by Janny Wurts
Checkrein
Summer 5648
For Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, the rage still burned white-hot, even eight months after her failed attempt to assassinate the Master of Shadow. Due to the intervention of a bungling, fat prophet, Arithon s’Ffalenn still breathed. Morriel shut her eyes. As if by cutting off the daylight which flooded her quilted chair by the casement, she could deny the thorny fact the prince still walked on this side of Fate’s Wheel. Old, withered, reduced by years and longevity spells to a husk of sagged flesh wrapped over porcelain bones, she endured the weary pulse of blood through her veins; each heartbeat a throb of endlessly unquiet pain.
More than anything she wished the oblivion of death.
Yet the haven of final rest lay beyond reach. First she must unyoke the chains of command and transfer the massive burden of prime power to the hands of a proven successor.
Forty-three women before this had perished attempting the trials of succession. Fear remained, to poison all pretense of patience. The years spent training the current candidate might be wasted, despite all her promising talent.
Morriel breathed in the humid sea air of the southcoast. Decades of handling critically potent forces had chafed her senses to unwonted sensitivity, until the ceaseless barrage of sound, form and smell besieged the desperately held order of her mind. Even removed to this high tower, confined in isolation above the sleepy commerce of Thirdmark’s narrow streets, Morriel battled the distractions. The moldered damp of age-rotted stone, even the salt crystal scour of the breeze through the casement flushed her thoughts to patternless noise. Her cognizance at times felt strung thin as cobwebs, until the air currents themselves seemed to separate into voices. Each passing second tapped a pulsebeat against her dry flesh.
Moment to moment, she denied the seductive lie. Inanimate matter could not quicken in sentient vibration. She would not permit inert reality to rock off reason’s track, slip the boundaries of discipline, and seduce her to embrace dreaming madness.
She had handled too many sigils of power in the course of her unnatural, long life. The very currents of her aura had been sealed into containment, to interrupt, then deny nature’s cyclic rhythm of death. Attrition thinned the veil between senses and perception. The spin of bridled power eroded Morriel’s control, until one day no bulwark would remain upon which to snag the purling thread of insanity.
The Koriani Prime endured with the dangerous knowledge that her age was now more than ten centuries. She had clung to breathing flesh far too long. None of her predecessors had dared test the limits so far beyond earthly balance.
Her will on the matter had been gainsaid by fate; and now, yet again, Arithon’s persistent survival reduced all her works to futility. The augury she held as fair warning galled most for its absolute, ruthless simplicity: this last living scion of Rathain’s royal line would disrupt the Koriani destiny, destroy a body of knowledge that stretched back into history to the time before catastrophe and war had driven humanity to seek refuge on Athera.
Morriel listened to the cries of the gulls skimming the breeze above the tideflats. She had never felt so wretchedly helpless. Her acquired depth of vision only mocked her. Earth turned, day to night, careless, herself a mote on its skin no more significant than any other unsettled speck of dust.
While the Master of Shadow plied the ocean aboard his brigantine, his unformed destiny hung over her sisterhood’s affairs. One malignant chain of latent events would snap a succession unbroken for thousands of years.
Morriel endured, her frustration contained. As the Khetienn embarked into unknown waters, Rathain’s prince would lie vulnerable to any bout of mischance water and gale could mete out. Her opening arose to spin a new plot over the wreckage of the old. A dry smile crimped the Matriarch’s pale lips. No step would be wasted. No other enchantress in the order need share in the fabric of her design. The first move in play could be masked to advance the training of Lirenda, First Senior, selected and groomed, but as of this hour, unprepared to survive the rigors of the accession.
On the eve of summer solstice, while the Fellowship Sorcerers worked in concert to complete an arduous conjury that had immersed them for over a year, the Warden of Althain would be least inclined to take meddling notice of accidents. The Koriani Prime snatched her-moment.
The bar of warm sunlight slanted through the casement and cooled to a soft flush of red. Morriel soon heard the rustle of silk she anticipated in the stairwell. Her chosen First Senior arrived on the moment appointed. Such precise obedience was not petty. For a candidate to show less than perfection in all things carried the risk of ill consequence. One woman alone could wield the full might of the Koriani Order. A small lapse of discipline on that scale of power could deflect the course of history, even harrow and scorch the green earth.
The latch grated, gave, and the door swung open. A gush of sea air displaced the miasma of dank stone. Then the shuffled step of the deaf steward who had replaced witless Quen, but who admitted the arrival with the same simpleminded devotion.
First Senior Lirenda presented a regal figure, slender, tall, and purposeful. Groomed and graceful as a panther, she wore hair like dark satin sleeked into a single, coiled braid. Her feet kept a dancer’s light tread on stone floors. The fine, sculptured bones of her wrists were set off by the gold-banded sleeves denoting her high office, and her violet silk mantle flowed off her lithe form like water poured from a vase.
She bowed before her Matriarch. Even in obeisance, her manner maintained innate breeding.
Morriel recalled the same trait in the child. Lirenda had always owned an elegant self-possession, that bone-deep assurance lent by wealth and background that touched servants to instinctive deference. This morning, the drifting perfume of the rose petals she used to sweeten her clothes chests came tanged with a trace scent of brimstone. Apparently the crates which sealed the new fiend banes had been troublesome to pack off to market.
Yet if the oversight arose from the duty novice’s instructions, or a boy ward had shirked his assigned labor, Lirenda showed no irritation. Her oval features stayed smooth as a cameo as she murmured the ritual greeting. “Your will, matriarch.”
That metallic, alto voice betrayed no curiosity, which was well. Morriel prolonged her survey of the prime candidate, her eyes like probing black quartz. Power forgave no shortcoming. Distrust of arcane practice within the walled towns had redoubled since Lysaer’s charge of dark sorcery against the Master of Shadow. The Koriani Order could ill afford to risk becoming mired in the backlash of frightened reaction.
“Sit,” Morriel commanded in a brevity that stabbed.
Lirenda settled to a rustle of skirts on the bare stone ledge of the window seat. Against failing light, her body affected a cat’s aloof . poise; her expression settled to waiting. But beneath that unapproachable, aristocratic polish, her mind seethed with ambition. The predatory spark in those pale almond eyes never slept.
Morriel opened at due length, “The time has come for the first trial to prepare you for mastery of our Great Waystone.”
Watchful eyes smoldered into full flame. “At last,” Lirenda murmured.
“You’ll use every minute before nightfall to prepare,” said the Prime, and waved her peremptory dismissal.
The massive, polished sphere of the Koriani Waystone stood unveiled under starlight, planed filaments of captured reflection spiked deep in its shadowy heart. Even seated, eyes shut, a full span away, First Senior Lirenda felt the amethyst’s aura soak into her stilled senses. With her mind diamond clear from an exhaustive course of ritual, the dark crystal’s presence chilled like the breath of a predator: lethal, unforgiving, and charged in pitiless peril. The stone was as ancient as the order itself. Over a thousand prime matriarchs had wielded its dire focus since the cataclysm and war which had cast an uprooted humanity from its homeworlds. The jewel’s deep lattice was said to encompass them all; their unquiet memories; the imprint of each departed prime’s exp
erience mazed like etched knotwork beneath its stilled facets.
At times in past history such knowledge meant survival. The records in the crystal could not be replaced. Nor could they be transferred. Stones mined in Athera fell under the Fellowship’s compact with the Paravians. The knowledge from outside worlds was proscribed. Limited to those crystals brought in by the order, every Matriarch since had no choice but to adopt the fixed practice, that its original set of jewel matrixes must be maintained without cleansing.
No stranger to the contrary properties of first focus stones, Lirenda required firm discipline to stamp down her apprehension. Her gnawing unease was no phantom. The Great Waystone’s secrets were held at perilous cost. Twined through the stored experience of the former matriarchs’ collective memories ran vicious, ingrained crosscurrents: the coiling, sullen residue left layered by centuries of arcane bindings, crammed together and entangled into dissonant, unquiet knots.
One day, these must become the prime candidate’s trial to master.
The protections Morriel laid down for this first exposure were forbidding enough to intimidate. Lirenda resisted the urge to break discipline and steal a glance through cracked eyelids. Against the mild fabric of summer night, she felt the formed lattice of wards stab her flesh like the prick of a thousand fine needles. The passes the Prime completed to frame each new sigil raised dire cold, and the salty damp that freshened the sea breeze came whetted by a bitter taint of ozone.
Minutes passed. Through the still blaze of stars and the tidal draw of the moon on the western horizon, Lirenda followed the pained shuffle of the Prime’s steps, circling, tirelessly circling. The low, flinty whisper as the Matriarch chanted in rhythm to align each intricate, chained set of runes. Perception itself drowned. Sensed impressions strung out to elastic proportions, as if moving time and the rustle of dune grass had slowed to congealment in amber.
Elsewhere, the world turned untouched. From the tide pools beyond Thirdmark’s harbor, a curlew called. A kicked cur yelped in the fish market alley, and the martial jink of steel as the wall watch changed guard reechoed off the city’s gabled roofs. Sounds reached Lirenda as if muffled through gauze, and then not at all, as her awareness submersed, ringed about by ambient power.
When Lirenda’s consciousness became a joined circle, sealed into relentless isolation, the Prime Enchantress said, “We are ready to begin.”
Instructions followed, the husk of each syllable sandpaper sharp amid that enforced web of stillness. “Do not look upon the Waystone as I raise its grand focus. To try is to beg for destruction. My set protections cannot shield you from direct interaction with the event unless you maintain perfect balance. No matter what happens, through temptation or disaster, remember you follow as observer. Stay passive. On pain of annihilation, however much you feel traumatized, do not exert your conscious will outside the bounds of my ward ring.”
One second passed in unbearable suspension. Lirenda fought down the dizzy pound of her pulse. Then in shared resonance, the plunge snatched her up in a rocketing, exhilarated rush, as Morriel Prime bent her will and invoked the Great Waystone’s focus.
Stark silence descended. Wide as old darkness, deep as the floor of Ath’s oceans, the stillness reigned absolute. Lirenda felt walled in unbreakable black glass, reduced to a dust speck captured and prisoned in jet. Of her Prime’s guiding presence, no sign remained, as if her aged flesh had succumbed to blank death, then faded to final oblivion.
Panic raked through, a blind, clawing terror of abandonment. Lirenda could be left here, forever entombed beyond reach of life and movement. She wrestled to breathe slowly as she had been trained. All of her pride and practiced control seemed trampled and torn into shreds. She had no dignity. In gasping, sweaty struggle, she fought herself steady. The need to leap up, to flee headlong without heed for safeguards became almost too overpowering to deny.
Then abrupt change overset even terror.
The eruption was cyclonic, an invisible whirlwind of force barbed in malice. The vicious, leading edge had a thousand voices, cursing, crying, tearing with words and far worse: the scything, bitter edges of passionate hatreds all stabbing to flay and draw blood. Even sealed beyond harm, Lirenda felt her mind become milled into fragments, her thoughts consumed by unadulterated violence.
No prior experience prepared her, although every other ancient focus she had handled harbored such coils of trapped rancor. By nature, all crystals absorbed the essence of spells raised to resonance through their mineral lattice. If the patterns were not cleared, the vibrations over time and usage thrummed into rank dissidence, a resentful moil of caged energies. A stone pressed to heel by the will of many mistresses was wont to reflect twisted spite, or worse, become warped into hideous subterfuge, to turn on new wielders and seek domination in turn. Greatest of all matrixes, the Waystone’s stored patterns spewed forth in unparalleled viciousness.
Lirenda felt the blast as an obdurate, scorching tide of hatred that strove to unravel her being. Never had she witnessed such forceful malevolence. Her own strength was inadequate. Before such a flux, her deepest defenses would snap like so many dry twigs. She shrank inside the Prime’s warded circle, cowed to a whimpering huddle.
She was not alone in her terror. The screams of Koriani predecessors who had failed to overmaster the Waystone’s maze of trickery roiled through the crystal’s depths also. Their despair charged the mind, shrank the flesh, and became a scourge defined unto itself; as if those vanquished, consumed spirits sought to lure fresh victims to succumb to the inner flaws that destroyed them. Their bodiless thoughts whirled in tireless search, seeking, prying, scrabbling to exploit any small chink of uncertainty. The peril of their assault was real, unforgiving. Lirenda’s skin rose into prickles of fear. Despite the assurance of Morriel’s wards, the danger sang through like the instant before a lightning strike, with her naked selfhood exposed but one breath shy of oblivion.
An inflexible truth, that if the Prime Matriarch failed to subdue the roused Waystone, her frail circle of protections must crumple. If those thin lines of power once faltered or faded, Lirenda would be cast to ruin in the turmoil of upset control.
As never before, the lesson thrust home: to succeed the Prime’s power, a candidate must become nothing less than a faultless instrument. No prime applicant would ever achieve dominion of the amethyst without unbreakable strength and no fault left to admit weakness.
Then Morriel made her presence known. Her confidence unassailable, she configured the Waystone’s seals of mastery, laid them down in silvered vectors of power, fast and precise as thrown knives. Runes arced into sigils, symmetrical, perfect, to shape raging passions to order. Through the convulsed moil of energies, Lirenda caught the half-glimpsed imprints of past conjuries, the ghost echo of old currents chained through the quartz axis: of storms and disease bent awry or tamed outright; of the very slipstream of time challenged and reversed. She heard, too, the dusky voices of past matriarchs, their words, their deeds, their arguments all melded like the sussurant scrape of dry leaves. Then one last stamp of mastery sheared the whispers away.
The Waystone’s sullen stew of resistance tore asunder, then surrendered to limpid clarity.
Lirenda watched, awed, as the limitless vista opened before her at second hand. As often as she had experienced the rushing, exhilarant joy in her mastery of other focus jewels, the Waystone yielded an order of magnitude more. An indescribable passion plunged through her, sensation shaved to an exquisite knifepoint of ecstasy. The fired thrill of self-awareness seized her unaware, left her flushed and craving. She lost herself. Rapture beyond all imagining rolled like sweet thunder down her nerves. As if she stood poised at the pinnacle with all Ath’s creation strung on its axle, turning; and her hand, hers, to grasp the rein and drive the wheel, to prod the harnessed vector of fate to the dictates of her chosen whim.
Revelation flooded her, a keen exhilaration spiced by addictive longing. She would own this power herself one day.
At whatever cost, no matter the sacrifice, Lirenda knew she would pay any price to succeed the Koriani Prime. No risk, even death, would swerve her rightful claim to that heritage.
Impatient for that hour, the First Senior envied Morriel’s grasp of that seamless course of power. She ached for her chance to let tuned awareness thread through the stone’s lattice and frame the runes into sigils of command.
The pattern the Prime chose was a basic scrying. Somewhere upon the world’s seas, a brigantine’s keel carved westward. A small mote; a dimple pressed into the wavecrests by a hull hand fashioned of planks and sheathed in a bottom of copper. The metal would be subject to personal resonance, stamped bright in imprint of a man’s desperation, and his all-consuming hope of escape from the geas that hounded his peace.
Arithon s’Ffalenn sailed west on the summer winds, and Morriel shaped her bidding to comb Athera’s broad oceans to tag his current location. For sheer display, the move was impressive. Water was earth’s most unbiddable element. Salt of itself balked cast conjury. The call through the Waystone arose in a tumultuous torrent, a whiplash of force before which the wide seas must bow to outright demand.
The search spell released, launched in stamped intent to claim dominance over its target. Yet the connection fell short, maligned by some unseen barrier. Another resonance intervened, then captured its order. Clear sigils were impacted and snarled awry, then diffused away into nothing. The sea appeared lidded by impervious shields, and the scrying failed, its pure force dispersed into aimless puffs of air.
Lirenda cried out, indignant. “So much for the Fellowship of Seven and their claim of unshakable morals! Look! They have broken the code of their own compact, even acted covertly for the sake of protecting a criminal. Did you plan to catch their hand in the act?”
But the Koriani Matriarch kept pensive silence. Beneath her hand, the violet sphere of the Waystone shed chill, its heart a thousand spindled planes of trapped starlight. The noosed perils of its focus stayed poised and still as the glint off an unsheathed axe blade. “The Sorcerers have shown a devious cleverness,” she finally said, noncommittal. “That defense ward left no tracks, no afterimage of structural conjury.” The resonant signature of Fellowship work in fact had been absent, as though Arithon’s presence had been masked by an unseen force, or sea itself had joined in conspiracy to hide him.