by Janny Wurts
“That took a great deal of nerve, risking Caolle in there,” Arithon opened. “You’ll answer to me if harm comes to him.”
The fat tinker drew a breath in trepidation better suited to his role as a prophet. “I won’t take that blame. You might have accepted his offer in Caithwood.”
Arithon stopped cold and clawed back the straw wisp of hair the busy wind flicked at his cheek. “You’re risking his life!”
“He’s risking his life,” Dakar corrected. “I’m flattered if you think my efforts could stop him.”
Looking frail boned in his pale-haired disguise, half-swallowed by the bargeman’s cloak, Arithon started forward with a visible effort to keep a tight rein on his temper. “We could be quartered in Riverton for months.” His bard’s instinct for sound seemed to guide his footing. His step fell almost noiseless through the race of loose leaves in the gusts. He went on, “A winding or two of ill-smelling bandage can’t hide a clan accent from headhunters!”
“Bandages won’t, but a glamour can,” Dakar argued. “I can work the small bindings to make the scar on Caolle’s jaw seem far worse than it is. He’ll wear the semblance of an injury to disfigure speech. In a port town with sailhand’s dives, who would bother to look for a spell to bend air? No one will trouble at all. His halting tongue will just seem too garbled for anyone but his friends to understand.”
“Ath, Dakar!” Arithon stopped again, one hand pressed to his face. At long last the misery showed through. “He’s Earl Jieret’s man, and the only foster kin that boy ever had to replace his slaughtered family.”
The Mad Prophet spun away, perhaps to lend the pretense of privacy for old grief. Even as the edge returned to Arithon’s control, he was unable to meet the appeal in the blank, masking gray of those eyes. Nor was he insensitive enough to try platitudes, or argue that Jieret was now a grown man and father to an heir in his own right. Not when the Earl of the North had been orphaned in one of Arithon’s former campaigns.
The loyalties demanded by the ghosts from that past were by far too deep and painful.
“You won’t win this one, old friend,” Dakar said at last in gruff sympathy. He turned around in the mat of dead pine needles, ducked a low-hanging branch, and forged the way back toward the tavern. “That’s Caolle’s clan heritage you need purloined ships to try and save. Nor can you shirk all the trappings of your birth or cast off your most sensible liegemen. Some will live and others come to die in the course of your service. That’s their picked fate. Yours is to bear it, until the day comes that the Fellowship Sorcerers grant you their lawful leave to abdicate.”
That stunned through the force of past sorrows. Arithon s’Ffalenn looked back from his shadow-wrought disguise, his eyes for a second reverted to their native, blazing green. “Then we’re stymied.” He smiled in that baiting, bright malice he used to divert stinging words. “A match brought to draw, since the end play can’t happen unless I sire an heir for Rathain. You should all leave me.”
Dakar chose to ignore that. “I presume you’ll be going into Riverton as a bard? Well, you’ve just acquired two servants. You might want to add some gray hair to fill out the part, since as the fair gallant, you’ll draw the wrong sort of notice traveling with a doting male retinue.”
Design
Autumn 5652
The Koriani orphanage in Capewell was housed in the refurbished shell of a merchant’s palace, a five-storied edifice of extravagant fancy that loomed over the harborside market. Stevedores’ calls and the dickering insults of house matrons never troubled its residents. High marble walls enclosed its stables and inner courtyards. Carved with weathered nymphs and the moss-caked cavities of scrolled waves, the scullery entrance fronted a sun-washed courtyard. A row of gnarled pear trees in tubs were all that remained of the formal herb gardens famed far and wide in past centuries. The branches lay stripped now, blackened skeletons shivering in the veering toss of the gusts off Mainmere Bay.
Hatched in their spiderweb shadows, Morriel Prime chafed porcelain stick fingers to encourage her poor circulation.
The days, the years, blended one into another. She wished she could scream for the frustrating labor of discerning one from the next, present from past; the jetsam of old memories become all but indistinguishable from posited future event. If the gardens where she sat this autumn morning had outworn their elegance through change, the routine obligations of the Koriani Order stayed tediously static. Each daybreak came, seamless in sameness as the metallic sheen of pooled mercury.
On Morriel’s right, from the close little chamber that once served the merchant as countinghouse, speech droned through the opened window. In muddled accents, a pouch-eyed little cobbler swore the order’s oath of obligation in exchange for a sigil of blessing for his craftshop. A fresh-faced girl novice would duly enter his name on the Lists of Service against the day when Koriani need would ask payment in boots or shoes, or some other piece of skilled leatherwork.
The ritual was timeworn as the order’s inception. Excepting the small sales of simples and remedies too onerously numerous for record, enchantresses took no coin for the spellcraft they rendered in service. With no wealth to gain, their practicing code of mercy remained difficult for greed to corrupt.
Morriel loosed a shallow, bored sigh. Entrenched tradition blended, not just days or seasons, but caused years themselves to meld together, memories rubbed smooth by repetition until none stood out from another. She endured the monotony. Moment to moment, she carried on with the tenacity of a lichen latched to north-facing rock. This morning’s task of selecting new page boys for her personal service had recurred so many times, she had ceased to number or name them.
The children seemed one long stream through time, as similar as pebbles in a brook. Unblinking, her obsidian eyes surveyed the dozen odd choices. They stood in a row with their fair hair combed, and clothing brushed formally straight. In age, they ranged from eight to ten.
Some always cringed from the Prime Matriarch’s review. Two stared at their feet. The inevitable coward sniffled and shook, while another near the line’s end presented tearful, flushed cheeks in defiant and terrified silence.
Morriel made her selection on a scant second’s thought. “That one, and that one.” The pair marked apart by her stabbing gesture were close matched in height, and possessed of a china-doll innocence. “Show the others away.”
“Your will, matriarch.” A matronly enchantress bustled from the archway behind. She comforted those children returned to her charge, then bundled them off to the kitchen with a promise of apple tarts and milk.
The Prime surveyed her latest acquisitions with a vulture’s unwinking regard. The near boy watched her back, trapped in awe and macabre fear, as if her withered limbs in their draping purple velvet belonged to a corpse, or some nightmare work of carved calcite. The other child stood frozen with a dripping nose and a chin puckered red in failed effort to dam back his tears.
“You will serve as my page boys until you reach twelve years of age,” Morriel informed, not unkindly, but rasped thin as steel set too long to the grindstone. “The work I ask will be light. Do well, and on your day of dismissal, an apprenticeship will be found with a reputable trade which suits your inclinations.”
“Yes, matriarch,” whispered the boldest of the boys.
The withered twitch of a smile turned a corner of the crone’s lips. “How fine, you have manners, boy. Bravery, too. When you are a man abroad in the world, those virtues will be appreciated. My needs here are simpler. Please recall, when I come to address you, I prefer you say nothing at all.”
The tearful child whimpered. The forward one shrank in uncertainty from the sting of her mild disapproval. Morriel offered the boys no false reassurance. They would do best to fear her, that the friends and associates they made in maturity should share due respect for her office. Like white-painted iron in the brine-scented winds that keened off the waves of the bay, she also withheld her dismissal. Her eyes fixed ahead l
ike sheared chips of slag, and her hands were unmoving marble.
The rift happened then, without any warning at all.
In one seamless second, she no longer inhabited the chilly autumn courtyard in Capewell. Ten centuries blurred; the friable webs of perception unraveled. The green fields of her village childhood resurged and wrapped her in sun and the fragrant, honeyed heat of summer haze. The boys who rolled tussling and yelling amid the new-sprouted barley were her dark-haired, dark-eyed little brothers. Sprites who clung to her ruffled skirts while she simmered berries into preserves; who brought her their skinned knees and elbows to be nursed; who secreted live beetles inside her jars of dried rose petals.
She loved them like an addiction.
When her talent came on too strong to deny at sixteen, her parents had sent off the young plowman who sued for her handfasting. Deaf to her pleas and her stormy bouts of rage, they sent her dowry to the Koriani Order and pledged her to lifelong service. The boys became the tie that broke her heart. Scene followed scene as she suffered for their loss, huddled under blankets in the echoing, vaulted stone of the dormitory. She wept for her brothers, while merchants’ daughters from Cildorn bemoaned their lost gowns and jewels, and sly-faced craftgirls from Narms vied to take illicit lovers before the day they came to swear vows, and seal themselves forever to the celibate ways of an initiate enchantress.
Then the years, passing, and the demands of strict learning claimed all their youthful rebellion. Study of crystals, then endless practice with the sigils of power erased their differences of station. Girls became women, at one with the Koriani Order, and few thoughts remained of the families abandoned in childhood.
The regrets which survived were the strong ones. Even after a thousand years, Morriel Prime would not suffer her pages to resemble the brothers who had grown and gone on to mortal death. No one alive remembered their faces; how they had fared, or where they had breathed their last. If they sired descendants, those too were vanished into forgotten obscurity. The folk who had known them were generations lost; their near kin gone to crumbled dust.
“Prime Matriarch?” A soft voice, then a tentative touch to her shoulder drilled her thought like electrified pain.
Morriel started. Her senses upset, awash in blind static. The moment became nightmare as she fought to reorient. Buffeted by the incongruous, fishy tang of winds blown off of salt water, she knew blank confusion more vast than the infinite dark beyond the veil. Then eyesight returned with a burning, sharp rush. Two robed seniors waited to one side. Their inquiring, smooth faces should have been known to her. Yet her memory would yield up no names; their identities blurred into thousands of others, until rank and personality failed to take on any semblance of importance.
The panic hit then, a slippery, dark wall too sheer for trained calm or reason. Fear yawned before her, that she might never recover her sense of time and place. Morriel shut translucent, webbed eyelids. She willed her breath steady while the trip-hammer pound of her heart threatened to burst through the walls of her chest. Years of forced discipline let her clasp the quartz pendant at her throat. The focusing properties of its matrix should let her grope out the right thread of recent memory.
But that remedy failed her. Sharp, questing thought slid past her guard and mired in the stone’s composite layers of stored imprints.
She had outlived her time. The crystal she wielded held a thousand years of memory, too long a span for a reactive mineral to stay in unbroken contact with breathing flesh. Past due for cleansing, any stone’s burdened matrix would develop an ornery character.
Its obstructive nature mocked her now, as if to expose her rank weakness. She regained no connection to the facts she required, but fell into the deluge of residual memories left behind by former primes: the disparate, echoed fragments of bygone personalities, strained at random from her use of the Great Waystone.
Morriel choked back a scream, beat down the visceral terror, that her last recollection of her name and identity might be mazed into the stewed thoughts of dead predecessors.
That instant, like a pane of snapped glass, the disorientation cleared away. As if the cogs of her mind had never once slipped, Morriel recognized the swept, white stone of the courtyard at Capewell’s orphanage. Against mortised coping and soft, southern marble polished by weathering rains, two small boys stood before her in terrified obedience, shivering in the north wind.
Though they must learn in due time to wait on her needs, today’s lesson was unduly harsh; Morriel blinked lightless, jet eyes, chilled herself, and uneasy. If age had eroded her grip on self-command, she had small choice but behave as if no lapse had upset her sound judgment. “Have my new pages taken to the seamstress to be fitted for proper livery.”
“Your will, matriarch.” The younger initiate shouldered the task, though the bands on her robes marked a rank far above petty errands.
The middle-aged enchantress stayed silent in respect while the courtyard was cleared of small boys.
Morriel refused any moment to compose herself. The dread could take root like moss in dim corners, that a second slip might over-whelm her. Until Lirenda was fully trained to replace her, she must permit no breach of faith in her competence. “You bring news?” she prompted, then gestured her formal leave to speak.
The enchantress gave proper obeisance, and said, “Matriarch, our clairvoyant received word from the lane-watcher stationed in Tideport. She wished you informed that Arithon of Rathain has made his return to the continent.”
Morriel’s interest took fire. “In Tysan? I thought so!” She wheezed through a gravelly laugh. “Very well! The hour has come to start forcing the Fellowship’s hand.” A snake’s eye glitter of diamond pins loured from under her hood as she delivered imperious instructions. “I’ll require a closed audience with your most gifted clairvoyant. She will send my instructions through the lane-watchers. Afterward, summon your two newest initiates and direct them to attend me in the observatory. Once I have admitted them, let no one interrupt or unseal the chamber until I emerge or give leave.”
The enchantress in attendance showed surprise. Such obvious steps to undertake a grand conjury would not usually proceed without steps to inform the First Senior of momentous events. “You don’t wish a messenger sent on to Lirenda at Valenford?”
“How dare you ever think to question my rule!” Morriel cut back in distemper.
“I bow to your will, matriarch.” The initiate took chastened leave, the displeasure of her Prime like the stab of an auger at her back.
The observatory built into the Koriani sisterhouse at Capewell was an edifice evolved through the contrary styles of seven centuries. The dainty, five-sided bronze cupola and the fancifully shuttered casements which overlooked the town’s roof peaks were the latecoming ornaments of folly. Mossy stone walls and the flint sills of old revetments bespoke grimmer beginnings as a watchtower. From its original vantage, merchants had counted inbound ships at the quay. The stone had been reset with arrow slits later, when townsmen fortified against vengeance-bent clansmen through the unsettled years of the uprising. The observatory built on when the keep was roofed over now served as a chamber consecrated for fine magic.
The inside air had gone musty since the pierced shutters were darkened with sheets of tarnished silver. Candles of incense-soaked wax fluttered on the shelves of the sills. The inviting, cushioned benches that once lined the walls were reframed as cupboards with bronze hinges. Door fronts and portals had all been replaced with unpainted oak panels, cut green, dried in fire, then inset with the knotty, counterlooped copper of a thousand runes of ward. Each latch had been painstakingly welded, then sealed by tin sigils with guard spells to deflect any outside prying. The old, timbered floors were flagged over in black slate, unpolished to accept the scribed traceries and seals of forced power.
There, an emaciated predator poised over a webwork of ciphers, Morriel Prime crouched with a sliver of chalk in her hand. If the construct she patterned against t
he Fellowship’s constraints showed a calculated, terrifying complexity, its driving plot was most simple: since the Sorcerers placed undue value on Prince Arithon’s life, he was himself made the key to arrange their coercion.
Capture the Master of Shadow as a pawn, and for fear of the threat lying latent upon Marak, the Seven must bow to Koriani demand. Better than most, Sethvir must own up to the stakes: Morriel would seize upon any provocation to see the Teir’s’Ffalenn dead. Indeed, the Prime deeply preferred to end his misspent royal life to forestall the prophesied threat to her succession.
Between each tormented step of her labor, the withered, old Matriarch cursed the crux that bred such necessity. With spiteful care, she etched chain after chain of linked ciphers in her wretched, crabbed script. Here and there, as line crossed line, or a finishing sigil raised latent energies, a sulfurous light flared from the contact. Shed glare lined her hooked profile, fleeting as the flit of a sunbeam. The air became glued into uneasy clarity, until the tapping scrape of her chalk ripped the quiet like the snap of flint-struck sparks.
Morriel shuffled another step, closed another circle. The rune signs might skip like torn stitches beneath her palsied, frail touch, yet the vectored arcs laid to move summoned forces stayed precise, as if scribed by a master mason using a pin compass and cord. At the center of the floor where the sigils converged stood a low tripod. There, looped in a silver cradle and masked in black silk, the amethyst Great Waystone stood waiting, center point for the uncoiling layers of Morriel’s enveloping snare.
Regarding its draped globe in stifled apprehension were the two young initiates Morriel had chosen to serve her. Though the shuttered, fireless chamber was chilly, both girls clasped damp hands in the folds of gray robes. Fresh from their novitiate, wholly unmarked by experience, they waited to give what was asked. When their Prime straightened up from her scribery and bid them to place themselves at the north and south poles of her construct, they accepted their role in stilled dread.