Long minutes passed, pressed in the musty atmosphere of sun-heated felt. Morriel’s breath rasped in and out, stirring through the stale musk of age. The astringency of brewed herbs hung over a room that resonated with the hollow stillness of a sealed drum. Silence reigned, fraught with the Prime’s brooding fury. The candle burned, a smokeless, bright finger in its graceful bronze stand, the floor tiles and the tapestries glinting rich colors only inside of its inadequate light. The spun gold of its touch edged a corner of silk counterpane, and mapped each infinitesimal crease surrounding Morriel’s black eyes. Nothing else moved. The Prime’s features seemed a cast-porcelain impression, assembled from a caricature of knotted old rags pinned on a framework of skull. Her fingernails gleamed dulled ivory, the skin shriveled beyond any inclination to give or take simple pleasures.
Only power remained, a dragon’s balefire caged in sapped flesh by the thorns of bound duty and a dauntless, implacable dedication. Though each passing second bespoke final failure, and the allure of oblivion and death, the Prime’s obsidian pupils stayed focused and sharp, sparked by a dangerous impatience.
If that last, held bastion of will should give way, the Matriarch would pass from her office unsucceeded. None other than she could measure the scope of such loss, or comprehend the risk of backlash into cataclysm as prime power ranged free with no prepared vessel at hand to contain the accumulated burden of stored consciousness. Too aware of the fragility holding the balance, the seeress responded, her words like scratched glass against her Prime’s nettled expectation. “The crystal was parted from our First Senior by a liegeman of Prince Arithon’s. He bore the name Caolle.”
“What?” Morriel’s screech of astonishment shocked the dense quiet, and the quilts jumped to the lash of her fist. “That man should have perished in Riverton of blood loss brought on by a sword thrust!” Hurled into rage beyond reach of aged strength, the Prime Matriarch ranted on in a whisper. “What has my First Senior done?”
“Your pardon, matriarch. I do not know.” The seeress cringed, shaken out of contact with her talents. “I cannot see her. The crystal will not show her presence, no matter where on the continent I search.”
Morriel blinked, her eyes two jet rivets. “That’s because she is masked by salt water.” One forearm twitched, as if under the skin, the nerves leaped to jolts of pure fire. Next to the duller agony of stiff joints, the torment of pure gall burned the hotter. The Koriani Prime had spent painstaking centuries grooming a successor, only to suffer this balking defeat at the hands of a dying clan swordsman. “More to the point, where is Lirenda’s spell crystal now? Who guards the imprinted key to her life, and for what unprincipled purpose?”
Another strung interval, while the seeress bent her head and sought answers across time and distance. Behind tight-latched mullions, the curtains did not stir to the crack of the late-afternoon sea breeze. Morriel lay, her shut lids like blued eggshells. In one of the windows, a trapped fly buzzed and battered for freedom. Its wings striking glass made her nerves flare and sear in sparks of pain from the sound.
In the end, submersed in a suffocating tension, the seeress’s answer came clear as flung acid with the impacting force of ill news.
“The crystal resides in the hands of Lord Maenol’s barbarians. They have instructions to give it into Prince Arithon’s keeping. There can be no chance of its rescue, even by the invasion of Caithwood by the Alliance troops. The clan scouts are jubilant with the fresh news that the ships out of Riverton’s royal yard were retaken. Due to Caolle’s intervention, and our First Senior’s coercion, every one of the Shadow Master’s condemned henchmen escaped from captivity while at sea.”
Morriel’s eyes flickered open, her weighted quiet an obsidian knife that could have scored lines in new iron. “There has been a betrayal,” she announced at raw length. Her clawed forefinger crooked on the counterpane. “Come here,” she directed. “I would know where our First Senior hides now. I can find out by means of your talents, but only if your link to her spell quartz is given over to my disposal.”
The seeress swallowed. Sweat trickled at her throat. Though she knew her free will was demanded in sacrifice, her vows left no recourse to refuse. Her talents were at the command of her order to spend for the greater good of humanity.
“You will come to no harm,” Morriel assured, brisk, and beckoned again for close contact.
The seeress arose; not young herself, her knees stiffened in complaint from the hour spent seated on bare flooring. She offered the crystal between her cupped hands in surrender to the will of her Prime Matriarch.
Morriel extended a skeletal finger. Her palsied touch traced a dark sigil over the quartz sphere. If her body was wasted, her powers were immense. A force rocked the sealed room like the shock of a thunderclap. The seeress quailed outright, chilled by recognition that she witnessed none other than the cipher of prime dominion, imprinted upon each initiate who swore oath. The one mighty cipher set a brand like a shackle, and granted the Koriani Matriarch her authorized ascendancy over all aspects of free will.
The sigil sieved into the clear quartz like a stain, a shadow wrought from the stuff of deep nightmare that spilled and frayed and darkened the crystal’s bright depths. There, the force hovered, pulsing with currents that shocked through live flesh and negated the most passionate coil of desire. Lightless and cold, it realigned the core matrix of the quartz, then spilled over and laid claim to the seeress’s awareness.
She flinched in recoil. The crystal’s transmission released a shearing sting of heat against her cradling palms. Engulfed by vertigo, she was unable to move as Morriel Prime pronounced the guttural words to key mastery. The sigil fired and took form. Its barbed force claimed thought and mind, then erased the last imprint of individuality. The resonance of subjugation shattered the frail web of the seeress’s consciousness. Will, self, and senses sucked away into vacuum, first dashed to powder, then whirled into void by a tide of cyclonic intervention.
Oblivion remained.
Seconds passed, or eternity; time lost all meaning as the spiraling force of the crystal’s transmission ranged across distance.
Then, like smashed ice reformed through smelting heat and dire cold, new sensation reassembled. The seeress no longer beheld the sun-drenched beachhead by Mainmere, noisy with exuberant clansmen. The eyes she gazed out of were not her own, but those of First Senior Lirenda…
Under a sky silted in low-hanging stringers of cloud, the harbor at Corith lay untenanted except for the churned phalanxes of whitecaps as the brig Lance threaded her inbound course through the chain of flanking islets. She dropped anchor against a stiff wind. The rock basin which gleamed fired russet in sunlight, under dampness wore the blotched tang of rusted iron. Slate waters rolled, and the air smelled of wet rock, and the faint trace of ozone which warned of an oncoming gale.
By the aft rail, the Alliance captain deposed by Caolle’s bold strategy stared shoreward. His locked hands stayed braced on new varnish, while over and over, the unraveling spume of the breakers sheeted the jagged crescent strand. The testy temperament once raised in defiance of Koriani sailing orders had deflated to fretful humility since the loss of his flagship command.
His pride was ashes. Anxious to please lest the First Senior’s testimony reveal the sad fact of his damning lack of fight before surrender, he volunteered his opinion concerning the vacant anchorage. “The Alliance fleet from Hanshire included oared galleys. Weather’s set up to blow, as you see. If Prince Lysaer’s ships are still here, they’ll be tucked up tight in deep shelter. Captains who’ll row on blue water know weather, or they don’t survive. They’d have winched up on land, high and dry on log skids. Else they’re crammed into some cove behind a barrier reef, where Sithaer’s own demons couldn’t raise enough swell to kick up a rank sea into combers.”
Another gust thrummed through the stays. First Senior Lirenda clamped manicured fingers over her billowing silk. A wayward strand of dark hair escaped anyway, to st
ream and snap a refrain to her fierce irritation. Her lighter mantle buffeted against the captain’s oiled cloak, while the silence magnified her indifference toward particulars. Whether or not the Prince of the Light would agree to trade off hostages with a pirate crew loyal to the Shadow Master, the stakes to her personal dilemma stayed unchanged. Moment to moment, she lived in blank dread, besieged by the knowledge her bonded crystal was withheld on the mainland, guarded by enemy hands.
The Min Pierens archipelago, with its forbidding, scarred cliffs and wind-mangled stands of crabbed cedar, wore its mantle of storm cloud in savage reflection of her mood. Yet where nature could stir the unrestrained elements into primordial fury, she must guard her vulnerability behind a mannered facade of restraint. She could do nothing but suffer her impotent rage for talents removed beyond access. Beneath anger and poisonous humiliation, she wrestled the insidious fear, that mishap could unstring every thread of her ambition and ruin her beyond salvage.
She had scarcely spoken through the weeks since the Lance had made covert landfall in Havish. There the prize crew loyal to Arithon had boarded a mannerless cohort of fortune-seeking mercenaries. At sea, the men had no enemy but boredom. They wrestled and grew crapulous and picked fights. Rather than suffer their attacks of lewd humor, Lirenda stayed out of sight. The fortnight’s offshore passage to the Isles had been spent locked in the privacy of her cabin. She came on deck for the landfall well aware she must keep up the semblance of appearances. Clothed in the eighth-rank robes of a Koriani First Senior and the empty trappings of power, she despised her reduction to female uncertainty, disposition of her fate given into the hands of these rough-cut, fallible men.
The lookout hailed down from the crosstrees. “Longboat sighted! Bearing in on our starboard quarter, and flying the sunwheel blazon!”
Lirenda throttled the urge to cross the deck and gawk alongside the sailhands. Nor would she acknowledge the vanquished captain’s self-blinded lift of optimism. The rippling gilt snap of Prince Lysaer’s banner against the crocheted heave of the wavecrests promised her no deliverance. Reprieve from captivity would not remove her from jeopardy. Not when a thousand ways existed to erase the attuned bindings which linked her lost quartz to the spells that extended her vitality. If few rituals offered the horrific severance that Caolle had arranged for the healer, some were deadly innocent enough to occur through ignorant mishap.
A moment’s inept handling might plunge the stone into the sea. Saltwater cleansing would follow, a gentle dissolution of the wards that would span the course of several days. The first symptom might bloom with a nagging, dull headache. Weakness would follow. Then a fumbling loss of reflex, which would progress into fits of sick trembling and convulsions, until she died at last of paralysis, as her internal organs failed and ruptured, torn apart by the unleashed backlash of stayed time.
The slap of raw winds made her feel her mortality, and the unblemished hand held clenched to the rail only mocked her: she could wake any morning and find herself trapped in the witless, shriveled body of a hag.
Jostled movement beside her upset her dark thoughts. Lysaer’s displaced captain had turned aside to make inquiry, while on deck behind, a clipped shout in clan accents called for the deckhands to sway out a boat.
“Koriathain, my lady?” The deposed captain faced back and addressed her. “Signals have been relayed through an officer from Lysaer’s royal galley.” Uncertainty checked him. His palm left a broad, misty print on new varnish as he shifted to scrape at the beard stubble he now owned no blade to raze off. “The clan brigands agreed I should plead for an exchange of prisoners with the Prince of the Light.”
“Those plans have changed?” Lirenda gave him her haughty attention. “State what you wish.”
The man cleared his throat, his diffidence laughable. Deprived of her crystal, Lirenda owned no powers to cow him beyond glacial manners and deportment. If keen observation could still let her fathom the gist of his disorganized thinking, no schooled methodology could restore her lost key to access the complex sigils of spellcraft. “State your wish,” she repeated. To hide her distaste for his jettisoned male pride, she fixed her tigerish gaze on the tumbled and desolate shoreline.
The man’s knot of dread and embarrassment loosened. “An officer from the Alliance flagship has insisted, by word of his Grace, that you be the one sent to speak for the hostages.”
Which warped twist of fate held a piquant justice; Lirenda could have howled for the irony. Had her towering rejection of intimacy not forced her need to defeat Arithon s’Ffalenn, Morriel Prime’s design to ensnare him would have succeeded without setback. No fool’s round of bargaining over prisoners and slave oarsmen would need under-taking at all.
Caolle would have passed the Wheel back in Riverton, with Lirenda spared from her present coil of entanglement.
The First Senior made certain as she sealed an empty promise that her voice masked her sorry self-derision. “If human lives can be redeemed from the Shadow Master’s henchmen, the vows of my order require me to act to the absolute limit of my resources.”
Individual awareness reawakened. The seeress snapped back into herself, disentwined at a stroke from Lirenda’s close thoughts, and the leveling sting of shared shame. Jerked back into the heat of a Capewell afternoon, she raised her damp head. Her heart raced too fast. The lingering horror reeled through her from the secondhand taste of the First Senior’s appalling disgrace. The seeress blinked, then shuddered in revulsion, unable to bear the closed, cloying dimness of the Prime Matriarch’s bedchamber.
The quartz burned, the etheric web of its matrix torn by the masterful force of the sigil Morriel Prime had rammed through its transmission. Pillowed in stained lace, the Matriarch lay motionless. Her features were an expressionless skull, swathed in crimped skin, only animated by the devouring intensity of jet eyes. Her glance in that hour could have pierced flesh and bone to plunder thought straight from the mind. Of all harbingers of disaster, this day’s scrying had delivered the penultimate stroke of ill news.
No setback could strike with such profound impact: the continuance of Koriani power had hung on Lirenda, First Senior.
Terrified to breathe lest any slight motion rip the dread stillness and ignite Morriel’s leashed wrath, the seeress froze in suspension. Alive to the unseen currents of danger, she hesitated to ask back her scrying sphere from the Prime Matriarch’s clasped fists.
Then the decision was spared her. Morriel unlocked her grasp on the quartz, though nothing else moved under the tucked layers of the counterpane. The pleats at her brow seemed starched into place. Her bitterness poisoned the stifling shadows that speared where the candle’s flame faltered. Her seamed lips held the limpid pallor of killed fish as she waved the seeress back from her bedside. “You may sit.”
“Your will.” The enchantress sank down, unsure whether she dared ask permission to cease further efforts at scrying. She knew of no precedents. If a betrayal had ever happened this high in the ranks during the order’s long history, none of her colleagues remembered. Lirenda’s defection left her stunned to incapacity, with the Prime’s disappointment an unvoiced anguish all the more deadly for being suppressed through an invalid’s weakness.
Nor had the seeress ever witnessed an augury cast across open salt water. She had always believed such a practice lay past the reach of the most advanced Koriani arts. The chill truth struck home, that the Matriarch’s seat required more preparation and knowledge than a senior enchantress imagined. Given the harsh fact, the enormity became crushing, that the one groomed successor had failed to maintain her integrity.
“Well you should fear,” said Morriel Prime. “There is only one glyph that can span the salt ocean. That is the sigil of mastery which I hold over each and every one of you, impressed on your oath of initiation. Spells spun through its vortex will track an enchantress, beyond every defense and safeguard. No place in this world lies exempt. There is no hiding. One who breaks faith cannot escape forfeit, n
o matter how far her flight takes her. Even death grants no surcease. Such spells have been used at need to call halt on the spirit in its final passage across the Wheel.”
The seeress knotted wet hands, shaking now, and unable to discern whether her Prime’s words were a warning, or a threat laid against the damaging evidence of Lirenda’s disobedience.
Nor did Morriel waste hoarded strength to volunteer clarification. “Leave me. Your duty is finished. You will tell nobody what you have witnessed concerning our order’s First Senior.” If setback and defeat at last undermined the tenacity of the Prime’s will, she yielded no sign. Her faint, husking voice still delivered her authority in snapping short consonants and clipped vowels. “The matter must bide until Lirenda returns. I will choose the day and the hour when she stands before me to receive my formal charge against her conduct.”
Reprieves
Summer 5653
Inside the circle of the Paravian grimward, Asandir defers his exhaustion and looses another net of spells to hold the dream of the ghost drake stable; while inside the bewildering coil of its spiral, yet another sunwheel soldier meets oblivion in spilled blood, leaving but three survivors of the original forty who followed the Hanshire captain, Sulfin Evend, in pursuit of the Master of Shadow…
In the null gray mists between the veil of the mysteries, Jieret s’Valerient’s naked spirit rides the winds, called ahead by the draw of a blood bond with his prince; and on the faint trail of his passage flies Traithe’s raven, bearing the tracking presence of Sethvir, who waits and watches at Althain Tower in the poised hope of effecting a rescue…
Steaming mists rise off the pools of Mogg’s Fen, where Lord Maenol crouches with a blooded band of scouts; and they move to crash the lines of yet another Alliance patrol, as yet uninformed that the campaign to break his clan foothold in Tysan has been defanged in the south: that two brigs from Riverton have made landfall at Mainmere, but flying the leopard blazon of Rathain…