But snow fell and the days passed in anticlimax. Arithon did not oblige Dakar’s expectations and grow darkly moody. He asked companionable questions of Asandir and spent hours regarding ice-scabbed trees, stunted brush and the white-clothed shoulders of the hills as though his mage-trained sight showed him wonders.
‘The Riathan Paravians,’ Dakar whispered, upon Lysaer’s puzzled inquiry. ‘Unicorns ran in these hills and bore young in the meadows here. The mystery of their presence lingers, even now.’
Wide-eyed, sceptical, Lysaer peered through dripping bangs. An unseasonal thaw had softened the trail to muck, and slush seeped rivulets of wet down slopes like rucked old burlap. As far as the mist would allow, nothing met his gaze but bleak landscape that lacked the redeeming comfort of a single man-made structure.
Perched on the dray’s hard buckboard, Dakar slapped the reins over the paint’s steaming back and jogged her abreast of the chestnut gelding. Swaddled like a vegetable in wet cloaks, a derisive grin splitting his beard, he called over the rumble of rolling wheels, ‘Don’t try to look with your eyes – use your feelings.’
‘To find what?’ Lysaer shrugged to vent frustration. ‘Every morning I wake up as though eyes are on my back, watching me, and each night I step away from the campfire, I get chills that have nothing to do with the cold. This place is unpleasantly deserted, as far as I can tell.’
‘That’s the point.’ Dakar puffed up his cheeks and looked smug. ‘Asandir and Arithon might appreciate what’s missing from this Ath-forsaken wasteland, but I suspect like me you’d rather be in a crowded tavern knocking back mugs of spiced ale.’
Although Lysaer did not precisely share Dakar’s sentiment, he would have welcomed any human presence to allay the aching, hollow something that tugged at his nerves like pain. At each bend in the road, behind every storm-stunted bush, he seemed to see the lady he was to have married, her eyes liquid with tears, and her hands held out in entreaty. He remembered how her auburn hair had blown in the sea-breeze off South Isle and echoes of her lost laughter ached his heart. No noble dedication to purpose could ease his longing for home in this wilderness. His suffering stayed silent out of pride; and until the Mad Prophet had spoken, he had not guessed that his depression might arise from a source outside himself.
At noon riders and wagon paused for a cold meal beside a spring whose waters rose bubbling through a cleft in milk quartz rocks. Snow rendered the site grey on white, slashed by the arched-over stems of dead briars.
Sent down to the pebbled edge of the pool to refill water flasks, Arithon returned whitely shaken. ‘You might have warned me,’ he lashed at Asandir in tones dragged flat by upset.
The sorcerer did not answer but accepted the dripping flasks to stow back into the wagon. Then he turned eyes as chilly as the weather upon the s’Ilessid prince who watched the exchange. ‘A centaur was beset during the rebellion and pulled down here. Moss does not grow where his blood spilled. The sunchildren sang a lament to commemorate his passage and the words and the melody still ring upon the wind, to any with sensitivity enough to listen.’
Stung by what felt like rebuke, Lysaer straightened in affront, then doubled over with a gasp, robbed of his royal dignity by an elbow in the ribs from the Mad Prophet. Finished graining the horses, Dakar thrust himself headlong between sorcerer and s’Ilessid with oat chaff bristling from his hood.
‘What was that for?’ Lysaer demanded, outraged.
‘To quiet your foolish tongue, prince.’ As Asandir turned away about his business the Mad Prophet winked sidelong in conspiracy. ‘For a sorcerer this place is hurtful to walk past, let alone stop and linger.’
‘That Fellowship mage has feelings?’ Lysaer shot back, his eyes following Asandir’s hands as they laced and jerked tight the lashings that secured the oiled canvas over the supplies in the wagon bed.
Dakar picked a seed-head from his sleeve and looked thoughtful. ‘My ever-so-powerful master is doing his best at this moment to keep from weeping outright.’
‘You say.’ A billow of mist rolled past, rendering horses, men and dray as featureless as silhouette. Lysaer raised his eyebrows.
‘Well,’ the Mad Prophet amended. ‘I’ve lived with Asandir for centuries, my friend. I know this place bothers him, and I’d wager one thing further. He stopped here on purpose, to use its effect as a weapon. If you think I’m lying, look at your half-brother.’
The prince forgot pique and did so.
Still dead pale, his eyebrows snarled into a frown, Arithon had remounted his dun mare. He hunched against the wind as if he were wounded and bleeding and tears traced silver down his face.
Embarrassed as if caught eavesdropping, Lysaer spun back to face Dakar. ‘Why don’t you feel anything? Why don’t I?’
The Mad Prophet clawed back an untidy lock of hair. Cold had reddened the tip of his nose and his eyes looked unwarrantedly bloodshot; yet a dignified majesty cloaked him all the same as he said, ‘Do you want to?’
The question hit hard. Driven to see into himself with uncanny depth and clarity, struck naked before his own judgement, Lysaer perceived that the confusion that had harried him since exile held a core of ugly truth. No longer did the glamour of noble purpose veil fact: that his brave resolve to Traithe in Althain’s storeroom had been rooted in vanity and pride. He had renounced a difficult path of study and vowed instead to redress the wrongs of a kingdom for his own personal glory. As though revolted by a foul taste, Lysaer sucked in a fast breath. He could hope his self-disgust was not exposed on his face, but Dakar regarded him strangely.
‘Do you feel nothing?’ The Mad Prophet slapped the straw from his cloak with sudden, biting sharpness. ‘I’d venture not. I’d say this place moves you as deeply as the rest of us.’
Lysaer looked back, unflinching. However this spirit-cursed place afflicted others, his ingrained sense of fairness forced honesty. ‘My true heart stayed behind in Port Royal, I see, with my love, and my family, and my people. If that is a failing, it’s at least no more than human. The problems that beset this land are not mine. Yet I will do my best to help right them.’
The prince’s conviction was so far at odds with the future forecast by the strands that Dakar shied back, baffled. To cover his foreboding, he clambered back behind the dray’s buckboard and sorted his tangled loops of rein. ‘Ath in his mercy, but I could use a flagon of dark beer and a fire.’
‘That makes two of us, friend.’ Lysaer remounted his chestnut gelding, unsure whether the lingering traces of Paravian tragedy or the unendingly dreary landscape caused him to hurt as if the chill cut his flesh to the marrow.
At Asandir’s word, wagon and riders pressed onward through an afternoon that wept cold drizzle. Now the trail wound like tattered ribbon between Daon Ramon’s vales and downs, intermittently flanked by stone markers capped with lichens and moss. No trees grew, only bracken and tasselled grasses beaten down by wind and early storms. Dirtied ice lay scabbed in the hollows. Braced in his saddle against the cold, and resigned to yet another sleepless night on soaked ground, Lysaer did not realize their destination lay in sight until, rounding the crest of a hill, Arithon gasped and yanked his dun mare to a halt in the roadway.
She danced a piaffe at his roughness, her hooves clanging loudly on slate. Jostled in his saddle as his own mount bunched in reaction, Lysaer looked ahead.
Looming in eerie outline through the mantling mist rose Ithamon, city of legend and seat of the high kings of Rathain.
The sight was one to stop the breath, even through the fog of Desh-thiere. No previous feature of landscape could prepare the traveller for the broad sweep of valley, slashed across by a rock-strewn scar of dry riverbed. At one time walls of rose-grey stone had arisen from the banks, but what remained lay torn to wreckage.
Landslides left less ruin.
The greensward beyond was overrun with briar, what had been orchards, gardens and tourney fields now choked by weed and bitter-root vine. A second wall had bounded the
inner edge of the common. Embraced within gapped, half-gutted watchkeeps, the tumbled shells of townhouses clung to the hillside’s ever steepening pitch. Dismembered foundations marked off a tangle of narrow lanes and briar-ridden courtyards. As if a mighty army had once razed the buildings stone from stone with battering rams, the craftsmen’s cottages, market stalls and merchants’ mansions all lay jumbled in chaos. Gabled roofs had caved inward, beams rotted away in the sunless damp of Desh-thiere. A scatter of fallen slates in what may have been a market court reflected the rain like coins thrown out for a beggar.
The devastation of the lower tiers was total, a memorial to unbridled violence. Yet as if moved by some powerful unseen force, the viewer found his sight drawn upward, where, slightly north of centre, the native granite of the earth sheered up through soil and rock into a near-vertical outcrop. The triangular summit on the clifftop was encased by embrasures of seamless, blue-black granite. Inside, an unkempt eyrie of broken walls and spires marked the site of the inner citadel, the castle where generations of Paravians, and after them, the s’Ffalenn high kings, had held court.
There the eye hung captive, unable to draw away.
Amid that graveyard of ravaged splendour, of artistry spoiled by war in a cataclysmic expression of hatred, arose four single towers, each as different from the other as sculpture by separate masters. They speared upward through the mist, tall, straight, perfect. The incongruity of their wholeness against the surrounding wreckage was a dichotomy fit to maim the soul: for their lines were harmony distilled into form, and strength beyond reach of time’s attrition.
The rain still fell relentlessly into soggy earth; the wind keened and stung like a dulled skive in a cobbler’s shop. No one noticed. Even the horses seemed strangely content to be stopped in their tracks in the roadway. The sordid, everyday miseries of winter and weather lost meaning. Into that suspended silence, Asandir began to speak.
‘Ithamon was raised by Paravians in the First Age of Athera. The outer walls were levelled twice, by Seardluin, hostile creatures native to this world that by the Second Age had been battled to extinction. The old races abandoned the city then, for its purpose as a fortress had been fulfilled. The lower tiers stayed in ruins until the dawn of the present age, when men rebuilt the double walls upon the remains. The third tier wall left standing and the four surviving keeps were part of the original city. Built by the centaurs, refined by sunchildren, they were Name-bound and warded by the unicorns.’
‘Don’t say any more!’ Arithon cut across, his bard’s voice queerly strangled. ‘I beg you, don’t!’ Bloodlessly pale, his hands clenched and shaking on the rein, he sat his mare and regarded the site where his ancestors had ruled as if he were held chained and in thrall. ‘Please,’ he finished in a whisper.
But Asandir might as well not have heard. ‘The Paravian towers have withstood three ages of strife, nineteen thousand years of history. Mortal men have called them the Sun Towers, or Compass Points, for their alignment and their dizzying height, but the ancients who laid their stones had separate names for each. The white one with the alabaster combing is Alathwyr, and its strength is Wisdom. The east, the black one, is endurance, which represents the Paravian concept of Honour. The south, of rose quartz, is Grace, and the last, of green jasper symbolic of renewal, is Kieling, Compassion. When civilization has abandoned any of these qualities, its respective tower will fail, for the power that binds their structure is the force of each virtue, renewed. “Ithamon” means Five Spires in the old tongue, and once this was so. Daelthain, the King’s Tower, for Justice, originally crowned the highest knoll in the city. That one cracked on the day his Royal Grace, Marin Eliathe, was murdered in his hall by an assassin. The last of it crumbled during the rebellion. Now just the foundation remains.’
Asandir’s speech ended, leaving the moan of the lonely wind to fill the emptiness. Lysaer discovered he must have been gripping his saddle too hard for some time.
Arithon looked tortured to his very core. Struck blind and deaf by the chord of Paravian mystery first tuned to his awareness in Caith-al-Caen, he had wheeled his mare in the roadway to confront Asandir. A betrayal too fresh to have sparked resentment tautened the planes of his face, and his voice was gravel as he said, ‘Ath’s own mercy, how am I to suffer this?’
The sorcerer sat his black stallion with the straight-backed formality of Daelion, Master of Fate. ‘I will answer when you ask out of care, Prince of Rathain.’
Arithon recoiled in a high flush of fury. ‘No need to answer at all, sorcerer. Everywhere I turn, it seems I get saddled with sand-kingdoms. Well, pity has torn out my heart far and long before this. I bear the ache already like a bad scar.’
Explosively murderous, he drove his heels into the mare. Her nerves frayed into a white-rimmed roll of eyes and she reared. Arithon gave rein, kicked her again and screamed what sounded like an obscenity ripped through by tears. His hands jabbed at the reins, and his mount clattered around in the roadway and shot blindly forward at a gallop.
Horse and rider thundered across the crumbling span that bridged the dry course of the Severnir at reckless speed and vanished into the ruin.
Dakar said something bitten under his breath and the paint mare stamped. Shaken by his half-brother’s savagery and pricked by cross-currents he lacked the background to grasp, Lysaer spun to confront the sorcerer. ‘Why did you push him?’
His mildness shaped by grief, Asandir said, ‘This city has weathered seven major tragedies and three ages of history. So much dust to you perhaps, but to those of us who have borne witness it means wisdom painfully gained, paid for by men who bled and died, and Paravians who weathered mortal failings time and again until the rifts in their world grew too wide to endure. Shall all that has been go wasted because Arithon dislikes responsibility? Athera’s civilizations struggle on the brink of imbalance with Desh-thiere’s coming defeat. A restoration of just rule must follow. The reinstated prince who subdues Etarra must descend from the old kings if he is to close the rift between townsman and clan barbarian.’ The sorcerer finished in baldfaced regret. ‘Put simply, Arithon’s recalcitrance is a luxury the times can ill afford.’
‘You’ve made an enemy of him,’ Lysaer observed coldly.
‘Merciful maker, I would that were all I had done!’ Closer to giving way to anguish than any mortal man had ever seen him, Asandir shook out his reins. He pressed his black stallion ahead against the rain and did not speak or look back the whole way through an afternoon of ascent through the ruins.
They found Arithon standing beside his horse within the broken circle that marked the old foundation of the King’s Tower. His face was hard set, and his temper brittle as iced-over current.
By now recovered from the outburst upon the riverbank, Asandir addressed him, whip-lash curt. ‘We shall camp in a tower. They are sound, comfortable and dry. Which shall it be, my prince?’
‘Kieling,’ Arithon said, determinedly blithe and uncaring. ‘Compassion.’
Caithdein
The vast stone hall at the west outpost in Camris held only a solitary figure, but the fire had been built high in expectation of a momentous event. Wax candles burned in sconces and candelabra and still, deep shadow darkened the corners. Winter had settled in. Winds moaned across the mountainside without and drafts rippled the Cildom tapestries, even the largest ones by the hearth. Slim and straight in her chair of state on the dais and clad formally in Tysan’s gold-bordered tabard over her traditional black, Maenalle s’Gannley, Steward of Tysan, fingered the gilt-tipped pen handed down through twenty generations to sign kingdom documents. The ornamental plume, though replaced at measured intervals, showed the ravages of last season’s moths; yet the nib in its cloisonne barrel remained sharp and unworn. Since the fall of the last crowned sovereign official word passed between clan chiefs by spoken courier, or not at all, for parchment could fall into the hands of townsmen if the messenger chanced to be captured.
Maenalle smoothed the feather’s
tattered fibres, her sharp-planed face taut with excitement. In the absence of written record she wondered whether tonight was the first time since the desecration of the royal seat at Avenor that all of Tysan’s clanlords would be gathered beneath one roof. She smiled fiercely, savouring the news she would deliver, that a true-born heir had returned through West Gate to claim the high king’s throne.
Elder Tashan was giddy as a boy with anticipation and young Maien was unable to contain nervous jitters for fear he might be clumsy and spill the wine; this after he had waited upon his prince without mishap. No scout from the west outpost had breathed a word of the royal arrival; Maenalle held cocky pride in them for that. Her announcement would completely surprise lords who had journeyed long, inconvenient distances through hostile country at her summons.
A sudden, preternatural stillness gripped the chamber; as if the insatiable mountain gales had forgotten to gust, or fire ceased for an instant to flicker.
Possessed of a scout’s reflexes, Maenalle stiffened a heartbeat ahead of the logic that warned of something amiss. A second later, and without the fanfare of breezes carried in from far places affected by Kharadmon, the discorporate sorcerer Luhaine flicked into existence. His image was robed austerely as a scholar and posed with round face furrowed in concern as he gazed up at Maenalle in the high seat. ‘Lady, I bring tidings.’
The Steward of Tysan felt her carefree mood evaporate. She regarded her visitor, aware never more than this moment that Fellowship sorcerers did not pay visits for trivial reasons. Luhaine by preference was a recluse: his last appearance in Camris had been in her grandfather’s time. ‘Tell me quickly,’ she said, afraid of the worst and anxious most of all to recover her shattered solitude.
Luhaine returned a shake of his head. His heavy robes were not stirred by the drafts and his eyes followed hers, aggrieved. ‘I cannot. Wards must be set first, in precaution.’
Maenalle shot to her feet. ‘Wards? Here?’ Affronted that the vigilance of her scouts might be questioned, she gripped the heirloom pen with a fierceness that threatened to snap the quill. ‘Whatever for?’