David Zindell - Lord of Lies

And then, on a cloudy day with the first chill of autumn in the air, I roused myself and went to work. I saw to Altaru's shoeing and changed the poultice where a sword had scored his flank during the batde. I began gathering in stores: dried beef and dried plums; cheeses as yellow as old paper; year-old hickory nuts; and battle-biscuits almost hard enough to drive nails. My friends watched in silence as I made these preparations. And then, when Maram could bear it no longer, he caught me out behind the barn oiling my old suit of mail that I had retrieved from my rooms in the castle.

'What are you doing?' he asked me.

'What does it look like I'm doing?' I said. Heavy rings of steel jangled in my hands as I examined them for any broken or weak links. 'I cannot remain in Mesh.'

Maram, too, had put aside his diamond armor; he stood before me wearing a plain half-tunic and trousers, topped with a leather hunting jacket. He looked every inch a Valari knight at his leisure.

'But where are you going?' he asked me.

And I told him: 'To Argattha.'

He shook his head as he looked out to the west and watched the clouds in the sky building thicker and darker. 'Ah, Val, Val, it's a bad season to be setting out on any journey. But this — surely you know this is madness?'

'I don't care.'

'But I do care,' he told me. 'You promised Kane to stay alive.'

'No, the spirit of the promise was that I would not kill myself. And I won't.'

'But you're throwing your life away!'

'Am I? Are you a scryer then, that you can see the future?'

'But you'll never even get past the guards at Argattha's gates! They'll shackle you in chains and drag you before Morjin. And before you die, he'll — '

'I'm not afraid any more, Maram.'

He slapped his fist into his hand as his fat cheeks puffed out. 'No? No? Are you proud of that? To be without fear is to be without hope.'

'Hope,' I murmured, shaking my head.

'I know, I know,' he told me. 'But what else can we do but try to find a good outcome to all the horrible things that have happened?'

'Life isn't a story,' I said to him. 'It doesn't have a happy ending.'

'Don't say that, Val. We're all involved in a great story, as old as time, whose ending hasn't yet been written.'

I looked down at the rings of oily steel in my hands, and I said, 'Perhaps it hasn't. But it's not hard to see what that ending now must be.'

'Are you a scryer?' he said to me. Then he grasped my arm and told me, 'I am afraid enough for both of us. And so I won't let you go.'

'How will you stop me?'

'I won't let you go … alone.'

His courage caused me gasp against the shock of pain that stabbed through my chest. I gazed into his eyes, all soft and brown and shining with his regard for me.

'No, you can't come with me,'I told him. 'It would be your death.'

'And how will you stop me, my friend?'

He smiled at me, and for a few moments, we stood there taking each other's measure. Then a gray, cold drizzle began sifting down from the sky; I covered my suit of armor with my cloak and told him, 'I won't let you go to Argattha.'

Later that day, as I walked through the woods beyond the stone wall at the edge of Lord Harsha's fields, I came upon a great, old elm tree that had once been felled by lightning. I sat upon its moss-covered trunk. Rain pattered against leaves and soaked into my cloak. Atara found me there, staring at the dark trees all about me as I rubbed the scar on my forehead.

'Maram told me I might find you here,' Atara said to me. 'He told me where you're thinking of going.'

She pulled her lionskin cloak more tightly around her shoulders as she sat down beside me. I said to her, 'If he tires of being a Valari knight, he can always find work as a spy.'

She smiled at this, then took my hand. 'It's cold, here, Val. Why don't you come in out of the rain and sit by the fire?'

I shook my head as I pointed at the mat of dripping ferns spread across the ground. 'This is the spot where the bear nearly killed me He nearly killed Asaru, too. All my life, Asaru told everyone that I'd saved his life.'

She said nothing as she oriented her head facing the place that I had pointed out. I wondered if she could 'see' me as a young boy plunging my knife into the huge, brown bear's back in a frantic effort to keep the beast from mauling Asaru.

'Where the Ikurians were upon me,' I said to her, 'he gave me back my life. But not in repayment. Only. . in love. You should have seen the look in his eyes, just before he died. He didn't care that he would have made a better king than I.'

Her hand tightened around mine, and its warmth flowed into me.

'I can't believe I'll never talk to him again,' I said. 'My mother, my father, all of them — I can't believe they're really gone.'

Atara's blindfold, I saw, was wet with rain, if not tears. I thought it cruel that she could never weep again, just as Liljana could not laugh.

'What was the point of us going to Argattha,' I asked her, 'if it all came to this?'

'I don't know, Val.'

'But you're suppose to see everything.'

'I wish I could.'

'So many dead,' I murmured. 'And in the end, we only succeeded in giving the Lightstone back to Morjin. I did.'

'You mustn't blame yourself.'

'Who should I blame then? Kane, for not seeing all of Morjin's plots and perfidies? You? The One for creating the world?'

'Please, do — blame us, if that would be easier for you.'

I squeezed her hand, and pressed it to my forehead. 'I'm sorry,' I told her.

'And I'm sorry, too,' she said. 'But not even a scryer can make out all ends. Something good may yet come of what has happened in a way that we can't see.'

'Something good,' I said, shaking my head. 'I should have done better to have claimed the Lightstone from the very beginning.'

'Please, don't say that.'

'Why not? If I had come forth as the Maitreya, that day with Baltasar in my father's hall, I might have united the Valari without even going to Tria. Morjin would never have attacked Mesh, and the Lightstone would be mine.'

'And what then?' she asked me. 'You know the prophecy. Would they come to call you the Great Silver Swan? Would you have that name become a curse, like the Red Dragon?'

'At least,' I told her, 'my people would still be alive.'

'There are some things more terrible than death,' she said, rubbing at her blindfold. 'Do you doubt that you could become as Morjin — or worse?'

I recalled the look on Ravik Kirriland's face as I had struck him down. I sat there in silence, listening to the rain.

'You would have brought great evil to the world,' she said to me. 'Great destruction and death.'

'Could the suffering that entailed have been any worse?'

'I don't know. I don't know how to measure such a thing. Do you?'

I pressed my fingers against her wrist, where I could feel her heart sending out pulses of blood like an anguished and savage thing. I said, 'There's no end to suffering.'

'No, perhaps not,' she said. 'But I must believe it has a purpose.'

I smiled grimly as I recalled Morjin's letter, and said, 'To torment us into hating the One so that we might become as angels?'

She smiled, too, as she shook her head. 'No, Val. But there is some-thing strange about suffering. It carves the soul, hollows it out — and in the end leaves room for it to hold more joy.'

'You say that?'

I stared at her blindfold, and I wondered what the hollows beneath it held inside their scoops of darkness?

'I do say that,' she told me. 'I have to make myself believe that there is still hope for all of us.'

'Have you been talking to Maram, then?'

She let go of my hand and brought out her scryer's sphere. Drops of rain broke against the white gelstei, and ran in streaks down the curves of the crystal.