Repulsed on a wave of untenable pain, Dakar reacted from reflex, cried Name to reaffirm self. Stunned separate from reeling confusion, he wove over torn thought a stinging hedge of screens to isolate the thread of his consciousness. His defences unfurled like sparkles of spun light, then shimmered before an answering coun-terforce.
A blow hammered down out of nowhere. Dakar felt his fragile defences smashed and then winnowed like metal exploded under heat to a glittering, scintillant shower of spent force. In the instant before blackness roared over his focus, he realized his intrusion had raised Arithon’s reflexive protections.
Then, spinning, twisting, battered to sickening vertigo, he was flung off into rarefied, airless darkness that burned him all over in stinging pain.
Dakar came to retching, flattened on his side in the salt-musty cabin aboard the brigantine. He was weeping, wrung; scarcely himself. His back was wedged at a horrible angle against the leg of the chart table. Bruises and wrenched joints combined to a fiendish chorus of aches. Slats from the broken coffer dug into his thigh. A spilled bin of quills winnowed under his right cheek, tickling his nose at each breath. Warning viced over his tissues, prickling prelude to a violent reflex to sneeze.
He batted the feathers away and sat up, engrossed in black curses. His glare pierced through darkness and found the Master of Shadow, roused now to jerks and small thrashes in the hellish grasp of nightmare where he lay, still unconscious on the berth.
‘Damn you, prince. Of course, you’d be guarded, even past the gates of unconsciousness.’ Too late, in pungent resentment, Dakar recalled a comment of Asandir’s that had outlined the very effect.
A simpleton should have recalled. Arithon’s was a brilliant and forthright discipline. While life lasted, and self-will, he was too much the trained mage to stop fighting to reassume his control. His grandfather’s early schooling had instilled rigorous defences against possession, the telling, likely reason why he had managed to resist the wide-reaching effects of Desh-thiere’s curse.
Lysaer s’Ilessid had owned no such advantage of protection. First-hand, in sorry clarity, Dakar had to recognize why the Fellowship Sorcerers had chosen the fair-haired half-brother for the sacrifice through the Mistwraith’s battle to confinement.
Had Arithon been risked, had the wraiths reached and turned him, the result could have spun his very strengths and trained power outside of all sane restraint.
Broken to fresh grief for old cruelties, Dakar sat in a cold sweat and chewed over the quandary ceded to his unwilling judgement. He could not heal this tienelle poisoning without inner consent from a mind that had already ranged far distant, vaulted on the drugged tides of vision to inflamed reliving of the past. Feeling battered, the Mad Prophet mumbled mixed lines of invective and self-pitying prayer. He lacked the stomach to suffer the private layers of Arithon’s anguish. Yet his limited frame of knowledge allowed him no other means of access.
For his moment of rapport had revealed what was wrong. He had traced the channels of Arithon’s lost powers, seared first by misuse, then racked, forced, compelled to overextend beyond the wise limits of talent and strength. The scars of past experience had healed over time, but not into functional recovery. Guilt remained, a bleak, damning barrier locked fast by the royal s’Ffalenn gift of mercy.
Dakar saw too clearly, and the damage made him weep. Too easily, the power to raise grand conjury for destruction might fall sway to the Mistwraith’s directive to kill. Arithon feared beyond life to bear the result. The very compassion of his bloodline intervened, to blind and to deafen; to block off beyond even irrational reach all the fires of bright power born in him.
The hour grew late. Silted in shadow, the stern cabin rocked in twisting violence as the brigantine plunged with a crash of spray through a trough. The swell was building. Jounced to the shudder and thrum of rising gusts through the rigging, aware of vibration singing down through the hull, Dakar sensed the first warning of ill weather.
As if hazed by the creaking distress of his vessel, Ari-thon’s fingers spasmed a tortured grip in the blankets. His head arched back, and he groaned. His nightmares of old bloodshed had begun to fray into delirium and tear at his living spirit.
The progression would grow worse. Dakar knew for a clammy, cold surety that the tienelle’s effects had not peaked. He dared not try to face Arithon’s devils, nor attempt to partner the blazing expanded consciousness of a drug vision unless he assisted his paltry perception as well.
‘Damn you to Sithaer,’ he groused as he arose to grope after the discarded stone pipe. Being milled under by the wheels of Dharkaron’s Chariot was a kindness beside the wretched discomfort of withdrawal from a tienelle trance.
Dakar packed the bowl with the dry, silver-notched leaves, set the stem between his lips, snapped flint to striker, and inhaled.
The next instant, the deck of the brigantine seemed to swoop and rock from beneath him. His senses smashed under a starburst of white fire and dropped him spinning into vertigo. Wherever Arithon had collected his plants, they were of rarely stringent potency. Dakar squeezed his eyes shut, alarmed through the unfolding climb of his higher awareness. Before he smoked, he should have counted the hours since the last time he had eaten; in punitive proportion, he would know how wretchedly he could expect to be sick.
Then that detail whirled from his mind as the narcotic bit into the core of his being and vaulted him to visionary prescience.
He steered back to the berth without stumbling because he sensed in advance how the wind would gust. Sucked into a multiple, overlaid perception, he could forecast cause and effect, every natural force laid against sail and bolt rope and frail wood. The tienelle’s scouring coil showed him which way the deck would come to roll. In a scalding burn of clear sight, his mind spiralled outward to trace how wind and sea would braid and spin cloud into a cyclonic axis of black storm.
Dakar grabbed the bulkhead, gasping in deep, aching breaths. His feet felt rooted straight down through the ship’s hull. Beyond the abyss, icy fathoms beneath, he could have counted each grain of sand on the sea’s floor. His head floated, wrapped in the singing bands of energies that were stars. The startling clarity of his insight went beyond prior experience, even through scryings under Fellowship auspices at solstice convocations. Whether his heightened powers had been induced by stress, or by the clean state of living he had embraced since Vastmark, he had no chance to determine.
Necessity required every nuance of art he could manage to cobble together.
The Mad Prophet sank to his knees, one hand on the Shadow Master’s forehead, the other placed over his chest. Outside of fear, threshed beyond doubt, he forced a grip on his drug-widened consciousness. He sealed himself inside an inviolate stillness, then dropped like an arrow shot off a high arc into the heartcore of Ari-thon’s mind.
Maelstrom sucked him under, white-hot and merciless, the effects of the tienelle redoubled as the physical torment to Arithon’s body rocked him off-balance into cramps. Then vision sliced him through like silver-bladed knives.
Dakar mustered flayed resources. This time when mage-trained reflex sought to fling him wholesale into the dark, he cried Arithon’s Name, tuned into a key of compassion.
Careful as he was, his personal feelings leaked through and coloured the weave. What secrets he hoarded allowed no false pretence; he was anything but impartial where the Prince of Rathain was concerned. As the fires of reaction roused to hound him once again, he sensed the futility of further effort. He could batter himself silly in attempt to weave an access, and only buy repeated failure. He was not as Asandir, powerful enough in wisdom and strength to intervene without force, and call spirit to respond from within. The final conclusion was unpleasant in the extreme. The herb had entangled Ari-thon in the same guilt which blocked off his mage-sight. Only one means existed that Dakar was aware of, to reverse the process and storm through.
He groped back to the table, too ragged to weep. Nothing, nothing at all, had
prepared him for what he must endure. Whether he despaired or he howled, whether he emerged irrevocably changed, he had no other means to stem the remorseless tides of the tienelle’s dissolution than to hurl Arithon’s own guilt back against him.
Dakar scraped up the spilled remains of the herb, then gathered pipe and striker and flint. He bore the items back to the floor by the berth, heartsick for what must follow.
‘You difficult, cross-grained, shadow-binding bastard,’ he murmured to the heedless prince as he repacked the stubby little pipe. ‘If I do this, I’ll never be quit of your memory.’
Dakar glared at the stilled form on the berth in a malevolence of sick misery as he fumbled the striker and managed at last to light the bowl. Bitter fumes bit the back of his throat as he inhaled. The far more likely truth was that Arithon s’Ffalenn would kill him stone dead for interference.
The Mad Prophet drew on the smoke, deeper and deeper until his awareness whirled like motes of dust through a starfield. He was going to have to overdose just to stay ahead of the other man’s blinding fast reflex. The tienelle’s narcotic was unforgiving. If he misjudged by a fraction, he would lose himself with the prince, with no man aboard the Khetienn trained to the mysteries to lend either one of them succour.
Settled into drug-heightened mage trance, tight-laced in control like a spear tipped in adamant, Dakar readied his assault. Then he arrowed a stinging cry of awareness across the mind of Rathain’s prince.
Defences lashed back, a peal of meshed force that Dakar had no skill to match except by a shield of stark vision: in the graphic detail impelled through heightened prescience, he shaped Arithon’s own pernicious memory of the townsmen his act of grand conjury had cut down on the field by the River Tal Quorin.
Sight collided with s’Ffalenn remorse. Dakar saw the silver-bright flare of imposed power as royal compassion stung the prince into flash point recoil. Arithon’s defences shuddered into disarray. Through that momentary gap, Dakar rammed force tempered like a killing blade. He struck without mercy, armed in ruthless, unsheathed power.
Arithon’s mage-sight had been poisoned by guilt; therefore, in judgement more pitiless than Ath’s angel of vengeance, those deeds that stung conscience would be tinned, reft beyond reach and veiled from recall. Dakar was relentless. He ransacked what memories he knew in ruthless succession: the grand failures at Tal Quorin; Steiven s’Valerient and his lady, now mouldered bones beneath a stone cairn in Deshir Forest; for one boychild spared, a generation lost in bloodshed; then Dhirken; Lady Maenalle; and nine other hapless innocents in an armoury; Talith’s lost marriage; all these griefs, Dakar swept into the fiery ring of his ward.
At each turn, Arithon’s awareness protested his presumptuous meddling. The fight in him would not be quenched. This violation of his innermost privacy roused a vehement storm of prideful temper. Dakar ploughed on, beleaguered. His instinct to show mercy for need must be utterly stamped out. He held all the weapons. He was inside the Shadow Master’s deepest defences. Any of a thousand thorny fragments of happenstance were his to seize and turn, to cut off resistance, no matter how brave, and to break down spirit and courage into reeling pain.
And even stung and stung again to inward howls of agony, Arithon’s nature would not give way in submission. The man who intervened in the effort to spare his sanity could do nothing else but meet each tortured obstruction, then use grief and sorrow to unbalance.
Dakar plumbed layer upon layer of guarded record, through events he had not shared through experience —memories that extended back to Arithon’s time as Karthan’s heir beyond the West Gate, where moral ideals and the fresh hopes of youth had culminated in an unspeakable interval as a prince in captivity under another s’Ilessid king. Laid out like tapestry, the Mad Prophet beheld the foundations for all that Arithon had become. Through each turn of event which had shaped a master of shadow rose the silver-gilt blaze of Fellowship intervention, the instilled gift of Torbrand’s compassion. Its influence laid an unmistakable trail to follow: a father’s death of an arrow upon the flame-racked decks of another brigantine; a kingdom lost to blood feud; a beloved grandfather whose every warning and principle had been disregarded and finally betrayed.
Dakar dug in and occupied, and cut like a scalpel until at long last he recoiled against the black, entwined web that entrenched the poisoned work of Desh-thiere’s curse. There he turned at bay. That tangle, not even the Fellowship Sorcerers dared disturb.
And waiting for him there, still armed with enough power to stun, was Arithon’s trained awareness, enraged to stabbing malice for an unconscionable violation of self.
Dakar knew despair. He had achieved no master’s training at magecraft: in born talent, in training, in knowledge, the other man outmatched him. He was in beyond his depth and pinned with no avenue of retreat. The straits were not forgiving. Through the mage’s reflex that disbarred his try at rescue, he could sense the ongoing pressure as the effects of the tienelle coursed through Arithon’s body. Should his hold slip, should the diversion of his presence become unseated, the guilt in the visions he defended would resume their inflamed sequence and spur on the unwinding descent into madness.
A course of sheer folly remained. The personal bindings of selfhood, which Dakar for expedience had broken, but that a master’s exacting reflex in defence must be instilled to respect; aware of only that one barrier that Arithon’s counterthrust would hesitate to cross, Dakar reacted. He claimed the burden of remorse he had stolen and assumed the full coil as his own.
As he conjoined borrowed memories with the signature pattern of his Name, the bleeding roots of the other man’s compassion became his personal inheritance. Along with the guilt came every wounding twist of fate that had arisen to separate a masterbard from his born calling to shape music.
A heartbeat, and the victim was freed from his crippling guilt. Reason returned, and full cognizance. In a rush fired to bounding expansion by the tienelle, Arithon’s mind unreeled through sharp, unfolding vision into the lost power of his mage talent.
For him, a wondering, peaceful miracle of insight; for Dakar, a stab of dark agony the likes of which ground and shattered his being through a paroxysm of change.
‘Do what you must,’ he charged the prince he sought to salvage. ‘Transmute the drug’s poisons and pull yourself out of this!’ He need not remonstrate that his spellbinder’s resource was finite. Nor could he sustain the weight of Arithon’s conscience for one second longer than shocked nerves could withstand the strain. He was not royal, nor tempered to mastery, nor disciplined to a masterbard’s empathy, but only a fat man born to a spurious gift of prophecy whose burdens had driven him to drink.
‘You are more than that, truly,’ Arithon’s reply sang back through the terrible, twinned link. ‘Else I would be mad, and you would be drunk, and the Mistwraith would have its fell triumph.’
But a darker deception lurked hidden behind the spellbinder’s barriers. The threat that awaited when winter browned the bracken in Vastmark, the prescient secret held guarded, stayed sealed away, along with the paralysing ties to memory Dakar had locked beyond reach. Then, as though the blast of s’Ffalenn conscience was not enough to flatten him, he saw the intent of his sacrifice repudiated.
‘Ah, you scheming, clever bastard!’ the Mad Prophet cried.
For Arithon did not use the reprieve he had been given to restore his taxed faculties to safe limits. Instead, he shouldered the restored scope of his self-command, grasped the reins of the tienelle’s powers of expanded vision, and launched through a nerve-stripping sequence of augury. As he had done before the battle at Tal Quorin to buy the survival of his clansmen, he tried now for the forthcoming debacle at Vastmark.
Dakar was drawn in as hapless witness. Meshed still in the wards that had stood down mage-trained defences, he had no resource to exert his own control as Arithon imposed his chosen test of cause and effect to trace a sequential array of probability. The spellbinder was forced to follow to its b
loody finish each traced-through combination of strategy. In an agony paired with Ari-thon’s, he counted, in sorrow and blood, the bodies fallen on the field. The battering ordeal imposed a cruel order. Through a horrific train of posited futures, Dakar came to realize that the Master of Shadow did not replay each ugly nuance with the sole intent to save his own.
At each turn, through every crafty twist of projected circumstance, the deployment of shepherd archers and clan scouts was replayed to sound for alternate tactics. Arithon broke rules. He trampled morality. He stretched every resource to unconscionable limit, and spared nothing of himself. At every turn, his exhaustive effort sought openings to disarm conflict. Dakar sensed the driving will to create ways to demoralize, and frighten, and haze back the enemy; to allow men misled for false cause the free option to retreat, and live, and return to their hearthstones and families.
Through the terrible course of the auguries made to steer the war in Vastmark, the Mad Prophet came to know that nothing concerning the massacre at Tal Quorin confirmed his past set of assumptions. Arithon had acted in perfect consistency, start to finish, each predetermined move done for mercy. He had not, after all, struck out in wanton fury, but used destruction as his most calculated tool, the sole means he had at his disposal to turn the scope of much wider disaster.
And so he would do again at Vastmark, over terrain most ruthlessly chosen to disadvantage a warhost. If Lysaer’s troops closed to fight, they would march into ruin. Arithon’s scryings were unequivocal. His light force of archers and clansmen would give way and strike from ambush. They could beat swift retreat into the mountains and lose themselves, or turn and cut down pursuit from the high cover of cliff walls while their enemies blundered, unable to find the hidden tracks to scale the cruel rocks and retaliate.
In spilled blood and in resource, for Lysaer, the campaign against the Shadow Master would be a terrible, drawn-out waste of life.