Jaric rebutted the verdict.
He rallied and negated oblivion with the third tenet of Kor's Law: No man shall claim wisdom to judge another; in the absence of order, law must prevail. Yet in the absence of the divine, no law, and no man, and no expedient can equal perfection. Forgiveness maintains the balance.
Wearied through, and pressed against the knife edge of annihilation, Ivainson awaited. If humility, mercy, and compassion defined the requirements of grace, Taen's greatness of spirit alone should have established mankind's case. But the unknowable awareness of the Morrigierj dissected the ideology of Kor's priests and found no satisfaction.
Keithland's cities would perish, seared from the face of existence along with all life seeded by the probe ship Corinne Dane.
Jaric knew stunned disbelief. Then anger gave rise to scepticism. The decree of the Morrigierj rang strangely false. Gifted with the beginnings of wisdom, the glimmer of greater truth, he realized that the sentence of death against his kind was no verdict but a foregone conclusion from the start. Caught up and agonizing over the meanness of his flaws, he had been duped into belief that humanity's fate could be redeemed by logic. Reality outlined the converse, the essence of evil embodied. The Morrigierj was a being wedded to destruction, addicted to the euphoria of exercising superior power over the weak.
Jaric retaliated with the brute philosophy of the Kielmark: Let strategy prevail through cleverness and force! Keithland shall go free. Driven beyond self-preservation, the master of two score Sathid released the sum of his powers against the bodiless darkness that imprisoned him.
Energy ripped outward. A core more fiery than sun force bloomed and burst across the nethermost dark of the void. Jaric screamed. Blasted raw by the recoil, he missed the dazzling play of defence wards while the demon he opposed strove and failed to compensate. As the Morrigierj and its minions became consigned to oblivion, his own awareness overloaded. Perception dimmed to the silvered grey of twilight, and plunged inexorably into shadow. Jaric glimpsed stars like frost on velvet, then vision died. Like a mote smothered in deep-ocean silence, he knew nothing more.
* * *
Ivainson Jaric roused to the needling ice of raindrops, and darkness like winter midnight. No aura of light eased his passage to consciousness; no roof shielded him from the elements. Stiff and chilled and alone, he listened to the wail of the wind off the fells. In time, vision unaltered by Sathid-power picked out the stony crest where Shadowfane's spires once rose. Not even rubble remained of the stronghold where Gierj had duelled for the chance to exterminate humanity.
Jaric blinked run-off from his eyes. Tangled hair coiled wet against his neck. His cheeks were rough with stubble, and weariness weighted his limbs like so much waterlogged wood. Though he preferred not to move, cold finally forced him to his feet. Standing, shivering, he found the past too painful to think on. The deaths of a friend and a sorcerer robbed his future of joy. Suspicious that the confrontation in the watchtower had been a dream invented by the Morrigierj to test him, Ivainson avoided memory of his Dreamweaver. He had faced her ghost, and made peace. Now duty drove him to straighten his shoulders and ascend the slippery escarpment that once had buttressed Shadowfane.
His feet slid treacherously on the incline. To prevent a wrenched ankle or spinning fall on to rock, he shed his boots and continued barefoot, though stiff crowns of lichen abraded his naked soles.
He reached the summit in the wintry light of daybreak. Rock there had fused into glassy whorls of slag; no crevice remained for plant life to grope and cling. Jaric knelt in the full brunt of the wind. A tattered figure with rain-soaked hair and lifeless eyes, he set scarred fingers to the stone. Then, without knowing what the outcome would be, he spoke a word.
A golden haze of light veiled his fingers; his mastery was not entirely dead. He called upon earth, and grudgingly, tiredly, power answered. The bowl of the sky brightened as he worked. Tattered storm clouds raced south and unveiled a morning sparkling with frost. Oblivious to the length of the shadow he cast, Ivainson Jaric arose. Cradled in his arms was the melted lump that once had been the Kielmark's two-handed sword. Perhaps in the past the twisted artifact had been crafted by a mother's hand, into a weapon for a wayward and precocious son; any truth in the claim had gone with the man. The Firelord sighed. His tears were long since spent. He touched the mass with his mastery, and sunlight and sorcery flashed on silver as ruined steel reshaped, perfectly replicating the blade's original form.
Jaric ran his fingers over the hilt, then tested balance and sharpness; the edge felt keen enough to satisfy the stringent standards of its master. Carefully Ivainson removed his tunic. His body glimmered with the returning trace of an aura, and he no longer felt the cold. He wrapped the blade in wool, then bound it with lacings borrowed from his shirt. When the task was meticulously complete, the son of Ivain Firelord stripped his last ragged clothing. He drank and bathed in a rain pool.
Dripping but clean, he shook the tangles from his hair. Then he gathered together his last memories of a friend, and a sword destined for Deison Corley. Clothed in a brightening radiance of power, the onetime scribe from Morbrith turned south toward the lands of men; and his steps melted footprints in the frost.
Epilogue
Warmth lingered late in the northern hills of Felwaithe. Days of rich sunlight alternated with crisp, star-strewn nights. Farmsteaders reaped full harvests and returned content to their firesides, forever secure from the predations of demons; news travelled faster than the sorcerer responsible. Clad in a shepherd's cloak of oiled wool, he made his way south on foot. He might have journeyed more speedily; the flare and shimmer of unused power veiled his form in light. Yet he would engage no sorcery since the morning he had restored the sword that hung from the strap at his shoulder. He avoided the villages and roads; but birds and wild creatures were drawn by the brilliance of his presence. Llondelei greeted him rejoicing, for their farseers predicted a grant of new Sathid from the Vaere. In the roughest wilds in Keithland, hillfolk waylaid him with song and wreaths of firelilies.
He learned, then, that Corley's translation of a priestess's prophecy had been deliberately understated. The faintest spark of amusement flashed in his eyes, the first since the fall of Anskiere.
Winter spit sleet from the sky when Ivainson Jaric reached Cliffhaven. Set ashore by a crotchety fisherman with a limp, the Firelord remembered another fisherman who had died. He paid for his passage with an unsmiling face, then delivered the burden of the Kielmark's sword in to the hands of Deison Corley. Memories he could not shed stayed with him.
Corley stamped cold feet, discomforted by the brilliant but taciturn figure at his side. 'Come in from the wind,' he invited.
Jaric declined with a faint shake of his head. He spoke his first and only words since leaving the slagged crest of Shadowfane. 'Where is Taen?'
Corley raised tired eyes. 'Gone. She went south, to the Vaere, when Anskiere - '
Jaric interrupted, gently, but unarguably firm. 'I know.'
So formidable was his conviction that the captain did not press the fact that the wizards of Mhored Kara had not entirely succeeded in damping the backlash incurred when his Firelord's powers were revoked. Several of their adepts had died, and the Stormwarden's injuries had been severe enough to require treatment on the isle of the Vaere. Corley shifted his weight, distressed by the restless manner in which the Firelord regarded the sea. 'You'll find Callinde warped to the south dock. My shipwrights kept her seaworthy.'
Jaric nodded; but his expression proved that his thoughts strayed elsewhere. He touched the captain's hand in farewell, and turned to find his boat. Long after nightfall, the sentries in Cliffhaven's beacon tower watched the distant spark of his presence vanish beyond the horizon.
Ivainson sailed through the gales of late winter and beached on the Isle of the Vaere. Snowflakes melted in sun-bleached hair as his scarred hands furled sail. At length he looked up and met a watcher with fey black eyes. Tamlin stood on th
e sand with his pipe, a cloud of smoke rings for company.
Jaric drew breath, troubled by the ache of old wounds. Speech came haltingly after long weeks of silence. 'Your secret is secure from demons. Men can now abandon sorcery and the Cycle of Fire.'
The creature, whose form was actually the projection of a sophisticated machine, was not intimidated by crackling auras of power. Tamlin lifted his pipe from his teeth and released an irreverent smoke ring. 'Firelord's son, you're ignorant. Now, as never before, the strength of your mastery is needed.'
Such was the perception of Ivainson's powers, the Vaere needed no words to qualify; Corinne Dane's mission at last had been realized, an effective defence for psionic aliens found in the person of the Firelord's heir. Jaric must stay, and train others with talent to multiple mastery of Sathid. After Keithland, Starhope and the other worlds enslaved by Gierj and Morrigierj waited to be set free.
Jaric bent his head. He, who had desired nothing beyond the bounds of Keithland, would reluctantly blaze the path toward the stars. The thought caused him untold sorrow, until a shower of sand struck his ankles.
'Fish-brains! Beloved, you took forever to get here.' Two hands plunged through the light of his presence, to lock with fierce strength around his chest.
'Taen,' Jaric murmured; he turned and buried his face in black hair. Only the Dreamweaver knew that he wept. She waited, patient in his embrace, as other footsteps approached. The presence of a second sorcerer brushed her awareness. She smiled then, but said nothing. When her Firelord looked up, he would find the Stormwarden of Elrinfaer limping across sand to meet him.
Here ends The Cycle of Fire
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1: Riddle
Chapter 2: Mastery of Earth
Chapter 3: Return
Chapter 4: Light Falcon
Chapter 5: Deliverance
Chapter 6: Demon Council
Chapter 7: Cycle of Fire
Chapter 8: Gierj Circle
Chapter 9: Counterstrike
Chapter 10: Ice Wards
Chapter 11: Crisis
Chapter 12: Hallowild
Chapter 13: The Reaving
Chapter 14: Morbrith
Chapter 15: Border Wilds
Chapter 16: Stalkers
Chapter 17: Ambush
Chapter 18: Shadowfane
Chapter 19: Starhope
Epilogue
Janny Wurts, Shadowfane
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