“Borrow his horse, then,” Luhaine suggested. “You won’t keep him, otherwise.” The eddy of his presence settled and rearranged, surrounding his colleague’s battered form in a mantle of radiance that blazed sympathy in contradiction to his dour, ending comment. “Stubborn as old granite, and pernicious when crossed. Well you are!” Luhaine insisted, as though Asandir had spoken in defense.
Sethvir hid his smile behind his crooked fist and ducked out, while Luhaine lectured the unconscious colleague he tended. “You’ve shown the bad grace and poor manners to walk through my being before, when I tried making sensible comments on your health.”
Judgment
Late Summer 5653
Swathed in quilts sewn with sigils of vitality chain-stitched in silver thread, and propped upright against goose-down pillows like piled snowdrifts, Morriel ruled the Koriani Order from an enormous, carved bed at Capewell. Reduced to a skeleton swathed in blanched skin, she held the reins of her power close to her breast, her eyes still like fathomless beads of chipped jet. Her speech was sparing, each word precise as engraving.
She was attended night and day, served in her fragile state of infirmity by no less than the sisterhouse peeress, her matched pair of pages, and a young girl initiate of exceptional talent, brought across Tysan in whirlwind haste from her first initiation at Cainford.
On the same afternoon Sethvir mounted his colleague’s black stallion and rode out of Althain Tower, Morriel had a circle of seventhrank Seniors immersed in deep trance at her bedside. Behind heavy, drawn drapes, the medicinal air wore expectancy like a brewing storm. Twelve candles burned upon silver stands arrayed in a perfect arc. Each enchantress was linked to a distant seer, tied by gifted sight to the free lane force that ranged in bands across Athera.
No draft flickered the beeswax candles. No shimmer teased the embroidery. The women held still as figures in wax. Their tranced talents activated an array of quartz-crystal balls, pocketed in a half-circle formation amid the rose-pattern quilts tucked over the Prime’s crippled knees.
The Koriani Matriarch probed into the orbs like the listening spider slung in the strands of her web. One of these showed the dark horse and the rider, standing knee high in gold meadow grass. A maggot white smile turned the crone’s bloodless lips as that particular scrying unfolded.
She did not miss the fleeting moment when the crystal appeared to cloud over. Satisfaction twitched a ghost imprint of amusement across her emaciated face. “Watch closely,” she instructed the mollified young girl who attended the scrying at her elbow.
The initiate leaned nearer. Her braided blond hair trailed across the heaped bedclothes, and lush, rosebud lips loosed a sigh of awestruck wonder.
Inside the crystal, almost too faint to catch, a starred pulse of light flicked and vanished. A waving expanse of empty gorse remained, while a barred hawk arose and soared on spread wings. It circled the flinty spire of the tower, then banked and sheared in a graceful glide above the road which carved through the greener hills to the south.
“Hah!” The Koriani Prime gave a cackle of reedy delight. “I’d hoped so!” A withered stiff finger signed a rune of thanksgiving in the coppery light of the candles. “Events progress in fair form. Althain’s Warden has no choice but to engage the Great Circle at Isaer.”
With his tower’s main focus pattern fully engaged to stabilize Asandir’s life signs, the lane force at that site could not be retuned for transport. Nor could an unstable grimward be accessed as a homing point for the Sorcerer in transit.
Reedy with satisfaction, Morriel finished her thought. “We can safely presume Sethvir will cross by magecraft from Isaer to the Second Age ruin at Mainmere. He’ll be forced to ride the Taerlin road.” A round distance of a hundred and fifty leagues gave due time to plan without Fellowship interference.
The child initiate raised a round, freckled face, still written across with amazement. “Can the Fellowship Sorcerers really shapeshift?”
“Dear, no.” Morriel fixed her with lightless, fierce eyes hooded under domed lids and milk lashes. “Sethvir is a master illusionist.” She tapped the scrying crystal which imaged the flying hawk with the yellowed tip of a fingernail. “The travelers he encounters on his way will not see him. Even those with clairvoyance will believe they were brushed by no more than the shadow of a bird.”
She trailed off, words lapsed into the labored hiss of forced breath. For long moments, the sealed, airless quiet of the room absorbed her stifled frustration. The Great Waystone offered the power to cut through Sethvir’s ploys of illusion. Yet Morriel dared not attempt mastery of its matrix in her current depleted condition.
The mere effort of speech left her prostrate. Eyes shut, her hands curled on the coverlet like the wind-frozen claws of a sparrow, she needed long minutes to ease her heartbeat enough to dismiss the Senior circle and the twelve remote scryers. The quartz spheres she kept arrayed on the quilt. Each was now attuned to track the deflections that events imprinted on the earth’s lane force. The sealed crystals would continue to reflect their sequence of distant events until natural attrition disunified the linking sigils.
With Sethvir’s departure, no development held precedence ahead of the snag in affairs arrived home to roost at the Capewell sisterhouse.
Cut off from her access to the Great Waystone, Morriel had withheld her most critical business until the Fellowship watchdog, Luhaine, had been recalled to Althain Tower. Each passing minute became precious. Morriel hoarded her dwindled stamina while the last of the Seniors filed out in a whispery rustle of silk.
The door latch clicked shut.
“Veil yourself,” Morriel ordered the sisterhouse peeress. Amid musky stillness and the cat-footed shadows cast by the slow-burning candles, the shattering impact of her next command came with unprecedented lack of formality. “The hour has come to pass judgment. You shall stand as the order’s Ceremonial Inquisitor, and act as my voice through the coming closed trial.”
The stout peeress started, then inclined her head. “Your will, matriarch.” Her round, suet face turned prim with austerity as she bustled to the armoire to don the black robes of high office. Despite her stiff posture and clipped movement, she held no qualms over her assigned role; justice would be served for those acts of disharmony which had disrupted the serenity of her sisterhouse.
The wide-eyed young initiate remained seated in stunned shock by the bedside. The ritual about to commence was older than Koriani residence on Athera. Afraid her presence may have been summarily forgotten, she shrank, while one of the blond pages unpacked the elaborate silver-bordered layers of the inquisitor’s veils. When Morriel’s dry fingers closed over her elbow, she jerked with a soft, breathy cry.
“Bide, girl.” The Prime’s peremptory whisper seemed the scrape of glass beads through old dust. “You will stay on as a witness here.”
To the statue-still page boy at her right hand, she delivered a whipcrack instruction. “Fetch me the box with the Skyron focus. Then go and inform the sisterhouse warden that the hour has come for the accused to stand before me and answer for her misconduct.”
Upon receipt of her summons, First Senior Lirenda arose from her willow embroidery frame. She tidied her gold thread with unshaken hands. The needle she left pressed into drum-tight silk, like a fallen ray of light speared through darkness.
She could only hope the desperate strain did not show as she gave the page boy her acquiescence. Apparently without hurry, she removed her purple mantle from the clothes chest. Its folds sleeked her shoulders like poured Cheivalt wine, and spilled with extravagant grace over the shining cuffs of her matched bracelets, and her eight-banded robe of high office.
She had been Koriani First Senior for fifty-six years. Prepared in every detail for this audience, clear relief all but shook her, that the unbearable days of strained waiting had finally come to an end. She had not lost her heart or her spirit. Ignominy had not overtaken her courage and let her lapse into endless, pleading petitions f
or her Prime’s intercession.
Yet the confidence born of her grip on main strength bled away as she arrived at Morriel’s chamber.
The page boy swung open the strapped oaken door. “Madam,” he bade her. “Enter.”
Darkness as stilled as a panther’s tread awaited over the threshold. The air within breathed of close-kept secrets and a dusty perfume of dried lavender. For as long as living memory, the Koriani Prime had preferred the night for her significant meetings. When council could not be avoided in daylight, she ordered her chambers kept dark. The curtains were sewn of black damask and velvet. The dagged valance was looped on silver rings, each cast in the sigil for eternity, the triple-coiled snake trapped forever in the act of swallowing its own tail. The sulfurous, candlelit well by the bedstead seemed sealed in an ironclad silence.
Lirenda loosened her fingers before they impressed sweaty marks on her immaculate silk. She, who had feared nearly nothing in life, almost lost the will to step forward.
Discipline saved her. Unbending in pride, she clamped down on raw dread and assumed the paper-thin semblance of dignity.
She advanced and acknowledged Morriel’s presence, a meeting of eyes like crossed sword blades. Then she sank in traditional obeisance. “Your will, matriarch.”
The Prime returned no verbal greeting. A presence swathed in violet veils, she seemed a wire puppet embodied in cloth, with a bleached death’s-head skull, and the folds of loose garments pinned in place with set diamonds. Seconds dragged by. The Prime spoke no word of acknowledgment. Apprehension sliced a dagger of ice through the pit of Lirenda’s stomach. While the pause stretched into an engulfing stillness, the page barred the door at her back.
Three others were present by Morriel’s behest, one an untried girl with flaxen-fair braids, and another a grown woman wearing a blank-faced, idiot’s stare. Lirenda took a moment to discern the forehead tattoo which signified an initiate who had failed in her vow of obedience. A deeper chill shocked her as she recognized the emptied creature’s face. There stood the young initiate who had failed in her sworn charge to hold the circle of Morriel’s grand conjury. The traditional penalty allowed no appeal. She would serve out her days as a mindless slave, her identity stripped through the power of the vows sworn through the Prime’s master crystal.
Morriel would have her cruel reason for demanding the witless one’s presence. Lirenda had not thought; had never imagined that she might be tested for the selfsame transgression.
This was no audience for private reprimand, but a closed-trial chamber. Subject to the Koriani Matriarch’s sole judgment, Lirenda understood her defense might become her last chance for cognizant thought.
A darker veiled shadow embedded in the gloom to the right of Morriel’s bedside called for the accused to stand before her Prime to be examined.
Lirenda arose. The unaccustomed, bitter taste of humility closed her throat as she gave the time-honored reply. “I stand before my betters to serve.”
She had taken her privilege and authority for granted. Now the sharp drop in status among her own kind left her frightened and rudderless as the Prime laid unsteady, bird-claw hands on the ironbound coffer held by her second page boy. Her whisper invoked the release of the seals. Each protection gave way with a whine like parted wire, and points of burst light stabbed the dimness.
As Morriel raised the strapped lid, the young girl who cowered by the bedside rubbed forearms raised into gooseflesh. Lirenda knew well her chills were no phantom. The Skyron stone’s presence was inimical as a predator, its etheric web steeped in old malice. Over the centuries while the Great Waystone had been held in Sethvir’s custody at Althain Tower, the smaller aquamarine had carried the burden of the order’s heaviest rituals. Years and hard use had left its channels surly with overload. That imbalance could never be rectified; not without losing the stored records of a thousand vows of service chained like steel-bolted ice through its heart.
As the knifing hostility of the unveiled jewel settled over the chamber, Lirenda’s dread became overwhelming. Her palms broke into clammy sweat. The witless woman’s stare drilled into her face, while from the chair that formerly had been hers, a green novice witnessed her fallen status with enormous cornflower eyes. Since by rigid tradition, the order’s Prime Matriarch never addressed an oathbreaker, the Ceremonial Inquisitor intoned the opening accusation.
“Enchantress Lirenda, you stand before your Prime to answer for willful acts and disobedience against your vow of Koriani service.” The matronly peeress smoothed the silver-bordered edge of her veil in prim self-importance and listed the formal charges. “You are accused of crossing a sealed ward without cause, and disrupting an act of grand conjury.”
Lirenda bristled. After weeks of smothered pride in Prince Lysaer’s company, and the ignominy of losing the crystal that accessed her trained talents, the moment’s grinding weight of humility threatened her last grip on control.
Then Morriel signaled her readiness with a flick of a twig-thin finger. “Begin.”
The Skyron stone lay unveiled in its coffer, its surface cold and glittering blue as the faceted heart of a glacier.
“Enchantress Lirenda, by your vow of obedience, you are asked to stare into the crystal’s matrix,” the Ceremonial Inquisitor commanded. “Lower your defenses. Surrender your mind for this inquest, that your innocence or guilt be established beyond any shadow of doubt.”
Lirenda snapped at that moment. “Merciful Ath! This charge of oathbreaking is a mockery.” Her protest slammed through the quiet like a shattering fist forced through lead. “As First Senior of the Koriathain, the authority was rightfully mine to use as I saw fit. I was summoned to Capewell because my Prime Matriarch had suffered a state of collapse. Certainly, I broke no vow of initiation through my decision to enter the observatory! If a personal shortcoming flawed my subsequent choices, that lapse is the one I must atone for. I demand a hearing in private. I will answer to my Prime for her broken conjury. Whether I forfeit free will for impertinence, I refuse to submit to examination for a transgression I did not commit!”
Behind silver-edged muslin, the Ceremonial Inquisitor huffed a breath for scathing rebuttal.
Yet the jerk of the Prime’s skeletal forefinger froze her silent. Jetdark eyes sheared across sullen gloom. Lirenda felt their angry weight bore into her, through her, reading and weighing; testing her down to the naked pith of the fear beneath her defenses.
She scarcely dared tremble. Her overpowering terror must surely rip through, unstring her last pride and see her weep. She could not call back the ultimatum just issued. Unmasked by the threat of the Skyron crystal, shamed before three indifferent witnesses, she could only endure, while sweat rolled down the channel of her back and soaked ragged stains in her silk.
No one spoke. Against the patched play of shadows, the few tall candles cast tips of sulfurous light. Splashed like disjointed fragments of dream, the quartz spheres on the counterpane flashed impressions of ordinary events recapped from distant sites on the continent: a flying hawk, a dark-haired shepherd child, a leaping trout in a stream. In Tysan, a master shipwright inspected a load of new wood. In Havish, the royal midwife confirmed a queen’s pregnancy. In Shand, a fat spellbinder paced down the Innish wharf to meet a dory off an inbound brig.
Wrenched by longing for the warmth of carefree sunlight, Lirenda felt as if she might suffocate. She battled the urge to fall to her knees in abject, begging appeal.
Then Morriel Prime stirred to a hiss of silk coverlets and pronounced, “This closed trial is over.” Diamonds spat glints like snap-frozen rainfall as she turned her head and excused the Ceremonial Inquisitor. “You are dismissed. As you leave, take the witless one with you.”
The sisterhouse peeress slipped her veils with a disapproving bustle of industry “Matriarch,” she ventured, “should the junior initiate not be bidden to leave also?”
The Prime’s sharpness fell like storm-cracked wood. “I may not walk, but I’ve not lost my
faculties! No. The girl stays. The matter at hand concerns her most closely.”
Emphatic enough warning, Lirenda understood. Morriel would not keep an untried initiate at hand, except as a successor in training. Lirenda needed to sit, but that comfort was denied her. Minutes passed, while her knees shook, and the peeress vented her vengeful, small cruelty by spending a maliciously long interval to smooth her mussed clothing and remove the half-wit from the chamber.
The final clank as the page boy reset the bar saved Lirenda from involuntary collapse. Now, when shaken nerves left her weakened, the Prime Matriarch pressed ahead with a scalpel’s dispassion.
“You have claimed your right to autonomous responsibility. That is well.” Eyes dark as death stayed pinned straight ahead. The bleachedpaper finger of one hand stirred to point. “Had you not spoken, madam, your worth to me would have become less than nothing. At the ninth hour, you’ve dared the initiative to claim your mistake. For that, you have won small reprieve. I wait to be shown whether you can satisfy the balance and master the means to redeem yourself.”
Lirenda swallowed. Through firsthand, hardened experience she sensed that no forward step would be easy. Morriel Prime would not volunteer her any grace of kindly assistance. Whatever petition the stakes would allow, the deposed First Senior understood she must assemble her case for herself. All the steel in her character was scarcely sufficient to let her ignore the puppyish, staring young girl. Battling a wildfire surge of resentment, she treated with the Prime as if the ongoing audience had been offered in perfect privacy.
“I let personal feelings interfere with clear judgment.” Admission was painful. The darkness, the candles, the inimical bite of the Skyron crystal’s aura abraded her cornered resolve to survive and reclaim her lost grace. “Give me trial by recompense. I would atone for the imperfections in my character, and see your trust in my competence restored.”