Traitor''s Knot (epub)

  The need to curb raw curiosity was painful after months spent in freewheeling pursuit of all manner of arcane knowledge. Arithon questioned, reluctant, 'Does Dakar know the ship has trouble pending?'

  'He can't avoid the awareness much longer.' Davien dived earthward. The rush of air through his wings became thunder as he used the downdraft over water to plunge from the rarified heights. 'Prime Selidie's engaged the Great Waystone just now, her purpose to waken that sigil. The groundwork she's laid is already entrained.'

  'No small working,' Arithon returned in the snatched second before the next uncanny wingstroke.

  'Small or large, her construct is most tightly focused.' Davien hurtled them through another blind crossing. 'Assumptions at this point will just cloud the facts. Eyes will serve better. We'll survey the territory on our way in.'

  A split-second of whiteness, then the sting of salt air, and stiff wind burdened with the moist charge of a squall line; now Davien's eagle form swooped above the jagged, hooked shore that ran south of the inlet to Alestron's deepwater harbour. The long, rolling combers swept in from the east, spouting lace spray on the rocky spurs that guarded the calm inner coves. Here, where the free wilds of Orvandir bordered the ocean, the coast-running galleys took refuge from storms. The sea-grass in the shallows showed the scraped gouges of keels where they had anchored in shoaling water.

  Near solstice, when the rough weather slowed trade, only the most experienced galley-men put their timbers and crews in harm's way. One oared ship, at most three, might be snugged into shelter in seasons when easterlies threatened; but never inside reach of Ishlir or Durn, and never in bunched-up numbers.

  Today, ships were packed in like schooling fish, their decks pebbled with clumps of armed men. The broad-bellied sails were left bent to the yards, with the variegate banners of a half-dozen towns flying like tinker's snippets of yarn. Yet the pendant streaming atop every mast-head bore the gilt-and-white sunwheel of Lysaer's Alliance.

  The Sorcerer broached the uneasy remark on their suspect strength and high numbers. 'Someone's been mustering at Ishlir, assuredly forewarned.' Every hull rode far too high on the marks to be properly laden with cargo. 'Their position won't be a coincidence.'

  Arithon sorted strategies, speechlessly grim. No natural hazard he could imagine should cause Feylind to alter the Evenstar's off-shore course. Fionn Areth's presence on board made any run to the mainland a risk.

  The question demanded swift answer: would the Prime's machinations be framed as a goad, or as bait?

  'Seen enough?' Davien asked, though already his next wingstroke sliced and blurred through the boundaries of time and space. More observation would be useless effort, given the aggressive evidence. The shore of Orvandir had been primed for an ambush. For the brig, any closure would launch a disaster.

  The eagle veered due east once again, soaring into the teeth of the gusts, with the Cildein's whipped crests knit cobalt and indigo, patched with the white snags of spindrift. There was a wrongness. Arithon caught the tingle of vigilance that narrowed the Sorcerer's awareness. Through avian senses, he also picked up the ozone that sharpened the breeze. No by-product caused by a natural storm, the scent was too fresh, and much too distinct to be left by a passing cloud-burst.

  His flicked thought to Davien went beyond warning. 'The brazen bitch wouldn't dare!'

  'She would. She has,' Davien confirmed. 'Through the Prime's eyes, this wide world is a game-board. She would sacrifice all to snatch victory. Need we tarry? You're going to have less than an hour.'

  Response from the Prince of Rathain was leashed fire. 'Get me aboard Evenstar. You already carry my word of forgiveness as the harbinger of bad news.'

  Dark wings swept down. Darkness followed. The form of the eagle dissolved into air, then bled away into memory. Arithon tumbled, bodilessly disoriented. He received the errant impression of a sealed stone chamber. The enclosure was egg-shaped, with polished, dark walls flicked by rainbow flares of moving light, and the echo of trickling water. Then that uncanny awareness unravelled. His consciousness plunged through a whirling, hard spiral, and recondensed back toward the forgotten, firm weight of his flesh . . .

  Mid morn arrived amid stiff, running swells. Still shut in the buffeting dark of the sail hold, though granted loaned clothes from the slop-chest, the Mad Prophet stirred. At last he had sobered enough to try the rudiments of his trained talent. The door remained barred. If Araethurian herders had pig-iron minds, their stomachs were made of no such stern stuff. Mage-sight revealed Fionn Areth, curled prostrate within a nest of mildewed storm tackle. Misery rendered him too limp to moan. The air reeked of sour vomit and urine, with the promise of worse: the bucket secured by bagged sand in the corner sloshed brimful, a hairbreadth from upset as the brig wallowed and slogged over each trampling wave-crest.

  By the working groan of the hull, and the relentless thrum of filled canvas, the Evenstar now ploughed a rhumb-line course through blue water.

  Dakar grumbled a thick curse. His tongue felt furred in frog slime, and his bladder was strained full to bursting. He shut gritted eyes. The blackness behind his closed lids fairly sparkled to the white flame of his headache. He groaned, moved, clamped fuddled hands to his brow. Somehow, he must refound the focus to engage his initiate awareness.

  Long-suffering patience let him center his mind. Discipline pierced through the muddle of pain, not steady as yet, but sufficient to begin to redress the damage left by his wrecked state of over-indulgence. If the battering that accompanied an off-shore passage escaped remedy, a blanketing sleep would do nicely to ease the misery of his condition.

  Yet his effort to settle his misaligned aura raised a queer, stinging flash that subsided to haze and red static.

  Dakar recoiled to a yelp of surprise. No member of Evenstar's crew had been mage-trained. Nothing he encountered upon the high seas should provoke a defensive reaction. The cold hunch remained, that this source of disturbance was external, and a part of the brig that now sailed, unprotected, across open ocean with Arithon's made double on board.

  That unseen pitfall ripped Dakar to chills.

  Eyes closed, wracked to dread, he shielded his working, then cast his awareness outwards. Sick pain notwithstanding, he combed through the grain of timber and planks with masterfully delicate subtlety. His probe traced the web-work and knots of tarred rigging, then spiralled through cordage, dead-eyes and blocks, finding no untoward sign of meddling. He sifted the mineral grain of the ballast rocks. No spell-craft lurked there. Pressed to the edge of his limited resource, now fogged by the turbulent rush of the brine, he tested the sheathing under the water-line. As a bare-handed man might grope for a spider, Dakar sounded until he encountered a tingling snap! The incursion sourced here, an embedded cipher that spiked his headache to redoubled virulence.

  Flushed to nausea, the spellbinder hissed through shut teeth. What he laid bare in the humid, thick dark, was a Koriani sigil of tracking.

  Dakar collapsed his extended awareness. Wracked witless by dread, he pushed straight and slammed headlong against the hatch combing. 'Feylind!' he howled through singing pain. 'Get down here this second! Your ship is threatened and heading for trouble worse than your most evil nightmare!'

  The bar slid back. The plank door yanked open, and a sailhand holding a candle-lamp squinted into the redolent gloom. 'Shut yer trap, bucko. The captain's asleep.'

  'Wake her!' On his knees, sweating, Dakar snatched a sail hank and jammed the tight swing of the door. 'Move now, you fool! We're disastrously exposed, and primed to fall under an arcane assault by an enemy.'

  'Now hasn't the whisky spun you some ill dream! Man, I've told you already. The old lady's knackered. Fought rip currents and a devilish wind through the narrows. No dog with a brain wants to roust her.'

  'I'll risk that, no question.' Dakar rammed the sailhand's obstruction aside and barged shoulder down through the braced doorway. Ignoring Fionn Areth's moaned inquiry behind, the Mad Prophet stumbled th
e length of the hold toward the grey glimmer of daylight. He mounted the ladder, shivering and sick, and cringed as the salt-laden wind slapped his face. Sea legs, he decided, were a capricious gift that Ath gave to rock-headed masochists. The deficit left him gulping back bile. Dakar reeled his way over careening, wet planks in a rush to bend over the railing.

  Dry heaves aside, he required relief. His bladder was nigh onto splitting. Swift footfalls approached. Aware that a pack of deck-hands converged with the riled intent to constrain him, Dakar tore at his clothing with hell-bent haste. Let them lay hold of him while he voided. Unless they hauled him away in midstream, his crass tactics would give him a snatched chance to explain. With naught else at hand to forestall their stupidity, Dakar opened his fly. The rush cost him ripped seams, and a button. The deck-crew latched hold of his shoulders and arms just as he started to piss. He yelled curses at them, to no avail. The tussle devolved to a brangle, with the wind and the thrashing spray off the swells posing both sides a ruinous handicap.

  Sweated fist guarding his beleaguered cock, Dakar snarled, 'Listen up, you runt litter of milk-sucking virgins! Your ship is packing a Koriani sigil! Do you know what vicious trouble that breeds? If you don't, haul your fumble wits out of your bollocks!' The Mad Prophet spoke very fast, after that, while the sailhands pressed in, struck to distrustful silence. Rumpled though he was, and green-faced with misery, the spellbinder mustered the rag ends of dignity, and finished, 'This threat is real. Your vessel's been tagged. To track past salt water, you'll have no less than Prime Selidie and twelve ranking seniors, engaged through the force of the Waystone. I can't thwart such power! Not on that scale, and not locked puking sick in the sail hold. Roust out Feylind! Do as I say, or else risk that boy who's set under the word of Prince Arithon's sworn protection.'

  'What,' sniped a man with a seamy, squint eye, 'that flea-scratching goatherd who's hell-bent to sell us out to Lysaer's Alliance? Throw him off!'

  'Aye,' called another. 'Feed his tripes to the sharks. He's a nattering nuisance, I say!'

  'Rot that!' snapped the cook, burst out of the galley with two fish skewers stuck through his pigtail. 'Use his guts as fresh bait for my drag-lines, I would.'

  Dakar shivered. 'Please, no debate.' Hoard the last dribble of piss though he would, his kidneys were already squeezed dry. Resigned to dread, he unlatched icy fingers and endeavoured to stuff himself back in his trousers.

  That moment, the hag face of luck played him foul: the sigil embedded in Evenstar's hull woke and burned, attuned by a circle of two dozen ranked seniors channelled as one through the Waystone.

  The influx slammed across the lone spellbinder's frail defences with the thundering force of an avalanche. He yelled, hands convulsed. Though spasmic reflex threatened him with castration, he failed to dodge the connection. Beyond any shadow of doubt, Prime Selidie now knew he and Fionn Areth were aboard Captain Feylind's vessel.

  'Ath above!' he gasped, shaken senseless, and bruised in a place that would not let him think. 'Now we have trouble!'

  'Because you've snagged your wee hairs in your buttons?' The brusque voice was the mate, shoved into the pack to see why his deck-hands were slacking. 'By Dharkaron's fell Spear, I'll have the lot shaved! Are we a latrineful of dimwit voyeurs, or a two-masted ship trimmed under three courses of sail!'

  'Wait,' urged the quartermaster, just culled from the wheel for the purpose of handling malcontents. 'Look at the man's face. Whatever's upset him is serious!'

  Dakar scarcely noticed the crowd parting around him. Pressed to the lee-rail as his knees let go under him, he caught only broken snatches of words, flung through the rush of thrown spray. Ripped by the blinding pain of his headache, he grappled to muster his talent. Someone must assay the force of the threat now attached to the hapless brig.

  If he was the Evenstar's only trained asset, he was not to have peace for his effort.

  Hands grabbed his shoulder and spun him about. 'What's happening?' The mate's piercing stare raked him over, now worried. 'What's this I hear about meddling Koriathain?'

  'They want Fionn Areth,' Dakar gasped in distress. 'I fear we're too late to forestall them.'

  'Bloodless bitches,' the mate swore, moved to sympathy for the herder. The lad was young for his plight. However he skulked, he could never hide with a face that bore such extreme notoriety. 'Trust me, I'd back Feylind and scuttle this hull before we strike flags in surrender. Since we're bound to fight, we'll fare that much better if we know how the Prime Matriarch intends to attack.'

  'I'll tell you,' a stripped, steely voice interjected.

  Dakar jerked at the sound, head upturned toward the quarter-deck. Although he had sensed no invasive disturbance, he encountered a lean figure muffled in black, leaning into the wind at the taffrail. The barest glance awoke recognition. A moment that should have brought speechless joy gave rise to explosive remonstrance. 'Damn your feckless hide to the nethermost pit! What in Sithaer possessed you to come here?'

  'My right of free choice,' the arrival replied. 'No one's pining for a reunion, I see.'

  The deck-crew stared, dumb-struck. This man's angular features might seem, line for line, a stamped replica of the boy Feylind's order had shut in the sail hold. Yet this was not he. The predator's gleam that lit these green eyes had never been bred in the grass-lands.

  Striding down the companionway to the main-deck, the man who was the Crown Prince of Rathain took pause. His braced stance was experienced as the brig tossed and slammed on her close-hauled course through the wave-crests. 'The occasion's beyond speech?' He glanced aloft, measured the set of the sails, then smiled toward the first mate. 'My compliments, fellow. You keep a tight ship.' His scouring survey reached Dakar's flushed face. 'Not Sithaer,' he added with irony. 'My presence is actually the gift of Davien.'

  'Welcome to the massacre,' the Mad Prophet said carefully. 'We're jammed square in the throat of a Koriani trap. Or didn't the Betrayer bother to tell you?'

  'I am fully informed.'

  That crisp tone revealed nothing. A silver-trimmed cloak, lately worn by a Sorcerer, draped over immaculate shoulders. The trial of the maze and a year in the caverns had accentuated the milk-quartz complexion. Less definable changes carried more force: the adamant clarity of a mage-trained self-awareness had been reforged to a fearfully surgical edge. Dakar swallowed, despite himself overcome. 'Welcome back, Arithon.' Foolish tears made him blink. Unprompted, he answered the hanging question. 'Fionn Areth is safe, though your friends want to wring his idiot neck on account of his uncertain loyalty.'

  'He's locked in the sail hold, I already know. Let that problem bide, for the moment.' Paused through a rapid, measuring glance, the Master of Shadow searched the faces of Evenstar's astounded deck-crew. 'Where's Feylind?'

  'Resting, your Grace.' The mate stirred to go, until Arithon's gesture forestalled his impulse to roust her.

  'No titles,' said the Master of Shadow. 'Bring all hands on deck, now. Together, we're going to work them like dogs. If you pray, beg for favour that we can strike sail, drop the yard-arms, and unstep the topmasts in less than an hour.'

  'We're in for a blow?' the mate asked, startled grim.

  'A storm like no other.' Arithon stripped off the fine cloak. 'This vessel's been tagged by a Koriani sigil, and they've meddled. Spell-craft's been engaged that will shortly make us a magnet for fiends.'

  'Iyats!' howled the mate. 'We're hard up in a clinch! Such damnable mischief could sink us!' He snatched for the lanyard strung at his neck, shrilled a blast on his whistle, while the crewmen at hand surged up the ratlines without need to be ordered aloft.

  Arithon dumped his cloak into Dakar's numbed grasp. 'Stow this below.' Through the shouted commands as the brig was braced by, and spray scattered in stinging sheets over the bowsprit, the Master of Shadow moved down the list of necessities. 'I need you to secure water-barrels. Lay them under every strong ward you know to guard against breakage and mischance.'

  'I can't.'
Dakar clutched the bunched wool, left utterly wretched. In stripped words he told why his talent was blunted from months of drunken sex and dissipation. 'What else could I do? Fionn Areth showed Luhaine an offensive mistrust. We had no opening to claim free permission.'

  Arithon, rapt, had grasped the sore gist. 'Do what you can, then. I have a few theories that could grant a stay from this lash-up. The Prime Matriarch thinks you'll be caught unaware. She doesn't expect to have me aboard, fouling the lay of her plans.'

  Dakar choked back his self-evident admonition, that Selidie Prime might instead seize her chance to trap both decoy and quarry together. 'What will you do now?'

  Arithon flung back a madcap grin, then spun toward the galley amidships. 'Have words with the cook. Then protect the provisions. After that, if the crew has the sail rig in hand, I'll nip down and release Fionn Areth.'

  'Not when he's a prisoner on my brig, you won't!' Waked by the commotion, Feylind shot out of the stern cabin. Hair streaming, she whooped through the mate's shouted orders, then pounced and locked her slighter, male target into a choking embrace. 'Nor will you escape with no courtesy, this time. You owe me that much, for your absence.'

  Which had been an inexcusable seventeen years; no glib word could sidestep that issue. Arithon did not try. 'My dear, you've surpassed expectations. The fitness of your command is a marvel, but unless you have skills to trap plagues of iyats, you'll hear my apologies, swimming.' Gently firm, he began to untangle himself.

  'Fionn Areth,' she snapped. 'You'll keep him penned up.' Her hold on his wrists did not loosen.

  The creature who had walked, alive, out of Kewar suffered the unwanted constraint. The depth of dimension in him was so changed, Dakar lost his breath. Shaken by insight that tingled his skin, only he glimpsed the inscrutable presence behind that unruffled composure.

  'Feylind, let go, my judgement is sound.' Arithon smiled with no outward sign of admonishment. 'The iyats will only feed on dissent. Leave the young man locked down, his reckless rage will endanger us. If he's not overjoyed by my company, you'll have to trust me to handle him.'