Shadowfane

by Janny Wurts

  The intensity of the princess's grief was too detailed to be anything other than real. Taen saw that demons had garnered this moment through Mharg-memory, then saved it as a weapon against just such a moment as this. The impact caused guilt enough to shatter Anskiere's poise.

  'Free me,' Maelgrim begged. 'Let my powers avenge your beloved sister who died of Shadowfane's designs.'

  Taen did not linger to know how the Stormwarden would resolve his trial of grief and guilt. Worried for Jaric, she reached through the link and found him racked by his own vision of hell. This image was recent, and Maelgrim's own, and vicious enough to stun. For Jaric, Morbrith bailey danced to a bloody flare of light. There, bound with wire to a horse hitch, the master scribe who had championed his cause as a boy writhed in a pyre of flame. Fuel for Iveg's torment was a cache of books and scrolls, the scholarly achievements of a lifetime kindled to roast his flesh.

  While Stormwarden and Firelord were diverted, the wards over Morbrith stood in jeopardy. The Dreamweaver acted out of reflex, driven by anger akin to madness. Across Maelgrim's dark dreaming she crafted images of her own, the separate suffering of every soul she had battled to save, and lost, through her months in the borderlands of Morbrith. Children, parents, and elders, she recounted each death distinctly; the agonies of each victim's final minutes distilled to a sorrow overpowerng for its cruelty.

  As the compact's minion, Maelgrim met her vision of suffering with venomous amusement. But Stormwarden and Firelord screamed with one voice. Reminded of their purpose, they rallied. Power surged back into the link. Now anguish for a tortured scribe and guilt for an abandoned sister became edges honed against a common enemy. Joined in grim purpose, the Vaere-trained of Keithland sealed the wards over Maelgrim's prison. As their combined sorceries fused complete, a shriek of defeat and frustration rang over the wail of the Gierj. The sound was savage enough to daunt the spirit. No mortal could listen, and linger.

  The link-born power died out with a snap. Taen relinquished the discipline of trance. Sore to the bone, she opened tired eyes and reoriented her awareness to a battlefield long leagues to the south.

  Ashes gritted under her knees. Her hair fell in tangles around her cheeks, tear-soaked, and acrid with the smell of smoke. Taen shook it back. She lifted a face pale with stress to the Stormwarden and Firelord, who stood near, shaken still from the shock of her counterdefence. Shivering herself, Taen drew a difficult breath. She did not voice what all of them already knew: Maelgrim might be mewed up within Morbrith, but his Gierj still sang. Though tired and harrowed to the heart, the three of them had no choice but ride north without delay.

  * * *

  Efficient in all respects, the Kielmark had selected his horseflesh with an unerring eye for the best. Though mounted on a blooded, blaze-faced mare of prized Dunmoreland stock, Taen failed to appreciate the Pirate Lord's expertise. Her knees chafed raw on a saddle intended for a large man, and the animal underneath it pulled like a steer, skinning her fingers on the reins. She cursed and tugged, and barely managed to match pace with the gelding that carried Jaric.

  Anskiere rode ahead on a cream stud conscripted at sword-point from a dandy. Its harness sparkled with a crust of silver and pearls, but threads now trailed where bells had hung from the saddlecloth; in disgust the Stormwarden had ripped the ornaments away. The Kielmark brought up the rear, on a black that snorted with each stride. He sat his saddle with an air of wolfish intensity, one hand poised on his blade.

  Yet as the company set off for Morbrith, both silence and vigilance seemed wasted. No travellers fared on the road. Houses by the wayside lay deserted, and the crossroads settlement of Gaire's Main stood abandoned and dark when they stopped to breathe the horses. Spring water trickled mournfully from the stone trough, but livestock no longer drank the run-off. Neglect left holes in thatched roofs, and the inn bulked black by starlight, one door drunkenly ajar.

  The Kielmark was quick to remount. Anxious to leave the deserted village, Anskiere and Jaric followed him to horse. No one seemed inclined to speak, since the ordeal of warding Morbrith. Taen swung into the saddle last. Though distracted by the need to review the security of her work, she still remained open to the sensitivities of others. Jaric had passed through Gaire's Main the time he had fled Morbrith on a stolen mount. Now the inept stablemaster who had reshod his horse was dead, along with the young girl who had offered him charity out of pity. Murdered on the brink of womanhood by Shadowfane's possessed, she had neither grave nor kin to remember her. Only chance-met travellers who had passed through Gaire's Main before Maelgrim's devastation might recall that the girl had lived at all.

  Weary and sad, Taen let her mount lean into a canter.

  Gaire's Main fell swiftly behind. The road to Morbrith stretched northward, silver under a haze of ground mist; the mare tried restively to gallop ahead of the others. The Dreamweaver tightened raw fingers and winced as the horse shook its head. It bounced one stride in protest before responding to the rein.

  Jaric swerved his gelding to avoid being jostled. 'Doesn't that mare know she should be tired by now?'

  Taen shook her head. 'She smells me for a fisherman's daughter and knows I hate riding.'

  Only, looking at her, with her brows levelled by an intent frown and her back held straight by something indefinably more than courage, Jaric reflected otherwise. Her childhood in the fishing village of Imrill Kand was behind her now; at no time in life had she ever seemed more like the Vaere-trained enchantress she had become.

  * * *

  Night passed, measured by drumming hoofbeats. The stars to the east paled above the rolling hills of the downs, yet dawn did not lessen the shadow of danger. Each passing league brought the riders nearer to final confrontation with Maelgrim Dark-dreamer. Threat seemed a palpable presence in the air. Unable to shake the hunch that Keithland's defenders rode toward a trap of Shadowfane's design, Taen focused her talents. Braced for the bite of Maelgrim's malice, she cast her dream-sense north to check the security of her brother's prison.

  Stillness met her probe. Disturbed, Taen tried another sweep. This time she included the grounds as well as the watch towers at Morbrith. Her efforts yielded nothing. Silence deep as windless waters bound the keep's tall battlements; even the pigeons had abandoned their cotes in the falconer's yard. Unnerved by the lifeless air of the place, the Dreamweaver drew a worried breath. She rebalanced her awareness, and only then noticed the absence of the Gierj-whistle. Surprise made her cry out.

  Her companions drew rein in the roadway. Stopped in their midst, the Dreamweaver exclaimed in disbelief. 'I've lost Maelgrim. The Gierj-whistle's stopped, and I can't track the presence of the enemy.'

  Anskiere drew breath with a jerk. 'The wards are intact?'

  Taen started to nod, then froze as she noticed a detail that first had escaped her. A small black hole lay torn through the spells that sealed the main gate. The rift was too small to admit the body of a man, but wide enough, surely, to pass the rope-thin bodies of Gierjlings.

  This news raised varied reactions in the grey gloom of dawn; both Firelord and Stormwarden had contributed to the setting of those defences; the power required to cause a breach overturned their most dire expectation. Jaric raked back hair in need of a trim; his eyes seemed distant with exhaustion under soot-streaked lashes. The Kielmark stilled with a look of rapacious speculation.

  Only Anskiere straightened with a glare like frost. His hands braced on his horse's neck, he said simply, 'Track the Gierj, then. If Maelgrim's left Morbrith, through whatever means, we have no choice but follow him.'

  'But the breach is too narrow,' Taen protested. 'The Dark-dreamer couldn't escape, and he can't have vanished. He shares my blood. Surely I would know if he took his own life.' She blinked away rising tears, vaguely aware of Jaric's touch on her arm. The contact failed to steady her.

  The creak of the cream's harness filled silence until Jaric intervened. 'Kor's grace, can't you see she's upset?'

  His pl
ea was ignored. 'Taen,' the Stormwarden said firmly, 'if Maelgrim Dark-dreamer has left Morbrith, we'll have to know at once.'

  XIV

  Morbrith

  Taen drew an unsteady breath. The surrounding landscape seemed ghostly, a place halfway between dreams and waking where nightmare could transform the ordinary without warning. She disengaged from Jaric's hold. Isolated from his sympathy by the demands of her craft, she rallied and marshalled her talents to trace Maelgrim.

  Morbrith's grey walls shouldered through tatters of thinning mist, sealed off by the lacework glimmer of wardspells. Beyond, the houses loomed empty, row upon row of rooftrees outlined coldly in daylight. The Dreamweaver concentrated directly on the palace. Her probe traversed empty corridors and wide, cheerless rooms with hangings mouldering on the walls. She swept bedchambers with mildewed sheets, kitchens where rats chewed the handles of the cutlery. Pantry and granary had been ransacked by insects and mice, while the armoury's stock of weaponry rusted in neat, military array.

  Taen tried the libraries, and ached for Jaric when she found the door splintered inward. Parquet floors bore the stains of spilled ink flasks; dust layered shelves stripped of books. Burdened by sorrow, the Dreamweaver moved on, past the darkened windows of the guards' barracks and a gate sentry's box whitened with bird droppings. The stables beyond held the rotting carcasses of the manor's equine casualties, from the Earl's niece's pony to war destriers and carriage horses. Only the stair that led to the watchtower was not empty.

  Taen found her brother in a windy cranny framed by stone keep and sky.

  No Gierj were with him. His Dark-dreamer's presence had diminished to a lustreless spark of his former vitality. Shocked by the change in him, the Dreamweaver brushed his mind. Maelgrim flinched from the contact. Wire chinked as he raised his hands, as though to ward off a blow; the mad, lost light in his eyes bespoke thoughts that were directionless and confused.

  Taen retreated without probing deeper. Keeping her awareness well guarded, she listened while wind moaned between Morbrith's empty battlements. Yet nothing untoward arose to challenge her. Maelgrim's condition apparently masked no tricks.

  Daylight brightened steadily over pastures whose only yield was weed; the farmsteads beyond the walls lay deserted. The Gierj-demons who had expanded the Dark-dreamer's powers of destruction seemed nowhere to be found. Suspicious of their absence, the Dreamweaver extended her focus over bramble-ridden fields and orchards choked with mist.

  If not for the scold of a jay, she might have overlooked the rustle of movement through the valley east of Morbrith. Gierj poured like spiders through the undergrowth, eyes flashing like mirrors filled with moonlight. They ran in silence. Steps coordinated in unison lent the disturbing impression that their movements were controlled by the hand of a mad puppeteer. The sight seeded growing uneasiness. The brother Taen found at Morbrith owned neither presence nor self-command, which meant the Gierj answered now to a new master, one whose summons came direct from Shadowfane.

  The Dreamweaver dispelled her trance. Roused to the sting of saddle-galled knees, she stirred under the scrutiny of Stormwarden and Kielmark. Dismounted, Jaric stood at her mare's bridle. He restrained the restive creature with a patience that belied his exhaustion, while the Dreamweaver related her findings concerning Maelgrim, and the apparent desertion of his Gierj-circle.

  She finished, feeling drained. Autumn winds whipped the brush by the roadside. The scratch of dry leaves filled silence as her companions considered the implications of an event no man understood.

  'Hold the wards firm,' said Anskiere. He then issued orders to ride. Jaric released his grip on Taen's reins and set foot in his own stirrup.

  'You know this might be a trap!' the Dreamweaver warned. The Stormwarden set spurs to the cream; as his steed leaped to gallop, she shouted after him. 'Gierj or no, Maelgrim is still possessed through his Sathid-link with demons. I doubt he's either vulnerable or helpless.'

  'Belay the talk, woman!' The Kielmark drew his sword and smacked the flat smartly across the mare's hindquarters. He qualified over the ensuing thunder of hooves as both their mounts flattened ears and ran. 'We have no choice but go forward. Fool or otherwise, we can't let the Stormwarden ride into danger unsupported.'

  Blue, fierce eyes reminded that, like the wolf, the Kielmark's loyalties ran deeper than reason. Though few things in life frightened Taen so much as the change she sensed in her brother, she gave the mare rein and galloped.

  * * *

  Leaves scattered, brown and dead, in the wind swirling under the battlements. The bailey beyond lay deserted, the smell of moss and sun-warmed stone glaringly wrong for a keep once filled with the bustle of habitation. No sentry called challenge to the party who rode in with the morning. Silence and the ghost-glimmer of wardspells shrouded a fortress better accustomed to the ring of destriers' hooves, and the shouts of patrols returning from the border. Having loosed their own lathered mounts by the river, Jaric trailed Anskiere through the gates. A thin snap of sound marked his passage as he crossed the boundary of the wards. Taen came after, followed by the Kielmark, whose weapons and mail shirt jingled dissonantly with each stride.

  Ivainson emerged from the far shadow of the arch and abruptly stopped.

  'Not here.' Taen shook off a compulsion to whisper. 'We'll find Maelgrim farther on, within the Earl's hall.'

  But the Firelord gave no response. His first, sweeping survey of the holdfast where he had been born ended at the stone blocks used to hitch horses. Rusted loops of wire dangled from the rings, cruel testimony of a prisoner recently bound there. Breeze blew. The fetters swung, blackened by fire above a flattened circle of ash; amid the debris Taen saw charred leaves of parchment, recognizably the half-burnt remains of books.

  The name of Morbrith's master archivist hovered, unuttered, on Jaric's lips. Taen sensed his deep and cutting grief. Although no bones remained, the Firelord beheld proof that his former master had died a tormented victim of demon caprice. 'Kor's eternal grace!'

  The vehemence of the blasphemy caused Anskiere to pause on the stair, a look of inquiry on his face. 'Jaric?'

  A shimmer gathered around Ivainson's still form. For a moment raw anger threatened to explode instantaneously into fire. Taen tensed in alarm. But the Kielmark stepped sharply forward and reached Jaric ahead of her.

  'I'll skewer the Accursed who did this.' The Lord of Cliffhaven wore an expression that chilled. Dangerously still in his silver-trimmed surcoat, he regarded the wire and the ruined parchment, as if to engrave the sight in his memory. Then, with a hand that half steadied, half pushed, he sent Jaric after the Stormwarden. As an afterthought, Taen recalled that the King of Pirates revered books; on Cliffhaven, his archivist was the only hale man not required to bear arms.

  Moments later, the party entered the candleless gloom of the keep. Dream-sense overlaid impressions like echoes, as the ruins prompted remembrance of an elegance that now lay wholly desecrated. Backland in location alone, Morbrith's Earls had been gifted with longstanding admiration for the arts. Scrolled cornices above the doorframes had once held porcelain statuary. Liveried retainers and ladies clad in silk and jewels had laughed and listened to music in halls now gritty with the refuse of bats. Unswept stone, and soiled hangings, and the weaponed ring of the Kielmark's tread made that past seem a fanciful dream. Anskiere walked, haunted by memories of other ghosts from Elrinfaer. Harrowed beyond sorrow, for this keep had once been his home, Jaric did not mourn for himself. Instead he ached fiercely for Taen; somewhere within Morbrith waited an enemy who had once been her brother.

  A stray shaft of sunlight silvered the Stormwarden's head as he followed the Dreamweaver's lead into a vaulted foyer. Four doors opened into chambers and a corridor swathed with spider-webs. Dream-sense tugged left. Numbly Taen turned, through bronze portals chased with a hunting scene. The antechamber beyond lay heaped with broken furnishings and the mouldered skeleton of a cat. Dampness from the floor chilled through the soles of her s
hoes. She shivered and kept on, barely aware of Jaric at her side.

  'Ahead lies the hall of the High Earl.' Echoes blurred the Firelord's words. 'An entrance in back leads to the Lord's quarters. Servants used to claim there was a spy closet.'

  Taen nodded absently. The pressure against her mind grew insistent, and suddenly she knew. The bedchamber and suite of the Lord's quarters lay deserted. The spy closet, if any existed, was empty. Maelgrim Dark-dreamer waited beyond the shut panels of the great hall.

  Taen stopped and pointed. Unable to move or speak, she watched Anskiere hook the lion-head door ring and pull. Silent on oiled hinges, the heavy double doors swung wide.

  Brushed into motion, a pawn from a fallen chessboard rolled across the waxed parquet; it vanished under rucked carpets and a jumble of overturned trestles. A lark cage swung from a scrolled pedestal, the occupant a dead and musty clump of feathers. Taen blinked. Openly trembling, she started as Jaric gathered her close in his arms. The vast chamber was deserted except for the dais, where a man sprawled in the Earl's chair of state. Even before she glimpsed black hair, Taen knew. She confronted the atrocity whose name had once been Marlson Emien.

  The Kielmark drew his broadsword. He crossed the threshold like a stalking predator, his step a whisper on wood, his face a mask of controlled fury. For Corley, for the dead scribe of Morbrith, and for six companies of slaughtered men, he was set to kill out of hand. Anskiere flanked him. Rarely impatient, his princely bearing never left him; except a cold glow woke in his staff. His glance carried an edge no mortal ruler could match.

  Yet the Dark-dreamer stayed strangely still in his chair. Before the threat of bared steel and sorcery, he lay as if dead.