Authors: Janny Wurts
Fugitive Prince (20 page)
Lapped like a mummy in quilts and thick shadows, her reed voice stripped to suspicion, Morriel said carefully, “Dead or not, those wraiths should have no thread of connection to exploit. Unless you’ve contrived some harebrained scheme to restore the old portal to Athera?”
“Ath forfend, never that!” Sethvir interjected, then submerged once again in his voiceless communion with Iyan. An inimical pause seized the chamber, strung out on the hiss of the tallow dip. Asandir turned his hand palm down on bare wood to thwart a visible urge to strike a fist. “This is properly Kharadmon’s story,” he said in quick discomfort.
Luhaine withheld all opinion, nor did he interrupt as the nexus of his discorporate rival drifted down to settle amid the used-up spread of light supper.
“The tale plays more like nightmare,” the Fellowship’s most incorrigible prankster confessed in chilling sobriety. Over the untidied jetsam of dishes and a tea mug abandoned brimful, Kharadmon dropped the too casual comment that he had accomplished a crossing between stars.
“I went to Marak with intent to find knowledge to break the Mistwraith’s geas of enmity over the princes. Why look astonished?” He chuckled for the joy of provocation. “Come now, Morriel, were your Koriani spies so inept? Did you actually think we would abandon the half brothers to the affliction of a cursed fate?”
The Prime Enchantress fixed his invisible presence with disdain as inscrutable as a sphinx.
“Well, madam, don’t rush to lend us due grace with an apology.” A miniature, self-contained wind devil, Kharadmon swept a tempest of crumbs into gyrating circles around the teapot. “I shan’t lend false hope. I found no reprieve.”
On Marak, where cities had once crisscrossed the continents with glimmering strings of lights, he had encountered a dead waste of freezing winds and ice. No people survived. There, the truncated mists of Desh-thiere brooded still, redoubled in malice, and haunted now by far worse than the original matrix of bound entities that had launched past invasion of Athera.
Kharadmon minced no words. “The fogs still enveloping Marak have inducted the spirits of every slain human victim.” His whirling exhibition of crumbs crashed and scattered, released as he swirled on to traverse the casement. “The whole world is a stew of trapped entities, suspended in active consciousness, and driven mad by unrequited hatred.”
The tallow dip fluttered and jerked. The Sorcerer’s unsettled movement stalked on, to raise the odd shiver from Iyan, who cast a sharp, startled glance past his shoulder.
“Never mind,” Sethvir soothed in daft unconcern for the fact the Prime’s newest servant was deaf. “Yon shade means no harm.”
While Iyan settled and resumed his absorbed, silent dialogue between the silver knife and the jam spoon, a crystalline pause filled the chamber. The moaning winter wind buffeted the tower and sheared all the warmth from the air.
“I was attacked,” said Kharadmon at unpleasant length, “beset and pursued almost beyond recourse.”
Morriel absorbed this, her lips pinched into a bloodless crease, and the frown lines like pleats on her forehead. For a Fellowship mage to admit to near helplessness shook her to driving unease. This recount was no ploy drummed up as diversion to upset pursuit of her purpose. She measured implications as the grim tale unfolded, of an unexplained silence, then the beacon signal sent off by worried colleagues to guide an errant Sorcerer safely home.
“We believed Kharadmon was disoriented, even lost.” Asandir made a small, strangled gesture of frustration, then explained how the sorceries he and Sethvir had raised on summer solstice had been ground-tied through the land’s living trees. Last came the harrowing corollary, given in hammered, steady speech. “Until every trunk, seed, and sapling alive completes its allotted span of years, a faint signature trace of that homing spell will linger. We can’t dismiss the risk. These loose wraiths upon Marak might find means to track such a resonance. If they should cross the vast deeps between stars, the mists that embody them would sublimate away. Arrived here as free wraiths, they would strike for possession and wreak death and destruction such as this world has never seen.”
“But surely they would perish outside their containment of mists,” Morriel said.
“These don’t,” Kharadmon admitted, reluctant. “They haven’t. Nine of them pursued on my back trail. Those survived the transition as pure spirit. The measures we invoked to trap and dispel them would never withstand the event of a large-scale attack.”
“Which is why you need Arithon alive? How very neat and convenient.” Morriel gave her most acid riposte. “If you look to a masterbard’s talent to effect a translation of Name and redeem them, that’s a desperate, thin straw to grasp at.”
“A thin straw’s the best hope we have at this time,” said Asandir with shattering dignity. “The logic is not hard to follow.” Taken individually, the scourging spirits could be bound through Arithon’s gifts. His rearing by mages already lent him an advantage of training to resist hostile attack and possession. “We are also in process of constructing defense wards to secure this world from invasion.”
“I see,” Morriel said. “All this takes precedence over the cities we already have torn into war by the criminal charges leveled against this dubious savior.”
Luhaine flared into rebuttal. “Neither one of the princes are expendable. Marak at this time is still choked in mists. Powers of light and shadow might still be used to entrap the wraiths on the planet. Even if the fell entities never try the crossing to Athera, our world is not free of threat. The wraiths in Rockfell Pit are imprisoned, not quiescent. The half brothers’ talent over shadow and light will be needed one day to help lay those trapped spirits to rest.”
“Then confine the half brother most inclined to cause mayhem if you wish them both to stay living.” Morriel sat forward with slitted eyes. “Don’t deny you hold the power to do this!”
“The issue of power has no bearing,” Sethvir exclaimed in fussy correction from the window seat. At some point, unnoticed, he had lifted the spoon and knife from Iyan’s hands. “You speak of two grown men born to free will, and not string puppets. Their lives are not ours to use for expedience.”
“Are they not?” Morriel arose, wizened and bent under trains of wool wrappings, but charged to denounce with the stripping, fierce sting of white lye. “What a pitiful excuse! You act when you’re moved to, or how else did five royal lines come by their gifts in the first place? Why should your wastrel apprentice have taken the arrow for Arithon’s sake back in Vastmark? Oh, you dissemble very well. The curbed powers of our Waystone establish that point beyond doubt.”
“Sethvir has curbed nothing,” Asandir contradicted. “The earth itself is your arbiter. What spells you impose by way of rank force, the land has been empowered to refuse. That is all.”
“And are lives and children worth less than a storm or an earthquake raised by the raw whim of nature? What upstart arrogance!” Morriel startled to a sweet metallic chime as Sethvir tapped the spoon to the knife handle. In no mood for his mooncalf byplay with
her servant, she raised her voice over the disturbance. “Release the earth’s imprinted memory of our crystal. Our help and its power may be sorely needed, to judge by the botch you have made back on Marak.”
That moment, Iyan yelped aloud. He shot to his feet, seized the cutlery from Sethvir, and clashed spoon to knife blade in an energetic clatter of wild noise.
“Daelion Fatemaster wept!” Morriel whirled on Althain’s Warden. “What have you done to my servant?”
Asandir burst out laughing. “Let him restore the nerves that afflicted his hearing, apparently.”
The Prime Matriarch blanched in shock. “Healed him?” Her dismay filled the room, since the act was no favor. The man’s value had been his inability to disseminate her secrets.
Oblivious to all nuance, too elated to perceive a mistress’s embarrassing, ungrateful hypocrisy, Iyan whooped for joy, then chortled to experience the music of his own voice.
“You should leave,” Luhaine suggested in a solemn bent of humor, “before something else more regrettable happens.”
Kharadmon abetted in devilish, barbed irony. “Be nice and smile, or your servant could also acquire speech.”
Which effrontery was too much; Morriel Prime lost grip on cold nerves and blazed into rare, scorching temper. “Ath curse you all for frivolous intervention! What you name restraint, I call cowardice! The Koriani Order is older than your Fellowship. Our first Prime Matriarch stood at the right hand of free governance
before
Calum Kincaid sold out his great weapon and became the destroyer of worlds. What are you defending in this land but ignorance? I call you tyrants, rank meddlers with what’s left of human dignity. Believe this. I shall not forget. Redress will be found for our damaged Waystone, and your Fellowship shall live to regret your unjust interference.”
She grasped Iyan’s elbow and pried knife and spoon from his crestfallen hands. “Come. We are leaving.” She shed borrowed blankets, scooped the Great Waystone from the cushions of her chair, and demanded to be seen down the stair to the gates.
“Good riddance,” Kharadmon announced on the eddy of air as the door slammed in the Prime’s departed wake. “The lady has a temper like a snake.”
Sethvir disagreed with a tilt of his head. “The years she has endured in the seat of Prime office have driven her just a bit mad. Pity her, instead. She’s inherited a charge she can never pass on. Since her
last candidate for succession died in the rite of passage, I suspect the complexity of her office has become too much for any new aspirant to bear. No initiate in her order, however well trained, could survive the transfer of power.”
“One might have,” Luhaine interjected, more than usually thoughtful. “At least, Elaira shows spirit enough to endure.”
“And count our good grace for the fact she is cast out of favor!” Sethvir cried in rife exasperation. “The current Prime Matriarch is headache enough, with her penchant to ally herself with Lysaer. A successor tied by love to Arithon s’Ffalenn would yield up a frightening collusion.”
Winter-Spring 5649
In a clandestine meeting, Lysaer addresses the devoted captain of his honor guard, and a well-trusted healer who had tended the maimed through all the horrors of Vastmark: “You are sworn to gravest silence because I must reveal several dangerous truths well before our people have gained faith of a strength to endure them. Arithon s’Ffalenn was begotten by a demon, and his unholy powers have suborned Lady Talith to the point where she’ll need to be secretly confined…
Safely returned since his audience on Corith, Earl Jieret,
caithdein
of Rathain, hears in relief the appeal of Caolle, his ex-war captain, who had fostered him since childhood, “My lord, the sword training of young scouts is more properly left in the care of my successor. I beg leave to go to the westshore and await the return of our prince. His Grace might deny the necessity, but a sworn liegeman who bears a strong sword should be there to serve him against the day he makes landfall…”
When spring comes, and rumors fly that Lady Talith will make no appearance for the traditional celebrations, Avenor’s royal healer admits in gentle sorrow to the court: that in distraught state for her failure to conceive, the princess has retired into strict seclusion for the sake of her delicate health…
Spring-Early Autumn 5652
J
ust over three years after Lysaer’s expulsion from the compact by the Fellowship of Seven, the brigantine
Khetienn
lay anchored off the distant shores of the continent half a globe away. An equatorial sun sliced her shadow in hard outline on the chipped crystal sparkle of salt water. Few fish swam those jewel-toned shallows. Bird cries never wove through the air. The only wild voice was the rasp of light breezes, flapping the single staysail left set to draw ventilation through the hatches. Throughout the logged course of six voyages, after arduous problems with restocking stores to provision for repeated ocean crossings, the brigantine had put into every cove, bay, and inlet along Kathtairr’s blighted coast.
That search of the shoreline, and further expeditions on foot into the rugged, stony vistas of the interior had turned up nothing living. Only mineral-poisoned rivers and a limitless expanse of sun-blasted, wind-raked desolation.
Tanned and taciturn where he leaned on the ship’s rail in the stifling heat, Arithon wore only breeches of stained canvas cinched at the waist with tarred cord. By preference while at sea, he dressed from dregs of the ship’s slop chest, as far from the trappings of royal heritage as tattered, plain clothing would allow.
His tourmaline eyes raked across the splintered ochre rubble, where the dun contours of scorched earth stitched the cloudless skyline, and
the knees of the headland met sea in lace petticoat ruffles of spent breakers. An ominous, flat inflection demarked his address to the sweating figure by his side. “How long have you known that Kathtairr offered no refuge?”
The Mad Prophet squeezed his eyes closed against the stabbing glare off the water. “A fair question,” he allowed in shrinking misery. “One I don’t care to answer.” He inhaled the tarred taint of oakum warmed blistering hot in the thought-shattering fall of noon sunlight. More than just heat left him faint. He feared even to expel his discomfited breath, aware to paralysis that if he said nothing, the man at his side would react in spectacular, inventive retaliation.
No use to pretend there had been no intent to lead Arithon in diversion through ignorance.
Dakar regrouped the rags of his nerve. He spoke the truth quietly, anxious to avoid notice from the idle sailhands who sprawled in the shadow by the forecastle. “These shores lay scorched sterile by drakefire long before Ath Creator sent the Paravians as living gift to redress all the sorrows of the world. No centaur, sunchild, or unicorn has ever walked here. Not through any age of known history.”
An uneasy interval, cut by an isolated movement; the Master of Shadow turned his head and delivered his most scathing, level glare.
“The Fellowship needed to buy time,” Dakar blurted. “They wouldn’t say why. Some outside crisis concerning the linked gate worlds has kept them clapped close as clams. The only thing that matters is what you intend to do now.”
“What I intend?” Arithon loosed a piercing, soft laugh. “The clans need a refuge. If a sea search was required to seek the Paravians, Daelion Fatemaster’s sorrows, Dakar! We need not have wasted
three years.
For a sweep of the oceans, we’ll need a whole fleet, and strong captains, and navigators trained to make star sights.”
Then came the striking, inevitable pause Dakar dreaded, while thought burned behind half-lidded green eyes. Rathain’s prince could connive with appalling invention, until even Sethvir became sorely tested to unriddle the final result.
“You had better hope,” said Arithon s’Ffalenn, “that Cattrick has been busy keeping the letter of my design back in Tysan.”
The impacting force of that statement took a pregnant second to slam home. “In
Tysan?
Merciful Ath!” Dakar all but shouted. “You’re not plotting to lift Lysaer’s new deepwater keels from the royal yard at Riverton!”
The lean, expressive mouth flexed amid the sharp-planed s’Ffalenn features. Where a stranger might mistake such expression for amusement,
Dakar knew to look deeper. But Arithon swung his inscrutable regard to the sapphire edge of the horizon as he said, “For the sake of my peace, don’t share speculation with Feylind.”
Night claimed the far continent of Kathtairr like ground quartz sown on dark velvet. Restless airs scoured the vivid, flint scent of dewfall off its vistas of sun-baked rock. The sky spread above the obsidian hills held no kindly embroidery of clouds. The stark, strewn blaze of Athera’s constellations scribed the arc of the sea where the
Khetienn
rode at anchor, a stamped silhouette rouged by the glow of her deck lanterns. From his solitary vantage on a shoreside hillock, Dakar could hear the desultory laughter, as sailhands made cracks at each other’s expense. The windborne exchange of camaraderie seemed disjointed in time, splashed like fragmented dream against the acid-leached contours of rain-stripped gullies and sere landscape.
Despite distance, and the fast-fallen curtain of darkness, Dakar could pick out the Master of Shadow, propped alone against the stern rail. Whether the Teir’s’Ffalenn ached for disappointment, or brooded alone in balked anger, no man dared say. Dakar remained outside his confidence. The festering dispute arisen between them concerning his meddling plots against Tysan’s shipworks had abraded those nerves which still remained raw from the ache of a tormented conscience.
For Arithon, Kathtairr’s barren shores delivered more than bitter setback. The afternoon’s truths had sealed the death of a desperate, cherished set of hopes.
The Mad Prophet rubbed sweaty palms on his thighs and swore at the grit that the land breeze sifted over everything. A decision to put about and sail back to Tysan meant shouldering the risks still left hanging by Earl Jieret’s fragment of augury. With Arithon left mage-blind, the unwelcome burden of scrying fell on the spellbinder’s shoulders. He had small choice but to sound the future for the source of the execution that Rathain’s
caithdein
had foreseen three years in the past.
Dakar felt inadequate. His birthgiven talent for prophecy had always been unpredictable. Despite five centuries of Fellowship training, his unruly, chance-met bouts of vision still blundered roughshod over his efforts to impose reason or mastery. The gift had ever been an affliction to upset the planned course of his life. Even worse, the stresses of backlash inevitably wrecked his digestion and left him sick as a dog.
“Ah, fiends plague!” he groused to his audience of desolate, stern boulders. “It’s a born sap who dies of stupidity.”
A fool’s self-preservation should have kept him from opening his mouth to volunteer. Too late, he wished he had capsized
Khetienn’s
dory, and seized the lamebrained excuse to beg off, sopping wet. Most of all, he dreaded to see what his ill-advised search might discover.
Arithon’s hot-tempered remark to Earl Jieret still retained its damnable accuracy. Too many factions wished the Shadow Master’s death. The question became less the timed moment of his end, but which one of his enemies would snatch first opportunity to slaughter him.
A whistle signaled the change in the ship’s watch. Dakar hugged his arms to his barrel chest, while the sere, desert breezes fingered the crimped screws of his sweat-runneled hair. He steadied plucked nerves. In trepidation and solitude, he centered his will, cast his thoughts still, and channeled the untrustworthy powers of his gift. His failure or success would support no observers, far less the discerning eyes of the prince whose confounding integrity had trapped him in friendship and loyalty.
Dakar held no illusions. He was no sorcerer, no grand power to toy with events. Kathtairr’s vast emptiness diminished all that he was, left him puny as a dust speck afloat on dark waters as he narrowed his scattered awareness. He resisted the pull of a lifetime’s rank cowardice and a sidestepping inclination to indulge in aimless woolgathering. Tonight, for the sake of Arithon’s life, he opened the undisciplined aperture of his talent while the sweat of cold dread slid in drops down his temples and moistened his thatched ginger beard. The salt taste on his lips reminded of tears before the blameless, bitter kiss of the seaspray lately splashed by his inept hand at the oar.
Time passed. Dakar held on in obdurate stillness. His gift could be stubborn. Countless times, he had sat with no reward gained but the yowl of a belly pinched to hunger. Yet even as he prayed tonight’s scrying would draw blankness, his mind sank into that cavernous silence that seemed etched through a void of black crystal. Forewarned by the first, creeping tingle in his gut that his awareness tipped over the edge, he shook to a drenching chill of apprehension. Then vertigo swooped down and hurled him headlong through an unraveling stream of wild prescience.
He saw pine trees, a bright shoreline where turquoise waters purled into spume, and there, Arithon s’Ffalenn on his knees in white sand, his black sword Alithiel drawn and upraised; and through the bone-hurting chord of grand harmony thrown off by the blade’s spelled defenses, a unicorn poised in the rampant, first thrust of a charge aimed to gore him.
Dakar screamed aloud, earthly flesh unable to bear the beauty and the pain,
as the sword Alithiel flashed, then blazed through its star-captured peal of ward resonance. The Riathan Paravian dipped his silver-maned head, a scything horn set to reap;
and vision scattered…
Darkness rolled over him, unrelenting and bleak, stabbed through by the rippling, clean harmony of a lyranthe given voice by the hands of a master. Notes plucked out in Arithon’s best style fell like sprays of dropped jewels, or sleet tapping brass, while decades slipped by in a drawn-out, mindless slow agony…
“No,” Dakar whispered. He strove to reach out, hook the freewheeling thread of his talent and bind it; but change ripped through him regardless…
He saw priests clad in vestments with sunwheel emblems, chanting litanies against the vile works of the dark.
“Ath show me mercy, no!” The Mad Prophet struggled, his yanked breath drawn too fast, lungs afire as if he had sprinted flat out with some ravening terror at his heels. “No.” He grasped after trained strictures, clawed for the will to wrest back some semblance of control. The vision he wanted was one that Earl Jieret had dreamed…
He saw blinding summer sun, and the red, bloodied length of a sword laid across an altar spread in a gold-edged, white cloth.
The image jolted through him, almost slammed his heart still. Screaming now, the Mad Prophet reached anyway, tried to rip past his grief to back-trace the event to its source. But the blood was too fresh, too red,
too real.
In slowed motion, the vermilion drops soaked the white silk, ragged stains scribing an ending too vivid to escape. Dakar shied back, wrung helpless by dread, and the channel of his talent exploded through white sparks to static. His unsteady control crumbled after, like an unfired clay vessel dissolved on a tap to blown dust.
Sunwheel became sun, sinking red to a horizon of weather-stripped hills: Daon Ramon. Before the light palled into featureless night, he beheld a new city embedded in tangled black canes of old briar. Somewhere, somebody sobbed in the throes of a gut-wrenching agony…
His own voice, perhaps. Dakar had long since lost wits to tell. String after string of prescience reeled through him, a spate grown too fierce to divert by means of sane thought or strong discipline.
A city, sheeted in fire and burning; a child, dead in the dust.
Milled under and weeping, Dakar let go. The dream claimed his measure. His senses rushed on in the plummeting slide into the numb haven of escape. His last thought before unconsciousness drowned him was his desperate craving to get drunk.
Much later, there were stars. Dakar pieced together the awareness that he lay on his back with his eyes open. Returned senses imprinted an excruciating impression of harsh rock jabbed into limp flesh. The pain rushed back then, resolved itself into a skull-splitting headache, to which every nerve in his body responded in a sapping chorus of aches.
Nausea knifed through him. He needed to sit up, but lacked the vitality.
A shadow arrived at the edge of his vision. A touch breathless, the voice of a bard phrased an oath ripe enough to scale fish. Then hands left ice-cold from a plunge in the sea grasped his shoulders and hauled him erect.
That succor given just barely in time; the first, rending spasm failed to catch the Mad Prophet facedown. Grateful not to lie heaving in his own filth, he coughed, spat, shivered, groaned, and finally croaked the name of his rescuer. “Arithon?”
“Lie easy.” When that instruction became impossible to carry out, the Master of Shadow held on until the Mad Prophet’s stomach stopped churning.
Dakar sagged into the lean, steady arm that settled him back against the lumpy support of a boulder. “I could see nothing certain,” he husked out, unwilling to sustain the unspoken query for one second longer than necessary. “Arithon, I’m sorry. You’re too strongly fated. The futures involved are too powerful to sort. I have no sure course of counsel to offer. Every fragment called in poured through me as uncontrolled vision.”
He rolled his head sidewards to interpret the other man’s stillness; no need to repeat what events at the Havens and Vastmark had already proved in spilled blood. Any prescience he tapped in the form of ranging visions was subject to change with the pressures of shifting event.
Seconds passed, filled by the rush of white foam gnawing the bleak, stony shingle. With no word spoken, Arithon settled in the darkness, his shoulders braced to the same rock. No sailhand from the
Khetienn
accompanied him; he had swum from the anchorage rather than roust out the crew to sway out a longboat. The crossing left him drenched as a seal, and shirtless. Kathtairr’s hazeless
starlight sheened the flex of his fingers as he worked the cork from a wine crock, ferried ashore in one of the mesh nets young Feylind tied to catch shiners.
“Ath bless you,” Dakar murmured as the welcome, earthy weight was passed into his hands, then guided through the arc to his mouth. He swallowed, eyes closed in relief. One slug, two, and the sour taste of sickness rinsed away. He savored restored taste, eased and mellowed by the sublime, tart bouquet of a rare vintage red from Orvandir.