Lord of Lies. David Zindell

squeezing the box that I had set by my side. In barely three heartbeats’ worth of time, Morjin had utterly transformed Atara’s face from one that was open, bright and alive into something other. For now shadows gathered in the dark hollows beneath her brows, and her lips would have frozen the breath of any man who dared try to kiss her.

      It might have been thought that my mother, who was the kindest of women, would have done anything to avoid a topic that caused me so much pain. Compassion, I thought, should be like a soft, warm blanket wrapped around those we love to comfort them, and hers usually was. But sometimes, it was like a steel needle that plunges straight into the heart of a boil to relieve the pressure there. My mother seemed always to know what I needed most.

      ‘You should remember her as she was when you first saw her,’ my mother told me. ‘Don’t you think that is what she would want?’

      ‘Yes … she would,’ I forced out. And then I added, ‘And as she might be again.’

      My mother’s face softened as she searched for something in mine. ‘You’ve never said much about her, you know.’

      ‘What is there to say, then?’

      ‘Well, nothing, really – nothing that your eyes haven’t shouted a hundred times.’

      I turned to wipe at my eyes as I remembered the way that Atara had once looked at me. Not so long ago, in the flash of her smile, in beholding the boldness of her gaze, my eyes must have filled with the light of that faraway star that fed the fire of our souls.

      My mother’s smile reminded me of Atara’s in its promise that she would only ever wish all good things for me. She said to me, ‘You’d never marry another, would you?’

      ‘Never,’ I said, shaking my head.

      She turned to regard my father a moment, and a silent understanding passed between them. My father sighed and said, ‘Then King Kurshan will have to look elsewhere if he wants a match for his daughter.’

      He spoke of this fierce king from Lagash who would sail the stars – after first marrying off his daughter, Chandria. Then Asaru nodded at my father and asked him, ‘Do you wish me to make marriage with her, sir?’

      ‘Possibly,’ my father said to him. ‘Do you think you might ever come to love her?’

      ‘Possibly,’ Asaru said, smiling at him. ‘By the grace of the One.’

      We Valari do not, as a rule, marry for love. But my grandfather had chosen out my grandmother, a simple woodcutter’s daughter, for no other reason. And my father had always said that his love for my mother, and hers for him, was proof of life’s essential goodness. For until the moment of his betrothal to Elianora wi Solaru, daughter of King Talanu of Kaash, my father had never set eyes upon her. And now, thirty years later, his heart still leaped with fire whenever he looked her way.

      ‘Well,’ he said, taking a sip of brandy, ‘we can speak of marriage another time. We have other kings to worry about now.’

      He glanced at Master Juwain and said, ‘There’s an ugly rumor going around that you quarreled with King Waray on your journey to Taron.’

      ‘I’m afraid that is true,’ Master Juwain said. His lumpy face pulled into a frown as he rubbed the back of his bald head. ‘I’m afraid I have bad news: King Waray has closed our school outside Nar.’

      The story that Master Juwain now told, as the logs in the fireplaces burnt down and we all sipped our brandy, was rather long, for Master Juwain strived for completeness in all things. But its essence was this: Master Juwain had indeed gone to Nar to make researches into the horoscope of an ancient Maitreya, as I had discovered earlier that evening. He had also wanted to retrieve relics that the Brothers kept in their collection in the Nar sanctuary. These were thought stones, he said, and therefore lesser gelstei – but still of great value.

      ‘King Waray allowed me to remove a book about the Shining One from the library, as Val will tell,’ Master Juwain said. ‘But he forbade the removal of any thought stone or gelstei.’

      ‘A king’s forbiddance does not make a quarrel,’ my father said.

      ‘No, it does not,’ Master Juwain agreed. ‘But when a certain master of the Brotherhoods very testily reminds that king that his realm ends at the door of the Brotherhood sanctuary, that is the beginning of a quarrel.’

      ‘Indeed it is, Master Juwain.’

      ‘And when that king orders all the Brothers to leave the sanctuary and the doors to be locked, some would say that is only the quarrel’s natural development and should have been anticipated.’

      ‘Some would say that very thing,’ my father said, smiling. ‘And they would be surprised that such an otherwise reasonable and non-quarrelsome master would risk such a disaster over some old gelstei.’

      ‘Over a principle, you mean, King Shamesh.’

      ‘Very well, then, but to lose one’s temper and court the failure of one’s mission over the continuation of what is really an ancient quarrel cannot be counted as the act of a wise man.’

      ‘Did I say I failed?’ Master Juwain asked. Now he smiled as he drew out of his pocket a stone the size of a walnut. Its colors of ruby, turquoise and auramine swirled about in the most beguiling of patterns. ‘Well, I didn’t fail completely. I managed to spirit this away before King Waray locked the doors.’

      ‘Spirit it away!’ Maram called out, leaning over to examine the thought stone. ‘You mean, stole it, don’t you?’

      ‘Can one steal from one’s own house?’

      ‘King Waray,’ my father said, ‘might feel that since it was his ancestors who built the sanctuary and his knights who defend it still, that the house is his – or at least the treasures gathered inside.’

      ‘You do not feel that way, King Shamesh. You have always honored the ancient laws.’

      This was true. My father would never have thought to act as tyrannically as had King Waray. In truth, he honored the Brotherhood even as he did old laws that others had long since repudiated. And so half a year before, when Master Juwain had returned with me bearing the Lightstone, my father had ordered a new building to be raised up at the Brotherhood’s sanctuary in the mountains outside our castle. Master Juwain – and the other masters – were to gather gelstei from across Ea that they might be studied. Master Juwain must have seen that King Waray’s envy of Mesh and the much greater treasure in my father’s hall was the deeper reason that he had closed the sanctuary in Nar.

      ‘Knowledge must be honored before pride of possession,’ my father said. His bright eyes fixed on the thought stone. ‘Let us hope that this gelstei holds knowledge that justifies incurring King Waray’s ill will.’

      ‘I believe it to hold knowledge about the Lightstone,’ Master Juwain said. ‘And possibly about the Maitreya.’

      My father’s eyes grew even brighter – and so, I imagine, did mine. Everyone except my grandmother now turned toward Master Juwain to regard the little stone in his hand.

      ‘You believe it to hold this knowledge?’ my father said. ‘Then you haven’t – what is the right word – opened it?’

      ‘Not yet,’ Master Juwain said. ‘You see, there are difficulties.’

      What I knew about the thought stones was little: they belonged to the same family of gelstei as did the song stones and the touch stones. It was said that a thought stone, upon the closing of a man’s hand, could absorb and hold the contents of his mind as a sponge does water. It was also said that in ages past, the stones could be opened and ‘read’ by anyone trained in their use. But few now possessed this art.

      ‘One would have thought that a master of the Brotherhood would have overcome any difficulties,’ my father said to Master Juwain.

      ‘One would have thought