“There’s sorcery here, sure as the mother who bore me,” someone cried.
Farmhands and craftsmen made signs against evil, while matrons snatched their children and hustled them to safety inside the craft sheds and cottages.
Dakar ripped out an oath, while fear stirred a palpable current through the gathering. The unarmed onlookers crowded a step back, while first one, then another guard’s sword sang from their sheaths. They advanced, bristling; not to unlock shackles, but to hem Arithon s’Ffalenn inside a nervous circle of steel.
“You mistake what you see,” Vorrice said, his confidence oiled by the shielding ranks of his guardsmen. He smoothed a wrinkle from his robe and explained in condescending forbearance, “Felirin does not burn as a singer. He stands duly sentenced as the minion of the Master of Shadow. As such, every man must agree, he poses grave danger to all of us. No masterbard’s privilege can excuse those who side with the Spinner of Darkness. Such license would lead us to ruin. My given office, by the seal of this realm, is to rout out hidden servants of evil. You could be one of them. Tell me your name.”
“Tell me yours, instead, puppet!” A brazen contempt sharpened Arithon’s voice, clear over the crowd’s stirring murmurs behind him. “Or do you not wear another man’s gloves, and parrot another man’s lies to give yourself airs and importance? Show these people here you can think for yourself. Or take my promise, you’ll have a satire the five kingdoms won’t readily forget!”
“Remove him!” snapped Vorrice. “He has upset proceedings.”
The guardsmen pressed in, hampered. They were many ranged against one, without proper space to wield arms. Dakar watched them close in, racked by agonized helplessness. Like the stag menaced by the jaws of a wolf pack, their quarry must know: the least step in retreat would trigger aggression against him.
Arithon’s feet shifted stance beneath the cloak as he answered in searing, soft mockery. “A contest of force cannot make your cause right. You’re a misled zealot, or else hopelessly stupid.”
Vorrice bristled. “Should I care what you think?” Gold braid flashed at his cuff as he snapped knobby fingers at his guard captain. “Clap him in irons! He’ll share the minstrel’s pyre. Let him die in anonymity. The mother who named him won’t even weep when the sea wind has scattered his ashes.”
“But his mother didn’t name him,” a gruff, broken voice cut in.
“No,” Dakar groaned.
Forgotten at the stake, sick and bewildered from inhaled smoke and the blistering pain of burned legs, the condemned minstrel cleared his throat and spoke out. “You don’t know whom you address?”
Felirin raised his smudged face and laughed in dazed triumph for the fact he still breathed, singed and degraded, but graced with an unlooked-for protector. “You face the Master of Shadow himself, called Arithon by his maternal grandfather. And burn him? Just try! With my own eyes, in Tornir Peaks, I once saw his birth gift quench the fires spat from the jaws of a Khadrim.”
Arithon’s shout pealed through the crowd’s shocked astonishment. “Fool!” he cried to Vorrice. As though he were not cornered, nor helplessly outmatched, he surged ahead, seized the towering mistake of Felirin’s loose tongue as a tactic of raw desperation. “Did you think you could threaten a sorcerer’s minion with a mere ten guardsmen to defend you?”
He hurled off the cloak. The scream of black steel drawn from his sheath came entwined with a soundless descent of pure darkness.
Then that seamless, unnatural night burst in turn, smashed asunder by unbridled light.
The guardsman singled out as Arithon’s first target reeled back as the runes in the longsword, Alithiel, flared into white mage-fire in just cause of Felirin’s defense. The Paravian blade in a masterbard’s hand could not but welcome a free singer’s right to disseminate truth, clothed in the fine art of music.
Its cry of bright power sheared the air into recoil.
Undone by terror before blows could be struck, the sunwheel soldier fled. Behind the glass house, Dakar dropped prone as the untamed chord which had first Named the winter stars knifed through the ramshackle hamlet.
Seared blind by fierce light, struck deaf by a peon of resounding celebration, every man ranged against Arithon s’Ffalenn lost his will to attack. Thought faltered and stopped. Grand harmony grown too refined to endure held them rooted, until mortal spirit longed to escape the bounds of its own living flesh. Onlookers unmanned by sheer splendor broke down and wept for a rapture too mighty for reason to encompass, and for a beauty too sharp for the clay of earthbound senses.
The enchantment built to a shattering crescendo. Reduced to shrill screams, Vorrice cowered on the dais. His less fortunate guards lost wits to flee as the land itself woke in reply. The ground shook to that spiraling resonance of celebration. Dust flew as the wild winds sprang aloft, to spin the arch of the sky into ecstasy. Caught in the breech, man’s works became winnowed like so much chaff set to the flail.
The glass pigs whined into crystalline cracks. First one, then another of them sheared through and collapsed to a sleeting slide of white fragments. The crown’s Lord Examiner toppled from skewed planks and landed, raked bloody and weeping. None heard his distress. Any whose feelings had maligned Felirin became trapped in the well of raised force from the sword.
Deadwood burst new leaves. Forged metal heated in sympathetic vibration, until swords and armor racked apart into smashed links and tinseled shards. Within heartbeats, the prostrate, stupefied guard stood stripped to the shreds of their gambesons.
At the apex of power, charged head to foot by a wave of unbridled joy, Arithon s’Ffalenn cried aloud. Athera’s titled Masterbard, sound was his element. Ceded a cresting tide of roused earthforce, he required no mage-sight to apply the fine dictates of his training.
Dakar thrust to his feet, prepared for the outcome. The Teir’s’Ffalenn had accomplished much the same feat before, when an accident of song had unleashed the grand mysteries during a summer solstice in Jaelot.
Arithon raised his schooled voice. Merged with the harmonies fired by the sword, he sang the exacting resonance to wake steel. The bolts snapped in Felirin’s fetters. Chain and shackles clanged free. Limned in the glare of the Paravian guard spell, Arithon kicked aside smoking bundles of faggots. Cinders whirled, sullen, in his wake as he reached the dazed singer and shouldered the man’s failing weight.
“Run!” he implored.
In his hand, the sword passed through its crescendo. The sheeting flare off the runes bled from white to silver, then sank, sparkling into subliminal haze. While Arithon spun shadow to confuse their escape, Dakar reached his side, hands outthrust to stave off Felirin’s collapse.
He said, urgent, “You don’t have to walk far, we have horses.”
Together, he and Arithon hauled the singer away from the charred bundles of faggots. Drunken flight carried them through the dazed guardsmen. They wove past the stacked saltwort, and ducked under the eaves of the craft shed, to explosions of fragmenting glassware as the sword’s diminished vibration unleashed fresh destruction inside.
To Arithon, in horrified admiration, Dakar gasped, “Ath preserve! If you planned this, you know you’ve just handed Lysaer’s Alliance all the fighting cause they need to raise the whole countryside against you.”
Running as though traced in a frozen strobe of lightning, Arithon stung back in dry irony, “That’s presupposing we manage to survive the next hour. Once that examiner and his guard find their wits, they’ll be at our heels like fell vengeance.”
Parchment and Seal
Spring 5653
Nine years into crowned rule, King Eldir of Havish still bore the weight of royal office like the encumbrance of effete finery draped on the shoulders of a laborer. His blunt nose, square face, and bluff manner were misleading. More than his high council and his guild ministers had been fooled into believing they could intrigue as they pleased, masked in deferent manners and false honesty. When the shrewdest of them all, the Lo
rd Mayor of Westcliff, took a hard fall in his effort to thwart the disbanding of the headhunters’ leagues, the king was barely eighteen, still fresh from his Fellowship coronation, and nicked with scabs from inept first acquaintance with a razor.
By the hour of his Grace’s twenty-first birthday, those titled officials left standing knew not to regard the Westcliff affray as a slip of poor luck or chance accident. By main strength and hard wits, his Grace of Havish had routed the most entrenched town policies from their bloodletting feud against clansmen.
At the age of twenty-six, the realm remained in firm hand, with the Second Age site at Telmandir crawling with stonemasons working to lift tumbled walls out of ruin. If Eldir still donned his state jewels with reluctant, stiff-shouldered forbearance, only those outside ambassadors who were deaf to advice misread his farmbred appearance. Even in private conference with a Sorcerer, his peat brown eyes stayed disarmingly direct. His hands, square and blunt, rested at ease. Beneath them, the inked script of state parchments unfurled across the battered deal planks which served as his council-hall table.
“Choose your stance firmly,” said Sethvir of Althain, perched opposite. His woodsprite’s face peered out in concern from a wren’s nest of tangled white hair. Shadowed by the gloom under soot-darkened ceiling vaults, he seemed a bundle of discarded maroon velvet, crossed legs tucked up like a child’s in the ostentatious gilt chair Eldir kept at hand to mollify disputing merchants. His inquisitive fingers traced the earthenware mug nestled askew in his lap as he added, “I pity the need that makes this step necessary, and I warn, what peace you buy will be temporary.”
Without visible emotion, the king snapped his fingers to his secretary, then accepted the waiting, dipped quill. He jagged the bold loops of his signature as if the act by itself framed defiance. In truth, no footing for compromise existed. The ban on slave labor was a point of charter law, held in faith by the Fellowship Sorcerers’ sworn compact with the Paravians.
“Since I don’t plan to abdicate, pity has no place.” Eldir’s dark regard rested back on Sethvir. “I won’t have my edict against slavery defied. Nor will I see my harbormasters tempted with bribes that beguile them to treason, or bend them to the whim of Tysan’s botched politics for the sake of a shipping guild’s profits.” The king’s eyebrows knitted in distasteful memory of the death sentence just enacted against three high-ranking offenders. “My relations with Prince Lysaer are already strained over principle. Well then, my port magistrates need waste no more trials collaring the scoundrels who meddle in the breech.”
If Prince Lysaer’s guilds pursued trade with the cities of Havish, they would ply the king’s coast in galleys rowed by free crews.
The pen was passed back. The efficient, mousy secretary had wax already heated, Havish’s great seal and scarlet ribbons prepared from long habit as the royal fingers snapped again.
Eldir impressed the realm’s blazon, the formality of his words at odds with his gesture as he skated the parchment across the worn trestle to Sethvir. “As King of Havish, sanction is asked with my sealed intent. This day I request Fellowship assistance to enforce the realm’s charter, bound to me by oath from my line’s founding ancestor, Bwin Evoc s’Lornmein.”
“By your leave.” The Sorcerer traced an apparently negligent finger over the wafer of warmed wax. His gaze stayed fixed on the other hand, aimlessly rolling his mug to and fro, while his drifty regard seemed absorbed by the shifting, whorled patterns sluiced through the grounds by the dregs.
King Eldir knew better. Moment to moment, immersed in the world’s multiplicity of events, Sethvir tracked the life threads of men, and sparrows, and flies. On that one second’s effortless thought, his consciousness unriddled a chain of disturbance that whipped the southcoast of Korias to a burst of unseasonal activity.
His far-flung awareness sensed three riders in flight, two of them unwell; and a storm brewing; and the shouts of post riders dispatched at speed to raise Alliance guardsmen from Middlecross. In the immediate quiet of the king’s patient presence, magecraft bloomed under the Sorcerer’s touch. A star of etched light flared over the fresh wax. Deft, precise, Sethvir traced a circle of glyphs. Spells stitched the air like the indelible glitter of foil ribbon. When he lifted his hand, the cipher remained, a fiery imprint cast across the royal blazon to seal promise of a Fellowship binding.
“Post fair warning,” he murmured, while untold miles to the north, a gray palfrey stumbled and her rider whimpered in pain. Speech maintained his divided train of thought. “In thirty days’ time, Traithe will travel your coastline to raise an enchained spell of proximity. When his work stands complete, any galley to raise sight of Havish’s shores will have no fettered oarsmen, on peril of Fellowship intervention. Every man set in manacles or kept under duress will have his steel struck by cold sorcery. Slave convicts go free, with their captains and crews to be held at the mercy of crown justice.”
“And the ships?” the King asked. “They’ll remain tagged with banespells?”
Sethvir shifted, his half-lidded gaze rinsed the lucent turquoise of a sky-caught imprint in a rain puddle. His distracted reply whispered echoes across the lofty expanse of the hall. “Impound them. Or set them afire as you please, though they’ll float without hindrance for a paid crew.”
Outdoors, the sun emerged from a cloud. Barred light streamed through the west bank of lancet windows, hazed with airborne dust. The sliced edge of the mote crossed the Sorcerer’s bent knee. Against the lit flare of wine-colored velvet, his hand clamped into a fist.
“Trouble?” asked King Eldir.
“Not yet.” Seconds passed, while the secretary fidgeted and Sethvir’s pixie features retreated into the semblance of doddering blankness.
A dutiful page boy poised by the doors rushed a step to rescue the tea mug, in danger of upset amid the folds of the Warden’s robe.
The king’s quelling gesture deflected the kindness. “Let be, lad.”
A minute trickled by, elusive as the fall of sand grains sieved through an hourglass. Then Sethvir blinked, stirred, and linked crooked knuckles through the rumpled fall of his cuffs. He flashed a conspirator’s wink to the page and rescued the canted mug himself. “A trip to the kitchen would not be amiss. Could you bring back a fresh pot of tea?”
His pert smile saw the boy off on his errand, yet the glance he bestowed back on King Eldir stayed as lapsed into distance as a fog-bank. “Merciful maker,” he grumbled. “If I’m overtaxed by any one thing, it’s intransigent princes who run amok without the saving bad grace of planting even one bastard on a tavern wench. When you marry next week, grant our Fellowship a boon. Breed up a clutch of royal heirs.”
A cough as rich as aged oak escaped Eldir’s sturdy palm. “Dare I guess?” Only one other childless scion in Athera was the last of his family line. “Is Arithon being difficult again?”
Sethvir raised miffed eyebrows. “That sort of indulgence would be blessed relief where the Teir’s’Ffalenn is concerned, well you know as much.”
King Eldir curled his knuckles against his lips to nip his impolitic laughter. One disruptive visit to his court had been enough; Rathain’s prince had countered Tysan’s public campaign of eradication through a volatile mix of unlawful conniving and a devilish bent for playing unconscionable stakes. No matter that Havish stayed neutral through the feud sown by Desh-thiere’s curse. All spring, the dockside at Ostermere had seethed with bold talk concerning the rigged ships disappeared from their Riverton launchings. If rumor held truth, the marauding crews included disaffected clansmen from Tysan.
Since no mind might fathom the full scope of Arithon’s design, the King of Havish asked outright, “What’s Rathain’s prince done this time?”
Sethvir blinked. “Raised a hue and cry that has every crown-commissioned guard in south Korias lathering good horses to kill him.” He scowled into space, while the reflexive span of his consciousness mapped the speed and direction of more than one far-distant set of hoofbeats. Then
his branching thoughts riffled like cards through a player’s deck, testing the probable offshoots of consequence.
Amid myriad moments of unformed possibility, one stood forth, a diamond-clear crossroads of movement and intent pared to the fixed edge of destiny: in three days’ time, guardsmen under a Hanshire captain named Sulfin Evend would close upon the three fugitives. The spells of illusion and misdirection the Mad Prophet spun to evade them would fail, because in the past, their commander had studied with the boy wards of the Koriathain. He understood very clearly how spellcraft could upset the hierar chy of political power. The grown man had sworn his sword to the Alliance to confront the source of that fear.
The King of Havish said something.
Althain’s Warden replied, his mind still enmeshed with the whirlwind array of unborn happenstance: when Dakar the Mad Prophet would come to scribe a distress rune in blood upon the surface of a stone. Under the light of a chilly, gray dawn, he would dry the figure in flame, then cast the construct into a streamlet. At the hour his appeal for help reached the Fellowship, time would be too short to act.
Sethvir shifted the are of his thoughts. A fraction of an instant let him catalog what resource he might call to hand. Though his powers as a Fellowship Sorcerer were overwhelmingly sufficient to effect complete rescue then and there, he would not, must not, do other than allow the threatened parties to act to save themselves. The reprieve he had won from a past outside of Athera’s historical record still haunted; still seared his waking awareness. A stock of experience too bitter to endure had stamped its mark of immutable truth.
By the Law of the Major Balance, his Fellowship could not use direct force to intervene without unseating the course of the world’s destiny.
The audience with King Eldir suffered a small lapse as the grievous pain of past losses weighed on the Sorcerer’s heart. He was not complacent. Once, before drake-dream had snatched the Fellowship of Seven to Athera, he and his colleagues had enacted their will for a cause. They had paid for their meddling with appalling consequences. He could not but ache before the chill wisdom that for Desh-thiere’s curse, his Fellowship must resist the temptation to relive the same choices again.