Shadowfane

by Janny Wurts

  Jaric searched for a response, but defeat sapped the nerve for defiance. No words came to mind; only the image of Taen weeping over the ravaged body of her brother. Dizzied, numb, and sick with weakness, he caught the trestle for support. Stone jarred his fingers. He barely felt the shove as packs of Thienz forced him upright.

  Demon speech came and went in his ears. Through fragmented phrases, bits of thought-image, and ragged patches of vision, Jaric saw a Thienz hand Scait a dark chunk of crystal. He recognized the same matrix that was the foundation of a Sathid-master's powers, and suddenly divined Shadowfane's intent. Dread made him blurt his horror aloud. 'You mean to impose a demon-controlled Sathid upon me, and overthrow my mastery of fire and earth?' Outrage cleared his senses; he straightened in his singed tunic, and glared at the Demon Lord's scaled visage.

  Scait smiled, his plumes dancing with magenta highlights in the red-paned light of the lantern. Thienz rustled in the corners, impatient for the moment when one of their own would partner the Firelord's overthrow.

  Hotly Jaric protested. 'You'll never control the result. Tamlin of the Vaere already tried to train men to mastery of tripled Sathid crystals. Each time he created a monster.'

  Scait rasped serrated teeth and tossed the contaminated matrix from palm to palm. 'Monster? If by that your mythical name for Set-Nav defined a creature dedicated to destruction, nothing less would suit the compact's purpose. Our method is assured. The human mind fares poorly in multiple bonding because it is isolated. But the Thienz whose crystal cross-links with yours can achieve dominance without harm, since thousands of Sathid-free siblings will shelter its psyche from madness.'

  Jaric took a firmer grip on the table. Blond hair slipped forward, veiling the fury in his eyes. He heard Scait's premise and felt cold, for his fate at the hands of demons now redoubled the threat to those children left living in captivity. If the secrets of his masteries provided the final key to their survival as demon pawns, Keithland's destruction could no longer be prevented. Eyes closed in the agony of failure, the Firelord hoped the Thienz who pressed at his sides mistook his trembling for weakness. In a useless effort to buy time, he grasped after a tangent. 'Set-Nav? You claim the Vaere hides a machine?'

  Scait fielded the crystal, set it gently down on marble, then laced spurred fingers over his knife. 'Shortly you will verify that. But the spoils of your discovery shall benefit Shadowfane.'

  Mute as he considered implications, Jaric wished he had obeyed the Kielmark's directive to flee while the chance had existed. Now escape of any sort was impossible. The chamber's only entrance was secured by a studded door and a clumsy mechanism of counterweights and chain.

  The Demon Lord rose. Feathers rustled like whispers as he swung the hook suspending the lantern closer to the wall. Shadows shifted to reveal shelves jammed with bottled elixirs and tins of dried herbs. Among them rested a row of flasks, filled with clear fluid and cradled in a rack of woven vine. Jaric recognized the intricate craftwork of the Llondelei; and irony stung like a thorn. The very Sathid he had entered Shadowfane to steal would engineer his doom and Keithland's final conquest. Jaric drew an angry breath and bore down on the support of the Thienz until the pair of them squealed in complaint.

  'Lord-mightiest, he faints!'

  Scait hissed his displeasure. 'Conscious or not, hold him upright.' The Demon Lord selected the nearest of the flasks and released the hook. The lantern swung in drunken circles overhead; alternately flicked by shadow and light, he set his blade to the seal and slashed. Yellow eyes flashed briefly at Jaric. Then Scait took the slave crystal from the trestle and dropped it in the flask with a click. The contents churned as if alive, and a Thienz huddled in the pack cried out.

  Jaric swayed. Desperate in his weakness, he watched the liquid in the flask settle and darken to amber. The change recalled a Llondelei thought-image shared on the night he and the Kielmark had set off for Shadowfane from Morbrith: 'You will know pure matrix from that enslaved by demons, for bonding turns the colour like wine.' The matrix within the flask had now melded inseparably with the Thienz-dominated crystal. A single drop in the bloodstream would initiate cross-link, and slavery more ruinous than Emien's.

  Scait dipped the dagger to the hilt in the flask and waspishly addressed his underlings. 'Hold him. Misery to you all if your hold slips.'

  The Thienz seemed small, even laughably ungainly; but their strength proved more than a man's. They caught Jaric's fetters and pinioned his arms against the marble. The vulnerable lines of human tendon and bone stood exposed in scarlet light. The blade poised above, dripping and deadly with Sathid solution already under demon domination.

  Scait struck downward to cut.

  'No!' Jaric twisted; fetters flashed like sparks as he jerked aside. The dagger missed flesh by a a hairsbreadth and screeched across stone. Scait cursed, even as the Firelord slammed against the trestle. The flask overturned, splashing the floor with amber liquid. Wooden bracing chattered across tile as the ponderous slabtop slid and rammed the Demon Lord's midriff against hard edges of shelving behind. Tins and crockery rocked while Scait rebounded in rage. Jaric ducked the spurred swipe of the demon's fist. He dived for the elixir untouched in the rack behind, his intent to end the misuse of the Llondelei crystals forever.

  Thienz sprang to restrain. Toad fingers snatched at linen and broke the impetus of Jaric's lunge. He sprawled sideways, hand outstretched. Sickness and the interference of his captors caused him to miscalculate; instead of sweeping the flasks from the shelf, to topple and spill and maybe contaminate the Thienz whose solution already puddled the tile, the Firelord crashed headlong into their midst. Glassware shattered. Edges like razors cut deep into his hands, and wrists, and forearms. Fluid deadly with unbonded Sathid seeped into open wounds.

  Jaric screamed. Tamlin's care had spared him the pain of first contact through the cycle of bonding on the Isle of the Vaere. At Shadowfane, alone, he endured an excruciating tingle of nerves as multiple Sathid coursed through his flesh. His senses blurred, smell, and sound, and light milled under by fiery agony. Jaric heard snatches of a Thienz' hysterical screech; then Scait, in cold fury, calling out, 'Don't touch! He'll cross-link, you father-licking fools! The wards binding his Firemastery will give way through multiple bonding and wild Sathid could overwhelm you all.'

  Chain rattled, followed by the boom of a door. Jaric thrashed on cold stone. His features gleamed, sweating in the glow of enchanted fetters, while two score untamed Sathid threaded rapidly through his consciousness. He began vividly to dream.

  But where the progression of Vaere-trained masteries had been orderly, a logical sequence of images as Sathid assimilated experience from infancy to adulthood, the present experience was chaotic. Each entity had a separate will, and all sought dominance over the others; Jaric felt his mind torn to fragments as Sathid awareness ransacked memory, fighting to establish parallel consciousness with the being whose body they invaded. Scenes formed, only to splinter, overturned by a bewildering and irrational succession of images. Jaric saw snowfall in Seitforest, beeches and evergreens cloaked in mantles of purest white; in a hollow between two deadfalls, Telemark shook ice from his cape and knelt to set snares for fox. The scene had scarcely stabilized when winter vanished. Fire and wind ripped the trees without warning, and sparks blew like driven lines through darkness. The forester swung his axe; sweat and grit and tears marred features racked by grief, but there memory distorted. Telemark checked in mid-swing, breaking the precision of his stroke. His blade bit earth with a thud, and fire faded before the scent of living greenery.

  'Jaric?' Cleansed of tears and filth, Telemark's face furrowed with worry. 'Jaric, are you all right?'

  This query was not borrowed from the past. The words echoed, as if the forester spoke in the very chamber where his former apprentice lay stricken. Even as Ivainson framed answer, the Sathid jostled his mind. Telemark's presence ripped cruelly out of reach. Gale winds screamed and slashed whitecaps into spindrift. The stormy
roar of breakers filled Jaric's ears. Callinde's steering oar yanked blistered hands, even as Anskiere's geas tore his heart and mind toward madness; salt spray drenched his shoulders and salt tears wet his face. Then, like glass frosted with moisture, that image also faded, overlaid by the ward-bound silence of the ice cliffs.

  The Stormwarden of Elrinfaer called out of darkness, his tone terrible with command. 'Ivainson Jaric! What's happened?'

  But that voice became lost as a great sword rose, sheened with blood in the shadowy deeps of Shadowfane. Helplessly the Firelord watched the blade fall, never to rise again. Cliffhaven's Kielmark whispered, his anger subdued to purest sorrow. 'Taen asked that I keep you safe, and I swore her an oath of debt.'

  Grief caught Jaric like a blow. He wept, and the image buckled, replaced by the smoky vista of stars once revealed by the Llondelei in dreams; but this time the velvet dark where the probe ship Corinne Dane had sailed was slashed by fiery lines of lettering. Words that once had been strange and meaningless now were uncannily clear: 'With the Veriset-Nav unit lost in the crash, no ship can find the way back to Starhope . . . Will our children's children ever know their forefathers ruled the stars?'

  Jaric wondered who would leave such a message, hidden in the spine of a book for a scribe to find generations afterwards; as if at his command the writing faded, replaced by the face of a man with tired eyes and close-cropped grey hair. His clothing was blue, trimmed with silver in the fashion of Kordane's priests, but cut from no cloth woven on Keithland. As Ivainson puzzled over the anomaly, the image vanished. Multiple Sathid scrambled to displace their fellows, and for a moment no entity dominated.

  Jaric gasped for breath. He assimilated the reality of sweat-stung eyes and muscles knotted from contortions before dreams overwhelmed him once again. Colours swirled through his mind, overlaid by light that pooled and focused. He found himself helpless under the malevolent glare of Scait Demon Lord. A Firelord in captivity repeated a phrase he had uttered only minutes before coherency left him: 'Set-Nav? You claim the Vaere hides a machine?'

  Prone on cold tile, his cheek pressed into the hard edges of his fetters, Jaric poised on the brink of vital revelation. But the crazed turmoil of the Sathid left no interval for thought or interpretation. Drowned in a flux of memory, he stepped barefoot on to sand. Sunlight warmed his body like a lover, and the spicy scent of cedar filled the air. Ivainson blinked. Touched by awe, he recognized a place whose uncanny perfection never failed to move him.

  Bells jingled, merrily at odds with a voice raised in reprimand. 'Ivainson Jaric! Firelord's heir! Stand and face me.'

  Shocked as if plunged in cold water, Jaric whirled and met Tamlin of the Vaere. This encounter was no memory; the clamour of the Sathid receded as cleanly as a knife pulled through cloth. Drawn into stillness beyond human understanding, Jaric lost his last hope of rescue.

  The gaze of the Vaere bored into him as if fey eyes could murder. 'Young Master, you've transgressed mortal limits. That's trouble. No resource of mine, nor any endowment of Corinne Dane's can spare you now.'

  Whipped by a shiver beyond his means to subdue, Jaric regarded his teacher across the boundaries of dream. 'I had no choice.'

  The Vaere stamped as though vexed. Poignant sorrow touched his face, half-glimpsed as he turned away. 'Then understand me, Firelord's heir. I, too, have no choice. Remember that, when you face the consequences.'

  The querulous, leather-clad being wavered, its origin traced by an Earthmaster's perception to a form that defied all belief. Buried beneath soil and sand, Jaric saw an angular engine crafted of metal. The structure of its surface was scarred, as if from terrible impact; and energies cycled endlessly on the inside, marked by blinking patterns of light. 'I am the master of space and time.' whispered Tamlin's voice from the past. Llondelei references aligned with other words spoken by demons, to reveal a terrible truth. Jaric identified the engine as the source of Tamlin's identity: Veriset-Nav, the lost guidance system of Corinne Dane. With a jolt of wonder and fear, he realized he had disclosed the secret of the Vaere; but so, also, had demons. The heritage of mankind stood in jeopardy as never before.

  Light danced as Jaric fought his fetters. Cut by the glassy stuff of spells, his wrists bled, and he cursed. The image of the machine reshaped, became a white square of parchment upon which he practised letters. Ink stained his knuckles. The draught through the rickety north casement raised chills on his back as, sharply attentive, Morbrith's master scribe reviewed his work.

  'You know the smiths thought me too stupid to keep accounts,' said a younger, more diffident boy. 'Why did you take me in?'

  Master Iveg peered over his spectacles, his large-knuckled hands hooked loosely over his knees. 'Sure, I don't know, Jaric.' He grinned, affectionate as an old hound. 'Your butt's so skinny, I doubt you can even warm the bench for me, come winter. Now fix those 7's. They lean like a hillman's tent poles.'

  The kindness of his criticism had made Jaric smile on the day he began study under the archivist. But now, with the bonds of Shadowfane constricting his flesh, and his mind lashed to delirium by wild Sathid, he cried out. Library and copy table vanished. The old scribe's voice broke into screams of agony; aged limbs jerked against wire as demons roasted him alive in a furnace of flaming books.

  Jaric thrashed, retching, his wrists pressed hard to his ears. Discrepancy pricked through his torment. He coughed, tearblinded, and remembered: he had not been present when Iveg died. The scene he currently witnessed was drawn not from past recollection but from the altered awareness of the Sathid-link itself. Ivainson explored, and discovered his perception expanded to awesome proportions. The events of past, present, and a multiple array of futures were accessible to him simultaneously. Revelation followed, bright with new hope. Mastery of fire and earth might be shackled by demon wards, but resources acquired through bonding with two score wild crystals were not. Possibly a blow could be struck against Shadowfane before the cycle of the Sathid destroyed his will.

  Jaric marshalled his stiffened body. With a gasp of tortured effort, he rolled on to his back. Sweat dripped like tears down his temples, trickled through hair to pool in his ears. Dizziness flooded his mind. Queasy and whimpering and hounded by fragments of nightmare, he glimpsed Taen's distraught and weeping face. The image of her sorrow shattered thought, just as the door to the chamber boomed open.

  Footsteps and voices approached, deafeningly immediate after the dream-whirl of images.

  '. . . must be destroyed,' hissed Scait in a monotone. Spurs grated horribly against metal. 'His powers are useless to us now. Even the Watcher cannot predict what befalls when wild Sathid conquer a mind that has mastered the Cycle of Fire.'

  Through eyes muddled by fever, Jaric saw a sword flash red by lanternlight. Rage stung him. He would be killed with no more resistance than a beast raised for slaughter; in the moment the blade sliced downward, two score Sathid shared his perception of threat. Their competitive tumult ceased, instantaneously melded to focused and biddable force. Jaric recovered power to art, even as steel stabbed a searing line of agony through his chest.

  XVIII

  Shadowfane

  Black tents clustered like clumped mushrooms upon the slopes between the town and the inner fortress of Cliffhaven. As dusk fell, lanterns flickered and swung from the twisted limbs of the almond trees, while dark-robed conjurers conferred in groups beneath. To Taen, who overlooked the scene from the harbourside battlement, the gathering looked like a hill tribes' summerfair gone eerily silent without music. The arrival of the Mhored Karan wizards had been her doing, and Anskiere's; despite the fact that the conclave's differences of ability had just place in the scheme of Keithland's defence, she looked upon her accomplishment and felt no confidence.

  The presence of the conjurers made itself felt in strange ways. The wards they established to enforce the reality that formed the foundation for their creed ran counter to Vaerish sorcery. Proximity to their encampment tended to inhibit the workings of dr
eam-sense; still, Taen sensed that something, somewhere, went amiss. Against all logic, the feeling persisted. The spells of the Mhored Karan conjurers were no part of the cause, but only the foil for an apprehension Taen had no name for.

  The air above Mainstrait hung unnaturally still. Over the crack of shipwrights' mallets, the Dreamweaver heard footsteps approaching from the postern. She lifted her head and saw Deison Corley stride toward her, his hair tangled with pitch and his brows levelled in an uncharacteristic frown.

  'You know.' he said as he drew alongside, 'I'm going to get spitted on a shark gaff for this.' He gestured toward the tents, and Taen understood he referred to the Kielmark's vociferous hatred of the wizards and their secretive conjury. The subject had sparked wild speculation among the men; wagers were on that Corley would lose his command, at the least, and just as likely, his head.

  The Dreamweaver returned a sympathetic smile. 'You speak as if you had a choice in the matter. You didn't, as I remember, unless you wanted to watch Anskiere call storm and scuttle every brigantine in the harbour.'

  Corley leaned on the battlement beside her. 'Threats cut no cloth with the Pirate Lord.' He paused, irritable, and rubbed to ease the unfamiliar weight of the tore at his neck. Below, boys in the grey robes of acolytes continued to kindle lanterns until the trees glittered like an opium eater's dream of exotic, night-blooming flowers. Yet the captain left in command at Cliffhaven found no beauty in the sight. 'To the Kielmark, wizards are trouble, the sort that invariably leads to bloodshed.'