David Zindell - Lord of Lies

'It's all so lovely,' Kane said, looking out toward the west. 'All of Ea, so lovely.'

I munched on an apple as I followed the line of his gaze. Beyond the mountains of my home, the Wendrush reached out into that part of the world where it seemed it was always night. For beyond the grasslands, nearly six hundred miles away, rose the Black Mountain called Skartaru.

'Some places on Ea,' I said to him, 'are less lovely than others.'

He smiled, showing his long, white teeth. Then he said, 'Surely you know that you haven't even a slim chance of slaying Morjin?'

'I know,' I told him. 'But before I die, I want him to feel what is inside me.'

'Then you hate him that much, eh?'

'Yes — don't you?'

'Hate him?' he cried out. He made a fist around a handful of snow, and his eyes burned like coals. 'So, I hate him as fire does wood, as steel does flesh. If I could, I'd cut off his head and crush it between stones like grain beneath a gristmill — then put a torch to the wound so that he couldn't grow another. I'd cut his bodv into pieces and feed them to the rats that infest his foul hole in the earth. I'd burn every book that mentions his name. No man deserves death more than he. And yet. And yet. He is a man, even as you are. He has hopes and dreams and a sense of how he might have been good and might still be. You cannot defeat him. If you can't under-stand this.'

I sat upon my lumpy rucksack as I dug my heels into the snow of Telshar's summit and listened to the wind. It was an incredible thing for him to tell me.

'Defeat him?' I said as I looked at him. 'I just want to fight him.'

'So, Val — so do I. To fight him and win.'

'But there is no winning,' I said. 'Once I thought there was, but I was wrong.'

'Were you? You nearly killed Morjin in his hall, and the day may come when you have that chance again.'

'No, he is too powerful now. And soon Angra Mainyu will stand beside him. No, there is no winning, not that way.'

'Then why fight at all?' he asked me

'Because in just fighting,' I said, 'we win something. There's never a final victory, only the struggle to attain it. And that is the only virtue. It's the only way in which good can triumph.'

Kane lifted back his head and looked up at the night's first start. A sudden coldness fell over him, and 1 felt his whole being trembling with longing for distant lights that would always remain just out of his reach.

'I believe,' he said to me in a strange, deep voice, 'in a victory so final and complete that even the stones buried miles down to the muck of the earth will sing with joy and light.'

I shook my head at this, not quite wanting to credit what I had just heard. And I blurted out: 'But evil can't be defeated!'

And he smiled and told me, 'Neither can good.'

Far below us, as night stole the light from the world and darkness crept across Mesh, the houses of Silvassu were beginning to glow a soft orange from candles and fires lit within. All across my beautiful land, mothers would be serving meals and weeping at the absence of their sons, and fathers would be raging at the fate of daughters carried away to Argattha.

'Morjin,' I said to Kane, 'is so evil.'

Again he surprised me, saying in a soft voice, 'But there are no evil men, Val. Only evil deeds.'

'Truly,' I said, 'but some men choose, again and again, to do the worst of deeds.'

'So — just so. And that is why we must strive, again and again, every moment, to do good.'

I looked past the castle and then toward the south at the darkening green of the Culhadosh Commons. I said, 'I've failed, too often.'

'So have I,' he told me.

'In Tria, I wanted so terribly to defeat him. And so I lied.'

'Morjin's whole life is a lie.'

'Yes,' I said. 'But we can't fight lies with lies, or hate with hate. Not unless we are to become like Morjin. And that is why he'll win.'

'No, he won't. He mustn't. Don't give up.'

'Sometimes,' I said, 'I don't care. I think of my grandmother and my mother, Estrella, too. And Atara — Atara. Suffering is. It's way the world will always be. And in the end, we all lose … everything. And so why should I care if I lie to gain advantage over our enemies or stab them in the back with a poisoned knife? Or torture them as they have me? Why should I care about anything at all?'

'Because if you don't,' he said, looking at me, 'you'll lose your soul.'

'Sometimes, I'm not sure I care about that, either.'

'So,' he told me. 'So it was with Morjin — and Angra Mainyu, too.'

I thought of Morjin as he once had been and perhaps still imagined himself to be: a man with golden eyes and a smile like the sun, beautiful in form and face. And now he was little more than sack of sickly flesh surrounding a core of corruption, foul dreams and a will to destroy his enemies that took its power from his terrible hate. The waste of it all made me want to weep. The anguish of his life built inside my chest with a sharp, pulsing pain that would not go away. And I hated myself for pitying, even for a moment, this dreadful man.

'I've been so close,' I said to Kane, 'too often, so terribly close.'

'So have I,' he told me.

'Why?' I said to him. 'Why do we choose what we choose?'

Although it was falling colder, with many stars now stabbing their bright, twinkling swords through the sky's blackness, he plunged his fingers down through the crusty old snow and seized a handful of it to hold it against his forehead. Then he stared down into the Valley of the Swans as if listening to all the sounds of the world.

And he said to me, 'Two wolves fight within your heart now. One wolf is vengeful and howls with hate. The other wolf is compassionate and wise.'

'Yes, that is true,' I said, pressing my palm against my chest 'But which wolf will win the fight?'

'The one you feed.'

I, too, gazed down into the valley that had given me birth. The light of the stars and the rising moon showed a gentle and peaceful land of farm houses, fields and silent forests.

'So many dead,' I murmured, repeating these words like a chant. 'So many dead.'

Kane looked back at me and said, 'Sometimes the worst defeats open the door to the greatest victories.'

I rubbed the scar on my forehead against the hot; angry pain that burned into me there. 'You can say that because it wasn't your family that was lost.'

'All people are my family, Val.' Starlight rained down upon him, and his face seemed as sad and distant as the moon. 'And I've list them a thousand times a thousand generations.'

His dark eyes drank me in, and I gasped to behold the unfathomable depths inside him. Everything was there: whirling constellations and blazing suns and worlds without end. The growling of a lion devouring his prey half-alive and the scream of a woman giving birth to her son. The song of a child singing to a butterfly. He grabbed my hand of a sudden, hard, and smiled as he held on to me with all his might. Something passed into me then. Not his unquenchable will to life, but a calling and quickening of my own.

I did not know if suffering could truly leave the soul open to more joy. But, like fire, it could burn away all of a man's conceits, desires and delusions so that only a greater and deeper will remained. Somewhere, in the charred ruins inside me, in the deepest chamber of my heart, there was a light. It blazed with all my will toward the beautiful, the good, the true. And, unless I let it, it could never go out.

'So many stars,' I said, looking up at the sky.

Their soft radiance bathed the cairn and all its rings in a silvery shimmer. Light poured down upon the mountain and touched its luminous fingers to the white granite of the Elahad castle and the white stones marking the place along the Kurash River where we had put my mother and grandmother, and everyone else Morjin had slaughtered, into the earth.