save him from a dread almost as dark as death even as I had saved Atara from the hill-men. And this knowledge burned me even more terribly than had his dragon fire or the kirax in my veins.
'Let me show you,' he said, forming his hands into a cup again. A fierce golden light poured out of them, almost blinding me.
'Servants I have many,' he told me. 'But friends I have none.'
I felt him breathing deeply as I drew in a quick, ragged breath.
'I will make you King of Mesh and all the Nine Kingdoms,' he told me. 'Kings I have as vassals, too, but a king of kings who comes to me with an open heart and a righteous sword – that would be a wondrous thing.'
I gazed at the light pouring from his hands, and for a moment I couldn't breathe.
'Help me find the Lightstone, Valashu, and you will live forever. And we will rule Ea together, and there will be no more war.'
Yes, yes, I wanted to say. Yes, 1 will help you.
There is a voice that whispers deep inside the soul. All of us have such a voice.
Sometimes it is as clear as the ringing of a silver bell; sometimes it is faint and far-off like the fiery exhalations of the stars. But it always knows. And it always speaks the truth even when we don't want to hear it.
'No,' I said at last.
'No?'
'No, you lie,' I told him. 'You're the Lord of Lies.'
'I'm the Lord of Ea and you will help me!'
I gripped the hilt of the sword that my father had given me as I slowly shook my head.
'Damn you, Elahad! You damn yourself to death, then!'
'So be it,' I told him.
'So be it,' he told me. And then he said, 'I will tell you the true secret of the valarda: the only way you will ever expiate your fear of death is to make others die. As I will make you die, Elahad!'
The hate with which he said this was like lava pouring from a rent in the earth, I realized then that fear of death leads to hatred of life. Even as my fear of Morjin led me to hate him. I hated him with black bile and clenched teeth and red blood suddenly filling my eyes; I hated him as fire hates wood and darkness does light.
Most of all, I hated him for lying to me and playing on my fears and making me sick to my soul with a deep and terrible hate.
It took only a moment for his dragon's head to grow out from his body and for his claws to emerge. But before his jaws could open, I whipped my kalama from its sheath. I plunged the point of it. through the dragon embroidered on his tunic, deep into his heart. It was as if I had ripped out my own heart. The incredible pain of it caused me to scream like a wounded child even as my sword shattered into a thousand pieces; each piece lay burning with an orange-red light on the ground or hissed into the stream and sent up plumes of boiling water. I watched in horror as Morjin screamed, too, and his face fell away from the form of a dragon and became my own. Clots of twisting red worms began to eat out his eyes, my eyes, and his whole body burst into flames. In moments his face blackened into a rictus of agony.
And then the flames consumed him utterly, and he vanished into the nothingness from which he had come.
For what seemed a long time, I stood there by the stream waiting for him to return.
But all that remained of him was a terrible emptiness clutching at my heart. My fever left me; in the darkness of the dawn, I was suddenly very cold. Inside me beat the words to another stanza of Morjin's poem that I could never forget: The stealing of the gold.
The evil knife, the cold.
The cold that freezes breath
The nothingness of death.
Chapter 13
A few moments later, Atara and Master Juwain, with Maram puffing close behind them, came running into the clearing by the stream. Atara held her strung bow in her hand, and Maram brandished his sword; Master Juwain had a copy of the Saganom Elu that he had been reading, but nothing more. The thought of him reciting passages or throwing his book at a man such as Morjin made me want to laugh wildly.
'What is it?' he asked me. 'We heard you cry out.'
Maram, who was more blunt, added, 'Ah, we heard you talking to yourself and shouting. Who were you shouting at, Val?'
'At Morjin,' I said. 'Or perhaps it was just an illusion – it's hard to say.'
I looked at the steel gleaming along the length of my sword, and I wondered how it had been remade.
'Morjin was here?' Atara asked. 'How could he be? Where did he go?'
I pointed toward the faint glow of the sun rising in the east. Then I pointed at the woods, north, west and south. Finally I flung my hand up toward the sky.
'Take Val back to camp,' Atara said to Master Juwain. She nodded at Maram, too, as if issuing a command. Then she started off toward the woods.
'Where are you going?' -I asked her.
'To see,' she said simply.
'No, you mustn't!' I told her. I took a step toward her to stop her, but my body felt as if it had been drained of blood. I stumbled, and was only saved from failing by Maram, who wrapped his thick arm around me.
Take him back to camp!' Atara said again. And then she moved off into the trees and was gone.
With my arms thrown across Maram's and Master Juwain's shoulders, they dragged me back to camp as if I were a drunkard. They sat me down by the fire, and Maram covered me with his cloak. While he rubbed the back of my neck and my cold hands, Master Juwain found a reddish herb in his wooden chest. He made me a tea that tasted like iron and bitter berries. It brought a little warmth back into my limbs. But the icy nothingness with which Morjin had touched my soul still remained.
'At least your fever is gone,' Maram told me.
'Yes,' I said, 'it's much better to die of the cold.'
'But you're not dying, Val! Are you? What did Morjin do to you?'
I tried to tell both Maram and Master Juwain something of my dream – and what had happened by the stream afterwards. But words failed me. It was impossible to describe a terror that had no bottom or end. And I found that I didn't want to.
After a while, with the hot tea trickling down my throat, my head began to clear and I came fully awake. Dawn began to brighten into morning as the sun's light touched the trees around us. I listened to the shureet shuroo of a scarlet tanager piping out his song from the branch of. an oak; I gazed at the starlike white sepals of some goldthread growing in the shade of a birch tree. The world seemed marvelously and miracu-lously real, and my senses drank in every sight, sound and smell.
Just as I was steeling myself to strap on my sword and go look for Atara, she suddenly returned. She stepped out from behind the cover of the trees as silently as a doe. In the waxing light, her face was ashen. She came over and sat beside me by the fire.
'Well?' Maram asked her. 'What did you see?'
'Men,' Atara said. With a trembling hand, she reached for a mug of tea that Master Juwain handed her. 'Gray men.'
'What do you mean, gray men?' Maram said.
'There were nine of them,' Atara said. 'Or perhaps more. They were dressed all in gray; their horses were gray, too. Their faces were hideous: their flesh seemed as gray as slate.'
She paused to take a sip of tea as beads of sweat formed upon Maram's brow.
'It was hard to see,' Atara said. 'Perhaps their faces were only colored by the grayness of the dawn. But I don't think so. There was something about them that didn't seem human.'
