The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One. David Zindell

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СКАЧАТЬ My heart swelled with a sudden fury that I feared almost more than any other thing. I found that secret place where love and hate, life and death, were as one. This time, when the mace swept past me, I rushed the assassin. I stepped in close enough to feel the heat steaming off his massive body. I got my arm up to block the return arc of his mace as he snorted in anger and spat into my face. I smelled his fear, with my nostrils as well as with a finer sense. And then I plunged my dagger into the soft spot above his big, hard belly; I angled it upward so that it pierced his heart.

      ‘Maram!’ I screamed out. ‘Asaru!’

      The pain of the assassin’s death was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was like lightning striking through my eyes into my spine, like a mace as big as a tree crushing in my chest. As the assassin gasped and spasmed and crumpled to the sodden earth, I fell on top of him. I coughed and gasped for breath; I screamed and raged and wept, all at once. A river of blood spurted out of the wound where I had put my knife. But an entire ocean flowed out of me.

      Val – are you hurt?’ I heard Maram’s voice boom like thunder as from far away. I felt him hovering over me as he placed his hand on my shoulder and shook me gently. ‘Come on now, get up – you killed him.’

      But the assassin wasn’t quite dead. Even in the violence of the pouring rain, I felt his last breath burn against my face. I watched the light die from his eyes. And only then came the darkness.

      ‘Come on, Val. Here, let me help you.’

      But I couldn’t move. I was only dimly aware of Maram grunting and puffing as he rolled me off the assassin’s body. Maram’s frightened face suddenly seemed to thin and grow as insubstantial as smoke. The colors faded from the forest; the blood seeping from his wounded head wasn’t red at all but a dark gray. Everything grew darker then. A terrible cold, centered in my heart, began spreading through my body. It was worse than being caught in a blizzard in one of the mountain passes, worse even than plunging through Lake Waskaw’s broken ice into freezing waters. It was a cosmic cold: vast, empty, indifferent; it was the cold that brings on the neverness of night and the nothingness of death. And I was utterly open to it.

      It was as I lay in this half-alive state that Asaru finally returned. He must have sprinted when he saw me – and the dead assassin – stretched out on the forest floor, for he was panting to catch his breath when he reached my side. He knelt over me, and I felt his warm, hard hand pressing gently against my throat as he tested my pulse. To Maram he said, The other one … escaped. They had horses waiting. What happened here?’

      Maram quickly explained how I had frozen up after the first assassin’s arrow had stuck in my jacket; his voice swelled with pride as he told of how he had charged the second assassin.

      ‘Ah, Lord Asaru,’ he said, ‘you should have seen me! A Valari warrior couldn’t have done any better. I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that I saved Val’s life.’

      Thank you,’ Asaru said dryly. ‘It seems that Val also saved yours.’

      He looked down at me and smiled grimly. He said, Val, what’s wrong – why can’t you move?’

      ‘It’s cold,’ I whispered, looking into the blackness of his eyes. ‘So cold.’

      With much grumbling from Maram, they lifted me and carried me over beneath a great elm tree. Maram lay down his cloak and helped Asaru prop me up against the tree’s trunk. Then Asaru ran back through the woods to retrieve our bows that we had cast down. He brought back as well the arrow that the first assassin had shot at me.

      This is bad,’ he said, looking at the black arrow. In the flashes of lightning, he scanned the woods to the north, east, south and west. There may be more of them,’ he told us.

      ‘No,’ I whispered. To be open to death is to be open to life. The hateful presence that I had sensed in the woods that day was now gone. Already, the rain was washing the air dean. There are no more.’

      Asaru peered at the arrow and said, They almost killed me. I felt this pass through my hair.’

      I looked at Asaru’s long black hair blowing about his shoulders, but I could only gasp silently in pain.

      ‘Let’s get your shirt off,’ he said. It was one of his rules, I knew, that wounds must be tended as soon as possible.

      In a moment they had carefully removed my jacket and shirt. It must have been cold, with the wind whipping raindrops against my suddenly exposed flesh. But all I could feel was a deeper cold that sucked me down into death.

      Asaru touched the livid bruise that the assassin’s mace had left on my chest. His fingers gently probed my ribs. ‘You’re lucky – it seems that nothing is broken.’

      ‘What about that?’ Maram asked, pointing at my side where the arrow had touched me.

      ‘Why, it’s only a scratch,’ Asaru said. He soaked a cloth with some of the brandy that he carried in a wineskin, and then swabbed it over my skin.

      I looked down at my throbbing side. To call the wound left by the arrow a scratch was to exaggerate its seriousness. Truly, no more than the faintest featherstroke of a single red line marked the place where the arrow had nicked the skin. But I could still feel the poison working in my veins.

      ‘It’s cold,’ I whispered. ‘Everywhere, cold.’

      Now Asaru examined the arrow, which was fletched with raven feathers and tipped with a razor-sharp steel head like any common hunting arrow. But the steel, I saw, was enameled with some dark, blue substance. Asaru’s eyes flashed with anger as he showed it to Maram.

      He said, They tried to kill me with a poison arrow.’

      I blinked my eyes at the cold crushing my skull. But I said nothing against my brother’s prideful assumption that the arrow had been meant for him and not me.

      ‘Do you think it was the Ishkans?’ Maram asked.

      Asaru pointed at the assassin’s body and said, That’s no Ishkan.’

      ‘Perhaps they hired him.’

      They must have,’ Asaru said.

      ‘Oh, no,’ I murmured. ‘No, no, no.’

      Not even the Ishkans, I thought, would ever kill a man with poison. Or would they?

      Asaru quickly, but with great care, wrapped my torn and tainted jacket and shirt around the arrow’s head to protect it from the falling rain. Then he took off his cloak and put it on me.

      ‘Is that better?’ he asked me.

      ‘Yes,’ I said, lying to him despite what I had been taught. ‘Much better.’

      Although he smiled down at me to encourage me, his face was grave. I didn’t need my gift of empathy to feel his love and concern for me.

      This is hard to understand,’ he said. ‘You can’t have taken enough poison to paralyze you this way.’

      No, I thought, I couldn’t have. It wasn’t the poison that pinned me to the earth like a thousand arrows of ice. I wanted to explain to him that somehow the poison must have dissolved my shields and left me open to the assassin. But how could I tell my simple, courageous СКАЧАТЬ