Then all voices faded as the excruciate torrent of amplified sensation whirled him headlong back into rarefied cognizance.
This time, Arithon forged his purposeful way through the onslaught. Not groping blindly into the unknown, he leaned on the centaur’s directive to focus the reflex of his initiate discipline. Exigent need quenched the errant flares of distraction until he re-encountered the glorious, live tapestry that unveiled the flux map of Caithwood.
Amid the unfurled nuance of flow, he found the traces imprinted by magecraft embedded like whorls of floss silk and stitched light. The brightest patterns wrought by the wise had been evoked in alignment with the dynamics of mystery and harmony. From those, he selected which strands to awaken and amplify. Two and a half centuries of enchanted captivity spent confined to a detached awareness left his talent exquisitely practised: just as he would have settled a wraith, Arithon stretched his inner talent to sing . . .
Two days later, shafted in morning sunlight beneath the vaulted ceiling in the Koriani sisterhouse at Whitehold, the marble floor engraved by the seal of the Fellowship Sorcerer’s oath should have cracked asunder.
Or so Prime Selidie fumed as she paced across the inscription with the agitation of a nettled tiger. The violet silk of her red-banded robe hissed across stone’s witness to Asandir’s pledge, the incised line of runes serenely cool and unshattered beneath her vexed steps.
‘I stand on the sure proof! The grand oath stays true,’ she snarled at the subservient Senior who witnessed the moment’s bad news. ‘That Sorcerer swore before my own eyes. Never imagine that I could have been so blindsidedly fooled!’
The seeress looked on in mute disbelief, hands gripped to the quartz sphere kept enabled for long-distance contact. The active crystal all but spat bursts of sparks as the Prime’s declaration spiked a charge of frustration through the link to the remiss enchantress posted in Tysan: the one whose trustworthy experience manipulated the Sunwheel invasion staged for Arithon’s pending recapture.
Caught as the intermediary holding the interface, the attendant seer flinched as the tasked sister’s response reverberated back through the sphere. ‘I have not mistaken! Asandir’s personal signature taints the working that balks the temple dedicates’ advance into Caithwood.’
Selidie raged over the corrosive irony. ‘Then be sure I’m informed in exacting detail! Precisely how has our effort been thwarted? Just what slippery practice has let that Sorcerer side-step the terms that discharged the protection of a crown heir?’
The seeress who wielded the quartz matrix braced her nerves and relayed the urgent demand, while the Prime’s impatience suffused the high hall, with its pillars inlaid with copper sigils of guard, and its stonewalls fraught with the murderous echoes of centuries of dead-locked conflict. More than one ancient enemy resented the order’s existence. The vicious implication of an allied conspiracy against the Matriarch’s higher interests could not be ignored. Whatever noxious reverse stymied her played gambit in Caithwood, the source must be unriddled with accurate speed. The Matriarch fumed in tense wait, her coiffed blond hair stabbed by the glint of diamond pins in the knifed slice of outdoor light through the lancet windows.
Beyond the leaded panes, workaday life seethed in gaudy, oblivious colour. The brisk pulse of the shoreside commerce came measured by the thunder of dray wheels in the cobbled street and the warbled cries of the meat vendors. The chants of the muscular stevedores, unlading, snaked through the hectic shouts of the children who raced the stray cats to snatch up the fish scraps tossed off the luggers at Fishermen’s Pier. Moored trade galleys lined the bay front with furled sails, crowded as tightly as wing-folded moths into shelter. A gale brewed offshore. The cold eastern sky wore the plumed, horsetail clouds that fore-ran a swift change to foul weather.
Inside, the froth of Prime Selidie’s anxiety vibrated on the stilled air. If Asandir’s touch had tipped her hand in Tysan, if his meddling Fellowship dared to thwart her by outright deceit, the cascade of consequence would unleash wrack and ruin!
Second to second, the Matriarch hung on the seer’s painstaking response. Just this once in the order’s long history, she hoped her archrivals were desperate enough to try such a fatal mistake.
‘By your will,’ murmured the seeress at due length, ‘I’ve acquired the full record for your inspection.’
Selidie spun away from the day-lit window. The flint gleam on her jewels flickered as she passed yet again over Asandir’s mark. The marble mocked her, smoothly unflawed by the crack that should signal a breach! Which effrontery perhaps should have raised no surprise. Sethvir’s most dastardly subversive schemes always came gloved in bright innocence. Though, by the perpetual ache of her scars, Davien the Betrayer’s did not! Enraged beyond pride, Selidie stripped the mitts that concealed her deformity by tearing them off with her teeth.
‘Give me the charged quartz,’ she ordered, her crippled palms outthrust towards her cowed subordinate.
The seeress complied, unable to suppress an undisciplined shudder of revulsion as the imprinted crystal changed hands.
Expressionless as glazed porcelain, but colder, the Matriarch cupped the sphere awkwardly and accessed the chronological sequence stored in the matrix. The trouble in Caithwood had started when the first company of dedicate lancers crossed over the trade bridge, and their squad of advance scouts failed to return . . .
A tracker with dogs set off with an armed escort to recover the men gone astray. The hounds circled where their fresh trail left the road, then spilled into the undergrowth and abruptly ran riot. No command and no whistle checked the pack’s rampage. Under hot pursuit, the mounted man at the fore tumbled out of his saddle. He pitched to the ground, sprawled as though asleep, except that no one’s rough measures could rouse him.
The tracker from Cainford was seasoned. Years spent poaching scalps for temple bounties had shown him what befell trespassers gone too far into the free wilds: Caithwood’s uncanny hauntings were not fanciful tales in the glens where the heart-wood grew thickest. But no such disturbances troubled the verges. There, even the oldest trees did not whisper in waking dreams, and game did not lure unsuspecting men into circles that spiraled their minds into madness. Suspicious of an intervention by sorcery, the tracker advised the search-party to collect its stricken dedicate and retreat straightaway.
The felled victim awoke upon their return to the troop, stalled in wait along the main thoroughfare. Propped upright, he proved unable to speak, which alarmed the temple’s diviners. Three sanctioned talents conferred over his case, then resolved to revisit the site and investigate. Taken there, two cowered in hysterical fear, while the third and the bravest ventured off alone and lost himself in the wood. By late afternoon, he wandered back dazed, chanting nonsense that branded him as a Shadow-touched heretic.
Caithwood emanated the language of grace, he insisted between vacuous smiles. No threat of burning made him recant. He claimed to hear music beyond the pale of all mortal experience. In his eyes burned the divine fire of conviction bestowed from the etheric realms of Athlieria.
While the disgruntled priesthood took charge of its stray, and the lance captains barked threats to quash rumour, the Koriani scryer in Tysan plumbed the affray for herself to seek evidence of dark spellcraft.
Selidie took pause, forewarned to engage her defenses before she proceeded. Yet even encountered through tight-laced protection, the pattern of causation relayed from Caithwood rocked all of her jaded experience. The unfurled glory of shimmering lines sprang from a music of such exquisite refinement, the thrill of cadence and harmony raised an irresistible state of entrancement. Selidie scrambled to shed the allure, shocked to tears and a shudder of ecstasy. Even at second hand, this relentless assault could hurl a stunned onlooker into derangement.
Prime power demanded the skills to master the weakness of human emotion. A stalking spider upon that strung web, Selidie recovered her objectivity and traced the signature threads woven through the begu
ilement. She encountered Asandir’s tell-tale handiwork instantly: a historical remnant, snatched from a past grand conjury when Caithwood’s trees purposefully had been wakened to thwart a prior invasion. The older framework, borrowed at today’s need, lay entwined with others, more ancient: from song cached within stones imbued with the lilt of the flutes once played by Athlien dancers; to the touch of gilt dew on a unicorn’s horn; to the grounded traces laid down by the might of the lost centaur guardians; to the deep groves yet held sacrosanct by dogged clan vigilance: mystery breathed still in the glimmer of starlight, where Athera’s power coiled yet in dire force, alive where Mankind’s step was forbidden to venture.
No Fellowship Sorcerer had wrought this combined edifice: none. Athera’s Masterbard acted alone, inspired by the faintest of echoes left imprinted into the flux. Arithon’s talent had gathered each disparate theme and braided them into symphonic alignment. Given Caithwood’s history as his sounding board, his healer-based senses had not wrought for harm. Gently implacable, this trap was raised clean, until any unshielded awareness that strayed from the trade-road was bound to succumb. Initiate talent, or folk gifted under the heritage of clan blood-line might pass with a measure of impunity. But the men-at-arms and the temple diviners would fall prey, enveloped by an exalted beauty fit to unstring them to the last man.
Fury could not abide in such a presence. Despite ironclad control, the Matriarch’s features eased into a smile of wonderment. ‘This is purest genius,’ she declared at a whisper. Thought leaped at the prospect. The sheer possibility, if Fellowship mageworks and Paravian remnants could be harnessed for pervasive use!
The musician’s consummate skill framed a potential not lost on Selidie Prime. She had enabled the prodigal talent, and such radical innovation. Arithon’s artistry had been perfected throughout centuries spent appeasing wraiths, while his captive spirit had been kept sealed in her spells of etheric confinement.
The rarefied heights of his current achievement inflamed the Matriarch to a fever pitch of ambition. Cold eyes agleam with excitement, she disengaged from the record retained in the crystal. She returned the blanked quartz to her attendant seeress, and avowed, ‘We shall reclaim what is ours for the betterment of our sisterhood.’
No care was too great, and no patience too trying: the order’s vast resource must stay positioned for the opening to bring Prince Arithon down: not to kill, but to take him alive for her use as an exclusive weapon.
Today’s set-back became a short-term defeat. Though Asandir’s presence had not forced the old score with the Fellowship to a final reckoning, the Prime’s exquisite quarry could not stay holed up inside Caithwood’s protection forever.
Late Winter 5923
Lash-Up
Dakar bit down on the hand that fed him hard enough to draw blood.
‘Wretched barbarian!’ The clanswoman jerked her clamped thumb from his jaws, unamused by the outburst of laughter from the trail scouts who watched from the side-lines. ‘Dharkaron take your feckless malice! I should let you starve and leave the crows the ripe gift of your carcass!’
‘I’d leap at the favour!’ Dakar groused back. He rebuffed his portion of jerked meat and dried fruit, which tumbled down the front of his jacket and pattered into the morning’s layer of fresh snowfall. He raised his lashed ankles. Stamped the food into pulp beneath his contemptuous boot-heels aware that such wanton waste in the lean season stung clansfolk beyond any insult. ‘Is a fortnight of captive mistreatment your idea of civil behaviour?’
‘You’re still hale and breathing,’ the clanswoman sniped back. ‘That’s more than polite, it’s the kiss of kindness itself for a traitor.’
Dakar ceded the argument.
For his rough eastward passage through Halwythwood, the relays of scouts who ran messages and supply between outposts continued to pass him from hand to hand. None relished the task. Foisted off with their routine sacks of provisions and their memorized rounds of dispatches, the prisoner had been driven along without mercy, prodded at weapon-point into the trackless forest until his feet blistered inside his drenched boots. Unlike his facile escort, the Mad Prophet had not been raised woodwise. His awkward weight broke through the iced streams. Mis-steps tripped him up in thorn thickets and brush, and fetched him sprawling atop roots and sharp boulders. When his limp bogged the pace, and his piteous groans stampeded the game, the sabotaged scouts salved their frustration by strapping his dead weight astride. Travel on horseback had never favoured his short legs and stout constitution. The abuse, Dakar whined, ached his bones, snapped his teeth, and pinched his bollocks to fiery perdition. Complaints only goaded his captors to make his mount trot, which thumping torment chewed his knees bloody and addled his brain. A man might go crazy jounced for days like a cargo sack, lashed by his ankles and wrists to the dastardly surcingle that clansfolk preferred over saddles.
The patrol captain shrugged without sympathy. ‘Suck it up, fellow! We won’t have to watch. Tomorrow, somebody else will be tasked with the effort to shift your lame carcass.’
Which trial taxed Dakar’s inventiveness daily, since the change of the guard in camp every night saw him foisted onto a new batch of keepers by the next morning. Any chance to wring them for advantage was fouled by his assigned keeper: a purse-lipped, middle-aged female whose luckless ancestry landed him under her charge for the wretched duration.
While she nursed her nipped thumb, Dakar eyed her with such distilled fury, a blush finally purpled her weathered skin.
Her surly glare fixed on him: peat-coloured eyes, festered with hatred. Bedecked with knives as a weasel had claws, and bad-tempered enough to gut vipers, she remarked, ‘Our craziest toddlers have better manners!’
‘Oh, nicety, is it?’ An awkward twitch of the Mad Prophet’s shoulders denounced his bound hands, strapped behind his back with deer sinew. The urgent fact that he needed to piss laced torment through his rife aggravation. ‘Since when have the tenets of charter law permitted this mockery of crown justice?’
‘We should be ashamed?’ Derisive, the camp cook tipped back his bearskin hat. He poked up the breakfast fire, too lazy to share the hot water, which soaked the dried winter rations into a palatable gruel. His tin spoon licked clean, and his leather jack empty, he resumed the snide sport of baiting the captive. ‘We’re called out by the blackened honour of one who abetted a royal betrayal? That’s ripe! If you’re minded to task us for immorality, stow the lecture till we’re on the move.’ A tall man with the natural grace of clan get, the cook rose and stretched, dumped the dregs from the tin pannikin, then kicked snow over his small fire.
‘That’s not what occurred!’ Dakar yelled over the popping hiss of the steam roiled off the doused coals. Since the fellow’s slur just as callously stained his warden’s ancestral birthright, he changed tack and pitched for her sympathy. ‘Do you know why your forebear was not cast out, or denied his Named inheritance as a kinless exile? Because Elaira spoke in Eriegal’s behalf. She faced the wrath of the clan chiefs at his trial and begged for a pardon since Arithon wished it!’
‘How did that enchantress know what his Grace would have said?’ his sour keeper remarked in stiff disbelief. ‘Or you either, come to that. By then our prince’s fate had been abandoned to Koriani captivity.’
‘Because of the truth!’ Dakar snapped in her teeth. ‘Be sure the Fellowship Sorcerers spoke in favour of Arithon’s intercession. I was there! Made to bear witness when their effort failed, then forced to seal the ugly bargain because I was the one to enact the debt against Rathain’s crown in the first place.’
‘We know your hand bound his Grace over to Selidie Prime!’ the woman agreed with ripe scorn. ‘A loyal friend would have died, first.’
‘Except that his Grace forbade me.’ Dakar bore that grief, still. Nothing might ease his cankered remorse, that the deepest secret behind what transpired at Athir could never be aired to vindicate his choice of action. The icy gusts through the boughs overhead could not rival th
e razor-edged chill of his afflicted heart-ache. Since the desperate purpose behind today’s errand also must remain veiled, he mustered what dignity could be found, lashed helpless in distrustful company. ‘You might believe I complied out of cowardice. But whether or not that opinion’s mistaken, kicking me hither and yon as your scapegoat can’t overturn the penned archives at Althain Tower.’ The Warden’s irrefutable script kept the words of Prince Arithon’s exoneration for Eriegal’s part in his downfall.
Today’s contemptuous descendant crouched, forearms crossed on her knees, and stared Dakar down, eye to eye. ‘Why?’
‘Because, tangled by a misguided revenge, Arithon understood the motive behind his betrayal.’ Here, Dakar quoted the prince verbatim from history. ‘Grief suffered in childhood broke the man’s spirit. If Eriegal dies, if he’s cast out, he might never outgrow his child’s rage for the family reft from him. Alive to accept the result of his choice, he might heal the wound of his losses. As I have, one day he might find his forgiveness for the human short-falls which led the clans to stand their doomed ground for my sake at Tal Quorin.’
‘A prince’s pardon for my forefather’s perfidy? Who listened?’ The pesky female shoved erect in disgust. Stamped off to girth up the horse, she fired her scathing dismissal over her shoulder. ‘Naught but the wind marked the carcass tossed off for the ravens and wolves! My foremother scarcely mourned her mate’s passing. Clan record says she kissed the red steel that dispatched his treacherous spirit.’
Which sad truth prevailed: an irrevocable tragedy sealed by a past chieftain’s formal condemnation, and forced through by the damnable quirk, that on the fateful occasion that Earl Barach had sworn fealty to his crown prince, the rebellious immaturity of the realm’s next caithdein had created an embarrassing vacancy. Braggen had been appointed as the stop-gap replacement, charged to bear the unsheathed sword to uphold the honour left in the breach. Awkward with the accolade, the odd, sullen loner had gripped the bared blade and pledged the ceremonial surety when Prince Arithon knelt in trust to offer his back, and Barach s’Valerient, as liegeman, bent his neck under the weapon’s edge for the ritual promise of fealty. Which true steel must answer for the horrific defection arisen from inside the high earl’s own war band.