Anguish infused the cat-gleam of Raiett's eyes. 'You won't. I can't free you. Why didn't you see? You're the new prize the cultists will seize to finish their plot to snare Lysaer.' The bard closed his eyes. 'Then for my sake, rest my appeal with Ath's grace.'
The guard's heavy hand closed upon his bound wrist. Brought to defeat, he did not engage sorcery. Nor did he call on his wild gift of shadow. Such restraint brooked no logic. Raiett frowned for the lapse. Yet his flare of unease died without analysis. Though the blade was plain steel, its cold edge bit deep as the guard's lightning stroke sliced the prisoner's forearm from elbow to wrist.
The singer's frame shuddered. Shock parted his lips. The air left his lungs in a gasping rush, while his blood ran and splashed on the floor-tiles.
Raiett lost all colour, his sleeve pressed to his mouth to stem a sharp uprush of sickness. The knife was not bone. It bore no binding spell-craft. The bleak burn of dark sorcery would come later. But the High Chancellor of Etarra understood how the gushing wound felt, as the Kralovir bled a victim with talent to sap the mind and weaken the sinews. Each night, he dreamed of the hard, spinning rush, then the panting need to draw air to stave off the feeling of incipient suffocation. Too well, he recalled the nauseous faintness that came as the mind spun down into darkness.
The memory of what would occur after that framed the terror that wakened him, screaming.
'Grace,' the bard whispered as consciousness failed him. His head tipped, chin forward, while his torso slumped, and the cord on his arms strained his tendons.
The cultist behind him wiped off the fouled blade. He sheathed his cleared steel, and waited. His dour-faced henchman looked on, unmoved, while in the oak chair, the victim's soaked fingers splashed a pattering red stream in the fire-light. If a glamour had wrought his disguise, the white hair failed to shift colouring. Raiett stared, disbelieving, but observed no change. Even under the swift encroachment of death, the aged skin kept its wrinkles. No signs of royal identity emerged. The singer's slack flesh turned blanched as a corpse. His slumped frame convulsed, then loosened.
The heavy-set guard snatched a fistful of hair. He raised the bowed head, peeled a fluttering eyelid, then swore for the inconvenience. Cataracts still fogged the pupil beneath.
Raiett Raven edged backwards to spare his fine hem. 'Look at the wretch, will you? He's no one's prized prince. My guess was mistaken. We've dealt with a lackey, and you have just butchered a free singer sent as a sanctioned Fellowship agent.' Regret resurged, charged by vindictive hope, that the bard's strained bequest might be answered.
But the grey cult's initiates knew their macabre trade in the barter of spirit and flesh. Undeterred, they fingered the vein in the neck until they detected a pulse. The raced heart-beat let them measure the bard's ebbing vitality. Practised experience made no mistakes. 'Enough. Strap his arm,' the burly guard snapped. His spattered fist clamped down to stem flowing blood, while his taciturn henchman slipped off his belt and wound the strap into a tourniquet. 'Blind victim or spy, he's no use to us, dead.'
The surly guard also stripped off the rope manacles, while the knife-bearing brute freed the knots binding the unconscious prisoner's ankles.
'Lordship!' he barked, as though Raiett was a servant. 'Fetch out some linen for dressings, and blankets. The spirit must not slip from the husk beforetime. Can't risk a chill that might start him shivering before we've got him down to the cellar.'
'Should we bother to stir for this night's paltry take?' the man wrapping the savaged arm grumbled. 'Could be he's naught but a decrepit old bird who carols for coin, after all.'
'Who knows? Who cares?' The ringleader licked a slicked, scarlet knuckle, then smiled and mopped his smeared palms on the singer's patched shirt. 'At least the tang of fresh blood never lies. The essence of him reeks of talent.'
A last glance, shot off in piercing contempt, caught Raiett Raven's masked strain and grey pallor. 'Still shrinking squeamish? Don't worry. We've bled your spy white. He won't be able to gather his wits, far less find the strength to recover his grip should he ever regain lucid consciousness.'
While the litter bearing the blanket-wrapped bard was transferred to the crypt underneath the governor's mansion, the clan children whisked into hiding remained at risk of forced search and exposure. Around them, Etarra continued to seethe with the intensity of a stirred ant-hill. Torches streamed down the bends in the road, as the night's flagrant scandal sparked lights up and down the town battlements. The sunwheel tents smoldered to cinders and smoke, attended by grudging recruits who laboured to thread buckets between the obstructive press of a mob stung to violence by moral betrayal.
Horns wailed. Harried officers shouted. Hecklers hurled mud at their white surcoats as they struggled to bind the naked offenders into locked custody.
The overwhelming noise drowned the priests' protestations as the onlooking crowd catcalled and fed on the rage of betrayal. More mounted patrols were dispatched from the garrison. Fast as they broke up the fist-shaking knots, angered citizens poured into the fringes and gathered in subversive clusters between the craft sheds.
More soldiers bore in. Since the entrenched canker of Etarran oppression bred hysterical fear of revolt, the troops were rough men who preferred to break heads and sort out with questioning later. Dakar dared not rely on glamours to mask old blood fugitives seeking escape. Not tonight, when any cloaked figure bearing a child was hell-bound to spark vengeful inquiry.
Just prior to dawn, as the ground mists rolled in, the unrest burned down to a sullen distrust of the motives of sunwheel priests. Before the daybreak change in the guard could revitalize the patrols, Dakar pushed aside his concern and fatigue, and wove the subtle protections that allowed the threatened clansmen to slip past the sentries. Dawn-light saw the boy-children safely away.
Dakar at long last found himself free to act. Past view of the town, tucked in the parched brush where the barrens of Daon Ramon lapped against the bleached ruts of the trade-road, the misted air smelled of manure and dew and the packed clay soon to raise clouds of dust in the swelter of daylight. Dakar tipped a pebble out of his boot. Alone with bad thoughts, his apprehension intensified, raising the aching throb at his temples that often fore-ran the onset of prescience. Every ruffled instinct he owned made him chafe over Arithon's detainment.
No spellbinder's resource might obviate risk: not since the High Chancellor's court rooted the seat of the grey cult's machinations.
'Damn your secretive nature to Sithaer's deepest pit!' Dakar groused. The next instant, he hopped as a needling pain stabbed into his exposed ankle. He glanced down, discovered his foot in an ant-hill, and spouted off with more venom. Since cursing did the absent prince little good, the Mad Prophet brushed off the insects and snarled an apology. Limping a respectful distance away, he sat down on a boulder and seized his first chance to conjure a shielded scrying.
No need, at this pass, to invoke an elaborate ritual. The past crisis at Rockfell and a merging with Kharadmon's power had reconfigured Dakar's rapport with his talent. Less than a league from Etarra's defences, he elected to channel his sight through Arithon's Named grant of permission. The view he received would arise from within the Teir's'Ffalenn's private being. That purposeful subtlety must suffice to forestall any hostile source from broaching the integrity of the connection.
Dakar closed his eyes. He settled his limbs. One deep breath, two, he released the distraction of his outer senses. Immersed in black calm, he configured the primary energy needed to shape his crafting: the heart-deep, clean flow of affectionate regard he held for the Prince of Rathain. To that, he linked the line of consent held under Arithon's given Name.
'Ath preserve,' Dakar breathed as his set construct flamed against etheric darkness. Braced for a fight, resolved to withstand the lash of an initiate master's inner defences, he dissolved the seal that demarked his privacy.
His delicate summons blazed forth, unshielded, but tuned with such precision that only one
living spirit might answer . . .
. . . awareness swooped downwards, sucked into a spin that dragged him beyond reach of sunlight. The air smelled of dank brick and mold. High and thin, as though distanced by fever, two echoing voices conversed. Whether they argued, or gloated, or simply passed time, the wracked thread of awareness Dakar encountered could not track the meaning of words. He sensed the ache of bound hands. Then the bite of more cord, looped around knees and ankles. Not just set in constraint, his limbs felt encased by a leaden lassitude. He was cold. A leaching weakness infused his flesh, and a raging thirst parched his throat. He breathed, but felt dizzy, as though starved for air . . .
'Arithon?'
A wisp of awareness answered his call.
A ghost touch so tenuous, Dakar at first thought the sensation was errant, shaped out of frantic anxiety. Never had any-one managed to cross the Teir's'Ffalenn's inner boundaries without a defensive challenge. Even unconscious, the prince had been known to rise to invasive intrusion. This yielding helplessness felt utterly wrong. Though Dakar's impulse was to dismiss the faint contact, he sounded deeper, persisted, until he all but dissolved the connection to his own flesh.
No good news came back.
The throbbing sensation of cut muscle ran the full length of his left forearm . . .
The pain was too real. Shocked, Dakar recalled Sethvir's bleak assertion, that cultists who preyed on trained talent bled such victims to the brink of death to weaken their innate protection. The rampant horror stopped thought: the Teir's'Ffalenn languished in the hands of the Kralovir, preserved for their rite at the dark of the moon, with no friend at hand to defend him.
Fury shattered Dakar's tranced calm. Cast back into his shivering frame, he shoved to his feet, only to
find himself checked up short.
A tall figure confronted him, arrived without sound. Male, but not mortal, he blocked Dakar's path, his flame-coloured tunic embroidered with patterns too fine for a jaunt in the brush. His piercing regard viewed the spellbinder's flushed haste with intelligent, poisonous irony. 'Sit back down, foolish man. You're not going anywhere.'
Startled halfway out of his skin, Dakar panicked. The attack spell he started was slapped aside with demeaning ease.
'Sit,' the frightening creature repeated. 'I am not a cultist. Grab hold, take my counsel, you're not going to faint. If you keel over and crack your fool head, suit yourself. I haven't appeared here to harm you.'
Thumped on the chest by the fellow's spread hand, Dakar overbalanced. Sent reeling backwards, he encountered the rock, then dropped on his rump, enraged and huffed breathless.
'You!' he gasped, strangled.
Davien raised his eyebrows. His smile was a tiger's, fierce with bright teeth. 'You're perishing quick to assign me the blame, that Arithon lies in Raiett Raven's cellar at risk of induction by necromancers.'
'If Kharadmon knew you had shown yourself here, he would abandon his vigil at Darkling forthwith and rip out your oily guts.' Dakar rubbed his chest, which evinced no scar from the Sorcerer's peremptory touch. But the ignominy burned like a wound cleaned with salt. 'Restore my free will. Allow me to pass. Or better, say why you obstruct me.'
'Leave your friend to his fate,' the Betrayer responded. 'He has not asked for rescue and needs none of your blundering assistance. For all of your misplaced philanthropy, trust me, you have never seen to the core of him.'
Dakar gasped, incredulous 'You're claiming he'd send himself in there as bait? That offends me.'
Davien stood unruffled, the citrine ring on his hand a hot spark in the sunlight. 'I beg your pardon. Your prince went informed. He rejected my grant to peruse the black grimoires, but Traithe caught the breach in Melhalla. Your Teir's'Ffalenn knows in depth how the Kralovir work. Since then, he requested, and received my direct help. No one's free will has been compromised.'
'Except mine, of course,' Dakar gritted, half-speechless. 'You've been involved with this farce from the start?'
Davien did not respond: the reason was plain. Dakar bit back a curse, for his idiot blindness. What else but a Sorcerer's hand could have masked a crown prince's etheric identity, or even, changed gold into stone, then back again? 'Why did you come here?' the Mad Prophet repeated. 'Don't say you could not have shouldered this risk and spared Rathain's lineage from a lethal exposure!'
Again, still opaque, the Betrayer refused answer.
Dakar suppressed his headstrong tongue. He sustained spiteful silence, against precedent. For unless the Sorcerer allowed him to pass, no protest would make any difference.
'Not a whimper of argument?' Davien's needling shifted to laughter. 'I see you've outgrown drowning set-backs in drink. That's unfortunate. You'll have to weather your rages, awake. The finale won't play for another two days, before midnight at the dark moon.'
Dakar found his lost nerve. 'Don't expect me to wait.'
Amused, Davien watched him. Those obsidian eyes could absorb all the light in creation before an opponent could read him. 'Arithon once told me the wish of his heart. Would you deny him the tempering experience he needs to achieve his most cherished desire?'
'Lies!' cracked Dakar, reduced to bravado. 'You can't rightfully keep me. Nor would Sethvir allow you the blood of another crown prince as a sacrifice.'
Davien's whimsy vanished. 'Spare me your tangle of trite accusations!'
'Trite? Accusations?' Dakar lost his wits. 'Your bluster's no better than piss in a wind-storm!' Infused by a courage he had never possessed, he lashed out. 'Alone, and drained to the verge of oblivion, Arithon lies at dreadful risk! He will succumb to the Kralovir's snare. Don't trouble to claim you'll act to spare him. Your double-dealing might make me toss breakfast.'
'The risks lie outside of your limited grasp,' the renegade Sorcerer rebutted. No muscle moved. Yet his patience was spent. 'Don't even think you can try to imagine! Move one inch, and depend on the fact I will take forceful measures to prevent you.'
Breathing hard, Dakar rose. 'Do that, by Ath! I refuse to lie down and cringe like a dog while you toy with more royal lives. Your chess match to see a crown lineage cut dead cannot meet the same end as
Melhalla's.'
Davien wasted no word. His poised form stayed motionless. The spell-craft he deployed struck Dakar's awareness, and darkness welled up without form and dropped him unconscious.
Summer 5671
Catch
The galley the Prince Exalted engaged for fast transport reached port in Jaelot just prior to sunset at the dark of the moon. Caught aback, since the pennant that streamed from her mast-head was the only forewarning received, the town's flustered Lord Mayor jumped, scrambling. Rushed orders saw an escort assembled. A cordon cleared space through the press at the harbor, while commerce ground to a stupefied halt, and a breathless fanfare of trumpets heralded the blessed arrival. The ranking burghers had assembled beneath the town banners by the time the august vessel tied up to the bollards. She had been run at speed. Her oarsmen panted in prostrate exhaustion, and her bright work wore crusts of dried salt. The curious craned. Flushed in their finery, the guild ministers cheered while the gangway set down, and the gleaming embassy from Avenor stepped onto the carpet spread over the dock.
Amid the excited explosion of talk and the galvanic rumour of war, the royal arrival was welcomed with dazed speculation and obsequious, open arms.
Foremost among Jaelot's dignitaries was the clairvoyant high priest whose suspect appointment had originated under the auspice of the corrupt high priest, Cerebeld. Abroad in full daylight, the rotund little man displayed no sign he might share the vile taint of a binding instilled by the Kralovir.
Yet Lysaer s'Ilessid was taking no chances. His person stayed guarded ever since the debacle that had flushed the treasonous ring of Avenor's turned council-men. A fresh-faced young man wearing the collared mantle of a crown examiner preceded the sunwheel guard, his tuned sensitivity entrusted to screen for signs of errant spell-craft.
While the t
own mayor was stalled by an opportune speech, the oathsworn talent gave the shining figure of the Blessed Prince his tacit signal of clearance. By his arcane assessment, the priest's presence was harmless. No lead-foil ripple of bound shades entangled the living stream of his aura.
Lysaer s'Ilessid smiled his relieved acknowledgement. A diamond in sunlight in his white and gold, he loosened the fist he had held in tense readiness to wield light for a summary execution. Assured of Jaelot's loyalty, his retinue gathered about him, and his guard captain signalled the drum-roll to march.
The Blessed Prince stepped into the glare of late day, ablaze in the pomp of state trappings. His blond head was bare, a fair beacon amid his cowled clerks, and the enamelled helms of his officers. As his personal guard and his banner-bearers formed ranks to proceed to the mayor's palace, the florid form of the resident priest was tucked into their glittering company.
Jaelot's aged mayor followed, leading his cluster of bedazzled council-men. Surrounding, the cheers of the onlooking crowd swelled into a deafening roar. As the procession swept away from the bay-side and arrowed through the packed streets, aproned craftsmen left work, and balcony windows banged open. If Lysaer did not pause to touch outstretched hands, he smiled with gracious acknowledgement. The shouts went from noisy to deafening. Matrons waved, and young girls with ribboned baskets showered a riot of flower petals. Man, woman, and child, all of Jaelot rejoiced for the avatar's visitation. Lysaer's cameo beauty and majestic grace captivated their adulation. Aged men lost their breath. Gawking boys pressed the cordon and clamoured to enlist, starry-eyed with eagerness to bear arms for the cause of humankind's deliverance from Darkness.
In such august presence, the plump priest was outshone. His innocuous stride bobbed unremarked amid blinding white cloth and inspired charisma.
But to the shade of the Fellowship Sorcerer who lurked unseen, that man's innocent appearance was not harmless. A latent potential for threat lay embedded in the ephemeral stream of the priest's outer aura. Its pattern was dormant. Insidious as a shard of transparent glass suspended in flowing water, the minute fluctuation in density snagged barely a ripple across fine perception. Yet Luhaine detected that shimmer of subtle disharmony, however far it lay past the range of visible light.