Dakar bit back an uprush of spite, then sharp grief, that the Araethurian herder’s fickle change of heart could have come at the ruined mill, before Arithon of Rathain had been forced to play sacrifice as a decoy. Yet brutal honesty choked him from speech. Often enough in the past, his own mistimed hatreds had threatened the last s’Ffalenn prince. If guilt and care would allow no forgiveness for abandoning his charge of protection, Dakar at least forced a measure of tolerance. ‘Since I didn’t pack gin for sweet ease and forgetfulness, any answers must be sought through magecraft. Will I get your self-righteous knife in my back, Fionn? No? Then damned well show me proof the use of cast spells won’t raise your chicken-heart moral hackles.’
Fionn Areth flushed. ‘I know goats, not much else.’ A furious gust off the heights flogged his cloak, and streamered the cookfire to ribbons. Rigid and miserable, and chilled to the bone, he gestured with obdurate sarcasm. ‘Since we don’t have a white kid to kill as a sacrifice, I can’t very well volunteer to pin its neck down for the knife.’
Dakar hurled his sharpened stick into the coals. ‘I’m Fellowship trained!’ He ducked wind-borne sparks, his exasperation stinging enough to scale the rust off old iron. ‘They don’t work dark rites on the death of small animals. Neither did Arithon s’Ffalenn, when he still had the use of his birth-born talents. He earned his high mastery under the mages at Rauven. Whatever fools’ talk you’ve heard in town taverns, the teaching he received regarded such practice as misuse and abomination.’
‘Never mind animals,’ Fionn Areth hurled back. ‘Some folk insist you use men, even children and babies.’ His stare level green, though the hands clamped on the horn recurve were shaking, the herder wrapped himself in the clay dignity drawn from his backcountry origins. ‘Do you wonder why townborn and craftsmen are frightened? The Alliance flaunts the sealed evidence of witnesses. If the best thing I can do for Arithon’s cause is to take a long stroll down the ridge, then just say so!’
‘Stay,’ Dakar snapped. ‘I’d rather you saw the bare bones of the truth. Better still, why not help? You could take the tin basin. Melt down some snow since I’m going to require clean water to call in a scrying.’
For a moment, the mismatched pair locked horns, the spellbinder resigned as a tortoise bearing the weight of the world on his back, and the younger man given no civil direction to vent his heated frustration.
‘Or don’t help. The worst may have already happened.’ The Mad Prophet shed the wadded cloaks from bowed shoulders. He arose, upended the supply pack, and from the oiled cloth satchel that stored his herbs and bottled tinctures, removed a silk-wrapped packet.
‘What’s in that?’ Fionn Areth laid his bow aside, his truce ambivalent as he fetched the tin basin. Unbidden fear and frank curiosity pinched a frown between his jet eyebrows, so like Arithon’s. The likeness at times raised uncanny chills, or startled queer twists of juxtaposed memory.
‘You’ll see soon enough.’ Dakar remained too pressured for tact. Nightmares had harried his sleep once too often, where the s’Ffalenn prince stood endangered, or dead, with himself caught hobbled and helpless. ‘I already gave you my promise not to keep wicked secrets.’
‘That’s meant to reassure me?’ As though the relentless chill granted the pretense for Fionn Areth to move, he gathered his nerve and set off. His goatherd’s planted, deliberate stride jarred, so unlike Arithon’s instinctive, cat grace as he footed his way down the scree slope.
Grumbling the impressive invective learned in the shoreside brothels, Dakar hunkered down. Always, the cruel, thin air of the heights worked his lungs like a stranded blowfish. In rugged country or mild flat lands, he never relished the nitpicking practice of spellbinding. He had long since lost count of his cringing mistakes. For ongoing centuries, refined energies had slipped through his inept handling like spilled pins. He endured his defeats, sunk in shame and embarrassment, or shook them off with self-mocking deprecation. Often, he felt, he would have to be dead, to match even one minute of Asandir’s wisdom, or rise to the standard of exacting, sure touch and utterly steadfast patience.
Nor could a man concentrate on an empty belly, with half a hundred hard corners of granite stabbing his backside like punishment. Dakar clawed underneath himself and singled out a particularly offending small stone. ‘Daelion Fatemaster take pity!’ He shied the fragment into the abyss that faced Rockfell in a flash-burn explosion of temper. ‘Why in the name of Sithaer’s sixtyscore fiends did I ever get myself born to woman’ – the rock landed and plowed up a shower of snow – ‘far less saddle myself with the cross-grained affairs of the almighty Fellowship Sorcerers?’
No natural force answered.
Overhead, frayed stringers of cloud raced over a zenith of bottomless indigo. The sun cast its dazzling patchworked light across acres of wilds, and gilded his face with scarcely a vestige of warmth. The rare glimpse of fair weather did nothing to lift the dread fastened over his heart. Dakar sucked a deep breath, and coughed. Bracing air made his lungs ache. Anytime, he preferred the sweaty, close fug of a second-rate tavern’s taproom. Drowned in beer, or sunk in pumping bliss with some harlot, he would not have to care if the last s’Ffalenn prince died alone on the barrens of Daon Ramon.
‘Mercy upon me,’ he whispered, desperate to stem the tears scalding the backs of his eyelids. He steeled quailing nerves, stilled circling thoughts, and surrendered the comfort of his innermost mental barriers. He grasped the unruly threads of his worry and stifled their clamor in stern discipline. For good reason fear stalked him. He had never earned mastery, or achieved firm control over his gifted talent. Even as he invoked the calm to engage the expanded vision of mage-sight, he invited the chance that his mad bent toward prescience might resurge and rule him instead.
He might see Arithon’s body, torn bloody and fallen, or worse: the dark passion of Jaelot’s guardsmen. Their behavior would not be pretty as they gave free rein to their ideological Alliance doctrine. Too likely, townbred men-at-arms would satiate their terror of the dark by exacting full measure of maiming torment on the hide of their s’Ffalenn victim.
Bathed in clammy sweat, and chilled to the bone by the hounding north winds, Dakar forced back his ravening doubts. He wrapped himself in his mantle, closed his eyes, then unreeled a line of questing thought through the vast sky arched overhead. In full daylight, he needed the Name of one star, risen high on its course toward the zenith; with that fact in hand, he must determine the precise moment the same body would cross the azimuth meridian. A Fellowship Sorcerer’s majestic, poised mind could encompass an ongoing tapestry of consciousness that placed him as one point, knowing, in connection to all other awarenesses, seen and unseen. As an apprentice spellbinder, the Mad Prophet’s skill was less facile.
Earthbound in the five senses of his mortality, Dakar, like the worm, had to grope. He turned his mind inward. Mental static subsided. He held firm until his consciousness stayed contained, a stilled pool against which the mage-sense that tracked the unseen could cast its refined reflection. Listening, Dakar cast a tactile thought into the bottomless well of the sky.
By rote knowledge, he tuned out the disparate voices of everything else: the whistle of the wind, and the rattle of storm-beaten fir branches. Their sounds in the ear were no less manifest than the voice of their being, that strand of aliveness that, interwoven, formed the fabric of all Ath’s creation. Each spun thread held Name, and could be marked and traced through the realms of existence that lay open to mage-sight. A star, in that context, sang in chords of exquisite complexity. Each made itself known, an explosive, exuberant play of energies, forming and unforming in the fire dance pavane that interfaced matter and light. A pure cry of high frequency, a star’s existence formed a gateway through the veil of the mysteries. Their identity crossed outside of imposed time and space; as the mind of a man might, when exactingly trained to know the elusive byways that stepped his awareness beyond the dense limits of five senses enfleshed.
Each star’s
patterning was self-aware, distinct in personality as no other. Dakar sifted, and puzzled, and sorted with precision. At length, he picked out the grand harmony of the constellation arisen to position overhead. Then, in a second pass, infinitely more taxing, he refined his perception to isolate the one star that would best serve his need. He must find it by Name, then make himself known in return, to exchange the requisite permissions. All this, he must do in the span of a moment, joined at one with the heavens that turned to the spin of Athera upon her grand axis.
A jab in the ribs knocked him rudely from trance. ‘Merciful maker! Now of all times, how can you slip off to sleep?’
Dakar snapped open offended brown eyes. Fionn Areth stood over him, the tin basin brimming with snow clods. Rather than risk receiving the load in a cascade over his head, the Mad Prophet scrambled upright, hand clutched to his side where the young man’s boot toe had rammed him. ‘I wasn’t asleep, you idiot goatherd!’ Wrung by savage dizziness, he clasped mittened hands to his temples. ‘Obviously, you’ve never seen a sorcerer in trance state.’
The disastrous shock to his nerves ebbed away. While his wheeling senses resettled into the sluggish couch of his body, Dakar held fast to the Name for the star he had garnered, rising barely minutes away from the overhead peak of its passage. The snow in the basin must be melted by then. Otherwise, he would lose his opening to scry. Too ugly, the chance his effort would be wasted. What use, to summon help, if Prince Arithon’s predicament had already been ended by sword, then a pine torch, touched to a pile of faggots.
‘Set that basin heating over the coals.’ The Mad Prophet pawed through the rumpled mantle wadded over his lap, relieved to recover the silk-wrapped packet unharmed in the scrip at his waist. He had always disliked working spellcraft with an audience. Since the antagonism seeded by Fionn Areth’s ignorance set him on edge all the worse, he diverted the young man with chores. ‘Scrounge out a burned twig or a sliver of charcoal. Something I can use to scribe out a protective circle.’
Next, Dakar swept off a flank of raised rock, if not level, at least with a reasonably flat surface upon which to work the ceremonial array for a star scrying. He accepted the snowmelt in the basin, aware of the sun, climbing the arc toward winter noon. More seconds fleeted by as he spat on singed fingers, then tried again to grip the charcoal Fionn Areth had just raked from the firebed.
Breath plumed from his lips, streamed white in the cold as Dakar invoked a Paravian blessing to honor and hallow the ground.
‘We always begin with the circle,’ he explained, drawing the figure around the aligned basin. Fionn Areth watched, huddled beside the heaped coals for their warmth, or perhaps for their illusion of security. Larger worries eclipsed the concern that the venison pot had boiled dry. ‘Next we mark off the cardinal directions, then intercede for cooperation from the four elements.’
Fionn Areth frowned as Dakar scratched the symbols for each point, beginning with air, at the east. ‘How can you tell where due north is, precisely?’
‘So you would also, if you learned to listen.’ Like a vulture hunched underneath trailing cloaks, Dakar drew runes for south, west, then north on his circle. ‘A good many clansmen are gifted with that awareness from birth.’
A pause, while the wind screamed and gusted. The water in the basin puckered, then hardened under the onslaught. Dakar swore, flung the charcoal aside, and scooped out a glassine fan of new ice. He would have to work swiftly. Should the water freeze over, he would lose his moment. Noon and midnight offered the most propitious times to craft an efficient scrying.
‘This,’ he said, stripping the tie from the silk, ‘is a shred from a bandage once used to bind up a gash Prince Arithon made to seal an oath of truth for his caithdein. Understand, and clearly, it is my limitation that demands the use of an artifice.’
Asandir would more simply visualize Arithon’s face, and by an unfailing recollection of detail, invoke a tie to his presence. A musical talent might sing in trued pitch and engage the harmonies of his Grace’s Name. Since the Mad Prophet’s froggy vocals would lose in a contest with a rusty hinge on a post, he resigned himself to crude methods and tore off a thread from the spotted linen. ‘Just so you know the old trace of blood in this cloth will not empower this spellcraft, but only serve to hold its alignment to Arithon.’
Of course, there were subtleties beyond time to explain. Dakar cupped the ripped swatch of thread in his hand, guarded in hope that the blood pact once sworn between prince and caithdein could be used to touch Lord Jieret as well. Arithon had still wielded his mage-sighted talent when he had sealed binding friendship with the Earl of the North; and Jieret had inherited the s’Valerient gift of Sight. Dakar knew, as he followed each step in due order, that the rite he enacted would cast an array of hidden ramifications. By the Law of the Major Balance, each conscious act affected all others across the greater breadth of Ath’s creation.
Invocations by grand conjury crossed outside the veil, past the warp-and-weft barriers of time and space that wove the world known by the senses. Spoken language fell short of description. Subjected to Fionn Areth’s critical attention, Dakar fumbled to impart how a precisely tuned thought and intent could dissolve the mind’s perceived boundaries. For today, he must free the reflective properties of water, and bring the element to respond to the rarefied vibration called down within the protected circle.
The Mad Prophet inscribed the linked chain of Paravian runes that ruled water. Next, he asked the requisite permission, and marveled, as he always did, as the surface smoothed over and acquired the mirror-bright sheen of pooled mercury. While Fionn Areth exclaimed, nervous and amazed, the Mad Prophet tipped his face skyward. ‘Sun and star will cross the meridian, here, and fix our place of reference. This won’t be easy to comprehend. But all event, past and present, is in fact simultaneous outside the bounds of the veil. For scrying, we have to establish a beacon point, a site of response for the natural forces that spell and rune will channel in answer to match our framed template.’
Dakar spoke the incantation to invoke the star, linking her portal to the one just created by circle and water. Then he cast the stained fragment of cloth into the basin, and waited the unbearable, agonized interval leading into the moment of noon.
Sweating with tension, with no second chance if he fumbled the timing, Dakar held his breath while, stubborn as any set bloodstain, the rusty clot in the thread slowly soaked through and dissolved. Mage-sight detected the delicate, smoke haze as the energies unwound in release, the trace magnetics of Arithon’s identity dispersed and then imprinted into the volatile essence of water. The juncture of spellcraft reached consummation as his signature frequencies and the star’s, overhead, resolved into vertical phase.
‘Now!’ Dakar whispered. Hope raised a flame of fierce expectation, as in response to relentless finesse his drawn rune lit to hazed phosphor, then drifted above the basin. Upon that actualized charge of prime power, the spellbinder invoked the sworn permission granted by the Shadow Master for the sake of protection and safety. Dakar followed with the Paravian command for the heightened awareness connecting spirit and flesh. ‘Tiendar!’
If Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn had not crossed Fate’s Wheel, if he still breathed, incarnate, the star as it crossed the arc of the zenith would conjoin with his living self. A reflection would appear within the spelled water, unveiling his location and circumstance.
Response came, not the blank darkness Dakar most feared, but a vista of snow-clad landscape. The Mad Prophet knew the stony, rising ground, where the hillcrests cut the wind-raked sky like the etched rims of broken crystal. The site lay near the ruins of Ithamon, amid Daon Ramon Barrens. There the spell-marked water in the basin resolved a fleeting image of armed men wearing Jaelot’s colors. Several conferred in a tight-knit group. Others posted a nervous guard over a bound and unconscious prisoner. Dakar received the alarming impression of bloodstained snow. The twist of black hair masking Arithon’s face was snarled to his scalp,
whorled into a clotted scab.
Overhead, in the Skyshiels, the sun reached station, climbed to the peak of its arc. That selfsame, meshed second, the flux of the noon tide peaked and cascaded down the fifth lane.
A burst of white light blasted off the spelled basin. The poised rune became immolated. Flash-burned, near blinded, Dakar howled an oath. His rank language entangled with a peal of wild sound far above range of mortal hearing. Yet to senses not mage-gifted, that cried note of alarm rippled across air and matter, a deep, belling toll that stirred and shook the bedrock roots of the mountains.
‘What’s happening?’ Fionn Areth shot erect in dismay, his nape roughened to sudden gooseflesh. Hand grasped to his sword, he frantically glanced right and left while the diminishing shudder of low-range harmonics shivered the stone underfoot. ‘Merciful Ath! What harm have you called down upon us?’
‘No harm. Nothing demonic. Put away that fool steel, you’re not going to be threatened!’ Dakar spat a final, furious epithet, hands pressed to the ringing shell of his skull to damp out the lingering, persistent vibration still ranging through his magesense. When Fionn Areth’s sword instead turned point first and threatened to skewer his neck, he shouted in exasperation. ‘A plain scrying never initiates energy. This was a passive spell, drawn upon feminine principles and run through a cipher of noninterference! The event that just happened was not the effect of anything done by my conjury.’
Fionn Areth bore in until the trembling tip of his blade rasped the unshaven skin of the Mad Prophet’s throat. ‘Well, prove that.’
‘I can’t. This once, why not just believe me?’ Dakar shut his eyes, snapped to ripe irritation: at least when he had suffered the same treatment by Arithon, the s’Ffalenn prince’s hand did not shake. His word was no lie. Rank fool that he was, pressed by haste and concern, he had simply neglected to use common sense, or recall Asandir’s basic teaching. He should have remembered the obvious step to account for his current location.