Yet even a prosperous town had its stews. Tarens ducked into an alley and rambled into the twisty narrows of Backwater’s lanes. Here, boiled steam off the vats soaked the air with the ammoniac reek of the tanneries, and the mouth-watering aroma of spiced grease from the grills of the sausage sellers. He dodged rib-thin curs, and the huckstering girls who peddled clove pomanders and goose balm, but encountered no sly, rotund figure. Nor did the brothel madams he bribed yield a client of Dakar’s description.
Tarens’s balked search at midmorning perused the rowdy, packed fug of the beer-shops. No tipsy prophet wedged into the press, where the idle trappers at winter’s end flattened their purses on drink. The fat layabout was not with the shiftless crowds, yelling in rings around tipped-over trestles, where hucksters smuggled live chickens in sacks and took shady wagers for cock-fights.
Since rumours abounded where loiterers received a halfpenny to piss in the barrels that supplied the fullers and dyers, Tarens swallowed a pitcher of water and stalled through an hour of chat. Tuppence richer, he gleaned word of a stout fellow’s interest in an unusual anecdote.
“Oh, yes! A deceased free singer’s lyranthe was sold to pay off his burial,” related the street peddler, hung with strings of noisome amulets. “The tale intrigues you, too? Well, a lovesick trapper bought the instrument for his courtship, but ham-fists and a frightful tin ear couldn’t rub two notes together that didn’t yowl like fighting tomcats. In debt for a royal, and desperate for relief, he shed the lyranthe for some ermine pelts offered by a scruffy Ettinman.”
Tarens shelled out both of his pennies. “The fat man you spoke of, where did he go?”
“Him? Left last night.” The vendor stowed the coins in a purse clinking with tin charms for iyat bane. “Trotted out the town gate astraddle a mangy mule.” Amused by the listener’s crest-fallen face, the shyster winked. “Never fret. Your bloke’s unlikely to get past Daenfal. His animal was a dupe’s buy, hereabout, since the ferry over the Arwent doesn’t board infested livestock.”
“Fiends alive!” Tarens shoved off, his plan for provisions abandoned in favour of urgent pursuit. Cures for mange posed no obstacle to a master spellbinder, and the conjured illusion of silver would bribe passage from any obstructive officials.
Well beyond town, Tarens sheltered in a willow copse. Curtained by yellow streamers, newly leafed out, he picked a seat where tangled roots laced the lake-shore like gnarled braid. He hoped Backwater hosted no True Sect diviner able enough to bear the regional flux currents. The volatile mysteries ran perilously strong near the southern verge of Athili, channelled by the old Paravian way and stabilized by two ancient marker stones that grounded the tidal bore: an unwise site to invite the back-lash of an arcane exposure. Tarens fumed for the feckless risk, left without a better option. Settled against a tree trunk, he tapped the clan hunter’s knowledge bequeathed by Earl Jieret’s legacy.
The light-track skeins of the game trails should reveal where Cosach had lifted his boat. Yet no tell-tale ripple disrupted the flow since daybreak refired the lane tides. Crouched on his heels, Tarens cursed the shiftless behaviour of loony prophets and clansmen.
The stealthy hand that latched onto his shoulder startled him almost out of his skin. He stayed his knife hand, just barely, aware of whose features loomed over him.
“I bagged that wretched spellbinder in the night!” Cosach carped. “Took you long enough to find out he’d scampered east on the back of a mule.”
Tarens shoved erect and batted away a necklace of willow fronds. “You’ve left the slippery wretch unattended?”
Cosach snorted, beard split to bared teeth. “Come and see.”
The Mad Prophet remained lodged in a thornbrake, bound hand and foot to his lop-eared mount, which was still tethered by dint of a rope noosed around the dumpling folds of his neck. The knot had not minded his unbinding spell: as much because he was reeling drunk, as the fact the cheap amulets sold by the coot at the privy proofed the bearer against iyats and commonplace mishap.
Tarens stifled an unkind snort of laughter. “Don’t claim he left Backwater gutful of beer!”
“No,” Cosach admitted. “But he had a gin flask stowed to celebrate later.” Which spirits had been ingested by force, after the Mad Prophet fell to the rock the caithdein pitched to waylay him.
Dakar swivelled bloodshot eyes towards his captor. “You didn’t have to sneak up from behind,” he accused with slurred injury. “Then or now. What’s the point, if this animal shies and I swing?”
“I hedge my bad bets,” Cosach agreed, redressing his vindictive handiwork. “Should I cry if a traitor meets his demise? Eriegal died on a loyal man’s blade for your tricks! Surely his unquiet shade won’t rest until you get your reckoning from your crown prince. No, don’t spin me another sad tale that you only slunk off for supplies. Not when I caught your weathercock nose poked into the breeze from Daenfal.”
“The windfall still benefits,” Dakar grumbled, sulky, “since you haven’t pitched my saddle packs into the lake.”
Tarens brightened. “He’s packing victuals?”
Cosach’s sharkish grin widened. “Hard biscuit and salt meat, dry beans, rice, and corn. Yon lard-sack’s steadfast in concern for his belly.”
“The blight on the mule’s a back-handed gift.” For of course an animal disbarred from the ferry lent them plausible cause to proceed through the wilds. They could round Daenfal Lake in the open since the only passable ford crossed the outlet that flowed from the southern shore above Silvermarsh.
“Time’s wasting!” Cosach stowed the coiled rope and tugged the mule’s head-stall onwards with the miserable spellbinder still bound astride. “Try bolting again, and as Rathain’s caithdein, I’ll declare you a threat to my sanctioned crown prince. That’s lawful cause under kingdom charter to drop you flat with an arrow.”
“I’ve already survived one shaft in the back on his Grace’s behalf,” Dakar snapped, which truth brought the slanging match to a stand-off.
The patchworked farmland thinned west of Backwater. Crofters dreaded the roiling borders of Athili, and the haunts that lurked like gleaming floss near the old way discouraged the most hardy woodsmen. Spring damp made the nights a bone-chilling misery, except for one spent in a ruin abandoned by charcoal-burners. The caved roof beams wore the holed remnants of thatch, which shed the sullen downpour in streams. Cosach maintained his testy watch well into the Storlain foot-hills, where, habitation fallen behind, Dakar’s itchy feet found no civilized sanctuary. Tarens loosed the mule before it lost flesh and divided the load to continue on foot.
Up-country by equinox, the party ascended on a scarce-trodden trail, snaking through the ravines and notched passes where the deep vales yawned in ink shadow, and the sunlit heights shimmered under snow. Mornings came etched in hoar-frost, melted by noon to melodious trickles that fed the spring cataracts, swollen to thunder that shuddered the ground. The green firs wore gilt in the harsh blaze of day, tinted in blue and white and pale violet by receding drifts under an azure sky: a vista so vast, all of Mankind’s endeavour seemed an insectile intrusion. Only one wayfarer shared the remote path: a solitary trapper turned crazy, who cared not a whit that the ermines’ pale coats had shed to dull brown.
But Tarens’s patience eventually thawed the saturnine fellow’s tongue. “The uncanny singer? Oh, aye! I’ve kent him. Walks the sheer rim atop Thunder Ridge. You’ll know when you hear him. The sound’s belike to drive any wrong-doing man to religion.”
Extricated with delicacy, the three travellers distanced themselves from the trapper’s eccentric company.
“Do you know this place, Thunder Ridge?” Cosach asked, craning over a dwarf stand of firs, pruned by avalanche on the far side.
Puffing, Dakar laboured to answer. “The same scarp the Paravians called the Tiendarion? Yes. The spur parallels the backbone of the Storlains, buckled to chaos where subduction pressure rams into the plain of West Halla. If Arithon’s there, the approach w
ill be troublesome.”
The chieftain’s response was a half-drawn sword, resheathed with a warning clash. “Don’t try that excuse to hare off again!”
“You think I’m suicidal?” the spellbinder grumbled. “The terrain will pump a man’s lungs like a bellows and dash out his brains on a mis-step.”
A fortnight later, wheezing alike in the thin, frigid air, the three searchers huddled around a spluttering campfire under the rock face of the Tiendarion. The razor-edged rampart carved an obsidian rip across the night sky, dusted above with silver veils of cirrus and stars like sequins in shot silk. Ettinmere Settlement lay twenty leagues southward and west as the crow flew, within the range of a Sighted shaman, even where the eddied flux currents disrupted scrying. Dakar took no chances. He fashioned individual constructs of lead, inset with black tourmaline, pyrite, and hematite.
“For grounding energy,” he explained, then enhanced the mineral amulets with charms against Cosach’s corrosive derision. “Would you have the Ettinmen blinded or not? Stay angry, and no subtle working can mask you. You’ll pose a ripe target for iyats, besides.”
Honest warning, since electromagnetic flares always drew fiends like a magnet. The same instability scrambled Cosach’s talent bent for the hunt. Pinched cross by the dearth of meat for the spit, the clan chieftain kept the spellbinder under his thumb and resolved to greet his liege by himself.
“That could be a mistake,” Tarens cautioned, ahead of the Mad Prophet’s pounce to seize the vindictive advantage. “His Grace hates the onus of titled formality.”
“Well, too bad. Tradition says crown princes bend their stiff knees to acknowledge their liegemen’s fealty. If his Grace balks, for the risk to my people, I’ll challenge his delinquent pride, throw him over and thrash him.” The caithdein jabbed his stick at the coals with contempt. “You’ve said yourself he’s a dainty wee snip. More nerve than brains, if he thumbs his nose at the man with the heftier sword-arm!”
“Do you think?” Tarens slapped off the stirred sparks flurried into his mantle. “Pithless as Arithon seems at first glance, he has brute will enough to wreck mountains.”
Dakar sighed, hunched into his cowled cloak like a browbeaten turtle. “You want a royal ally, Lord Cosach? Be well-advised. Curb your resentment and listen, or turn tail and keep your bowels intact.”
“I should play the craven and help you slink off?” The High Earl of the North dug in his heels, rowelled by Dakar’s overweening advice.
Tarens kept his own counsel and turned into his blankets. Sleepless, he tossed, chafed by Earl Jieret’s remembrance: of Arithon’s feral nerves in the aftermath of a prolonged chase through Daon Ramon. The past caithdein’s experience fore-promised a temperament dicey as a cornered adder’s. Cosach’s bullish over-confidence would trample diplomacy. Add the blistering catalyst of the Mad Prophet’s guilt-fed anxiety, and the volatile outcome surpassed imagining. Before Tarens relinquished the mission to folly, he arose in stealth and took the path up to Thunder Ridge on his own.
Dawn found the former crofter cresting the sheer, pleated ridge that gouged the world’s roof like a curtain wall. Ruddied by the glow of new morning, he was closest when Athera’s titled Masterbard made his appearance and started to sing.
A slight, tousled figure against livid sky, Arithon walked the jagged rock rim, shaping his art as he went. The crystalline purity of his voice awoke a primal restlessness in all things living. The fierce urge seized hold: to follow his lead and dance to his paean of exultation. With joyful abandon to quicken the blood, the bard wove desire to pique the voracious interest of Athera’s energy sprites.
And the fiends came, irresistibly drawn, darting unseen from cleft rock and frisking through the crabbed tangle of firs. They spun out of the wind as small eddies and errant breezes. Impulsive wisps flocked to his lure, their pocked shimmers kited into a gyrating halo that tousled his hair and tweaked at his clothing. Tethered by rapt fascination, they became pared down and netted in shadow, their chaotic exuberance snugged into slender bands fitted onto his fingers.
Tarens tracked the bard at short distance, shielded from notice by Dakar’s amulet. The oblivious singer continued. As though naught existed beyond sky and mountains, his sustained summons bound the thralled iyats until both hands gleamed with the uncanny fruit of his gathering.
Then the thrust of his enchantment changed key. Face tipped back, Arithon added the exquisite cadence of Paravian. His lyric shaped yearning, a cry beyond the human surcease of tears.
To witness a man’s heart-strings laid bare became a violation. Tarens braced as though to deliver a death-blow, and stirred to interrupt.
Arithon’s melody checked in midphrase. He spun, alarmed. Sight of the crofter woke shocked recognition, changed to distress as he clawed at his shirt to rip something offensive away.
“Stop!” Tarens exclaimed. “No harm’s done!” Thrust forward by Jieret’s uncanny perception, he caged Arithon’s wrist before what seemed a plain copper button tore free.
“Rest easy! The Ettinmere shamans are blinded.” Staggered a step by a murderous tussle, Tarens kept talking. “My safety’s secure. If not, you’d have noticed my presence before this.”
Yet Arithon resisted with dauntless ferocity. “Show me proof!”
Tarens let go. Palms empty, he opened his collar and hooked out the knotted string with Dakar’s talisman. The frigid wind seared his exposed throat, while Arithon surveyed the construct.
“Who led you to find me?” Then, brusque as an interrogation, “What did you promise to buy a signature line of protection?”
Which ugly disclosure punched Tarens off balance. “Signature?”
Arithon looked exasperated. “Your Name is wound into that working! Count on the fact you won’t keep any secrets away from whoever created it.”
Which attack was a feint. Steadied by Jieret’s infallible insight, Tarens answered the evasive panic directly. “You’re not alone! I know why you can’t leave. The enemies who test your defences are dangerous, and I’ve come to help heal the rifts in your memory.”
Not disarmed, Arithon returned the viciousness of the caged tiger. “Who else has taken a prying interest?”
Lies would not serve. Before Tarens mustered the poise to confess, Cosach trampled in, loud-mouthed, from the access path.
“The Caithdein of Rathain, first of all!” Breathless from his ascent, the High Earl arrived on the ridge-top aflame with self-righteous reproach. “Should we need to chase after your coat-tails, your Grace? While you dawdle amid these benighted wilds, our realm confronts the horror of a True Sect purge. The Hatchet commands a veteran war host, the same one that sacrificed Havish’s finest to win you free with your life. Shall your own people die under the forfeit of your oathsworn legacy?”
If Arithon had seemed strained before, his demeanour hardened, implacable. “You seek the entitlement for wholesale slaughter?” He added, “The benighted fools raised to arms against you will leave behind orphans who grow up to continue the next cycle of vengeful reprisal. You can’t sow a legacy of meaningful joy while you widow their mothers and sisters to suppress a misguided canon.”
“We are speaking of clan survival!” snapped Cosach, his tousled belligerence blossomed to rage.
“Is there any difference?” Arithon cracked. “What is any war, after all, but the abject surrender of hope? A craven rejection of human grace, with righteous mass murder ennobled in place of inspired imagination!” Against scorching rebuttal, he mocked, “The stubborn mind never looks for alternatives. Let’s drop the cat-and-mouse rhetoric since you’ve come only to drag the chained bear to the mastiff’s pit.”
“Singed fur’s bound to fly, anyway.” Jabbed beyond sense, Cosach challenged, “Let’s rip for the jugular and see who gets flayed.”
Arithon’s lip curled. “Perhaps I prefer to skulk like the cur before strutting your puppet’s parade in the royal arena.” Inimical green eyes raked back over the onlooking crofter. “Wer
e you the eager conspirator or the sadly duped gambit?”
Caught out, Iyat-thos Tarens squared off. “I know you prefer to spare others from the hazard that dogs your company. But your liegeman’s fate is not detached, and I came only for friendship.”
The jet eyebrows rose beneath tangled black hair. “Ath wept! Did Earl Jieret not share the vicious brutality of his death? No! A sane man would gag before repeating that hag’s brew of fatal sentiment.”
But the choice to back down stayed squarely thwarted by Cosach’s armed bulk in the breach.
“The agog audience, amazed by disgust for the freak?” Arithon’s brutal regard swept the stalwart s’Valerient descendant, dismissed the bristle of weapons, the scraped leathers, and even the weariness of harsh travel stamped into a countenance weathered lifelong. “I prefer obscurity,” declared the Teir’s’Ffalenn.
Cosach shredded the flummery. “Well, this isn’t a puppet-show drama. The plight of the kingdom can’t spare you the luxury!”
The second that followed stretched beyond silence. Stymied where record and hearsay fell short, the caithdein found his ironclad duty no match for the royal heir in the flesh.
Head tipped back, his loosened shirt unadorned as an Ettinman without an upright claim to property, Rathain’s titled crown prince returned, full bore, his unsettling interest. “As the latest chip off a rock-headed lineage, don’t tumble for the romantic idea I’ll sit for a coronation.”
Cosach anchored his sword-belt with a hooked thumb and glared downwards with blood in his eye. “The Fellowship Sorcerers might flinch given the mob of armed factions clambering over themselves for your head.”