Shadowfane

by Janny Wurts

  Jaric screamed in a rage of futility.

  And the staff struck.

  A note parted the air like a slashed harpstring. Jaric suffered a blow that rocked the seat of his being. He crashed on his back, winded, paralysed, blind, and deafened, while the fires in the crystals at Cliffhaven extinguished like water-drowned sparks. All mastery of power sundered instantly.

  Yet like a curse, life endured.

  'No,' Jaric whispered. His body seemed a husk sucked hollow by torrents of wind as two score wild Sathid marshalled force to retaliate.

  In vain he tried to resist, to smother the cataclysm of ruin that earlier had destroyed the demons. His effort was swept aside by pain that thrilled and a joy that sickened him to experience. An insatiable lust for cruelty was now permanently instilled in the Sathid's collective memory. No act of reprisal could unmake the forces his rejection of principle had created. Jaric cried out in agonized recognition. Too well he understood the downfall of Marlson Emien; too late he begged for remission. His plea might as easily have reversed the flood of the tides.

  Anskiere sensed the surge as power aligned against him. Undone by memory of a second betrayal, he cried out, 'Ivain! By Kor's grace, not again!' White with recognition, he angled his staff toward the window, as if some miracle wrested from the sea might save him.

  No evasion could bridle the untamed Sathid's attack. Energy cracked forth, virulent as summer lightning, and hammered against the Stormwarden's defence.

  For an astonishing moment, he held out. Jaric sensed a reflection of the stresses Anskiere withstood through long years of experience and a persistence born of ruthless desperation. Yet courage could not avert the inevitable. The pressure of the wild Sathid lashed sparks from the wards. The Stormwarden called warning to Taen, then slammed his staff horizontal. Energies snapped and sang. His defences crumpled, instantaneously obliterated by a shattering explosion of light. The powers of the Sathid whirled away Jaric's view of Stormwarden, tower, and ocean in a blazing coruscation of energy no sorcerer could hope to survive.

  Jaric howled denial. The enormity of the wild Sathid's retaliation inflicted a burden too terrible to bear. As the rage of crystalline entities milled the last of his reason to slivers, he thought he heard Taen weeping. The sound pierced his soul. If the cycle of destruction took her life, her Dreamweaver's intuition might never unlock understanding that he had never intended betrayal of Keithland for Shadowfane when the Sathid's powers of defence struck Anskiere down.

  The backlash did not end with the Stormwarden's fall. Worse than the darkest nightmare, Sathid entities redoubled their ferocity. Utterly helpless to intervene, Jaric thrashed as surge after surge of force arose from the depths of his being. Blame could not be attributed to the crystals' wilful nature. They had melded with his mind, moulded their earliest awareness from him. Jaric's own passion for vengeance had schooled the Sathid to murder. That humanity might share the fate of Shadowfane's compact as a result left guilt that could never be assuaged. No ward ever raised by Tamlin's masters could thwart such fury from destruction; the heir of Ivain Firelord could do nothing but endure through the evil his weakness had created until the storm of the backlash was exhausted.

  In time the riptide of cataclysm faded; like spent ripples on the surface of a pond, all settled finally to stillness. The Sathid entities retired, their focus of fearful energies centred once more upon the drive to mature and dominate.

  Ivainson Jaric was left to the prison of his thoughts and horror too grievous to escape. Firelord no longer, he raged, broken and damned by fate. Misery acquired new meaning, and its edge cut deep; still braceleted with the husks of Scait's fetters, he smashed his fists into stone. Over and over in his mind he saw his view of the Stormwarden cut off by energies no sorcerer could withstand. Hope perished also. A forester's wisdom, an old fisherman's gift of a boat, and a master scribe's kindness no longer held power to inspire. Jaric covered his face with bleeding fingers. Possessed by despair near to madness, he wept in understanding of the father he had never met.

  Ivain Firelord had inflicted ruin as wanton as this. Gone to the Vaere a laughing, generous man, his hope of serving Keithland fresh as morning, he had suffered the Cycle of Fire, then yielded up integrity to survive. He also had seen all that he valued come to grief. Finally, poisoned by self-loathing, torment, and loneliness, he had died by his own hand.

  Abandoned in confinement at Shadowfane, Jaric drew a shuddering breath. Like the tortured soul who had sired him, he had nothing left in Keithland to lose. Close by, the corpse of the Demon Lord lay with a sword still clenched in its fist. Jaric rolled on to his side, fingers outstretched and groping. But two score Sathid divined his intent. Secure in their bid for conquest, they lashed out collectively to prevent him.

  Pain mauled his body, more intense than anything he had endured through the Cycle of Fire. Jaric convulsed, whimpering until his lungs emptied. Wretched with agony, he sought refuge within his mind. But the flare and spark of alien energies pursued him even there and denied him sanctuary. Sathid arose in force to break his spirit, swiftly, violently, and forever. No vestige of will would survive their final assault. Death itself would become irrevocably beyond reach.

  Jaric reacted on reflex. Although the foundations of Fire and Earthmastery were destroyed, exhaustive hours of training left their mark. Experience handling Sathid forces had long since fused with primal instinct; and rage lent the strength of a beast snared in a trap. Ivainson twisted, and slashed, and boldly singled one entity from the composite mass of its fellows. The move touched off an avalanche of reaction.

  In instantaneous awakening, Jaric shared every scrap of knowledge gleaned and stored by the matrix. His mind expanded, assimilating web upon web of structured information. He perceived the workings of his physical body in minute detail, comprehended a miraculous capacity to heal; perception doubled, then doubled again in the dizzy change of a moment. Beyond muscle and bone and organs, he saw the helical chains of matter that encoded the secrets of life. The web work of energies that comprised mastery and emotion stood revealed, and he saw in himself nearly limitless reserves he had never tapped.

  Jarred by revelation, Jaric pushed to his knees. The Sathid possessed keys to the riddles of fire and earth, taken intact from memory. The entity that emerged supreme after bonding could re-create every aspect of his Vaere-trained talents, but with near-infinite power.

  Wakened as never before to the perils of possibility, Ivainson saw in himself a potential more ruthless than any mad quirk of his father's. Anskiere's death had taught him remorse; now his matrix-born potential for evil cancelled temptation to engage in a struggle no mortal could win. On the chance, however slim, that isolated humans might survive, the judgement of the Vaere must stand. Even as Sathid-force poised to smash his will to oblivion, Ivainson delved inward. Inspired by new knowledge, he seized the spark of awareness that was his life and, in defiance of the wild crystals' sovereignty, claimed the initiative to unbind the threads of his existence. Warp and weft, he found a way to negate the fabric of his spirit as thoroughly as if he had never been born.

  His strike caught the Sathid unprepared. The primary mortal instincts of survival had conditioned the assumption he would not violate selfhood and seek immolation from within; no healing of the body could stave off such a death. In a flurry of desperation, the Sathid prised at his resolve. Force proved counterproductive; Jaric's grip could be loosened only by precipitating the very end he desired. Nonbeing offered defeat more final than dominance. The Sathid floundered. Incapable of jeopardizing their own survival, there remained no further option. Jaric committed his will. As the spark of his selfhood flickered, the crystals reacted. Enraged in defeat, they yielded control, utterly, finally, and with a viciousness that ceded to Jaric a burgeoning nexus of power. The influx burned his senses beyond tolerance, and broke the progression of negation he had sacrificed all to achieve.

  He screamed. Ripped into chaos in the shattering space of an in
stant, he struggled to cope; but crosscurrents of resonance flayed body and mind to tatters. Like a swimmer battered by undertow, Jaric strove to recover his wits. His eyes stung with light. Nerves sundered from bone and muscle, agonized by forces never meant for mortal endurance. No discipline taught by the Vaere could assimilate such a flux of energy; one after another the bastions of reason gave way.

  Harrowed to the brink of madness, Jaric was driven to innovate. His Sathid-born inheritance superseded every former limit. The expanded prescience of his mind sorted futures and the branching avenues of event each possibility might take. From a million projections of disaster.

  Ivainson Jaric found and seized the one safe recourse left open to him. He resorted, in the end, to sorcery that violated every known law of creation.

  Consciousness altered by Sathid recombined the basic patterns of matter; like metal smelted and reborn in the spark-shot heat of the forge, Jaric underwent change. No longer the sickly scribe from Morbrith, nor the Firelord taken captive at Shadowfane, he wove the composite energies of two score Sathid through the living essence of his body. He himself became the instrument that gathered, contained, and warded the near-infinite energies of new mastery. The result married flesh to a legacy of unimaginable power.

  Victory left him exhausted. Sapped by sorrow and grief, and aching for Taen's lost trust, Ivainson Firelord cradled his head on crossed wrists. Too beaten to examine the miracle of his accomplishment, he closed swollen eyes and slept.

  XIX

  Starhope

  Jaric awoke to a golden blaze of light. He gasped. Certain that Thienz with lanterns had unsealed the chamber to do him harm, he pushed in panic to his feet. Movement brought vertigo. Braced unsteadily in one corner, the Firelord blinked and sought his enemies.

  The trestle where Scait had threatened him canted against shelving; boxes and flasks and spilled bundles of herbs lay jumbled in dusty disarray. The lantern hung dark on its hook. On the floor, amid an eggshell sparkle of smashed flasks, the sprawled skeleton of the Demon Lord leered in death. Spurred and bony fingers still clenched the rusted grip of a sword. The doorway beyond stood sealed, its mechanism webbed over by spiders.

  Jaric shut his eyes. He forced trembling muscles to relax, then carefully traced the illumination to its source. Power discharged from his body in a steady corona of light. The patterns of the aura were similar to those of a sorcerer's staff, but brighter, more intense, and complex beyond mortal comprehension. Jarred as if bedrock had shifted under his feet, Jaric recoiled against cold stone; the surrounding brilliance slivered through a blur of anguished tears.

  He had changed. Only time would determine whether he had traded humanity for survival. Unwilling to sort ramifications, and afraid above all to contemplate the fate that had befallen Taen, Jaric immersed himself in the immediate.

  Measured by dust and the decomposed stage of Scait's corpse, his mastery of the wild Sathid had spanned considerable time. Yet Ivainson knew neither thirst nor hunger. He surveyed his hands, found his wrists reduced to tendon and bone within the slack husks of his fetters. A white webwork of scars marred flesh that was pale, yet supple with health. Hunger, even thirst, had not touched him. Against all odds, he had survived; he wondered whether the folk of Keithland had fared as well.

  The thought provoked a surge of clairvoyance; Jaric felt his mind turn like a mirror, reflecting a dizzy succession of images. Fallow after harvest, the fields of Felwaithe showed a herringbone stubble of cut corn; hill clanswomen beat clothes in the spume of Cael's Falls, and leather-clad herders drove weanling foals to Dunmoreland pastures. Ships offloaded baled wool at Landfast harbour, rigging like ink lines against wintry skies. Enveloped by consciousness of humanity's teeming complexity, Ivainson encountered no trace of Anskiere or Taen. His loss sparked awareness of others; at Cliffhaven, Corley paced the battlements, his black cloak of mourning whipped by changeable winds; at the captain's throat nestled the ruby torque that once had been the Kielmark's. Shared grief snapped the sequence.

  Sheened with sweat, Ivainson Jaric gasped for breath in the musty confines of Shadowfane. Anskiere's sacrifice had not, after all, been in vain: to all appearances, Keithland had been spared the rage of the wild Sathid.

  The reprieve was unexpected. Ivainson turned his face to the wall. Relief threatened his balance, and flood after flood of tears wet his cheeks. He did not weep only for release. Though his own powers of sorcery had inspired the visions, the scope and intensity of newfound awareness unnerved him. A considerable interval passed before he regained any semblance of control. Still more time elapsed before he dared to explore the source of the miracle that had preserved his land and people from destruction.

  Trembling, more than distrustful of powers that bent his thoughts like a prism into focused arrows of force, Jaric directed his sight toward the watchtower at Cliffhaven. He sought the nightmare moment in the past when Anskiere of Elrinfaer had levelled his staff against the combined retaliation of two score wild Sathid.

  The scene unfolded with damning clarity. Again the light bloomed with a brightness unendurable to the eyes. Like a stab to the heart, Jaric saw the sorcerer become enveloped by a raging tide of destruction. His Stormwarden's defences were obliterated; the rough-hewn stone of the tower reddened with heat, then glazed in an explosion of force. Jaric compelled himself to watch as the blaze of the Sathid backlash coursed outward, hungry to destroy. His willpower threatened to fail him. Yet in the moment before he broke, the current turned inward upon itself, caught and twisted in check by the shadowy circle of a wardspell.

  Joined in their unfathomable chants, the wizards of Mhored Kara fenced the tower with conjury that negated all resonance of Sathid power. From without they imposed the reality of unharmed tranquillity that the killing backlash could not overwhelm. The wizards' philosophy provided the framework, Jaric saw. But the energies that set peace into harmony were familiar to the point of heartbreak, unmistakably lent by the hand of Taen Dreamweaver.

  Keithland had been saved, but at a cost that wounded to behold.

  In the comfortless dark of Shadowfane, Jaric slammed his fist into the stone. Taen had divined the scope of the backlash the Sathid might unleash. Alone, betrayed, cut where love left her vulnerable, still she had mustered courage enough to act. As Anskiere had fallen, she had reached beyond heartache and achieved the salvation of Keithland.

  The consequences of her sacrifice could not be escaped. Jaric suffered remorse without reprieve as wave after wave of power broke against the wizards' wards. Some robed figures rocked under the impact, others collapsed soundlessly in death, but the singing of their colleagues never faltered. The adepts of Mhored Kara held firm through the worst onslaught of destruction ever to challenge Keithland. Never once did they break either rhythm or concentration. Their defences held. When at last the fury of backlash became spent, the watchtower at Cliffhaven remained, a slagged and smoking shell ringed by a charred expanse of paving.

  The sorcerer who accounted himself responsible watched numbly while the wizards released their wards. Haggard, singed as scarecrows, the survivors of the conclave bent and tended their fallen. Jaric saw them bind the hurts of their wounded, then wash and bury their dead.

  In the town, smoke rose from the chimneys of the craftsmen's shops. Ships rocked at anchor in the quay, and the sky shone an untouched blue; flocks of gulls squabbled undisturbed at the tide mark. From Felwaithe to the Free Isles, Keithland remained whole and in sunlight, as if no disturbance had threatened the continuity of life. Yet no wizard of Mhored Kara ventured across the blasted stone that marked the boundary of their protection. They did not set foot near the tower.

  Neither, for all his awesome power, could Jaric. Pain stripped away his resolve; the memory of Taen's laughter would haunt him to the end of his days. Not miracles, nor breadth of vision, could lend courage enough to search amid the ruins for her remains, or meet the accusation in her eyes if by some twist of fate she had managed to survive. Anguish of
spirit could never restore the trust Ivainson had taken oath to preserve. The fate of his father had at last become his own, cancelling every hope he had ever dared to foster.

  Left in bitterest debt, Jaric raised his face from his hands. He longed for nothing beyond forgetfulness. That being impossible, he buried his shame, abandoning all memory of the watchtower so that he could set his killer's instincts toward preserving what Anskiere had died to keep safe.

  The danger posed by demons was not ended. Recalled to the peril of the Morrigierj, the son of Ivain Firelord bent his will away from the fortress at Cliffhaven. Empty with sorrow, he began a systematic review of Felwaithe's north coast, which lay closest to Shadowfane, and most vulnerable to invasion.

  At first glance nothing seemed amiss: winds whipped a reed-ridden channel to whitecaps, and a cutter flying the wolf of Cliffhaven scudded with her rail buried in spray. Jaric lingered in appreciation of her captain's bold seamanship, and power bucked his control. A subliminal suggestion of ruin suffused his inward eye, as if the tranquillity of the bay with its rugged chain of isles were destined not to last. Jaric shivered. Touched by a clear note of dread, he hesitated; and prescience snapped all restraint. Visions of pending devastation came upon him in a virulence of Sathid-born perception.

  The wind changed key. Ivainson heard the suck and thud of breakers fouled with debris. Smoke clogged his nostrils. Stumps thrust like rotted teeth from shores where, moments earlier, stands of pine had notched clean air and sunlight. The view shifted. Sea water scalded his hands, oceans sloshed with scorched fish; neglect laced runners of briar between the bones of cattle and men. South, the land was littered like storm wrack with razed towns. Roadways lay choked with toppled wagons, traces draped like knotwork over the shrivelled corpses of oxen. Clansfolk rotted amid the crumpled wreckage of their tents, and the sunken masts of fishing fleets speared through the tide pools at Murieton. Cliffhaven's proud corsairs had smashed like eggshells on shore, and silent, foggy nights blanketed a beacon tower thrown down into rubble.