Lord of Lies

earlier taken from Skyshan. Atara must have sensed if not seen it. She shook her head even as a ripple of dread tore through her. She murmured, 'No Val, not this, please!'

'There's always a way,' I said to her. 'There must be a way.'

'No — not this way.'

A child, I thought, is born perfectly formed out of her mother as her mother is from the earth. And the earth, and all the earths and all the stars, take their being from the One, as all things do. And the One's essence, this divine will to create, was just love. In the One's fiery heart was the secret of creation itself. And didn't all human beings hold some of this bright flame inside? In the Healings it was also written that the Lightstone is the perfect jewel inside the lotus found inside the human heart'. Might not this jewel, I wondered, be used to quicken this flame until it blazed like a star? And might not Atara once again bring forth the perfectly formed being that she held inside herself?

'Atara,' I whispered. I cupped my hands beneath the Lightstone and held it between us. I felt its radiance penetrate my diamond armor and fill up my chest like the sun; I felt her heart beating in perfect rhythm with my own. For a moment, we were like two stars giving out light to each other in brilliant golden pulses. 'Atara, Atara.'

And then she shook her head as something seized her with a terrible will. It seized me and seemed yank me away from her; it ripped my heart from my chest. And then there was only darkness. Inside me there was a hole, black and bottomless as empty space. The cold was so bitter and deep that I wanted to cry out in anguish.

'No, no,' Atara said, 'this mustn't be!'

As the Lightstone fell quiescent once more, I squeezed it between my hands until my fingers hurt. I said, 'Why Atara, why?'

In the fire's red light, her face filled with both resolve and a silent anguish of her own. And she asked me, 'What if you fail in this miracle?'

'What if the sun should fail to rise on the morrow?'

'So sure you are of yourself! But if you fail, this sureness will turn to despair.'

'I won't let it.'

'Can you help it? Could you help the despair that would then finish me? You, with your valarda and the way you've always looked at me?'

Could I help it, I wondered? Could I hear to live if the brightest star in all the heavens suddenly died and shone no more?

'It would kill your dream,' she said to me softly. 'And so it would kill you, the finest part. How could I let that be?'

My eyes filled with a moist stinging pain too great to hold in. And I gasped out, 'How you love me!'

'More than you could ever believe. Almost as much as you love me.'

'And that is why,' I said, 'I would take the chance.'

'Yes, you would risk it, for yourself. And so might I for myself. But we do not live for ourselves, alone.'

I stared at the white cloth covering her face I wanted almost more than life to rip it from her and see revealed the two brilliant blue eyes that had once shone there.

'The Maitreya, men call you,' she said to me. 'But if you fail to work this miracle, what will you call yourself?'

'Would that matter, then?'

'More than you could ever believe.'

'If I fail, I fail. It must be put to the test. I must know.'

'Yes, indeed you must,' she said. 'But not by such proofs. Do you need it proven to yourself that you are alive? That deep inside, you are beautiful and sweet and good?'

'But how; will I know, then, who I truly am?'

'As with anyone, that is for you — and you alone — to discover.'

I gazed through the fire's wavering flames at the many Guardians laid out on their sleeping furs in silent rows. Beyond them others stood watch against the line of trees down by the river. I listened to this dark rushing water and to the crickets chirping in the grass; I listened, to the wolves howling far out on the steppe and to the faint far-off whisperings of the stars.

'This I know,' I said to her. 'Nothing about the future matters to me unless you are there to look at me as you once did.'

'Please, don't say such things. What of your friends and family What of your people? The whole world?'

'The world can take care of itself,' I said. 'It always has.'

At this, she shook her head almost violently, then held her hand out toward the north, and then east and west. She turned for a moment as she beckoned south, toward the river. Her hand swept upward as if reaching out to the stars, and she faced me once again. The Golden Band grows ever brighter. 'Sometime I can see it. It's not really golden of course. It has no color, but if it did, I would describe it as glorre it's all softness and shimmer and carries inside it an infinity of hues. Infinity, itself. It. . touched me. You were right that my sight grows greater. And that is why I must tell you what I must tell you. Fate lies balanced on a sword's edge infinitely sharper than that of the knife Karimah put to lord Harsha. Your fate, and that of the world. If you turn from it all will fall into darkness.'

With a deep sigh, she set down her kristei and held out her hand to me. 'Please, may I have the Lightstone?'

I extended the golden cup straight toward her. For a moment she fumbled about, trying to find it in the cool air of the night. Then I leaned closer and pressed it into her hand.

'Thank you,' she said. 'Now you take this.'

She gave me her crystal, and I held it in my hands not knowing what she wished of me.

'Look into it!' she told me.

'But this is a scryer's sphere. Am I a scryer then?'

'Look into it!' she said again.

With the fire giving out just enough light with which to see, I looked into the kristei. It was of white gelstei and as clear as my sword's diamond pommel. There was nothing inside it.

Atara drew in a deep breath even as the Lightstone came alive in her hands. A clear, deep radiance spilled from the cup and spread outward to envelop me. It illumed the crystal sphere. Suddenly, with a gasp, I saw myself inside staring back at myself. I shuddered and blinked my eyes, for the eyes I saw boring into me were so black and bright with dreams that I couldn't help pitying their owner. I tried to put down the sphere then, but I could not because I found myself holding my sword instead. I tried to look away from the sphere, but I could not; through its clear surface I beheld myself holding the sphere as I sat with my back to a crackling woodfire, with the warriors of our encampment lying still behind me. I cried out in fear. No one heard me. The sphere's glittering surface suddenly hardened, and the world of my birth disappeared. All around me and above was a cold, curving brilliance like that of a minor. With a shock, I realized that somehow the sphere had seized me and held me captive inside it. Everything felt cold then, like an icy blue inside blue, like a sky behind the sky I felt myself falling down and down into a shimmering neverness. Its depths were infinite. It opened outward and upward and inward, forever. For an endless moment I hung suspended in space like a feather buoyed upon the wind. I could see outward in any direction to the end of the world. There was an immense clarity. I looked down a million miles as from the height of a star. Below me blazed a city by the sea. I beheld the great white Tower of the Sun and the Tower of the Moon; the palace of the Narmada kings sat on top of a hill overlooking a great river. The city, I knew, was Tria, and it was all on fire: the palaces and houses and gardens spread across its seven hills. Men and women, burning like human torches, ran screaming through its streets. I screamed out that this must not be, but still no one heard me. I reached out toward this City of Light and found that I still held my sword. Blood flowed down its silvery length and drenched my hand. I tried to rub it away with my other hand, but it would not come off. It was, I knew, the blood of an innocent: perhaps a child who had got in the way of my killing wrath. For my fury to destroy the evil one who had set fire to the city filled me with a terrible burning of my own. My bright sword suddenly leapt with a terrible flame that ignited the fields and the forests around Tria. Faster than I could believe, it spread outward to the grasses of the Wendrush and the Morning Mountains and the sands of the Red Desert until all of Ea was on fire. There was no help for it; it burned with a fury that consumed even naked rock, down to the very bones of the earth itself. The world blazed and