Whatever crisis had shaken them to mount an earthshaking conjury from Althain Tower on the force of the last summer's solstice, the cause continued to elude the most diligent Koriani seers.
The mood of their Prime Enchantress grew brittle finder the pressure as events outpaced the scope of her informants.
Where once the Great Waystone had enabled her Senior Circle to track the Fellowship's intent, now, they could only hurl probes and futile auguries against impenitrable wards. When Sethvir of Althain chose secrecy, he could circle his tower in guardspells as opaque as Paravian ironwork.
Tenaciously unwilling to leave the passions of geas-cursed princes to run their fell course unremarked, at the head of an order founded on principles of merciful intervention, Morriel Prime settled in for autumn equinox at the orphan's hostel maintained in the coastal fortress at Whitehold. Situated where the flats of a lowland peninsula jutted north into Eltair Bay, the high, pale buttresses of the citadel's inner ward shaded a cobbled courtyard that rang to the shouts of parentless children by day. By night, the high, mortised walls contained the chalked circles and candles laid out for spell rites performed in seasonal rhythms under starlight. If the sentries posted over the gatehouse were troubled by the uncanny vibrations of sealed ritual, they were bound to withhold their complaint.
Since history held that a former Senior Circle had once saved the city from flooding under a tidal surge through the might of a winter storm, Whitehold's welcome toward the enchantresses remained an entrenched tradition. The orphanage over the years had pre-empted the brick mansions on both sides of the narrow street.
The Prime commandeered a high, pillared chamber, once the solar of a rich shipping merchant. Rows of paned casements aflood with east sunlight warmed the damp air on clear mornings. The view overlooked the strand. Beyond the workaday clutter of lighters beached like seined fish on the sands, the bearded combers hurled themselves in ranks of filigreed foam and exploding spray. Vacant mooring buoys beaded the heave of leaden waters. Every galley available for charter had sailed north to Werpoint to serve Lysaer s'Ilessid as troop transport.
Morriel basked in the windowseat to ease the cruel ache in her joints. Gone were the days when she could meditate without the distracting, soft comfort of cushions. Intolerant of cold, less patient with setbacks, she forbade the attendance of her First Senior since Elaira's failure to establish herself as Arithon's mistress. On the night the younger initiate had unmasked the man's defences and roused him to passion, the direct force of his character coupled with s'Ffalenn compassion had shocked a signal the clear length of the seventh lane.
A grave enough obstacle to the transfer of prime power, First Senior Lirenda's fascination with the Shadow Master must be shielded from added temptation through the polishing phase of her training.
Morriel assumed the knotty burden of tracking the s'Ffalenn prince's movements since his recent departure from Merior. For this purpose, a coffer filled with blownglass spheres lay open to her inspection. Embedded inside each fragile globe, suspended in miniature reflection by an initiate whose talents were manifest through air, morsels of live event had been captured by the dawn's lane watchers.
The Koriani Prime bent in focused intent over each detailed imprint. Hooded in shawls like a fortune teller, she prodded the orbs to and fro and arranged them in patterns by subject. Throughout the past month, the disparate collection of happenstance gleaned from the continent's east coast narrowed steadily toward a convergence.
Only those subjects charged and weighted with emotion would impress themselves into the lane flow: in Merior only that morning, a tow-headed set of twins had badgered a blind splicer who worked rope for a brigantine's ratlines. Morriel cradled the glass with their image, sharp in analysis of the spirit and loyalty to Arithon impressed in those paired young faces. Her clawed nail rolled that sphere aside.
Another, captured from close council within the walls of Alestron, showed Duke Bransian s'Brydionand his brothers immersed in fierce discourse over maps. By the patterns of the marker pins under their hands, Morriel gleaned their intent to join their armies with Lysaer's war host in the campaign to trap Arithon on the sands of the Scimlade hook. Associated, but contained in a smaller glass, a dishonoured guard captain clad in beggar's rags hunkered over a stolen bread crust. No less fervent in dedication, this one ached for the chance to claim vengeance. His hatred burned hot against the Shadow Master who had undone his claim to pride and credibility.
Northward, under octagonal towers at Jaelot, merchant guildsmen grumbled over the edict from their mayor's council that conscripted their fastest galleys and dispatched the fleet northward to serve the allied muster at Werpoint.
Transactions abounded up and down Eltair Bay, where vessels of load-bearing capacity changed hands, or were chartered out for Etarran gold.
Morriel marked one image orb aside for its oddity: a flotilla of derelict fishing luggers moored in a hidden cove off Crescent Isle that should have passed unnoticed but for the curiosity of a passing school of dolphins. Since Lysaer's affairs were infallibly couched in ceremonious, forthright candour, the Prime tapped the glass that failed to fit in irritable speculation, then moved on with her methodical review.
While affairs on the waterfront transpired apace, the war host itself remained bogged down in Valleygap, low on supplies, and harried by outbreaks of clan raids. The latest trap had sprung a rockfall across the narrow roadway. Reduced under glass like black ants, soldiers laboured with shovels and ox teams, shifting boulders to clear the choked pass.
Of Jieret Red-beard and his clan Companions, the lane watchers had traced no sign. Either their scouts had abandoned the site since the ambush, or they slept by day and no man among them dreamed with sufficient intensity to deflect the lane's magnetic flux.
Morriel curled crabbed fingers in yet another spasm of stray pain. Eyes bead-bright in concentration, she con sidered the last three spheres in the coffer whose meaning lay provocatively obscured.
In the first, Black Drake's wily captain scoured the sailors' dives at Highscarp, recruiting a disreputable stamp of crewmen even her smuggler's brig should hesitate to sign for passage.
In the next, a graceful, painted sloop lay tucked in a secluded anchorage by the fir groves of Ithilt. The Mad Prophet curled like a leaf against her headstay, croaking drunken ditties, his pudgy hands clasped around the whisky crock he had nursed since his mishap with the vat in Garth's pond. The Master of Shadow was not on board. The image trapped under glass replayed its maddening, repetitive cascade of surf; the cove's crescent beach showed no tracks.
Another sphere garnered a league to the northeast showed a herd of deer fleeing some disturbance. Twinged by impatience, Morriel traced the slick, cold surface of the glass. Tonight's lane watch, perhaps, could pursue these disparate threads to their origins. The order's most gifted scriers had been advised to sift events in Talliarthe's vicinity.
Dakar's presence offered proof: the Prince of Rathain had returned to his kingdom, sure sign he angled for conflict. Outside Elaira's influence, Arithon's mind was a maze of subtle intrigues a mere image could scarcely hope to track. Whatever he plotted, incessant lane watch offered tantalizing glimpses, but seldom enough insight to back a forecast. Though Elaira had affirmed that the s'Ffalenn prince had impaired his mage-sight, he had not lost the disciplines of his mastery. A trained awareness and a masterbard's instincts yet enabled him to batten his emotions in stilled silence. The lane flow picked him up rarely, and almost never when his movements displayed intent.
Balked to a hissed sigh of anger, the Koriani Prime snagged hands as fleshless as bird's claws in the dark. Abased in the confines of the doorway, Lirenda did not flinch at the omission of her title. 'I dare nothing. News has arrived for your ears alone.'
'What under Ath's sky cannot be made to wait?' Morriel Prime contradicted. 'If you came to say something important, let me hear.'
Lirenda's frosty poise never wavered. 'I beg you, reconsider. T
he subject is too weighty to broach without due precautions.'
Too subtle a creature to show disdain or approval, the Koriani Prime snapped fingers like dry sticks. 'Rise, then. Admit the one who awaits in the corridor behind you as well.'
At Lirenda's rebellious catch of breath, Morriel gave a cracked exhalation. 'Do you think to gainsay my wishes? That's unwise. I already know the source of your news. Another senior has travelled from Tysan to see I me, yes? She was ordered to keep watch on events at Avenor. She would scarcely leave her post for a pittance.'
'Matriarch, beldame Haltha is here,' Lirenda admitted through a rustled hitch of skirts. 'Shall I lay down a ward to preserve privacy?'
'No. Fetch the news bearer. I shall attend what protections are needed myself.' While Lirenda withdrew to obey, Morriel Prime veiled the glass image spheres in a shawl. Then she shrugged off her quilts with laborious care and stood upright.
Her lavender robes dragged at her skeletal form like the wings of an exotic moth as she opened a wall chest and drew out the silk bag that wrapped one of the order's lesser focus jewels. Unveiled, the white quartz burned with caught light, a spike of cold flame cased in crystal. Morriel paid no heed to the movements of her underlings in the doorway. She cupped the gem's faceted weight in palms like dead leaves, then cast her stilled thoughts into its lattice to enhance her tuned reservoir of power.
Heightened awareness flooded through her.
Brick and mortar, she sensed the framing presence of the mansion, board floors infused like ghost dreams with the tap of women's steps and the tears of growing children and the trace glow left by past conjuries. Spent fragments of ward seals clung like grit in old plaster. Layered underneath in shadowy lacings of hallucination, Morriel could nearly detect the subliminal groan of over-stressed natural energies. More than ever as her years advanced, their febrile ring teased her consciousness, as though the grain of painted moulding and sea-damp stone walls struck and vibrated, spun into contrary currents by the strictures of time-faded sigils.
Morriel gave such fancy short shrift. To pity the heart of inanimate substance while breathing humanity still suffered was a Fellowship affectation, as ruthless to life as their bloodless, isolate meddling.
She raged alone in bitter knowledge that since the Waystone's loss, the sorcerers perused her sisterhood's affairs at their whim. The most potent ward at Koriani command never stopped Sethvir's prying, or Luhaine's lugubrious surveillance. At best, Morriel could impose a construct upon the air to lend warning of Fellowship presence. Sealed through the principles of elemental domination, every sound to occur within her chamber could be tracked and confined by scribed runes. The resonance she knotted through her crystal recorded the expanding signature of each event in a shimmer of subliminal blue light.
Should any outside power seek to bleed off a trace pattern, Morriel Prime would know at once, with First Senior Lirenda little the wiser. The old Prime had learned when pursuit of perfection could become a wasting mistake. Serpent-sly, she preferred to discover which facts the sorcerers came to monitor, then tailor her precautions to suit.
Lirenda was dedicated, but she had much to learn of the strengths to be gained through abstinence. She stood now in a simmer of prim impatience while her Prime rearranged fragile limbs in their closest approximation of comfort amid the quilts.
By contrast, the senior enchantress just in from Tysan presented herself for audience in humbled quiet, her fustian clothes still wrinkled from the road, and her seamed features chalky with weariness.
'Your will, Matriarch,' she murmured. Beneath the probing regard of the Koriani Prime, she sank to the floor in obeisance.
'You have my leave to speak.' Morriel nested her hands in her robes, her porcelain hair strained through by cold fire in the shimmer of spell-tempered air.
'My Prime,' the beldame opened, while the grimy hem of her skirt fluttered to her terrified trembling. 'A decision of grave moment was given into my hands and I was forced to a choice. For an act of unconscionable independence, I throw myself on your mercy. I closed a bargain with Prince Lysaer s'Ilessid. In exchange for the secret of his half-brother's interests at Merior, I have his witnessed assurance that the Waystone of our order was never lost.' In rising uncontainable excitement, she finished, 'The jewel is whole still, and held in close care by the Fellowship sorcerers at Althain Tower.'
Morriel raised clawed forgers to stifle a warbling cry. This news was momentous, their vanished grand crystal revealed at long last! Thrilled by a tingling expansive rush of joy after tedious years of proscribed power, the Prime reached out a shaken hand and traced her seal of blessing above the prostrate senior's hood. 'You are forgiven your presumption. Indeed, well done!'
These tidings afforded great hope. If the stone were recovered, not only could the disarranged humours of her body be drawn back into balance until the trials of her succession were surmounted, but means might be restored to quell damaging storms and banish disease, and even to throw off the suffocating constraint imposed by the Fellowship of Seven.
In heady elation, Morriel locked eyes with her First Senior.
Lirenda's flush in the heat of stunning news showed more than exhilarated eagerness: under her varnished layer of poise flashed a spasm of unguarded anger.
Morriel seized upon that oddity. Barbed with searching power, sped to sharp force by the spell crystal still meshed with her mind, her scrutiny lanced through the First Senior's reserve to wrest out that sand grain of dissidence. Understanding followed like a hammer blow to rock. Lirenda's displeasure stemmed from personal betrayal, that the Waystone's location had been bought at a cost of endangering the royal fugitive at Merior.
Proof stung, that the prime candidate's recurrent fascination for Arithon s'Ffalenn had indeed threaded deep enough to unbalance her grasp of affairs.
Pricked spiteful in displeasure, Morriel narrowed eyes like black pebbles and snapped an immediate order. 'First Senior, I charge you to take the Skyron focus stone. Leave for Atainia and muster a grand circle of one hundred and eight seniors. You have one task: confront Sethvir and wrest back our Great Waystone. Fail in this, come back empty-handed, and you may consider yourself unworthy of your post.'
Expressionless as sculpted alabaster before the evident censure of her Prime, Lirenda returned a polished curtsey. Her back unbent, braided hair like chiselled jet under the flicker of spelled air, she said, 'Your will is my pleasure. I shall not disappoint you.'
Morriel watched, arranged in brittle stillness as her appointed heir arose in fervent grace and departed.
To the elder still prostrate at her feet, the Prime cast a less jaundiced eye. 'Put aside your fear, Haltha. Arise. You acted at great risk for an end you judged to be worth any sacrifice. Your service deserves due reward, but necessity drives me. I lay on you my request for a small, additional service.'
The beldame straightened before her mistress, head bent in submission. 'Matriarch, I am yours to command.' Morriel lifted an arm reduced to bone wrapped in paper-thin tissue, twitched aside her shawl, and selected an orb from the array beside the opened coffer. She set its glass weight into Haltha's hand and said, 'Repeat the scrying you made for Lysaer s'Ilessid, which exposed Arithon's shipyards at Merior. Let the man whose likeness you hold be given the selfsame knowledge.'
Permitted no leave to question, the senior enchantress cupped the sphere, which held the tormented reflection of the dishonoured captain from Alestron. 'Your will,' she intoned.
Outside the close chamber, like a sudden, clouding omen, a child in the courtyard started wailing. Worn beyond care for any infant's painful trials, Morriel granted the weary senior her permission to retire. Alone in the chamber as the morning's last sunlight retreated into chill shadow, she closed her eyes to resume meditation. Her ancient heart beat unburdened by remorse for the mischief she had loosed to hound the last heir of s'Ffalenn.
Should one rancorous, whip-scarred guardsman pursue his cherished vengeance and bring the Shadow Maste
r's death, or if his passion for murder simply fouled s'Ffalenn machinations and caused a fatal delay for Lysaer's war host to exploit, the difference would be moot. Arithon dead or maimed at second hand would disentangle Lirenda from the flaw that endangered her succession to Prime power. One last detail remained.
The instant Morriel felt restored enough to resume the burdens of her office, she demanded the attendance of her errand page.
'I have a message for the duty-watch to be sent immediately by lane current,' she commanded. 'Initiate Elaira is to be found and informed that my sanction for congress with the Prince of Rathain is as of this moment withdrawn.'
Indeed, against the prospect of a restored Great Waystone, the woman's assignation was no longer vital. Of far weightier import, First Senior Lirenda must succeed in her contest against Sethvir. Then stronger means would lie at hand to curb her ill-founded infatuation, if through brute luck, or thrice-damnable s'Ffalenn cleverness, the subject of her weakness mastered the odds against him and survived.
Sunset, Midnight and Noon
Informed on the lane surge at sundown that Morriel Prime has released her charge to seek liaison with Arithon s'Ffalenn, a bronze-haired enchantress in Merior weeps in gratitude for restored honesty, and in loss for shared love that must languish unpartnered; through the quiet, resolved hour as she packs to depart, she prays for the man, that he might stay free to refound his happiness with another...
In the deeps of the night, ripped awake by an uncanny, clear dream that tells where to find the sorcerer who had fired his duke's armoury, a bearded blond outcast scratches old whip scars, arises, and begins a journey to Merior by the Sea to enact his sworn blood vow of vengeance...
On a rocky slope above Valleygap, on the day of his twentieth year that clan custom reckons full manhood, a red-bearded chieftain called Earl of the North bends back his black bow, sets his aim on one figure above the crews who shift rocks in hot sunlight, and lets fly an arrow inscribed with the name of the killer who brought untimely death to a father, a mother, and four sisters ...