Authors: Janny Wurts
The poleman paused. Shoved by contrary wind, his boat drifted.
On the greening bank, the spearpointed sedges bent and flattened, streaked like ruby glass with reflections. The juddering light picked out the arrivals, with their stitched leather caps tied with talismans fashioned from feathers, and strung acorns, and little stars woven of flax straw.
“It’s a man sitting there. Has no boots on, that’s odd,” the grandmother observed in a mollified, half-toothless warble.
Rain slanted through the purl of the mist. “Could be dead,” mused the squat uncle, who rinsed the offal from the last kill from his hands. He jabbed a thumb rubbed shiny from endless hours spent twisting fish twine. “Has a sword, see? Could be dangerous.”
“Isn’t moving,” the third party ventured.
The skiff jostled closer. The thwart gouged the peat bank.
“Still breathing,” said the trapper, kneeling down. “Just barely.” He stabbed his bloody knife into the reed basket shining with the scales of gutted fish, while his companions reached out tentative hands and lightly fingered the stranger gone lost in the bogs.
“Clanborn, and in trouble,” the grandmother determined.
Another chimed in soft counterpoint, “Shelter then.”
In silent efficiency, the two men arose from the skiff and stepped onto the marshy bank. Shadows wheeled, stitched with carnelian where plummeting raindrops sliced through the flickering lamplight. They bent, grasped Mearn’s arms at the elbow and shoulder, then startled back with hissed breaths as their find stirred and lifted his head.
He had gray eyes, the pupils wide and black with shock. The two fen folk poised, stilled as scared rabbits, while the rain sang and splashed unabated. The man squinted through the downpour. His vision seemed reluctant to focus, as if the skiff and its occupants were a nightmare come visiting, or a madman’s distortion of Dharkaron Avenger’s Black Chariot, filled with wizened little people with bloodied knives and insistent plucking fingers.
Then he spoke, the ingrained courtesy of his ancestors set in the antique speech of his breeding. “Please. I beg help. If you know, if you can spare a runner to seek, let these cases I carry reach Lord Maenol s’Gannley or his kinsmen with all possible speed.”
The grandmother clicked her tongue through shut teeth. “Whist, bring him in. Or this one that he seeks will receive his cold bones for naught but last rites and a burial.”
At Althain Tower, the mood changed from downcast to grim in the darkened, chill hours before dawn. Sethvir sat, chin on fist, at the massive stone table in the library chamber, half-swallowed by the gloom which gathered under the star-patterned beams of the ceiling. As his mind ranged through yet another chain of auguries, his forehead stayed pinched into creases. The last such cast sequence had already fretted the white ends of his beard into finger-caught tangles. The dark, polished table before him was swept clear of books. By his elbow, a filled mug of tea had gone cold. The casement windows at his back were latched shut, the tight fastenings kept under tireless siege by a barrage of sharp winds that, farther south, coalesced as a rainstorm.
The one dribbled candle alight in the stand fluttered anyway, tormented by the gyrating presence of a visiting discorporate colleague. “Just say what you see,” Kharadmon urged at length, his pique the snarl of a mewed-up predator, and his worry unsubtle as the flaying edge of a storm front. “I’m well aware the news out of Tysan bodes no good. Can the details make things any worse?”
Sethvir shut his eyes. Unmoving, he answered, “Dakar’s warning framed an accurate judgment. Arithon eats, but his body rejects sustenance afterward. He speaks, he perseveres. He stubbornly enacts all the movements of living. But the fire, the passion, his sense of selfworth and entitlement have all been strangled by grief. Like the Paravians, who waste away in the absence of hope, our Teir’s’Ffalenn tries
to endure against the grain of his born nature. He keeps the very letter of his oath to survive.”
Through a plangent, fierce pause, Kharadmon spun in suspension. “Say on. I can already guess.”
“Oh, the gist isn’t new.” Sethvir stabbed distraught hands through the hair at his temples, the farseeing span of his vision all bitterness. Morriel Prime had foreseen this crux years ago, that Arithon’s inheritance from two royal bloodlines created an incompatible legacy. “The gifts of s’Ahelas foresight cross-linked with s’Ffalenn compassion poisons all that he does, all that he thinks. Now he’s forced to betray the loyalties he holds sacrosanct, he has no defense against guilt and despondency.”
While his colleague’s roving angst churned a crock of quill pens into rustling agitation, Althain’s Warden summed up. “In the absence of grace, entropy triumphs. The flesh loses its natural drive to renew itself.”
“Then you fear our Teir’s’Ffalenn will succumb into wasting disease, over time.” Kharadmon’s presence sheared over the bookshelves, raising dust like fine smoke from the rows of old, musty covers. Pages flipped madly on another opened tome propped on a lion-carved lectern. “Well give him some news.” The self-contained tempest paused on its course, reversed direction, and whirled the quill pens on the opposite spin like small weathercocks. “Find him some word of encouragement.”
The Warden of Althain simply looked up, his gaze the blank blue of a robin’s egg.
Kharadmon stopped, a poured well of cold that exuded biting frustration. “There are moments your mind’s just like knotted string, too vexingly layered to unravel.”
Sethvir stirred, unfolded crimped fingers, and with a fingernail showing a black rim of ink, traced a circle on the obsidian tabletop. “You won’t like what you see.”
“Well, that’s nothing fresh,” Kharadmon breezed on. “These times are rank chaos. Though Luhaine is a pessimist, and his theories are galling, I have to agree that entropy’s been winning since Desh-thiere came calling through South Gate.”
“Peace, here.” Althain’s Warden traced a glyph in blue light on the air.
Then he laid light palms on the table and pronounced a phrase in the slow, rolling consonants that awakened the Name for the primal awareness of
this
stone which held his attention. A permission was exchanged in language and pitch beyond range of ordinary hearing.
Sethvir traced another glyph inside the closed figure, and awaited an inward alignment.
A connection closed like a spark in his mind. He framed his intent and sank his awareness into the dance of meshed energies which bound the obsidian into solidity. His grasp of grand conjury accomplished what no other arcane order on the continent could achieve on the wings of pure thought: he invoked shift in resonance, and raised the vibrational frequency of dense matter.
Within his drawn circle, the stone’s matrix dissolved, transmuted to a state of pure light.
Rinsed in a flare of actinic brilliance, Althain’s Warden reached out again. He said, hand poised, the spiked snow of his eyebrows trained toward Kharadmon’s breezy fidgeting, “The fish, at least, led the proper fishermen to the catch. I give you the brightest thread in the tapestry.”
“Well, we can’t all be scatterbrained and capture such nuance by dreaming.” But this once, Kharadmon’s baiting humor fell short.
Althain’s Warden did not smile as he touched the field of unformed matter with his forefinger and imprinted the reenactment of a scene drawn in through his tie to the earth link…
Rain splashed and guttered through the reeds in Mogg’s Fen, where a soaked party of marsh trappers poled their skiff northward through night’s inky maze of shoals and mudbanks and flat water. Wrapped in furs and greased hide, a shuddering clansman lolled half-unconscious, raging curses against an Alliance invasion in feverish fits of delirium…
“Mearn s’Brydion? Taken north? But you know his warning will come far too late.” Kharadmon wheeled over the shadowy aumbries, sarcastically unimpressed, since Lysaer’s gathered forces were already present and closing upon Maenol’s clansmen. “What’s one coal raked from the flames of a building conflagration? Merciful Ath! If that’s a success, you’d better show me the failures. Or Luhaine will claim I’ve traded my bollocks for outright, shrinking faintheartedness. ”
Sethvir bowed his head. “Wiser, perhaps, to discount pride and praise the one gift as a blessing.” But he honored Kharadmon’s bidding and set the small linkage between transmuted stone and his powers of earth-linked perception. The scenes he translated through the ring of his scrying were indeed unrelenting bad news.
Lysaer’s war galleys swept down on the Isles of Min Pierens and overran Arithon’s small outpost at Corith. The site had no defenses. The ramshackle
sheds, the tools, the small sail loft which refitted the stolen hulls from Riverton were razed and burned inside the first hour of landing. The laborers had been trapped, killed as they resisted, or run down and captured as they fled through the brush by headhunters and trained packs of tracking dogs. The handful of survivors now languished in chains with the wounded, shortly to see the Alliance destroy their last outside hope of a rescue.
Into the harbor, unsuspecting, ran the
Cariadwin
with her crew of freed galley slaves and her hold filled with clan scouts just signed on as untrained volunteers. These expected to man three forthcoming new ships, and were yet unaware of the setbacks inflicted by Koriani intervention. None of them knew of the launching just gone bad at Riverton; neither they nor their captain realized as they sailed that an Alliance trap lay in waiting.
Sethvir spoke a word, and time bowed to his bidding. The colors in the scrying on the tabletop bled into the ghostly gray prescience that unveiled the unformed future. The sequence firmed into sharpening focus, as the few tracks of possibility in play merged into a remorseless junction. Kharadmon saw that the coming sea fight at Corith would end in a vicious defeat. Against an outfitted war fleet, caught in confined waters, the
Cariadwin’s
fierce defense was foredoomed.
“Alt,”
Sethvir murmured, the Paravian rune that marked closing. The silver-point tones of unborn event bled away, replaced by another vision, this one a view of the Alliance shipworks at Riverton, grained in a mist of falling rain.
“What you see next occurred just this afternoon,” Althain’s Warden added in subdued explanation; and Kharadmon shared all the sorrowful details of Caolle’s survival, now entangled with the last thread in the Koriani design that devolved from the arraigned yard workers and sail crews kept hostage to force Arithon’s capitulation. Sethvir’s scrying perused the firelit chamber where Lirenda, First Senior, signed the requisite papers of extradition in the smug company of Riverton’s mayor. With a crystal wineglass poised in one hand, and an expression serene as milk porcelain, she delivered her order for the prisoners to sail on the dawn tide three days hence.
“I don’t like her eyes,” Kharadmon observed tartly. “Vindictive as nightshade to stop a man’s heart in his sleep.”
“She looks that way when she’s hiding something.” Althain’s Warden considered the sorry prisoners held in chains in the cramped cell that once had confined Dakar. “The three new brigs will be diverted from crown orders by her Prime’s will to form a blockade. If our Teir’s’Ffalenn crosses through Korias without mishap, he could
certainly fall to Morriel’s conspiracy as he sails his small sloop out of Mainmere.”
A wind like black ice, Kharadmon’s course riffled a stack of loose parchments weighted down by a chunk of iron meteorite. “You sent me summons. What do you ask?
What else have you seen that you are so loath to tell me?”
Still reluctant to answer, Sethvir raised one finger. His soft word sang release over his suspended conjury, and the bindings inside his drawn circle let go. The sustaining, fine energies carried from the Prime Source spiraled downward. Spell-fired light sank to a pale halo, then vanished. Residual heat fanned and stirred the pale ends of the Sorcerer’s hair and beard, while spent forces dispersed, sighing away to stilled silence.
Between Sethvir’s elbows, the stone table reverted to form, seamless black as before, the sole remnant of change the upright candle, now snuffed to a febrile ember. Out of chill darkness, a stir of worn cloth as Althain’s Warden stood up. “I can’t say what tomorrow will bring. There are too many free-will choices involved to guess whether Arithon s’Ffalenn can achieve his escape into freedom. Yet one fact can’t be argued: at large or held captive in Koriani hands, he cannot long sustain a despair of self-damning proportion.”
Sethvir’s library suffered another tempestuous dusting as Kharadmon seized on the gist. Neither one of the half brothers had escaped the deranging sorrows linked to the bloodshed at Tal Quorin, Minderl Bay, and Vastmark. But where Lysaer s’Ilessid became driven to self-sacrifice for morality, ennobling his losses through a public campaign of justification, Arithon s’Ffalenn more quietly bled in compassion until his solitary resilience ran dry. No need to belabor the painful necessity, that the one threatened life held the lynchpin of the Black Rose Prophecy’s resolution. All hopes for the Fellowship’s restoration back to seven still hinged upon a crowned prince for Rathain.
“You want a mitigator,” Kharadmon burst out, his mercuric impatience the springboard to seize on the direction of Sethvir’s thinking. “Someone to reforge the bond of his trust with
himself?
Who’s to ask? Daelion Fatemaster wept! We’re talking of Kamridian s’Ffalenn’s direct descendant, and nothing we tried in
that
hour of trial turned his mind to seek self-redemption.”
“I know.” Sethvir reclaimed his tea mug and sipped its cold contents as he shared consternation and the grievous past memory of a valiant s’Ffalenn high king, driven to his doom in the Maze of Davien, where the Betrayer’s insidious coils of truth spells faced a man with his own mirror image. Arithon’s ancestor had died, torn
apart by the pangs of guilt-driven conscience. The thread which had seen him undone at the last was his line’s royal gift of compassion.
“We lost King Kamri despite every conscious protection, and he had no damning entanglement with the effects of s’Ahelas farsight.” A spark jumped and grounded into the stone floor as Kharadmon vented his testiness.