On our second day in Taron, Maram had good cause to wish lor the previous day's dust: toward noon, some thick, dark clouds came out of the west and let loose a downpour lasting for hours. The rain turned the road into a bog of sticky mud and potholes like little brown ponds. Twice, one of the wagons got stuck in this mire. Our pace slowed as the horses slogged along; I listened to the squish and suck of their hooves against the mud as I blinked my eyes against the slanting rain. The gray sky seemed too low, too heavy. The rain was too moist and nearly smothered me. I felt something cold, wet and dark sniffing at my insides like the snout of some fell beast. I felt a pulling there in my belly as if sharp teeth were tearing into me while long claws hooked into my back. This odious sensation seemed to emanate from somewhere behind me; it reminded me of the time that the dreadful Grays had pursued Maram, Master Juwain, Atara and me through the wilds of Alonia. Only now, on this muddy road in the open country whatever was pursuing me seemed to have no hate for me, but only a fierce will to rend and destroy.
We made camp that night in well-drained meadow above the road. After Estrella's riding lesson, I held council in my tent with Maram and Master Juwain - and with my brothers, too. 1 told them of my misgivings. And Maram immediately sighed out, 'Oh, no, not the Stonefaces! I'd rather face Morjin himself again than them. If it is them, too bad for us.'
'It will be all right,' I said to him. I remembered too well the unclean sense of how the Grays wanted to suck out my soul and torment me. This didn't feel like them.'
'Well, what did it feel like?'
'Like someone behind me wanted to murder me.'
Yarashan, who had little liking for the new Guardians, didn't hesitate to sawOne of the Ishkans, then?'
'It can't be,' I said. 'Whoever is pursuing me, in his wish to slay ... there is so much power!
Yarashan shook his handsome head skeptically. This strange gift I had of sensing others' emotions disturbed him, the more so because he seemed to lack it. 'It could be one of the Ishkans, Val. King Hadaru chose them himself, didn't he? What if he's set one of them to murder you?'
He went on to say that King Hadaru could not want me to be the Maitreya. Even though King Hadaru had spoken nobly about uniting the Valari, very likely he himself wished to be the one to lead an alliance against Morjin. If I were killed, then King Hadaru might contrive a way to use the new Guardians to give him control of the Lightstone.
'You've a keen mind for plots and strategies,' I said to Yarashan. My brother beamed as if he had just beaten me in another game of chess and was proud to explicate my mistakes. 'What you say makes good sense - except for one thing.'
'And what is that?'
'King Hadaru is no murderer who would set an assassin upon me.'
'Can you be sure of that?'
'As sure as I am of Ianashu and the new Guardians. As sure as I am of Skyshan and Sunjay and the Guardians that I chose myself.'
Yarashan looked at Asaru as if in frustration of my naivete. And Asaru said, 'There is another possibility. The ghul may have followed us from Mesh.'
I shuddered at this suggestion as I looked out the flap of my tent at the darkening hills around us. If a ghul was hiding in the pastures or woods nearby, I could not sense him.
'We should post extra guards tonight,' Asaru continued. 'And we should post guards around your tent, Val. Men we can trust beyond doubt in case one of the Ishkans is an assassin.'
Each night, since we had set out on the road, it had become our custom that the Lightstone return to my hand and be kept in my tent at the center of our camp.
'No, there will be no guards around my tent,' I told Asaru. 'What would we tell them? That we mistrust the Ishkans, who are now their companions? And what would the Ishkans think of their calling as Guardians when they discovered that we of Mesh sought to guard ourselves against them?'
Master Juwain, who had been silent until now, sighed as he rubbed the back of his head. 'Very well, then, since the rain has stopped, I'll sit outside my tent as if taking a bit of fresh air. If anyone approaches your tent, Val, I'll find a way to detain him and give the alarm.'
'Ah, do you intend to sit up all night?' Maram asked him.
'Are you volunteering to relieve me and take a shift?'
Maram, who had been proposing no such thing, or so I thought, looked back and forth between Master Juwain and my brothers. Their unyielding black eyes fixed upon him as if to ask whether he was truly a Valari knight in spirit, as the two diamonds of his ring proclaimed him to be.
'I suppose it wouldn't hurt me to lose a little sleep tonight,' Maram finally said. He clapped me on my shoulder with his huge hand. 'I wouldn't sleep very well in any case knowing that a ghul was stalking my best friend.'
It was arranged then that Maram would take the second of the night's shifts. Asaru and Yarashan, whose tent was pitched next to mine, would keep watch during the last hours of the night.
And so everyone except Master Juwain retired to his bed. I spread out my sleeping furs inside my large pavilion; next to me I laid my chess board and the wooden box containing thirty-two ivory and ebony pieces. And on top of it I set the Lightstone. I lay back to look up at the stars through the open flap in the roof of my tent. I felt outside among the many Guardians for the cold knives of a desire to murder me; I felt nothing. I was certain that I would be unable to sleep. It pained me to think of Master Juwain sitting up for hours outside his tent while I tossed about here futilely trying for a bit of rest. Then I remembered a meditation that he had once taught me in the heart of the Vardaloon, when clouds of mosquitoes had whined in my ear for endless dark hours. I closed my eyes to practice it. My mind cleared as time began to dissolve. The little noises of the camp and the chirping of the crickets in the fields outside faded away; inside me there was a spreading calm and a desire to lose myself in the timeless realm of the One.
I was more tired than I knew; I must have dozed off quickly and slept for hours. I was not quite aware of what awakened me. Perhaps it was the swirl of little lights as Flick spun furiously about in the dark spaces above me For a moment I lay suspended in that netherworld of unknowing, not quite able grasp onto the sights, sounds and smells of the earth, or even the sense of my own existence. And then consciousness came flooding into me like the crush of an icy river. I gasped for breath, and a surge of fear caused my heart to begin beating wildly. I opened my eyes to see the cloaked figure of one of the Guardians moving toward me. He held a mace in his apraised hand. Seeing that I suddenly saw him, he leaped forward in one furious motion and whipped the mace straight down toward my head.
My whole body convulsed with a terrible urge to escape this sudden death. I jerked my head away from the descending mace even as I rolled to my side and grabbed the Lightstone. I was not quite quick enough; the iron mace grazed the side of my head and stunned me. The knight above me raised back the mace again as he fell upon me; by some miracle I grabbed his arm so that he could not brain me. With his other hand, he grabbed at my hand that held the Lightstone. Thus locked together, he bore his weight down upon me, raging at me like a lion, twisting and pulling and trying to push his mace into my teeth even as he drove his knee at my belly. I smelled the sweat-stained leather of his battle armor and the essence of lilacs steaming off the white scarf tied around his neck. As we rolled about in this death struggle, he kept trying to bring his mace to bear. The insane power of his body and being shocked me. It could only be another moment before he fought free of my weakening grip and split my head open. I finally cried out with all the force of my lungs: 'No!'
From far away, it seemed, I heard the sound of swords being drawn from their sheaths. And then someone called out: 'It came from the pavilion! It must be Lord Valashu!'
The knight above me at last succeeded in pushing the mace into my throat. I slid my hand down toward the mace's wooden shaft and latched onto it. But I couldn't quite rip it from his grasp, and he pressed the mace downward with a sickening force. I choked and gasped for breath, even as
the knight tried to rip the Lightstone from my hand. But I gripped onto the little cup with the last of my strength.
'Lord Valashu, we're coming!'
Suddenly, this murderous knight let go both my hand and the mace He sprang up and lunged for the opening of the tent. Through the red haze of my stunned senses, as I struggled to breathe, I saw him open his mouth and call out: 'He's getting away!'
Then he rushed from my tent even as Sunjay Naviru and two other Guardians rushed in. They came right up to the side of my sleeping furs. While one of the Guardians held up an oil lamp, Sunjay began checking me for wounds. I struggled to sit up; I struggled to speak, but for a moment I could not. I pointed toward the tent's opening. Sunjay laid his hand on my chest and said, 'It's all right, Val. You'll be all right - whoever did this to you won't get away.'
Sunjay, I suddenly realized, believed that the knight who had tried to murder me was in hot pursuit of a would-be assassin. The two other Guardians in my tent, and the many others in the camp, must have believed this, too, for I heard a dozen voices pick up the cry: 'He's getting away!'
I shook my bleeding head back and forth as hard as I dared. I finally found my voice and croaked out, 'He tried to murder me!'
'Who did, Val?'
'The one .. . who was here.' I realized with a start that I recognized the man who had left me holding his mace - and the Lightstone. 'The one you let get away: it was Sivar of Godhra.'
Sunjay burned with anger and shame to learn that he had been fooled by such a ruse. I burned with disbelief that one of my own, the faithful Sivar, could have betrayed me and then had the cleverness to fool Sunjay in order to make his escape.
I shook off the pain in my pounding head. I sat up and pulled on my diamond-studded boots. And then I ran from my tent, out into the camp which had come alive with men holding torches and shouting while others were ripping open their teat flaps to see if we had been attacked in the middle of the night. To the east, from the nearby encampment of King Hadaru and the Ishkans, came the flash of torches being lit and the cries of knights fearing a plot against their king.
'Search the camp!' I called out as I drew my sword. 'Find Sivar!'
It didn't take long for the Guardians to fulfill this command for the camp was small and there was no place to hide except inside the tents or underneath them. A quick search turned up only one surprising thing: that Maram seemed to have fallen asleep outside his tent. Not
even the clamor of a hundred and twenty knights hurrying about
sufficed to awaken him.
And then one of the sentries to the north remembered seeing Sivar near the stockade just after all the shouting had begun. An examination of this wooden fence revealed some displaced branches where someone must have climbed over it. The sentry, Omaru Tarshan, was aghast that he had failed in his duty. But I eased his shame, pointing out that the stockade and the sentries had been meant to keep enemies from infiltrating the camp and not murderous Guardians from escaping.
Then King Hadaru and his knights arrived to reinforce us. King Hadara made his way into our camp and called out to me, 'What has happened?'
'One of my knights fell mad,' I said. 'He tried to steal the Lightstone.'
After that, I ordered a search of the surrounding pasturage. Men holding bright torches spread out in a widening circle across the still-dark grass. A short while later, from a copse of mulberry to the north, one of the Guardians cried out that he had found Sivar. I led a charge toward these trees with twenty of the Guardians and King Hadaru close behind me. I followed the torchlight of the first Guardian into the copse. And there, fallen on his back next to one of the trees, I saw Sivar. He clutched a bloody dagger and stared at nothing because his throat had been cut from ear to ear. It seemed that he had died by his own hand.
'Here, now - what's this?' King Hadaru cried out as he came up to me. 'Look, then, a Meshian has turned traitor!'
'No,' I said, 'he was no traitor - not exactly.'
Asaru and Yarashan, with Lansar Raasharu, Baltasar and Sunjay joined me beneath the mulberry trees, with their darkly fluttering and coarsely-toothed leaves. Then Master Juwain came panting up to us followed by Lord Harsha, who limped along as quickly as he could. When his single eye looked past the light of the torches to take in Sivar's fallen form, he called out, 'This is terrible! My grand-nephew, whom I recommended as Guardian myself - how can this be?
'Because he as a ghul,' I said. My heart ached with a sharp pain because there could no longer be any doubt of this. 'It must have been Sivar who used the sleep stone on the Guardians at the castle. He must have waited for this night, for a second chance to steal the Lightstone.'
I brought forth the golden cup to show everyone that it remained safe. But neither it nor anything, it seemed to me, would ever be safe again.
Lansar Raasharu's noble face was now a mask of anger. He pointed down at Sivar and said 'But if this man was a creature of Morjin's why did he kill himself!'
'To keep from being captured and questioned,' I said. 'In any case, once I had recognised him, he was useless to Morjin.'
'Yes, but hy kill himself here? Could not the accursed Cruecifier simply have commanded him to cut his own throat in your tent?'
We all looked at each other then. It seemed that the hand of Morjin lay heavy about us even from a thousand miles away, pressing down like a mailed fist upon this little stand of trees and reaching out to rip open the fabric of our tents in the encampments below us.
It was Master Juwain who had an answer for Lord Raasharu. He nodded his bald head toward him and said, 'Sometimes a ghul retains enough of his soul to hate his master, even to break free, for a few moments. It may have been so with Sivar. Until the Red Dragon found him hiding here in these trees.'
I held up my hand as if to ward off Morjin's evil eye. With Sivar dead I knew that Morjin had no way to perceive this place or anywhere else nearby. But in that dark moment, with the blood filling the dark opening in Sivar's throat, it seemed that Morjin could look into any part of the world that he willed.
'A ghul,' Master Juwain said, his voice heavy with sadness. He turned to examine the gash that Sivar's mace had torn along the side of my head. 'It's a miracle he didn't kill you, Val.'
'He ,.. was so powerful,' I said.
I didn't add that Sivar, moving to Morjin's will, had been possessed by all of his sorcerous strength.
'Here, Val,' Master Juwain said to me. 'Let me look at your eyes.'
As one of the Guardians held up a torch, a bright lancet of light stabbed straight through my eyes into my head. The kirax with which Morjin had once poisoned me seemed to flare up in my blood as if Moriin himself had breathed his fiery breath into me. It was like acid eating into every nerve in my body, making this pain a hundred times worse.
'Damn him!' Lansar called out as if my hatred of Morjin had becone his own. 'Damn Morjin for doing this!'
After Master Juwain had finished testing me to concussion. Lansar Raasharu looked at me in thankfulness that I would be all right. I wondered if he might have possessed some part of my gift. His devotion to me was like a shield held up to protect me, leaving himself uncovered, and I loved him for that.
'And damn Sivar for betraying us!' he added.
I looked down at Sivar's body and said; 'No, let's not damn him for he has damned himself. It might be so with any man.'
'With any man who is weak, perhaps. With any man who is faithless and turns away from the Law of the One.'
I said nothing as I looked down into Sivar's dead eyes. Even great angels such as Angra Mainyu, I thought, had turned away from the One.
'What shall we do now, Lord Valashu?' Lansar asked me.
'Let's bury him,' I said. 'Before Sivar was a ghul, he was Sar Sivar, whom many of us loved.'
After that, one of Sivar's friends wrapped his body in his cloak, and six of the Guardians bore him back to camp to prepare for burial. King Hadaru and his knights went back to the Ishkan encampment, there to take a littl
e rest in what remained of the night. I retired into my lent. Master Juwain met me there with some hot tea to soothe my savaged throat. Then he went to work stitching up the gash along the side of my head while I spoke with Asaru and Yarashan about the night's calamity. After a little while, Maram poked his head inside and joined us, too. Yarashan tore into him for failing asleep on his watch and nearly getting me killed. But Maram had kept many long watches through many long nights on our quest across Ea; I knew that he hadn't simply allowed himself to nod off. Maram confirmed this, filling in another piece of the puzzle of how Morjin had nearly worked my doom.
'I didn't fall asleep,' he huffed at Yarashan. 'Near the end of my watch, Sivar approached me with a cup of brandy. He said that he couldn't sleep, either, with all the excitement of the tournament beginning the day after tomorrow. He asked if he could join me in a little nightcap before sleeping. And why not, I thought, since I had only a few minutes left before I was to wake up Lord Asaru? Sivar was really a kind man, everyone said that about him, and I was grateful for this little kindness. But the brandy must have been poisoned with a sleeping potion. I remember talking with him about the lance-throwing competition ... and then there was nothing.'
His suspicions were proved when he retrieved his cup for Master Juwain's examination. Master Juwain took one sniff of the still-moist brandy residue and pronounced, 'Nightstalk. The Kailimun use such potions. Probably Salmelu or one of the Red Priests supplied Sivar with it - along with the sleep stone that dropped the Guardians in King Shamesh's hall,'
Lord of Lies Page 17
