Dreaming, Arithon did not feel her touch on his person. Light as a thought adrift on a breeze, he lacked the bodily awareness to know whether he walked somnolent, or if he was borne on a litter, or if the song of her crystalline flute wrapped his being in ribbons of light and towed him like a wisp through the ether. Through sheeting brilliance, he beheld wonders endowed by a beauty that flayed like edged glass. Palaces of translucent stone speared upwards, buttressed by a lace-worked confection of arches. The tiered hill-side beneath lay honeycombed with dwellings, walls and roofs braided of flowering vines and walled by entwined, living evergreens. Paravians built with unparalleled harmony: structures that embraced the needs of small animals, with niches and spires for nesting birds, and shaded arbours bejewelled with iridescent insects. Butterflies flitted on the intoxicant breeze, scented by salt spray wafted inland.
Whether the jumbled impressions were phantoms distilled from hallucination or wistful fantasies spun between moments of black-out delirium, Arithon never determined. Strung over the abyss of disintegration, he tracked the susurrant rush of white surf, then the beat and splash of what sounded like oars rocked him over jewel-toned swells. The astounding view of a tiered ship with patterned sails that netted the wind melted into a vision of high-flying clouds, and the lullaby creak of silk cordage.
The flute’s song dwindled somewhere in the course of his disjointed journey. He wept for the hot roar of blood through his veins, and flinched from the thundering drum of his heart-beat. Tumbled in the maelstrom, his consciousness floundered as torrential sensation swallowed him, utterly. Drowning, the weight of the air in his lungs as heavy as liquid glass, he heard the Sunchild’s parting echo through his deranged awareness. “Beware of which faction most stands to gain if you should surrender your birthright and abdicate.”
But long since, the meaning of words had forsaken him. Arithon reeled into the desolate dark, either to fight for the rags of his life or to abandon the struggle for worldly existence.
Spring 5925
Policies
The shifted dynamic sprung by the Paravians’ disrupted seclusion splashed across the world’s weave and vanished, sunk into a poised silence. The ripple passed unnoticed, outside the rare few. The Rei-yaj Seeress plumbed the motionless depths, staring sunwards from her tower eyrie. The secrets behind her opaque, marble eyes stayed inscrutable as her pact with the tribes at Sanpashir, who remained a force unto themselves, with interests outside the compact that served Athera’s great mysteries. Ath’s Adepts owned the requisite vision, past question. But their sentinels at the world’s etheric portals guarded only the volatile hush at the heart-core of their hostels, held sacred by their stricture of nonintervention.
Unlike their renegade fallen, who jealously hoarded the residual power coiled in the old vortex at Ettinmere: of the shamans’ staked interest, no echo sparked through the erratic flux in the Storlain Mountains. Unflinching as basilisks, Roaco’s enclave rebuffed the piercing regard of Sethvir.
Althain’s Warden preferred not to heckle that wasps’ nest. Elsewhere, his watch saw the lightning-burst flare of event subside into latent absence. No faction’s curiosity rippled in hindsight. The True Sect’s high talent stayed buried in blinkered complacency under the Light of their Canon. No gifted clanborn scryer alive owned the experience to note the fleeting radiance of the Paravian presence. Day on day, undisturbed, Mankind’s contentious trade and belligerence chased their entrenched pursuits on the continent. Lawful sufferance under the compact granted the townsmen’s activity free rein: which peril plucked at the quivering string, tensioned for the unsounded note that threatened humanity’s future.
Fate dangled upon the unravelling question: how the old races might choose to respond to their accidental disclosure. The uncertainty made Asandir hair-trigger cross. Sethvir gave his annoyance the wary stare of a discomposed cat, unable to measure the outcome, given Tehaval Warden himself had spun the strategic gaps in his earth-sense.
“From a nuisance akin to being nibbled by ducks, we’re like cripples dodging loose knives in a fiend storm,” Kharadmon grumbled in passing. “All we need is a green Matriarch’s fork in the broth to spike the last hope held between us.”
Sethvir poured fresh tea in scalded offence. “Avert!” His greater awareness already grappled that cup of fermenting poison. The upset accession to the Prime seat elevated a creature smelted in the crucible of an excessively cruel punishment. Lirenda was a dark-horse entity, re-emerged from centuries of oblivion. The restive seethe of her displaced opposition lent a juggernaut spin to the jackstraw toss of grim industry bent upon war.
On the hour she chose to exert supreme power, her brazen demand for a mandated summons jerked the snarls of dissent and stripped every single established sisterhouse of its administrative authority. The stroke dropped with no warning, served upon her ranked peeresses by a crystal transmission, thrust into the message relay.
Which dissonant shock, punched through offworld quartz, grazed Sethvir’s skittish awareness at Althain Tower. His startled cough sprayed a mouthful of tea across a leaf of new manuscript.
“Fiends plague!” Arrested by stark fascination, he ignored the marred parchment, instead riveted on the blistering recoil, as one hundred and eighty Senior enchantresses snapped short under their upstart Matriarch’s leash.
Loudest, the appalled dismay of those farthest from Whitehold, who confronted the harsh inconvenience of travel when winter’s last snowpack choked the high passes. Low country, melt frothed the fords in full spate. While thaw softened the trade-roads to sucking quagmires, traffic with urgency moved by the southcoast galleys, with scarce passage sold dear at peak season.
“Clever timing, Lirenda,” Sethvir murmured, disarmingly vacuous as his broad-scale awareness mapped her bold strategy: isolated by distance, from all points, and hobbled by adverse conditions, the dissatisfied peeresses and their Senior entourages would be disunited for months, with no chance given to regroup.
“Outclassed ahead of the party, my dears.” Beard split by a barracuda flash of bared teeth, the Sorcerer ruminated, “Though I’d pillow my head on a sack full of scorpions before taking a step in Lirenda’s shoes.”
The succession’s end-play must unfold in due course. Immersed in the dicey present, meantime, Sethvir framed a contrite request, then swept his quill feather across the spoiled parchment. Marred ink realigned like snapped ribbon under the splattered tea, which obligingly dried without stain. Althain’s Warden scribed his next line. The measured scratch of his pen resumed in sunlight, and continued under the wan moon, while the ebb and flood of the tide marked its measure, and Mankind’s affairs on the continent implacably darkened towards bloodshed.
War’s prelude fired the oratory of the priests and clattered to the painted-bone dice, cast by the mustered dedicates packed into the seamy ale-houses. Pending violence rode the clogged indoor air, in the sour redolence of unwashed wool, wet leather, and rust, with the reek of goose greased steel welted through the fecund tang of fresh buttermilk. Against the vigorous splash of spring rain, tension shrilled through the wharf-side exchange, where brokers moving the bids for supply haggled over last year’s grain stores.
While True Sect tacticians bent their eyes north, with pin counters arrayed on The Hatchet’s maps of the Plain of Araithe, the clans withdrawn to Strakewood braced for invasion. Sethvir tracked the tension in their council circles. He tasted their despair in the night, as the harried scouts reported off watch, and grim women plaited green hide for the spring traps. No plan offered a clear course of action. The seers’ talent needed to thwart ghastly odds raised no visions, only formless menace and dread.
Foresight of the assault remained veiled, even to Siantra’s exceptional gift. Amid fear like rasped flint, her youthful inexperience failed to recognize the gravid pause seizing the flux.
Sethvir’s earth-sense grasped the awful, pent hush, the storm’s eye where possibility locked before an on-coming nexus. Momentum converged, a
s unstoppable forces cascaded into alignment. Althain’s Warden listened for the snapped twig at the forefront, ruffled to gooseflesh in the twilight draught spilled through his opened casement. By nights, he tended his seedling herbs. Daily, he tracked the melancholy honks of north-flying geese, chorused against the crack of calved glaciers and the browsing of gravid deer. Nothing else spoke in the natural world. Whatever arose to deflect the world’s course, the catalyst stayed elusive.
A fortnight crept past. Late-falling sleet tapped the pillars at Northgate, where scoured rock wore leaden puddles. Southward, rain sheeted through the Mathorns, roaring in runnels down the ravines that hampered The Hatchet’s deployment. Teams hauling supply to Etarra splashed at a crawl up the trade-road, goaded by swearing teamsters. Draught animals threw shoes, and huddled, heads lowered, while dismounted outriders laboured to shift laden wagons bogged to the axles. Dedicates on cut rations scoured rust from their mail, miserable and raked by disease from encampments wallowed to a standstill.
Throughout, like stranded pearls in the burlap of workaday commerce, came the Koriathain summoned to Whitehold. Clustered in their red-and-violet mantles, they endured the packed inns, purses flattened by premium rates. They dickered with tight-fisted galley-men for deck space, or shared quarters within a cramped cabin, nerves flayed by quartz-amplified talent. From the eastshore, they braved the rough passage by ship. Overland, from the west, sisters traversed Araethura on mule-back to the Backwater ferry, then boarded the flat barges at Daenfal with the caravans bound on to Shipsport.
When the first arrivals from Highscarp straggled into the Whitehold sisterhouse, the pique ignited by the uprooted peeress’s reception snagged Althain’s Warden’s attention. In simultaneous pursuit of a sink-hole through time, opened by the doings of dragons, he glanced up in the darkness fallen over his tower seat in Atainia …
“Stars above! Lirenda has no justifiable cause! A talent sounding, demanded of us?” The sister’s dismay railed against the invasive assay customarily applied to rank novices. “The imposition’s a criminal insult!”
“None are exempt.” The initiate minding the gatehouse qualified without sympathy. “Your Prime has her purpose, which demands your unquestioned obedience.” Or else hazard the inflexible penalty for oath breaking …
Sethvir tracked the stew of road-wearied outrage, denied due relief to clean off clinging mud, seek a meal, or exchange closet gossip. Quarantined instead, Highscarp’s arrivals seethed in isolation, while their peeress received summons, alone. The Prime’s choice to conduct her sessions in private brushed forewarning across Sethvir’s faculties.
For the Whitehold peeress was established in power, not wont to be cowed by a pretender one step above her own station. Particularly when a subservient testing invited a contest to seize brute control: a pitched duel of folly against the order’s only eighth-level initiate, a former First Senior herself, groomed lifelong for the Prime succession. The subordinate sister’s downfall gave Lirenda legitimate cause to prosecute her rival for disobedience. Sethvir witnessed the summary reprisal, brutalized by the burn as the Prime’s master sigil excised the rebellious defector. The condemned peeress survived as a vacant puppet, useful for menial chores and rote service with no spark of conscious intelligence.
“To Sithaer’s darkest pit with your order’s unnatural practice!” fumed Althain’s Warden, the reach of his hands tied twice over. Whitehold lay under town law, subject to Melhalla’s crown justice; and the charter that underpinned royal authority rested on the compact’s tenet of free choice. He could not save an initiate sister oathsworn under crystal unless she placed a direct appeal to the Seven for help to reclaim her autonomy.
Without recourse, the Sorcerer banged a fist on the table in acid frustration. “Dharkaron, Angel of Vengeance! If I believed in sordid redress, I would cast the fabled black Spear and have done with the order. Rue the day, until the violation allows us the due process for a swift destruction.”
Until then, the Fellowship’s might stayed constrained. Sethvir did nothing, nothing at all, except bear cold witness as the peeress’s subordinate was called, next in line. Today’s horror would repeat, as the ordeal screened the ranked seniors one by one. No sister raised to red rank was exempt. Those who harboured dissent would be culled, crushed, or cowed, before their resistance fermented.
“The vicious price of a disputed succession,” Sethvir remarked, unimpressed by a sovereignty forged under tyranny. The claimant to the Prime seat was no longer an obvious creature, wedded to ambition. Punishment had annealed Lirenda’s spirit and throttled her natural emotions. Her controlled intent barely inflected the probable future, a concern that taxed Sethvir’s nerves.
He sharpened his nib with fussy precision, while his broad-scale awareness sifted Mankind’s doings and measured their impacts, all the way down to the pebbles ground under the boots of The Hatchet’s dedicate troops. He knew what disrupted the high-flying swallows and the nestled colonies of roosting bats. From the stir of the currents in the black deeps, alive with the flicker of schooling fish to the rumbling purr of a khetienn with kittens, to the roar of white magma far belowground, the living trace of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn as yet eluded his grasp.
“Dharkaron’s Five Horses trample the hindmost!” Althain’s Warden hurled his pen. The quill shrieked through the air and struck with quivering distress, nib impaled in the granite wall. Too galling, the stalemated consolation, that the impasse stymied the new Prime Matriarch’s aggressive interests as well …
Lirenda swept into Whitehold’s main hall, her step swallowed by cavernous emptiness. The purple fall of her over-robe whispered echoes across gleaming marble, icy under the morning light spilled through the harbourfront casements. The rumble of barrels rolled by the wharf’s industrious stevedores thrummed through her hollow chest. Behind the plate armour of discipline, fear frazzled her nerves.
For the truth gutted pretence. Selidie’s upset left a yawning breach. Lirenda mounted the dais to the Prime seat as the rightful claimant, her grasp firm on the reins of the Matriarch’s absolute power. Show doubt, and her subordinate Seniors would tear her apart like starved jackals.
She was the last eighth rank and fittest to rule. Yet the core purpose that steered the Koriathain had died with her predecessor, the historic, first gap in a heritage unbroken for countless millennia.
Aristocrat to the bone, Lirenda came steeled for the challenge. Gold combs pinned up her sable hair. The diadem on her brow glittered like twilight’s frost with amethysts and diamonds. Her accomplished deportment salved nothing. The Fellowship runes impressed below her raised chair mocked her toothless authority. More than proof of an oath kept intact, Asandir’s handiwork served up the constant reminder of Selidie’s miscalculation.
The sisterhood’s future hung in the balance. Trip over the dangerous holes in her knowledge, and the True Sect’s zeal for burning talent might turn on the order. Their priesthood must be held in check, as the brush-fire expansion of Canon writ also suppressed the outbred offshoots of talent Koriathain required to restore their pruned ranks.
Noxious thoughts, as the bossed doors opened. A pair of trustworthy sisters, grey-clad and marked by the white ribbons of charitable service escorted two more docile figures, bovine stares and slack features vacant. These were followed by lackeys, who arranged eleven carved chairs in a half circle before the dais.
Then Whitehold’s summoned Seniors arrived for their joint audience. They bent their stiff knees in obeisance, until their new Prime’s flicked fingers bestowed leave to rise. Erect in discomfort, not permitted to sit, they faced dread and intimidation. Their former peeress, and the sisterhouse’s subordinate senior, now being prodded to kneel like cud-chewing cattle, both rendered witless for use at their Matriarch’s beck and call.
Morriel, before, kept two pretty, matched boy wards to fetch and carry for her convenience. After her, Selidie had enslaved Lirenda for menial service. Yet this brazen display of their fallen s
uperiors shocked the breath from the Seniors just released from isolation.
Lirenda sealed her ascendance before the stunned gathering. “Behold the forsworn, disclosed by trial and swiftly condemned for insurrection. Witness their demise! I will tolerate no secret dissent! Sisters who toy with conspiracy will be stripped without quarter.” Dead-pan, Lirenda breathed in the taint of her subordinates’ acrid sweat. Cold patience learned under oppression let her extend their petrified expectation.
Amid the appalled silence, she broached her agenda. “Koriathain, you are the marrow of an order whose influence has spanned millennia. Our origin predates this world, and all you know of human history. I have no mercy for offenders because on your shoulders, and in my hands rests a guarded repository of human knowledge beyond our collective experience. Everything that we are, and the sum of our sisterhood’s tireless work for Mankind’s betterment has been thrown into jeopardy. This critical hour sets our founders’ purpose under siege as never before. Surmount adversity, or founder in ruin, our deeds at this cross-roads will define us.”
Before stopped expectation, a shimmer of jewels as Lirenda stood before her raised chair. Eyes the flat brass of the lioness raked over her following, formless as wax to be shaped by her mould. “The murderous strike at my predecessor also destroyed priceless assets. Along with the lives of our best Senior Circle, we have lost an irreplaceable focus stone and its store of encoded records. This disaster has weakened our vital strength, and I tell you now: we may never reckon the damage inflicted by Prince Arithon on that bitter night in Daon Ramon Barrens.”
One outraged sister exclaimed, “Retribution is long overdue for that rogue sorcerer’s crimes.”
Lirenda’s raised hand quelled the outburst. “Yes! But the order’s recovery takes priority while we pick up the pieces.” Her salvo of orders was brutal and brief. “At the threshold of war, time is urgent. You’ll return to the Highscarp sisterhouse forthwith. The husks of the condemned go with your company, tasked under my thralled directive. They will catalogue the library. You’ll surrender every book, every scroll, every journal and folio of correspondence, and also the imprinted contents encoded in crystal. Throughout, your mindless sisters will work under lock and key, sequestered until I’ve reviewed the compiled index in person and detailed the list for initiate access.”