Stormed Fortress

  ‘How far?’ Kharadmon paused, whirling dusty air in sore agitation. He had not been prepared. ‘How deeply has the Warden been drawn towards oblivion?’ Such a miserable handful of words, to express a grieving rage beyond outlet. Or the galvanic fear: that Asandir might be lost, consumed by the corrosive Scarpdale grimward, and past hope of returning alive.

  The whole of Athera lay in the balance, if Althain’s Warden should fail. And he must: the impossible burden upheld for two years far outmatched any one Fellowship Sorcerer.

  The adept answered gently. ‘Even you cannot pass, where Sethvir has gone.’ His thought-form lamented far more than the state of the creek-bed. ‘There is only one being who can safely go to the place where your colleague is dreaming.’

  ‘Damn his name to Sithaer and Dharkaron Avenge, that we should fall so far into jeopardy!’ Kharadmon howled in abject despair. ‘I should tear up the roots of the Mathorns myself, before asking for help from that quarter!’

  The adept bowed his head.

  ‘You already know why I’ve come.’ The discorporate Sorcerer’s anguished presence roved to and fro, rattling through the dry grass and seed-stalks. ‘Luhaine’s whining aside, I’ve just been dangerously singed. You’ve noticed the blight that now poisons the flux line that crosses the square at Avenor?’

  ‘Our hostel at Northerly has been adversely affected,’ the adept affirmed, but without remonstrance. ‘Leaves shrivel and fall in the grove, there. Were you told any sooner, what could you have done?’

  ‘Nothing!’ Kharadmon’s frustration rang loud, where the breeze had ceased dancing. ‘Without Asandir or Ciladis, we’re hobbled as babes, fit to piss nowhere else but the cradle.’

  For the latent terror Sethvir most feared now brewed a disaster: the skulls of the four dragon hatchlings once enslaved for black augury had been left unwarded too long. Their angry ghosts stirred. Daily becoming more self-aware, they soon would remember their defiled origin.

  ‘The Light’s faithful?’ Kharadmon ranted on. ‘They’ll pray! Beseech their false prince for his spouting falsehoods, while the flesh of Tysan’s defenceless citizens gets stripped off their standing bones. Today, next week, Ath knows when, those bleating sheep are going to be squatting bang over the birth of a new grimward!’ The Sorcerer’s tirade reflected his agonized helplessness. ‘Did Sethvir believe, in his depleted state, that he also could contain that unravelling chaos?’

  ‘He went,’ the adept stated. Such was his sorrow, he might have stopped hearts. ‘Could you have kept him from trying?’

  ‘Yes!’ Kharadmon’s incandescent rage rippled through the etheric landscape. ‘I would have looped time! Tied Sethvir’s heroic entrails in knots, before watching him leap into self-sacrifice.’

  The adept looked up, then, saddened for the pain that served him such savage censure. ‘When your Warden chose, he told me this: that he would have the world fair and green, and kept fit for Asandir’s home-coming.’

  A shade had no tears. Kharadmon left in a shriek of whisked air, lest the parched rocks in the gully should be made to weep in his place.

  His wake of whipped dust dimmed the air a long time, before settling. Serene beyond tarnish, Ath’s adept shook the film out of his white robe. Alone, he kept the last space for hope, with his beacon light steady and burning.

  The peril was not overwhelming, as yet. A pressure that scraped the nerves to unease, or a formless weight, suggestive of threat, that infused the surrounding site where the dungeon tower had collapsed overtop of Avenor’s state treasury. The four hatchling skulls buried under the slagged rubble were interred past recovery, with their unquiet ghosts not yet coalesced to a deranging vortex.

  Yet Sethvir’s dreaming sensed them: as the flare of a burn might inflame tender skin, although here, he retained no real sense of his body’s awareness. His naked being knew only will, focused by the knowledge Athera was threatened. For the consciousness trapped within those slaughtered bones had been freed. Once the enraged spirits recalled their demise, their death-screams would resurge, unleashing explosive destruction.

  No warding to limit the damage was possible, given Sethvir’s weakened state. Ranged beyond his slack flesh, he had no protection. Only the lulling spells of deep calm: the grip of a polar winter’s vast silence; the stillness that threaded the darkest nights, and the inbreath of being that paused living thought at the nadir between the moon’s phases. Such a thin tissue, to stay the eruptive storm as the murdered hatchlings awoke. Nigh as insubstantial as the drake shades he fought to suppress, Sethvir knitted the circles of quiet that were all he had left as a shielding defence. He worked, hazed each second by stalking peril. He would perish, and worse, once the drakes’ memory roused. His comatose body at Althain Tower lacked the vitality to anchor him.

  Sethvir faced that risk, since no other Fellowship Sorcerer at hand might withstand the dire peril. Discorporate, Kharadmon and Luhaine could not survive the proximity to a drake shade. Verrain, as master spellbinder, was not able to weave wardings with sufficient subtlety.

  Sunk deep below ground, and beleaguered by weakness, Sethvir proceeded with laborious care. Layer by layer, he sifted through textures of mineral and slagged glass, melted iron and ash. He crept at a snail’s pace, touched each particle of smashed brick, char, and soil, sounding for their separate Names. Due permissions were asked and granted. The infusion of peace he presented, each time, was accepted by willing consent. Patient listening taxed his exhaustion: laid him wide open to the conjured serenity shaped by his striving.

  How long might he endure without hope of relief? Each moment sapped his dwindling life-stream. Hours or days, no immaculate focus was going to extend his survival.

  Sethvir felt cast adrift. Scarpdale’s grimward itself was a drain his patched wardings could never stem, with the fate of his overdue colleague already consigned to that bottomless spiral. Lose himself, and Asandir might also fall: how far, no mind knew. A grimward’s existence was as bleak a chaos as the sacred groves of Ath’s Brotherhood were ruled fair by the fire of creation. The one could not exist without the living possibility of the other: limitless love held all of the dark, and the dark, the potentials of light and shade beyond measure. The beauty and pain, the grotesque and the graceful loomed the thread of a boundless universe. By its vast, inexhaustible nature, greater mystery outmatched every limiting framework.

  A being made flesh could not grapple such paradox, or embrace the infinite irony. Sethvir wrestled at the brink. How easily he might be cozened to give in, release the harsh ties to his compromised destiny and soar free. More than the charge of the dragon’s trust bound him: he held also for care, strengthened by the redemption once graced by Athera’s Paravians.

  Despite vigilance, the heart’s need wore and tore him, fraying the steadfast loyalty holding live spirit to his inert flesh. One more fleck of Named gravel, and one more bed of powdered ash, and Althain’s Warden succumbed. For one faint instant, weakness flawed his braid of spelled calm.

  He tumbled, unmoored. His instinctive reach for Asandir’s help escaped his prudent restraint. Sethvir plunged down and down. Through layers of deep soil and rock, unable to brake, his awareness carved a meteor’s trail into the molten iron that seethed at the planet’s core. He did not rest there, but hurled beyond, crashed past remembrance of his solid form. His senses became stripped. Unwilling to release the imperative charge to defend the survival of the old races, his unseated awareness sped relentlessly through the frail barriers he had stitched to stem Scarpdale’s breached grimward.

  A fleeting impression left the vague sense that something crossed his plummeting path.

  Then the dead drake’s dreaming closed over and drowned him…

  … in chaos that shredded both substance and thought. Sethvir whirled through pin-wheels of fire and rain that fouled his mage-sense. Ash clogged his vision. Winds boiled dark clouds like whipped lead and sulphur, laced in lightning, while thunder boomed, fit to shatter his last awareness.
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  No ground existed to define up or down. Star and sunlight had never shone here, nor had the leafed shoot of any green plant unfurled from a seed, seeking flower. All things ran formless, ungoverned, bled into jangled sensation. A dragon’s thoughts were not fashioned for the mind of a man: any more than the rage of its death-scream could be tamed by mortal reason or masterful striving.

  Here, tucked into a knot of clenched limbs, Asandir still guarded the spark that once had been a living black horse. At strength’s end, he held, beyond reach of rescue, with Isfarenn’s spirit tucked safe in his hands…

  That instant, Sethvir’s tumbling awareness snapped short. He cried out, yanked back from the brink. His savaged senses resurged, familiar dimensions restored with a pain that all but flayed spirit from flesh. He awoke: not to his body in Althain Tower, but to the ruined, ephemeral meadow, beside the gulch of a vanished stream.

  Davien perched on a boulder beside him, clad in the vivid colours of harvest. Dark brows and black eyes unsmiling, he toyed with a stem of dry grass. Seeds loosened by his teasing fingers blew in the parched wind that also whipped his streaked hair.

  ‘Where is your censure, now?’ he inquired, but this time, bitter challenge came tempered.

  ‘I have you to thank that I did not plunge all the way to unending oblivion.’ Sethvir’s scraped whisper acknowledged the grim certainty: the vision of Asandir’s current straits was not drawn from the loom of his earth-sense. ‘Which living drake brokered the bargain you’ve made, to peer inside of a grimward?’

  ‘Should that matter?’ The turned-up corner of Davien’s mouth always lent his expression a cynical twist. ‘We might be dedicated to the same concepts, but never by sharing alliances.’

  The words carried glass edges: yet never before had Fellowship desperation walked this narrow a precipice. Althain’s Warden resisted the need to cry mercy. He had been rescued, once. Asandir’s life was the bargaining chip, tossed like the stripped bone between them.

  ‘Everything matters,’ Sethvir declared. ‘Are you here to assist? Or will you gloat while a pending disaster obliterates all of Avenor?’

  ‘I am here to tender your choice,’ said Davien. ‘As I forewarned, the hour has come. Salvage the compact and try for Asandir’s rescue, and your hope to achieve a crowned monarchy wanes. Our Teir’s’Ffalenn will be left most cruelly unsupported in his moment of greatest need.’

  Sethvir captured the delicate change, his tender question above venal spite. ‘Our Teir’s’Ffalenn?’

  A dream beyond flesh, Davien bent his head. He stared at his restless, artisan’s fingers, that wrought wonders from unruly genius. ‘The galling truth?’ he admitted at last. ‘Arithon is more than I realized. A crown prince in heart, if not willing to be caged by the joyless demands of high office.’

  Too enervated to smile, even for a startling concession, come too late to be counted a victory, Sethvir watched the wind winnow up ochre dust from the parched stream-bed. ‘His Grace was your weapon, you said, fitted best to champion the cause of humanity. You trained him to fashion his own cutting-edge. And he has, far beyond the rare brilliance you once thought to facet from the raw diamond. First at Etarra and also, outside hope, at the King’s Grove in Selkwood. Why should you regret?’

  Davien laughed and stood up. ‘Do I, in fact?’

  ‘Enough that you’ve asked me to say who should be marked out for sacrifice,’ Sethvir observed. ‘Though you might prove me wrong, and still do as you please, the same way the cat plays out his pinned mouse for morbid amusement.’

  Such a soft ambush, to set a cold sting to the viscera. Davien raised his eyebrows. ‘Should you not blame Ciladis, as well? How inconvenient, that his disappearance should force the resumption of dialogue between us.’ Beyond merciful quarter, the Betrayer struck twice. ‘You dare not try to quell those stirred hatchlings again. Even past counting Asandir’s threatened fate, your drained reserves can’t be nursed to recovery. The rise of a new vortex will wrack this world. Past ruin, we’re doomed. My friend, if you haven’t staged your good-byes, someone ought to point out that your life-force has bled ghostly thin.’

  ‘Too thin for a fight.’ In the haven far gone from the lush meadow, Althain’s Warden closed tired eyes. ‘Why fence with sharp words? You haven’t mentioned the dire cost to yourself, should you opt to restore your fractured support. If you think I don’t care, you’re mistaken, Davien. I have no right to direct any course that would lead you to crippling servitude. Before the peril you might shoulder for us, my stake in the matter becomes nothing at all, if not arrogance, pretence and mockery.’

  The pause hung, while the wind devils swayed through the rock clefts. Sethvir did not need mage-sight to know that the Sorcerer’s spirit had left him. Nothing else broke the dream’s desolation. He was alone, perhaps facing the end of all striving. Like Asandir, Sethvir held no more options. He must hunker down. Cling to the receding essence of life and three grimwards, while enduring the agony of fresh suspense.

  For if Davien felt moved to commit, and if action led him to shoulder a risk beyond the pale of all human cognizance, which one of his adamant, capricious loyalties would rule the course of the Fellowship’s destiny?

  Late Autumn 5671

  Threads

  Far westward, the merchant brig Evenstar sets sail from Telmandir, laden down with grain, flour, dry beans, and salt meat; the fine linen, rare herbals, and tinctures for healing; and the barrels of raw spirits granted as relief by the High King of Havish, and bound for Alestron’s besieged defenders…

  Days later, ahead of the next autumn storm building off the Cildein coast, the war fleet under Parrien s’Brydion and Vhandon’s armed company leaves the haven behind Lugger’s Islet, this time using prize hulls to mask their planned raid on Alestron’s entrenched enemies…

  While Sulfin Evend lathers horseflesh on his errand to Tirans, and Lysaer tosses in the restless dreams influenced by Koriathain, a water-drop falls within a sealed chamber, under the Mathorn Mountains: its downward course is uninterrupted, while the brooding form of an eagle looks on, the splash races ring-ripples across the black well of a virgin spring…

  Late Autumn–Early Winter 5671

  X.

  Hammer and Anvil

  Through the fortnight that followed Duke Bransian’s act of misrule, and redress to the Crown of Rathain, the citizens of Alestron waited, suspended between Lysaer’s standing war host and the poised sword of unwritten destiny. Tension sang on the air. Each dawn arrived like an unplucked note that burned the heart with pent silence. The sentries remained vigilant on the walls. Grim officers doled out the dwindling rations, while the hollow-eyed clerks maintained the tallies that marked the slow plunge towards starvation.

  The season turned. Relentless, the shortening days brought a winter that held no relief. The citadel’s routine ground onwards, unchanged, despite the shame suppressed in the furore that brought them the Master of Shadow.

  Man, woman, and child, Alestron’s people awaited Prince Arithon’s promised response.

  He gave them no act of saving conjury. No grand plan to counteract the ongoing siege. No word, no sign, and no encouraging gesture salved their un alloyed worry. The ringing declaration of assistance wore thin, with the first creeping whispers abroad that Rathain’s prince had misled with a falsehood.

  Beneath day-today drills, and through the wailing of displaced families, the frustrated urge to disrupt the cold stalemate built into devouring need. Mage-sense unveiled far more: in the glassine bubble of rage, as the Koriani Prime spun her provocative nightmares to force Lysaer’s cursed explosion; in the seething of enemy troops on shorn hills, by manic turns sick and craving for home, then the visceral thrill of a violent engagement.

  If Elaira stayed immersed in her calling as healer, and Dakar found numbness through sleep, no such outlet was open to Arithon. The fanatical pitch of deluded belief that shackled his half-brother’s following bled into the flux and inflamed his rogue foresight
. Let down his barriers, he could see too far: the posited future of each misled spirit could sweep him to abject despair. His words could not sway them, or shift their blinded fate. Understanding could not grant him heart’s ease. Branded by doctrine as minion of evil, and maligned for his own warped campaigns from the past, Arithon could do nothing for folk whose fears demanded a simplistic world, punch-cut into darkness or light.

  Truth gave him no solace. The short-sighted concept of fair-weather day never could rule supreme, without night, and not parch the green earth, or freeze the timeless, dynamic creation that birthed wholeness through the unseen play of the mysteries.

  With nowhere to turn, Arithon sought for the deeper balance within Paravian masonry. Hour upon hour, with Sidir at his back, and Kyrialt guarding the guest-quarters, he sat wrapped against the blustering cold, listening in depth to the chiselled blocks first laid to defend against drakefire. On the high battlement, Rathain’s prince harkened by starlight. He tuned his ear to frequencies unknown to men, while the quarter moon sailed bright as shaved silver above. In those still moments, carved in light and black shadow, the rainbow colours that lay hidden between seemed to shimmer, scarcely veiled from his questing senses. Sound whispered. The mighty chord that underpinned the great stones’ aware fastenings eluded his straining cognizance. Arithon heard with a masterbard’s ear what might never be placed into melody.