltasar, 'if you rode into Trahadak's encampment with lances and drawn swords instead of gold, it would be you who was slain. Trahadak is Kurmak, and Zakut at that.'

'Whatever he is, he's a treacherous dog.'

Atara smiled at this and told him, 'You should be careful how you speak of men on the Wendrush. We of the Manslayers might speak of a man this way, of course, but you should not. And you should know that we eat dogs here. And if Trahadak heard of your slur, he'd roast and eat you'.

Baltasar paled at this, for every child in the Morning Mountains is told stories of the Sarni's cruelties. Then he stroked the hilt of his sword and said, 'He would first be greeted by steel, as he was today.'

'Indeed? Tell me, Sar Baltasar, at the Zakut's encampment you paid tribute to Trahadak yourself, didn't you?'

Now Baltasar's hand tightened around his kalama's grip as he huffed out, 'We Valari pay tribute to no one. The gold was a gift to honor Trahadak for his hospitality.'

'Very well, a gift then,' Atara said, smiling. 'But you sat as close to Trahadak as you and I sit now, did you not.'

Baltasar, who sipped from a cup of brandy with only his father and Maram between me and Atara, nodded his head.

'Very well,' Atara continued, 'then you know Trahadak's face well as my own. Tell me, brave knight, did you see him on the field today?'

'Of course. That is, it must have been he who led that cowardly retreat. The truth is, it's hard to tell. All you Sarni look alike.'

This caused Karimah to burst into laughter. She scooted even closer to Atara and pressed the side of her face against Atara's cheek. Then she laughed out, 'Oh, yes, and we of the Manslayers, who are all sisters, especially look alike. I'm sure you can't tell Atara from me.'

We all had a good laugh at this. Where Karimah's long hair was bleached almost white from many years of sun, Atara's hair shone like living gold. Karimah's face was plump and pretty, except for the round scars on either side where an arrow must once have driven straight through her cheeks; Atara's face was square and smooth and beautiful. In her arms and body, Karimah was almost stout enough to have been Maram's sister. But Atara was long and lithe, clean-limbed and a wonder to look upon, even with the white cloth breaking the perfection of her countenance.

Baltasar, seeing these two women together, flushed with heat as if he had sat too close to the fire. He said, 'What I meant was, with your faces painted blue, who could tell one Sarni from another?'

'We certainly can,' Atara said to Baltasar. 'And that is why I must tell you that it was not Trahadak or any Zakut that we fought today. Nor any clan of the Kurmak, who always keep their word. No, the men we killed were Adirii.'

While I traded knowing glances with Lord Raasharu and Baltasar's face flushed an even angrier red, Atara went on to tell us that a band of warriors of the Adirii's Akhand clan had crossed the Snake River and invaded the Kurmak's country to hunt us.

'But how did they know to find us here?' I asked. 'And the Adirii, for them to ride through Kurmak country, risking war and slaughter, they must have been desperate.'

Desperate for gold, I suddenly thought. Desperate to steal the gold gelstei.

In her eerie way, Atara turned her head toward me as if she could see me and look into my heart. 'All the Sarni on the Wendrush know to find you here, or soon will. The Red Dragon has many spies, and word of your route toward Tria has preceded you and spreads like a wildfire.'

'But this is terrible news!' Maram cried out. He took a long drink of his brandy, and then another.

'No, Maram, perhaps not so terrible as you fear,' Atara reassured him. 'The Red Dragon, it's true, has promised a great weight of gold to anyone who will deliver the Lightstone to him. The Akhand clan must have learned of this and fallen mad with greed. For them to have crossed the Snake, they broke the truce between our tribes and the will of the Adirii's chieftain, Xadharax, who loathes Morjin nearly as much as do we Kurmak.'

Now it was Baltasar's turn to drink deeply of his brandy. To Atara, he said, 'My apologies, my lady — it was wrong of me to have impugned Trahadak, who treated me well.'

He treated you more than well. When he learned that your company would be making its way toward the lake, he sent messengers to alert our Society where we were encamped scarcely half a day's ride away'