“No, Elaira!” Dakar bulled forward and seized her arm. “Stand firm! You must!” As her frantic jerk tested his planted feet, the Mad Prophet locked his grip, and pleaded, “The moment you came for has already happened! Let the wheels of destiny unleashed by Arithon’s choice stay in motion.”
“Then why is the Fellowship not here in force?” Through the rampaging noise of the multitude, and the dust sifted down by the footsteps shaking the planks overhead, she despaired, “Why haven’t the Sorcerers acted?”
A cogent question and a point Dakar might have conceded. Yet astute explanation cost further delay, unthinkable amid a crisis past tipping point, fast sliding into a chartless arena beyond a mere spellbinder’s purview.
“You dithering lackwit! I don’t need protecting!” Elaira fought against sane restraint, the need in her shattered past quietude. “Why else under Ath’s sky are we here?”
Her insane desperation dragged Dakar, stumbling, towards the post, while her protests shrilled into panic. “If we do nothing, Davien’s imprint of longevity cannot salvage Prince Arithon’s life.”
“You can’t throw yourself into the fray with a True Sect Examiner!” Dakar had no margin to stall her with reason, or to broach the weightier impacts of large-scale responsibility. Elaira carried the Biedar knife, as well as sole guardianship of the attributes that endowed Rathain’s royal signet: a tribal talisman and a powerful crown jewel that must not be surrendered at all costs. Sethvir had set a star stamp on Prince Arithon’s bequest, an indelible, sealed record with profound implication, evoked for a purpose past compromise. Dakar’s savaged conscience acknowledged the irony. He wrestled the same vicious crux as Davien, who once had knocked him senseless to curb his free-will intervention, for Arithon’s sake at Etarra: also to safeguard a terrible course and play through an entrained sequence of horrific probabilities. Elaira’s crazed sentiment must be curbed by regrettable force if she failed to desist.
“Gutless coward!” Half-possessed and snarling oaths, she raked the Mad Prophet’s wrist. Her frantic kick drubbed his knee-cap, buckled his leg, and displaced the blow aimed to drop her.
“Tarens!” yelped Dakar. “Help me contain the confounded enchantress before she exposes her presence. Koriathain ply her bereavement as leverage to reap the windfalls of disaster!” Fenced within of a cordon of dedicates, no possible recourse she owned might prevail. Not pitched against a pack of diviners, an examiner, and a temple conclave of True Sect priests. “If Elaira’s not stopped, we risk losing her also, against Arithon’s heart-felt bequest.”
No response answered. Dakar turned his head. Through scouring pitch smoke, and the nauseous reek of spilled oil, he discovered that Tarens ditched sense. Baldric tossed aside, surcoat stripped, the blond crofter lunged forward. Not to hobble the endangered enchantress, but to smother the fluttering torch flung downwards to ignite the pyre.
Elaira snatched the diversion and stamped on the fat spellbinder’s instep. “Put out the fire before we all burn!” She wrenched free and hurled herself toward the piled faggots, intent on clambering upwards to reach the slaughtered flesh of her beloved. Tears sheened Dakar’s eyes. He was no Fellowship Sorcerer, fitted to shoulder the relentless far-sight of ages. Caved in to humane weakness at the last, he embraced the flawed character that forged his disgrace: he engaged the cipher to cancel flame, before the confounded woman and her loyal crofter became immolated in front of him.
Tarens never snatched pause to ascertain the lethal spark had extinguished. Unaware, or uncaring, as Dakar’s active working blazed into the flux and alerted the temple’s diviners, he bent with his hands laced into a stirrup. “Here, lady!” He caught Elaira’s foot and boosted her weight. Her grip caught on the blood-slicked catwalk spanning the gap to the post overhead.
Through the True Sect watch-dogs’ yells of alarm, The Hatchet reacted soonest. He seized the hilt sunk in Arithon’s torso and jerked the embedded blade clear. Elaira’s yank on his ankle unseated his balance, just as he spun. His counterstroke went wild, sliced through air, and bit wood, binding the weapon’s edge as he staggered. His cat-quick recovery met Tarens’s flung log, which struck his crested helm with a thunk, and up-ended him into the pit.
“To Sithaer yourself, you murderous runt!” Dakar kicked the fallen Lord High Commander under his gilt-blazoned breastplate. To his curled enemy, gasping for wind, he finished in bleak benediction, “May the day never come that you take up a sword to butcher the helpless again!” At the last, the Mad Prophet used his bulk weight. He stomped on The Hatchet’s gloved fingers and crunched the bones inside to splinters.
Tarens shouldered him off. Rammed past, he stretched his tall frame and snatched the grip of the stuck sword overhead. Borne onwards by Jieret’s agile prowess, he scrambled up the stacked pyre, roaring challenge, to mount a caithdein’s defence and repel the True Sect foes at Elaira’s back.
The enchantress dared not pause to acknowledge his bravery. Hurled full length against Arithon’s limp form, she engaged every skill she possessed to stem the fast-fading wisp of vitality. “My love, hold on! I’m with you at last.” Hands drenched scarlet, she worked to reverse the tide’s ebb, all of her healer’s awareness engaged by the precepts taught by Ath’s adepts. Heart and will, she plumbed Arithon’s frayed aura, binding together the tissue-thin shreds as she searched for the seal of longevity embedded by Davien’s Five Centuries’ Fountain. The tenuous spark of her love’s being still flickered. But the powerful seal to secure his spirit had not fired into renewal. The intact cipher stayed latent, inactive, where it ought to have blazed incandescent.
Dread revelation stunned Elaira to stopped breath. The Fellowship’s binding of nonintervention also enforced this drastic stay of prevention. Her dearest beloved was lost past her reach without that crucial support.
“No. Arithon, no!” She fed the guttering flame of his spirit with her own hand, come what may, and wept without thought for the battle that viciously raged to cut her lone champion from his stance on the catwalk behind.
A man with a sword might stave off, for a time, the invasive might of a True Sect examiner. Yet no matter how skilled, despite the practised ability to bend flux derived from a forest scout’s heritage, Tarens faced the fervour of a conclave of priests, surrounded and backed by a dedicate war host over three thousand strong. His courageous sally must fail, unlikely to hold long enough for Dakar to drive his walrus girth up the log pyre, far less finish his wheezing effort to gain the platform. Worse, the lethal mill of crossed steel at close quarters, as Tarens repelled his attackers, would haplessly carve him to collops.
Dakar seized the low ground. Too fat to run, and too shamed to hide, he retreated beneath the plank scaffold. Where he lacked the main strength to defeat the fury of the True Sect cabal, he might raise a swift warding and buy a delay, no matter how hopeless the outcome.
The Mad Prophet engaged his trained skill in the gloom. Settled cross-legged on the bruised turf, ears closed to the belling din of lethal steel and the hammering din from the rioting crowd that shocked vibrations through air and earth. He ignored The Hatchet’s ineffectual whimpering, and immersed his honed awareness into the flux to sift out the signature Names of his threatened companions. Elaira’s love wore the steadfast blaze of the stars; Tarens, the bonfire of a loyalty equal to Earl Jieret’s bequest; and glimmering, weak as blown phosphor in a gale, the stream of the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s shattered vitality. Dakar swallowed remorse for what could not be changed. He wrestled back torn concentration. While focused on spinning a hurried confection of utterly futile grand conjury, his refined mage-sight unveiled the subtle anomaly: an etheric shimmer of spirit light drifting unmoored, luminous as a blown seed of thistle-down snagged in the torrid clench of raw combat.
Revelation struck like a blow to the chest. Belatedly late, the spellbinder unlocked Elaira’s anguished conundrum. He knew beyond question why Fellowship interest had failed to support their urgent need in the breach.
L
irenda arose from the Prime seat at Whitehold. Before her, the scryer’s engaged crystal disclosed the futile last stand on Daenfal’s scaffold. The inevitable stroke of her victory loomed, a scant second away. Tarens’s hard-fought defence at the catwalk pressed him another step backwards. He would die on the swords of the veteran dedicates or be thrown off his footing into the pit. Elaira’s frail tie to Arithon’s life-force rapidly waned. Since her inevitable fall into True Sect custody risked a disastrous disclosure of the order’s privileged knowledge, her demise by the aegis of the master cipher must be swift. An end far more merciful than a sister condemned as a renegade deserved, but a casualty demanded by circumstance that would sting the Seven in punitive recoil.
Tawny eyes cold with astonishment regarded the submissive Fellowship Sorcerer, shackled to inaction by the runes incised in the marble floor. Bold enough to seize her rightful triumph, but without the scalded insolence of her late predecessor, Lirenda declared, “I never expected your word to stay sacrosanct. You may extend my ruthless admiration and condolence to the Warden at Althain Tower.”
The titled Prime Matriarch moved to claim the match. Unrivalled at last, she swept forward. Breeze fanned by her formal mantle stirred the white hair on Asandir’s head, where he bore silent witness as the supplicant beneath her dais. Lirenda assumed the ruler’s position before her arc of poised Seniors, back turned towards the Sorcerer’s presence to deliver her low-voiced command.
Asandir need not eavesdrop to interpret the eerie, prickling surge as the Koriathain melded their engaged powers into a collective trance.
Sethvir’s earth-sensed perception supplied the unspoken thrust of the Prime’s directive. “She’s raising the master sigil of command in force through her attendant Seniors.”
Lirenda’s snapped fingers summoned a veiled sister forward with the coffer housing the Skyron aquamarine. She unlocked the clasp and unwrapped the cold jewel nestled within. Chill laced summer’s warmth and infused the sealed chamber as she charged the latent stone’s focus. “Mark and wait for my word!”
Asandir shut his eyes. Inner vision stretched to scintillant strain, he forced his locked hands to stay still. Through the harrowed, split second, he sensed the footfalls of Sethvir’s fraught pacing; and he burned to the checked smoulder of Kharadmon’s rage, equally unable to do aught but listen and bear the course of event.
Lirenda aligned her entrained sigil against the embedded record of Elaira’s oath. Her touch was deliberate but not yet fluid. Acceded to Prime rank through a broken succession, she required meticulous care to enable a murder her predecessors could have achieved with one stroke.
Time slowed. The world’s pulse hung suspended, strung on the order’s pending engagement, and three gossamer threads that served hope. Against ruin, unsupported: one man’s loyal steel, wielded by the intrepid endowment of a caithdein’s heritage; the steadfast devotion of a woman’s love; and on a weeping spellbinder’s rattled attempt to refigure a fading, imperfect harmonic: the remnant chord left unfinished by Arithon’s failure, all but drowned under the roil of blood slaughter and the thunderous roar of mass hatred.
Lirenda’s next order smashed the seized quiet inside the great hall at Whitehold. “Now! Open the enabled quartz sphere to me.”
Ceded the scryer’s live channel as conduit, the Prime forged the connection to impress the Skyron aquamarine’s amplified transmission into the flux stream at Daenfal. Unerring, she followed with the enchained sequence for activation. Then she unleashed the master sigil to strip Elaira of her conscious faculties.
Power surged down the link, building resonance, while from the hidden cranny on site underneath of Daenfal’s scaffold, Dakar’s local working leaped the split-second gap. Sobbing, undone, he engaged his wrought effort to restrike the pure intonation that Athera’s Masterbard had narrowly missed: the true Name to call Valien’s disturbed spirit into transition across the veil.
The flux flare responded. Sethvir’s spontaneous outcry at Althain confirmed the completion of the child’s passage. Instantaneous synchronicity erased the etched runes from the marble at Asandir’s feet.
“Alt!” The field Sorcerer’s shout at Whitehold resounded through the crystal spheres held aligned by Lirenda’s directive. His authority snapped off the transmission, and stifled them into quiescence.
“The outstanding business between us is finished.” His crisp declaration snuffed Lirenda’s wild anger and silenced her colleagues’ whiplashed outrage. “Rathain’s oath of debt to Koriathain is fulfilled by the death of the crown’s sanctioned heir. Valien Teir’s’Ffalenn met his fate alone, without Fellowship intervention. He died by your order’s ratified terms, and may Ath forgive us for the criminal cruelty of his unwarranted suffering.”
No further moment was wasted for audience. Need demanded the Fellowship’s resources elsewhere. Freed at last to respond in full, Asandir meshed with Kharadmon’s distant presence, lurking at the locale of Daenfal’s scaffold. “Reach!”
Effortless power enabled the transfer. Before dazzled vision cleared from the burst, the sisterhouse floor at Whitehold gleamed empty, unblemished in reflected sunlight.
Lirenda retreated to the Prime seat. She perched, a disgruntled, hungry hawk in the ruffled folds of her mantle. Empty-handed before her stunned circle of Seniors, and denied the satisfaction of just redress, she realized her order’s interests were not crushed entirely by the facile trick. “Our bid to defeat the Fellowship has not collapsed into a total failure.” Surely, her summary word to her sisters also stung Sethvir’s rapt ears. “The Seven’s exigent betrayal of a child surely will provoke their reinstated s’Ffalenn scion into a vehement estrangement.”
Summer 5925
Reprieve
The same moment the Fellowship’s impenetrable light bloomed in the packed square at Daenfal, dazzling the onlookers’ sight of the scaffold, at Erdane’s High Temple in Tysan the last line of the devotional song chant settled into the whisper-thick calm of late morning. Dace moved through air hazy with incense smoke, burdened under the extravagant drape of gold-crusted, white-satin vestments. For whatever reason, the True Sect High Priests had ordered lavish, formal raiment for Lysaer. Charged with the weighty delivery, the avatar’s valet mounted the central stair, gut hollowed by sudden foreboding. The purpose behind the ceremonial clothing was unlikely to be innocuous. The stitched-bullion facings, gemmed buttons and seed-pearl embroidery surpassed ornate, a profligate outlay of temple tithes that might have uplifted the district’s poor families for decades.
More, the pervasive hush on the subject squashed rumour. Whatever unprecedented occasion demanded the disruption of his liege’s sequestered convalescence for a staged spectacle, not even the couriers’ grooms gleaned a whisper. Such uneasy secrecy certainly stemmed from the temple’s innermost ranks. Dace rounded the square landing, his thoughtful expression pinched into a frown by an echoing crash from above. Official indignation gave tongue, while a howl to bristle the hair at the nape resounded from the avatar’s suite.
Lysaer! Dace bolted up the last flight, hampered by trailing silk. He dumped his armload of garments, swerved right, and breathlessly sprinted the narrower stair towards the ante-room door.
His rush collided with three flustered priests, then a pasty-faced acolyte, all routed from reverent prayer by their divine idol’s corrosive displeasure. Dace thrashed his way upwards against the stampede. He extricated himself from another shocked worthy in hell-bent retreat, grey head turned in a panicked glance backwards. A candlestick flew out the doorway and clanged, end over end down the marble risers. A white-silk pillow sailed after, gold tassels pin-wheeling through a leaked blizzard of feathers. Dace charged through the storm, ducking chaff as a hail of incense sticks clattered around him.
The cry rose again, a desolate note that poured chills down the spine.
The last shaken priest hiked up his vestments, fled the suite, and jammed into Dace at the threshold. “Light defend and protect! Go in at your peri
l. Divine presence has ridden the avatar mad as a dog at full moon.”
Knocked against the pillared door-jamb by the coward’s frantic haste to depart, Dace righted himself and stepped through. Two porcelain offering bowls whizzed past his ear. Grazed by showering coins and a splatter of holy water, he dodged aside, seized the massive, strapped panel, and slammed the outer door shut. The last offering bowl struck the studded wood and smashed into egg-shell slivers.
“We are private!” Dace cried into the roaring fit that gripped Lysaer, who vented his hell-bent fury, back turned, behind the splintered prayer rail. Already air-borne, the gilded kiosk that enclosed the Canon’s scrolled writ hammered into the floor. The metallic crash rang loud enough to daze hearing within the closed chamber.
But Lysaer had heard. Fists ploughed into the ruckled cloth draping the desecrated altar, he went still. The last candle left burning tottered and drunkenly stood, guttered under the bellows gusts of his panting. Dace watched his master’s heaving, tense back, well warned to keep his silent distance. If ever the man needed space for composure, this moment outstripped the scale of every previous outburst.
A minute passed; two. Disordered hair shimmered like submerged gold in the wrack. Lysaer locked his throat, his next outcry stifled by trembling force. Dace had a split second to measure the courage required, before the Light’s avatar shoved upright and turned.
The livid face exposed to his scrutiny was not contorted by livid insanity. Instead, Dace stared into the agonized horror of self-damning shame. Not kindly madness, he realized, stricken, but the impact of a ruthless awakening brought by the absence of Desh-thiere’s curse.
“He’s dead,” Lysaer whispered. The phrase slurred by damaged nerves was stunned hoarse by a strain unimaginable. “My half brother … has passed … the Wheel.”
Dace swallowed, cast too far out of his depth. He had withstood Lysaer’s testy rages before, from aristocratic fury at being handled, deformed, to the ferocious blaze of righteous ire that challenged the helpless ground down by iniquity. Never this edge of caged desperation, born out of gut-wracked exposure: not the lacerating hurt birthed by recognized guilt or the visceral wound of a spirit strayed past the moral compass of experience. Here stood the stricken champion, seared awake by the soul-deep acknowledgement of reprehensible acts beyond human accountability.