“Keep on,” warned the healer, “stop his heart, and risk damage enough to fragment his cognizance beyond retrieval.”
Selidie frowned, inconvenienced by the needful delay to change tactics. “Lirenda? Fetch the packet of diluted tienelle from my herb chest, along with the little brazier. A touch of smoke should speed my progress.” The narcotic’s effect would intensify her probe, with the bogging detritus of Arithon’s remembrance dissolved like cobweb as the uplifting thrust of the herb punched open his refined faculties.
“See to the dosage,” Selidie instructed the healer. “Under the influence, I’ll resume the onslaught at strength and seize my objective directly.”
A collective sigh swept the circle of Seniors, temporarily relieved of their entrained trance. The Prime stretched like a cat, then settled to steady herself ahead of the bracing expansion. The striker snapped. Flint sparked against steel and ignited the flame, thin as shot silk in the gloom. A silvery thread of smoke twined aloft, sharpened by the abrasive scent as the infused leaves caught and burned. The Prime netted the fumes in a hood of veiled silk and inhaled. Discipline harnessed the uprush that followed. The stifled atmosphere became gravid, every onlooker likewise affected, lungs steeped in the wafted haze.
The effect swept through Arithon in extremis like the blast of a gale-wind. Explosive intoxication whirled his deranged consciousness, already forcibly frayed to a thread. His frantic pulse slowed. His tortured breaths deceptively deepened. Relaxation eased his rigid frame, cramped sinews wrung pithless through the soaring lift as facile intuition unfolded.
Agony lessened, as his mind drifted free of his tormented flesh. The active Waystone loomed overhead, its proximal chill fit to sear naked skin and its depths vast enough to drown Sight. His expanded awareness had no other stimulus. The jewel’s crystalline lattice dominated his proscribed existence, the fresh influx of sinister power shrilling like stroked glass as the Prime Circle’s assault coursed through its focus.
Trained mastery responded. The surge of initiate reflex aligned Arithon’s consciousness towards the hostile thrust ranged against him.
The reverse startled Selidie’s quickened aptitude and caused her to overreact. She engaged, bent upon conquest with redoubled savagery.
Arithon spurned retreat. Goaded as the leopard touched by the whip, he launched his awareness into the jewel to grapple her hold at the source.
Selidie quit the contest. She relinquished control of the amethyst’s matrix and emerged with a cry of triumph. “The ripened fruit falls into my hand.” Flushed by the ease of her victory, she laughed. “He’s doomed himself, truly. The Waystone’s inherent malice will finish him. Lirenda? Extinguish the brazier. Have my servants bring in refreshments. We need do no more than stand idle watch until the Teir’s’Ffalenn succumbs and dies.”
The great jewel, by nature, would capture everything: all the brilliant nuance of his gifted talent. At leisure, the Matriarch could retrieve the imprinted record, and without hindrance explore the prized pattern left behind by his trapped consciousness.
Plunged deep within the Waystone’s mineral lattice, Arithon sensed the abrupt dissolution of Selidie’s aggressive presence. Direct opposition faded and vanished, with his disembodied identity left stranded inside. Self-aware, he surveyed the mighty vault of the amethyst, a structured geometry of facets that sheared outside light into purple tones rich as stained glass.
The bias of the jewel’s power surrounded him, masterless, but still enabled: the piezoelectric properties of quartz, ferociously enhanced by a gem cutter’s art, amplified and released captured energy. Arithon’s past experience imprisoned in crystal called for preternatural caution. Since back-lash from every attempt to break free would recoil into punishing agony, he stilled his impulsive panic and invoked a bard’s skilled proclivity for listening.
Unlike the clear stone that ensnared him before, the amethyst sphere was not silent. His practised perception of nuance disclosed the Waystone’s extreme sensitivity, fine-tuned enough to be influenced by the surrounding environment. Arithon picked out the resonant hum raised by the day’s ambient heat, then the flickered static as the slight friction of draughts raised back-drop fluctuations akin to weather.
More disturbing, the high-frequency spike introduced by his pensive quiet. The jewel’s nexus quivered and surged to the naked flare of his living awareness. Every minuscule deflection aroused shimmering ripples of reactive charge, the matrix explosively poised to align to the least whisper of influence. Self-command held small purchase, caged inside of a gem engineered as a potent echo chamber. Any thought would trigger a response. Helplessness sparked the split second’s desire to unleash that magnified force and dismember the sigils that ruled his confinement.
Arithon doused the reckless impulse, too late.
The focus engaged with preternatural speed and spun up a cataclysmic whirlwind. The storm trampled mastery. Arithon’s tattered identity drowned under a tidal bore of hostility. He had no shields. Already stripped of his innate defences, he failed to centre before the Waystone’s tempestuous ferocity pulverized his attempt to reinstate neutral quiet. Mage-Sighted awareness lost cohesion, torn piecemeal by the remnant cacophony of sundered lives and mass destruction. Long dead, not forgotten, the Great Waystone held the trauma of entire populations hurled like so much chaff across Fate’s Wheel.
Its ancient, relict witness encompassed the ending of worlds, with the violent experience of entire cultures scoured to ashes and ruin. Arithon thrashed as a mote in the deluge, milled under the battering desolation raised by refugees doomed to exodus. He knew wrenching sorrow, and the sore desperation of war-weary survivors made wretched by epidemic disease and privation. The collective testament of human misery wracked him with the panic and pain of unimaginable billions. Men and women, children and babes, the Waystone’s residue of the uncleansed misfortunate wailed for deliverance with deafening need.
Trampled under the flood, Arithon was flayed senseless. He lacked the refined concentration to winnow out every trapped figment and sing for their requite release.
He languished past respite until the tattered recall resurfaced: in fact he had confronted the gist of this ghastly tableau once before. The final test of his mettle incurred by the maze under Kewar had foreshadowed a facsimile of such large-scale crisis. Then, Arithon had unravelled the clamour through a reckless invocation of the primal ciphers of unbinding. Inside a guarded sanctum, contained under the seal of a Fellowship work of grand conjury, his shaped response had bordered upon stark insanity. The same remedy, attempted at the enabled lens of a major quartz focus, toyed with peril beyond all imagining.
Safer to sound for the resonant notes and try clearing the crystal’s imprinted disharmony. Yet, when Arithon gathered himself to regroup, the amethyst’s brew of trapped consciousness rose up in virulent retaliation. Not the clamorous echo of deranged ghosts: this vicious resistance was self-aware, launched by the order’s prior, failed candidates, who had lost themselves during the initiate passage to claim the prime succession. The mineral lattice still harboured their tormented spirits, a host entrapped for countless millennia, and long since abandoned to hope. Extended captivity had stewed them into a maelstrom of ravening madness, fury distilled to insatiable might by the great amethyst’s focus.
Unshielded before them, Arithon fled. The matrix offered no bolt-hole, no safe harbour in which to snatch rest. His demented attackers converged in pursuit, a storm of hatred inflamed by his utter defencelessness. Driven, he coursed through a thousandfold layers of compounded knowledge and catalogued history.
Images erupted around him like dreams, excited by the spark of his passage. Impressions fragmented as mirror shards, painted with scenes otherworldly and strange: of silver cities beneath carmine skies, and tropic seas foamed by breakers the colour of lime. He viewed engines blazing white streaks across starfields, and the translucent violet of a desert sky hung with alien moons of pearl and cabochon opal; elsewhere, steel s
pires melted in wreaths of blue fire, and teeming blocks of grey tenements toppled into crevasses torn asunder by shattering quakes. He saw inconceivable marvels as well: forests teeming with exotic life and cities that hovered in bubbles. Stacked buildings the size of mountains, agleam with windows like cloisonne enamel, and arched bridges suspended from towers, spanning vistas that smoked with spewed gouts of lava.
The Waystone cached more than outlandish history. The detritus of old conjuries burdened the matrix, with the frozen memories of the order’s past Primes strung in veils like layered cobweb. Arithon brushed through libraries of foreign knowledge, each cache vast enough to overshadow the archives at Althain Tower. Twice, he floundered against guarded sectors, blocked like vaults from unauthorized access. He streaked past grimoires of dark practice and light, written in unrecognizable ciphers and translated into dead languages. The accreted trove encompassed more information than any one mind might access in the course of a lifetime.
The staggering size of the collection helped nothing. However Arithon twisted and turned, he ran blind, while the ravening shades stalked at will, unimpeded where the embedded sigils of ward imperilled his living integrity. They hounded his progress, pursued him into the murky depths, where the amethyst’s contorted inclusions abetted their manic chase. If safety existed within the labyrinth, the stone’s entombed denizens thwarted his search.
They whittled down the range of his choices and narrowed his marginal lead. He could not outstrip the hunt, or evade defeat, only hazard what freedom remained to strike out before he was surrounded.
Arithon doubled back, a suicidal attempt to seize a surprise advantage. His tactic failed. The horde closed and pinned him. Trapped beyond quarter, he braced for a battle he lacked any resource to win.
Yet the lethal assault he expected did not commence. The Waystone’s malevolent entities made no move to destroy him. Lost to all recourse, Arithon listened, hopeful his Masterbard’s ear might discern a last avenue for resolution. If no other option existed, he might sound for the notes to abate the mass insanity ranged against him.
The Great Waystone itself answered his patient query with the shocking imprint of his own Name. Arithon weighed that astonishing overture, taken aback. If the confined shades—fallen cream of the most talented Koriathain—had indexed the jewel’s vast archive, suggestion allowed they may have herded him to this particular junction for a purpose.
Arithon defied the sensible prickle of trepidation. For good or ill, against certain ruin, he surrendered himself to the riddle …
The imprinted reference bearing his signature unfolded a vision of darkness and candleflame: record of a closed audience amid a curtained, hammer-beam chamber. The scattered glitter of mother-of-pearl inlay and the jet lacquer of Vhalzein furnishings framed a disturbingly familiar setting. The scene matched the transaction, encountered before, captured within the quartz sliver reclaimed from the cabin in the Storlain Mountains. Arithon realized he viewed the fateful bargain sealed between the enchantress, once his most dearly beloved, and Selidie Prime. Except the Waystone’s eidetic witness retained the intact event …
Called onto the carpet before her Matriarch, travel-worn and aching with weariness, the initiate, whose name was yet lost to him, declared herself without compromise: “I will not betray Arithon.” Although her refusal invited a swift downfall, she firmed her shaken resolve. “If that’s what you have brought me here to achieve, let me clear the least shadow of doubt. I’ll cast off my vow of obedience, even welcome the punishment that makes final end of my love as your private weapon. Never again will I be the tool to gain leverage for Koriani politics.”
Riveted, Arithon beheld the enchantress whose love had claimed the heart core of his being. The cherished features expunged from his memory were not hardened against him but etched by anguish and terrified turmoil as her omnipotent Prime laced a ruthless threat with the poisoned honey of back-hand persuasion …
“Did you know our great amethyst can record and enforce promises?”
The subordinate initiate shivered. The Matriarch before her was no green antagonist but a master player who countered her moves with frightening, cold-blooded intellect. “Don’t do this.”
“I require your trust,” said the Prime, unequivocal. A freezing finger of cold stirred the air, then a ripple of malice clothed in stinging power, as the sisterhood’s most perilous focus stone awakened to enact her will. “For the record, in duration of my lifetime, bear witness to my words as Selidie Prime: initiate Elaira will never be forced to betray Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn in the interests of the Koriani Order.”
The re-echoed surge as the spoken vow engaged the amethyst rippled throughout the quartz matrix. Arithon had no chance to ponder the import. The re-enacted archive of the audience unreeled to finish with absolute clarity …
“You are given my sanction to wield the powers of the Koriani Order in the cause of Prince Arithon’s life.”
“Ath, of course!” The conflicted enchantress shot to her feet. “With the usual condition, that he would owe us his personal oath of debt for our service. Even the Fellowship must honour that stricture, no matter if the price we demand should seal his final downfall.”
Selidie inclined her head. “We have never granted exception for birth or any other privilege of rank.” A brittle smile bent her lips. “The choice remains yours, whether or not to offer your prince the option of our help. You are, as you see, the initiate best suited to carry out this mission. The only direct command you will bear is to stay involved with Prince Arithon’s affairs.”
“A feat far easier said than accomplished.” The bronze-haired enchantress drew a steady breath and showed the unyielding mettle of her character. “If I don’t go, I suppose you’d send Lirenda?”
“My ends can be served out of love, or from hatred,” Selidie agreed with poisoned logic. “Which emotion will sway Arithon’s fate in the straits of his uncertain future …?”
The exposed truth delivered an exoneration, corroborated by recent proof: the affray upon Thunder Ridge verified that Dakar’s word under a mishandled Fellowship auspice had been what invoked the crown’s outstanding debt to the order! Not, Arithon realized, his personal bond bestowed under the far-more-sacrosanct trust. His beloved had never betrayed him. The sliver of crystal planted in the cabin had selectively painted a lie.
The manipulative deception lay at the feet of the Koriani Prime Matriarch. Arithon bent his regard upon Selidie, ablaze with a rage beyond caution. His determined intent to pierce the secretive darkness surrounding her person catalyzed yet another referent response from the Waystone.
Its pristine record delivered the orchestrated sequence of criminal conjury once invoked over a quartz vein in the Skyshiels. There, Morriel had engineered a catastrophic upset of Athera’s lane forces to blindside the Fellowship’s oversight when her act of necromancy had cheated death.
Arithon witnessed the horror, full bore, as mage-trained perception rent the dimmed veil and disclosed the hag’s theft of a victimised woman’s young body.
“Ath wept!” Pity unleashed in full measure the empathy of his crown heritage. His peal of anguish stirred through the captive shades who had driven him to a standstill, and reverberated in wild outrage across the crystal’s aligned matrix. “Your Prime’s smothered a subordinate’s birthborn right to autonomy and kept her suppressed consciousness buried alive?” The cruelty trampled ethic and reason, an assault on free will beyond all human decency.
When Arithon’s revenant antagonists made no aggressive move to protect their sisterhood’s exposed infamy, the grim theory dawned: the jewel’s pervasive hostility might not, after all, be directed against him. Perhaps instead, he confronted the chafed gall of rebellion, for millennia bound by intractable oaths, and helplessly yoked under the iron fist of a perverted, tyrannical mistress.
The Great Waystone itself may have turned its subjugate might as his ally. Arithon engaged his initiate mastery on that posited gamble.
He weighed the measure of the abomination entitled to rule the Order of the Koriathain. Then he mustered the reach of his gifted talent, engaged artistry, and composed a Masterbard’s song to lay down a harmonic unbinding.
Late Summer 5924
Breaking Point
The on-going vigil in the Koriani pavilion extended past nightfall under the flicker of candlelight. The ranked Senior Circle remained in attendance, retained by the command of their Prime. Most enchantresses dozed where they could, aged indignity slouched upon chairs, or reclined on spread cushions, wrapped in their mantles against the draughts that stirred through taut canvas and tapestry hangings. Outside activity in the encampment had long since quieted under a fair sky. Past midnight, the first chill of summer’s end breathed through the dense heat. The Prime retired in curtained privacy, with a skilled healer entrusted to stand the death-watch at Prince Arithon’s side.
The appointed sister was not remiss. Minute to minute, she tracked the prisoner’s life signs as his condition deteriorated. His erratic pulse and shallow breathing suggested Rathain’s royal lineage would be extinguished before dawn. Armoured against pity, the enchantress bestirred herself for another routine inspection. Her impersonal touch clasped the victim’s chained wrist to affirm the inevitable onset of heart failure.
Yet this pass, the flaccid flesh under her touch showed a flush of revitalized warmth. The order’s observer straightened, surprised. Her rapt survey revealed Arithon’s respiration also had deepened and steadied. More, the strengthened beat in his vein indicated the flow of life energy quickened.
The sister repeated her detailed review, waited, then rechecked to confirm. Against expectation, the prisoner under her charge had upset the slide towards attrition. The enchantress arose. The improbable change, however minute, demanded an urgent report.