The flat whap of The Hatchet’s poised weapon launched the quarrel beyond intervention.
The light-bolt crackled off Lysaer’s poised fist. Air screamed under the volatile blast as feathered shafts and their lethal freight of forged broadheads winnowed to ash. Except for one missile, sped onwards amid the sheen of an uncanny counter ward. The deadly spin of a sigil sliced through the applied might of the elements. That fateful quarrel sheared onwards, not flared to a smoke-puff of carbon, but untouched on its whistling passage through the gusty recoil of white-heated air.
Impact struck the avatar in the right eye, a split second before the next levin bolt kindled, and just as Dace’s flung weight cannoned into his stricken liege.
Collision knocked the breath from them both. Entangled, servant and master crashed to the ground.
Dace coughed on live sparks, wind-borne where the back-flash had kindled a grass fire. The nearby crackle of flame scarcely registered. Under his hands, back arched and mouth gaped, Lysaer thrashed in wounded agony. Dace fought his convulsions.
“My liege, be still!”
Lysaer turned his head. Amid his mauled face, the good eye shone sky-tinted blue. Dace flinched, wrenched by horror. Though revolted, he managed the strength to endure the ghastly sight of his liege’s dawning awareness. Lysaer caught his breath, shuddered. One moment, he stared down the abyss of his irretrievable failure. Then his iris dilated with shock. Dace heard the slurred murmur, perhaps the desolate outcry of apology before his liege’s consciousness faded.
Tears striped the smudged ash on the servant’s cheeks. Smoke billowed, where the surrounding heath blazed in patches. Lysaer’s slack torso pinned his folded knees. Dace glanced behind, struck in the teeth by an earth clod as the riderless white destrier took flight. His own trustworthy grey was nowhere in sight. Overburdened, he clung to a man mortally injured, who surely ought not to be moved.
Courage impelled him to survey the crossbolt, embedded down to the razored-steel fletching. Blood welled from the ruined socket, and wicked the blond hair sticky scarlet. Soaked in gore to the wrists, Lysaer’s head in his lap, Dace fought not to gag. The fist he clenched in his liege’s splashed surcoat ascertained a stricken body fighting for survival. The chest underneath rose and fell, and pulse throbbed in the vein above Lysaer’s collar. Traumatic damage might not cost his life, granted the prepotent ward of longevity imposed by Davien’s Five Centuries Fountain.
The grass fire ignored, Dace tore a strip from his cuff. He wrapped the nub of the shaft and applied careful pressure to stem the worst gush of the bleeding. The bolt had struck at an angle. As if, at the crux, Lysaer had averted his face in reflexive avoidance. The move saved little. The eye was destroyed. But the quarrel had lodged into bone with the flange protruding. A skilled healer might withdraw the sunk point from the brain without breaching the skull or slicing through additional tissue.
“I won’t leave you, liege.” Dace held on, against the rise of his gorge. People arrived: Miralt’s dedicates, or Erdane’s, which side scarcely mattered. No choice of his steered the outcome. Nearby, an officer’s shouts detailed men to quench flames, while more booted feet crowded around the fallen avatar.
Numbed by fear and grief, and soaked in the stench of a dire trauma’s incontinence, Dace shouted, “For mercy, summon trained help!”
“He’s alive?” An authority in a High Priest’s regalia advanced, his glittering hem fastidiously lifted clear of the splashed effluent. “Then no healer’s required.”
Dace’s appalled protest fell on deaf ears.
“This is not a secular matter!” the priest dismissed with self-righteous admonishment. “No question pertaining to mortal flesh but a trial of divine veracity.”
“You expect my liege to stand and walk from the field?” Dace attacked with savage impertinence. “The shaft of the crossbolt ought to be drawn. Straightaway, while your blessed lord is unconscious. Kindness would spare the pain of needless suffering.”
“In due time,” snapped the priest. “The Canon demands unassailable proof. Mortality will arbitrate an imposter’s case. If Lord Lysaer recovers his health, his claim to spring from the Light of the godhead will be ascertained before witnesses.”
Dace begged, beyond pride. “Then call for a litter. I’ll find hands to carry him. Someone must care for my liege. Life or death, I ask leave to attend him.”
Movement jostled through the gathered onlookers. Dust blew, and a nervous horse snorted. Then the rumble of wheels parted the pack, and the harness team drawing a war chariot reined up, stamping hooves to the jingle of harness. The Hatchet himself leaped down from the platform. Energetic, short-strided, he stalked in, helmet plumes jaunted sidewards in the stiff breeze as he took vengeful stock of his marksmanship.
Then, “Grant the servant his wish!” he barked at the hovering clerics.
The affronted fanatic bristled and glared. “Lord Commander, you overstep. How dare you entrust our sacred mission to a lowly stranger?”
“Why not?” Square teeth flashed in contempt beneath the war commander’s lowered visor. “That fellow tried to take the fall in his master’s place.” The Hatchet shrugged, plate armour rasping under his emblazoned surcoat. “Base courage deserves recognition, if only to stand the death-watch for a coward who abandoned the field at Lithmarin. I won’t let my officers stoop to the task, or dishonour themselves with disposal of any deserter’s maimed carcass!”
Stung red, the upstaged priest bridled. “This is no commonplace issue of troop discipline!” Fuming through pinched nostrils, he pressed his superior rank. “For undue interference, by the blessed Light, you will allocate your troop’s surgeon at once, along with two stalwarts fit to bear a litter.”
The crested helm cocked upwards. “Your faith is miraculous!” Spun on his heel in contemptuous irony, The Hatchet dismissed, “I’ve seen more than my share of red carnage. A bolt in the eye socket’s certain to pitch even a god into fatal extremis.”
Arrived in ragged haste from Telmandir, Asandir scaled the dim stairwell at Althain Tower to the melancholy echoes of Sethvir’s singing. The rasp that mangled the tune’s minor pitch redoubled the field Sorcerer’s distress. He sprinted the last flight, too rushed to light sconces, and rounded the spiral bend to encounter his colleague seated in the dark.
Knees tucked up beneath his rumpled robe, Sethvir perched on the steps at the fifth-floor landing, his white hair raked up into rooster tails.
Asandir whisked past in one stride. More than the fresh corona of charge from his transit through the dungeon focus, his clothes shed a storm-lightning crackle of static as he slammed his back against the locked door.
“How bad is it?” Surely no breaking disaster should warrant broaching the stilled power that coiled, barred in the spelled silence inside.
Drifty as a poet, Althain’s Warden ceased his sorrowful maundering. He peered upwards. Reflected, the cruel toll of untimely deaths, as his earth-sense recorded the on-going slaughter of clansfolk in Camris. And yet, eyes turquoise as a dawn sky also gleamed with mutinous humour. “The occasion does not warrant laughter,” Sethvir temporized. “Nonetheless, I think you’ll enjoy the back-handed reason to celebrate.”
Asandir shuddered, not a whit deceived. “Show me.”
The Warden’s flicked wrist scribed a circle in air. Colour and light bloomed amid the drear dark. An image resolved of an opulent chamber gilt-panelled in the temple’s Sunwheel motif. Asandir identified the palace wing that housed the highest of Erdane’s priests.
There, installed on an immaculate bed with gilt tassels, Lysaer s’Ilessid languished. A spotless bandage swathed his forehead and one eye. Stilled marble, his hands lay folded on his breast with the posed formality of a corpse lying in state, except for the pink tinge at nostrils and earlobes.
A blot of servant’s brown broadcloth, Dace Marley huddled in vigilant watch, perched on a chair to the side. Where mortal regard discerned little encouragement, a Fellowship Sorcerer saw
past surface appearances. Lysaer was not dying. Rainbow flares stitched through his aura revealed the restorative spells spun by the Five Centuries Fountain, stabilizing spirit and flesh, and stemming the ebb of vitality.
“That’s not what I meant!” Asandir cracked, annoyed to be side-tracked. Davien’s functional grasp of human physiology always had been nigh unto infallible, even before the hair-raising centuries of his discorporate adventure with Seshkrozchiel.
Althain’s Warden sighed like a hound dragged off a bone. “Do you truly wish to behold the reactive impact of that accursed crossbolt?” He tapped his cheek, rolled a bothered glance skywards, then delivered a precise imitation of Prime Selidie’s incensed shriek, “How under sky has this bollux happened?”
Asandir stifled his thrice-needled temper. Too wary of the iron-strapped door secured by his flattened hands, he chased the abstruse prompt behind the Matriarch’s outburst. “Dace!”
Sethvir returned an enraptured smile. “The Prime missed the s’Gannley presence, in fact, and failed to account for an ally’s true service when she hatched her nasty plot with the crossbolt.”
“Not on the shielding of my mark alone!” Asandir weighed the virtues of his own construct, annoyed. “Ath’s blinding glory!”
For presumption on his part had masked the change, where a consummate meddler had neatly altered his original cipher. The harmonic seal to strengthen the young woman’s natural aura now displayed the glass-fine tracery of a realignment. “That crafty tinkering bears Davien’s signature!”
“His subversive touch,” Sethvir confirmed, smug.
Asandir’s eyebrows lifted in astonishment. “He’s crafted the quadrangle runes to draw chaos into Daliana’s shape-change? But that’s the same frequency Selidie’s—!”
Sethvir’s chuckle cut the rant short. “Oh yes.” Indeed, like must attract like. The effect will upstage a hostile sigil like the vengeful clap of a thunderbolt.” Swept along by resonant synchronicity, the True Sect priests never noticed that their contrary choice to keep Dace had been influenced. Neither would the insidious pressure end there.
“No wonder Selidie’s uprooting her hair.” Asandir snorted. “I should think twice about stirring the pot with that dab bit of mischief afoot. Dace is also protected from harm, given that volatile trigger in his proximity?”
“With immaculate conjury, of course.” Sethvir laced innocuous fingers atop his draped knees. “Should you pause to wonder?”
“Yes!” Asandir snapped. “Saddled by Davien’s genius, we’re the minnows darting for morsels between the shark’s teeth.”
Any hostile move to wreak havoc with Lysaer would spin out of control, a disastrous set-back to the puppet-string spells that infused the steel crossbolt that felled him.
The beleaguered Fellowship must bless the audacious artistry binding a lock between master and servant. The reactive effects would defend Lysaer, too, while master and servant stayed in partnership. Koriathain dared not interfere without ruffling their manipulative alliance with the True Sect priests.
Asandir gripped his ribs, stern face split, while Sethvir dispelled the image and scrambled erect.
The field Sorcerer recouped his keen sobriety, still backed against the locked door. “Why dawdle to sing dirges here of all places?”
“Luhaine liked to complain that wind through a holed bucket whistled a less plaintive melody.” Sethvir blinked, his evasive step sidewards balked as his colleague braced a booted foot against the newel-post.
“Don’t claim you were feigning despair to deflect me! Or deny that Prime Selidie’s actions suggest the frightening chance she’s unstable.”
Sethvir laid an ink-stained finger across his lips. Eyes ignited to turbulent fury, he vaulted over his colleague’s obstruction: not to spurn sense, but to access the stairs. Asandir followed, forced to chase the breeze in the wake of his colleague’s distress.
The forlorn response echoed downwards through the tower’s obdurate gloom. “Because you insist upon sharing the grief, we’ll sit down with tea in the library.”
Slant sunlight glared through the western casements, yet the afternoon heat trapped beneath the slate roof never oppressed Althain Tower’s top floor. Chased by the wind off the Bittern Waste, northward, the fragrance of the citrus peel Sethvir used to spice tea sweetened the pervasive must of old parchment. Asandir inhaled the soothing aroma, his boots crossed at the ankles atop a pre-empted pile of books. Between gusts, the acrid stench of scorched velvet caused by his rushed transfer by lane force offended his frugal character: field leathers better suited his lifestyle, the virtue of toughness preferred over comfort.
Across the obsidian table-top, the loose leaves of an ancient manuscript fluttered, pinned under fieldstone weights. Sethvir sipped from his mug, tucked up like a pixie, busy threading the waxed thread to restitch the folios. Calfskin and horse glue to replace the cracked binding displaced his usual clutter of quill pens.
Asandir felt the prickle of wards, raised by a potent cipher to repel rot and silver-fish from the original First Age chronicle: death histories preserved in the Books of Lost Spirits, illumined by the Athlien Paravians. He did not avert his glance quickly enough, the lyric, inscribed Names by themselves fit to wring tears of sorrow, no matter the beauty of the departed had been lost to the world over seventeen thousand years in the past.
Yet the Warden’s haunted lament on the fifth-floor landing did not arise from those bygone elegies.
Asandir bided, while fading day shafted carmine motes through the casements.
Sethvir spoke at length, eyes downcast as if a grim pattern arose in the chiaroscuro drift of swirled steam. “How can the living Paravians bear the refrain, if the unchecked crises provoked by Mankind continue to flare beyond salvage?”
Asandir sat forward, rapt. “We’re not facing that predicament yet! Why should you despair for the outcome?”
Althain’s Warden sighed, unable to make a beginning.
“Let’s continue with Lysaer,” Asandir suggested. “I saw where the crossbolt struck. Given the neurological damage, is Dace prepared for the impact?”
“I’ve sent Kharadmon.” Sethvir jabbed his hair into fraught tufts. “Mettlesome shade!”
“Kharadmon made free with sharp language regarding the Sunwheel elite?” Asandir snorted. “I expect you forbade him to shatter the faith of the dedicate guards posted at Lysaer’s threshold?”
“Lest the poor, devout brutes should get burned for apostate heresy? Yes.” Sethvir stuck no words in the meat of the problem: that likely Dace Marley would suffer the blame if the Sorcerer toyed with the feckless temptation.
Althain’s Warden side-lined the sheaves of manuscript, dipped a forefinger into his tea, and inscribed a circle on the table-top. “You might as well bear living witness, since Kharadmon’s about to fulfil his appointed errand …”
The room was a decorated prison, fit to overawe the most jaded state visitor. But for Dace, the gilt moulding with mother-of-pearl inlay and curtain pulls tipped with gold counter-weights did not merit a sideward glance.
Not while Lysaer s’Ilessid thrashed in the throes of another convulsion. Dace braced his liege’s head with down pillows to cushion the wound and keep the healer’s fresh bandages intact, while four muscled dedicates wrestled to pin their injured avatar flat on the bed. Back arched, the man’s unconscious contortions tried even their trained strength. Jostled, the washstand basin upset. Porcelain shattered. Spilled water flooded the costly white rug.
The dedicates skidded in their hobnailed boots. One lost his grip on a flailing wrist. Dace ducked a punch, reduced to pleas that did nothing to settle the demented fit.
Lysaer collapsed in due time, reduced to limp flesh amid the wracked bed-clothes. The chafed bruises of rough handling purpled both his wrists and ankles. The dressing on his wrecked socket survived, though the reopened wound seeped a fresh stain in the linen.
Dace stepped back, while the irritable dedicates were displaced by
staff, who whisked into the chamber like gad-flies, clucking and tidying. One sent for a mop to swab the mushy carpet. Another grumbled and righted the upset chair. Dace caught hold of the furnishing and sat, frayed to rags amid purposeful bustle.
Soon enough, the solicitous staff had Lysaer laid out beneath freshened silk. They left him impeccably groomed as a doll, his combed hair nestled on a plumped pillow.
He had not recovered his senses after the crossbolt had struck him down. Perhaps never would, although a parade of physicians attended his hurts with bandages and unguents. Plied with infusions for wound fever, momentarily peaceful, his damaged body kept breathing. Dace did the nurse’s stoic chores and kept his liege clean when he voided. Wakeful through the anguished hours, he waited for the next bout of convulsions. Guarded by dedicates, surrounded by priests, and immured in the True Sect High Temple, he lived in stark dread, his covert role under constant threat of disclosure.
Fixated on Lysaer’s motionless form, Dace shivered, chilled despite the heat trapped behind the barred casements. An unnatural cold rode an influx of draught that flattened the flame behind the paned lamp-shade.
“How staunch are you?” a voice inquired from the shadow behind.
Dace recoiled and spun, confronted by no Sunwheel priest.
Kharadmon’s image bowed at his pleasure, regaled in an extravagance of velvet and silk. An emerald pin gleamed in the lace at his throat, striking match for his forest-green doublet.
Shot bolt upright in panic, Dace braced for the alarmed outcry from the armoured guards by the door.
None came.
The dedicates stood still at their posts, unresponsive as a pair of wax statues.
Kharadmon dismissed their presence with airy charm. “Relax. They’re unharmed. If you wish, you might hang your cap on their halberds. They’ll arouse after our conversation.” His raised finger admonished. “By then, listen closely, you’ll be on your own. Unless I might convince you to leave without Lysaer?”