‘I’ve never known you to be such an outright fool.’ From Dakar, the censure fell bitter.
Arithon crossed the cramped cabin, turned before the dark panes of the stern window. The confined space snapped his temper, and he spun; slammed a fist in cornered force against the bulkhead.
‘Listen,’ he said in breaking desperation. ‘If I keep on making errors of judgement and see every friend I have come to grief, I’m going to be driven mad anyway.’ The fallow glow of lamplight lined his shoulders and the suffering, stark edge of an expression kept turned beyond view. ‘Tharrick was tortured. Dhirken and Maenalle were executed. Merior’s now the bound outpost of Avenor, and Talith —’
‘Stop this!’ Dakar cracked. ‘You aren’t responsible for everybody’s lives! You can’t let yourself be ruled by their choices, no matter how much the s’Ffalenn royal gift leaves you exposed to their hurt.’
Arithon whirled, his eyes defenseless in pain as few ever saw, and terrible for the depth of their vision. ‘Ath preserve, we’re not talking about individuals this time. If I make a miscall against this warhost in Shand, the Vastmark tribes will be scattered. Erlien’s clansmen are also involved, and outside my sovereignty to forbid. Do you think I can live with a repeat of Tal Quorin, but on a scale to make that massacre seem an exercise? Save us all! My feal clans in Rathain were all but destroyed the last time Etarra marched to war.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Dakar said, still obstinate as a dog caught lounging muddy in silk sheets. ‘I can’t stand aside and let you take such a risk.’
Arithon gave way to a laugh that cut off in abject disgust. ‘I only meant to drive you out of my affairs. What I’ve gotten instead is an interfering ally, and Dharkaron witness! I’d rather you stayed drunk.’
‘No ally at all,’ Dakar amended, crisp above the thunder of the wake as the brigantine nosed through a swell. ‘You forget. We’re eighty leagues from land and I don’t know the first wretched rule of navigation.’
‘All right.’ Arithon pushed from the bulkhead, his tension rueful in capitulation. ‘You’ve won your right to berate my choice of timing. If we’re going to argue, at least use your powers as spellbinder to set a minor binding on that door latch. There could be other crewmen with the interfering guts to break down my joinery and investigate.’
Dakar shoved up, staggered, caught a handhold, and banged his head in the ridiculous train of mishap that passed for locomotion on a ship. When the heave of the deck let him reach the companionway, he bent to the door lock and cast the spun thread of his consciousness through his fingers to engage the rusted dregs of his training.
The Name of the wood answered him, clean as new song. He had never felt so fired to self-awareness. As he marvelled at the change, he scarcely heard the step behind him. Nor could he react, lost in trance as he was, or feel aught but the pain of the hard, sure blow that slammed into his nape and felled him.
Dakar awoke, limp as a slit meal sack, and sprawled out prone in the cramped little corridor outside of Khetienn’s master cabin. His mouth tasted like baitfish. The lump on the back of his neck flamed his skull and his shoulders into a jellied mass of aches. These exploded to white sparkles of shot pain the instant he tried to move. With his cheek pressed to oak, and his fists crimped under his breastbone, he groaned a string of oaths that came out all vowels against the battering effects of s’Ffalenn temper.
For a racked span of minutes, he lay slack before a hurt that undid his desire for survival.
Forward, through the sluice of parted waves and the creak as a sheetline tugged through a stiff block, the click of ivory dice and laughter drifted back as a sailhand finished a joke about a whore and a belaying pin. The talk turned to gossip. Someone else joined in comment that made laughingstock of Dakar’s lame-brained effort to butt into Arithon’s business.
‘Coldcocked the interfering fool, right enough,’ came the excited baritone of the bosun. ‘You didn’t see him? He’s sprawled out flat beyond the aft companionway, senseless as a skinful of sausage. We’ve got us a wager that says he won’t stir until the midnight change in the watch.’
The Mad Prophet mumbled another oath to the deck boards, though, in fact, he bore the sailhands small rancour. Rather, he wished he had a bet of his own on. The pull of the stars against his bludgeoned awareness showed he was awake against all the odds. The least he deserved was a round of winnings for his troubles since the pain scarcely let him keep breathing.
In natural complication, Arithon s’Ffalenn would have gone on to try the unthinkable.
The breath Dakar drew to fortify himself came burdened: the frost-clean bite of tienelle fumes trailed from the crack underneath the stern cabin’s door. He understood he had no choice but to burst in and measure the extent of the damage. A dead prince was an altogether safer prospect than Arithon bound insane in a prescient trance while entangled in the geas of Desh-thiere’s curse.
As if in response to that surge of jagged fear, something in the cabin crashed over to a scream of splintering wood.
Jolted to hurry, Dakar took a jelly-legged step and thumped into the door panel. The latch had been wedged from the far side and the key left turned in the lock.
‘Dharkaron’s Spear and Chariot!’ Working magecraft in the pinch of a thumping headache was his particular hated pastime.
His palms printed sweat marks on the varnish as he leaned on the lintel alongside the fastenings. He moaned, shut his eyes, then let his awareness filter like fingers of light through the layered grain of the wood. Fused within its substance, Dakar sensed the kissed warmth of summer and the rainfall that had nourished the cut tree. Against the airy grace of its substance, the latch stood out, a bright cry of resonance wrought screaming in hammer strokes and forge fire. The pin was brass, and had been braced with a rolled leather map case. The hides of its making, to mage-sense, still reeked of the stock pens where the bullock had been slaughtered before skinning.
In need of a moment to resettle his nerves, the Mad Prophet measured his options.
The imbalance required to tip the obstruction and cause it to skid out of place was infinitesimal. A busy sea surrounded him with inanimate energy his powers could tap without the encumbrance of permissions. Dakar reached out, borrowed force from the brigantine’s laggard roll, then deflected a random twist of motion. The bracing map case clattered clear, which left the lock, a grim, black lump of opaque vibration stamped in the acid tang of wrought steel.
Dakar cradled his head before a sharp flash of pain behind his temples. He had no skill with cold iron. The secret of its mystery always twisted through his grasp; chased reason into knots that left him gasping. Battered to a mood of monumental ill temper, he tried the unbinding anyhow. The guttural command to raise the signature of steel passed his lips. Then he asked the permission, and stunned himself witless when the lock sang back in vibration and answered.
The mechanism turned; the bar slipped aside, and the door gave, creaking, and swung open.
The lamp on the table within had burned down to a sickly red glow. Its faltering flame winnowed as the brigantine tossed her course through the swell, silting the blue gloom of smoke which overhung its glass cover. The pungency of narcotic spice stung Dakar’s nostrils. Even spent to dilution, his first coughing breath spun a flick of raw fire through his nerves. The aches in his body incinerated with a scintillant flash of heat. His senses whirled, teased to a half-glimpse behind the veil of wider consciousness, not unlike the sickening plunge into vertigo that preceded his prophetic visions.
But this was no moment of augury. Too well, Dakar recognized the wretched first kick of the drug that initiated a tienelle trance. Its perils at least framed a dance he was well schooled to master. He huffed the air from his lungs and grounded his senses, then closed down his mage-sight behind a blank barrier of will. He would see only what was traced out in common flame light, and hear only what sound grazed his ears.
The confines of the cabin swam clear once again. The lamp pane
s glinted ruby gold. Fanned in hot light lay the stone pipe, discarded and cold, its crumbled ash scattered from the bowl. Black flecks remained where the strayed cinders had cooled, pitting scorch marks in the varnish. The canister rested open on its side, its treacherous dregs upset. A stipple of silver-grey leaves strewed in patterns across the board, winnowed and licked by the draught.
Arithon’s chair stood empty. The blankets on his berth were rucked into snarls, the sheets half-torn from the mattress. Chart chest, hanging locker, cabinet, and logbook, all were closed and still neatly latched, which left only the well of gloom on the deck, buried in attenuated shadow.
Sweating through apprehension, Dakar resumed his search. He scanned past a jumble of upset quills, the smashed veneer of a lacquered coffer; beyond these, a hand in faint outline, spread out and locked, the tight-fitted bones of a face pressed into a cradling forearm. Arithon lay curled on his side beneath the bowed curve of the stern window.
Too clumsy to move with the heave of the deck, Dakar crashed past the chart table and dropped to one knee beside the prince. His drug-heightened hearing drummed to the din of white foam off the wake, unreeling across starlit ocean a yard beneath the sill. He firmed his control against a dread that made him cringe, reached across darkness, and touched.
The bared nape of Arithon’s neck was ice-cold and beaded in sweat. A shudder jarred from the contact. Dakar heard the saw of an indrawn breath over the squeak of steering cables as the Khetienn’s helmsman took up a spoke to ply the rudder to weather.
Dakar gave the unresponsive shoulder a shake. ‘Arithon?’
No movement answered.
The lantern flame on the table wobbled and dimmed, its spill of bloodied light tremulous in recovery. Opened to options by the narcotic in the air, Dakar extended his spellbinder’s knowledge into a feather of inquiry; and power answered. The lantern wick spurted up in false brilliance, enough to let him measure the prince’s life signs.
Under their blued lids of flesh, his pupils were expanded black wells. Arithon’s limbs were dangerously cool, the reflex that spasmed the muscles to burn off deep chill reduced to intermittent, thin shudders. His pulse was erratic and fast, his skin drenched, and his tissues scoured to a dangerous, toxic dehydration.
The symptoms of tienelle poisoning were multiple and savage, a rigour no practising mage would undertake at less than the peak of mental fitness. Warmth and fluids were immediate needs. Given water, the body could flush some of the effects.
Dakar scrambled to the berth, tore off a wadded blanket, and tucked it over Arithon’s still frame. The lantern on the chart table started shuddering in wild spurts, its oil reservoir plumbed dry. The Mad Prophet let the flame go out. By touch and by mage-sight, he found the cask and the cup laid at hand to counter the tienelle’s initial side effects. A brazier stood readied, but unlit, to prepare infusions of herbal tea.
Afraid the debilitating symptoms had progressed past the reach of simple remedy, Dakar knelt with Arithon’s fine-boned fingers cradled between his two hands. A pang rocked through him for the musical legacy Halliron had left Athera, set into irrevocable jeopardy.
For the physical damage was not yet severe. A fatal poisoning by tienelle took hours to run its due course. Worse peril threatened the defenceless mind, spiralling uncontrolled through a visionary trance without access to sighted guidance to stabilize the vaulting flight of expanded awareness. The trained mage who offered help for the floundering spirit was as prone to stray and drown in the selfsame nightmare vortex.
Here was proper work for a Fellowship Sorcerer, not for any bumbling apprentice who had wasted his centuries of instruction chasing whores and getting paralytic drunk. Dakar held no pretence. Since he lacked the practised skill to send a distress call over leagues of open ocean, the best he could do was seek contact with Sethvir through the earth link bequeathed by the Paravians.
The Mad Prophet shoved his bulk upright, clawed open the lid of the chart table, and scrounged out the flake of slate kept for windy days to weight the pages of the brigantine’s logbook. He rummaged through drawers for a candle and a penknife. The ritual he employed was simplicity itself: scribe a distress rune in blood on the rock, set the mark in new flame, then unlatch the stern casement and let the construct splash overboard into the sea.
The rune, the blood, and the imprint left by fire on the extreme staid energies of stone would disrupt the patterned resonance of saltwater. If Althain’s Warden was not too preoccupied, he would detect the anomaly and send aid.
Crouched on his hams, his elbows jammed against the sill, Dakar waited, while the minutes crept past and the brigantine’s wake unreeled like crochet on dark silk under starlight. The flake of slate by now should have settled to the sea bottom. Arithon’s prone form lay unmoving, all but unbreathing, a discouraging sign. Dakar would rather have seen him thrash in nightmares. Convulsions, screams of delirium, the most unpleasant twitch of life would have been better than such stark, disoriented stillness.
Dakar fidgeted, desperate. The wait had extended too long. Sethvir was not going to respond. Any of a thousand small crises might preoccupy the Sorcerer’s attention; or he might hear clearly enough, but be hard-pressed with other trials, and have no discorporate colleague available to dispatch help.
When a quarter hour passed, Dakar had no choice but to confront the dire prospect that the problem was his own, to master or fail on his merits. The ghost of Jilieth haunted him still for shortcomings he had not sought to remedy. Guilt racked him. The alternative was to do nothing, to risk Athera to the unleashed effects of Arithon’s madness, whipped on to who knew what lengths by the driving hatreds engendered by Desh-thiere’s curse.
Dakar closed the casement and bent over the prone form at his feet. He firmed hold on his mage-sense and cast a shallow probe into the veils of unconsciousness to try and raise the Shadow Master back to primal awareness. His effort met and drowned in a velvet layer of darkness. He felt battened in shadow, adrift. The surface currents of Arithon’s mind were untenanted, blank and reflectionless and still as an unrippled lake.
Dakar roused and opened his eyes. Forced by need to an unkind choice, he cursed Daelion Fatemaster to be left alone at the crux of such crisis. With Khetienn at sea, he could scarcely engage the services of a herb witch to spin him small talismans of protection. If the volume of saltwater beneath the ship’s keel would buffer his effort from the unshielded presence of the sailhands, the blessing came mixed. Bedamned if he would try a deeper sounding while wedged beneath the chart table, and the unkind roll of a following sea rattled his bones like a string puppet. Since Arithon was built small enough for even a fat man to heft, Dakar shouldered to the effort, half dragging the Master of Shadow across the deck.
Movement and disturbance roused a flicker of tension in the unconscious man’s frame. His lips moved in whispered entreaty, ‘Are they safe yet!’
A static flash of mage-sight closed the contact between them: some leftover channel from the link forged through the child’s failed healing in Vastmark, raised active by the tienelle fumes. From Arithon, the Mad Prophet snatched the tattered image of trees burning. Against that flashfire rage of white heat, sword-bearing figures reeled and cried, entangled in the light-caught contortions of a desperate, killing struggle.
Sickness shot through Dakar’s belly. He knew what he saw: the memory reborn in Arithon’s mind, of the war that had ruined eight thousand lives on the banks of the River Tal Quorin. The blank darkness encountered in his earlier probe had been nothing else but a Shadow Master’s mesh of defences, set nine years past to smother all Strakewood and quench out the reiving flame loosed by Lysaer’s gift of light.
Overturned into dread, Dakar rolled his limp burden onto the wadded bedding on the berth. The tienelle visions had not led Arithon’s awareness outside of himself. Instead, he was lost in relivings, damned by his own pity and unable to win reprieve from his burden of s’Ffalenn conscience as perception turned inward to unstring him. r />
Dakar sat and laid the prince’s sweat-soaked head in his lap. Nerves he never knew he possessed recoiled in trepidation as he steadied himself into balance. He had nothing in that poised moment to suggest the best way to begin. With a whimper of fear, he smoothed back damp black hair and closed his eyes. He let his awareness unreel into stillness, then turned down to plumb the racked depths of the mind beneath his hands.
The last thing he recalled was a scream to pierce the Khetienn’s very timbers; perhaps his own. Horror closed over him, worse than nightmare, for the pain he came to suffer in rapport with the Shadow Master became real with the impact of unalloyed experience …
Dakar shared the fell massacre at Tal Quorin, not as retelling described it, nor even in the history rerendered by art to the majestic tragedy of Halliron’s ballad. Instead, first-hand, he heard the screams spawned by rapine, as Pesquil turned headhunters loose to despoil mothers and young girls; he beheld the flash-burned remains of the women and children Lysaer had annihilated in one blast of cold strategy, to draw Arithon’s allies in a hot rush of vengeance, to be entrapped and slaughtered in their turn. He cried in terror for the tearing forces that had burned through Arithon’s hands, as the Master of Shadow undertook the unthinkable to achieve the impossible: as he bent his knowledge of grand conjury to kill to spare Deshir’s clans from annihilation.
The harrowing went beyond even this, as in wounding pain that could find no atonement, Arithon walked the battleground in the deeps of the night. Again and again over the corpses of slain victims, of townsman and clan-born, of woman and child, he called power through the Paravian ritual to reweave their violent deaths. Beyond the dregs of his strength, on the shining, wilful force of spirit alone, he had absolved the shade of each lost and grieving victim and set them free to find Ath’s highest peace.