Seconds dragged into minutes, all the more fraught with tension. The fractional trickle of time was his enemy. Let Morriel’s assault engage him too long, her dark workings would seek out the breaches. Let one destructive sigil inside, its pattern could shred his foundations to ribbons and drain off his personal strength. In the riptide of weakened control, he risked disclosing every damaging detail of his origins to Morriel’s grasping interest.
That above anything, he must not allow. Those ancient blood debts had been fully redeemed. Events carried through on distant soil and other worlds served no place here and now on Athera. Set in the wrong hands, or whispered in the ears of Lysaer’s fledgling priests, the damning history of Fellowship affairs might be used as an arsenal to damage the future.
At length, in a bell tone resonance that rang agelessly massive, the iron-dark summit of Quaire Peak responded and offered itself as receptacle.
Asandir paused only to return heartfelt gratitude. Then he snaked a tangling chain of new ciphers into his warded circles. Power flowed through in precise increments.
The backwash of shed forces shot off fierce jags of lightning that grounded themselves in black ore. The leakage to ionized air became minimal. Only a small static discharge bled down the sixth lane, a dance of loosed energies no more harmful than the flares of a northern aurora. Until they played out, they would draw nothing worse than the appetites of stray iyats.
Unyoked at last from encumbering duty, Asandir rallied against Morriel’s invasion. He seized on the anchor left rooted in earth amid the old towers of Ithamon. Light pealed, then a rattling slam of deep thunder as he engaged his raised will and downstepped his vibration back into the physical spectrum.
Solidly himself, now standing on frost-silvered grass amid the crumbled foundation of the King’s Tower, he tipped up his face. Winter wind flung back his hood and lashed silver hair to his cheek. He screened out knifing cold and the sting of the elements as he linked his right and left hands. Then, eyes closed, he gathered his trained awareness and cast his sharp focus inward.
Morriel’s construct buzzed and whined through his aura, shrill as a swarm of roused bees. His skin tingled and burned, hazed by conflicted forces. Asandir safely ignored the discomfort. For him, minor ills of the flesh held small consequence. So long as the provenance of his spirit stayed whole, he could mend any bodily dysfunction. Free at last to respond to Morriel’s assault, Asandir admitted the energies into his being and claimed them.
All the horror, all the hate, all the disruptive, chaotic destruction wrought through cramped seals and sigils, he welcomed, then Named as wholly his. On the catalytic crux of annihilation, at the bitter edge of total sacrifice, he reached out with an acid-etched core of intent and engaged every last wasting sigil. Self-will and mastery matched dark force with light. He did not seek to reverse, or control, or manipulate. Instead, he melded the unbinding force of destruction with his own creative exuberance. The gush of that wellspring arose from the core of his individuality. His invention was bottomless. Through an awareness honed into relentless refinement, through the reach of his limitless compassion, he diluted the ruinous barrage set against him into cascading change.
What remained of each warped patterning at the last was its original core of emotion: the impetus behind the enmity that founded the need for Morriel’s vindication. Her fear, her dread shame, and her outright worry for the proscribed knowledge she held in trust for her order were as surface ripples over a shattering void of bleak loneliness. No family or friend remembered her girlhood. Her glory days of idealism were spent, leaving only the unbearable burden of an office grown onerously heavy. Her days, her acts, her purpose had grown hollow, until, each hour, she battled her withering, frail flesh, tormented by uncertainty and a burning self-righteous indignation. No consolation might ease her cruel strait. The fate she was sworn to accomplish before death could not be impelled to fruition.
Against a despair beyond tears to encompass, Asandir held his dispassionate balance. His long-suffering strength had known worse and survived. Poised in tender care, with a gentleness that could have cupped a cobweb against a gale, he wrapped that anguished residue in compassion, shored up by his sorrowful understanding. Once he, too, had lost hope to despairing grief and stark hatred. His recovery had come at the bitter end of hope, through the gift of Athera’s Paravians.
The channel to prime power their wisdom had opened had reforged his Fellowship in redemption. That source was inexhaustible as tide, limitless as the flight of an imagination set free of shadow and doubt. Asandir engaged the higher octaves of resonance. He let the life dance of celebration that strung all existence shift the misaligned strands of Morriel’s hostility. For a mage of his stature, converting barbed spite into transforming joy was an act as unthinking as reflex.
No discharge of fey power marked the event, no display of dazzling sorcery. The last sigil subsided as a whisper into the abiding stasis of true peace.
Asandir opened his eyes to the white blaze of stars over the dark hills of Daon Ramon. Around him, the four Paravian towers speared skyward. The ethereal harmonies of their pristine wards intertwined with the unquiet lament of the breezes. Ithamon yet sheltered the cries of its ghosts. Air still voiced the imprint of past betrayal through tumbled stone walls and the rims of shattered foundations.
Under his feet, where the transmuted forces of Morriel’s malice had been grounded, the frost had melted away. Earth had responded to the influx of grand mystery to raise up a circle of green grasses. Amid their feathered stalks, a briar sprig bloomed, a flawless primrose fresh as new morning. The Sorcerer bent, the weariness in him an ache etched down to the bone. He sketched a blessing over the site, then asked for leave and plucked the bloom before the icy night wind could shrivel its fragile petals. He pressed the flower’s sweet fragrance to his face. Burdened of heart, he sighed for the plight of a Koriani Matriarch whose hope and humanity had grown twisted, her altruism warped under too many years of prime rule.
He had been where she sat. For him and his colleagues, how terrible had been the final step into wisdom. Compassionate tolerance had been bought in blood, that ends did not ever justify the means, and that help for the world’s sorrows could never be won through the exigencies of power or control.
Tonight’s reckoning would bring no succor for Fionn Areth, languishing under threat of an unjust execution.
Asandir faced the larger defeat inside his personal victory, while the cold set him shivering, and Ithamon’s sad spirits moaned their perpetual refrain of lament. Morriel Prime had succeeded in cutting off his swift access to Jaelot. Whether or not she dared use her Waystone to mount another assault against him, for prudence, he knew he must not stress the flow of the sixth lane with another transfer. Not until his stopgap spell of warding expended the pooled reservoir of dissident energies into the summit of Quaire Peak. The elapsed time would delay him until past the day of winter solstice, more if he fared eastward on foot.
Until then, he must hope Elaira’s good sense could withstand the mayor’s vindictive fury and the pressure of Jaelot’s town council.
Winter 5669
Fell Signs
The Mayor of Jaelot’s dungeon had not changed for the better since the Mad Prophet’s fateful incarceration twenty-five years in the past. Seepage from the limestone strata of the headland still beaded and dripped, clouded by the ancient layers of soot the pitch cressets left on the ceiling. The erratic tick of moisture into rank, moldered straw stitched through Fionn Areth’s dazed thoughts. His last lucent memory was of the posset given by a Koriani enchantress he could not see in blank darkness. Through a fogging numbness which dulled the worst pain, the touch of her hands came and went, sure in skill, mapping the list of his injuries. He had her assurance that no bones were broken. More pressing worries remained unassuaged, while the herbs in her remedy spiraled his mind between fitful sleep and nightmare.
Time returned him, unwilling, to the splashing plink of water a
nd the revolting, acidic reek of rat. Thirst left him unmoored. He had no sense of the hour. Around him lay darkness fretted by the sultry, spent flicker of a pine knot torch. Someone’s lent cloak, steeped in sage and lavender, muffled the worst of the cold. Under the cloth, bound in the heat of strong poultices, the ache of uncountable cuts and bruises throbbed in lockstep with his pulse. His sides seemed a mass of outraged flesh. The guardsmen had kicked him with hobnailed boots, and his bed of damp straw and sweat-clammy clothing combined to knot cramps in his sinews.
‘Keep still,’ urged a female voice, one he recognized. ‘I have seals of mending at work on your knee. Should you move, you’ll unstring the fine energies.’
Fionn Areth shut his eyes. The splintering pound of blood through his swellings did little to refresh his memory. ‘I know you, I think.’
No answer came; only the icy breath of the draft across the exposed skin of his cheek. The competent restraint of the woman’s hands as she bound the stitched cut on his forearm suffered no break in steadiness. Her face was obscured. Fionn Areth made out little more than a lit curve of cheek, sliced by a dark fall of hair. The tight-focused glare of the spell crystal she engaged cast an actinic halo too fierce for his unshielded eyesight.
Fionn Areth battled an overpowering urge to give way to leaden drowsiness. Through muddied thoughts and the torpor of drugged dizziness, he managed, ‘You’re the healer who once lived in the cottage on the moor.’
Her hands paused, then resumed in delicate firmness. ‘Yes. That’s how I knew for certain you couldn’t be Arithon s’Ffalenn.’ She tucked in the ends of the bandage and settled back onto her heels.
‘I look so much like him?’ Fionn Areth asked, bitter. ‘No one seems willing to believe me.’
‘Hate has no ears.’ Elaira pushed back the stray hair slipped over her brow. A small tuck of worry pinched the line of the forehead he remembered, as she added, ‘Nor are grudges in Jaelot ever too old to pursue.’ She let the light in her quartz flicker out, then did something to his knee by the blood weak spill of the cresset. ‘I’ll help you in every way that I can, and as far as the vows to my order will allow. Believe this, your predicament is serious.’
Fionn Areth caught in a wincing breath, then another as a flare of sharp warmth hazed through his stiffening tissues. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘With your knee? Torn cartilage and a puncture.’ She raised a hand, her wristbone chiseled in unsubtle shadow, and captured the lick of auburn hair which stubbornly troubled her eyesight. ‘I’m sorry for the sting. I’d rather be thorough than risk complications.’ Her neat, narrow fingers flicked the stray lock into a braid and secured it behind her left ear. ‘You’d lose the joint if the wound became septic.’
Fionn Areth let his head loll back, unable to think while his innards twitched in sickly protest. When next he spoke, the worst of his fear grated through. ‘The leg won’t much matter if the mayor has his way, and I find myself on the scaffold.’
‘The leg matters,’ snapped the enchantress, as though a raw nerve had been scraped. ‘As for the scaffold, don’t hold any doubts. The Lord Mayor’s misdirected justice landed Jaelot its trouble with the Master of Shadow in the first place.’
Fionn Areth shut his eyes against another surge of healing force, this one a sweeping rain like fine silver needles down his spine and into his leg. ‘You know him?’
‘Very well, thank you.’ Another queasy pause, while the enchantress traced a seal and sigil over his flaming, sore skin. ‘Arithon of Rathain has a rife quarrel with anyone who trifles with his personal affairs or his loyalties. Now be still. The energies should soon settle into a closer alignment.’
Beyond the particulars of healing his damaged knee, the ramifications of her statement about the Shadow Master took a tangled minute to sort out. Fionn Areth pondered, while the cresset flared and spat dying sparks over the noisome stone wall.
‘I didn’t come here to meddle in any sorcerer’s private feud,’ he protested at length.
The enchantress ran light, testing fingers over the traumatized tissues of the knee, cross-checking her meticulous work. The little braid of hair slid undone and escaped the constraint of her ear. She raked back the persistent strands with an unnerving, jangled impatience. ‘No. It’s the mayor the Master of Shadow will target, once he hears what’s afoot. Don’t despair. He’s lifted prisoners out of locked chains before.’
Which presumption was too much; Fionn Areth vented his flood of unease in outright disbelief. ‘He’s also slaughtered thirty thousand at a stroke, on the field at Dier Kenton Vale. I came here,’ the herder’s son clarified in acid affront, ‘to sign on my sword with the ranks of Avenor’s Alliance. A bloodletting criminal is as unlikely to stir a hand to spare me from his own laid fire as I am to run steel through his unmerciful heart.’
‘Do you think so?’ Ill-tempered at last, Elaira sat down on her satchel. She fixed Fionn Areth with a stare bleak gray as the winter-frozen puddles on the moor. ‘Well, think first, and carefully. Because you may get your chance. Just like the mayor, you can strike out of prejudice before letting your victim speak in his own defense.’
‘That’s unfair!’ Fionn Areth chose argument, more than desperate to stave off the fear that whiplashed him toward an abyss of unutterable terror. ‘No question exists over Arithon’s guilt. Against the sealed record of evidence against him, his death would be named as a boon to society.’
But the enchantress appeared to reject his assured view. ‘Be quiet.’
Fionn Areth insisted, ‘Why hasn’t your sisterhood stepped forward to proclaim his innocence?’
‘Be quiet, I said,’ Elaira snapped, sharper. Head raised, chin turned toward the rusted steel grille at the doorway, she had gone rigid with tension.
Brushed to sudden chills, Fionn Areth subsided. ‘What is it?’
Elaira shook her head, frowning. She closed her grasp over the spell crystal chained to her neck, her sudden uncertainty palpable even in near-total darkness. ‘Something’s gone wrong.’
‘Perhaps the Shadow Master’s sorcery,’ Fionn Areth suggested, still bitter.
‘No.’ Inarguably certain, the enchantress clasped her quartz and stilled into concentration. Whatever the probing nature of her inquiry, the crystal flared into sudden, bloodred sparks of light. As though their touch stung, Elaira cried out, and her hands jerked away in recoil.
‘What was that, lady, if not some fell working of darkness?’
‘Not Arithon’s,’ the enchantress rebuffed. ‘The trace signature I caught was warped light, born of fire. And the charges of dark sorcery against Arithon are false, whoever claims otherwise. It’s a little-known fact, but the Prince of Rathain lost his access to mage talent thirty years ago.’ She held back the rest, that the event just picked up through the staid calm of earth had more likely been the caught resonance of a Koriani sigil. ‘I don’t like what I feel.’
No time was given to survey the source of her qualms.
A wave of wild shouting filtered in from the street, hard followed by the crash of splintering wood. Excited voices echoed down from the upstairs guardroom, no dispute between bored sentries in disagreement over a dice throw, but a shouted confrontation between armed men bent on forcing their way into the dungeons.
One voice clashed and rose above the duty captain’s protests. ‘Man, you haven’t looked outside. There’s unnatural lights all over the night sky! That sorcerer in your dungeon has been stirring dire portents. This time, we won’t wait for sound walls and roofs to come clapping down in fell heaps. If you have the brains of an egg-laying goose, let us through. We’ll slit the spell-winding criminal like a herring and string out his tripes for the ravens.’
The captain’s reply came fragmented between fist-shaking threats and the hot-blooded jangle of weaponry. Reference to the mayor’s decree of due process became mown down in midsentence. ‘What need for a trial? Already the whole sky’s alive with fell conjury! The wretch is as good as proved guilty wit
h every man’s eyes as my witness.’
Steadfast, the captain shouted back. ‘Then show me a sealed writ from his lordship granting you lawful right to dispose of the prisoner.’
There followed a slamming exchange of armed blows. The raw din of steel flung ugly reverberations off the stone walls and bare ceilings. A man’s choked-off scream signaled somebody fallen. More swordplay followed. Then a stampede of feet in hobnailed boots thundered from the wardroom down the steep, lower stairwell.
‘Mercy, they’re through.’ Elaira shoved to her feet, her hand clenched to her spell crystal. A short step saw her to the locked and barred door, the studded, strapped steel marred like old blood with streaked rust stains. ‘Whatever happens, lie still. Say nothing. Wisest if we can make them believe you’re drugged beyond reach of your senses.’
Light speared down the stairwell, felted with the distorted shadows of angry men brandishing mismatched weapons. A straight silhouette against that juddering spill, Elaira held her stance by the doorway, her quartz pendant tucked in her right palm. She raised her free hand to frame sigils of protection in the air. Conjured light spilled like ribbon from her moving fingertip. Seal paired with counterforce and locked the raised energy in stasis. A chained mesh of spellcraft laced like thread foil across the threshold of the cell. Before the insane paranoia of mob panic, her concentration stayed clear as stilled water. Through sheer force of will and her order’s stern discipline, she would not admit fear in distraction. Her arm remained steady. Though the effort stippled sweat on forehead and temple, her quartz burned hot and bright as glass set above open flame.