“No! The late High Earl’s spirit forces my choice.” Floated back through the rush of the falls, the crofter’s anguished, last words spiked Dakar to terror: “The compact won’t fall into jeopardy here! Nor will Deshir’s heart-wood be threatened. Fellowship help will not arrive, because your blind prophecy spelled warning at Ettin and Daenfal!”
The Light’s advance into Strakewood, meantime, showed no sign of let-up. Midafternoon cooked the jaundiced gloom under canvas where The Hatchet maintained his tactical headquarters on open ground to the east. Despite tied-back flaps, the air was stifling. Staffers and field officers streamed anxious sweat, in wait for requests and instructions from the helmeted conclave bent over the chart trestle. The engagement’s press reeked of blood and exertion, pierced from outside by screams from the surgeons’ camp, and the quick-marched tread of relief squads called up for swift reinforcement. Jammed at the centre, a squat caricature in glittering chain-mail, The Hatchet peered up at the third company’s runner, who wheezed through another report. “The enemy war band’s boxed on three sides, taking heavier losses. We’ll have their backs when they run out of arrows.”
“You say!” The Hatchet’s crow split his nutcracker jaw, like filed iron with several days’ stubble. “By dusk, we’ll finish them!” His elated fist thumped on the tactical map. The doomed jumble of enemy counters bounced helter-skelter off the breastplates of his officers, then rolled underfoot, mashed with relish under his boot-heel. “Light’s glory, we’ll gut the resistance right here. Where’s fourth company’s runner?”
Enthused, in his element, The Hatchet leaned over the map. “By now, our skirmish lines should have swept the low ground. Once their relay confirms, I’ll close our flanks like a pincer. Rout the rats up Tal Quorin’s ravine, where our fifth will meet them at the head-water. Crossbowmen stationed on the rim can mop up the rear-guard survivors, neat as shooting trapped fish in a barrel.”
A stir shuffled the bystanders at the entry. Impatient, The Hatchet waved the messenger off and barked orders at the sallow captain beyond. “Ready your foot to march out. Full armour. I want axemen and pikers with bill-hooks. Chew through the infested coverts, and drop any varmints that bolt.”
“Fourth company’s runner has yet to report,” the Light’s message officer cautioned.
The crest on The Hatchet’s helm whipped left. One jaundiced eye fixed on the splotched smock of the battle surgeon. “Why are you here? If there’s a supply problem, damn well collar my quartermaster!” Without stopping, he snapped, “Where in Shadow’s black arsehole is Arwi Unfrey? His runner’s late, too. I need him with trackers and dogs straight away to run point for the task force dispatched to clear out the canyon.”
No witness rushed forward to break the bad news: the clever league head-hunter had died, messily, sawn nearly in half by a noose snare. The uneasy pause wore, filled by the metallic scrape of shifted accoutrement. Then the outside upheaval, gaining momentum, brought raised voices. Discord clashed through the clangour of arms as the pressured sentinels braced for a barricade.
“Fiends plague! What’s that dastardly racket?” The Hatchet craned his bull neck. View obscured by his staff officers, he rammed forward, elbows raked up like a mantled fighting cock. Counters crunched under his hobnailed soles. Petitioners wedged in his way jumped like lackeys, treading on toes. An equerry bearing a tray dodged aside, spilling his pitcher. Thrust past him, dripping, The Hatchet stamped through the air-borne flutter of napkins.
No overdue messenger fielded his wrath. Instead, a ceremonial procession inundated his active command post. A tinkling nuisance of bell-ringers and hooded penitents with brass cymbals escorted three palanquins crammed with priests in jewelled regalia. The outrageous parade stonewalled his out-bound runners. More, against shouted threats, several acolytes with mirrored lamps borne on wands jostled the stance of his posted guards.
The Hatchet jammed short, just shy of a collision. Choked by a billow of incense smoke, he ducked a lit censer. The back-swing clanged against his armoured nape and stuttered the bell-ringers’ rhythm. Pelted by sparks, he snuffed his singed horsehair crest with a murderous clap of his gauntlet.
Through a hacked cough, he exploded, “Which lick-spittle chump do I hang by the bollocks?” His swipe broke the golden chain of the censer. “We already suffered devotions at sunrise. That puppet-show wafted blessings enough to gag a maggot at forty paces!” His throw pitched the bauble in a fuming arc, which quenched with a hiss of steam in a horse trough. “I’m conducting a war! I’ll not have your faithful die unsupported while my chain of command gets bogged down by posturing mummery.”
Shocked silence descended. The officers crowded within the command tent stared, stunned, while the High Priest at the forefront unfurled his stiff finery. Emerged from his tasselled palanquin, chalky with offence, he extended a ringed hand with a scroll.
“I’m asked to bestow a clerk’s scribble on this?” Confronted by supercilious frost, The Hatchet tipped his chin, brows bunched as the boss on a bull flagged to gore.
“No endorsement’s required.” Wax seals glinted, ribboned in state formality. “A direct mandate from the Light’s blessed avatar demands your compliance. Immediately.”
The Hatchet snatched the document. His violent irritation shattered the seals and batted away the burst ribbons. He snapped open the roll, the sparse contents read at a glance.
His face purpled. Reflections juddered over his armour as he snapped the divine edict over his shoulder. A gasp confirmed his tense subordinate’s receipt of the content: affixed to cream parchment, verified by the seal of Erdane’s temple council, a thin strip of rice paper carried by bird bore the light-burned impression of a thumb print. Beneath, the gilt ink of divine effrontery ordered the withdrawal of the Light’s forces from Strakewood.
“Pull back, you say? Disengage with all speed and quick march my war host two hundred leagues to the south?” The Hatchet’s galled tirade gained pitch. “Abandon my victory and disown the sacrifice of my fallen? Over my bloodied carcass! I’ll rend Strakewood’s clan menace to carrion, first.”
“The barbarians can be broken another day,” The priest dismissed with superior sang-froid. “Our avatar is the will of the godhead, personified. Bow to Lord Lysaer’s sacred directive or be damned for apostasy. Decree says the Spinner of Darkness has set foot in West Shand. Refuse to destroy the tap-root of evil, and Canon Law condemns you as Shadow’s collaborator, to be pierced by the sword for the fire. Embrace destiny, before higher wisdom sets a more devoted man in your place. Sound the retreat. The invasion stops. Now.”
The Hatchet fumed, butted up to the Sunwheel blazon on the High Priest’s chest. “I’ll cede the day on command. But when the Master of Shadow is taken, no trial and no quarter! I’ll drive the blade through his black heart myself, and torch his remains on the scaffold.”
The war host’s abrupt disengagement from Deshir began with a trickle. Messengers dispatched at a lathered gallop to reorder the supply lines stitched dust across the Plain of Araithe, where spring’s lush growth leached to pale yellow, and the breeze fore-running the dry blaze of summer waved tasselled seed-heads. As though the outriders carved the path for a flood, the pebbled helms of ranked dedicates followed. First the mounted divisions, their white-and-gold banners flanked by the snap of the emblazoned company standards.
After, splashed like foam over newly chopped turf, came the resplendent dazzle of the vested priests, foot ranks surrounding the gilt-fringed palanquins heralded by braying horns, and cowled acolytes singing adoration. At their heels, the teams of cream oxen plodded with capped horns and caparisoned harness, hauling the temple drays laden with hampers of incense, and folded pavilions, and chests of holy paraphernalia.
The glissades of trumpets gave way, in turn, to the throb of the drums, matching the tramp of the dedicate infantry. The host milled ochre dust from the beaten earth, its flood thinned to a mud-coloured draggle of camp-followers: the cooks’ and the smiths’
wagons, the laundresses and the harness menders, trailed by the sentenced labourers and the officers’ equerries. Last came the rear-guard, felted in dust, its arrowed formations of outriders chivvying stragglers and the ragged jetsam of feral children.
The massed passage roiled the natural flux, a disturbance compounded as, wave upon wave, the host trampled the bank of the upper Liffsey and splashed the churned ford to billowing silt.
The flare of upheaval ranged south on the lane tide, striking the sensitive leys beneath Kewar into dissonance. Elaira’s talent affinity through water suffered the relentless barrage, no matter how fiercely she focused upon the research pursued by necessity. The distraction compounded her galling frustration as the exigent knowledge eluded her.
“Needles in haystacks at least would respond to a cantrip aligned to draw steel!” The enchantress huffed fallen hair from her eyes, and piled up the books that held nothing.
Extended hours by candlelight, and days spent rummaging through cupboards and mining the stacks atop lofty shelves had produced a sore neck and rife irritation. Reliable facts on the Biedar culture proved sparse, even in Davien’s proscribed collection. “A sweet word of guidance would help, damn all to the blistering honour of Fellowship oaths!”
Her host could lend no assistance since the heirloom knife involved Arithon’s fate. Worse, a culture whose eldritch lore evoked etheric discourse with their deceased ancestry had made written knowledge superfluous.
“Blight take the nuisance!” Discouraged, Elaira returned the borrowed tomes back to the shelves. “Can’t the elders’ finicky ties to their ghosts raise some benighted assistance?” For their mouldered cause, she had spent fruitless weeks, poring over generations’ worth of crabbed script on fusty scrolls and flocked pages. She had nothing to show except eye-strain.
A frisson shuddered over her skin, dismissed as she flung open an aumbry and sequestered the final volume. The book slid into its place and hung up. Its flaked-leather spine jammed the door.
Grumbling, Elaira fished into the cranny and removed the obstruction: a thin treatise in an ancient cipher, apparently pushed out of place.
Sharper gooseflesh flicked her flesh in reproach. “I’m so sorry!” she gasped. “Entirely mine, the ignorant oversight.” Too immersed, she had never imagined to ask; or else better sense shied from the unnatural peril. Since an unseen power fit to cross Davien’s defences might take who knew what advantage of a free-will invitation, Elaira accepted the uncanny windfall with cautious humility.
The old script required three more scholarly texts on ancient languages, followed by a closer study of obscure dialect to grasp the content. Elaira rubbed ink smears from a wan cheek, as under her hand, the laborious notes in translation disclosed the properties bound into the Biedar knife. The arcana exceeded her minimal vocabulary and involved concepts beyond her depth. Yet how the blade’s working outstripped the temporal bounds of perception did not matter. The purpose was clear. She guarded a talisman fashioned for striking magical bindings asunder.
That hard-won discovery roused her to inchoate dread, before triumph.
Elaira fretted through three idle days, still rudderless after months of intensive study. The constant disturbance of the outside flux skewed her attempts to scry Arithon’s activity. Anxiety drove her to seek quiet refuge: not in the library, with its perilous secrets sequestered in parchment and ink, but in the ruined, parabolic chamber where the only fresh air could be found within Kewar’s seclusion.
Her solitude did not last long before Davien remarked out of turn, from behind, “A True Sect company in an ordered retreat would not break due south towards Daon Ramon as the crow flies.”
Resigned to the Sorcerer’s inquisitive appearances, Elaira did not startle out of reverie. “This is your sideways jab to alarm me? In fact, the main war host bound for Etarra has split off a dedicate strike force?”
“A division of light horse just received a packet of urgent orders.” Davien’s word detailed the fore-running quiver of probability she had sensed through the flux. A treble note like tapped brass, the deflected tremor in the current arrowed towards the western horns of the Mathorns, on direct course down the lane sited through the Sorcerer’s private retreat.
Elaira arose from her seat by the spring, which welled out of the deeps from a girdle of rock. The broken rim still showed the fragments of elaborate carving, sundered by a dragon’s explosive emergence from her stone chrysalis of hibernation. Collected, the enchantress regarded Davien, poised like a lynx in a burned-orange doublet beaded with onyx. Immaculate without Kharadmon’s rakish extravagance, he wore his hair loose, the frosted tumble of russet ice lit by a shaft through the holed dome overhead.
Elaira quashed her impulse to cringe. “To rout out the dread scourge of Shadow. I’d guessed. These days, the draw of Desh-thiere’s curse seems a more reliable compass than my heart-linked affiliation.”
Davien fielded her barb, complacent as mercury balanced on glass. “If you knew where your beloved has been, and what exalted company hosted his presence, the considerate ally makes no apology for Kewar’s defensive shielding.”
Elaira stabbed back, acerbic, “Without even the token pretence of free will?”
“Guest rights handed me the entitlement.” Stone re-echoed the Sorcerer’s tart astonishment. “The wards here forestalled a breach of my integrity.” Watching her sidelong, Davien added with delicacy, “You’d prefer the brute ethic that permits harm to visit you under my roof?”
Unresigned to a disadvantaged defeat, Elaira held her ground before the deep pool, fathomless under the mirrored sheen of sky-caught reflection. “I resent being nurtured like a mushroom, planted neck deep in the dark!”
The Sorcerer’s rapt silence forced the enchantress to outline the obvious. “My conjecture says his Grace has holed up in the Storlains, where the unstable flux lends the tactical edge to blind hostile scryers. But even there, my repeated failures outstrip credibility. I’m practised at nuanced evasion enough to see more than chaotic electromagnetics at work.”
Davien hesitated, his gaze apparently fixed on a cloud drifted across the chink overhead. His reticence ceded Elaira no option except to pursue the lopsided discussion.
“The only time I’ve known Arithon to languish, his equilibrium had been frayed into grief by interaction with a Paravian.” A hitched pause ensued, consumed by startled thought.
“Go on!” snapped Davien, his unnerving impatience reaffixed upon her as though welded.
Stunned, Elaira sat on the lip of the spring, numb to the chill as water wicked into the dipped drape of her skirt. “A back-lash caused by a Paravian visitation?” Rage catapulted her to accusation. “For how long have you interfered with my awareness?”
This time, Davien answered. “Only through the duration of proximal contact. Your extended blindness in the aftermath was not caused by my shielding.”
Accustomed to the abstruse guidance dispensed by Fellowship Sorcerers, Elaira tackled the terrifying conundrum. “Which implies my beloved made landfall under a protection wrought by the old races themselves!”
Davien’s opaque regard remained comfortless as a freeze out of season.
Which blunt absence of denial spurred Elaira’s scathing conclusion. “If Arithon needed no refuge, he’s hell-bound through the Storlains for some other purpose.” Which point suggested the frightening reverse: surges through the region’s destabilized flux would degrade even an exemplary working’s efficacy. “His Grace plans to challenge the Ettinmere shamans over the lapsed terms of his oath?” That frightening truth fit. Character would drive Arithon to break their binding to a child, hooked into a sworn obligation whose breach afflicted his birthborn autonomy.
Elaira snatched a desperate breath. “Ath wept! Does Arithon have any grasp of the stakes?” Discipline brazened through logic to finish. “Unless he knows the roots of the enclave’s power, he can’t guess. His opponents will see him coming.”
No brave front could
thwart the invested perception of a Fellowship Sorcerer.
“I cannot abet your desire to warn him.” Davien quashed the transparent leap of her hope. “Not only would your departure from Kewar throw you naked to your Prime’s vengeance, I cannot sanction the choice.” Not without the disaster of breaking Asandir’s oath.
“I would be too late to intervene, anyway,” Elaira declared, courageously conversational. The riddle spun by her late scrying was solved. Prince Arithon’s activity explained why Dakar and Tarens had fled Strakewood as though hounded by Sithaer’s furies.
If Davien appeared to receive her anguish in velvet-gloved quiet, she was not disarmed beyond sense. Her subtle analysis swept his bearing and read anxiety in the black wells of his pupils. The Fellowship Sorcerer was afraid.
Which dread discovery screamed risk. Reason flinched from the prospect of playing the reach of such fathomless power. And yet: the tremulous flicker of Davien’s citrine ring spoke of intimate tenderness, behind his clenched fist.
Gestalt epiphany suggested a vulnerability deep as her own. “You love him, too,” Elaira blurted, before thought. “After your own fashion.” Embarrassed for her presumption, she blushed. “If you cannot break an untenable pledge, his Grace has powerful friends.” The tribal elders at Sanpashir owned the main strength to stand as his ally.
“You have met the Matriarch of the Biedar.” Davien need not elaborate, given the dagger bequeathed in conflict with her Koriani obligation: tribal interests did not rescue human fallibility. Nor were the desert-folk subject to the compact that secured mankind’s leave to inhabit Athera.
Davien’s gaze bored into Elaira. Intense as an artisan measuring clock-works, he watched her absorb disappointment. No intervention would come from Sanpashir. Biedar reckoning had acknowledged the Teir’s’Ffalenn as a descendant of s’Ahelas ancestry. But he was not the last living scion of Requiar’s blood lineage.