Lord of Lies. David Zindell

the secrets of the Lightstone itself.

      ‘If this stone contains such knowledge,’ Master Juwain said to my father, holding up his opalescent little marble, ‘it may be that the only way to open it would be with the aid of the Lightstone.’

      ‘Do you wish my permission to use the Lightstone this way?’

      Master Juwain’s face tightened with dismay. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know how. Perhaps no one now living does.’

      My father swirled the brandy around in his glass and watched the little waves of the amber liquor break against the clear crystal. Then he looked at Master Juwain and said, ‘Then you need the Lightstone to open the thought stone, and the thought stone to understand the secrets of how the Lightstone might be used. How are we to solve this conundrum?’

      ‘I had hoped,’ Master Juwain said, ‘that if I stood before the Lightstone, the answer might come to me.’

      He turned toward me and added, ‘I had hoped, too, that the thought stone might tell us more about the Maitreya. About how he is to be recognized and how he might use the Lightstone.’

      Now I, too, looked down at the swirls of brandy in my glass. For a long few moments, I said nothing – and neither did anyone else.

      And then my father said to Master Juwain, ‘You may certainly make your trial whenever you wish. It’s too bad that you brought back only one such stone. But you say that others remain in Nar?’

      ‘Hundreds of others, King Shamesh.’

      My father smiled at him reassuringly and then nodded at Asaru. He said to him, ‘Do you still plan to journey to the tournament?’

      ‘If that is still your wish, sir,’ Asaru said. ‘Yarashan will accompany me to Nar next week.’

      ‘Very good. Then perhaps you can prevail upon King Waray to reopen the Brotherhood’s school.’

      ‘Can one prevail upon the sun to shine at night?’

      ‘Does the task daunt you?’

      ‘No more than Master Juwain’s conundrum must daunt him,’ Asaru said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘In either case, there must be a solution.’

      ‘Good,’ my father said, smiling at him. ‘Problems we’ll always have many, and solutions too few. But there’s always a way.’

      His gaze now fell upon me, and I couldn’t help feeling that he regarded me as both a puzzle to be solved and its solution.

      ‘Always a way,’ I said to him, thinking of my own conundrum. ‘Sometimes that is hard to believe, sir.’

      My father’s gaze grew brighter and harder to bear as he said, ‘But we must believe it. For believing in a thing, we make it be. As you, of all men, must believe this now.’

      Strangely, what had happened earlier in the hall with Baltasar had so far gone unremarked, like some family secret or crime, instead of the miracle that Lansar Raasharu proclaimed it to be. But my family and friends knew me too well. Master Juwain and Maram, on our quest, had seen me sweat and weep and bleed. When I was a child, my mother had wiped the milk from my chin, and once, my father had pulled me off Yarashan when I had tried to bite off his ear in one of our brotherly scuffles. They might or might not believe that I was the Maitreya of ancient legend and prophecy – but it was clear that they did not intend to speak of me in hushed tones or to forget that whatever mantle I might claim, I would always remain Valashu Elahad.

      ‘It is not upon me,’ my father said, ‘to determine if you are this Shining One that many hope you to be. But you are my son, and that is my concern. The brightest flower is the one that is most often picked; the elk with the greatest rack of antlers draws the most arrows. You are a target now, Valashu. Even before this thing passed between you and Baltasar, it was so. Consider the way that the traitor nearly brought about your doom – and my own.’

      The quiet of the room was broken only by the hissing from the fireplace and my father’s measured words. We all listened to him tell of what a great tragedy it would have been for Mesh if I had murdered Salmelu. For then my father would have been faced with an excruciating choice: either for the king himself to break the law of the land in sparing my life or to order the death of that which gave his life purpose – and the death of one who might possibly be the Maitreya.

      ‘The Red Dragon,’ he said, ‘set a terrible trap for us. By the grace of the One, we found a way out. You did, Valashu. A way – there’s always a way.’

      ‘I … hated Salmelu as I’ve only hated one other,’ I said. I picked up the box containing the two broken windows to Atara’s soul, and gripped it so hard that it hurt my hand. ‘And when he gave me this, the hate, like fire in my eyes, like madness … this is what Morjin must have calculated would make me kill Salmelu. But how could Morjin have been sure?’

      ‘Go on,’ my father said as everyone looked at me.

      ‘This trap of Morjin’s – it wouldn’t have caught another. And it shouldn’t have caught me.’

      ‘No, it shouldn’t have,’ my father agreed. ‘And from this, what do you conclude?’

      ‘That there will be other traps that we haven’t yet seen.’

      Across the circle from me, my mother’s breath seemed to have been choked-off as if by an invisible hand. I heard Maram muttering in his brandy, even as my father nodded his head and said, ‘Yes, just so. This is why we’ve all been kept from our beds tonight, that we might see these other traps before it’s too late.’

      Asaru, it seemed, had been making calculations of his own. He eyed the familiar chess set for a moment before turning to my father. ‘The Red Dragon was willing to throw away Salmelu’s life, like a pawn.’

      ‘No, rather like a knight that must be sacrificed to checkmate an opponent,’ my father said.

      ‘Very well, a knight, then. But did Salmelu know that he was to be sacrificed?’

      My father smiled grimly and shook his head. ‘Few men have such devotion for their king.’

      ‘Morjin is no king,’ I said, thinking of the whips I had heard cracking in the darkened tunnels of Argattha. ‘Men do not follow him out of love.’

      ‘Then shouldn’t we consider the Galdan scryer’s prophecy?’ Asaru asked. ‘She spoke of a ghul, didn’t she?’

      Could Salmelu truly be a ghul, I wondered? Had he given up his soul to Morjin so that Morjin breathed his fell words into Salmelu’s mouth and moved his lips and limbs from afar like a puppeteer pulling on strings? The living-dead, ghuls were called: they who were as corpses inside and were forced to think the very thoughts of their masters.

      ‘No,’ I said at last, ‘Salmelu is no ghul.’

      ‘But, Val, how can you be sure?’

       Because the flames of his being burn with different colors than do Morjin’s.

      I stared off at the candles in their stands as I said, ‘In Salmelu and Morjin, so much malice, so much hate. But the fire that eats away at Salmelu is different from that which consumes Morjin. Its source is different. I … can feel Salmelu’s will to destroy me. It’s as unique to him as a knight’s emblem or a man’s face.’

      Asaru thought about this for a moment as a sudden dread came over him. ‘But, Val, if Salmelu isn’t this ghul, who is?’

      Master Juwain, now sitting utterly still, cleared his throat and said, ‘A scryer’s prophecies are famously difficult to interpret, even those that prove true. But we should all give much thought to this one.’

      His large, gray eyes fell upon me with the weight of worlds as he continued, ‘We see at least one of the Red Dragon’s traps within the trap: if Salmelu had failed to goad you into murder, what he brought here