Traitor''s Knot (epub)

  Dakar stared, aghast. 'No,' he blurted. 'You couldn't. Dharkaron's Spear drop you for taking mad risks, you can't try such a damnfool ploy, now!'

  'Iyats crave complex patterns,' Arithon repeated. Eyes level, hard as the glint off chipped emerald, he finished his razor-edged point. 'They might, therefore, respond, led on out of straight fascination.'

  'Arithon! Be quiet!' Harried past subtlety, Dakar ripped at his beard. 'The Koriathain are onto your game-board, again. Their forsaken sigil's turned active.'

  'Some minutes ago, yes. The dissonance stings. But I have no intent, now or at any time, to grant their meddling wiles even one step off my chosen course.' The Master of Shadow turned his head aft. 'Feylind! The men aloft, have they restrung the topsail halyard?'

  'Almost,' the captain's reply floated forward. 'The cracked sheave's repaired. The boy's catching his breath before shinnying back up to the mast-head.'

  Arithon's manic interest flashed into a grin. 'Let's whip up a little experiment, shall we? Could Teive perhaps pass me a suitable line? Then call the hands down from the crow's nest.'

  Dakar loosed a martyred breath through his teeth, then clambered aside to make way for the crewmen descending the ratlines. 'Are you dead certain you ought to try this?'

  Arithon laughed. 'Sure as the scryer's eye tracking my back!'

  He received the coiled line, then bent and untied the knotted strings securing the sack. A lightning-fast reach, and his fingers emerged, grasping a glint of rarefied light. Two days of experimentation had let him define the precise frequency required to shadow a fiend. Tuned in to the range of their volatile energies, the sliver of effort required to stay them had been reduced to an artful subtlety.

  Trapped iyat in hand, Arithon engaged mastery and tightened his intent into crystalline focus. His etched purpose defined the sequence required to raise and rethread the lift for the topsail halyard. Then, ordered thought framed as template, he let the iyat soak up the imprint.

  'Stand clear,' he cautioned. He placed the flaked rope, then loosed the charged fiend from his grasp.

  The iyat dispersed to a wisped shred of light and faded from view altogether. A drawn second passed. The sailhands watched, riveted. Another moment, while the grousing quips from the hold rang on the windless air. Then the rope twitched. Snake-like, its hemp coils stirred in possession. Sprung out of its coil, it unreeled in a vertical rush, aimed for the topmast crow's nest. The end threaded through the appropriate block, swooped back down, then veered awry in a gleeful dive toward the wallowing swell of the Cildein.

  Arithon, laughing, snapped off a fresh shadow. His timely move stripped the fiend from the rope, while Teive's thrifty reflex captured the flailing end before valued cordage lost itself overboard.

  'Feckless creature,' chided Arithon, thoughtful. Mage-sight let him track the creased bolt of distortion left by the fiend's streaking departure. 'We'll just have to try the manoeuvre again.'

  'You shouldn't,' Dakar grumbled. 'You're likely to find the rope turned as a whip, if not hanging you up by the throat.'

  'Free will, my Prophet, in law and with strictures.' The Master of Shadow delved back into his warded sack with enthusiastic delight. 'No starved creature bites the hand bearing gifts. I only have to toy with the mix. You don't think my demand can be tailored to taste? Shall we find out which frequency dazzles a fiend and which drives it to intoxication?'

  The on-going trial required three attempts. The deck-hands observed with opened mouths, then played the stakes, taking bets. They slapped their knees and yelled ribald encouragement, while the fiends that had ripped them to shambles and shreds were cajoled into rerigging the topmast tackle. Arithon plied his mastery and refined his touch. His subsequent pranks grew flamboyant. When he set an even dozen to stitching a rent sail, Feylind whooped and cried tears, doubled over in gales of mirth. If a needle was lost, and three fiends defected, the nine that stayed on did a passable job.

  None complained of the uneven stitching.

  Which dalliance did nothing for Dakar's nipped frown. 'We still have a scryer riding that sigil,' he reminded with acid remonstrance.

  'Trust me, I know.' Arithon caught his breath. A snared fiend in hand, he nodded in deference toward Teive. 'We're fit to bear sail?'

  'Oh, aye,' the mate said, easy candour restored. 'The boys just sent word. Our ballast's restacked. Give us a fresh breeze, we've just got to bend on the canvas.'

  In fact, the brig's keel rode trim again. Her hull settled tight in the water as ever, except for a stripped patch of sheathing.

  'Welcome back, ladies,' said Arithon s'Ffalenn. He glanced briefly downward, as though something pained him: and the eye of the scryer, far distant in Forthmark, spied the green edge of metal, pinned underneath his placed foot.

  All the while, the active sigil of tracking had been removed from its original fastening. Under the opportune gift of a calm, shifting the brig's ballast had raised the watermark high enough to let a swimmer down on a rope. Short work, from there, to spring the fastening nails and pry off the thin sheet of copper. The inscription had not been disrupted, or destroyed. Pressed flat to the decking, unremarked until now, the aggressive sigil now covered a second inert inscription fashioned from charcoal.

  Bound into live scrying, the Koriani observer had barely that moment to ponder the cipher's significance. The mark bore no trace of resonant power. Masked out of view, obscured by the Prime's sigil, its form became vexingly hard to discern. Since the figure was copied, it might be recognized as Selidie's own construct, lately used to incite a rank plague of fiends. The slight caveat distinguished: that this configuration had been reversed, line for line executed in mirror image.

  Arithon, meanwhile, had not paused to laugh. He now sang a lyrical phrase in Paravian. Two days in recovery, his clear tones struck the air and revived the remembrance of flame: and a coal, once reduced from a living tree's heart-wood, retired to the call of the element. The charcoal mark quickened. Held in passive contact, pressed overtop, the copper-scribed sigil captured the pattern in resonant sympathy.

  The Master of Shadow seized the moment and flipped the bright fleck in his hand. 'Well, ladies, you've had more than plenty of warning to let go and back off your damned spying!'

  He flattened his palm. This time without pause to temper his thought, he tore off his stayspell of shadow. The iyat he held unfurled and reclaimed its lost freedom. Gifted the limitless bait of live charge, it darted straight down, drawn first by the brightened promise of fire, then hooked by the vortex of the active sigil, still linked through the Waystone's roused focus . . .

  Lirenda possessed no resource to break off the scrying's engaged connection. Denied personal autonomy, she could not frame a banishment or disengage the great amethyst. No critical step in evasion was possible without orders, made on the Prime Matriarch's initiative.

  Then the moment flashed past. The iyat crashed in like a vengeful, shot arrow, consuming the energies of every last stay laid down for guarding protection. Unable to warn, Lirenda suffered the burn of wild forces as the fiend snagged the raised field of the Waystone. Chaos erupted. Sucked down, whirled under, then punched blind and witless, Lirenda lacked voice for her agony. She could not breathe, could not think, could not feel her own heart-beat. A whisker from death, she raged, helpless.

  Then the Prime's shriek of fury shattered the dark. 'Alt!'

  Lirenda snapped free. Dropped limp on the carpet, wrenched dizzy and heaving, she regained a grip on her up-ended senses. Prime Selidie stood above her, wrestling to quell the raging might of the Waystone. Her mastery was contested with virulent force. The loose fiend inside had no mind to relinquish a feast of near-limitless power.

  Its fight was not scatheless. As energetic contention flared and whirled through the jewel and torqued the spin of its axis, a sawed note of vibration ripped through structured quartz, chopped short by a spang like snapped wire. A crack sheared one side of the great jewel's matrix, spreading a crackle of craze
marks that threatened to shatter the sphere.

  'Alt, damn you, Alt!' the Matriarch howled, desperate. Splashed by filth as Lirenda spewed on the floor, she rammed through the last sequence of ciphers.

  The stone's power doused. Just shy of disaster, its aligned focus slammed shut. The invasive fiend stayed locked inside, trapped as a fly caught in amber.

  'Damn the man, damn him!' Prime Selidie gasped. Shaking, drained white, she dropped in a limp huddle onto her chair. Her shocked eyes regarded the gossamer smoke that dispersed off the stress-heated crystal. 'Cursed seed of wild talent, what have you done?'

  For the massive amethyst had been pressured too far. Not only flawed, not only polluted by an embedded fiend, its clear purple heart was streaked through: intense heat had feathered a raw streak of citrine across the jewel's dark center. The irrevocable change would alter the quartz matrix and shift the sphere's frequency and alignment.

  Struck dumb by the penalty of her morning's work, unable to measure the damage done to the order's most irreplaceable resource, Prime Selidie pounded the scarred stubs of her hands in wordless, ferocious frustration. While her spoiled slippers and soaked hems chilled her feet, her tears fore-promised a vengeance beyond words upon Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn.

  * * *

  Late Winter 5671

  Interludes

  By the lamp-lit glow of Evenstar's chart desk, Arithon prepares a packet of dispatches for Feylind to sail on to Southshire; and to her sharp protest, he answers, unswerved, 'Your delay will be passed off as damages caused by a natural storm. I shall be gone, with the four in my party well away aboard Khetienn. A snared fiend can be dispatched to summon her north and arrange for an off-shore rendezvous . . .'

  With Lysaer s'Ilessid bound upcoast by galley, along with his remnant war host, High Priest Cerebeld meets with Avenor's high council, elated by news just arrived from Raiett Raven's suborned spy ring: 'A colossal mistake has just turned in our favour! Once the Divine Prince receives King Eldir's sealed dispatch, the hard proof that set his princess to flight will lay the ground for our opening to break him . . .'

  Immersed in the earth link, the Warden of Althain dreams a thread of interlinked possibilities: of an enchantress at Ath's hostel, now fated to shoulder a perilous journey; of a flawed amethyst and a Prime Matriarch hobbled; an eagle whose mettlesome impulse has seeded a whirlwind whose harvest will reap bitter fruit, followed hard by the telling, first link that forges the chain into ill-starred event: a vivacious, laughing carrot-haired bride is promised a bolt of scarlet silk for her wedding . . .

  * * *

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  Winter 5671

  VIII. Avenor

  Sulfin Evend had never been dazzled, first hand, by Avenor's former princess from Etarra. Her fabled beauty and her fiery wit were volatile subjects, wisely avoided in his liege's presence. Since her death had occurred before his appointment to rank, the repercussive response caught him off guard when the dispatch set under King Eldir's seal reached the hand of the Blessed Prince. The packet exposed an intractable truth, backed up by names and hard proof. Talith's murder, concealed by a conspiracy as suicide, sparked off an explosion that smashed the restraint of eight months of sensible planning.

  Every painstaking, laid strategy became swept aside.

  The insane speed at which Lysaer put his galley to sea and on scorching course for Avenor pitched his Lord Commander at Arms to a state of stripped nerves without precedent.

  'You are taking an unmentionable risk, and for what? A woman whose demise happened years ago! Another month, and you'll have our new recruits behind you. Go forward with less than five companies at your back, and you won't have enough strength to cordon your gates. Who knows what evil might slip through the breach? This rush to move now is stark madness!'

  Lysaer s'Ilessid chose not to reply. His stance on the deck was as steel, utterly set against reason.

  Sulfin Evend had known he might face his own death; peril in war was his venue. Yet at the end of the galley's drenching run north, tied up at the dock at Avenor, the dread that reamed chipped ice through his veins outstripped every concept of fear. He had argued himself raw, held his ground like scraped flint, that Fellowship counsel gave short shrift to the folly of standing untrained against necromancy.

  No adamant word changed the outcome. The party of picked officers gathered on deck, resplendent in parade arms, and glittering braid, and immaculate sunwheel surcoats. Sulfin Evend shut his eyes against the stabbing glare, while the clammy sweat trickled under his mail coat and gambeson.

  'You are the right hand of justice,' addressed a taut voice at his side. 'More than Tysan's people rely on the justice we march to enact here, today.'

  'I would be elsewhere,' Sulfin Evend replied. A kind hand clasped his shoulder, provoking recoil. He opened his eyes before thought.

  The vision that met him was substance: Lysaer s'Ilessid regarded him, clad in white silk clasped with abalone shell buttons, and without other jewel or ornament. The only gold accent was his bright hair, feathered in the light riffle of sea-breeze; the only intense colour, his glacial blue eyes, which matched worry with magisterial candour. 'If I had any-one else, on my word, your desire would be made true. Is this so very bad for you?'

  No reply served. Sulfin Evend did not wish to speak of the spirits, swirling like silver and gossamer foil on the surrounding air. His recent, night ride through the free wilds to reach Hanshire had shown him enough of such things to unsettle his peace for a lifetime.

  'The seers of s'Gannley do not view the course of the future,' Asandir had explained on the hour Sulfin Evend had honoured his full commitment to Enithen Tuer. 'Their gifted talent encompasses truth and reopens the gateway to what has passed. If you take oath for the land under Fellowship auspices, I must warn: the ritual will awaken that latent cognition. I cannot make the process selective or reseat your eyes should you live to regret. Nor would I, if the choice left the option. Every resource you have will be needful.'

  Too late now, to revoke the binding done in the King's Chamber at Althain Tower. Too late as well, to curb Lysaer's impatience. Outside, the deafening noise at the water-front revealed a populace gathered to witness their idol's return. That such an effusive celebration should turn out to greet an unscheduled arrival boded no earthly good.

  Sulfin Evend regarded the white-clad figure before him, solid and warm; too hurtfully vibrant against the wisped ghosts of the sorrows left imprinted upon the site of Tysan's crown capital. Grey-eyed and mortal, he granted his liege his scorchingly brutal response. 'Sight or not, I am no trained talent. Being able to see beyond time is not the same thing as a guarantee of protection.'

  Lysaer lashed him back with incensed conviction:'I will not suffer the murder of innocents!'

  'You feel that your victimized subjects are due your sovereign protection,' Sulfin Evend restated. 'Then for their safety alone, I should force you to run!' Against jingling noise as the armed escort prepared to form ranks, he added, 'Since you can't embrace reason, you won't leave this ship, that I do not stand at your shoulder. You're wearing a mail shirt and the Biedar knife?'

  'Here.' The Divine Prince tapped the breast of his doublet, a quilted garment of satin-stitched silk that shimmered like mother-of-pearl. 'I'm determined, not foolish.'

  A rumble signalled the gangway, run down, then the milling tramp as the men-at-arms debarked to assemble on the cleared dock. The standard-bearers fell in at the fore. White-and-gilt icons, they unfurled the state banners to stream in the wind: the Alliance sunwheel, opposed by the crown-and-star blazon of Tysan agleam on its field of deep blue. Arrayed five abreast in two parallel squares, fifty of the elite royal guard stood for their field captain's inspection. Their spired helms gleamed, and their war-sharpened weaponry hung parade-ground precise. Today, with no spare attention for oversight, Sulfin Evend was compelled to turn out his most reliable veterans. After Daon Ramon, the necessity galled him: against irrational od
ds, he knew that he risked the most steadfast core of his troop.

  'I will not cower,' Lysaer insisted, stonewalled by his Lord Commander's resistant silence.

  No option remained, except to bear up and issue the order to march.

  'Positions!'

  The troop captain took his place at the avatar's back, along with the muscled bursar and two petty officers. Whichever men carried the forged silver shackles, the fine cuffs and thin chains were well muffled and hidden. The Divine Prince's party assumed their place with the escort, whose smart columns wheeled and faced straight ahead. Sulfin Evend covered his liege's left flank. His finest point-men strode at right and left, bearing the fringed royal banners. The finials on the standards had forge-sharpened points. Steel chimed to each step: the advance herald's tabard concealed enough weaponry to stand down an assault at close quarters.

  Against arrows, or cross-bows, Lysaer wore only mail, and the birth-born power of elemental light. 'This is as it must be.' His quick glance showed confidence to scald the raced heart. 'I am in the best hands. Carry forward.'

  'On my mark!' shouted the troop captain.

  The baton fell, and the ranked squares marched shoreward, with the world's divine saviour a white diamond clenched in their armoured midst.

  A wall of sound met them. Although the s'Ilessid regent had not entered Avenor for over a year, his magnanimous presence had made itself felt on the heels of defeat in Daon Ramon. Through summer's famine, his tireless work on the coast had seen laden galleys and supplies routed north. His draft teams had braved the clogged roads, and his war host had stooped to guard caravans. Beset by the torrential lash of the rains, their trained strength had battled the flood, slogging the relief carts through cresting rivers and sucking mud that wore the hearts out of men and horseflesh. No village had starved. Packed against the breakwater and along the warehouse sheds at the harbour front, Avenor's populace shook earth and sky with their cheering.