“Much easier said than accomplished.” Caolle added a string of pungent epithets. Too real, that Earl Jieret’s dreamed vision might happen on Riverton’s fresh-bloodied scaffold.
The Laughing Captain’s upper story lay dark, the candles set burning to guide patrons to their rooms long since drowned in sooty wax. The door to Arithon’s chamber was closed. No light leaked under the sill.
Dakar stalked down the corridor, his flesh napped with chills as he touched Caolle’s sleeve. They had agreed he should disrupt the bard’s privacy first.
A board squeaked underfoot. The hallway with its ingrained tang of lye soap and floor wax, and the stale fust of overused bedding raised too clear a memory of another tavern hallway, and the Shadow Master hurled outside reason.
No lingering pinch of guilt plagued his royal Grace this time, but the proximity of Lysaer himself. Dakar rolled back his sleeve cuffs. Perspiration snaked down his neck. If he misjudged and the fatal balance tripped, disaster would follow beyond any power to contain.
The unlocked door latch gave at a touch, the plink of the bar like a cry against silence. Unnerved by apprehension, Dakar eased open the panel.
Darkness met him, thick as warmed felt and stamped with indistinct shapes. The mullioned casement latticed diamonds across a rectangle of indigo sky. The feeble, ruddy gleam of coals in the grate brushed the textured bedhangings, and scattered sequin reflections over the yarns of gold tassels. Steeped in the mingled fragrance of citrus oil and beeswax which toned the wood of the Masterbard’s lyranthe, Dakar searched the gloom.
His mage-trained acuity found nothing amiss. The silk shirt and pearl velvet breeches Arithon had worn the day before were draped over a chairback, creased by an ornate clasped belt. The bard’s full-length cloak hung in order from its peg. His wrapped instrument rested on the clothes chest. The accustomed coils of refined wire lay on the marquetry table by the casement, nicked to scarlet glints where the light caught; nearby, the spare winding pegs and pearl-handled knife the Masterbard used to trim lyranthe strings. Everything kept its accustomed place, except for the item that counted.
The Paravian-made sword was not on its hook by the armoire.
Dakar shrank to a stab of alarm. Innocuous stillness became sinister as he moved on and surveyed the bed. The hangings were tied back: recessed in the shadow of the dagged velvet curtains, the blanketed outline of a sleeper. Dakar shut burning eyes in relief, then advanced in quick stealth to take down his quarry unaware.
Movement sighed from the shadow behind, a friction of leather against cloth. Dakar caught his misjudgment a split second before a chill pinpoint pricked at his nape.
He swore in venomous consternation. The uncanny attunement of his mage-sense informed that the irreplaceable blade he required now threatened to skewer his neck. Lost, his one chance to deflect Desh-thiere’s geas; the sword’s enspelled virtue would only deploy if the defender held to a just cause. In Arithon’s hands, the malignment of the curse would keep its defense spells dormant.
“If you plan to wreck the peace, make your stroke count,” Dakar accosted. “You were awake.”
“In fact, I never slept,” said Arithon s’Ffalenn in his most abrasive ill temper. “Whatever else did you expect?”
“Not words of brotherhood and courtesy.” Dakar chattered on in the spurious hope he could mask Caolle’s presence in the hallway. “Your promise to Lord Maenol has become a bad risk. If you know Lysaer’s coming, we’ll agree, you can’t stay here, no matter how ugly the fate of chained clansmen.”
“But I can,” Arithon contradicted. “I’ve a launching in two days, and plans I’ve no wish to abandon.”
If the voice held its usual pared sting of mockery, speech offered an untrustworthy gauge of a masterbard’s state of mind. Dakar cursed the sword, which forestalled his need to turn around. Even in darkness, his trained senses must discern more than Arithon wished to reveal. The inimical bite of the blade turned informant as a finegrained tremor ran through its steel.
“Arithon, hear me. You’re not yourself.” Through the pound of his heart, hammer to anvil against the wound pain of his headache, Dakar forced himself to keep talking. “If you stay, you’ll be letting Desh-thiere’s curse overset your mind and integrity.”
The sword moved, as if Arithon noticed the price of its bearing pressure. “And what if I planned this to be the last bloodbath?”
Dakar gathered up the rags of his courage and spun face about in the darkness. “If you had,” he said, tremulous in terror and entreaty, “then as I was born, I’d not stand here.” He pitched all his resource to unmask the man facing him, and desperately wished he had not.
The sword blade divided the air in between, an obsidian line against a less palpable darkness. Arithon no longer wore his delicate pale-haired disguise. Alert and reverted to his natural coloring, he had also cast off fancy clothes. “Since I didn’t cut you down as you came through my door, you may accept my invitation to leave.”
“You know I can’t do that.” Dakar licked dry lips. His headache redoubled, the throb of forced blood at his temples a trip-hammer misery of pain.
Arithon said nothing. Reclad in fitted riding leathers, his form seemed sheared out of black watered silk. He did not look deranged or demonic. Excised by the curse from the encumbrance of loyalties, he looked ready to scythe down any obstacle in his path.
“I won’t move aside,” Dakar said in ultimatum. “To get past, you’ll just have to kill me.”
A tensioned thread of suspension snapped. Mage-tuned intuition sensed the event as a frisson of vibration shot through the weave of Ath’s creation. Only then, too late, the Mad Prophet realized what his tactless handling had cost. Until this instant, Arithon had been aware, and still fighting the pull of curse-driven directive.
“Stand me down at your peril,” came his silken invitation from the dark.
The infinitesimal shift in tone speared chills down Dakar’s spine. Opened to mage-sight, he witnessed the change as the last sane controls burned away.
Now wholly ruled by the Mistwraith’s design, the Shadow Master showed the fixated viciousness of a cat as it tracked a lamed kill. “I’m sure the whole Fellowship would applaud your good sense for dying to stop the inevitable.”
“Mercy on us all,” Dakar whispered, unable to outface the ferocity in those unprincipled green eyes.
This was what Earl Jieret stood down at Minderl Bay; and another time as well, on the banks of Tal Quorin, when as an orphaned child, the boy had thrown himself between Arithon s’Ffalenn and the abyss of geas-bent destruction. The Mad Prophet was made of no such stern stuff, to stand firm as a friend’s private self came undone. Nor did he own even that child’s advantage: the direct, binding tie of a blood oath sworn in amity, while Arithon still commanded his mage talent.
“Could I remake my choice, I’d be far from this place.” Yet even Dakar’s cruelest honesty had lost any power to wound.
“Drunk, surely,” Arithon mocked. “Or else buried to your short hairs in some willing woman’s flesh. You’d have been better off.“
However one might ache to hear regret in that tone, none existed.
Then, “You’ve interfered enough,” the Master of Shadow said. Without further warning, he attacked.
Dakar escaped the first sword thrust because his knees gave way as he ducked. He had poor success with the well of bleak shadow which clapped down and masked his trained sight. He resorted to magecraft, begged help from the air, then drew on its reserves to fashion a banespell to stop Arithon. The exchange of raw force settled chill through the room as warmth fed the draw of his need.
Before Dakar framed the seal to balance the conjury, the energies ripped from his grasp. The next breath he drew sheared his chest like white frost. Just as before, the effect of the curse let Arithon wrest his own powers against him. He gasped, coughed, wrung his lungs empty before killing cold stopped his heart.
Dakar’s warding cantrip emerged as a whisper. ?
??Avert!”
Defense and counterspell locked and unfurled. Barely in time; through a ratcheting, starved breath, Dakar heard a low, trilling whistle. He felt the ward bend, like stress applied to a green stick clenched in his fingers. The sound built and focused, and the symmetry of the spell suddenly let go and twisted. Whatever fell package of magecraft rained down, the shock lanced Dakar’s nerves like spilled needles. He rechanneled the worst. Backlash smote the floorboards. Wood squealed and burst into smoking cracks under the kick of wild energies.
Half-paralyzed by pain, Dakar resisted. “Arithon, don’t!” But pleas could not save him. At his peril, he dared apply no more talent. Arithon’s refined ear picked up the vibrations of sorcery. Though the powers were not of the Shadow Master’s making, he had knowledge enough, and a fearsome command lent through his trained gift for music. He would simply keep on retuning the pitch to augment and reverse summoned forces.
Edged steel sliced the darkness. Dakar blundered clear. The sword snatched a rip in the doubled-up cloth of his shirtsleeve. He rolled to evade the next cut. Each desperate move, each flurried thought but entrenched the bite of the spell turned hostile against him. His flesh felt stitched with white-heated wire. Each effort to think cost him agony. He denied his need to enspell a release. Any arcane defense would only be hurled back in hostility against him.
If he could not fight back, he still held Arithon’s given power to bind. Dakar rushed through a string of entangling cantrips, then laced these through with the true power of Name, enforced by ritual permissions. The stay spell deployed and sealed. If the mangling pain seemed to let go a fraction, or the blind of wrought shadows relented, the sword hissed down in a cut to his head like the howling descent of pure vengeance.
Dakar flung open the door to the armoire to break the force of the blow. Lacquer-worked ebony jounced to the scream of turned steel. Chipped abalone pelted his knuckles. He rammed the slivered door hard into his attacker and deflected the following thrust. Something hard bashed his shoulder: the pommel of the sword. His arm went numb, and he crashed into a chair. Through a rain of split rungs and a mire of bard’s clothing, he snatched what defenses he could. Rolled fabric muffled his bludgeoned forearm. The chair seat made a temporary shield.
The sword Alithiel whined off wood and snicked a hungry tear through the silk. Dakar gained a scratch instead of an amputation, but the sting rocked his mental equilibrium.
“Saved,” he wheezed, while the blade zinged and clanged, “by the shirt off your back.” As the barrage whittled slivers out of the chair seat, shrill fear and the limpet throb of his hangover impelled him to inane hysteria. “You know you’ve gone mad. Arithon.”
No word came back. Only the clang as a murderous riposte gouged another scallop from the wood. Splinters rained down on the spellbinder’s cheek. Flat on his back like an upset turtle, Dakar cringed as stout oak gave way in his hands. A whimper escaped through locked teeth.
One heartbeat; two; the lunge he expected would come to impale him never fell. Dakar heaved in a raxed breath. He recouped the presence to map a defense ward and cast another snare across the doorway.
He felt Arithon sense the surge of channeled energies. Braced, he absorbed the counterpull as the strength of his binding by permission was grappled, and then sorely tested. Now aware he was bound, Arithon eschewed all attempt to match sorcery. He smashed the glass casement instead.
“No, you don’t.” Dakar clambered clear of the mangled chair, then shed on the fly the entangling veils of silk shirt. The belt he retained, and swung like a sling, which Arithon’s blade intercepted.
Silver clasps sheared off and clanged into the wall to a pattering fall of chipped plaster.
“Stop now!” Dakar snapped. “Don’t you realize how closely you just came to shattering the lyranthe Halliron Masterbard passed on as your legacy?”
Arithon used the emerald pommel of his weapon to sweep broken glass off the sill. “That’s a touching concern, but irrelevant. My half brother isn’t going to lie down and die from the glorious rapture of music.” He set his hand on the frame, but Dakar had anticipated. White sparks ripped out. The branch snare of the spell set to seal off the doorway stung Rathain’s prince into recoil. “Curse you for meddling!”
“That was your own permission just blistered your skin!” the Mad Prophet cried in correction. “Don’t try your birth gift of shadow. You’ll find yourself curbed there, as well.” He seized the washbasin and pitcher from the stand, dumped out their contents, and sought for a point of aim by the casement. “Why not simplify things and hold still?”
The solution required no genius. He need only batter an armed and demented adversary into a state of unconsciousness. The sulky thought followed, that long before, Caolle should have seized the advantage bought out of his desperate diversions. As Arithon’s liegeman, the man must try something to bring his sworn charge back in hand.
“You’re not speaking,” the Mad Prophet accused. “From you, silence never bodes well.”
He shied the pitcher, waited for the smash as sword steel fended off porcelain, then winged the basin on a corrected trajectory. That vessel also became deflected by weaponry. Arithon must have seized his sly chance to fetch out his quilloned dagger.
Dakar met the changed odds with a vexed string of oaths, and finished in plaintive injury. “Two blades make for butchery. You know when I’m drunk I don’t even carry a penknife!”
No answer; armed now with both sword and main gauche, Arithon bid to wrest back his mastery of shadow.
His geas-bent will slashed against sealed restraints and deflected onto the spellbinder. No surprise to Dakar, that the attack brought a fragmenting explosion of agony. Arithon’s talent encompassed the command of elemental darkness. He required no effort to raise simple shadows. If a ward of permission denied his access, he need do no more than apply testing pressure to wear down the inhibiting stayspell.
Dakar held firm, teeth locked in misery through a pain that plucked him at random. He suffered the bearing, innovative feints as Arithon quested to find weakness. The scalpel-swift slice of each forthright attack hazed him dumb with torment. Wrenched and pulled as though milled in a spate, he hung on, though his senses shut down at each onslaught. Leaching numbness beset his extremities. Next, his balance succumbed to mangling weakness. He toppled. Only the intervening bulk of the armoire saved his doomed effort to stay upright.
He clung, victim tied to ruthless antagonist through the grant of permission which founded the first rune of stasis. The spell which curbed Arithon from use of his mastery keyed into Dakar’s fast-failing strength. No recourse lay open to retaliate. A call for assistance from air or from matter would invite a flank strike from the bard’s use of dissonant sound.
“Ath, where is Caolle?” gasped Dakar, as his sight dissolved in a howling rain of white static.
His chest felt cumbered in molten lead. Each nerve end felt dipped in raw acid. The fight had been futile, outmatched from the start, with him pitched alone against an opponent beyond his depth and resilience. Dakar had no genius reserves of bright talent. Only a fool’s suicidal tenacity to bear up and sustain under pressure.
“Arithon. Listen.” Pain racked the plea to a whisper. “I can’t let you go. A sword and a dagger can’t stay Lysaer’s army. Fight for your sanity, damn you!“
No answer from the creature claimed as Desh-thiere’s instrument.
Dakar crumpled. A horrid, sucking pull swallowed his mind as the force of resistance drained him. This was a contest drawn outside of mercy; wise limits were long since abandoned. The only way left to stave off disaster was to borrow off his own life force.
Weeping, Dakar tapped that last well of resource, though he knew the end was upon him. Arithon stayed in thrall to the Mistwraith’s dark violence. Already he advanced on his victim. Paralyzed by throttling agony and dizziness, Dakar scarcely tracked his murderous, light tread. The dormant spells in the Paravian weapon gave mage-sense fair warning
of his peril. Air brushed his skin with preternatural clarity as the blade poised to cleave hapless flesh.
Then the Masterbard’s voice, cold as no man ever heard. “Be a dead fool, then, for interference.”
The whetted, steel length of Alithiel descended. Dakar shut his eyes. Limp as a hare stunned and stretched for the knife, he kept obdurate hold on his bindings.
“In Earl Jieret’s name, leave that spellbinder be!” Metal clanged in a screeching collision and arrested the sword in midfall.
Dakar flinched. Whimpering beneath a trip-hammer exchange of fierce swordplay, he realized a burly figure with a torch had rushed in to claim his defense.
“Merciful Ath!” The prince’s gruff liegeman had not abandoned him after all. “Caolle.”
“I went for my mail shirt,” the clansman flung back by way of testy apology. Harried across the carpet by Arithon’s attack, he beat off a rain of furious ripostes with blunt and deliberate competence. The years he had served as Earl Jieret’s war captain matched Arithon’s fierce brilliance through experience. The pair had sparred often. Caolle knew his opponent’s fast style and quirky, unpardonable tricks. But this was no straightforward match in the open. The mad drive of Desh-thiere’s geas set him at extreme disadvantage. The caithdein’s sworn man, he dared take no life. His slighter antagonist obeyed no such scruple, but sidestepped and angled to kill. Nor did Caolle have better weapon than his accustomed hand-and-a-half longs word.
In cramped quarters, the blade’s greater reach spoiled accuracy. Close and tight as he parried, the tip clanged off furnishings or stabbed and hung in the curtains. The torch in his left hand spat hellish sparks as he turned the wooden haft to deflect the swift fury of Arithon’s dagger hand. Cinders showered the carpet. A sickening reek of singed wool laced the room.
Caolle flicked his wrist to haze off the flame which streamered and singed his leather bracer. Through the clangorous dance of thrust and parry, he resumed his belabored dialogue. “Nor would I fight a possessed demon again without light. You just keep tight hold on those fiend-plaguing shadows.” A feint, a disengage; Caolle’s sword battered against the smoky sheen of Alithiel, then screamed through a sliding bind. “If I’m blinded in darkness, we’re dead men.”