This time, the blast that threw Asandir to his knees did not fetch him up under a convenient boulder. Not sand, but a jagged scarp tore his palm, while the flaying wind tattered his clothing. Curled against the wrath of the storm, clinging over an abyss that loomed, fathoms deep, Asandir set his teeth. He must rally his resources. Climb the cliff-face, and walk, before the gale ripped away his frail hold, or scourged his exposed flesh to the bone. The Name of Isfarenn still clutched to his breast, and his left palm extended, Asandir clawed the brutal volcanic stone for a finger's hold to gain purchase. A wind devil tumbled him. Knocked into a slide, coughing out grit, he gouged in his toes and repeated the effort.
Perception up-ended.
The slope flattened under him, and his bloodied hand plunged wrist deep into icy water.
The sting ripped a startled shout from his throat. This was no streamlet wrought from a grimwarded drake, dream-sprung from a single consciousness. The tumbling winter brook carved its course through Athera. Water element splashed across his torn skin, full-bodied and alive with the ecstatic synergy of a myriad creation.
'How?' Asandir flung back the rags of his hood. He stared upwards, shocked dumb as he met the massive gold eye of a dragon. She crouched with her fore-talons cupped alongside him, her rampant wings stretched above like curved sails, deflecting the wind.
The pocket of Scarpdale restored by her dreaming had granted his ninth-hour respite.
First things first: the Fellowship's field Sorcerer scraped crusted dirt from his streaming eyes. Propped on skinned elbows, he croaked a courteous phrase, stunned to gratitude for the deliverance. Then, shaken down to his final, stripped nerve, he opened his fingers. Too beaten to weep, he whispered his grief-stricken tribute to speed his dead stallion's safe passage.
Throughout, the dragon's fixated gaze burned with impatient inquiry. 'Sorcerer! Wisest if you also accept my secured return to Athera's free wilds.'
'Sooner would I have abandoned Isfarenn!' Asandir snapped, unequivocal. His steely glance had not missed the presence lodged in the dragon's left pupil. 'Sethvir holds his post at Althain Tower? Then my place is here, without question.'
Asandir gathered his abraded limbs. He arose, braced against an ebon claw to steady his wheeling balance. Already, the ominous change in the breeze revolted his natural instincts. The haunt's vicious dreaming resurged like flood-tide, a boiling swell to unstring the solid footing beneath him. 'I don't need a reason,' he addressed Davien. 'No more than you did, when you left Kewar and sealed your unorthodox bargain.'
Asandir bowed to acknowledge Seshkrozchiel. Grave dignity intact, he asked whether she would mind bearing him. 'I might walk, except my benighted boots are in tatters.'
The dragon regarded his dwarfed presence, unspeaking. Then her overpowering fore-talons moved. Asandir found himself caged in a grip that could have cupped a butterfly's wings without damage. Yet Seshkrozchiel did not spring aloft. Her snout turned, steaming smoke. She presented the huge, yellow disk of her right eye, the slit pupil tall as the Sorcerer. Reflected within that black well of intelligence, Asandir sensed the thundering pulse of her thought. Her awareness stung through him, skin, bone, and viscera, as she contemplated a pattern, not dragon.
'Loyalty,' he stated, ineffably gentle. 'A quality honoured by sages and fools, by which humankind finds the courage to trample the reflex for self-preservation.'
Seshkrozchiel snorted a riffle of flame. 'Has the sage or the fool spoken for your decision?'
Asandir loosed a gasp of hoarse laughter. That will depend on the outcome, my friend. Shall we brave the endeavour and see?'
Seshkrozchiel gathered the Sorcerer up. Immaculate in finesse, she unfurled the double-layered vanes of her wings and took flight, with Asandir clasped inside of jet claws. Tail lashing, she steered for the turbulent heart of the gyre, while Scarpdale's sere ground fell away and dissolved. That stabilized presence could not be maintained through the winding last turn of the spiral.
Now, once again, rock-cliffs reared up like ramparts, pocked with fumaroles that belched gritty cinders. The sulphurous air reeked, searing with acid. Asandir tore a rag from his threadbare mantle and muffled his nose and mouth. Spare of word, always, he addressed his discorporate colleague. 'Your action has salvaged Sethvir, beyond question.'
'I should feel honoured?' Davien bit back. 'Your thanks was more eloquent in behalf of the shade of your stallion.'
'Isfarenn was steadfast,' Asandir agreed.
Provocation met back-lash. 'Surely you long to ask after the fate of your precious crown prince?'
'Torbrand's get dislikes officious spokesmen' Asandir declared. 'In the case of Athera's titled Masterbard, should either one of us dare to presume?'
'The rogue gift of prophetic far-sight imposed by s'Dieneval sharpens that talent somewhat,' Davien denounced with sly irony. "The headache makes Luhaine chase his own tail like a terrier baited with rat scent. Kharadmon rails with epithets, and Sethvir is certain to try himself, scrying, until he's short-tempered and cross-eyed. You're not worried?'
Asandir's mouth twitched. Stifled amusement made him look raffish, with his silver hair tangled and singed. While the dragon swooped through the noxious clouds, cut by jagged stacks of cooled lava, he said carefully, 'If we survive, I won't need the debate. Arithon's doings have always entangled the hot list of snagging developments.'
Awarded Davien's nettled silence, Asandir's threatened smile broke free, brilliant as sudden lightning. 'Ath's glory! You're vexed? Does that mean his Grace has outmatched every test you've laid on him?'
'You couldn't handle him before Kewar's maze,' Davien attacked without flinching.
Necessity cut off the nipping exchange, as the weather-stripped bones of the haunt loomed ahead, tumbled in unquiet death. Athera's affairs paled as Seshkrozchiel's flight broached the tumult that seeded the gyre. Gusts snapped at her wings. Membranes strained to withstand their mangling force, while her sleek armour of scales shed the blast. Storm charge struck sparks off the spines of her neck where her being contested the corrosive flux. She looped and twisted the dream to force access, then shot, needle straight, through a vast granite arch. Her wings carved upwards, braking her rush. Neat as a cat, she set down on her haunches amid the remains of Scarpdale's grimwarded drake.
Eerie quiet descended. No winds rampaged here. A low hillock arose, bleached to powdery chalk by the flare of the drake's final breaths.
The creature had not perished quietly. Pearlescent shards remained of the rib-cage, tumbled like scythes amid the ridges ploughed up by the thrash of maimed limbs. The tail flukes were a smashed scatter of spines. Even the whorled skull wore the furrows left by gouging talons.
'No skeleton I've seen ever showed such a harsh mauling' Asandir ventured in shock.
"This combatant failed to secure a life mate.' Here, where the latent charge in the air seemed to strain towards volatile release, Seshkrozchiel constrained her mighty presence to a whisper. "Three times the young male fought, and thrice lost the contest to a rival. He died of the wounding, in brooding despair. His agony still howls defiance.' She balanced the sorrowful note with reproof, since most vanquished unmated who suffered fatality plunged into the sea, their lives quenched without pain in salt water.
Asandir dared an impertinent question. 'Do you also carry the Name for the lost?'
'You presume to know what possesses no substance?' Seshkrozchiel raised the talon-wrapped Sorcerer, her burning gold eye half-lidded in scorching disdain. 'Names for our kind are declared, always forged in the act of a triumphant mating.'
'So we are told by Athera's historical record,' Asandir allowed with strained dignity. 'Yet wise experience takes no fact for granted, even though scribed in the lore books at Althain Tower. Methurien also claim no innate identity. But by my understanding of Paravian law, as derived from Ciladis's study, that condition is a misperception.'
Steam puffed to the dragon's incensed reproof. 'The Athlien singers failed in sounding th
e requiem here!'
Asandir bowed. Unshaken despite his shattered appearance, he stated, 'Today, we do not have that option.'
Empowered yet by his quickened flesh, the Sorcerer could have entered the skull's chamber and effected a transfer back to Athera; yet for Seshkrozchiel to bring Davien through without harm, the discorporate must maintain his subtle awareness amid the dire blast of the haunt's resistence. Davien would be dependent, until the last, that her living strength could master the challenge, victorious.
Since no outside place in the world remained safe with Scarpdale's grimward unbounded, Asandir added, 'We stand or fall here. Our kind do not quench our defeats in the sea! Or forsake a sworn trust by abandonment.'
'Davien's bargain with me was none of your making,' Seshkrozchiel hissed. The provocative thrust of her phrase was kept open, a deliberate danger left dangling.
Asandir raised his eyebrows. His eyes dauntless grey, every whiplashed nerve steady, he sealed her reactive statement. 'Differences don't grant me the arrogance of dismissal. I will honour my colleague's endeavour without prejudice. Let him argue my born right to choose! Free will says I stand at his back.'
Davien kept his own counsel. Even Sethvir never gainsaid the gift of Asandir's forthright commitment.
'Such force could shape diamond.' Seshkrozchiel dipped her massive, horned head. After beauty and loyalty, she acknowledged adamance. Things not dragon, but concepts that fitted together in patterns whose nuance was pleasing. She opened her clutched talons and invited the Sorcerer to stand at liberty, nested inside the spiralling curve of the dorsal spine at her brow. Once his perch was secure, she settled from rampant crouch onto her fore-limbs. Her back arched. Snake quick in movement, she darted into engagement: to shatter the derelict skull if she could, and dream the haunt's bones out of Athera's existence.
Where live dragons closing for battle would lunge with a roar that shook sky and earth, this strike was eerily soundless. One moment the emanation off Seshkrozchiel's spines was restrained to luminous quiescence. The next, as though torched to an indigo bonfire, her auric field flared and unfurled.
Everything shattered, swept into pulsating rainbows. Through the deluge of energies, the bones of the drake lit and gleamed golden red as forge-heated metal.
Force met bared force! with a clap like explosion. Although no thunder marked the event, Asandir felt the recoil sleeting chill through his viscera. As Seshkrozchiel's dreaming sought to unmake the wracked skeleton, its wraith arose in pealing wrath to contest her. From nothing, a spirit form burst from the ethers. Neat as a bared sword-blade, vicious in splendour, the haunt appeared as a lambent form, wrought out of crystal and gossamer. Its whipping plunge for Seshkrozchiel's throat was ravening fury, distilled. A bolt to serve ruin from bared fangs to lashing tail-tip met indigo fire with a grappling shock. Seshkrozchiel's ebon spines crackled with lightning. Fast as she absorbed the attack, deftly as the electrified blaze of her aura knitted chaos back into stability, the strike sowed rippling back-lash. Asandir and the dragon were buffered by flesh. But Davien's lodged spirit was a naked mote, hurled through the moiling flux. His reactive sensitivity possessed no anchor.
So had Isfarenn's spirit been left vulnerable to the erosion of bounded identity. Alone until rescue, Asandir had staved off the stallion's attrition. Yet no brutal trial by experience prepared for the task of safeguarding his threatened colleague. Failure awaited if he did not try. Sethvir's survival must not come at the cost of Davien's reckless sacrifice. Disruptive, creative, unbridled in passion, his rogue genius had always been the breath and light that impelled fresh angles and change.
Asandir shouted, but words did not carry.
Seshkrozchiel already mounted the hillock, unravelling the bones of fore-claws and rib-cage, and blasting comet-tail bursts towards the skull. She could not disengage without risk to herself, while her dream and the haunt's focused fury collided. Bones re-formed and melted. Shattered glass rainbows warred with lancing dazzles of light, scattershot as hurled mercury. As the haunt raged in spiteful counterpoint, human senses found no familiar expression. Sound could not hold the texture of language. Davien rode without shield at the forefront, embedded within the rampaging thought-stream of the live dragon's visioning.
He could not withstand the naked interface.
Hesitation would kill just as fast as wrong action. Wrapped in the crackling coil of Seshkrozchiel's leading dorsal spine, surrounded by bursts of indigo flame and violet lightning, Asandir shoved his hand into the streaming flux of her aura. He closed his seared fingers. Shut his scalded eyes, gathered his will, and imagined the most vivid encounter snatched from the shared annals of Fellowship experience .. .
* * *
The year was Third Age 5129, when the inquiry that had turned so terribly wrong convened at Althain Tower. That solstice summons came wrapped in dank chill. Despite the fragrant heat of the birch fire ablaze in the King's Chamber's hearth, Desh-thiere's leaden mist leached the warmth from the inside air. Outside, its blight dimmed the waning moon, arisen past midnight. Yet the flames in the candle stands were torn by more immediate draughts, as Davien paced in caged fury before the high table, which seated Sethvir, Ciladis, and Asandir. The discorporate witness of Luhaine and Kharadmon breathed a disapproving cold through the gathering.
Only Traithe had been absent. His delay leaving Morvain looked to become chronic, since few deepwater captains dared the risk of lee shoals, left only fog-bells by which to navigate. A century, since the fall of crown law, and a year shy of three troubled decades since the departure of the last Ilitharis guardian: how blindsided their beleaguered Fellowship had been, to presume that their straits could not turn for the worse.
'You might sit' Asandir snapped, 'since we're asking an honest effort from you, and a fresh avenue for resolution.'
'Hold your council without me.' Davien turned his sharp profile, haggard despite the livid cast lent by the fluttering candles. 'Your hope of a compromise courts disaster.' Hands clenched, black eyes harrowed, he defied with a cornered wolf's wariness. 'I will not be a consenting party to ruin. Or watch as the town populace slides deeper in jeopardy.'
'Then the door must stay barred, until we have your word' Sethvir declared, pushed at last to consider a drawn line. 'No one but you spurns our Fellowship's covenant. None, since the dream of the dragons laid claim on us! You are the first who has acted outside of our informed backing.'
'I will not cede my liberty' Davien bristled. The lynx gold of his jerkin no less than immaculate, and his footfall warningly firm, he spun away from his fellows. 'Bedamned to your pussyfoot need to mince through a formal emasculation with manners! I'll leave you the choice. Since I won't serve your course to reinstate the crown heirs, you'll just have to step aside gracefully.'
'Not after the bloodshed unleashed by your hand!' Kharadmon hurled into the breach. 'How many infants and children were murdered because the cabal at Hanshire was allowed the free rein to disseminate havoc? Luhaine's left discorporate. Our pussyfoot mincing where you are concerned has been altogether too forbearing! No thwarted ideal can excuse your decision to harbour that nest of bigotry and provocation!'
'I'm not laughing' cracked Davien, 'But surely you jest! Has five thousand years, bearing the trials of high kingship, not killed our precocious crown talent off any faster?'
'Kharadmon speaks out of turn.' Who had the heart left to defend but Ciladis? The most gentle, and the quietest, whose laced brown fingers were trembling still from the intricate spells that fired the sunloop. 'In fact, Davien, you have not been accused. We are hoping you'll explain what went wrong. To weep is not weakness. What price, for our patience, that this cankerous grievance can heal and reach wiser consensus?'
'What's left for me that's not already been said?' Davien stalked to the ebon stone mantel and poised there, whipped to scalding bitterness. He could scarcely speak: the sorrow that shadowed Ciladis's joy posed a misery beyond endurance. Overcome, he buried his face in long f
ingers, while his shoulder-length tumble of hair caught fire in the uncertain light. 'Shall we perish of tedium?' he asked, hammered flat. His nerve-wracked hands moved. 'Sit and grow moss, while I yap myself silly? Well, I am not yet the lap-dog, too inbred to have any teeth!'
Again, Ciladis addressed the sore point, disarming the cynic, with gentleness. 'You insist we were wrong to demand the service of mankind's birth-gifted talent.'
Davien exploded back into his tigerish stalk. "The split that's evolved between town-born and clan is a widening schism that begs our destruction. I will not stand down. If respect for the free wilds' existence cannot be learned, we are lost!'
Luhaine's effort at censure was trampled over by Davien's blazing frustration. 'Have you bothered to think beyond rhetoric? Won't you realize we've sent the wrong blood-lines to exile on Dascen Elur? Let the townsfolk who've grown blinded to Athera's mysteries be dispatched through the West Gate, instead. They will learn the faster to manage themselves on a world of more limited resources.'
Before Luhaine could defend with a lecture, or protest that harsh trial by privation, Davien razed through. 'We have lost our living contact with the Paravians! What's next? How long will you nurture the bones of past policy? Because the more dire disaster will strike! How far should we drift, till we're driven to forsake a bad call and change course to salvage the future? Our burdens here have grown far too weighty to keep the lame pretence of vigilant oversight'
'Law cannot replace the responsible choice, willingly made out of freedom,' Sethvir agreed with wide-open, mist eyes. He paused through a taut interval, groping to bridge thorny impasse. 'If more problems arise for every solution, we must become more creative. Your wild-card methods have always inspired. If Hanshire's conspirators were left unbridled, you will have had profound reason.'
Davien arched his eyebrows.
Whether or not he meant to provoke, Luhaine pounced to attack. 'Did you hope to incite the towns until we were obliged to revoke their claim under the compact? If so, Paravian presence is gone! We're left to strike balance across the raw ground that hatred has soaked in fresh bloodshed! Does that condemnation suffice, by your lights? You've unleashed enough impetus to force our hand, and not left any avenue open for guidance.'