The Ships of Merior

  Above her, between moans likely due to colic from ingested shreds of sponge, the prisoner gasped, ‘Where’s Arithon?’

  ‘Tied to the mizzenmast pinrail, damned unpleasantly tight, if you please.’ A moment’s forethought, and Dhirken sheathed her cutlass, the cook’s steel being handier to hack through knotted twine. There your man stays till Black Drake makes port where he’s promised.’

  As his bonds gave way, the Mad Prophet chafed scored wrists. ‘How many seamen did he kill before you trussed him?’

  Knelt down to free Dakar’s ankles, Dhirken looked up sharply. ‘None,’ she said in irritation. ‘Why ask? He gave himself freely.’

  ‘Ah, lady.’ Dakar heaved a soulful sigh. ‘You don’t know him at all. That’s trouble. Whatever you think, whatever Arithon led you to believe, be certain of this. If he didn’t kill, then you dance to his design.’

  Dhirken stood, her eyes like sheared rivets in the gloom, and her dagger hand thoughtfully steady. ‘You don’t like him one bit. I don’t find that reassuring.’

  Dakar shook his head, then snapped his palms to his mouth to dam back another seizure. As he groaned an apology and stumbled through the companionway to be sick, Dhirken looked after him, her arms folded in tight trepidation across her breast.

  ‘Well, by Ath, I don’t trust either one of you,’ she confided to her cabin’s creaking bulkhead. ‘Whatever the outcome, until I see a motive, I’m going to use my own judgement.’

  Attrition

  Along the coast of Eltair Bay, late summer hazed the jumbled, steep-sided valleys in their mantle of hardwood and evergreen. The oaks hung gemmed with acorns. Larks ceased singing to mark off territory, their fledged young gone from their nests. But in the mountains to the west of Jaelot where Luhaine fared on the errand deferred to him by Asandir, cruel cold ruled the upper altitudes with small regard for changing seasons. On cloudless mornings, the loftiest peak in the Skyshiels pricked the sky like a knife upthrust for a sacrifice. Ice-clad, glistening white, or else scoured of cover like a hammered scrap of unforgiving black iron, it shadowed even the deepest gorge glazed by snow melt through the clefts of Rockfell Vale. Under mist or in storm, its edged northern scarp split the winds. On days when the gusts raged the hardest, the wail of sheared air keened like a haunt through the glens and broken foothills beneath.

  Foresters from Daenfal who worked traps in these wilds never tarried over their snares. They claimed the mountain’s brooding could be felt in the sough of the breeze; a solitary man could go mad here, listening too long or too carefully.

  In the hour the Fellowship envoy arrived to resurvey the Mistwraith’s prison, the rain that drenched the green lowlands rampaged in blizzards across the heights. Gusts whirled over cliff wall and ice face, shrill as war steel dragged sharp across a whetstone. Driven snow scoured the incongruous stone stair cut into the scarp at the whim of Davien the Betrayer. The baroque scrolls of newel posts and chiselled, glowering gargoyles poked through blank drifts, sheeted like age-rotted dust covers over frivolously abandoned furniture.

  To Luhaine’s mage-tuned perception, the eyes of the carvings were not dead. Spells of guard wakened by his passage flared to coronas of energy just past the range of natural sight. Wild rocks would have shown indifference to his trespassing; the obsidian-flecked bones of Rockfell Peak were not dumb, but aware and watchful of encroachment.

  Yet where an intruder who lacked Fellowship guidance might press upward unheeding, misguided to believe that this sky-framed, wind-burnished pinnacle would permit an unsanctioned presence, Luhaine paused. An unseen vortex more chill than frost, around which the gusts sucked and skirted like a current rechannelled by obstruction, he unreeled a tendril of awareness downward, touched the mountain, and tacitly requested a permission.

  A vibration answered from the deep, a bell-stroke chord reminiscent of earthquakes, mournfully slow and drawn out. Too subtle to stir mortal senses, the language of stone held a grandeur so vast that time seemed dwindled and meaningless. To Luhaine, whose fussy penchant for austerity counted music a scatter-brained dalliance, the enduring character imbedded in primal rock made the quickened lives of plants and animals seem chaotic and shrill by comparison.

  Rockfell’s bleak depths lay cloaked by a dignity that humbled; its consent had extended through longsuffering centuries, to house and imprison those myriad entities bent in malice against the Law of the Major Balance. The latest of these was the Mistwraith, and there, even Luhaine’s obstinate patience must bow in salute to the mountain’s steadfast endurance.

  Granted leave to resurvey the ward-spells that bound Desh-thiere’s warped spirits captive, Luhaine diffused his presence. No longer a contained vortex of fine energies, he settled and sank downward into the heartrock of the mountain. Snow, ice and surface cliffs gave way to striated black mineral never harried by air or sunlight. The hidden depths whispered of earthsong and ores, and buried trickles of subterranean springs stitched a darkness interlaced with magecraft. Luhaine’s perception could discern each gossamer strand, laid down in resonance and spun to shining harmony by his disparate Fellowship associates.

  Davien the Betrayer had cut the original shaft, and also the five-sided chamber at its base that shaped the stone bounds of Rockfell’s prison. Seamlessly pragmatic on first encounter, a blunt-cut statement of purpose that Luhaine knew well not to trust, the fibre of grand conjury that underpinned Davien’s works held twists like kinked cord, and eddies like current under trout pools. Stealthy forces moved and moiled, outside of sound and beyond the pale of visible light. When enfleshed, Luhaine recalled such vibrations had pressured him to headaches. As spirit, he felt as if the spiked legs of insects prickled nerves he no longer possessed.

  He deepened his search, skeined past the remnants of spells used to drill through the fastness of rock; beyond flickers, like sparks sieved through velvet, of older Paravian magecraft. Beneath the settled striations of the earth, shafts of unmined crystal rang still to the horn-calls of vanished centaur guardians. Here, like a glimmer of drowned starlight, rang the blessing of a unicorn’s dance; there the captured echo of a sunchild’s song. Had Luhaine retained the means to show physical emotion, the remembrance of faded beauty preserved in Rockfell’s roots might have moved him to weep.

  The only recourse left to him as spirit was to pour his balked pain into methodical labour. The mist-based entities that had driven off the Paravians remained here, alive, unquiet and too dangerous in malice to be entrusted to the mischance of fate.

  Desh-thiere lay incarcerated behind three seals of stone, inside interlocked sigils, each one structured to impound by the most ruthless deployment of energies. These shackles were not mazed like the defences set over Althain Tower, that a trained master could slip through and leave undisturbed. The bindings closed over the Mistwraith would admit nothing living, whether encased in quick flesh, or unclothed as pure spirit.

  To sound the integrity of the completed ward, Luhaine could only settle into absolute quiet and take painstaking stock of the vibrations where anchor points fixed the spells to Rockfell’s immutable granite. He must listen, unwind and verify each signature telltale fashioned by his Fellowship colleagues. Every mite of worked power must be inspected and mapped, the resonance instilled in each seal rune swept through exhaustive cross-checks for anomaly.

  The construct itself shed a perilous corona, unquiet emanations whose very strength could spread an ache fierce enough to ravage bones and flesh. Its dire presence sieved through Luhaine’s being as unkindly, muddling his aura into dissonance like a flame played along a bared nerve.

  Asandir’s intricate discipline had coerced cold stone to part and change shape and encompass; his handling rang forthright as the arced flight of swallows, or the trail of a falling meteor. Kharadmon’s capricious energies cajoled order from raw chaos, then jagged spindles of white light across time and dimension, to stabilize the ward-glyphs into balance.

  Were that flamboyant spirit not absent from Athera,
he would no doubt have dropped in unannounced to crack some scathing comment.

  Luhaine dismissed a stab of loss. Annoyed that the antagonistic rivalry he shared with Kharadmon could invade on stray thought and distract him, he realigned his lapsed concentration. The interfering ghost had scarcely been missed, and the risk did not brook a second thought, that his search beyond Athera for the Mistwraith’s origin should end in tragedy and silence. A sorcerer who affected such caustic lack of manners would scarcely go astray through the course of a crossing between worlds. Any peril grave enough to leave Kharadmon compromised would be of far-reaching proportion.

  Luhaine distanced his distress by immersing himself in the onerous tedium of work.

  The energy coils fused in imprisoning resonance still sang in flawless balance. Piqued afresh by the masterful powers woven into the irreverent cartouche that finished one of Kharadmon’s ward seals, Luhaine, in sheer irritation, repeated his last step. A crawling, half-sensed movement slipped through the slow probe of his awareness.

  As if hooked by a thorn in clean grass, he stopped, backtracked, and re-sounded the passage just traced.

  The magic’s structure gleamed whole, its symmetry unsullied.

  Luhaine paused. While the energies that bound Rock-fell’s mass into matter danced to the Creator’s vast design, he combed through the seals once again. Nothing seemed amiss. And yet, elusive as a slivered bit of glass, the anxiety persisted. He distrusted the integrity of his own findings.

  Possessed by the soul of a counting-house clerk, Luhaine pondered a whorled loop of spellcraft at random. In the laborious, jaundiced suspicion that Kharadmon could never resist baiting, he retested its anchor to the living stone.

  Perfection rang back, every dying sigh of echo in predictable, harmonious register.

  Luhaine could bore a mastiff for sheer, lockjawed tenacity. He could worry a conundrum for an hour, or a century, until he had tried every one of his colleagues to exasperated fits of frustration.

  He set up wards to shield the emanations of his presence. Then he threaded his damped probe through the energy coils. Inside them, wrapped under spidery nets of illusion foiled at last by his masked approach, he discovered an infinitesimally small rip through the barrier of Asandir’s wards.

  He poised himself, examined the rent, then the tinselled veil of shields that hid its presence. The fact that Kharadmon’s work still rang sound was significant. Grand conjury worked by a spirit-form naturally differed from the binding of a mage tied to breathing flesh. If one colleague’s work showed no flaw, and the other bore sign of attrition, the change would be no anomaly.

  A day and a night passed. The storm over Rockfell cleared to a crystal dome of stars, while Luhaine hounded every facet of this nuance to its frightening, unequivocal conclusion: the peril presented by the Mistwraith had widened.

  Withdrawn from the deeps of Rockfell Pit, the sorcerer dispatched prompt warning to the Warden at Althain Tower.

  ‘The wards that guard Desh-thiere have deteriorated, and the work is the Mistwraith’s own. It pains me to say this, but no outside party can be faulted: the stolen knowledge the fell creature used to work its mischief bears the stamp of Arithon’s training. Our dread is quite real, that the schooling he received from the masters at Rauven might one day key the power to set the captive wraiths free.’

  Sethvir gave harried reply. ‘This curse that binds our princes confounds itself more by the hour. Our hope lies in Kharadmon’s charge.’

  Embroiled in the irrefutable aftermath, that the wards over Rockfell would require swift intervention and the help of a corporate colleague to mend, Luhaine dared not ask what else galled Sethvir to rare temper. Since an unpartnered spirit could not penetrate Rockfell’s bindings, he must perforce stand guard at the pit until Asandir could journey north from Shand.

  ‘I regret to vex you further,’ Luhaine added, ‘but this problem of black powder at Alestron is going to have to bide a while longer.’

  ‘It can’t’ Like a whipcrack through still air, Sethvir’s irritation spanned the distance to Rockfell Peak. ‘The duke’s foundry has been casting in secret again. I can’t send Traithe to look in on this. He’s busy curbing a plague of iyats that have set a string of house fires in Ghent.’

  ‘Well have Dakar address Alestron’s bit of mischief,’ Luhaine cracked back in a flayed up whirlwind of snowflakes. ‘That’s the least the useless drunkard could do, and just compensation, for his ruinous caper in Jaelot.’

  The notion was absurd, if not dangerous. But the straits exposed by the Mistwraith’s activity posed too grave a threat. The Fellowship’s affairs were strained to the point where Alestron’s dilemma became secondary.

  Precedents

  Under Westwood’s summer foliage, a company of Avenor’s field-army dispatched to test its new-fledged might against the barbarians who plague the trade route reaps reward on its threshing bloodied swords; and twenty-eight clanborn men taken captive are marched to receive sentence under the mayor’s justice in Karfael…

  In a sunbaked glen within Alestron’s domain, a man in dusty scholar’s robes sets a touch match to a tube of bronze, and a spark flies, to unleash a booming roar and a belch of thick smoke; and a whining ball of stoneshot hammers into an oak grove, splintering green boughs like burst bone…

  Far off in Atainia, jolted from reverie by the scream of rent greenery the width of a continent away, Sethvir of Althain raises a care-lined face and traces an eddy of wind, laden still with the acid pall of burnt brimstone; a pledge centuries old leaves him no choice but to send Dakar with all haste to plumb the ducal armoury at Alestron for its secrets …

  VIII. RENEWAL

  Old Avenor had been a small city. Abandoned through the centuries since the uprising, a line of weather-stripped, crumbled foundations marked the inner, Paravian-built citadel, where an elegant cluster of found keeps and a curtainwall had rested like a jewel’s bezel on a knoll above the west seacoast. The setting commanded a broad, lowland valley, crowned still with stately oak and alive with game and deer. Through the reign of Tysan’s past high kings, merchant trade and shipping had fared further south, from the generous cove harbour at Hanshire.

  Since the current ruling mayor remained adamantly opposed to any form of royal alliance, the s’Ilessid prince who came to restore his ancestral seat could not resume the tradition of mooring rights. The diminished elegance of the Paravian ruin was too narrow for Lysaer’s plans. He would build something larger, grander, a city like no other on the continent to stand as a monument for change.

  The summer began with vetch lacing green runners over the tumbled walls that overlooked the Westland Sea, and ended in mud, noise and the rich, humid reek of slashed earth. Under blazing, dust-silted sunlight, through drizzling rain that hazed the hills like greyed muslin, the Prince of the West ordered the old, carved megaliths undermined and torn from their settings. If Paravians had once danced their blessing on this site, if the glimmering spirits of homed Riathan mourned the present desecration, Lysaer lacked mage-sight to perceive them. In past company of a Fellowship sorcerer, he had walked other Second Age ruins; the experience had impressed full awareness that such structures preserved a channel to renew the mysteries of the earth. If the prince was saddened by the fears of his citybred following, who looked unkindly upon the old ways, he must not let sentiment rule him.

  What stones could be broken and dressed square for new use were unemotionally salvaged. Others too frost-cracked, too hard, or too stubbornly incised with old carvings, were dragged aside and piled on a hillock where bitterroot vine laced them over. There, when he craved solitude, Lysaer retired to think, or to practise his hand at refining the powers inherent in his given gift of light.

  If an uncanny disharmony seemed to linger in that graveyard of riven blue granite, its disquiet only charged him to reaffirm his commitment. Once the Master of Shadow lay dead, new peace could reunite the rifts between factions. Then the old knowledge set aside for expedienc
e could be the more splendidly restored.

  While the late day sun slanted long, barred rays above the leaden heave of the breakers, Lysaer raised his chin from his fists and swept back hair tarnished with perspiration.

  The voice that broke his sanctuary came again, pitched in exasperation from beyond the jumbled rim of the stone pile. ‘His Grace is up there. Nowhere else. My Lord Diegan insisted, and he knows the prince’s moods like a brother.’

  A lull in the breeze framed someone’s dubious reply. Resigned to untimely interruption, Lysaer stood. Ambient light snagged in the bullion on his sleeves as he flicked crumbled lichen from his hose and waved to disclose his location.

  ‘Your Grace?’ A sergeant at arms in a byrnie and the muted tan surcoat of Karfael’s garrison spun and looked up in surprise. ‘Who’d have guessed! What’s in this place but creepy old carvings that even the gulls won’t make nests in?’

  As the visitor hitched his shoulders to even the weight of his mailshirt for the climb, Lysaer shouted, Don’t trouble yourself! I’ll come down.’

  Though no state visitors were expected, his informal dress dependably never compromised his charge of sovereign responsibility. His doublet was cut of summer-weight silk, with gold trim and a discreet badge of rank. Close up, he needed no circlet or trapping to command the respect of his stature. By blue eyes unflinching in candour, and a majesty impressed since birth that no costly show of finery might replicate, the eye of the least discerning stranger must know him at once for a prince.

  Disarmed by unwonted admiration, Karfael’s road-dusty sergeant at arms was moved to offer him a bow.

  ‘Please rise.’ Lysaer offered his hand in courtly concern. ‘The day’s too hot for formalities. Forgive my impatience, but did your mayor allow me that company of archers whose service I begged leave to borrow?’