by Janny Wurts
Then his own hasty conjury rebounded on its maker and accomplished its end like fell vengeance.
Dakar stubbed his toe on an uneven plank, crashed full length, and skidded. His palms caught a nasty scouring of splinters. The more frightening truth hurt worse than the pain: beyond any doubt, the Master of Shadow was wielding his talent for magecraft.
“Curse me with fiends, that shouldn’t be possible!” Dakar scrambled upright, vexed to despair.
Always before, the block had remained beyond reach of Arithon’s resource, the trained powers of his upbringing shackled in guilt by his imposed royal gift of compassion. Too late now, to avert a disaster past imagining. The Mad Prophet launched in hotfoot pursuit. This was a realm where Lysaer’s crown campaign to eradicate sorcery brought victims to the stake without trial. Too real, the chance that Earl Jieret’s augury might come due in this backwater settlement.
Breathless, stabbed at each step by the grate of a cracked rib, Dakar reached the opened door. The hallway beyond showed him rows of closed rooms, the end by the stair banked in shadow. Dakar dammed back his rasping breath. Through the masking noise from the revelers, he listened, but detected no scuffle of footsteps. Arithon s’Ffalenn could move like a ghost, even with no gifts to hide him. The darkness he called to mask his escape hung too thick, even to pass the fine, signature energies which underpinned all things of substance. Dakar strained his mage-sight, but recaptured no glimmer of pattern to guide him.
Resigned, he plunged into that blind dark by touch. His best course lay in reaching the stables. Caolle deserved warning. After that, the flimsy hope must suffice, that their combined efforts would be enough to extricate the Shadow Master from whatever brawling havoc arose from his foray through the taproom.
Dakar tracked the wall with a palm stubbed with splinters and minced his hampered way forward. Above the racketing clamor belowstairs, he heard someone bellow: Caolle, returned from saddling their mounts against need, and confounded to find himself under attack as Arithon sought fugitive exit.
“Don’t let him get past!” Dakar rushed to stop Rathain’s prince from doubling back through the hallway.
Ahead, grunts of effort, then an alarming thump. A body cracked through the oak banister. Caolle snarled an oath. Someone’s knuckles smacked flesh. An incongruous reek of pitch smoke spiraled up from the stairwell. Dakar winced through a snort of laughter. Barbarian to his core, the clansman stuck by his cantankerous habit of lifting the coachmen’s torches from the stable yard to light his way within doors. Between prince and liegeman, the battle raged on, a no-holds-barred scuffle fought on the steps with fists and fire and fell shadow.
A wooden-sounding thunk bought a surcease from darkness. Dakar blinked to adjust abused eyesight. Against the filtered glare from the taproom, Caolle poised with one massive fist clenched to the haft of his cresset. The flame had extinguished. Sultry coals still flared from the tip, laced in demonic trails of spent smoke. Collapsed in a heap against his braced feet lay Arithon s’Ffalenn, a welted mass of newly raised blisters glistening across his forehead.
“Ath, he went mad!” Still brandishing his bludgeon, Caolle glanced past his shoulder as if he expected another assault from behind.
Dakar made neither excuse nor denial. “Lucky the meatbrains downstairs are flat drunk. We’d best move your liege before some sweaty john wheedles one of the barmaids upstairs.” He ignored his own throbbing chorus of aches, knelt over Arithon, and helped Caolle check for lingering injury.
“No broken bones. That’s better than he deserves.” Caolle for a mercy never stalled over questions. He licked a bloodied knuckle, jammed his spent torch in the stump of the banister, then bent to the task of hefting royalty. “Runt sized or no, his Grace fights like Sithaer’s furies.” An accusatory glower shot back as he straightened and took note of Dakar’s hitched stance. “Kicked you also, I see.”
“One rib. Only cracked.” Dakar raised a hand to wave off the matter, then gave up the gesture for speech that hurt just as much. “Won’t keep me from riding.”
Caolle let that pass with a dubious grunt and plowed onward with Arithon across his shoulders like bagged game. “Well, whatever undid him, I’ll hear a reason. For this, there’d better be cause fit to stop Dharkaron’s almighty justice.”
But time was not given, even for Dakar to outline the gist of disaster. On return to the room, Arithon stirred the moment Caolle laid him back on the bed. Since the damaged bindings of the sleep spell were now too perilous an influence to keep, Dakar effected their immediate release.
The Master of Shadow regained full awareness at once, his pupils black and wide in the flare of the candle Caolle brought to measure his reflexes.
“No concussion. You’re lucky,” Dakar pronounced. Too heartsick to meet the anguished recognition unveiled in those wakened, green eyes, he held out a ripped twist of linen, soaked in the spill from the washbasin.
Arithon took the offering. As wary himself of prying observation, he pressed the compress over his scorched forehead. He asked just one question; heard from Caolle of the torch used at need to take him down. Then he sucked a sharp breath through shut teeth and let the sting to his outraged flesh stall off unpleasant explanation.
Too brusque for tact, Caolle showed him no quarter. “Liege, what evil possessed you?”
“Ath, let him collect himself!” Dakar snapped, detesting the pity that made him speak in defense.
“I can’t be spared,” Arithon contradicted.
The ground-glass hurt in his voice set even Caolle aback. In wordless embarrassment, the clansman pawed through the fallen blankets to recover the stool. That evasion helped nothing. On the floor lay the Paravian-wrought sword; the bared sweep of black quillons offered stark enough proof of a trust gone desperately amiss.
“You reached for Alithiel!” Arithon cried, the name of the blade charged with horror.
The Mad Prophet lost his chance to soften the impact.
“Yes, it’s the curse!” Arithon snapped, the admission jerked out like barbed steel from a nerve. “Desh-thiere’s touch has warped me, never for a moment forget this.” For Caolle, he explained his razor-edged quandary. “The geas which drives me to destroy my half brother grows ever more uncontrollable. That’s why Dakar holds my given permission to reach past my deepest defenses. So long as I keep my right mind, the preventative ought to be binding.”
A moment passed, rinsed in the buttery glow of the candle. “You’re not always sane,” Caolle summed up in his usual, hammer-blow bluntness.
Arithon shut his eyes. The rag in the mangling grip of his fist could scarcely mask his expression. Forced to yield his unwilling confidence, he lowered his hand, limp now, the knuckles scuffed red from warped violence. “Yes.” A shiver coursed through him. “The curse has invaded by way of my dreams. Apparently, there, it just claimed me.” He looked up then, his shaming appeal made the worse by his unflinching dignity. “I’m no fit prince to lead Rathain’s clans anymore. Caolle, I beg you, accept my release here and now. Take back your oath of fealty before the worst happens. Before-”
“Before I die by your own hand?” Caolle slammed to his feet. “Never.” He spun and paced, his wheeling shadow too large for the cramped room. “Liege, my death is not the worst that could happen. By your oath, sealed in blood before Fellowship Sorcerers, I stand fast. Even if your charge to stay alive was not binding, my heart could not do less. You are the hope for my Lord Jieret’s future. The heritage of your bloodline is not revocable, your Grace, any more than my own sworn trust.”
“Caolle, could you step out,” Dakar pleaded, as much to stop that lacerating contest of wills as to seek word with Arithon in private.
“No. Caolle remains, by command of his prince, if he’s too much the fool to disown me.” Arithon sat straight, faced them, the spark in his eyes too baleful and steady to wear down. “If he stands endangered through guarding my flank, he’ll not take those risks in ignorance.”
Aware th
at statement was pitched to provoke, Dakar joined forces, not just to turn Caolle, but to make Arithon withdraw before ruin overtook them. “This time, your Grace, you tapped into your training. You worked talent and wrought conjury against me.”
Arithon went white.
“Not once, but twice.” Dakar steeled his nerve and bored in. “My sleep spells were bent back in deflection against me, and not by an outside act of sabotage. When I used force at need to bar your way, all your sworn permissions were revoked.”
“You’re quite sure?” Arithon looked as if his own knife had slipped and stabbed him through to the heart. “Ath save us all, then the curse has subverted even my royal-born gift of compassion.” The forearm half-raised to mask his stark shock dropped nervelessly back in his lap.
“Not when you’re conscious,” Dakar amended quickly. Aching too much to endure forced bravado, he looked aside, and noticed that Caolle retreated also. As if care for this prince posed too punishing a trust, the gruff clansman busied his large hands to right the crashed washstand and retrieve the dented tin basin.
Dakar strangled pity out of fear and resumed. “Your Grace, we can’t argue facts. A masterbard’s gift grants you linkage through sound to something akin to your mage-sight. Any performance which recalls the Mistwraith’s influence, like tonight’s lament for Dier Kenton’s fallen, may well open channels for its curse to exploit.” While Arithon weighed this, Dakar nailed home his point. “I think you know it’s dreadfully unwise to proceed with your mad plots in Tysan.”
“I must,” Arithon insisted. The entreaty on his features too anguished, too vivid, he bared himself to explain. “We need more ships to seek the Paravians. The clans here require sound vessels and crews to spare them enslavement on the galleys. Lord Maenol’s people won’t survive the next generation if they are forced to stay landbound. They have no recourse left, since their former caithdein gave her life to declare them my allies. Against Lady Maenalle’s execution on my conscience, I pledged them my word I would help.”
No sensible counsel would move him. A swift, sideward glance showed that Caolle saw as well. Bull stubborn, or maybe cow stupid, Dakar tried again all the same. “You do realize that any encounter with Lysaer could send you over the edge. Not just your sanity, but the whole of this world would be threatened.”
“I have to go on.” A wry bent of humor flexed Arithon’s mouth as the stew downstairs roared to crescendo. Still unapologetic, he delivered his adamant conclusion. “What’s left but to run? And if I turn tail, that solves nothing. You must understand: this curse just compounds as time passes. Evasion will bring the same downfall. Actions and will are all I have left to stave off my own self-destruction. Worse than Lysaer, despair is my enemy.”
“Are you sure?” Dakar pressed. “Do you speak true? Or is your thinking corrupted by the Mistwraith’s geas itself?”
“Come ahead and find out,” Arithon invited. A testy, backhanded delight lit his face, almost welcome for the change as he shoved to his feet in familiar, acid-bright temper. “I’ve always liked fighting my demons up front. Since I’m dangerous, asleep, we may as well embrace folly headlong and ride on for Riverton tonight.”
Dawn blazed over the deep estuary at Riverton, a veiling of cirrus like cloth-of-gold fringe strewn across dove gray silk. Against that gilt backdrop, the walled inner city spiked a bristle of towers and battlements, streamered with pennons and pricked by the rake of ships’ masts. Seventeen centuries of commerce had overrun the original citadel. The flats where the barges docked along the river delta spread crammed to bursting with wharves, the arched gateways of coach inns set chockablock with boathouses and ferryman’s lighters.
Arithon and Caolle led the horses ashore for stabling with a liveryman. Ten paces behind, suspended over water on the gangplank, Dakar half sensed something; a fleeting prickle of spent energy, not unlike the imprint of a dissipated spell. He suffered a swift pang of nausea. Nagged by the oddity, he braced half in dread that his gift of prescience might trigger between steps to the dock.
But his tread on dry boards raised only the expected hollow echo. He frowned, paused anyway, plumbed mage-sense until his head ached. His search yielded nothing. Only the random, silvered dance of energy which patterned grained wood into substance. The air bore only the reek of black river mud, skeined through by the mulch of turned rose beds in the merchants’ garden courtyards, and the seasonal must of piled leaves.
Dakar rolled his shoulders, irritable and anxious. All week, he had been starting at phantoms, and no wonder. A man with the sense that Ath gave a flea would be anyplace else but in the Shadow Master’s company, inside the crown territory of Tysan.
Dakar hastened on before Caolle’s impatience could shatter the morning quiet.
If the wide, tranquil lanes by the barge docks met misty daybreak in restraint, by contrast, the harborside reflected a livelihood steeped from the rowdier tastes of men who plied deepwater shipping. There, the sky above the roof peaks teemed with raucous gulls. The puddles in the gutters reeked of flotsam and fish, a furlong removed from the exquisite walled mansions of the riverfront. The division between saltwater commerce and fresh lay demarked by the customs keeper’s compound, its seaside encroached on by sagging, tiled roofs and the storm-weathered planks of old warehouses. The market became the hub of activity, with its channeled gutters of herringbone brick spanned by the pilings of squatters’ shanties. Behind them, the half-plank tenements loomed three stories above the street-level sprawl of bawdy houses and dilapidated taverns. The mews in between held the seamier sailors’ dives, wedged amid tangles of cobblestone alleys scarcely wide enough to pass single file.
Arithon traversed the bayside mazes on foot, his lyranthe slung from his shoulder. His step was unhurried, almost meandering, and everything living made him linger. He dallied to peruse the trinkets spread on open-air tables; conversed with the idlers leaning on lampposts, or carters, wolfing hot pastries over their slackened reins. Caolle wore his sword and shadowed his shoulder. Made jumpy by the lazy accents of townsmen and the hated enclosure of city walls, he insisted on keeping his hands free. Which left Dakar to heft his tinker’s gear, the saddle packs of spare clothing, and the manful share of complaints.
“Don’t pretend you didn’t notice that circle of ash in the market square.” Disgruntled since he had dismissed the painted redhead whose playful fingers had promised fine dalliance, he groused, “They burned some poor wretch for the practice of unclean sorcery only yesterday.”
A pause, filled by the Mad Prophet’s puffing as they jagged up a narrow stair and passed a darkened archway through a close. His chorus rang plaintive echoes through a courtyard choked with frost-withered flowerpots. “The merchants should riot. Who will craft fiend banes if everyone with mage-sense cowers in fear of execution?”
Down a rickle of heaved flagstones, the party of three emerged back into daylight, with Caolle’s grip white on the sword as Arithon stalled again on his course.
Dakar scarcely avoided crashing into him. Blinking like a mole past the bundles clutched to his chest, he snapped, “If you’re going to give silver to every beggar we pass, my back will break before we find an inn.”
Arithon broke off a quiet sentence with his latest fascination, a raggedy old salt propped on a crutch. “That’s heartless bad manners,” he admonished.
Less eloquent, the beggar hawked and spat on the offensive Prophet’s boot.
“You toad-humping spawn of a maggot!” screeched Dakar.
The beggar cracked into devilish, deep laughter. “Now didn’t you say the same on the day you crammed yourself into that beer cask and we heaved you afloat on Garth’s Pond?”
Dakar’s eyes widened. The jab of Caolle’s elbow into barely healed ribs nipped his cry of recognition just in time. “I’m sorry,” he gasped when he could manage civil speech. Through another glare at Arithon, he added, “Our singer here has a soft heart and a head as addled as a duck’s egg. We’d all join you in the str
eets before he’d let a layabout go hungry.”
The beggar flashed a tigerish grin, none other than the lame joiner whose past touch at subterfuge had once helped the theft of a princess’s ransom. “Ye won’t lack for beer and feather mattresses, I’d say. Not in the company of a bard whose playing could charm life into a stone gargoyle. The Laughing Captain, hard by the shipyards, is a tavern to welcome a good singer.”
That suggestion passed off in languid disinterest, Arithon pursued, “If Lysaer’s royal guardsmen are busy burning talent, what does this city do for fiend bane?”
The beggar scratched his chin. “Well now, the Koriathain fashioned the talismans for the yard. Merchant guilds signed oath of debt for that.” An expert lag, while scruffy fingers poked for lice; until Arithon’s hand obligingly dipped into his purse. In glad speculation, the joiner delivered. “For the rest, we had a good bell founder.”
Arithon’s interest lit. “Had?”
“Aye. Man’s fair useless to anyone now. Born without perfect pitch, see? Can’t rematch the tone since one of his master set’s cracked.” Nonplussed by Dakar’s scowl, the scoundrel joiner palmed coins as though he had begged all his life. “Strolling that way, are you? Yon craftshop’s off Chandler’s Alley.”
Yet if the bell founder’s plight concerned Arithon s’Ffalenn, the path he chose to the harborside became everything else but direct. His small party tailed him in and out of three wineshops. Underneath the planked walkways which linked the close tenements, he shared biscuits with the filthy children who lived by picking pockets in the shadows. Dakar battled his shortening temper. Each move seemed to fuel his anxiety. More than once he spun around, certain someone was dogging his heels. He saw only slinking alley cats and rats. His skin stayed nipped into gooseflesh, as if the creatures were golems raised from bones, and set spying by furtive conjury.