Spoken words, and the sting of a knife-cut: by such small acts, a sealed thread of intent, that now spun whole cloth into tragedy.
Yet it was Arithon's whispered reply that seized the heart-strings and cruelly twisted. 'Just keep me awake,' he implored the mate. 'By my witnessed permission, freely use whatever method that takes.'
'Then, at your word, we'll proceed as you wish.' Teive shouldered the watch. The choice was not willing. The dangerous spark of his latent hostility set even Fionn Areth on edge.
For as Dakar had forecast, Arithon had worn himself down beyond gentle means to redress. Tranced calm could not restore his taxed resource. Beyond walking, past ability to track an intelligent conversation, he would drift when his shoulder was shaken. Cold water came next, until he started to shiver. Dakar called a halt, then kicked the emptied bucket away as the mate bent to scoop from the bilge.
'No, Teive, no more.' Knelt in the puddle at Arithon's side, the Mad Prophet gentled the icy, wracked flesh. 'We can't. More such mistreatment will just drive him down.' Extreme chill now would only hasten unconsciousness. 'Help me bundle him into dry blankets.'
The abusive measures they had to use next choked Fionn Areth to tears. Snapped back, time after time, from the sliding fall toward oblivion, Arithon set his teeth. He did not complain. Scarred by past horrors he would not repeat, he endured the crude methods, beyond dignity. Too spent to stifle his reflexive cries, he surfaced, again and again, until his body shuddered and shrank, and flinched at the touch of hands on him.
When the mate finally balked, the Master of Shadow gasped Feylind's name. For an interval more, that incentive forced shrinking nerves to sustain.
Then Dakar recoiled. Arithon railed at him through clenched teeth and reviled the weakness of pity. 'I have survived Kewar. Can you imagine this feels any worse? Then let me correct your tender presumption. Against loss of this brig, and any life on her, your tormenting jabs are a pittance.'
Yet his jagged appeal could not lift distress. Defeat lay at hand. A bard wracked by such tremors could not hope to whistle the critical pitch for a fiend bane.
'You will not risk her life,' Arithon insisted, his fury brought to a scraped whisper.
Propped by the barrels with his head on his knees, he had roused, barely in time. The ward flickered and dimmed, pale as spun smoke. The ravenous fiends sensed that instant of weakness. Closed in, voracious, they darted and circled, testing the integrity of the barrier.
Soaked in sweat, Arithon marshalled his fragmented will. He reforged the frayed thread of connection. By arduous increments, the sword's song levelled out, then burned to full strength, and continued. Dakar offered water. Arithon averted his face. His lips moved without sound, in refusal. The lamp touched his sweat-glazed features like varnish. His eyes were black wells, from the pain. Such extreme pallor might have been bloodless, except for the flushed patches where the nerves ran under the skin. The light taps to cause hurt had been done without marking him, a bitter mercy that served to prolong his wretched state of extremity.
And already, before the next breath, his lifted chin started to droop.
'As I love the captain, I wasn't made for this,' Teive objected, wrung sick.
'I'll say not,' whispered Arithon, rammed against the stacked casks. His hands rested limp on the boards where he curled, knees to chest in a trembling knot. 'Feylind would choose a man with high heart, and not an ounce of vicious-ness in him. Give Dakar a turn. If he can't, call on Fionn Areth.'
Yet the drastic hour had come. Further torment could not drive back the abyss or stave off the numbed surge of exhaustion.
As the damp, black head dipped, and finally nodded, Dakar arose. He scrounged a scrap of silk, wrapped his grip, and reached to take up the Paravian sword from its upright position in the soaked tarps.
'Mercy, no,' Fionn Areth cried protest. 'He's helpless! You can't draw his blood.'
Reviled past words, the mate surged erect and restrained the Mad Prophet's wrist. 'Enough. No more! Any longer will just break his mind.'
'I know.' Dakar swallowed. 'Trust me this far, I can't continue this, either.' As the mate's grasp stayed adamant, he worked his arm free. 'I'm only going to do as Arithon asked, and lay the sword into his hand.'
Touch masked by the silk, the spellbinder freed the jammed blade. Each juddering movement came scored in light. The steel spun its radiant mystery, unchecked. Starred rays pierced the darkness like opaline glass, and grace sang beyond hearing, alive with a purity that scoured the hidden depths of the heart. Dakar placed the pommel between Arithon's slack palms and rested the flat of the blade upright against his slumped shoulder.
Naught remained to be done.
Helpless, the three standing vigil confronted the uttermost face of defeat. The Mad Prophet knelt. He gathered Arithon's hands and closed slackened fingers over the sword's grip. As he offered the warmth of his presence to ease the slide into unconscious surrender, the mate fetched a blanket. He covered Arithon's contorted body out of unself-conscious respect.
'You are worth her love,' he admitted, though the ear that received his tortured tribute had all but passed beyond hearing. 'Ath grant you peace, I wish I had known that in all other ways, except this.'
The lamp wavered. Fionn Areth seized on the coward's excuse to adjust the failing wick. He could not stop listening. Nor force back the wretched, salt burn of his tears, while Arithon dragged in a ratcheting breath, then another, and another one after that. As the soft, silvered glow of the sword flickered also, the Master of Shadow recoiled. He battled in desperate, painstaking stages, until the ward was snatched stable again.
'Don't fail me,' he pleaded. 'One minute more. Prime Selidie could give way and free us.'
Yet reprieve did not happen. The terrible, wrenching shudders slowed down and subsided. Bruised eyelids fluttered and closed. Crushed under by tiredness, Arithon succumbed, spun down into oblivious sleep.
First the hazed glow from the sword flickered out. Then the faint, sustained thread of unearthly music faded under the threshold of hearing. The instant before silence let in the fiends, Dakar straightened.
'Douse the lamp!' he cracked, urgent. Clumsy with cold, Fionn Areth was caught unprepared. He fumbled to unlatch the hot casing.
The mate surged to help. Spurred to panic, aware of the horrific calamity posed by a fire at sea, he tangled his foot in the blanket. His trip pitched him sprawling across Arithon's lap, just as the wave of starved fiends arrowed in. Their ravenous plunge sucked the flame to an ember as they absorbed light and heat for replenishment.
Dakar's cry for retreat arose over the tumult.
Then the last, static flux of the ward crumbled down, and more iyats swooped in like fell vengeance. The hostile pack punched in from all sides with the howling force of a hurricane.
The lamp toppled over. Flame and spilled oil soaked the rucked blankets. Dry cloth served as a wick. A whoosh of raised fire curtained the air. On a buffeting, hot breath, the conflagration seared and spread, lashed into an unnatural, crackling scourge by the horde of rampaging fiends.
Dakar's cursed exhortations drowned under raw noise, then a pealing yelp, as Fionn Areth jerked back, cut off by a burgeoning wall of inferno as he snatched to retrieve the dropped bucket.
'All hands!' yelled the mate, choked by roiling smoke. But the crisis had passed all containment. No frantic salvage by Evenstar's crew could avert the cascade into ruin.
Except, at next second, the fire snapped out.
Darkness plunged down. Dense as thrown ink, shadow sliced like a blade through the carnage. Dakar sensed the slamming descent as a blow, as Arithon, wakened, engaged the birth gift of his mastery.
Night slapped through the raging wildfire like the dread stuff of chaos, unleashed. No mere barrier to quench light or heat, or subdue the maelstrom of roaring air, this conjury hammered with walloping force. Dakar felt his mage-sight go cold, clapped down, then snuffed as though strangled.
'Arithon!' he
shouted. 'Desist! The raw might of such power could kill us!'
The spellbinder had endured through hard bursts of elemental shadow before. He had stood on Kieling Tower, when Desh-thiere was imprisoned. Much later, he had suffered a hostile assault, when cursed insanity had claimed Arithon, at Riverton. This bout was different; utterly changed.
The darkness that howled through Evenstar's hold held a virulent edge that was frightening.
The range of Arithon's core talent had strengthened. Exhaustion erased stays and limits. No man had witnessed the scope wielded now, a wave of jet ice that sheared through skin and viscera, and reduced the prime reflex of life. The blast did not pass, but set in like dropped lead, a blind scourge unleashed to annihilate.
'Arithon!' Dakar urged. 'Let go!' Abarrel hoop sprung, to a scream of stressed wood. 'Ath save us, man! The freeze is going to burst all the casks!' Out of the howling maw of let dark, over the ship's groaning timbers, Arithon's protest ground through like rasped glass. 'The fiends. They've backed off? Has the fire gone out?'
And there, in stunned shock, the unlooked-for reprieve broke into awestruck epiphany: Dakar realized the marauding whirlwind of iyats had vanished. Nothing stirred in the hold. Only the lap of the bilge, and the white rush of spray cleaved by no more than the power of sail and the surge of seagoing timbers.
'Dharkaron's Five Horses and Chariot!' The mate coughed inhaled grit from his sanded throat. 'By glory, sorcerer! We're snatched from the brink. Have you any clue what you've done?'
The reply returned through the glassine black air came equally mangled by wonder. 'Shadowed the fiend storm, apparently.'
Steel chimed against wood. Frozen cloth crackled as Arithon stirred. The ice and the darkness relented, a fraction. With the lamp doused, and the sword's spells quiescent, the closed hold should have been lightless as pitch.
Yet everywhere, scattered across the shocked dark, pale flecks of marsh-light were drifting.
They hung like small stars, a sequin glimmer in fine shades of blue, tinsel silver, and even a glimmering, delicate violet that strained the far boundary of vision.
Dakar lifted a trembling hand. He touched one. A prickling snap snicked his palm, not unlike a brisk discharge of static. In fact, he could rake the quiescent wisps up, like so many dry autumn leaves.
Eyesight adjusted to the pallid light: showed the mate on his knees, blistered hands pressed against his streaked face. Fionn Areth cradled seared knuckles. Next to the enamel gleam of the sword, a limp wrack of flesh lay curled in on itself beneath the bulked loom of the water-casks.
Left stunned to awe that the brig had been salvaged, Dakar clambered over the ice-coated tarps. He ploughed away oil-soaked blankets. Clumsy with chill and overstrained nerves, he rescued the Paravian sword and laid it aside, somehow without slicing his fingers. On his knees, choking back strong emotion, he laid his bruised hands upon Arithon's shoulders.
'How long?' croaked the mate from the darkness behind. 'Your Grace, if the fiend storm is bound, will you be able to hold them?'
When the desperate query dangled, unanswered, Dakar shoved back his hysterical tears. 'We are saved, and indefinitely. Arithon's gift is an inborn force, a direct access link to the elements. I've seen him sustain glamours wrought from shadow for days. At need, the act becomes reflex.'
Erect now, a scarecrow swathed in singed clothes, the mate recovered his dignity. 'Your liege is asleep?'
'I think so.' At least, the breaths rose and fell in a regular pattern under the Mad Prophet's explorative touch. 'We should make him more comfortable.' Yet that cursory assessment proved premature. A jarring tremor combed through Arithon's stilled frame. His fingers plucked at Dakar's sleeve-cuff.
'Be still,' soothed the spellbinder. 'Mercy on you, be still. I'll divine what you want without speaking.'
The instructions were scarcely a trial to fulfill. Arithon wished the Paravian sword left unsheathed and set near to hand. The drifting iyats were to be netted up, then contained and placed at his side.
'You'll have help.' The mate crunched over debris toward the ladder, where his deck-watch relayed swift orders.
Using silk, and the labour of three steady men, the tight, pin-prick flakes of raw light were recaptured, and clapped into the cook's last available pot.
When the lidded vessel was laid at his feet, Arithon roused back to awareness. He sealed the trapped fiends inside with his gift. Then he adjusted his conjury and bound the brig from stem-post to stern under an unnatural twilight.
Dakar rose to ascertain the strength of his handiwork. 'Rest,' he urged. 'Your ward's stable and sound. No sprite should cross your spun shadow. The blanketing filter of force you've laid down ought to keep us in shielded protection.'
At last, replete, the Master of Shadow accepted the pillow that Feylind tucked under his head.
Vhandon and Talvish arrived in hushed quiet. They stripped Arithon's soaked clothes, then strung up the hammock the sailhands sent down to ease him. Swathed in dry blankets, Rathain's prince had no choice but recuperate where he lay.
Topside, for the first time, the deck-lanterns burned. Compass restored, Evenstar plied her warded course to the east. Until the sigil could be stripped from her hull, she could not sail undefended. A man at the hatch guarded Arithon's peace, with Fionn Areth set on his obdurate choice to remain in the hold through the aftermath.
'You'll do him no good here,' Dakar said, unstrung by impatient exhaustion. 'Let go. Leave him be.'
The Araethurian stayed planted, even as Alestron's gruff liegeman prepared to drag him away. 'Is the Master of Shadow injured, or sick?'
'May Daelion's Wheel turn quick for a fool!' Dakar snapped in exasperation. 'He's stood down a frontal assault through a sigil, and reduced a storm of iyats three hundred strong. His Grace is blessed worn-out!' As reason failed, Dakar warned Vhandon off, and tossed up his hands in disgust. 'What earthly use do you hope to serve, Fionn?'
A faint voice emerged from the shrouded form in the hammock. 'He's burning to ask me a question.'
Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn had opened his eyes, their febrile gleam far too bright in the flood of the lamp slung under the deck-beam. He surveyed his recalcitrant double. 'I cheated you out of your fair match, with swords. Therefore, by forfeit, you have the right. Ask.' Before any-one moved, or forced him to silence, Fionn Areth let fly. 'Why did you let children die in your name when Etarra marched on Tal Quorin?'
The Mad Prophet sucked a shocked breath and blocked Talvish's incensed rejection. 'Wait. Can't you see? As a crown prince, he has to answer.'
And the wearied words came. But not with the self-poisoned, tearing remorse that close friends had braced themselves to deflect.
'Because all I was then, every wise skill I knew, could not keep them safe and living.' A taut moment passed. Then, since his answer did not seem profound, or satisfy his inquisitor, Arithon delivered his compassionate promise. 'There are survivors. Stay, and I will provide you the chance to question them in your own right.'
* * *
Early Winter 5671
Rift
On a mild spring night seventeen years ago, a brash, young captain at arms had pounded from Hanshire's gates at the head of a column of riders, his assignment to escort three Koriani Seniors on urgent business to Korias. His hand had been a white fist on the rein, and his face, flushed with fury from a savage fight with the Lord Mayor, his father.
Youth and hot rage had claimed their bitter toll. For the sake of political rank, and his safety, his light horsemen had delivered their Koriani charges, then followed his impulsive orders. Their elite skills had been offered to Riverton's town-guard to spear-head an urgent search for the Master of Shadow.
The chase had led them through the bounds of a grimward, and not a fighting man had returned.
Since that day, the surviving prodigal son had viewed the tall towers of Hanshire just once, from the deck of a sea-going galley. His momentary stop on the wharf had spurned every overture toward
a contrite reconciliation. His uncle Raiett had boarded the ship with the intent to cozen him home. Instead, the family's most powerful statesman found himself bedazzled in turn, swept into foreign service, and granted the post of the Light's High Chancellor at Etarra. The estranged heir kept his officer's post at Lysaer s'Ilessid's right hand; and Lord Mayor Garde was deprived at a stroke of the brother whose shrewd brilliance guided his council.
Now, under the stars of a fierce winter's freeze, the commander of the Alliance armed force reined his lathered horse from the covering scrub. Its lagging stride rang down the cobble-stone thoroughfare that led to the torch-lit main gate. He rode alone. At the vigorous height of maturity, under challenge by dangers beyond precedent, Sulfin Evend returned: to face his aged parents and the final destruction of his family's expectations. To a reunion that must scour the scars of old pain, he bore the knife-cut sting of an oath sworn in blood to a Fellowship Sorcerer: a vow of life service that no mortal power under Athera's wide sky might revoke.
Sulfin Evend shoved back his rough hood. A useless ploy, now, to keep his face hidden. Even mounted on a nondescript post-horse, and wearing no sunwheel blazon, his covert approach from the northern wilds was bound to be marked in advance. The Koriani scryer employed by Hanshire's council watched over the town's interests like a vigilant hawk.
The Sorcerer's parting words had not promised immunity from the family's store of pent rage. Nor might a steadfast resolve to fight necromancy forgive the unresolved impact of past scores. 'Sethvir has given his sage reassurance. You will reach Hanshire on the hour when you are most sorely needed. Once there, your oath to the land must come first. Caith'd'ein, you are bound before ties of heritage. You stand outside of sovereign allegiances. By choice, you must tread the razor's edge. Lose your focus, or waver one step, and you will reap the hideous consequence.'
Sulfin Evend drew rein before the stone gate keeps that flanked the land entry to Hanshire. Deep shadow layered its cut arch of black basalt, shadowed under the streaming torches that illuminated the gaudy panoply of draped banners. Yet no sunwheel standard hung from the wall. Dazzled after hours of star-studded darkness, Sulfin Evend resisted the need to wheel his mount and retreat. At his back, the harrowing cross-country ride through the wilds, plagued by Second Age haunts and the unquiet sorrows left imprinted by bloodshed; before him, a living trial by fire: never in his bleakest hour of doubt had he thought to reach journey's end and not find the Alliance army encamped at full strength by the gate.