Late Autumn 5670
VI. Counterploy
Chin braced on clasped fingers, Arithon turned the page of an obscure text on the Paravian practice of working masonry without mortar. The hour was late morning. Clad for comfort, he wore an unadorned shirt, and a laced jerkin of black suede. A silver-edged belt clasped his whipcord-lean frame. Though he had not ventured outside of the mountain for nigh onto a year, Davien’s quirky habit of issuing challenge had forced him to maintain peak fitness. If he missed the sun, or the frisk of the wind, he showed no fidgeting restlessness.
That discipline was not wasted. A day begun without expectations changed fast as a prickle of energy brushed at the bounds of his aura.
He stood at once, wary. The candles were streaming, a striking departure from form: never before had Davien’s arrivals abandoned the high art of subtlety.
He dared a soft inquiry. ‘We have trouble pending?’
A voice answered out of the ruffled air. ‘More than you know, Teir’s’Ffalenn.’ Davien’s living form assumed substance, his fine-grained skin flushed from the cold. He wore a black mantle edged with silver embroidery. The hood was tossed back, a sign of recent impatience since the salt-and-russet tumble of hair was neatly constrained by a tie of dark leather. ‘Your associates on Evenstar have put to sea,’ the Sorcerer opened. ‘They’ve cleared the narrows from Alestron, bearing south-east, and Koriathain have unleashed a spring trap.’
Arithon said without flinching, ‘I trust I’ll have time to gather my sword?’
The Sorcerer laughed. ‘In fact, you do not.’ He unfurled the thick cape and extended the weapon as offering. The black steel had been sheathed in a sturdy new scabbard and hung on a bronze-studded baldric.
‘You know me too well.’ Arithon accepted the blade’s icy weight. Without pause for argument, he armed himself, not astonished as the tang of the buckle slid into a hole punched for an accurate fit. ‘Princess Ellaine’s no longer aboard?’
‘No.’ For once, the Sorcerer was not inclined to try games. ‘The brig’s captained by Feylind, her mate and crew. For passengers, she carries Dakar, your double, and your clanborn honour guard.’
‘Vhandon and Talvish stayed on?’ Arithon’s glance was balefully sharp. ‘My order released them back to their duke’s service. They were instructed to remain ashore!’
‘And so you should, also, Teir’s’Ffalenn.’
‘What will I be facing?’ Arithon surveyed those stilled, night-dark eyes, and encountered a spark of unease. ‘Since you didn’t ask whether I wanted to go, and unspecified warnings aren’t useful, I trust you’ve a way to transport me?’
Davien raised his eyebrows. ‘Even your vaunted nerves will require a shielding.’
‘Permission to stand guard and act in my behalf? You have it.’ Arithon stepped forward without hesitation. He met and matched the Sorcerer’s troubled regard with a trust that was woundingly genuine.
From a stiff, poignant pause, which startled them both, Arithon stated, ‘Have we not shared guest oath? If you wished me harm, I would be dead. Your nature is not to beg any-one’s help. Therefore, I stand, freely offering.’
Davien’s surprise vanished behind masking reticence. ‘As you’ve asked, then don’t curse the messenger, Teir’s’Ffalenn.’
Arithon stood firm, despite that hurled challenge. He did not flinch at the Sorcerer’s approach. Nor did he recoil from the touch, when it came, though the contact held nothing physical. Davien’s power arose like a well of poised force. Seamless crystal, its silence enclosed him. Sealed inside its ring of forged purpose, mind and awareness were gathered, intact, then whirled upwards and out of his body. Enveloped in sudden, devouring darkness, Arithon re-emerged through a shower of light.
He sensed air, then wind, then the vault of sky, at one with the flight of an eagle.
Cold rushed across the sleek vanes of his feathers. The ice of high altitude burned pumping lungs. Arithon rode, gloved in the bird’s form, wrapped inside the matrix of Davien’s consciousness. All remembrance of his human form was gone, a feat that had happened too blindingly fast to reverse.
Past the threshold of change, the Sorcerer’s thought picked up the question left dangling. ‘I can’t say what you face. Not yet. Prime Selidie has kept her intent tightly guarded. Now that she’s launched the close plot she’s been hatching, we’ll see the design set in play.’
Arithon regrouped his shifted perception, while cloud streamers spun past, and the gusts whistled over the pinions of outstretched, taut wings. Spread below, a crazy-quilt pattern of hills lay seamed by ice-crusted ravines. Such low scrub and briar, snagged with rock at the crests, identified the frost-blasted heath of Daon Ramon. A wing stroke, more clouds, a sensation like dizziness: beneath, now, were snow-dusted vales. Furrowed ledges rose up to white summits that flashed like a crumple of enamel and glass. The bird threaded a tortuous pass through the Skyshiels, a transition that smashed every concept of impossibility. Arithon fought his distracted mind steady. Threat by Koriathain left no option except to pursue the subject at hand. ‘You can’t guess the extent of Selidie’s plan?’
‘Beyond a sigil for tracking set in Evenstar’s keel, no,’ Davien admitted point-blank.
The eagle’s head turned. His far-sighted gaze scanned the lay of the land, and pin-pointed a summit for navigation. A banking arc steered though a slipstream of air, over the glimmering surge of the fifth lane. Then another vigorous, downsweep of wings. Water now flashed beneath, pocked by a brass sun, amid the indigo ruffles of wave-crests. Eltair Bay; Arithon identified the distinctive shore-line from a vantage heretofore only seen inked on charts.
‘The Fellowship can’t act, nor can I intervene without seeding a cycle of damaging vindication.’ The Sorcerer’s shared musing bespoke undertones deeper than balked frustration or open regret. ‘The Koriathain ought to be curbed. Prince, you’ll have to win through on your merits.’
Arithon weighed his immediate answer, then probed with the utmost wry delicacy. ‘You are not your colleagues’ ally, in this?’
Davien’s brittle irony suggested that this time, the nettlesome prick of exposure found him as the unwitting victim. ‘You have grown to know me too well, Teir’s’Ffalenn.’ He conceded, not hedging, ‘I bear the other six Sorcerers no malice. If their choice was to stand, I had to fall. They had committed too much to revoke their position. I expected no more, and no less than the fate their hand dealt me before I chose exile.’
Another wing-beat, and another plunge into the white-out sheet of a cloud-bank. Arithon realized this was no natural mist, formed out of crystallized moisture, but a transverse pass through some unknown frame of conjury that unreeled across dimensional distance. When the eagle broke through, they now soared above the East Halla peninsula, slashed by the mud road that led into Tirans, with the broken walls of the Second Age ruin nestled into the fringes of Atwood, due south. Bound at such a pace, they would cross over the open ocean within a matter of minutes.
The need to curb raw curiosity was painful after months spent in freewheeling pursuit of all manner of arcane knowledge. Arithon questioned, reluctant, ‘Does Dakar know the ship has trouble pending?’
‘He can’t avoid the awareness much longer.’ Davien dived earthward. The rush of air through his wings became thunder as he used the downdraft over water to plunge from the rarified heights. ‘Prime Selidie’s engaged the Great Waystone just now, her purpose to waken that sigil. The groundwork she’s laid is already entrained.’
‘No small working,’ Arithon returned in the snatched second before the next uncanny wingstroke.
‘Small or large, her construct is most tightly focused.’ Davien hurtled them through another blind crossing. ‘Assumptions at this point will just cloud the facts. Eyes will serve better. We’ll survey the territory on our way in.’
A split-second of whiteness, then the sting of salt air, and stiff wind burdened with the moist charge of a squall line; now Davien’s eagle form swooped
above the jagged, hooked shore that ran south of the inlet to Alestron’s deepwater harbour. The long, rolling combers swept in from the east, spouting lace spray on the rocky spurs that guarded the calm inner coves. Here, where the free wilds of Orvandir bordered the ocean, the coast-running galleys took refuge from storms. The sea-grass in the shallows showed the scraped gouges of keels where they had anchored in shoaling water.
Near solstice, when the rough weather slowed trade, only the most experienced galley-men put their timbers and crews in harm’s way. One oared ship, at most three, might be snugged into shelter in seasons when easterlies threatened; but never inside reach of Ishlir or Durn, and never in bunched-up numbers.
Today, ships were packed in like schooling fish, their decks pebbled with clumps of armed men. The broad-bellied sails were left bent to the yards, with the variegate banners of a half-dozen towns flying like tinker’s snippets of yarn. Yet the pendant streaming atop every mast-head bore the gilt-and-white sunwheel of Lysaer’s Alliance.
The Sorcerer broached the uneasy remark on their suspect strength and high numbers. ‘Someone’s been mustering at Ishlir, assuredly forewarned.’ Every hull rode far too high on the marks to be properly laden with cargo. ‘Their position won’t be a coincidence.’
Arithon sorted strategies, speechlessly grim. No natural hazard he could imagine should cause Feylind to alter the Evenstar’s off-shore course. Fionn Areth’s presence on board made any run to the mainland a risk.
The question demanded swift answer: would the Prime’s machinations be framed as a goad, or as bait?
‘Seen enough?’ Davien asked, though already his next wingstroke sliced and blurred through the boundaries of time and space. More observation would be useless effort, given the aggressive evidence. The shore of Orvandir had been primed for an ambush. For the brig, any closure would launch a disaster.
The eagle veered due east once again, soaring into the teeth of the gusts, with the Cildein’s whipped crests knit cobalt and indigo, patched with the white snags of spindrift. There was a wrongness. Arithon caught the tingle of vigilance that narrowed the Sorcerer’s awareness. Through avian senses, he also picked up the ozone that sharpened the breeze. No by-product caused by a natural storm, the scent was too fresh, and much too distinct to be left by a passing cloud-burst.
His flicked thought to Davien went beyond warning. ‘The brazen bitch wouldn’t dare!’
‘She would. She has,’ Davien confirmed. ‘Through the Prime’s eyes, this wide world is a game-board. She would sacrifice all to snatch victory. Need we tarry? You’re going to have less than an hour.’
Response from the Prince of Rathain was leashed fire. ‘Get me aboard Evenstar. You already carry my word of forgiveness as the harbinger of bad news.’
Dark wings swept down. Darkness followed. The form of the eagle dissolved into air, then bled away into memory. Arithon tumbled, bodilessly disoriented. He received the errant impression of a sealed stone chamber. The enclosure was egg-shaped, with polished, dark walls flicked by rainbow flares of moving light, and the echo of trickling water. Then that uncanny awareness unravelled. His consciousness plunged through a whirling, hard spiral, and recondensed back toward the forgotten, firm weight of his flesh…
Mid morn arrived amid stiff, running swells. Still shut in the buffeting dark of the sail hold, though granted loaned clothes from the slop-chest, the Mad Prophet stirred. At last he had sobered enough to try the rudiments of his trained talent. The door remained barred. If Araethurian herders had pig-iron minds, their stomachs were made of no such stern stuff. Mage-sight revealed Fionn Areth, curled prostrate within a nest of mildewed storm tackle. Misery rendered him too limp to moan. The air reeked of sour vomit and urine, with the promise of worse: the bucket secured by bagged sand in the corner sloshed brimful, a hairbreadth from upset as the brig wallowed and slogged over each trampling wave-crest.
By the working groan of the hull, and the relentless thrum of filled canvas, the Evenstar now ploughed a rhumb-line course through blue water.
Dakar grumbled a thick curse. His tongue felt furred in frog slime, and his bladder was strained full to bursting. He shut gritted eyes. The blackness behind his closed lids fairly sparkled to the white flame of his headache. He groaned, moved, clamped fuddled hands to his brow. Somehow, he must refound the focus to engage his initiate awareness.
Long-suffering patience let him center his mind. Discipline pierced through the muddle of pain, not steady as yet, but sufficient to begin to redress the damage left by his wrecked state of over-indulgence. If the battering that accompanied an off-shore passage escaped remedy, a blanketing sleep would do nicely to ease the misery of his condition.
Yet his effort to settle his misaligned aura raised a queer, stinging flash that subsided to haze and red static.
Dakar recoiled to a yelp of surprise. No member of Evenstar’s crew had been mage-trained. Nothing he encountered upon the high seas should provoke a defensive reaction. The cold hunch remained, that this source of disturbance was external, and a part of the brig that now sailed, unprotected, across open ocean with Arithon’s made double on board.
That unseen pitfall ripped Dakar to chills.
Eyes closed, wracked to dread, he shielded his working, then cast his awareness outwards. Sick pain notwithstanding, he combed through the grain of timber and planks with masterfully delicate subtlety. His probe traced the web-work and knots of tarred rigging, then spiralled through cordage, dead-eyes and blocks, finding no untoward sign of meddling. He sifted the mineral grain of the ballast rocks. No spell-craft lurked there. Pressed to the edge of his limited resource, now fogged by the turbulent rush of the brine, he tested the sheathing under the water-line. As a bare-handed man might grope for a spider, Dakar sounded until he encountered a tingling snap! The incursion sourced here, an embedded cipher that spiked his headache to redoubled virulence.
Flushed to nausea, the spellbinder hissed through shut teeth. What he laid bare in the humid, thick dark, was a Koriani sigil of tracking.
Dakar collapsed his extended awareness. Wracked witless by dread, he pushed straight and slammed headlong against the hatch combing. ‘Feylind!’ he howled through singing pain. ‘Get down here this second! Your ship is threatened and heading for trouble worse than your most evil nightmare!’
The bar slid back. The plank door yanked open, and a sailhand holding a candle-lamp squinted into the redolent gloom. ‘Shut yer trap, bucko. The captain’s asleep.’
‘Wake her!’ On his knees, sweating, Dakar snatched a sail hank and jammed the tight swing of the door. ‘Move now, you fool! We’re disastrously exposed, and primed to fall under an arcane assault by an enemy’
‘Now hasn’t the whisky spun you some ill dream! Man, I’ve told you already. The old lady’s knackered. Fought rip currents and a devilish wind through the narrows. No dog with a brain wants to roust her.’
‘I’ll risk that, no question.’ Dakar rammed the sailhand’s obstruction aside and barged shoulder down through the braced doorway. Ignoring Fionn Areth’s moaned inquiry behind, the Mad Prophet stumbled the length of the hold toward the grey glimmer of daylight. He mounted the ladder, shivering and sick, and cringed as the salt-laden wind slapped his face. Sea legs, he decided, were a capricious gift that Ath gave to rock-headed masochists. The deficit left him gulping back bile. Dakar reeled his way over careening, wet planks in a rush to bend over the railing.
Dry heaves aside, he required relief. His bladder was nigh onto splitting. Swift footfalls approached. Aware that a pack of deck-hands converged with the riled intent to constrain him, Dakar tore at his clothing with hell-bent haste. Let them lay hold of him while he voided. Unless they hauled him away in midstream, his crass tactics would give him a snatched chance to explain. With naught else at hand to forestall their stupidity, Dakar opened his fly. The rush cost him ripped seams, and a button. The deck-crew latched hold of his shoulders and arms just as he started to piss. He yelled curses at them, to no
avail. The tussle devolved to a brangle, with the wind and the thrashing spray off the swells posing both sides a ruinous handicap.
Sweated fist guarding his beleaguered cock, Dakar snarled, ‘Listen up, you runt litter of milk-sucking virgins! Your ship is packing a Koriani sigil! Do you know what vicious trouble that breeds? If you don’t, haul your fumble wits out of your bollocks!’ The Mad Prophet spoke very fast, after that, while the sailhands pressed in, struck to distrustful silence. Rumpled though he was, and green-faced with misery, the spellbinder mustered the rag ends of dignity, and finished, ‘This threat is real. Your vessel’s been tagged. To track past salt water, you’ll have no less than Prime Selidie and twelve ranking seniors, engaged through the force of the Waystone. I can’t thwart such power! Not on that scale, and not locked puking sick in the sail hold. Roust out Feylind! Do as I say, or else risk that boy who’s set under the word of Prince Arithon’s sworn protection.’
‘What,’ sniped a man with a seamy, squint eye, ‘that flea-scratching goatherd who’s hell-bent to sell us out to Lysaer’s Alliance? Throw him off!’
‘Aye,’ called another. ‘Feed his tripes to the sharks. He’s a nattering nuisance, I say!’
‘Rot that!’ snapped the cook, burst out of the galley with two fish skewers stuck through his pigtail. ‘Use his guts as fresh bait for my drag-lines, I would.’
Dakar shivered. ‘Please, no debate.’ Hoard the last dribble of piss though he would, his kidneys were already squeezed dry. Resigned to dread, he unlatched icy fingers and endeavoured to stuff himself back in his trousers.
That moment, the hag face of luck played him foul: the sigil embedded in Evenstar’s hull woke and burned, attuned by a circle of two dozen ranked seniors channelled as one through the Waystone.