Fugitive Prince (17 page)

While the fitted block walls of the citadel ceased their sympathetic vibration, the visiting adept of Ath’s Brotherhood paused just outside the door to the King’s Chamber. Her willowy build and white robes made her form appear cased in brightness against the grimed arch of the stair vault.

Or perhaps the effect arose from the spirit aura thrown off by initiates of her discipline when they chose to walk in dim places. Few in Athera were empowered to keep pace with the mysteries of Ath’s Brotherhood.

One such confronted her now, a Sorcerer who, over thousands of years, had been other things in his past.

He leaned on the massive, iron-strapped door in what seemed a deranged fit of woolgathering. His features were glazed in the glow of the candles. Less susceptible than stone to the fluxes of grand conjury, wax-fed flame only danced to the drafts, as winter’s cold swirled
and snatched at the shutters, and moaned through the chinks in old masonry.

The adept surveyed Althain’s Warden with her tuned awareness. Her shapely hands stayed clasped beneath her embroidered cuffs; threadwork of gold and silver which at times glinted back something more than commonplace reflection. The heavier sconces, flaming in iron brackets on the landing, scrawled moving shadow across her Fellowship subject, masked in his disarming vagaries.

Sethvir’s eyes alone showed a mind like surgical steel swathed in misleading burlap. Beneath the spiked tufts of white brows, his gaze remained bleak and trackless as ice on the northern flank of a snowdrift.

The adept knew a sudden, deep stab of uneasiness, as if a wet leaf had brushed scraping tracks down her spine. “Never doubt,” she urged, her dusky chin lifted under the shelf of her hood. “Your Fellowship chose right and fitting action with regard to Lysaer s’Ilessid.”

Sethvir’s seamed knuckles tightened on the doorframe. “Right or not, his expulsion was our forced duty.”

Evasive words, to mask chains of happenstance that
would come
to shape Athera’s future. Ath’s adept matched his challenge, unwavering in her regard. Drafts stirred the clogged fleece of the Sorcerer’s beard and combed unseen over sinews and flesh he often forgot he possessed, so many years had his consciousness ridden the intricate tides of the earth link. Against flooding warmth and pale paneling, Althain’s Warden seemed an emaciated tree, braced and shaped by relentless storms.

The adept laid slim, olive fingers on his sleeve. “Why are you troubled? Should we fear for one man’s fate, do you think? The judgment of the Paravians is sourced in Ath’s wisdom. They won’t err in behalf of your prince.”

By their nature, indeed, they could not. Sethvir knew best of any. His sustained, rooted patience
was
the unflinching remorse of a conscience chained still through long years and hard-fought experience. Before such burdensome memories as his, no mere touch in kindness could comfort. Althain’s Warden therefore yielded nothing, his face clamped to folds like burled cypress.

The adept firmed her grasp, insistent. “Lysaer shall receive his redemption from wrong.”

“And is his choice wrong?”
Sethvir asked. No kindness could spare him the lacerating vision imposed through the channels of the earth link. Stamped into his awareness, passed on through her contact, the adept shared the keening, hot surge of a crowd whipped on to devotion in the far-distant plaza at Avenor.

“What’s left to weigh?” Unperturbed, she let Althain’s Warden share the upset Lysaer’s will had once imposed upon the sacred grove in her brotherhood’s hostel near Shaddorn. “This prince is both willful and flawed.”

Outside, a blast of north wind hurled sand like gritted smoke against the tower. As if flesh were scoured by the sting of each grain, Sethvir shook his head. “Lysaer is terrified beyond life to abandon his care for the innocent.”

“Never mind they need none of his help!” The adept spilled a silvery, sharp laugh. “Athera’s folk can find their salvation very well. They need no misfit savior playing on their fears to shore up a creed reft of spirit.” Still probing, she gave Althain’s Warden her most bracing pity. “Stay your grief in this hour, you waste anguish on the wrong victim. While Ath’s order becomes maligned by false truth, and the masses are fired to worship your Prince of the Light,
rather, Arithon s’Ffalenn becomes the spirit in mortal danger of corruption.”

“Then you see very well.” Sethvir disengaged his arm. “You must know our Fellowship dreads that beyond anything.” For an instant, the wells of his eyes seemed rinsed blank, both shield and mirror against her prying concern. “You name just one ugly crux out of many.
Each of my doubts is well-founded.”
He covered her young, woman’s fingers with a palm that had worn bloodstains before those of ink, and too much of both for lasting quietude. The strength which led her to the head of the stair was anything but an old man’s.

She protested his courtesy as unnecessary.

“As you wish.” Sethvir let her go. While the tormented flames in the sconces rinsed his face, Ath’s adept read its mapwork of lines and snatched insight: Althain’s Warden regretted a hope kept too fiercely.

Swift in riposte, his forthright, sad smile foiled her sympathy. “Your Brotherhood can never serve as priests.”

The lady gave way, then, no longer able to match that wise gaze. Shaken, not cowed, she veiled her distress in the screening shadow of her hood. “For all good intent, if we tried, we would seed the very rift in Ath’s continuity that Lysaer s’Ilessid shall create through selfish error.”

Brotherhood adepts could not intervene in affairs of kingdoms or men. Nor did their high initiates leave their hostels to teach or draw in new acolytes. They dared not set forth to preach, even against Lysaer’s threat of false faith, which could raise the sure power to scatter them. Theirs was not, and never could be, a guide to established religion. Seekers came to them to find inspiration;
as they chose, they might stay and take the path to life’s deeper mystery.

Ath’s adepts held to no doctrine and no creed. They kept their way clear, their channel to truth unclouded by the arrogance of moralizing fools, to misinterpret, or by the greedy who corrupted to exploit. The Paravians who had been their example were departed, and with them went the world’s pure connection to the miracle of the prime source.

“We cannot let the knowledge we guard fall prey, first to dogma, then to power and politics. If your Fellowship would ask help,” the adept admonished, “then search again for the lost. Should the old races return, Lysaer’s claim of divinity cannot do other than fail.”

“We have sent Arithon,” Sethvir said. Nothing more.

Those words should have been arrows, to strike so quick to the heart. “I am humbled,” the adept gasped. Tears broke her voice, and trembling reflections sparked over the thread patterns at her collar and cuffs. “Because of your sacrifice,
Ath preserve, yet again,
for the endurance of your Fellowship, the light of our grace may live on.”

Sethvir’s fingers, reclasped to hers, became reassurance and comfort.

Whatever deep worry he hedged to keep hidden, her standing to pressure him was forfeit.

Serenity undone, the adept quit the landing. Her retreat down the stairwell raised pattering, small echoes, no tribute at all to the sorrows enshrined in the granite walls of this sanctuary. The vast, shifting shadows offered no refuge. Nor did the Warden of Althain’s piercing watch ever leave her. His thin, fragile shoulders in their formal maroon robes stayed unbowed, in full command of a desperate history. To one who might hazard the whole scope of that burden, naught was left but to ache. Words were no match for such courage and generosity, that in unequivocating competence assumed Lysaer’s dark tangle in her Brotherhood’s stead.

Again, the Fellowship chose to brave every fissure of torn continuity that human works brought to the world.

Worst of all, the decision to champion her Brotherhood’s seclusion was
not
blind. Sethvir fully recognized the perilous potential posed by s’Ilessid folly. He knew too well how events might grow to jeopardize all that his Fellowship had become in their labor on Athera’s behalf. Risk and sacrifice, the Sorcerer grasped every possible ramification. No warning could serve; stewardship of the compact might test
yet again
the peace of mind he and his colleagues had earned amidst the strife of two Ages.

They would shoulder this coil, atop the dread quandaries already ceded to their care by the past flight of the Paravians. Tears made an ungrateful gift for such courage; pity fell short as a eulogy.

While the adept sought her peace in the comfort of solitude, Sethvir left his post on the third-floor landing. Circling thoughts left him frayed as a scrap of old rag hammered and wrung by a storm tide. His Fellowship no longer held the Brotherhood’s view, that the disappearance of the Paravians posed Athera’s greatest setback. That belief had been violently undone a year past, when Kharadmon’s foray to the sealed worlds beyond South Gate had unmasked the darker face of Desh-thiere.

Weighed down by the terrifying scope of those facts, Sethvir reentered the King’s Chamber.

There, settled into a solitary vigil, Traithe sat unmoving, his fingers with their bands of old scar tissue knotted beneath his cleft chin. His cut gray hair brushed his collar like tarnish as he roused to the clank of the door latch. He tracked his colleague’s passage through coffeedark eyes, while ghost silent, Althain’s Warden recrossed the carpet and pinched beeswax candles one by one.

“You did not broach our problem with the wraiths still at large upon Marak,” he surmised.

“No.” The acrid bite of singed string spindled through the musk of hot wax, and the room’s ingrained fragrance of citrus-oiled wood. For each light extinguished, one shadow died also; like overlaid oil stains, those remaining capered in pantomime about Sethvir’s feet. “If the Brotherhood won’t open their hostels to help thwart Lysaer’s proselytizing in Athera, they would scarcely face damnation on the scale we’ve encountered for lost spirits entrapped on a gate world.”

“You don’t fault them?” Traithe said, prodded out of the pragmatism he brandished like armor against his own measure of despair.

Sethvir’s fleeting smile masked inward distress,
that any Fellowship colleague ever required to beg reassurance.
Years might pass, but the ongoing tragedy of Traithe’s impairment never for a day ceased to sting. “The adepts aren’t wrong in their stance.” No more than the Paravians had been to abandon man’s conflict since the hour clean sunlight was vanquished. “I could ask, but not argue. Desh-thiere’s works have ever been ours to unravel.”

Wings rustled. The raven swaggered the length of the mantel, head tipped askance and one sequin eye fixed on the Sorcerers.

“I hear, little brother,” Sethvir murmured, his regard centered still upon Traithe. In the dimmed majesty of the King’s Chamber, he
waited, the grip of his patience like the earth wisdom contained in old stone.

For a colleague left crippled since the hour of the Mistwraith’s forced entry, courage came slowly to define an event too recent and raw to assimilate. “I can’t doubt our stern judgment was needed,” Traithe broached at length. “But, Ath show us mercy, I need to ask. How much of Lysaer’s acts arise from Desh-thiere’s accursed instigation, and how much, out of wayward self-will?”

Sethvir moved. The last branch of lit candles spoked his step in wheeling shadows. “Do you wish me to show you the aura?” He stopped again, waited, while the casement panes rattled to the outside barrage of north winds.

“Yes.” Traithe shivered, straightened, laid his hands on the table. The fingers would not flex fully straight; the elegant, long bones that onetime were clean as a dancer’s lay twisted and ravaged by old burns. His formless apprehension poisoned the pause.
Half the given talent to set shackles on the Mistwraith lay tied through today’s condemned prince and his inborn power to shape light.
“I would know what we face for the future.”

The issue went beyond the corruption of an ancient royal line. Desh-thiere’s threat had increased. The step which cast Lysaer outside of the compact opened yet another pitfall to bring the last plunge to disaster.

Althain’s Warden extinguished the last bank of candles. He recrossed the carpet, soft footed, and rested his palms on Traithe’s shoulders. His touch in the darkness came feathered and dry as the chance-met brush of a moth’s wing. Instantaneous awareness crossed that slight contact and seized his mind like dull pain. He knew as his own the harrowing weariness wrung through the flesh beneath his hands. “Let me carry this,” he murmured.

“Take my permission, and gladly at that.” Traithe raised a crooked grin, the humor forced through his iron bravado an unvanquished bent for lightheartedness. “You always did like to run things, never mind your crafty knack for making everyone believe that somebody else was in charge.”

Sethvir laughed. “I could wish this particular trouble sat elsewhere. Then we could chat over honey and scones, and brew up a nice pot of tea.”

He started his work in one seamless second, his bodily senses discarded for the sharp, trained awareness of mage-sight. The chamber around him transformed to that altered plane of perception. Simple objects unveiled themselves in complexity, the weavings of Name
and history revealed. The pile of the carpet showed its humble beginning as wool on the backs of jostling sheep; then shadowed in overlay, each dye in its coloring, brewed from plantstuffs and crushed insects and urine; and underlying the weave like the tap of ghost fingers, the thump of the looms dragging warp threads through weft in the hands of chattering craftswomen. The pale shafts of candles bespoke honeyed summer days and the bustling industry of bees. Mere flecks of dust adrift on the air gained the lordly, bright splendor of stars. Metal for latches, and the bronze of wrought ornament whispered of dark beginnings in the earth, then shrilled to the bright heat of smelting.

At will, Sethvir could sound solid matter for its nuance. His mastery could sort through its light-dance to the bundled spin of energy which held the imprint of events long past. The ebony tabletop would still house the echo of the commitment that Halduin s’Ilessid had accepted, in signature and seal and blood oath, when he swore to uphold Tysan’s royal charter. The old stone kept vibrations of earlier times, when the flutes of the Athlien Paravians had led the joy of spring larks, and the winds past the casements had thundered to the mating calls of great dragons. Years and change like layers stamped in sediment, through the centuries comprising three Ages, the structure of Althain Tower itself speared its indelible imprint. Its bleak stone crossed time’s arc in fired loops. Its guard pattern bridged every facet of existence, then soared beyond, an unvanquished fist of white light: a lofty splendor of desperation and hope, shot through by the terrible defense wards wrought by the centaur mason who, for love of the land, had fitted each mortised joint in the walls, then spilled his own blood to bind the seals into permanency.