Traitor''s Knot (epub)

  'Leave your friend to his fate,' the Betrayer responded. 'He has not asked for rescue and needs none of your blundering assistance. For all of your misplaced philanthropy, trust me, you have never seen to the core of him.'

  Dakar gasped, incredulous 'You're claiming he'd send himself in there as bait? That offends me.'

  Davien stood unruffled, the citrine ring on his hand a hot spark in the sunlight. 'I beg your pardon. Your prince went informed. He rejected my grant to peruse the black grimoires, but Traithe caught the breach in Melhalla. Your Teir's'Ffalenn knows in depth how the Kralovir work. Since then, he requested, and received my direct help. No one's free will has been compromised.'

  'Except mine, of course,' Dakar gritted, half-speechless. 'You've been involved with this farce from the start?'

  Davien did not respond: the reason was plain. Dakar bit back a curse, for his idiot blindness. What else but a Sorcerer's hand could have masked a crown prince's etheric identity, or even, changed gold into stone, then back again? 'Why did you come here?' the Mad Prophet repeated. 'Don't say you could not have shouldered this risk and spared Rathain's lineage from a lethal exposure!'

  Again, still opaque, the Betrayer refused answer.

  Dakar suppressed his headstrong tongue. He sustained spiteful silence, against precedent. For unless the Sorcerer allowed him to pass, no protest would make any difference.

  'Not a whimper of argument?' Davien's needling shifted to laughter. 'I see you've outgrown drowning set-backs in drink. That's unfortunate. You'll have to weather your rages, awake. The finale won't play for another two days, before midnight at the dark moon.'

  Dakar found his lost nerve. 'Don't expect me to wait.'

  Amused, Davien watched him. Those obsidian eyes could absorb all the light in creation before an opponent could read him. 'Arithon once told me the wish of his heart. Would you deny him the tempering experience he needs to achieve his most cherished desire?'

  'Lies!' cracked Dakar, reduced to bravado. 'You can't rightfully keep me. Nor would Sethvir allow you the blood of another crown prince as a sacrifice.'

  Davien's whimsy vanished. 'Spare me your tangle of trite accusations!'

  'Trite? Accusations?' Dakar lost his wits. 'Your bluster's no better than piss in a wind-storm!' Infused by a courage he had never possessed, he lashed out. 'Alone, and drained to the verge of oblivion, Arithon lies at dreadful risk! He will succumb to the Kralovir's snare. Don't trouble to claim you'll act to spare him. Your double-dealing might make me toss breakfast.'

  'The risks lie outside of your limited grasp,' the renegade Sorcerer rebutted. No muscle moved. Yet his patience was spent. 'Don't even think you can try to imagine! Move one inch, and depend on the fact I will take forceful measures to prevent you.'

  Breathing hard, Dakar rose. 'Do that, by Ath! I refuse to lie down and cringe like a dog while you toy with more royal lives. Your chess match to see a crown lineage cut dead cannot meet the same end as Melhalla's.'

  Davien wasted no word. His poised form stayed motionless. The spell-craft he deployed struck Dakar's awareness, and darkness welled up without form and dropped him unconscious.

  * * *

  Summer 5671

  Catch

  The galley the Prince Exalted engaged for fast transport reached port in Jaelot just prior to sunset at the dark of the moon. Caught aback, since the pennant that streamed from her mast-head was the only forewarning received, the town's flustered Lord Mayor jumped, scrambling. Rushed orders saw an escort assembled. A cordon cleared space through the press at the harbor, while commerce ground to a stupefied halt, and a breathless fanfare of trumpets heralded the blessed arrival. The ranking burghers had assembled beneath the town banners by the time the august vessel tied up to the bollards. She had been run at speed. Her oarsmen panted in prostrate exhaustion, and her bright work wore crusts of dried salt. The curious craned. Flushed in their finery, the guild ministers cheered while the gangway set down, and the gleaming embassy from Avenor stepped onto the carpet spread over the dock.

  Amid the excited explosion of talk and the galvanic rumour of war, the royal arrival was welcomed with dazed speculation and obsequious, open arms.

  Foremost among Jaelot's dignitaries was the clairvoyant high priest whose suspect appointment had originated under the auspice of the corrupt high priest, Cerebeld. Abroad in full daylight, the rotund little man displayed no sign he might share the vile taint of a binding instilled by the Kralovir.

  Yet Lysaer s'Ilessid was taking no chances. His person stayed guarded ever since the debacle that had flushed the treasonous ring of Avenor's turned council-men. A fresh-faced young man wearing the collared mantle of a crown examiner preceded the sunwheel guard, his tuned sensitivity entrusted to screen for signs of errant spell-craft.

  While the town mayor was stalled by an opportune speech, the oathsworn talent gave the shining figure of the Blessed Prince his tacit signal of clearance. By his arcane assessment, the priest's presence was harmless. No lead-foil ripple of bound shades entangled the living stream of his aura.

  Lysaer s'Ilessid smiled his relieved acknowledgement. A diamond in sunlight in his white and gold, he loosened the fist he had held in tense readiness to wield light for a summary execution. Assured of Jaelot's loyalty, his retinue gathered about him, and his guard captain signalled the drum-roll to march.

  The Blessed Prince stepped into the glare of late day, ablaze in the pomp of state trappings. His blond head was bare, a fair beacon amid his cowled clerks, and the enamelled helms of his officers. As his personal guard and his banner-bearers formed ranks to proceed to the mayor's palace, the florid form of the resident priest was tucked into their glittering company.

  Jaelot's aged mayor followed, leading his cluster of bedazzled council-men. Surrounding, the cheers of the onlooking crowd swelled into a deafening roar. As the procession swept away from the bay-side and arrowed through the packed streets, aproned craftsmen left work, and balcony windows banged open. If Lysaer did not pause to touch outstretched hands, he smiled with gracious acknowledgement. The shouts went from noisy to deafening. Matrons waved, and young girls with ribboned baskets showered a riot of flower petals. Man, woman, and child, all of Jaelot rejoiced for the avatar's visitation. Lysaer's cameo beauty and majestic grace captivated their adulation. Aged men lost their breath. Gawking boys pressed the cordon and clamoured to enlist, starry-eyed with eagerness to bear arms for the cause of humankind's deliverance from Darkness.

  In such august presence, the plump priest was outshone. His innocuous stride bobbed unremarked amid blinding white cloth and inspired charisma.

  But to the shade of the Fellowship Sorcerer who lurked unseen, that man's innocent appearance was not harmless. A latent potential for threat lay embedded in the ephemeral stream of the priest's outer aura. Its pattern was dormant. Insidious as a shard of transparent glass suspended in flowing water, the minute fluctuation in density snagged barely a ripple across fine perception. Yet Luhaine detected that shimmer of subtle disharmony, however far it lay past the range of visible light.

  His aware foreboding would not be dismissed. He stalked the circle of fervent disciples attached to the sunwheel banner, a purposeful current that stitched between the carved sign-boards and threaded through the stone finials of ivy-clad buildings. His eavesdropping raised no trace of disturbance. If years of sly practice had taught him to hoodwink the Koriani Council, that expertise did not ease his inherent distaste for skulking.

  His caustic complaint spanned over distance and ruffled his colleague, on stationed surveillance in Darkling. 'This pursuit is rank madness! Sethvir was insane to believe Rathain's prince should have risked the least part of our charge to purge the Kralovir from the Alliance.'

  'So what's wrong with blood sport in front of the chase?' Kharadmon flipped back in double entendre. Ensconced like a wisp of caught shade in a crack in the mountain-based citadel's curtain wall, he tracked a ferrety sunwheel devotee, as well. This one's mettlesome cla
irvoyance had once launched an armed company to hunt down the Master of Shadow. Since the disastrous outcome had left the Barrens littered with the bones of both horses and men, the reminder should have squelched Luhaine's grumbling dissatisfaction.

  Yet today the scholarly spirit posted at Jaelot harboured a foreboding too jagged to still. 'Davien. That's what's wrong. He's juggled the stakes. Without his inveigling, do you truly think Arithon would have dared -'

  'We're past second options,' Kharadmon flared back. The surprise change in planning could not be undone. The Betrayer's hand had already meddled, with Arithon's life immutably thrown into jeopardy. 'Best stop wafting loose wind and mind the fat priest that you came for. If that latent sigil he carries turns active, we'll be in the proverbial muck-heap over our heads.'

  Never less than meticulous, Luhaine huffed. 'Lose Rathain's prince, your revolting point's moot.' The burnished procession he followed now arrived on Jaelot's palace stair. As Lysaer commanded the predictable pause to address the fawning crowd, the watchful Sorcerer blended his essence into the wood grain of a lamp-post. 'No sanctioned crown heir should have been asked to redress Etarra's cult pestilence in the first place.' Kharadmon could never resist casting bait. 'You'd rather watch the prince speared on the run by the swords of a corrupted army? That's scarcely fair play. One against twelve makes far better odds than one set against fifteen thousand.'

  Yet Luhaine in pursuit of a chokehold concern could outlast the clamped jaws of a bull-dog. 'Your charge is asleep?'

  'Behind darkened shutters inside a locked keep, and sitting a clutch of ominous portents,' Kharadmon allowed on a rankled shift into wariness. 'Don't rush to commiserate, or better still, volunteer to exchange places.' Unlike the priest counterpart with Lysaer in Jaelot, his own charge bore the lead-foil haze that demarked a fully consecrated practitioner. Past question, the bad lot resided in Darkling. The inequity left all too little tolerance for the wool-gathering indulgence of worry as the crucial hour approached.

  Moment to moment, the crept line of shadow engulfed the surrounding slate roof-tops. Alpenglow briefly burnished the Skyshiel peaks, then dimmed into featureless gloom. As night followed sundown on the dark of the moon, the pair of discorporate Sorcerers held their vigilant ground: one immersed in the speeches and pomp of a state celebration in Jaelot, and the other, standing guard in the dour, walled town that straddled the notched pass on the road to the Eltair coast. There, as cold dew-fall pewtered the cobbles and dripped from the gargoyle gutters, the priest immured in the closed keep stirred awake.

  Servants regaled him in his gold chain and sunwheel mantle behind his latched door and bronze shutters. Moments later, their helping hands were dismissed. The cult minion emerged alone. The terraced courtyard he chose to enact his dire sacrament was enclosed by thick walls, and bordered by tended flower-beds. Around him, lavender and foxglove and phlox shed their fragrance in earth-bound silence. From the street, far below, the grind of a dray and the dicers' whoops from a packed tavern seemed a life set apart. Under black sky and glittering starlight, the corrupt priest stepped onto swept stone and invoked his ritual circle.

  'They've started,' Kharadmon signalled to Luhaine.

  Still nestled into his niche in the masonry, the Fellowship Sorcerer watched the Kralovir cultist strike a spark to a stinking grease candle. Sullen red, the lit wick hissed and spat. As if ill-set flame resented its tether of string, it took hold and burned as though feeding on light. The priest drew a bone-knife. He whispered in monotone, then pressed the point to his arm. One drop of let blood, a last guttural word, and the dark birthed a host of capering, unclean shadows.

  These, the priest breathed in like perfume.

  Kharadmon coiled in readiness . . .

  At Jaelot, the first harbinger did not seem momentous. Beneath the wax-lights of the sumptuous banquet given to honour Prince Lysaer, the smiling, fat priest accepted a seat with his fellows at the Lord Mayor's high table. Yet where any latent sigil of necromancy seeded potential for threat, the Sorcerer keeping watch in concealment knew not to place trust in appearances. Luhaine lurked with taut patience, prepared, as Sethvir's tacit contact came through and revealed the events in lock-step, at Etarra . . .

  Darkness shot through with the smell of damp stone infused the glimmer of returned awareness. Arithon swallowed. His scraped throat was dry. Somewhere, forlorn, a child was crying. Befogged by lassitude, he realized her wailing had troubled him for some time. His disturbed effort to rise was caught short by fixed rope: a wrongness. Bound at ankles and wrists, he was splayed naked across a stone slab. The taut cords stretched his joints and pulled at his throbbing left forearm. The hurt arose from a scabbed-over cut; more wrongness.

  He did not remember receiving the wound.

  Arithon wrestled his spinning senses to sort meaning from febrile chaos. Shadows moved, near him. Male voices were chanting in scratched whispers that conjured; a worse wrongness still. A sullen flicker of flame burned nearby. He lay enclosed by a circle of candles, breathing in grease-stinking smoke. The pall burdened his lungs and shot queer, leaden murk through his mage-sight. Lids cracked as he peered through the whirling haze, Arithon made out the forms of his captors.

  Their heads wore an unpleasant aureole of dull mercury, streaming in shadows above him. Each face was cowled. Bare arms were circled with inscribed copper bracelets, and drenched: ringless fingers touched, coated bright red. While the crying child wailed, Arithon felt them stroke his strapped flesh. The whispered chant rose and fell in the background as his person was painted over with uncanny symbols, rendered in blood.

  Arithon wrenched. Ripped by gagging nausea, he found no relief. His gut was long emptied. Choked by the burn of heaved bile, he wracked with dry heaves until he sank, wrung limp by wheeling vertigo. The nightmare of abusive practice continued. A soaked finger traced over his brow, while the metallic tang of fresh slaughter savaged his mind and his senses.

  The phosphor shine of animal magnetism whirled away like blown dust, and trained mage-sense exploded with knowing: the blood was a child's. The odd, sucking sound he had struggled to place was her slashed-open heart, still beating in convulsive reflex.

  Arithon cried aloud. Overcome by revulsion, he blacked out as his hammering pulse rushed him giddy, then drained his head.

  Sensation returned in shimmering patches. He had to fight for each breath. Whirled by a roiling rip tide of faintness, he clawed his way back to cognizance. A cold weight burdened his unsettled stomach. Someone had rested a clay bowl on the flat muscle beneath his rib-cage. The rim was inscribed with baleful ciphers. Their power glared as a coal in the night, shedding ripples like miasmic blight. The emanation laced into the gravid dark and combed streaks through the vapor from drug-scented candles.

  The child sacrifice had ceased her tormented crying. A gulf of unnatural quiet remained. Amid the fraught singing of blood in his ears, through the rags of his disjointed vision, Arithon saw the nacreous flicker of ghosts: children bearing the lead-foil seals that bridled the spirit beyond death. Snared shades had no voice. Without sinew to scream, their desperate, mute writhing became rendered in graphic silence.

  Arithon strained at the knots on his wrists until exhaustion threatened oblivion. He could not pull free. Eyes shut, lips parted, he sought the dropped threads of his mastery. How had he come to be here? Swimming senses ravaged all cohesive thought. The harsh ciphers written at chest, throat, and brow stained the clarity of his mage-sense.

  Through dizziness, he felt heavy fingers close on his bare arm, followed fast by the sting of sliced skin.

  Shocking pain ripped a gasp from his throat. Though shallow, the cut hurt like the jab of a hornet. Arithon thrashed, yanked up short. The ties pinned him, utterly helpless. His attempt to turn his head was clamped fast. More voices whispered. Smoke and black robes swirled at the edges of vision as someone raised a ceremonial candle. Heated wax dripped across his fresh wound. The scald was followed by the imprint of a seal and given
closure by lines of cold conjury. Arithon howled as a sleeting needle of ice shot into the bones of his wrist. The sensation ripped through nerves, bones, and viscera, then stabbed as a spike through his heart. The left upper quadrant of his body went numb, more void than a sucking vacuum. As though flesh had vanished, Arithon was no longer aware of his arm. Worse, the hand still roped to the slab remained oddly unaffected. By the trickle of warmth tracing over his palm, he still felt the inflicted gash, copiously bleeding.

  Something coiled as though alive through thick smoke. Its dull silver cloudiness made the burdened air seem too dense to draw into his chest. Raced pulse, panted breath, Arithon shuddered. The cowled figures moved a step widder-shins. Scarlet fingers rose overhead. They clasped the hilt of the dripping blade, now streamered like flame with blued phosphor.

  The horror broke Arithon to shivering sweat. Initiate sight recognized the effervescent stain unleashed by the act of blood-sacrifice.

  More hushed incantation; the gleaming bone-blade was consecrated by the black art of necromancy, then rinsed in the bowl on his abdomen. The liquid inside captured the resonant imprint. Sigils inscribed in the vessel's clay rim entrapped Arithon's individual signature. Named consciousness recoiled. An invasive spider dropped onto a web, the thrust of warped conjury lanced a shard of ice through the victim's exposed navel.

  Arithon screamed.

  This, his first experience of dark sorcery: a separation from the stream of grand harmony that shattered the hoop of his being. The fissure expanded. His innate wholeness felt sundered in ways that left him no grasp to recover. The abyss sucked him down. Plunged into a gulf of imprisoning fear, shown helplessness beyond imagining, he howled. Initiate mastery could not reconcile the tear. He bled energy through the rent at his wrist; drowned in the dire void in his belly.

  More voices muttered. A clammy touch handled him. A necromancer's spell infused the wax seal set over his bleeding wrist. The arcane closure set into the wound solidified the dissociated feeling. His torpid hand now felt cast in lead. Skin and joints were alive, but now sheared from the command of his natural reflex.