Lord of Lies

None killed! I thought, giving thanks to the wind. None killed!

But as I stepped around the bodies of the fallen Tarlaners, I knew in my heart that too many had been killed. Five-Horned Maram, my fat friend, had himself slain five of the enemy that day, more than had any of my knights. But the dead no longer looked like enemies to me: they were only dead. They were all men who should have lived to take wives and sire children and fight the true enemy, called the Red Dragon. They were all men, luminous beings beneath their coverings of flesh, created in the likeness of angels. And now, like all the other countless souls who had once stridden the earth in all their pride, they walked among the stars.

Chapter 24

The next morning, we rode away from that blood-drenched place. The Tarlaners were too ashamed to put a name to the terrible defeat that: had befallen them, but it would ever after be known among the Valari and the Kurmak as the Battle of Shurkar's Notch. King Shurkar Eriades, I thought, would have been appalled that the stone taken from the quarry there had failed to protect his realm from this small force of Sarni who rode with us. I, too, was appalled by the slaughter that we had wrought together. It occurred to me that with these splendid warriors on our side, working with the Valari at a man's thumb might coordinate with his fingers, I might at last reunite the two estranged kindreds of the tribe of Elahad and forge a weapon of terrible power, efficiency and deadliness.

Our pace away from the escarpment was slow, for we were all tired, and 1 did not want to press my wounded knights. One of these was Sar Kandjun. It seemed that a Tarlan knight, while Sar Kandjun had been playing dead, had used him for target practice, sticking his lance into Sar Kandjan's thigh. Sar Marjay and Sar Jaldru had testified that Sar Kandjun had borne this insult without uttering a sound. But after the Duke's host had passed, Sar Kandjun had arisen from the grass, bound his leg with some cloth torn from his surcoat and had whis-tled for his horse. Then he led the others toward the notch. These three brave knights thus came late to the battle, but with Sajagax's warriors,

they had fallen upon the Tarlaners' rear with a vengeance that brought honor to their names.

Our flight across the Duke's lands had taken us too far west almost all the way to the Aquantir. And so, to cut the road leading to Tria, we had to journey north and slightly east, toward the hills that glowed golden-orange beneath the sun. I did not think that Duke Malatam was mad enough to try to gather his scattered horses and mount a pursuit. And doubted if his beaten men would follow him if he did. Even so, we kept a watch behind us. Sajagax sent outriders to patrol in that direction as well as ahead.

The steppe stretched before us, a sea of long swishing grasses that seemed as endless as the sky. But according to Atara, who had been this way before, we were approaching its northern bounds. After about eight miles of easy travel, we saw single trees pushing up out of the turf like lonely sentinels. A few miles further on they were joined by a sprinkling of their cousins. And then suddenly, after we had crested a rise, we came upon a line of trees stretching from east to west for as far as the eye could see. Alonia's Great Northern Forest stood before us like a wall of green. Sajagax and his warriors seemed even more loathe to enter it than they had been to cross the Long Wall.

'Trees,' Sajagax said to me as we sat side by side in front of our companies surveying the country ahead of us. 'So many trees.'

I pointed at a band of stone about a quarter mile ahead of us and to our right. I said, 'Look, there's the road. From here, if Atara is right, it's scarcely more than a hundred miles to Tria.'

'About such things, Atara is always right,' he said. 'Though I passed this way once, before she was born, and it seemed like much more than a hundred miles.'

We made our way onto the road, with Sajagax riding foremost and his guard strung out behind him. I led my knights in three columns following them. After the soft ground of the Wend rush, the road's paving stones seemed too hard and the sound of our horses iron-shod hooves against it too loud. And then we passed into the archway of trees before us, and their fluttering green canopies suddenly blocked out the sun. It grew cooler, and the air thickened with the moist breath of the forest. Several of the Sarni warriors ahead of us made signs as if to ward off evil.

We ambled up the road for several more miles. This dosed country of wooden pillars and shrubby ramparts seemed to chasten our yellow-haired allies. Many of Sajagax's men, I thought, had never seen more than a scattering of trees in all their lives. Although Thadrak and a few others had ridden on raids into Anjo, that broken kingdom's patchwork of woods was nothing like this expanse of vegetation that went on a hundred miles to the north and more than twice that to the east and west. The forest's gloom fell over them like a dark, green blanket and smothered their easy laughter, which I had come to relish as I did the wind and sun. Even I, who had grown to manhood among the great oaks and elms of the Morning Mountains, found myself wishing to come upon an open field or a crag that might give a good view of the sky. But the only high ground nearby was the hill land along the Poru to the east of us and these old, rounded mounds of earth were covered in trees as thick and tall as those towering above

us.

Late that afternoon, however, we came upon a great clearing to the side of the road. It seemed large enough to encamp an army. Indeed although we were still in Tarlan, King Kiritan had ordered it cut out of the forest in order to accommodate his armies, should he have need to march this way. It was one of many such sites along the roads leading through Alonia. We decided to spend the night there. When we were finished laying out our firepits and pitching our tents acres of sweet green grass surrounded us, and this made Sajagax's warriors happy and all our horses even happier.

During the night, a thick shroud of clouds came up to cover the stars. It began raining hard before dawn and continued all the next day. Big drops of water and occasional bursts of hail pelted us in millions of silver, streaking missiles. My wounded knights felt this assault most grievously, although they did not complain of it I gave my cloak to Sar Kandjun to keep out this wet, driving cold. It helped him, a little, I thought. I wished I had two hundred cloaks, for all of us who had fought the Tarlaners suffered from aching limbs and a stiffness that penetrated to the bone.

Atara, wrapped in her lion skin, kept warmer than most — at least in her body. Her soul, however, remained as cold as the little bits of hail that fell down from the dark clouds above us and broke against the diamonds of my armor. It was like a wall of ice between us. I wanted to melt it and heal her of her deepest anguish as badly as I wanted the sun to return. I knew that she pushed me away only to drive me into myself, to learn the truth of who I really was. It cost her a great deal to maintain her aloofness. In her heart was a deep hurt that choked her and would not go away. I wanted to weep at this strange and terrible compassion of hers, as cold and hard as the crystal of her gelstei.

As we trod down the road and our horses kicked up a muddy spray, I brooded over what she had told me about the world's fate hanging balanced upon the edge of a sword. I felt my own fate, pulling me on toward Tria. I felt, too, something dark and too-familiar pursuing me from behind. Then the road led us past the last of the hills to the east and a sense of dread and doom fastened its claws into the bones of my back and would not let go. That night, lying on ground so sodden that my sleeping furs soaked-through, I dreamed that I was trying to ride away from my own shadow. But the faster I rode, the stronger and more defined it grew. When I told Master Juwain ot this the next morning, he interpreted it to mean that I was afraid of my fate of being the Maitreya.

'All men,' he said to me as he pressed a cup of hot tea into my hand, 'fear the great shining thing inside themselves and try to flee from it-How much worse this must be for the Lord of Light.'

I gulped the tea and scalded my throat. I said, 'But this is no shining thing. 'It is dark. It is cold, like death.'

'As I've said many times,' he told me, 'there is an identity of opposites. The light that is too bright burns and blinds. And is it not written that the silver swan is born anew from the ashes of its own funeral pyre?'

'To live, I die,' ' I said, quoting from the Valkariad. ' 'Out of the deepest darkness, the brightest light.' '