Set against an ebb tide, the ferry passage to Middlecross required a half day to complete. The landing was accomplished amidst heat and haze in the close, summer fetor of a port town. While a dithering harbormaster recovered from receiving the royal party unwarned, Lirenda went her separate way and arranged passage by galley to Capewell.
The Prince of the Light saw her off with smooth courtesy, then made his presence felt among the town council through the due process of royal requisition. His small company prevailed against gathering crowds and deafening cries of adulation. On demand, his captain procured the fittest, fresh horses. Under the limp folds of the sunwheel banner, the two dozen mounted and rode out, watched by awed merchants and idle children, and by sailhands staggering drunk from the taverns who wandered upon the commotion. The prince’s guard left behind a furor of fresh hope, and rumor that would spread east and north by the trade couriers.
Under sparse clouds like melted enamel, they left the trade road and crossed into the flats with a local guide to lead them. Across the windswept leagues of tilled farmland, past barking dogs and the stares of herders and goodwives, they pressed lathered horses. Four men were left when remounts ran short, and the day bled away toward sunset. Angled light stabbed flecks in the mica which crusted the striated rock. In ragged order, the company clattered across barren crests and dried gullies. They churned, slapping midges, through the mud of the sinkholes where the fog was first to gather, then camped by the glow of a three-quarter moon veiled under bridal-lace mist.
Astride once more in the half-light of dawn, the sea fogs like smoke about them, they passed the last inhabited farmstead; then its outlying sheep stanks of tumbledown stone, crusted in moss and gray lichen. Except for chinking bits and the creak of saddle leather, the riders might have been ghosts. They poured through the crossstitched fronds of the willow thickets and exchanged no chatter at all.
Prince Lysaer led, his gleaming gold hair and scintillant jewels unearthly against the bald slabs of striated granite which scabbed that desolate setting.
The men at his back had outworn their will to raise spirits through railing banter. While the fogs rolled and shredded, and hazed sun speared down and raised trickling sweat under padded gambeson and helm, they dared set no words to their dread. No mind among them could grapple the horrors they might be required to face.
Somewhere ahead, forty competent soldiers had been swallowed alive by fell magic. The ones who rode now in sworn duty to try rescue owned no better protection than steel swords and their obdurate faith in the Light.
For Lysaer s’Ilessid himself, the bleak landscape left unpleasant, slack hours to think. His aching grief for Talith’s loss became a torment of wretched persistence. As though the mainstay to his intellect had splintered like glass, pain left its branding reminder. Circling memories reopened old scars. The cycle of betrayal and abandon begun by his s’Ahelas mother now magnified and replayed, until he wished he was numb to all passion.
The friend who might have shared his hour of mourning lay dead, slain along with the war host massacred by the dark on the field at Dier Kenton Vale.
Nor could the Prince of the Light claim the luxury of solitude, even with the onset of night. The warren of scrub willow where the field troop made camp afforded no privacy for grief. Lysaer spoke and ate where necessity demanded. Duty bound to the needs of his men, he lay wakeful and watched the summer constellations melt slowly into the mist. The hour saw him more alone than he had ever been since the hour of his birth. Isolated by his royal rank, and by the cause that he shouldered to amend the defenseless plight of humanity, he still could not hide from himself.
Around him, no sound but the dry scrape of crickets; the plink of seeping water from a rock spring could not lull him to the forgetful oblivion of sleep. Nor could he silence his rampaging hurt.
Once, his marriage to a single woman had threatened to seduce him from his oathsworn obligation to bring down the Master of Shadow. Now Talith was gone. Temptation removed, he had not gained relief. Death had not brought him one iota of freedom from the drawing agony of her allure, which had dreadfully threatened to snap his integrity and undermine all his high principles. He felt newly lost. No grand cause could bridge the terrible vacancy love had left torn through his heart.
The only fire that remained to be fanned was his hatred for Arithon s’Ffalenn.
The Shadow Master’s cleverness had manipulated Princess Talith to betrayal. In the months of her abduction, his accursed, scheming wiles had orchestrated her estrangement. Lysaer s’Ilessid endured the chill fact that he owned nothing dear in the world on which to build a
bright future. Empty himself, royal justice demanded he not shirk his responsibility for the needs of his people. His life had meaning only if he delivered their destiny from the manipulative powers of the mageborn.
Yet even the comfort of resolve left him hollow.
Lysaer locked his teeth against flooding, bitter rage as the scourge of his faithless mother’s s’Ahelas farsight mocked him to gritty self-honesty. At least for tonight, he could not mask the lie: he shouldered the challenge of the grimward for raw need, that the rooted aversion he held for all sorcery might drown out the pain of his loss.
Dawn saw him the first man arisen from his blankets. He still led the company through the baked heat of high morning. Starburst reflections jumped off the mica from the flood of sun overhead. Where bare rock was covered, the horses plowed chest high through topaz tassels of goldenrod and saw grass. Their hooves thudded over sod matted with gorse and bracken in the gullies which still hoarded moisture.
The land seemed empty, a circle of silence sealed under limitless sky. Then, with no warning, the horses took alarm. They snorted, necks rigid, their tails and ears raised, as if some uncanny presence raised distrust. No effort would settle them. Spur and rein, and feats of skilled horsemanship failed to restore their willing temperament.
“We’ll dismount.” Lysaer vaulted off his skittering mount, then waved for the hook-nosed local shepherd who served as guide to approach for immediate consultation. “Are we near the place where the men disappeared?”
“Your Grace, no.” The man rammed the cork in the neck of his skin flask, mopped his dripping mustache, and glanced uneasily over both shoulders. “That site lies another day’s ride to the east.”
Down the ranks, a man slapped a fly. The report caused the guide to start out of his skin. “We should leave here. Animals are wiser to danger than we.”
“I didn’t come this far to run at the first breath of trouble.” Lysaer raised his head, squinting against the glare of full noon. The strained quiet extended, while around him, the breeze stilled and died. Men shuddered with odd chills and gooseflesh. An insidious need stole over the mind to turn tail and beat swift retreat.
Chin up, eyes forward, his dust-caked surcoat straight on trim shoulders, Lysaer s’Ilessid masked the icy, first onset of fear. Only his stance of unmalleable determination kept the men steadfast at his heels.
A horse stamped. On a choking intake of breath, the local guide whirled and ran, thrashing a headlong course through the brush in blind panic to take himself elsewhere.
“Steady, keep sharp!” barked the captain. “Docked pay for any man who breaks from his place in the ranks!”
Suddenly the air gained an unsettled density, unsubtle and heavy as quartz. Sunlight fell magnified in unexplainable brilliance, as though the sky itself had turned refractive. The stabbed reflections off mail shirts and metallic gear caught in queer, actinic sparkles that befuddled clear vision. Then all natural sense of direction dissolved.
“By the light, we’re being witched!” the bannerman gasped, shaken.
Lysaer touched the man’s shoulder with quelling strength. “Be still.” In reckless defiance, he raised his fist high and issued his own challenge in pure light.
The bolt seared aloft like the quenching shriek of hot steel. Its dazzling radiance slammed into resistance and summoned a veil
of blank fog. Gray wisps eddied and curled, first as disorganized rags of vapor, then as a frothing, impenetrable veil which expanded to mask the known landscape.
To the men-at-arms rooted in trembling obedience, the surge of Lysaer’s gift seemed to collide with an uncanny barrier of mage-force.
“Light save us!” the royal equerry cried through the murmur of another man’s prayers.
The words rang flat and echoless with distance. Seared blind by the stifled, white radiance of his effort, Lysaer s’Ilessid fed the hard edge of his terror through the inborn channels of his talent. The more fight he raised, the more tightly he felt the unmalleable vortex of force twine like wire about his person. He sensed the connection. On the shaken verge of panic, he burned his gift like balefire, determined to rout the magecraft which bore down as if he had been chained as its target.
Visceral fear ripped through him.
Then the veil which masked mortal sight from the infinite tore across and shattered into light. The beacon this time was not of his making; his birth mastery could not grapple or bind it.
He beheld no land, no rock, no live body. Around him and through rang the dance of pure energy that fired the chord of Ath’s mystery. A fist of dauntless power embraced him. He could not move, could not think, only be, melded as one with the forces which pealed to unbearable crescendo and Named him out of the void.
A cry like a shard of clear crystal lanced his mind.
“Lysaer, Prince of the Light, deliver me safe from the darkness!”
For one sustained second, ephemeral as moonlight on snow, or the whisper of thermals through a hawk’s wing, the whole substance of displaced reality seemed to pivot and spin on its balance.
Then a peal of thunder cracked the luminescent air. Vibrations slapped his person with ranging force, tearing earth and sky back into solidified existence.
The land had not changed. Clear sun shone down, untrammeled by strange mists. Shocked speechless and scarcely able to stand upright, Lysaer s’Ilessid saw that his company of guards had been thrown to a man from their feet.
For a disjointed moment, they remained in stunned fear, flinching and paralyzed from reaction. Then a breeze stroked the weed tassels. A wren sang. The day resurged in all its diverse normality, while shocked men rubbed flash-blinded eyes. They groped after dropped weapons. A stupefied handful of seconds crept by before any of them noticed the miracle.
A dust-coated, haunted captain at arms was sprawled weeping at Lysaer’s feet.
The prince blinked. He could not place the man’s wiry, dark hair, nor the bloody gash raked down his forearm. The filthy, torn blazon on his surcoat was no sunwheel, but a sable stag on a scarlet shield.
His own captain was first to exclaim from the sidelines. “Hanshire? Sulfin Evend?” The name raised a babble of incredulous shouting.
“Look! Ath, it’s him!”
“One of those who was taken by dark sorcery!”
“Behold! Did you see? My Lord Prince of the Light has recovered the lost company’s commander from the well of oblivion!”
Lysaer took firm grip on his rattled nerves. Plunged into shocked chill, still half-unmoored and consumed by his struggle to dismiss the chord of grand mystery which had touched him, he fell back on reflexive inspiration. He caught the prostrate man’s pitifully thin shoulder and raised him in a brother’s embrace.
Then he studied the face, a square-jawed stranger’s.
His racing heart rejected the implication, though to his bones, he knew. The powers which had redeemed the lost captain were none of his own. His memory of their uncanny strangeness pried at logic, undid belief, to the massive upset of clear principle.
Denial remained. If sorcery was wrought from the heart of life’s source, if music and grand harmony and clean balance framed its powers, then Lysaer rocked on the edge of the abyss. All that he strove to accomplish in the world became unveiled as a misguided illusion.
“No.” Lysaer shut his eyes, his two hands locked and shaking. Conflicted by self-honesty and devastated pride, he ached through a moment of absolute crisis, before he recalled his own truth: the adepts of Ath’s brotherhood once sought to sway him the same way. They had used such diabolically crafted illusion to distort his perception, and blind honor, and convince him that Arithon s’Ffalenn was born innocent.
Indeed, what better way to seduce a mortal will from right action than to cloak perfect evil in a seamless, evocative beauty?
Around him, his dedicated company were clamoring for attention. He heard words, felt the heat of their worshipful astonishment. Sulfin Evend was speaking of his sojourn through terror, of seeing his small troop of men torn and savaged by monsters drawn from the First Age. He described landscapes cloaked in ice which had changed into mountains, or chasms of boiling rock between one man’s step and the next. “Of all who followed in pursuit of the Shadow Master, I was the last left alive.”
“Fellow, you’re bleeding,” the royal captain interjected. “Let’s see that arm.” At his reprimand, the equerry was sent to fetch bandages from a saddlebag.
“There was a Sorcerer,” Sulfin Evend gasped, while a man knelt and cut away the clotted shreds of his sleeve to bare his untended wound. “He wore dark robes. While the rocks of Sithaer itself boiled and burned and ran molten about me, he came and forced me to walk down the throat of a dragon’s skull. I fought him. He told me to cease struggling, that resistance was wasted. Then he flung me into the dark.”
“Ugly, but just scrapes,” the royal captain informed, his examination complete. “You’re lucky the mess hasn’t festered.” He accepted the dollop of poultice paste the remiss equerry had mixed from stored remedies and a waterskin.
While his gashes were dressed, the victim insistently pursued his story, trembling from shock and amazement at his deliverance. “I knew I would be imprisoned in that place for all time. In my hour of despair I called on the Name of the Prince of the Light, and was heard!” He turned shining, worshipful eyes upon the blond-haired scion of s’Ilessid who stood a half step removed from his honor guard. “Praise your Grace! The blessed powers of Light have triumphed over darkness, and I stand before you alive.”
The instant the bandage was secure on his arm, he pushed through the men and knelt once again at the feet of Lysaer s’Ilessid. “I have seen the truth. You are sent by divine mission to deliver us from darkness.”
Surrounded by the worshipful circle of his men, the prince understood he must keep the pretense of manhood and react. If not, he risked being forced to explain how narrowly he had escaped an insidious and subtle attack of enemy subterfuge.
He laid his crossed hands upon Sulfin Evend’s bent head. Unable to imagine how a man could stay sane through a harrowing ordeal wrought of sorcery, he chose utmost tact and said gently, “You need not still serve.”
The Hanshire captain’s fervent response became the balm which cemented cracked faith, and distanced the grief of Talith’s passing.
“My lord prince, I would walk through Sithaer yet again to join in your battle against darkness!” Sulfin Evend tipped up his transformed, avid face. “Your Grace of the Light, let me ride at the fore-front of your troops, that the spirit you have saved from the pit of evil should inspire others to stand strong.”
Touched to relief, that a man of such fiber wished to carry his sunwheel banner against the legions of Shadow before him, Lysaer s’Ilessid raised the wiry Hanshire captain to stand erect at his side.
“You shall command the host of my field army.” His royal admiration was no less than sincere as his choice squared battered shoulders under the singed tatters of his Hanshire surcoat. “The cause of humanity stands strengthened this day by the priceless gift of your courage. Your mettle is proven, Sulfin Evend. Your name shall resound unforgotten throughout history. No braver heart in all of Athera could spearhead the honor of the Light!”
Weeks after Lysaer’s new Commander of Armies received his investiture at Avenor, the focus circle beneath Alth
ain Tower captured light and then blazed into an actinic coruscation of raised power as a spelled tracer crossed the veil. A template of slipped time interlocked and aligned. Hurled through that storm’s eye by the much delayed impetus of his homecoming, Asandir set foot on firm stone and staggered.
The Warden stood waiting by the center of the pattern; Sethvir caught his colleague’s weak-kneed, failing weight before he measured his length.
“Blessed Ath,” Asandir whispered. “I’d hoped you might meet me.”
Around him, the restive flare of raised lane force sparkled and churned like a river flood sucked into whirlpool. Its brilliant intensity all at once shattered thought. His eyes would not focus. The laced mesh his own powers had called into being hazed into a blur, and his knees buckled under him after all. Despite the help of the Warden’s staunch shoulder, Asandir understood in dismay he was not going to stave off collapse.
The dwindled reserves he tapped for clear speech became unimaginably precious. “The Major Balance is served.” He paused to control a spasming shudder. “The Hanshire captain has been sent through alive.”
“I know. He crossed back six weeks ago.” Matter-of-fact before the shocking, hot touch of Asandir’s clothing, Sethvir shifted his grip. “Don’t speak.” He clapped out a spark of conflagration with his palm, felt the stout weave of cloth and worn leather tatter away into ash. “I’m here. You don’t have to fight to stay standing anymore.”
With utmost gentle care, he eased his colleague’s rangy frame onto the cool, grounding stone of the floor. One quelling word scribed a rune on the air. In response, the excited flare of stressed power dispersed. The focus patterns dimmed and subsided back into their dancing blue glimmer of quiescence.