turning her head, and then backhanded her, turning her head again. But she summoned up all her courage and held her head up proudly as she continued to sure at him. I sensed that she was seeing something in him that no one else could see.
'Damn you!' he snarled out, slapping her again and bloodying her mouth. Then he whirled about to face me. 'And damn you, Valari!'
He paused to catch his breath. Then he called out, 'Lay down your sword!'
I turned to catch Kane's stare and said, 'Let's charge them now and make an end to this.' Kane eyed the hundred guards waiting around the circle, and he said.
'It would be our death.'
'There's no help for that now.'
'No – there may yet be a chance.'
'What, then?'
Kane's dark eyes picked over the walls of the room, the great throne, the pillars and the bolted iron doors. Then he said, 'I wish I knew.'
Morjin, hating to be ignored, waved Atara's arrow at me and shouted again: 'Lay down your sword and I will spare your woman!'
'No!' Atara cried out to me. 'You must never surrender!'
'Do it!' Morjin hissed at me. 'Now!'
'No!' Atara said again. 'The sword is his death – can't you see how he fears it?'
Morjin tore his gaze from my flashing sword to stare at Atara. And then he screamed at her, 'And what do you fear, scryer? Not death, I think. And scarcely pain.
Something worse. What is it you see when you look at my eyes now? Look as long as you can, scryer – look deep.'
Atara looked at him in utter loathing and contempt, and then spat the blood from her broken lip straight into his eyes.
'Damn you!' he shouted. He wiped his sleeve across his face and blinked furiously.
He shook the arrow at her and cried out, 'Is this one of the arrows you shot into my son's eyes?'
I stood almost unable to breathe watching the rage flow into Morjin's face as I remembered the deadly accuracy of Atara's arrows in the darkness of the Vardaloon.
'Meliadus,' Atara said clearly for all to hear, 'was a monster.'
'HE WAS MY SON!'
Morjin screamed this so loudly that the rock of the archways three hundred feet above the circle rang with his anguish and wrath. He suddenly reached out with his left hand and grabbed Atara's long hair. He slammed her head back against the standing stone and held it there. And then, with blinding speed, he stabbed the arrow's barbed point into her left eye. It took only a moment for him to rip it free and plunge the bloody steel straight through, the center of her right eye.
I surged forward then to kill as many priests and guards as I could in my rage to get at Morjin. But Kane suddenly grabbed me from behind and wrapped his iron arm around my throat. Maram grabbed my right arm; Liljana held fast to my left. From somewhere behind me, I heard Daj screaming and cursing and gasping out his fear of Morjin, all at once.
Morjin didn't even pause to glance at me. He cast down the bloody arrow. And then, like a bird of prey, like a rabid cat, like the demon he truly was, he fell upon Atara with all his fury and hate. He spat and hissed as he drove his clawlike fingers into her face. He stood fastened to her, shaking and snarling and gouging, pulling ferociously, tearing at her – driving his fingers beneath her brows and tearing out her eyes. He suddenly jumped back and held the bloody orbs up for all to see. Then he crossed over to the brazier and cast these lumps of flesh into the burning coals.
For a long time, it seemed, my world went dark, and I could not see for the terrible burning that blinded my own eyes. A high, hideous scream broke upon the hall. At first I thought it was Atara giving voice to what Morjin had done to her; then I realized that the sound had been torn from deep inside me. When I could finally see again, it was not by virtue of the glowstones' dim light but only the hate that filled my heart and head and utterly possessed me. I looked over at the circle to see Atara shaking and sobbing as she wept blood instead of tears from her reddened eye hollows. Morjin stood holding a cup to her cheek, catching the blood that flowed out of them. More blood – a whole ocean of it, it seemed – flowed off Atara's chin in streams. It fell to the floor and ran through the dark grooves cut into the stone there; it disappeared into the dragon's open mouth like water gurgling down a hole.
Kane's arm was an iron collar bound around my throat; his body behind me was a pillar of stone that I could not break or pull down. And his breath in my ear was the red-hot flame of vengeance: 'Damn Morjin and all his kind!'
Now Morjin stood back from Atara and gazed at her ruined face. He took a drink from the cup that he held in his bloody hands. Then he passed it to Lord Yadom, who likewise drank from it before passing it on to another priest.
With great effort, Atara pulled back her head and oriented it facing Morjin, as if she could smell or sense his presence. Her heart beat with her contempt for him. And then an incredible thing happened. I perceived Morjin as she had, just before her blinding. The mask of illusion was suddenly ripped away from him, and he stood revealed as he truly was: no longer beautiful in face and form, but rather terrible and ghastly to behold. His eyes were not golden at all. They were a sickly red, with pigments of ocher and iron settled into the irises, while the whites were bloodshot as if he was never able to sleep. His pale, mottled skin was likewise disfigured with a webwork of broken blood vessels. There were pouches under his eyes, and much of his limp, grayish hair had fallen out. In the skin that drooped from his neck and in his predatory countenance was a ravenous hunger for vitality and lost love.
I knew that I would never be able to see him otherwise again. As his tongue darted out like a snake's and he licked the blood from his lips, I saw something else: that he had blinded Atara not because of Meliadus but because she had seen through the veil of his most precious illusion and had shown him in the mirror of her eyes what an evil being he truly was. He knows! I suddenly realized. All this time, he has hnown! Somewhere, beneath the lies and trickeries that he crafted for himself and others, lived a man who knew very well the wrong of what he did – and chose to do it anyway. And why? Because people were less than animals to him.
What is hate? It is a black abyss full of fire hotter than a dragon's breath. It is a poison that burns a thousand times as painfully as kirax. It is a black and bitter bile that gathers at the center of one's being, seething to a boil. It is a stabbing pain in the heart, a pressure in the head, a gathering in of all the world's anguish and an overwhelming desire to make another suffer as you have. It is lightning. But not the thunderbolt of illumination, but rather its opposite which maims and burns and blinds. And its name is valarda.
MORJIN!
As he had once promised I would, I struck out at him with the gift that the angels had bestowed upon me. Something very like a thunderbolt of pure, black hate shot out from my heart along the line of my sword and struck his heart. It staggered him.
He gasped as he stared at me in astonishment. He dropped to one knee, gasping and clutching at his chest, even as Kane held me from behind and kept me from collapsing in the sudden agony of what I had done to him.
'Oh, Valari!' Morjin gasped as he struggled to breathe.
I, myself, had stopped breathing. For few moments, I think, my heart stopped beating, too, and I nearly died. And then, as Morjin regained his strength, I felt hate pouring into my limbs again and firing up my being.
'Oh, Valari!' Morjin said again as he stood up and gazed at me. On his pale, fell face was a look of utter triumph. 'That is the last time you'll catch me off-guard. You're stronger than I would have believed, but there's much you have to learn. Shall I show you how it's done?'
So saying, he whirled upon Atara and fixed her with his terrible red eyes. A storm of hate gathered inside him. His heart beat in rhythm with mine. 'No!' I cried.
'Then throw down your sword!'
'No!' I cried again.
'What befalls your woman now,' he said, pointing at her, 'is upon you.'
'No, that's not true!'
