Lord of Lies. David Zindell

      One of the guards suggested sending for a rope and lowering it to the girl from the battlements high above.

      ‘No, there is no time,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to climb up to her.’

      ‘Climb this wall?’ Maram said. ‘Who will climb it?’

      In answer, I unbuckled my sword and pressed it into his hand. It was the first time since it had been given to me that I allowed it out of my reach.

      ‘Are you mad?’ Maram said to me. ‘Let us at least search for a rope first before you –’

      ‘No, there is no time!’ I said again. I knew that the girl outside who had looked straight into my soul would soon lose her hold. ‘Help me, Maram.’

      I reached to pull at the rings of steel encasing me, but the sudden and silent plaint that sounded inside me told me that I didn’t even have time to remove my armor. I moved over to the window again and gripped the cold sill.

      ‘But, Val!’ Maram protested, ‘she’s a slave. And you are … who you are.’

      But who was I, really? While the guard held the torch for me, I again stuck my head out the window to descry my route up to the girl. She gazed down at me. And her dark, wild eyes showed me that I was a man who couldn’t let a young girl simply fall to her death.

      With everyone’s help, I backed up and out the window, gripping the edge of the casement above it as I pushed my feet against the sill. The darkness of night fell upon me; the cold wind rattled my hair against the wall’s ancient stone. Through empty space I stared down at the rocks far below. My belly tightened, and for a moment it seemed I might lose my dinner after all. How could I climb this naked wall? How could any man? Once each spring, I knew, my father walked around the entire castle inspecting it for any crack or exposed joint in its stones. Such flaws in the masonry were always mended, making it impossible for an enemy to scale the walls. But here, a hundred feet up, it seemed that no such repairs had been made for a hundred years. Who could have thought to prevent a simple slave girl, in blinding fear, from climbing out a window upon cold, cracked stone?

      I drew in a quick breath and turned my gaze upward. The guard held the torch out the window, and its fluttering yellow light revealed a crack above my head. I reached up and thrust my fingers into it. I found another crack with my left hand. And then, as I fit the toe of my boot into a narrow joint in the stone to the right of the window, I slowly pulled myself up. Two feet I gained this way, and then a couple more as I pulled and pushed against other cracks and other joints.

      It was desperate hard work in the dead of the night, and a single slip would kill me. My hands were slick with sweat; the rough granite soon abraded the flesh from my knuckles and left them bloody. I suddenly remembered the story of how Telemesh had fought his way up the face of Skartaru, the black mountain, to rescue an ancient warrior bound there. Lines of verse came unbidden into my mind:

       Through rain and hail he climbed the wall Still wet with bile, blood and gall …

      I fought my way up another foot and then another. The torch’s light soon weakened so that I could barely make out the features of the stonework above me. I nearly slipped, and tore my fingernails to the quick on a little lip of granite. The immense black weight of the sky seemed to lie upon my shoulders and push me back toward the earth.

      Where dread and dark devour light, He climbed alone into the night.

      But I was not alone. As if in answer to my silent supplication, Flick joined me there beneath the stars. His whirling, fiery form showed a crack about three feet above me that I would have missed. And the girl kept looking at me with wild hope. She called no encouragement, with her lips. But her eyes, clear and deep, kept calling me and urging me upward. They reminded me that I had a greater strength than I ever knew. This connection of sight and soul was like an invisible rope tied between us and joining our fates together as one.

      At last I drew up by her side. My fingers clawed a little crack; the tips of my boots had bare purchase on a broken joint of stone. The trembling of my body was almost as great as the girl’s. I felt her heart beating wildly a couple of feet from mine. The wind carried her scent of fear and freshly-soaped hair over my face. Through the dark I looked at her and said, ‘Grab onto me!’

      She shook her head. I knew that she didn’t have the strength to let go her hold without falling.

      ‘Wait a moment!’ I said.

      I looked about and espied a wider and deeper crack a little above me. I jammed my whole hand into it. Its sharp knurls bruised my bones. When I was sure of my hold, I reached out with my other hand to wrap it around the girl’s narrow waist. Then, in one carefully coordinated motion, I helped her up and onto my back, even as she threw her arms around my neck and locked her bare legs around my waist. In this way, carrying her piggyback like the little sister I had never had, I began climbing back toward the window.

      ‘Val!’ Maram called up to me as he stuck his head out the window and held the torch high. ‘Careful now! Only a little farther and I’ll have you!’

      It was much harder climbing downward. I had trouble seeing where to put my feet and finding holds for my hands. Although the girl was as slight as a swan, her weight, added to that of my armor, was a crushing force that burned my tormented muscles and pulled me ever down toward the hard and waiting earth. Twice, I nearly slipped. If not for Flick’s guiding light, I would never have found holds in time to keep us from plunging to our deaths.

      ‘Val! Val!’

      And yet there was something about the girl that was not a grief but a grace. Her breath, quick and sweet, was like a whisper of warm wind in my ear. In it was all the hope and immense goodness of life. It poured out of her depths like a fountain of fire that connected both of us to the luminous exhalations of the stars. In the face of such a strong and beautiful will to live, how could I ever lose my own strength and let us fall? And so there, beneath the black vault of the heavens, for many moments that seemed to have no end, we hung suspended in space like two tiny particles of light.

      As promised, when we reached the window Maram grabbed onto us, and he and the others helped us back into the room. The girl stood facing me as we regarded each other in triumph. Then she cast a long look at her murdered friends in the corner of the room. She burst into tears, and buried her face against my chest. I wrapped one arm around her back as I covered her eyes with my other hand, and I began weeping, too.

      Master Juwain touched my shoulder and said, ‘Val, this is no place to linger.’

      I nodded my head. I was now trembling as badly as the girl. I looked down at her and asked, ‘What is your name?’

      But she didn’t answer me. She just stood there looking at me with her sad, beautiful eyes.

      One of the guards came up to me as I was buckling on my sword. He said, ‘It seems that the Red Priests’ servants were all mute, Lord Valashu.’

      ‘No doubt so that they couldn’t tell of their masters’ filthy crimes,’ Maram added.

      I bit my lip, then asked the girl, ‘Was it Salmelu – Igasho – who did all this?’

      The sudden dread that seized her heart told me that it was.

      ‘Do you know if Salmelu kept company with a ghul? Might he have secreted such a man in the castle to steal the Lightstone?’

      But in answer, she only shrugged her shoulders.

      ‘Come, Val,’ Master Juwain said to me again.

      I started moving the girl toward the door, but then stopped suddenly. I said to her, ‘Your name is Estrella, isn’t it?’

      She smiled brightly at me, and nodded her head.

      ‘I must ask you something.’ I bent over and whispered in her ear, ‘Do you know who the Maitreya is? Is it I?’

      It seemed a senseless thing to ask a nine-year-old