Traitor's Knot (epub)

  Sulfin Evend moved into that welter of noise, nerves keyed to unbearable tension. Lysaer's step beside him stayed measured. The caparisoned horse sent from the palace to bear him was refused with lordly disdain. Whether that shocking departure from form had been done for courage, or arrogance, or spurious whim, the act already lay beyond salvage. The avatar's will was no man's to question.

  Past the rebuffed consternation of the grooms, and the prance of retreating horseflesh, Sulfin Evend pressed the company ahead through the clouding swirl of the spirit imprints. Unseen by his men, they hovered and danced, ethereal as dusted silver wherever the land held a confluence of lane force. Avenor had once been a Second Age stronghold built by Paravian founders, each of its laid stones aligned into harmony with the tidal flow of the mysteries. The earliest structure had not been ornate. A narrow, walled keep had once crowned the rise, overlooking a coast-line left wild.

  Lysaer's restored rule had dismantled that ruin in defiance of ancient history. Now, square brick towers supplanted the tumbled remnants of the foundations. Warehouses and wharves jumbled over a shore-line opened to bustle and commerce. The slab that remained of the Paravian landing had been smashed, its mossy, whorled carvings and rusted spikes for ring moorings reduced to sunk rubble in the green surge of the tide. Yet if the granite that had received the law-bound step of past high kings lay fallen, the magics instilled by the centaur guardians were not wont to yield their reach lightly. Power yet flickered like undying light, spun off as the lane flux caressed the crushed shards that retained a tenaciously living awareness. Where currents snagged through those caught bits of held memory, sorrow still spoke with a subtle dissonance. The burning flow of subliminal forces, snapped and snarled off course, retired the forgotten past. Sunchildren sang, their heads crowned with garlands, while wraith-frail boats carved into bird forms and fish crowded to launch for the seasonal water festival. Echoes once sounded by crystalline flutes plucked the heart-strings and closed the throat.

  Overwhelmed from the moment he stepped on dry land, Sulfin Evend lost his footing and stumbled.

  An anchoring clasp closed over his wrist. 'You look like a man on a march to the scaffold. Is this regret?'

  The Alliance commander turned his spinning head and regarded the grave countenance of the man he had sworn an irrevocable oath to defend. 'At Hanshire, my life was never my own. This at least is a path I have chosen.'

  Lysaer's answering smile both dazzled and blinded. 'You have not let me down even once under fire.'

  The flame of s'Ilessid regard stole the breath, raised a swell of fresh pride to lull caution and flatten resistance. One might live for such favour. One might die to answer the unearthly craving instilled by this prince's affections.

  Before the wreck of the campaign in Daon Ramon, Sulfin Evend would have gone forward to bask in that addictive radiance. Afterward, he had braved Althain Tower to prevent the same brilliance from falling enslaved. A knife's edge had severed that piece of himself, which could have gone forward, self-blinded. His pledge to a Sorcerer had, now and forever, torn off the glittering veil.

  Today, he held firm to keep such rampant charisma from carving the less-ordered world into chaos. Seen beside the exalted, clean grace of the spirit forms, or the spun dream of a sunchild's flute, Lysaer's grace was exposed as gilt over clay: all promise, without truth as substance.

  'My trust is unshaken,' Avenor's regent insisted. 'Who else but you could walk steadfast beside me?'

  'Better me than another,' Sulfin Evend replied, surprised to be galled by that irony.

  Lysaer's friendly touch fell away, scalding far less than the afflicting, sorrowful silence left by the Paravian ghosts. Sulfin Evend pressed on, rocked to reeling grief. Over the site of the Second Age wall, the unquiet onslaught intensified. Awake at the threshold that opened the gateway to perceive Athera's live mystery, he walked the duality behind Asandir's warning fully and finally at first hand.

  Attack, if it came, would not find him prepared. The fell workings of necromancy unravelled the shining law that had once given these spirit forms breathing substance. The core harmony sustained by Athera herself shrank before the wounding blight of cult practice, that ensnared the living, then para-sitically fed on trapped agony to crystallize flesh into an unnatural state of longevity.

  Against dire threat, Sulfin Evend walked naked. Steel could not defeat a warped creature whose ways had defied the Wheel's crossing. Muscle and brute force held no power to vanquish the forces that moved past the veil: only conscious awareness, raised beyond the bounds of the physical senses and trained by the ways known to mages.

  Creeping doubt seeded dread. Sulfin Evend battled the ebb of his courage, all too keenly aware the commitment he shouldered would not forgive ignorant failure. While the silenced light of reanimate grace seized his raked heartstrings and twisted, the roaring voice of surrounding humanity hammered into the morning air. The rising ground from the harbour led his company into the shade of the sand-brick towers of the inner citadel. Changed Sight showed no glory of human architecture flying the realm's snapping standards, but a planted impediment that shaved the dance of the mysteries into shuddering disharmony. If clanbred barbarians discerned with such eyes, small wonder they hated the towns! Sulfin Evend reined in the strayed bent of his thought. His duty demanded strict vigilance.

  'You must safeguard against the ritual knife-blade, and other things far more difficult,' Asandir had forewarned. 'Where the rites of necromancy might be at play, a small wound can pose lethal danger. A pin in the hand of a suborned servant, or a sharp edge on a ring might break the skin during casual contact. Because Lysaer has succumbed to a binding before, he will be doubly vulnerable. If a man set under the sway of cult influence sheds the least drop of his blood, you don't have the skilled grounding to offer a remedy.'

  Battered numb by the deafening adulation, with his vision awash in the glittering static of flux, Sulfin Evend could scarcely walk upright, far less absorb threatening details. Whether or not he harboured regrets, Lysaer was not going to turn back.

  The thoroughfare narrowed past the customs office. Forced into close quarters, his armed columns re-formed and dressed ranks. Pressed on both sides by cheering fanatics and hailed from the dormers above, the Blessed Prince and his retinue crept towards the main gate. Amid the smart polish of his men-at-arms, Lysaer wore no gleam of metal. Stark as a snowdrift, his form drew the eye, an exposure no less than frightening: from overhead, and in frontal assault, he was guardless and desperately vulnerable.

  Sulfin Evend choked down his driven need to signal an instant retreat. A dried posy shied down. Torn leaves and trailing ribbons brushed across Lysaer's shoulder. He never flinched. His gracious nod acknowledged the young woman, whose wedding circlet dropped at his feet. Patchouli and rose, lavender and citrus, the scents swirled on the breeze as more favours rained down, blithe as a blizzard upon him.

  'You would have more security,' Lysaer observed, not oblivious. 'We haven't much farther. The archway's just ahead.'

  'One crossbolt would kill you,' Sulfin Evend said, curt. Eyes fixed forward, he stared through the gossamer form of a high king clad in unadorned deer-hide. That royal, also, had walked without arms. In an antique serenity lost with the rebellion, the pellucid imprint of a young woman awaited that forgotten, past home-coming. The young king enfolded her in his embrace. Her loose hair streamed over his shapely, taut hands; words or laughter, their reunion stayed silent.

  At next step, their twined forms flickered, then vanished. The trammelled air cleared. Dropped out of tranced vision, hit by deafening noise, Sulfin Evend swore and recovered himself. His foot columns now crossed over the old city gate, where Avenor's past keep underlay the new paving. The cavernous new portal of brick just ahead obscured his critical view of the square, foreclosing his chance for advance preparation. Since an ambush might easily lurk behind the effusive welcome, Lysaer s'Ilessid saw reason enough to awaken the light of his gift. Illumination
bloomed overhead as the column marched into the passage spanning the four outer keeps.

  Despite flooding brilliance, Sulfin Evend felt cold as his tight-knit company tramped under the embrasured defences. The mounted, caparisoned ranks of Avenor's royal guard met them on the far side. The moment stung, for the fact there was no princess waiting, and no red-haired crown heir standing tall to greet his father's return.

  Like a blow, one recalled that Kevor s'Ilessid had been killed by Khadrim fire on a past winter foray through Westwood.

  How Lysaer s'Ilessid managed his grief, no man knew. His beautiful features were forge-hammered iron as the spires of the state palace fell behind, then the pennoned cornices of Avenor's guild-houses and garrison armoury. Beyond the inner gate and the citadel bastion, the roadway disgorged into the open plaza, its paved sunwheel a dazzling glory of gold-and-white brick, and its central, railed dais with its gilded cupola, shimmering under full sun.

  No more spirit forms lurked. Instead, the cold air abraded the skin with something more than winter's ice clarity. Here, where a Second Age focus circle underlay the Alliance renovation, the converging flux of the first lane's current scoured off the wisped cry of past history. On the hour Asandir had arranged the arcane transfer from Althain Tower to this place, Sulfin Evend had encountered no Sighted visions. Only the surging pulse of Athera flowed here, an ephemeral sense of the magnetic forces that shimmered past range of perception.

  By night, stars had burned with unnatural brilliance. Under daylight, without any Fellowship escort, the plaza heaved with movement and noise. A packed mass of pink faces and wealth, Avenor's court displayed its full plumage to greet the return of the Blessed Prince. The celebration seemed a sure sign that the high council had touted the stalemate at Kewar as a victory for the Light. Effusive citizens stamped and teemed, bearing lit candles or flourishing streamers. At the first dazzling glimpse of the avatar, the barrage of raw sound became shattering.

  Aware, through the tumult, of Sulfin Evend's locked frown, Lysaer said, 'What did you expect? No matter how sudden my home-coming, the masses thrive upon spectacle and formal ceremony.'

  'I don't have to like it,' Sulfin Evend snapped back.

  Hand closed on the cross-wrapped grip of his sword, he glanced forward to measure the welcome turned out on the central dais. And there, underneath the domed roof and draped banners, the uncanny danger he feared lurked in state finery to meet them.

  Shade itself seemed to darken in that one place. Unlike the Sighted shimmer of spirit forms, this horrific, smoky roil of trapped shades seemed the dance of the damned out of Sithaer. Their shrouding presence spindled the air like black snags of raw silk, naked forms wound and pulled to distortion. The horror he viewed was no trivial handful of violations enacted on innocent victims. In cold fact, the aberrant corruption of the realm's ranking peers was entrenched, the work of a cult fed to saturation by long-standing practice of vice. The glittering party arrayed on the dais wore its unseen miasma, thick as the clogged scum on a pond. 'Mercy on us, they're riddled!' Sulfin Evend gasped, appalled. 'Strike them from a distance, I can't promise they'll drop.'

  'Then we shall close in and trust to surprise,' Lysaer answered. 'I refuse to retreat. The fifty we have must rise to the challenge. You hand-picked each one for his courage.'

  Yet a fearless advance could not abrogate danger. 'You face power enough to make dead flesh walk!'

  The nightmarish warning posed no deterrent. Lysaer held to his steady advance, where even a madman should falter.

  Sulfin Evend swore desperately under his breath. Cult minions relished murder as a hunting sport. They would have their eye fixed on one standing target, where, from a distance, his men-at-arms had no means to differentiate the blameless bystanders from the afflicted.

  His sharp guard of veterans would be utterly hobbled. Puppet shells ruled by necromancy wore their haze of infection beyond range of unSighted vision. No abnormal behaviour marked them apart. They awaited Lysaer's approach in cold ambush, knowing he had slipped through their cult's fingers at Erdane, and now lurking shoulder to shoulder with innocents, secure in their mantles of high office.

  Sulfin Evend battled an uprush of nausea. To a seer whose gifted talent was truth, the dais ahead was murky and crawling: a rippling, tormented fabric of shades whose slavery transcended mortality. Smeared faces reflected their ghastly torment, gibbering in silenced agony. Elongated hands snatched and plucked and implored, each pitiful gesture a mute cry for mercy. Women, children, babes, and old men, the necromancers' captive prey drifted as smoke suspended in swirling oil.

  And through them, a thousand dire sources of threat: the jewelled pins, the ceremonial knives, the gentlemen's spiked canes, and parade arms - any one of which might he turned to draw Lysaer's blood. Sulfin Evend wondered in harrowed distress if his sole option would be to throw himself bodily in front of his heedless prince.

  Worse, the palace guard stood at the fore. Well trained, fully armed, their front ranks were equipped with cross-bows. Sulfin Evend saw, horrified, that he could not be sure the elite captain appointed to their command was untouched by the deadly taint.

  'Lysaer, your light!' he exhorted. 'You have to dazzle them, now!'

  '. . . seems excessive to stage an intense display,' Lysaer s'Ilessid demurred through the welter of noise.

  'Do it, no argument!' The Lord Commander's shout was imperative. 'Fires of Sithaer, this is a staged trap! Your regency ministers are not just suborned, but replaced by cultists who practise enslavement. Fail me once, and you won't leave this plaza unscathed, nor will one man among the picked company I've brought to stand at your back.'

  'My high council's turned? All of them?' Lysaer's shock was shrill. Targeted by worse than invasive conspiracy, he did what was asked: augmented the halo cast by his gift. The blast cracked the surrounding air to white fire and unleashed a harsh back-lash of heat. 'Names,' he insisted, his face a stamped mask. 'Give me names! I'll serve every one who's transgressed by black arts under the arm of crown justice!'

  The roar of the awe-struck crowd redoubled and slammed like a living wave through the square. Sulfin Evend walked battered and blinded. 'I would give you corpses, run through with cold steel,' he snarled, though grisly truth made that promise a mockery. Brute force could not grant his liege a defence, or win his best company their deliverance. Not against a worked evil that fouled the natural turn of Fate's Wheel.

  Fear numbed the mind, that the horror ahead outstripped every mortal protection. Sulfin Evend was seized by the anguished need for a greater wisdom to stand alongside him. His scalding appeal expected no answer. Yet he walked inside a Paravian focus ring, bound by a caithdein's blood pledge. An arcane confluence of energy aligned. His acute, inner cry burned into the flux as it peaked towards crest at high noon.

  Forces inherent in the land itself captured that crystalline thought, and one man's piercing desire for balance engaged the heartcore of the mysteries.

  Sulfin Evend felt a fist of pure energy punch through the wall of his chest. His breached heart opened up. Ripped through by a thundering wind from the void, he reeled, all but unmoored. The bone-rattling din of the mob fell away. Firm boundaries dissolved into distance. Between one step and the next, he was here and also there, hurled back to the moment at Althain Tower as he spoke a vow to serve Tysan, and a knife in the hand of a Fellowship Sorcerer touched his wrist and cracked open the vault of his inner awareness.

  Then and now, Sulfin Evend's perception arced upwards. A force outside comprehension embraced him: fluid as light, gentle as breeze, and as joyously silent as dew on a leaf under starlight. The moment here, now, and there, then, became as unknowably vast as eternity: but the Sorcerer who cradled his being was not any longer Asandir.

  Instead, Sulfin Evend knew the Warden of Althain. Sethvir appeared first in his robes of maroon velvet; then as a presence half-seen, bundled into an astonishing weave of soft light; then as a withered old man, pillowed unconscious in the flo
od of a candle-flame . . .

  'I don't understand,' Sulfin Evend gasped, startled. His words echoed. Their form was both spoken and not: he existed in twofold awareness. Both in and not in the King's Chamber at Althain Tower; and also, amid the winter chill plaza in Tysan's capital of Avenor.

  Sethvir's response reflected grave calm. 'Don't try. Stop thinking. Just listen. Accept the gift of my experience.'

  Sulfin Evend still heard the din of the throng, registered the passing impression that Lysaer s'Ilessid was speaking. Yet the core of his mind that existed at Althain enfolded him in pristine silence. All else lost meaning. Here, the cold air glued his skin into space. From there, his earth-bound form sheared to gauze, while his unfettered mind spiralled free.

  As well, the dazzle of Lysaer's gift seemed reduced to translucent glass. Where the cupola loomed, packed to crowding with state figures clothed in gaudy panoply, Sulfin Evend saw outside the shocked shell of his intellect. His greater Sight unveiled all of the names. The creatures entrapped by the cult's twisted influence stood exposed, their corrosive threat vivid as blight.

  'How can I contain this?' Sulfin Evend quailed, winnowed helpless before the depth of a horror that held force and darkness to swallow the spark of his fragile mortality. 'Such knowledge lies past me.'

  'Knowledge is of the moment', Sethvir stated in gentle correction. 'Caithdein, Sulfin Evend, your claim to serve balance has been witnessed and heard. Your oath as permission: my wisdom is freed to stand upon yours. Go forward, self-determined, and place trust in that truth. Let my actions speak through you. Or fail. You act on your merits, both ways.'

  Sulfin Evend knew terror. The withering sense of his personal inadequacy crushed him down. Against cringing retreat, he held one silken thread: a touch sustained in ephemeral connection through the heart of Athera's grand mystery. Faced by the unknown on both fronts, he chose.