Black Jade (39 page)

And the droghul said to me: 'Even if you escape the Skadarak now, in your persons, you won't escape it in your souls. Look on Kane! Look on me and behold yourselves! Soon, very soon, the Dragon will use the Black Jade to make anyone he wishes into a ghul.'

'Damn you!' Kane roared out. 'Damn you!'

He moved to thrust the brand at the droghul, but I stepped between them and tore it from his hand. For a moment it seemed that I looked upon a legendary beast. Kane, as ever, shook with all the rage of a lion; his eyes flashed as fiercely as any eagle's while his long white teeth seemed as powerful as those of a shark. And then my eyes cleared, and I remembered who this dangerous friend of mine really was.

'Why trade words any longer with the Lord of Lies?' I said to him. I breathed deeply the night's dark air, hoping it would clear my mind of much of what I had seen and heard. 'Let us tear off a rag and bind his droghul's mouth.'

'And what then, eh?' Kane said as he glared at me. 'Will you leave him tied up here for the bears to eat?'

We could not leave him as Kane had said. But neither, I thought, could we drag this bound and hateful creature all across Ea, and we certainly could not free him. That seemed to leave us only one choice.

I stood before the droghul and gripped my sword with both hands. How many men, I wondered, had I slain? Although I had kept no count of the numbers, the faces of each one burned inside me. One more, surely, would poison my soul only a little more. And yet I had never put sword to a bound and helpless man. I knew that Kane would be glad to execute the droghul in my stead. Bui it seemed that the duty was upon me.

'Free me,' the droghul said to me. He cast a beautiful smile at Atara. 'Lead me to the Maitreya, and your woman shall be restored.' 'You do not have that power,' I told him. 'I have the Lightstone,' he reminded me. 'And so I have all the power in the world.'

'No,'

'Free me, and you shall be elevated to your rightful place. For you, Valashu, there will be no death.'

For a moment, the hilt of my sword seemed to soften, and then buckle as it came alive and writhed like the coils of a snake. I nearly cast it from me. I said to the droghul 'You lie - as ever, you lie.'

'Is
this
a lie: that you know my heart as no other man ever has? Even as I know yours?' 'No, no.'

The droghul with his soft, golden eyes looked at me in all the terror of death - and something more. Something deep and beau-tiful inside him called to me. It was a plea to be as brothers. And yet something else, dark and vile, denied him this brotherhood and shouted down to me that he would be satisfied only with my submission, flattery and adulation.

'How can I kill him?' I said to Kane - and to myself.

'So, Val, so - give me your sword and I'll give you his head!'

I hesitated. I remembered Kane once telling me how Morjin had a sense of how he might have been noble and great, and still might be.

I said to him: 'There is good in you - I can feel it!'

As I spoke these words, a darkness fell over his eyes. His whole body jumped against his bonds and then shuddered. I had sense of hard scales and burning
relb
and terrible, black claws seizing hold of his heart. 'There is good in you!' I insisted again.

'Is there?' he asked me. His voice had fallen hard as ice.

My eyes locked onto his, and the whole world seemed to disappear. 'Yes,' I said.

'Damn you, Elahad! Do not look at me that way!' he snarled out. 'Always, you and your kind presume too much!'

'But it is the will of the One!' I told him.

'The One be damned!' he shouted at me. 'Do you want to know about the One? Then I shall tell you.'

He drew in deep breath, and then let it out in a torrent of words that was more like a fiery blast than true human speech: 'The One calls all things into being, from worms to men to myself. We are given freedom of will - those who do not surrender it to someone greater. But because
being
itself, in this hell that is the world, is cruel and hard, some few of us, the truly great ones,
will
ourselves to be even crueller and harder. Some call this evil. Some men - and Master Juwain and his order are among these - teach that the strong and the great do evil only out of ignorance, in the mistaken belief that we are doing good. At the worst, they say,
our
kind are cruel despite knowing what we do is evil, as if there is no help for it. No one wants to know the truth: that the One made this to happen when he made this hell for me to live in and gave me my perfect will to
be
the Red Dragon. I do what I do
because
it is evil. I
like
it.'

He paused to let these words pierce me like so many nails. His eyes were as hard as hammers; all the light seemed to have gone out of them, leaving only black iron in its place.

He continued. 'I
love
it that men fear me as the Crucifier, for I was born to this calling as others were to be sculptors or minstrels. It is my art. I have written of this. About how the One, above all else, wishes for me to create the greatest and most beautiful of all possible things.'

He looked at me as he licked his dry lips. His throat, I sensed, was parched. But his eyes no longer held any plea that I should give him water, nor would I have obliged him by so much as spitting into his mouth, even if he had begged me.

He smiled as he looked down at his remaining hand, sticking out from beneath a turn of rope. He said to me, 'With these fingers I have torn the liver from a young boy's belly and ate it as he screamed.'

I took a step back from him, shaking my head. Master Juwain again called for the droghul to be gagged. Daj, I saw, standing over Gorman and Pittock, had dropped his club and clasped his hands over his ears. I sensed in Atara a gladness that she was blind and could not look upon the droghul's face. Kane, however, stared at this dreadful being as if entranced. Estrella simply looked at him. and listened. I could not bear for her to hear another word. I raised back my sword. I noticed that all the light had gone out of it.

'Yes, kill me,' the droghul said. 'Do you think
he
cares? Do you think
I
do?'

Again, I hesitated. For a moment, I wasn't sure who was speaking to me, the droghul or Morjin.

'What do my eyes tell you?' he asked me. 'Do they beg for mercy? Damn you! You, who are damned as I am! What did the eyes of all those you killed with that filthy sword say to you? Can you not hear their voices? Listen!'

I stood holding Alkaladur back behind my head as I looked into the droghul's hateful eyes. I felt, rather than saw, my sword's silus-tria beginning to glow a hellish red.

'How many have
I
killed, Valashu?' he asked me. 'How many stars are there in the sky? And each one, as it must have been for you, said
this
to me: "I die for you. I give you my life that yours might burn brighter."
This
is my will. I tear a living heart from a man's chest, and this feeds me. My hunger is vaster than all the oceans of the world. I drink the blood of a woman's cut veins, and I
do
grow, vaster, brighter and brighter - as bright as all the stars from Ea to Agathad. And the whole of creation sings to see its purpose fulfilled.'

Now I could see the flames running along my sword. It seemed that there was only one way to extinguish them.

And still the droghul spoke to me. The words poured out of his mouth, clear and lovely in their tone, but they burned me like poison: 'And some deaths, Valashu, feed us more than others, don't they? You know of which deaths I speak. Your brothers -'

'Stop!' I cried out. The diamonds set into the hilt of my sword cut into my clenched hands. 'Be silent!'

'Your brothers died beyond my sight, it's true, but
you
saw them at their end, didn't you? Your father, too. Your grandmother, though, and your mother -'

'No!'

Kane, standing beside me, could bear the droghul's talk no longer. Almost quicker than thought, he lunged forward and smashed his fist into the droghul's mouth. This mighty blow would have felled an ox; it stunned the droghul, but only for a moment. His eyes clouded as with concussion, but soon cleared as they filled with desire to destroy Kane - and me. He spat blood and teeth at my face. When he spoke again, his words were no longer so beautifully formed.

'I must tell you, Valashu.
I
must. I've written you that your mother never cried out for mercy, and that is true. But she called for you.'

'No,' I murmured. The heat of my flaming sword burned my hands, but I could not let go of ot. Neither could I move it forward, not even an inch. 'No, no.'

'When I put the nails in,' the droghul said, 'her thoughts were of you. Her last words, too. Shall I tell you?'

'No!'

'I shall,' he said. His eyes seemed redder than my sword, and blood stained his lips. 'She lives in me, now, you know. She speaks, always, as she spoke that day. She said
-'

'No!'

'Valashu.'

I listened stunned as the timbre and rhythm of the droghul's voice changed into a perfect mimicry of my mother's. If I closed my eyes, it would have been as if my mother stood bound and tormented before me. I hadn't known that Morjin, or his droghul, possessed this power.

'Valashu,' he said again in my mother's beautiful voice. It held infinite love for me and all the pain in the world. 'Why did you leave me to die?'

What is it to hate a man? It is grinding teeth and burning skin and nails driven through the eyes. It is a tunnel of fire. Its heart beats with a rage to inflict all your agony upon him, increased ten thousandfold. And then to destroy him, utterly, expunging him from existence so that nothing - no word nor gleam in his eye nor hair upon his head - remains.

'Morjin!' I shouted out. My breath blasted out and seemed to shake the leaves of the trees all about our encampment. 'I'll kill you - I swear I will!'

Inside my heart the valarda flamed red and terrible, with a fury greater than even that of my sword. It came to me then that if I struck out with it, Moijin might feel a mortal hurt even through his droghul.

'No. Val!' Atara suddenly shouted at me. 'Remember your promise!'

I had promised myself that I would never again kill with the valarda. Could I keep this unkeepable covenant? I would, I told myself, I must - or die. But many times I had killed with my sword, as I must kill many more. The droghul might truly have good in him, as all men did. But he was evil, too. almost as twisted and evil as Morjin himself, and so he must be destroyed. 'Valashu.'

With all the fury of all the sinews of my body, with hate blackening my eyes, I swung Alkaladur down upon the droghul's head. The speed of the blade slicing through the air caused the flames to flare up and whisper with a burning wind. It sent out a sudden and bright light. I knew then that I could not kill the droghul this way. At the last moment I checked the blow, stopping the edge of my sword half an inch above his head. 'Damn you, Elahad!' he roared out.

I pulled back my sword. I said, 'We'll take the droghul with us through the Skadarak, to help us find the way.'

At this, the droghul's eyes filled with something black and vile. It was all of Morjin's malevolence made as real and palpable as iron smeared with dung.

'It was good to make your mother die,' he told me. 'But when I kill
you,
when I tear out your heart and eat it, I will sing with joy!'

I could not bear the fear fighting through the droghul's implacable face. Fear and hate, hate and fear - it seemed the whole of the droghul's existence. And then a light flared inside him and it seemed that there was something he hated even more than me. He clenched the fingers of his single hand into a fist. He shook his head back and forth, and twisted and pulled against the rope cutting into his chest. Then his eyes, his glorious golden eyes, fell upon me. A clarity came into them. It was as if he looked straight into my heart and smiled. For a moment, as fleeting as a breath, I had a sense of an eagle beating his wings against the wind and screaming out that he was free. 'Elahad!' The droghul's mouth opened wide, showing his reddened teeth.

And then, as the hate came back into his eyes, as a poison worse than kirax flooded through him, his jaws snapped shut with such force that I felt his teeth bite off his tongue and break. His eyes rolled back into his head, and a bloody froth bubbled from his lips. He screamed. I felt every fiber along his neck and limbs twisting in agony. His whole body thrashed like a speared fish; from some dark source, it gathered up a power so great that his spasms shook the whole fence to which he was tied. He raged and lunged and screamed; unbelievably, he pulled up a great wooden log half-rooted in the ground and lunged at me as the fence fell apart. He spat blood into my eyes, straining at the rope that still held him tied. He cried out with such a terrible and keening pain that I thought my eardrums would break. And then he died.

'Morjin,' I whispered. I hated the burn of water filling up my eyes. 'Morjin.'

The droghul lay in the mud beneath my feet, twisted and tangled up in the rope still attached to the log. I swung my sword and cut the rope. Master Juwain came forward and held his hand to the droghul's throat to make sure that he was really dead. But I knew that he was.

After that, Kane used an axe to cut the droghul into pieces. He insisted that we bury each one in its own hole dug into the moist forest floor. We buried Jastor as well. With the droghul destroyed, it seemed safe to untie Pittock and Gorman.

But we would never really be safe. While Maram let loose a cheer that we had slain yet another monster, Atara walked off by herself a dozen yards into the woods. Dawn had come an hour since, and filled the trees with a smothered gray light. She stood beneath an old oak with her hand on her blindfold, shaking her head. I could almost feel the coldness that fell upon her whenever she was gifted with a vision. And then her words chilled me even more as she told us: 'This droghul was only the first. There will be two more, each more terrible and more powerful, as Morjin gains power over the Lightstone.'