'You will intervene to spare Lysaer from threat?' Sulfin Evend challenged point-blank.
'We must act to curb necromancy in its most extreme forms,' Asandir allowed. 'Its practice abrogates the most basic terms of the compact.'
'But not this time?'
The Sorcerer sighed. The hands that had crowned the original high kings now rested flat on the table-top. 'If Lysaer should fall victim to the Kralovir, the grey cult, the power its practitioners might seek to wield through him could compromise the very heart of Athera's deep mysteries.'
'You would execute him,' Sulfin Evend gasped, shocked.
'We do not kill!' Asandir snapped, emphatic. 'Do you understand the abomination you face? If Lysaer succumbs fully, he'll be worse than enslaved. Something other than dead. The rites the cults practise do not leave soul or spirit intact. We are sadly left to release what remains. The devoured husk must be burned in white fire to put an end to a horrific misery. Stay at Lysaer's side, you might risk the same fate.'
Sulfin Evend leaned forward, roused as a mantled falcon. 'I will swear oath.' He raised his glass and tossed off the spirits as insistent proof of his trust. 'Lysaer spared my life, once. I owe him this much.'
'Lysaer saved you from nothing,' Asandir reasserted. 'You are free, Sulfin Evend. Walk away from this place under my warded protection.'
Yet no entreaty displaced the Lord Commander's fixed stance. The Sorcerer regarded him one taut moment more. Then he emptied his glass, and accepted the burden laid on him with a sigh of hard-set resignation. 'Very well. As you wish. What can be done, will be. Fetch down your locked box. You'll allow me to deal with the contents?'
'Freely.' Sulfin Evend stood up. Anger steadied him as he retrieved the strapped coffer, then unhooked the chain he wore at his neck and surrendered the key to the Sorcerer.
Asandir placed his fingers against the top one brief second, then turned the lock. He flipped up the lid and touched the wrapped contents. His mouth tightened, as though contact pained him, even through veiling silk. Then he said, 'Do you wish to step out?'
Returned to his chair, about to sit down, Sulfin Evend checked sharply. 'If I stay, do I stand in jeopardy?'
'No.' The Sorcerer did not elaborate, but incanted a phrase in actualized Paravian. As the knots binding up the sacrificial blade loosened, he slipped off the silk and snapped a fist around the knife's handle as though he took charge of a striking snake. His left forefinger and thumb grasped the bone-blade, and ran, hard, from hilt to tip. Light flared. Air screamed. Through rushing wind, a child cried out in piteous pain. An old man's voice wailed for reprieve. A young woman wept, and something else sobbed in shrieking, soprano agony.
Head bowed, Asandir gripped the vibrating knife. His tall form seemed wrapped in scintillant light. Through tumultuous noise, he gathered himself and began speaking. Names, Sulfin Evend realized with cold horror: a long list, recited one after the next, with a glass-edged, imperative clarity.
The wailing gained volume, keened into a hideous, tormented cry that first raised the hackles, then threatened to freeze mind and heart. Asandir turned the knife, point down toward the earth. Then he clasped his left fist at the haft, firmed his grip, and drew the blade through. The sharp edge slit his flesh. Blood ran. Fire bloomed. Droplets pattered onto the ebony table and dissolved, smoking, into white light, within a chamber that seemed suddenly darkened and crawling with shadows.
Inky ribbons of force unfurled from the bone-blade. As the power awakened and, called by blood sacrifice, snaked out to claim a fresh victim, the Sorcerer's person came under attack. His arms, his broad shoulders, then his face and head were bound up, then swallowed by those blighting streamers of darkness.
Cramped to nausea, Sulfin Evend reeled. He snatched a bracing grip on the chair-back. While he steadied himself, the room dissolved through a burst of blinding, unbearable brilliance. Asandir spoke a word that razed through the turmoil and caused the stone table to ring like a bronze bell. The pure tone shattered thought, undid human reason. With a start, the Hanshireman realized the voices had all fallen silent. No more fell winds howled. The queer lights were gone. Only the commonplace candle-flames burned in their metal sconces.
The knife lay, clean and ordinary, on the stone table. Asandir was stanching his opened left hand with the sleeve of Lysaer's erstwhile dress-shirt. 'You found that unpleasant?' The Sorcerer glanced up. His scalding stare blistered. 'I beg you, go. Don't try to meddle with necromancers. Their doings lie outside all mercy.'
Speechless, Sulfin Evend sat down. Sick and shaking through the after-shock, he watched the Sorcerer unwind the stained silk. Asandir's hands seemed quite normal. The fresh wounds on the fingers and palm had already closed and healed over. Naught remained but the seam of a livid scar. Beneath that, his workaday callus was marked across and across: older weals, thin and shiny white, their accounting too many to number.
Asandir smoothed down his cuff. He reached for the cider, refilled his glass, then slid the bottle toward Sulfin Evend. 'You will bury that knife,' he instructed as he eased his dry throat. 'The blade was cut from the bone of a girl-child's thigh. Her name was once Enna. Her parents believed they had apprenticed her to an upright woman who worked for the weaver's guild as a yarn-spinner.'
Sulfin Evend managed a shuddering breath. 'You will take my oath?'
Asandir sighed. 'I must.' He retrieved the cleansed knife, gently laid it to rest in the box, shut the lid. 'As you said, we have no one to stand guard for Lysaer. I have a simple request, in return. Are you willing?'
The Lord Commander straightened. 'What do you ask of me?'
Settled back with his cider, Asandir tucked away his scored hand. 'You carry a stone-knife from Enithen Tuer, given for your protection. I ask you to accept my direct warding instead, since an object could be easily lost or misplaced. The stone-knife may help to guard Lysaer, as you wish. But when the day comes, if you rout the works of the grey cult from Avenor, and clear the foothold they seek at Etarra, then -'
Sulfin Evend shot straight. 'Etarra!'
'Oh, yes.' The Sorcerer leaned forward. He pressed his guest's hand around the stem of the goblet with an almost ephemeral touch. 'Drink, foolish man. You've established your bravery. Cerebeld has been a cult puppet for years. He dispatched his priests to three cities in the east, and your uncle Raiett is already shadowed by the same peril.'
Pale to the lips, Sulfin Evend raised his glass, amazed at how quickly Sethvir's strong cider burned off his deep-seated nausea. 'I'll give what you ask.' Prepared for a blood price, a geas, or some demand for a difficult sacrifice, the Hanshireman held braced for the worst.
Asandir smiled. The expression showed tender sweetness and sorrow, and quite transformed his gruff face. 'Take the knife given you by the seeress and, at your earliest convenience, return it to its rightful owner.'
'Who might that be?' Sulfin Evend asked, disbelieving. 'Do I know him?'
'Her?' The Sorcerer shook his head. 'She is the elder of the Biedar, a desert tribe found in the Black Waste of Sanpashir.'
* * *
Autumn 5670
Game-pieces
While falling leaves and frosts clothed the north in carnelian and gold, edged with diamond, amid the milder lands to the south, the day's early heat streamed through the high colonnades of the ancient hospice at Forthmark. The Koriani Seniors who attended their Prime Matriarch were obliged to wait in the glaring sun of the courtyard. Yet unlike her three sisters, Lirenda was powerless to shed her stifling formal mantle. While sweat trickled down her nape, and her layered skirts clung to her humid ankles, she could not unclasp even one tight button. Chin held high, she was powerless to protect her pampered complexion or raise her hand to relieve the prickle of heat rash inflicted by dampened wool.
No reprieve lay in sight. The courtyard's stonewalls, with their uncanny carvings, blocked the breeze from the snow-clad peaks. Shaded under the overhang, Selidie Prime sat enthroned in a high-backed chair. Her purple mantle
draped in pristine folds, the hems stitched with sigils of copper. Beneath pinned gold hair, her aquamarine eyes offset a delicate, doll's face. Exquisite in beauty, her deformity jarred: bundled in linen, her maimed hands lay like clubs on a cushion placed in her lap.
Tragic center of the morning's activity, the most skilled of the hospice's healers bent over the Prime's ravaged limbs. They fussed and conferred, in no rush to finish the delicate task of removing their enspelled bandages.
While the ranked seniors waited, constrained to patience, Lirenda fumed in forced stillness.
A more terrible fate could not be conceived to crush pride and dismantle ambition. Fallen from power and privileged position, Lirenda suffered, consumed by trapped rage, her favoured title stripped from her. Through the months since she fell under punitive sentence, she fed on her well of balked hate. Though she still owned the knowledge of an eighth-rank initiate, her punishment denied her autonomy. Snared by the sigil of obedience sealed through the matrix of the Great Waystone, Lirenda could not move or speak without a direct command. Kept like an item of valuable furniture, she existed now as a precision tool at the beck and call of the Matriarch.
Unlike the witless ones, stripped as blank husks, Lirenda suffered the corrosive torment of her unimpaired intelligence. Day to day, she endured, her most basic needs enslaved to one voice, that her flesh must obey without question.
She could not speak, though the pretence on-going before her scalded her very blood. She must watch each move as the sigils for reversal, destruction, and regeneration were dissolved, one by one in succession. The polished quartz stylus dipped, flashed, and cut, a moving light in the healer's deft hand. The meticulous work would be tiresome: each eddy of tied energy must be recaptured in crystal, then given release and dispersal. Close handling of such contrary forces required deep concentration. One slip, or one misplaced stroke might easily sever a finger. With unflagging courage, the hospice healer blotted her brow. A skilled assistant answered the Prime's breathless complaint, then offered a posset to numb her gnawing pain. Slowly, the fine gauze bandages were snipped, then unwound with tender care.
Lirenda chafed as the rest of the farce was played through. She seethed to witness each hopeful, faked phrase the Matriarch spoke to her underlings. For this warped creature who sat wearing the mantle of prime power well knew of the gaps that existed between the restorative spells and a resident spirit that did not match the auric matrix of her youthful body. Today's exhaustive effort must fail. The same as it had, week upon week, since the Matriarch's arrival four months ago.
Immersed in their dangerous, intensive labour, the best healers at the order's command still believed they might cure their Prime's ruined hands. Lirenda stayed powerless. She could not divulge the unsavoury secret: that Selidie was a being possessed by the unscrupulous shade of her predecessor. The irony scalded, that Morriel sat there, a smug, changeling crone, re-embodied as a slender sylph.
The last layers of the dressing were eased away to a cry of dismay from the healer. For of course, the contracted claw fingers remained frozen amid their scarred calyx of wrecked bone and tissue.
Selidie said no word to ease the distress. Forthmark's most skilled talent exclaimed with bent heads, then faced their defeat with hushed deference. The thin silk mitts were retrieved and slipped over the Matriarch's ghastly infirmity.
'Next week,' the Prime ordered. 'You shall try again.'
'Your will, Matriarch.' The healer dared not argue a direct command, or protest today's thankless dismissal. Oath-bound to obedience, she wrapped her instruments, while her assistants swept up the cut shreds of bandage and bundled them for disposal. The group curtseyed and filed out, leaving Prime Selidie enthroned in her chair.
Such towering confidence should have raised hackles, had any-one present possessed either authority or courage to try inquiry. Yet Prime rank of itself granted total immunity. The sole voice that might have denounced the vile crime had been crushed by that tyranny, then silenced. As Selidie surveyed the seniors awaiting her needs in the courtyard, Lirenda alone had the sense to be frightened, aware as she was of the ruthless mind behind that peremptory glance.
'I want Fionn Areth,' the Prime opened at length. 'He has been left at large for too long. I require him taken back in hand and placed under our order's protection.'
The peeress wearing the fourth band of red rank responded with veiled trepidation. 'By your will, Matriarch, your command shall be served, though with all due respect, the boy is still kept under lock and key inside warded walls at Alestron. We lack the duke's confidence, and the merchants we hold under our sworn oath of debt have not succeeded in buying his ransom.'
'This could change, shortly,' Selidie said, crisp. Where, as Morriel, she would have dispatched subordinates with an impersonal snap of her fingers, now, her change of persona compelled her to address them by name. 'Marisette! Prepare an array for a grand scrying. Lirenda, take charge of my keys and fetch the Great Waystone from the compartment beneath my state chair.' On afterthought, she added, 'You look hot. If you like, my page can take charge of your mantle as you let yourself out.'
Reduced to a miserable, subservient gratitude, Lirenda swept out on the errand. By the time she returned, shrouded jewel in hand, Forthmark's skilled seeress had completed her protective chalked circles. The quartz sphere for her scrying had been aligned to receive the Prime's influx of tuned spell-craft.
Lirenda placed her wrapped burden in the Matriarch's lap. Under orders, she had to kneel on the tile, then set up the shielded tripod with its forged ring of containment. Next, her fingers were needed to untie the jewel's silk wrappings. She unfolded the cloth, taking desperate care not to graze the perilous contents. The bared presence of the order's great amethyst puckered her skin with unpleasant chills. Worse torment still, she sustained the dazzling proximity of its powerful presence as she used shielded touch, and seated the sphere into its cradle.
Longing seared her to obsessive desire. To be this close to the penultimate might of the order outmatched every concept of cruelty. Lirenda steamed, become little more than the acting hands for a position that should by due right have been hers. A helpless slave, she stepped clear as ordered, while the onlooking seniors took position to one side, and the active seeress settled herself into trance. Then the usurping Prime leaned forward and rested her brow against the faceted jewel. The southern air chilled to ice as she woke the dire force of the Waystone's focus. Lirenda sensed the harrowing flux of stirred energy as the great amethyst engaged. She shuddered to its contrary tides of charged malice as its matrix was tuned and locked into submission. Once the stone's wayward forces were bound, firmly under the Matriarch's command, Lirenda was asked to enact the sigils to connect the grand focus to a smaller quartz sphere, preset by the seeress for scrying. Harnessed as thoroughly as the massive amethyst, she must act in strict concert, her neat, puppet gestures entrained with the Matriarch's invocation.
When the poised sigils meshed, a thread of hot light burned through the stilled air, there and gone, as the paired crystals equalized their resonance.
'Now,' said Prime Selidie.
The seeress invoked her high art, made the dedicate vessel to her Matriarch's will.
A saffron streak of sunshine speared through the quartz sphere. As the image resolved fully, the need to empower the Great Waystone became obvious: this scrying bridged an expanse of salt water, prying into the gloom of a ship's cabin lit by the checker-board glare from an open hatch grate. Further, the vessel carried a powerful protective talisman: the view came through scattered with flecks as the cipher warding the hull diffused the imperative of the Prime's sigils. The specialized training of Lirenda's lost rank let her interpret the signature of the lane tide and divine the ship's east-bound course, south-west of the Cascain Islands.
'Merciful grace!' murmured Porthmark's titled peeress. ' I never knew such a potentized scrying could be done in an ocean setting!'
Selidie's secretive lips fr
amed a smile. 'The Evenstar has carried our tag for some time. We had a ship's chandler on our rolls. He discharged his due debt by embedding our wrought-copper sigil under her sheathing when she was careened.'
The elderly senior showed dismayed interest. 'The merchant brig bearing an Innish registry that's been shipping relief to the west? Don't say her mission hides covert motives.'
'Listen, you'll see,' Prime Selidie responded. 'The ship's records might appear spotlessly clean. But her captain has been a loyal supporter of the Master of Shadow since childhood.' Under her direction, Lirenda fine-tuned the array of sigils. The increase in power, upstepped by the Waystone, pressed the air into palpable tension. The scene in the quartz sphere flickered to life and unveiled two figures engrossed in a scathing argument . . .
'. . . won't put in at Innish, to try would be madness!' Feylind's long braid flicked like rope in the shadow, to the adamant toss of her head. 'A ferreting customs keeper's forced inspection could land us in trouble over our heads!'
Her first mate's remonstrance bounced back, through the irritable clomp of his sea-boots. 'Because of our passenger? Sithaer's deathless fires, Captain! The crew isn't partial. They'd see your live contraband thrown off for bait before they would sail to Alestron without putting in for provisions. We'll be down to stale water and salt beef with maggots. Run out of spirits, besides, you'll see your best sailhands swim for Shaddorn's brothels the moment we wear ship to round Scimlade Tip!'
'Oh, "Captain", is it? Formal title, but no respect for my orders?' Feylind chose a word she had learned in the stews rousting laggards. 'The bullheaded crew on this hulk is well paid. They'll use their brains, not their bollocks!'