Fugitive Prince (24 page)

The inside air had gone musty since the pierced shutters were darkened with sheets of tarnished silver. Candles of incense-soaked wax fluttered on the shelves of the sills. The inviting, cushioned benches that once lined the walls were reframed as cupboards with bronze hinges. Door fronts and portals had all been replaced with unpainted oak panels, cut green, dried in fire, then inset with the knotty, counterlooped copper of a thousand runes of ward. Each latch had been painstakingly welded, then sealed by tin sigils with guard spells to deflect any outside prying. The old, timbered floors were flagged over in black slate, unpolished to accept the scribed traceries and seals of forced power.

There, an emaciated predator poised over a webwork of ciphers, Morriel Prime crouched with a sliver of chalk in her hand. If the construct she patterned against the Fellowship’s constraints showed a calculated, terrifying complexity, its driving plot was most simple: since the Sorcerers placed undue value on Prince Arithon’s life, he was himself made the key to arrange their coercion.

Capture the Master of Shadow as a pawn, and for fear of the threat lying latent upon Marak, the Seven must bow to Koriani demand. Better than most, Sethvir must own up to the stakes: Morriel would seize upon any provocation to see the Teir’s’Ffalenn dead. Indeed, the Prime deeply preferred to end his misspent royal life to forestall the prophesied threat to her succession.

Between each tormented step of her labor, the withered, old Matriarch cursed the crux that bred such necessity. With spiteful care, she etched chain after chain of linked ciphers in her wretched, crabbed script. Here and there, as line crossed line, or a finishing sigil raised latent energies, a sulfurous light flared from the contact. Shed glare lined her hooked profile, fleeting as the flit of a sunbeam. The air became glued into uneasy clarity, until the tapping scrape of her chalk ripped the quiet like the snap of flint-struck sparks.

Morriel shuffled another step, closed another circle. The rune signs might skip like torn stitches beneath her palsied, frail touch, yet the
vectored arcs laid to move summoned forces stayed precise, as if scribed by a master mason using a pin compass and cord. At the center of the floor where the sigils converged stood a low tripod. There, looped in a silver cradle and masked in black silk, the amethyst Great Waystone stood waiting, center point for the uncoiling layers of Morriel’s enveloping snare.

Regarding its draped globe in stifled apprehension were the two young initiates Morriel had chosen to serve her. Though the shuttered, fireless chamber was chilly, both girls clasped damp hands in the folds of gray robes. Fresh from their novitiate, wholly unmarked by experience, they waited to give what was asked. When their Prime straightened up from her scribery and bid them to place themselves at the north and south poles of her construct, they accepted their role in stilled dread.

“Be seated,” Morriel commanded. When she asked them to assume a deep trance, they knew, but dared make no protest. They would not take active part in this spellcasting, but serve as its passive binding. As their Prime required, energy, talent, even life force itself might become siphoned from them. By the strict oath of obedience to their order, their Prime Matriarch could demand any sacrifice against the needs of greater humanity.

“For the mercy of the world,” Morriel exhorted them, “do exactly as you are told. I will be threading your personal energies through the Great Waystone. No margin exists for your weakness.”

Minutes passed, sluggish under the weight of pent powers. The Prime visited both initiates in turn and collected the summoning crystal each one wore at her neck. She traced each with a sigil, then performed the Prime’s invocation to claim and attune their personal powers under her dominion. Time assumed the drugged torpor of dreaming as the circles upon the observatory floor were called active and dedicated to the secret, dark side of the moon. Mystery pulsed through the febrile veil which tied life to its housing of flesh. The paired initiates felt as though a misdrawn breath might shatter the whole firmament of creation into eddies of glittering current.

Then Morriel spoke a word in command. She clapped withered hands, and the spells of prime power claimed the girls, spirit and mind.

All now lay in readiness. The Koriani Matriarch advanced to the tripod. She slipped off its covering cloth, the smoothness of silk a cruel contrast to her ruined flesh. Her skin had grown so translucent with years, at times, she seemed but a spectral shadow, unreal to her own tactile senses.

This moment the allure of death’s peace left her hollow. She sorely
missed Lirenda’s support. If a relapse of blocked memory should claim her now, she had no one to anchor her through the perils which lay ahead. Each time she raised the Waystone’s great focus, she shouldered the risk that her will might become overwhelmed. Yet the stakes at play to arrange tonight’s plot had never before been so dire. Age had unstrung her sure grasp of self-awareness. Should the cross-grained old jewel finally defeat her, the Koriani Order must continue. Lest this hour’s work come to frame her last act, the untried girls who backed this spell’s pattern were expendable, as the handpicked successor to prime office was not.

Steeled, heart and will, by fatalistic resolve, Morriel cupped fleshless palms around the faceted amethyst. Its cold pierced in dousing waves to her marrow as she eased into trance. Perhaps for the last time, she locked horns with its spite and grappled to wield its dire focus.

If Fellowship meddling had curbed the stone’s reach, its innate strength was untouched. Charged to the familiar, freewheeling exhilaration, restored to the pinnacle of power and command, Morriel bent will to accomplish her desire.

If Sethvir had granted the earth backdoor wisdom to encumber the stone with permissions, the works of man were exempt. She still ruled quarried stone and the milled timbers of buildings, bridges, and diked roadways. The signature energies of individuals left vulnerable through trusting, blind ignorance remained subject to the Waystone’s spelled influence. Although the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s training as a master mage made him elusive prey, his return to the continent had occasioned him to accept other company on the road. The former clan war captain, Caolle, offered as volatile a personality as any tracking enchantress could wish. The signature seals of the spellbinder’s glamour which disguised him with scars and slurred speech tagged his presence. Each move he made flared small pulses of static through the world’s tracery of magnetic current.

Searched out by the Waystone’s piercing focus, Caolle’s course blazed like a beacon. Past, present, and future, his movements could be scryed as cleanly as text marked on parchment.

Given such infallible guidance to dog his liege’s footsteps, the Prime became the more cautious. The weavings to entrap the Master of Shadow must be wrought with consummate care. Dakar was a Fellowship spellbinder, and guarded. Though Arithon’s talents were left blank and blinded since his past misuse of grand conjury, he still held a masterbard’s arcane hearing and a trained mage’s eye for nuance. The disharmony raised by hostile intent would unsettle his keen sense of empathy.

The interface must therefore be indirect. In velvet-gloved delicacy, Morriel wrought. From the riverside tavern where her quarry last slept, she quested among the dust in the floorboards. Her search yielded three flecks of stubble left from Arithon’s grooming. Before the inn’s chambermaid arrived to sweep, minute sparks of energy flared in the candleless gloom. The Prime’s first tendril of spellcraft embraced those cut snippets of hair, then wound their purloined essence, ephemeral as spun moonlight, into a personal signature to guide the course of her snare.

Next, the Prime Enchantress launched into deep augury. She traced the course of event yet to come, sounding the probabilities of Arithon’s close movements as he mounted his foray in Tysan. She narrowed the vast might of the Waystone into tightest, fine focus, and targeted those actions her quarry was likely to take. Then she played the full range of probabilities and allowed for the utmost array of contingencies.

A trap of such delicacy could not follow a schedule. Chance action held too wide a range to predict the precise timing of event. Rather than structure her plot into a single, inflexible binding, the Prime instead tied its course to multiple chains of tagged markers.

This
board in a bridge that Arithon might cross on his travels: Morriel set a hair-fine tendril of spellcraft into the wood’s grain that would trigger in response to his passage. Here the wax lamps in a tavern’s taproom were hazed in small spells of recognition; there, a ferryman’s rope on the shores of the Ilswater became twined in ciphers of watch. Next, signposts en route to Riverton were tied into the growing tapestry, then people drawn in as well.
That
official in the royal shipyard who would need to be bribed or misled; a cipher of listening was laced through his jeweled chain of office, keyed to Arithon’s voice. Specific cobblestones in certain city streets; the carvings on doorknobs or lintels; then the gate latches of every harborside inn: all became knotted into the weave of an ever so subtle array of spellcraft.

Morriel was patient. She had need to be thorough. One overlooked possibility, and the whole linked network would fail. Her grand construct was shaped, one step to the next, through infinitesimal increments of care. Then each separate facet was masked in a glamour. Dakar’s watchful eye must be made to turn elsewhere, through a loosened board set to cause him a stumble; or else the lurking presence of her embroidery of seals must be groomed to mimic the natural resonance of stone, or wood, or wrought metal.

Across the path of Arithon’s future, Morriel seeded her small barbs and hooks. To these, in ingenious, connected succession, she attached the seals and small ciphers to drive Arithon into her net.
This
rumor
would find its way to the lips of a street beggar;
that
hunch would prompt a certain volatile clansman to raise a round of inquiry and search. When the orchestrated moment arrived for the coup, Arithon s’Ffalenn would be flushed from cover and hazed into desperate flight.

Morriel burned reckless power, affirmed and cross-checked every venue of possibility. Her labors cased options until no choice her quarry might try could win free of her invidious design. She adjusted and fine-tuned; twined tortuous traps in tight spirals.

On
this
hour, when every likely auspice came aligned, an ancient book from the Koriani Order’s closed libraries would fall into the hands of a scholar who owed a sworn debt of service. The knowledge and the man would make their way to Lysaer; then war galleys would arm and cast hawsers and sail. The Mistwraith’s curse would engage with its victims, and in the heat of its geas-bent obsession, the s’Ffalenn pawn could be spirited away.

A criminal who endangered society would be curbed, and the Fellowship of Seven be served its timely comeuppance.

Only the last, great sigil of ending remained to seal the chain of augured event. Tinged nitrous violet by the glow of the Great Waystone, Morriel grimaced like a skull. Never had she worked so elaborate a conjury upon resources pressed to such limits. While the daylight hours fled into night, then the starry sky paled and birthed the new dawn, she sensed a deep-down, burning discomfort. She had drained reckless power and now suffered sharp warning her strength ran dangerously low.

She pressed on, wrung what she needed to steady herself from the pair of initiates bound to her use through the Waystone. Were the crystal not restored back to unfettered potency, mankind’s rightful legacy would stay jeopardized; the Koriani charge to restore civilization to lost grace would remain threatened by Arithon s’Ffalenn. Morriel did not equivocate. She spent ruthless force to shape that last cipher, and set final linkage between the disparate, trip-wire elements arrayed to bring Rathain’s prince to defeat.

At the last, the squared circle of sigils dragged at her mind like spilled needles. Exhaustion leached her will, pulled like unseen fingers against her weak housing of flesh. Willful as old iron, the Koriani Prime reached out again to tap the initiates who stood as her anchors.

Something went wrong. The smooth flow of power summoned to her hands ripped through a sharp hesitation. One of the young women rejected the sacrifice, perhaps touched by the sudden, cutting panic of instinctive self-preservation. Betrayed in her need, Morriel
felt the balance of raised spells veer awry. She screamed in rebuttal. The forces she grappled seemed shadow and flame, two opposite elements bent toward unbiddable destruction. Lacking her flawless and rigid control, the whole construct could fold into backlash.

Morriel perceived no safe avenue. Poised at the crux, taxed past the limit of her visceral frailties, she grappled harsh fact: without months of recovery, she could never retrace all the steps of this complex conjury. Should this construct tear itself asunder, the jagged vibrations of its collapse would burst even the most rigorous protections. Sethvir would stand warned. The priceless opportunity to suborn the Fellowship would be thrown away for one faithless initiate’s weakness.

Fury seared through Morriel Prime. Well aware her demands must claim the life of the loyal enchantress who held firm, even still, she engaged her act for necessity.

Power flared up, too bright, too frenetic. Morriel lashed lawless forces into order, used the channel of the Waystone to reaffirm her cleared will. She joined the last sigil. Her drawn-out, wrenching cry of effort rocked the room. Then the dregs of her strength bled away. Slumped in collapse, her cheek laid to rest on the burning-ice sphere of the amethyst, she gasped out the ritual chant to blinder the jewel’s roused focus.

No space to wonder, that these words might shape her last act. Her heart raced and throbbed. Each breath rasped like steel filings in her throat. Vast blackness devoured her senses. While the fires in the heart of the great crystal blazed low and flickered at last to quiescence, the spark of her will bled away.