The scruffy dog and the children were long since gone when she cleaned her steel needles and packed up her satchel. Pallid sunlight had shortened the shadows, with the water-front dives immersed in midmorning’s brisk business. Koriathain still lurked amid the thickened crowd, strengthened by reinforcements: to Sighted vision, the nearer side alleys now crackled with the crystal-tinged blaze of their presence. Disconsolate, Elaira hunched into her cloak. Too late for regret, she faced the misfortunate penalty, that the shimmering blaze of the healer’s techniques learned from the wise at Ath’s hostelry had marked her out like a beacon.
Exposed beyond salvage, measured by enemies as if she had stripped all protection, Elaira abandoned the marginal haven lent by the open wharf. She edged into the teeming street braced for trouble. The first strike might come in straightforward assault, launched by what seemed like a commonplace ruffian. Or she could be waylaid by insidious means, her active shields breached by a spell of compulsion. Prepared for both tactics, Elaira clasped a sweaty grip on the belt knife under her mantle. With the quartz shaft of a natural Atheran crystal palmed, left-handed, she skirted a dray-load of Sanshevas molasses, ducked a matron hawking meat-pies with leeks, and side-stepped the rank splash as a shaggy cart-horse balked in its traces to urinate. Alert senses poised between subtle perception, she strained to winnow the nuance of threat from the seethe of dock-side activity. Her facile experience was hard-pressed to sort, since the taint of the charm maker’s talismans to ward drowning, and the spiced aphrodisiacs worn by the whores might also mask darker workings.
Noise always rattled her heightened focus. The clangour of a wheelwright’s mallet shaping an iron rim, and the chatter of a vacuous girl paraded on the arm of a sweetheart rang in her ears, underscored by the bass grind of the brewer’s emptied hogsheads being rolled from a cobble-stone tavern yard. At least Ithish austerity did not lend her predators the opulent southcoast convenience of pierced grilles and lush courtyards, with balconies and shaded lovers’ nooks.
Hungry, and pressured to a tension headache, Elaira fought the fear that threatened an onset of trembling. Buffeted by the crowd, she encountered the drenching tingle that bespoke a warded boundary. She tried to stop short. Jostled ahead despite planted feet, she stiffened her defenses, to no avail. The seamless, enchained sigils outmatched her strength and netted her on all sides. While she struggled to strike down the web, a second assault speared into her mind, honed with the master sigil the Prime used to subjugate oath-bound initiates.
That measure alone should have finished the contest. No subordinate enchantress might withstand the bond that committed her autonomous will to the order.
Elaira fought anyway. No matter how futile the effort, she resisted the ugly, imperative noose with all the ferocity of her free spirit. She met the searing agony that fashioned the sigil’s imperative with the woman’s steel of her fierce loyalty that would defend Arithon’s interests, even above her own life. Knocked to her knees, suffocated to the black edge of collapse, she focused her frantic need through the crystal aligned to her use by the precepts taught by Ath’s adepts. Healer-schooled to redress harmful influence, she mapped the patterns bent to enslave her, then matched their measure with balance and wrestled to disarm the wrapped coil of forces through entropy.
The red-hot wires that strapped her lungs gave and loosened. She gasped hoarsely for breath. Through wheeling dizziness, she heard a bystander ask if she needed help. Too stressed to answer, scarcely able to move, Elaira wiped tears from her eyes, shoved off the cold cobbles, and staggered back upright.
The ringing in her ears did not subside, or the queasy wave of faintness that rippled her vision. Elaira could not catch sight of her adversaries or determine where in the crowd they might be hidden. But through pins and needles, she sensed the fierce gather: a heaviness like heated bronze choked the air as the hostile circle of Senior enchantresses refashioned their defrayed intent. Before their prey rallied, they hurled their renewed assault against her.
Inflamed to pure fury, Elaira unsheathed her belt knife. As she must, she would stab her own flesh to foil the vile incursion. No limit existed, before desperation. She would not fall to Prime Selidie’s hand or risk being turned as the mindless tool to drive Arithon back to captivity.
But her adversaries changed tactics to compensate. Their thrust passed her by. Instead, a man’s strength pinned her arms from behind. Elaira twisted like a bagged wildcat. She glimpsed the baffled, bearded features of one of the dock crew’s longshoremen. Horror met her discovery, that her enemies’ dark working had fixed an unconscionable spell upon him to hold her at bay. The burly man hoisted her off her feet. Suborned as their string puppet, he had no training to resist, or protest an act of abduction prompted without his conscious volition. Elaira had no time to choose which arena to forfeit before her defeat.
She could let go, loosen her stubborn resistance to the Prime’s master sigil, and buy the moment she needed to snap the longshoreman free of beguilement. Or she could sustain her last resource to shield, and stab the thralled man in the shoulder. Her surgeon’s knowledge could sever the artery with a deft stroke. His hold would loosen as he bled out. The murder would be almost painless, and fast, while the shocked uproar as he went down lent the turmoil to hide her escape.
A split instant to act and no chance to reason, or weigh the grief of remorse. Her gut reaction sprang from the innate emotional truth in the heat of the moment.
Elaira responded to what was, and not the projected concern for what might be. The live man who pinned her commanded need, first, before Arithon’s distant predicament. Her pealed cry of anguish split the cold air as she shredded her self-protection and answered the healer’s call to intercede for the sake of the labourer’s violated integrity.
Her practised unbinding severed the sigil that enslaved the hapless man’s mind. Horror followed on the recoil. She braced to reap the hideous consequence, keenly aware how her action might recoil and jeopardize her beloved. Yet no master sigil flayed her awareness. Instead, the brutal assault suddenly melted away. Confounded, still reeling, Elaira fought to regroup her battered composure.
Breathing too fast and dizzied by her electrified pulse, she encountered no triumphant sisters. Only the ruddy face of the longshoreman, who crouched over her in perplexed concern. No longer coerced, he cradled her shuddering weight, his weathered forehead creased with apology. ‘Lady, are you ailing?’ Embarrassed, he added, ‘I was on my way past with your charity case, headed for the infirmary. Should I take you there also?’
Ridden by panic, Elaira shook free. ‘I’m not sick, thank you.’ The man evidently did not recall his exposure to hostile spellcraft. Though the order’s dark work had been banished clean, nothing rational suggested why the Prime Matriarch’s tasked circle also should withdraw before they clinched their sure victory.
The stevedore was nothing more than he seemed. A generous fellow, born without talent, Elaira saw naught about him to explain the sisterhood’s abrupt retreat.
She disentangled herself, repeated her distressed murmur of thanks, then sheathed her blade and arose. Around her, several curbed wagon teams sidled, to shouted oaths from their drivers. A street urchin sucked dirty fingers and stared, while a muffled girl with a goose crate irritably shouldered her way through the crush of stopped traffic.
But one step away stood the beggar, whose gashed forehead she had just bandaged. Angular, thin, still filthy in his tatterdemalion rags, he planted himself squarely in the path of the Seniors dispatched to waylay her. Not by chance, Elaira discovered, caught aback. In fact, he was the power that thwarted them. A badge raised in his gaunt hand cast a ward of protection that blazed blindingly bright to the nuance of her mage-sight.
Shielded by forces beyond recognition, and rattled by sheer disbelief, Elaira asked, ‘Should I know you?’
The peculiar man faced her. Poised with unshakeable serenity, and quite unconcerned that his vagrant stance snarled the thoroughfare, he
bowed and acknowledged her. That frivolous gesture incensed the stalled carters, who cried murder for the obstruction. Manners made him seem no less disreputable. The fresh swathe of bandage across his stitched injury remained the only clean rag on his person. The wrinkled skin weathered by fierce, southland sun was oiled with dirt like worn teak.
‘Don’t mind the deception posed by appearances,’ he declared in bemused apology. ‘The Koriathain set after you by their Prime dare not cross the one who sent this.’ Palm upraised, he extended his unearthly talisman with a smile of invitation.
The metallic disk was nothing Elaira recognized, marked on its face with a sun and moon, encircled by stars and incised foreign characters.
‘Whose servant are you?’ she inquired, adrift.
The awkward pause lengthened. While the puzzled longshoreman withdrew his offer of escort and sauntered back towards the dock, the flow of inconvenienced pedestrians brushed past an encounter that rippled like the mirage in a fever-dream. Elaira swayed. An annoyance, after all, that she might faint as her weakened knees turned to jelly.
The ragged man offered a thin, vital hand and supported her elbow. ‘On all counts, you’ve established your worth. As you are the mate, and she, the guardian of Mother Dark’s chosen, the Biedar eldest has consented to grant the audience you desire.’
Which specious pronouncement stunned Elaira beyond speech.
‘Food and rest, first.’ With infectious kindness, her strange ally drew her aside before she collapsed in the street. Through the grind of wheels and the jingle of harness as the congested way cleared, he said, ‘You’ll have the grace to recover while I visit the bath and change into respectable clothing.’
‘You’re no mere beggar!’ Rebounded to guarded suspicion, Elaira eyed the fresh blood-stains leaked through her neat bandage. ‘But that cut, all those bruises. Your injuries were real!’
Her odd savior nodded. ‘I was tasked to be there when the barrel stack fell. And I was beside you for rescue since your charity also saw fit to arrange for a destitute stranger’s care at an infirmary.’
‘You’re precognizant, also?’ Elaira exclaimed, a bit shrill. Several alarmed bystanders turned their heads to stare. Remanded to caution, she lowered her voice. ‘These events were all staged? You got hurt for the sake of some meddling party’s sadistic amusement?’
‘Not the attack!’ Indignant at last, the bronzed stranger summed up, ‘That plan was Prime Selidie’s doing, executed by a master circle of twelve with the fullest intent to accomplish your downfall.’ A tender touch to his blotched bandage became dismissed with a fatalist’s shrug. ‘You earned your right to rescue, sweet lady. Rest assured, my discomfort has served a true cause.’
Elaira balked outright, dismayed, while a boy who shouldered a bundle of kindling cursed her for a Dark-sent nuisance, and barely missed mowing her down. ‘Explain!’ she demanded. ‘Right now! Who are you? Who sent you, and what perverse whim draws your unforeseen stake in my destiny?’
‘A keen tongue, as well as a mind devoted to unswerving honesty.’ The lean stranger raised quizzical eyebrows and laughed. ‘My dear, you can drop the death grip on your knife! By the will of the Reiyaj Seeress, and after such proof of your sterling character, I have orders to safeguard each step of your journey the rest of the way to Sanpashir.’
Late Winter 5923
Mission
The last time that Dakar rode at break-neck speed out of Halwythwood to address a white-hot crisis down the Mathorn Road, the breathless pace over wild terrain took a fortnight, with his sluggard’s bulk in the saddle pounding horses to foamed sweat under the brass heat of summer. Then, his urgent rush had backed Arithon’s effort to destroy a cabal of dark necromancers, dangerously entrenched at Etarra. Never brave in the face of consummate evil, that past day’s dire necessity had terrified Dakar to yanked hair, already streaked white at his temples.
Now, his head bleached more silver than chestnut, the Mad Prophet shouldered the arduous journey again. This time, he faced the same passage under the cruel freeze of winter, with the distance to be crossed to salvage disaster allotted less than six days.
On the first leg, the scouts’ relay rushed him northward through Halwythwood with cracking efficiency. He changed mounts each half hour and crammed his meals of jerky, nuts, and raisins, eaten still astride. Dakar should have crowed over the piquant reverse, with his former smug captors forced to jump at Earl Cosach’s command to support his case. But their crashing speed whipped him through low-slung branches and chafed his tender skin raw. The relentless gallops on fresh horses without saddles made him sore in the back and too breathlessly cross to speak.
The River Aiyenne was shoaled enough to risk the ford in cold weather. His competent clan escort cut him loose on the bank to finish the distance alone. Sunwheel lancers were ever a peril to their kind beyond the wood. All the more, with their clanbred nerves cranked to painful dread that the threat of Lysaer’s instability might corrupt the Mayor’s justice at Etarra, subject to renewed pressure from Desh-thiere’s curse.
‘Fare well, ride hard,’ urged the grizzled scout, then slapped the rump of the handsome bay gelding lent to hasten the spellbinder’s errand.
The horse leaped into the sandy shallows, then splashed chest-deep into the black swirl of iced current. Dakar clung astride. His shrill curse became swallowed by the vast blue sky as the water flooded up to his calves. Knees raised to keep his boot-tops from filling, and both fists locked in coarse mane, he weathered the lurch as the hardy beast under him stumbled through a pot-hole and breasted the bore of the rapids.
Across with soaked toes, paused at the verge to re-centre his tipped seat as the dripping horse lashed its soaked tail, the spellbinder regarded with trepidation the frost-scoured vales and whipped broom that unrolled ahead of him. No chance at all that sensible action would see him through in time to matter. Asandir’s instruction had shown him how to apply his longevity training to extend a horse’s stamina. Though such transference of life-force was recklessly dangerous, need demanded: Dakar must cross thirty leagues and reach the nearest post-station through the night. If burning his reserves did not wring him unconscious, to perish of chill in the desolate wind whipped off Daon Ramon, at the end, he confronted the test of his life: a feat grave enough not to countenance failure and a grueling trial to outstrip the scope of a master spellbinder’s faculties.
For a spirit best suited to lie with a strumpet, Dakar shouldered the course with the humor of a rankled bear. Starved himself, he attracted, then dispelled two packs of ravenous iyats. He had not a stray wisp of energy to spare, stressed beyond sense since the outset. As the soft, excess weight melted off his short bones, he punched new holes to tighten his belt and cursed every moment that his fatigue forced a catnap, curled in misery amid the thorn brakes. Altogether too much like his past mentor’s style, Dakar avoided the wayside taverns. Withdrawn to dour silence, he fretted through each harried pause to change mounts. The bustle of grooms and the noise made him wince, while the harsh use of magecraft inflamed his senses.
Dawn on the third day, he left the exposed downs of the barrens and began the climb through the Mathorn foothills. Farther on, the trade-road crooked upwards between rock-clad scarps, which steepened into the switched-back approach to Etarra. The slopes acquired petticoat ruffles of fir, broken by vistas of clumped rock and snow. Where the steepened grade wrung the winded draught teams to lather, the wayside coach-houses and stables to service town-bred travellers became more frequent. Apple-cheeked boys by open hearths in the yards sold roasted nuts and mulled wine for a penny. But the fee for fit hacks came dear, since the fodder and grain stores hauled in by cart were reserved for the couriers’ mounts. Dakar lost more flesh as his horses tired under him. He napped on cold ground and barren ledges, and once, in the ditch where he rolled when he tumbled senseless out of the saddle.
He woke gimping stiff. Ringing ears and light-headed exhaustion still dogged him, worsened by hunger pangs t
hat wrung him faint. Since his strayed mount was nowhere to be found, he persisted on foot, aching and bruised and jolted through each abused joint as he tripped over the bristle of snow-capped, stunt saplings. Under the pewter flood of new daylight, he counted four nights, since his journey began. Unless he intercepted Lysaer’s cavalcade before sundown, his star-crossed endeavour was a lost cause.
The hills beneath stretched away like crimped burlap, napped dark green where evergreen flounced the bare scree, and the runged ice of the frozen springs bearded the vertical scarps. Above, rumpled foil snagged in black rock, the peaks pierced the tatters of cloud that lidded the scoured crests of the ridges. The trade-road gleamed with iced puddles where the seamed wash-outs were patched with shored slate. Except for the whine of the gusts, the sole sounds were the clatter of an out-bound messenger, underlain by the bass grind of wheels from the ox-train that snaked up the slope at his heels. Nothing else moved but the cinnamon dart of a fox and the lazy spirals of hunting hawks. The drab vista held no west-bound state cavalcade with liveried outriders. No flash of gold from white banners or Etarran scarlet rounded the switched-back curves in descent.
Dakar shivered. Grumbling, cold, his leathers like board and his mantle caked grey with horse sweat, he scraped at the itch of his beard and shook off low spirits. His saddle-sores stung. Last night’s fall had sprained his left knee. He gimped off the thoroughfare, sought a sheltered hollow, and hunkered down under a stony outcrop chiselled by frost fractures. There, he engaged his worn faculties with intent to ascertain that his quarry had not passed him by as he snoozed by the verge.
No sooner had he settled in trance when a chill point of steel poked his nape. He surfaced, stung by someone’s triumphant shout, called back to a titled superior. ‘Eminence! Here. He’s holed up where you said we would find him. Yes, send up the shackles. He’s captive at sword-point. That doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.’