“Your jewel sets off a disturbing dissonance,” he temporized as he ceded its cold weight into her protective grasp. “Better we ease the distraction before the next subject is explored.”
Morriel Prime tugged a silk shawl from her knees and veiled the sullen glimmer of the Waystone. She felt disgruntled, manipulated, and pricked by the awareness that Asandir’s gently innocuous request urged dismissal of her complaint. She would not be side-tracked from her mission. Nor would she be lulled by the informal nature of Sethvir’s bachelor hospitality. Fellowship Sorcerers were ever subtle players. Placed firmly on guard, she must anticipate their ploys, even as they offered diversions that led off on tangents.
“Are the wards on Rockfell Pit gone unstable?” She settled the Waystone in the hollow of her lap and waited in rankling patience.
“Those defenses are secure,” Kharadmon assured from his overhead vantage above the door arch. “But Desh-thiere was divided upon its entry to Athera. The greater concentration of its fog was turned away, as we have unsettling proof. The uncontained portion cut off on the gate world of Marak is anything but a dead entity.”
Lapped like a mummy in quilts and thick shadows, her reed voice stripped to suspicion, Morriel said carefully, “Dead or not, those wraiths should have no thread of connection to exploit. Unless you’ve contrived some harebrained scheme to restore the old portal to Athera?”
“Ath forfend, never that!” Sethvir interjected, then submerged once again in his voiceless communion with Iyan. An inimical pause seized the chamber, strung out on the hiss of the tallow dip. Asandir turned his hand palm down on bare wood to thwart a visible urge to strike a fist. “This is properly Kharadmon’s story,” he said in quick discomfort.
Luhaine withheld all opinion, nor did he interrupt as the nexus of his discorporate rival drifted down to settle amid the used-up spread of light supper.
“The tale plays more like nightmare,” the Fellowship’s most incorrigible prankster confessed in chilling sobriety. Over the untidied jetsam of dishes and a tea mug abandoned brimful, Kharadmon dropped the too casual comment that he had accomplished a crossing between stars.
“I went to Marak with intent to find knowledge to break the Mistwraith’s geas of enmity over the princes. Why look astonished?” He chuckled for the joy of provocation. “Come now, Morriel, were your Koriani spies so inept? Did you actually think we would abandon the half brothers to the affliction of a cursed fate?”
The Prime Enchantress fixed his invisible presence with disdain as inscrutable as a sphinx.
“Well, madam, don’t rush to lend us due grace with an apology.” A miniature, self-contained wind devil, Kharadmon swept a tempest of crumbs into gyrating circles around the teapot. “I shan’t lend false hope. I found no reprieve.”
On Marak, where cities had once crisscrossed the continents with glimmering strings of lights, he had encountered a dead waste of freezing winds and ice. No people survived. There, the truncated mists of Desh-thiere brooded still, redoubled in malice, and haunted now by far worse than the original matrix of bound entities that had launched past invasion of Athera.
Kharadmon minced no words. “The fogs still enveloping Marak have inducted the spirits of every slain human victim.” His whirling exhibition of crumbs crashed and scattered, released as he swirled on to traverse the casement. “The whole world is a stew of trapped entities, suspended in active consciousness, and driven mad by unrequited hatred.”
The tallow dip fluttered and jerked. The Sorcerer’s unsettled movement stalked on, to raise the odd shiver from Iyan, who cast a sharp, startled glance past his shoulder.
“Never mind,” Sethvir soothed in daft unconcern for the fact the Prime’s newest servant was deaf. “Yon shade means no harm.”
While Iyan settled and resumed his absorbed, silent dialogue between the silver knife and the jam spoon, a crystalline pause filled the chamber. The moaning winter wind buffeted the tower and sheared all the warmth from the air.
“I was attacked,” said Kharadmon at unpleasant length, “beset and pursued almost beyond recourse.”
Morriel absorbed this, her lips pinched into a bloodless crease, and the frown lines like pleats on her forehead. For a Fellowship mage to admit to near helplessness shook her to driving unease. This recount was no ploy drummed up as diversion to upset pursuit of her purpose. She measured implications as the grim tale unfolded, of an unexplained silence, then the beacon signal sent off by worried colleagues to guide an errant Sorcerer safely home.
“We believed Kharadmon was disoriented, even lost.” Asandir made a small, strangled gesture of frustration, then explained how the sorceries he and Sethvir had raised on summer solstice had been ground-tied through the land’s living trees. Last came the harrowing corollary, given in hammered, steady speech. “Until every trunk, seed, and sapling alive completes its allotted span of years, a faint signature trace of that homing spell will linger. We can’t dismiss the risk. These loose wraiths upon Marak might find means to track such a resonance. If they should cross the vast deeps between stars, the mists that embody them would sublimate away. Arrived here as free wraiths, they would strike for possession and wreak death and destruction such as this world has never seen.”
“But surely they would perish outside their containment of mists,” Morriel said.
“These don’t,” Kharadmon admitted, reluctant. “They haven’t. Nine of them pursued on my back trail. Those survived the transition as pure spirit. The measures we invoked to trap and dispel them would never withstand the event of a large-scale attack.”
“Which is why you need Arithon alive? How very neat and convenient.” Morriel gave her most acid riposte. “If you look to a masterbard’s talent to effect a translation of Name and redeem them, that’s a desperate, thin straw to grasp at.”
“A thin straw’s the best hope we have at this time,” said Asandir with shattering dignity. “The logic is not hard to follow.” Taken individually, the scourging spirits could be bound through Arithon’s gifts. His rearing by mages already lent him an advantage of training to resist hostile attack and possession. “We are also in process of constructing defense wards to secure this world from invasion.”
“I see,” Morriel said. “All this takes precedence over the cities we already have torn into war by the criminal charges leveled against this dubious savior.”
Luhaine flared into rebuttal. “Neither one of the princes are expendable. Marak at this time is still choked in mists. Powers of light and shadow might still be used to entrap the wraiths on the planet. Even if the fell entities never try the crossing to Athera, our world is not free of threat. The wraiths in Rockfell Pit are imprisoned, not quiescent. The half brothers’ talent over shadow and light will be needed one day to help lay those trapped spirits to rest.”
“Then confine the half brother most inclined to cause mayhem if you wish them both to stay living.” Morriel sat forward with slitted eyes. “Don’t deny you hold the power to do this!”
“The issue of power has no bearing,” Sethvir exclaimed in fussy correction from the window seat. At some point, unnoticed, he had lifted the spoon and knife from Iyan’s hands. “You speak of two grown men born to free will, and not string puppets. Their lives are not ours to use for expedience.”
“Are they not?” Morriel arose, wizened and bent under trains of wool wrappings, but charged to denounce with the stripping, fierce sting of white lye. “What a pitiful excuse! You act when you’re moved to, or how else did five royal lines come by their gifts in the first place? Why should your wastrel apprentice have taken the arrow for Arithon’s sake back in Vastmark? Oh, you dissemble very well. The curbed powers of our Waystone establish that point beyond doubt.”
“Sethvir has curbed nothing,” Asandir contradicted. “The earth itself is your arbiter. What spells you impose by way of rank force, the land has been empowered to refuse. That is all.”
“And are lives and children worth less than a storm or an ea
rthquake raised by the raw whim of nature? What upstart arrogance!” Morriel startled to a sweet metallic chime as Sethvir tapped the spoon to the knife handle. In no mood for his mooncalf byplay with her servant, she raised her voice over the disturbance. “Release the earth’s imprinted memory of our crystal. Our help and its power may be sorely needed, to judge by the botch you have made back on Marak.”
That moment, Iyan yelped aloud. He shot to his feet, seized the cutlery from Sethvir, and clashed spoon to knife blade in an energetic clatter of wild noise.
“Daelion Fatemaster wept!” Morriel whirled on Althain’s Warden. “What have you done to my servant?”
Asandir burst out laughing. “Let him restore the nerves that afflicted his hearing, apparently.”
The Prime Matriarch blanched in shock. “Healed him?” Her dismay filled the room, since the act was no favor. The man’s value had been his inability to disseminate her secrets.
Oblivious to all nuance, too elated to perceive a mistress’s embarrassing, ungrateful hypocrisy, Iyan whooped for joy, then chortled to experience the music of his own voice.
“You should leave,” Luhaine suggested in a solemn bent of humor, “before something else more regrettable happens.”
Kharadmon abetted in devilish, barbed irony. “Be nice and smile, or your servant could also acquire speech.”
Which effrontery was too much; Morriel Prime lost grip on cold nerves and blazed into rare, scorching temper. “Ath curse you all for frivolous intervention! What you name restraint, I call cowardice! The Koriani Order is older than your Fellowship. Our first Prime Matriarch stood at the right hand of free governance before Calum Kincaid sold out his great weapon and became the destroyer of worlds. What are you defending in this land but ignorance? I call you tyrants, rank meddlers with what’s left of human dignity. Believe this. I shall not forget. Redress will be found for our damaged Waystone, and your Fellowship shall live to regret your unjust interference.”
She grasped Iyan’s elbow and pried knife and spoon from his crestfallen hands. “Come. We are leaving.” She shed borrowed blankets, scooped the Great Waystone from the cushions of her chair, and demanded to be seen down the stair to the gates.
“Good riddance,” Kharadmon announced on the eddy of air as the door slammed in the Prime’s departed wake. “The lady has a temper like a snake.”
Sethvir disagreed with a tilt of his head. “The years she has endured in the seat of Prime office have driven her just a bit mad. Pity her, instead. She’s inherited a charge she can never pass on. Since her last candidate for succession died in the rite of passage, I suspect the complexity of her office has become too much for any new aspirant to bear. No initiate in her order, however well trained, could survive the transfer of power.”
“One might have,” Luhaine interjected, more than usually thoughtful. “At least, Elaira shows spirit enough to endure.”
“And count our good grace for the fact she is cast out of favor!” Sethvir cried in rife exasperation. “The current Prime Matriarch is headache enough, with her penchant to ally herself with Lysaer. A successor tied by love to Arithon s’Ffalenn would yield up a frightening collusion.”
Loyalties
Winter-Spring 5649
In a clandestine meeting, Lysaer addresses the devoted captain of his honor guard, and a well-trusted healer who had tended the maimed through all the horrors of Vastmark: “You are sworn to gravest silence because I must reveal several dangerous truths well before our people have gained faith of a strength to endure them. Arithon s’Ffalenn was begotten by a demon, and his unholy powers have suborned Lady Talith to the point where she’ll need to be secretly confined…
Safely returned since his audience on Corith, Earl Jieret, caithdein of Rathain, hears in relief the appeal of Caolle, his ex-war captain, who had fostered him since childhood, “My lord, the sword training of young scouts is more properly left in the care of my successor. I beg leave to go to the westshore and await the return of our prince. His Grace might deny the necessity, but a sworn liegeman who bears a strong sword should be there to serve him against the day he makes landfall…”
When spring comes, and rumors fly that Lady Talith will make no appearance for the traditional celebrations, Avenor’s royal healer admits in gentle sorrow to the court: that in distraught state for her failure to conceive, the princess has retired into strict seclusion for the sake of her delicate health…
IV. Turnabout
Spring-Early Autumn 5652
Just over three years after Lysaer’s expulsion from the compact by the Fellowship of Seven, the brigantine Khetienn lay anchored off the distant shores of the continent half a globe away. An equatorial sun sliced her shadow in hard outline on the chipped crystal sparkle of salt water. Few fish swam those jewel-toned shallows. Bird cries never wove through the air. The only wild voice was the rasp of light breezes, flapping the single staysail left set to draw ventilation through the hatches. Throughout the logged course of six voyages, after arduous problems with restocking stores to provision for repeated ocean crossings, the brigantine had put into every cove, bay, and inlet along Kathtairr’s blighted coast.
That search of the shoreline, and further expeditions on foot into the rugged, stony vistas of the interior had turned up nothing living. Only mineral-poisoned rivers and a limitless expanse of sun-blasted, wind-raked desolation.
Tanned and taciturn where he leaned on the ship’s rail in the stifling heat, Arithon wore only breeches of stained canvas cinched at the waist with tarred cord. By preference while at sea, he dressed from dregs of the ship’s slop chest, as far from the trappings of royal heritage as tattered, plain clothing would allow.
His tourmaline eyes raked across the splintered ochre rubble, where the dun contours of scorched earth stitched the cloudless skyline, and the knees of the headland met sea in lace petticoat ruffles of spent breakers. An ominous, flat inflection demarked his address to the sweating figure by his side. “How long have you known that Kathtairr offered no refuge?”
The Mad Prophet squeezed his eyes closed against the stabbing glare off the water. “A fair question,” he allowed in shrinking misery. “One I don’t care to answer.” He inhaled the tarred taint of oakum warmed blistering hot in the thought-shattering fall of noon sunlight. More than just heat left him faint. He feared even to expel his discomfited breath, aware to paralysis that if he said nothing, the man at his side would react in spectacular, inventive retaliation.
No use to pretend there had been no intent to lead Arithon in diversion through ignorance.
Dakar regrouped the rags of his nerve. He spoke the truth quietly, anxious to avoid notice from the idle sailhands who sprawled in the shadow by the forecastle. “These shores lay scorched sterile by drakefire long before Ath Creator sent the Paravians as living gift to redress all the sorrows of the world. No centaur, sunchild, or unicorn has ever walked here. Not through any age of known history.”
An uneasy interval, cut by an isolated movement; the Master of Shadow turned his head and delivered his most scathing, level glare.
“The Fellowship needed to buy time,” Dakar blurted. “They wouldn’t say why. Some outside crisis concerning the linked gate worlds has kept them clapped close as clams. The only thing that matters is what you intend to do now.”
“What I intend?” Arithon loosed a piercing, soft laugh. “The clans need a refuge. If a sea search was required to seek the Paravians, Daelion Fatemaster’s sorrows, Dakar! We need not have wasted three years. For a sweep of the oceans, we’ll need a whole fleet, and strong captains, and navigators trained to make star sights.”
Then came the striking, inevitable pause Dakar dreaded, while thought burned behind half-lidded green eyes. Rathain’s prince could connive with appalling invention, until even Sethvir became sorely tested to unriddle the final result.
“You had better hope,” said Arithon s’Ffalenn, “that Cattrick has been busy keeping the letter of my design back in Tysan.”
The impacting force of that statement took a pregnant second to slam home. “In Tysan? Merciful Ath!” Dakar all but shouted. “You’re not plotting to lift Lysaer’s new deepwater keels from the royal yard at Riverton!”
The lean, expressive mouth flexed amid the sharp-planed s’Ffalenn features. Where a stranger might mistake such expression for amusement, Dakar knew to look deeper. But Arithon swung his inscrutable regard to the sapphire edge of the horizon as he said, “For the sake of my peace, don’t share speculation with Feylind.”
Night claimed the far continent of Kathtairr like ground quartz sown on dark velvet. Restless airs scoured the vivid, flint scent of dewfall off its vistas of sun-baked rock. The sky spread above the obsidian hills held no kindly embroidery of clouds. The stark, strewn blaze of Athera’s constellations scribed the arc of the sea where the Khetienn rode at anchor, a stamped silhouette rouged by the glow of her deck lanterns. From his solitary vantage on a shoreside hillock, Dakar could hear the desultory laughter, as sailhands made cracks at each other’s expense. The windborne exchange of camaraderie seemed disjointed in time, splashed like fragmented dream against the acid-leached contours of rain-stripped gullies and sere landscape.
Despite distance, and the fast-fallen curtain of darkness, Dakar could pick out the Master of Shadow, propped alone against the stern rail. Whether the Teir’s’Ffalenn ached for disappointment, or brooded alone in balked anger, no man dared say. Dakar remained outside his confidence. The festering dispute arisen between them concerning his meddling plots against Tysan’s shipworks had abraded those nerves which still remained raw from the ache of a tormented conscience.
For Arithon, Kathtairr’s barren shores delivered more than bitter setback. The afternoon’s truths had sealed the death of a desperate, cherished set of hopes.