Traitor's Knot (epub)

by Janny Wurts

  Stunned himself by the resounding force of that closure, Sulfin Evend startled to the incongruous, warm touch as his prince placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. 'Come away, Lord Commander. You'll retire to my galley. There, be assured, you'll receive your due rest and the courteous welcome that this town of Hanshire and your own blood-kin have denied you.'

  * * *

  Early Winter 5671

  Reversal

  Two days after their Matriarch's failed effort to capture the Prince of Rathain, Forthmark hospice's high-ranking senior enchantresses remained exhausted and beaten limp. Stiff with the bone-deep ache of defeat, the Prime Circle lately called back into session kept to the comfort of their cushioned chairs. They might yearn for the sleep today's duty denied them. Yet the tradition surrounding a novice's oath-taking required their presence as witness.

  Before their worn faces and critical eyes, Lirenda did not share the suffocating panoply of their formal red-banded robes, or a weighty mantle of purple and silver. Demoted to the grey shift of low service, she shouldered the brute work of screening the young girls gathered for their induction into the sisterhood. Five had been presented for today's review.

  The paltry number displeased the Prime. Enthroned on her couch, flushed under draped silk and the jewel-strung net confining her jonquil hair, Selidie confronted the last of the untested candidates with slitted, lynx eyes. Her blame for the short-fall wore an enemy's name: Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn had instilled the changes that reshaped the surrounding territory. The Vastmark tribes that once had backed him in war were no longer severely impoverished. Ships now moved the wool trade, disbanding the network of brokers. In the hard years, when misfortune and shale slides reduced the flocks, shepherd parents no longer sent daughters to Forthmark to spare them from wasting starvation.

  Today's applicants ranged in age from four years to ten, lined up in a shivering row in the hospice atrium. Streaming light from the windows struck their brushed hair and scrubbed skin, and hazed the coarse nap on their clothing. They stared at their feet, or fidgeted, faces pale with a justifiable nervousness.

  Amid silence that tagged the least movement with echoes, a creeping chill pressed the air: the Great Waystone itself lay unveiled to record their novice's oath. Since the induction process could not be rushed, the jewel's raised focus would not be released for somewhile yet to come. Through the lengthy pauses, the day's petitioners to the Prime came and went, their low talk a droning back-drop.

  Lirenda endured the unbearable tedium. Attached to wealth, and fine clothes, and the cosseting of high position, she detested the depth of the probes required to determine each candidate's fitness. The intimate sounding of a girl's inner faculties felt like the pinch of tight shoes, replete with the mental suffocation left from their disadvantaged backgrounds and former experience.

  The two cherubs gone first had been gutter-snipe orphans, charity cases taken in from the dock-side stews of the southcoast. Their minds had been dim, cluttered with memories of hunger and sores, and summer rains spent huddled under piles of fish-rancid packing crates. Neither child showed a glimmer of curious thought. Life's hardships had already crushed them. Oppressive fears wounded their brilliance of spirit; malnourishment stunted their hope.

  Lirenda told over the time-worn, sad patterns. Here again, the imaginative sensitivity that fore-promised arcane potential had been ground too far down to break out of stoic resistance.

  Now finished with the third child in line, the disgruntled enchantress aroused from her disciplined trance. She wrapped the paired quartz spheres that held the child's imprint and passed the bundle across to the waiting peeress. Then, slaved under the Prime's directive, she declared the candidate's fitness. 'A grey robe, and no schooling for rank. Her destiny lies with the hostels.'

  The girl curtseyed, trembling, as the peeress's touch guided her on to Prime Selidie's chair. At eight years of age, she knelt to swear oath: to grow up and shoulder the menial tasks of laundry, or cooking and child-care, or to fill some minor niche of secretarial work. If she developed gentle hands and a kind nature, she might progress to assume convalescent care of the infirm.

  'Next, please step forward,' Lirenda intoned.

  The skinny, older candidate presented herself. Her hair hung dull brown, and her chilblained hands were a crafts child's. She could have been expelled from apprenticeship for laziness; or her parents might have offered her up in exchange, to fulfill a past oath of debt. The rare applicant, these days, would be a volunteer, encouraged to serve by her family.

  Moved to yawning distaste, Lirenda selected two more quartz spheres cleared to a state of blank dormancy. Careful to keep her touch shielded in cloth, she said, 'Give me your hands, child.'

  The paired crystals were placed into the offered, chapped palms. 'Hold these, place your thumbs on their surface, and wait. When I ask, give them back over to me.'

  Those basic instructions might last for minutes, or extend as long as an hour if a child's grasp lacked the vigor to imprint the stones' matrix. Throughout, Lirenda endured her cramped perch, forced to wait in subservient boredom. To her right, the frightened girl-child now taking oath knelt and laid her palms against the faceted Great Waystone. Standing opposite, the house peeress gloved her hands in white silk, then touched the imprinted spheres to each side of the unshielded amethyst.

  Then, prompted carefully, the lisping orphan recited her lines. 'I, Nayla, declare myself free to bind oath to the Koriani Order, From this breath, this moment, and this word, until death, I exist to serve, this I vow. My hands, my mind, and my body, are hereby given to enact the will of the Prime Matriarch, whose whole cause is the greater good of humanity, this I vow. All states of fleshly desire to renounce, this I vow. All ties of heart, of family, of husband and lover to put aside, this I vow. . .

  The raw power of words, spoken over by thousands across a history that bridged generations, unleashed the energy of a living force. The ancient crystal remembered: each named initiate, and each former prime, extending back to the dawn of the order, before cataclysmic war had sent a destitute enclave of mankind to beg for settlement on Athera. The amethyst focus that had recorded the order's past origins retained each initiate sister's embedded imprint. The young, open heart and the vulnerable mind could not be less than swept away by the torrent.

  Lirenda recalled that branding, first thrill. The answer to every stark longing had seemed within reach on the moment when she sealed her oath. Declared as a candidate for the prime succession, she had never foreseen the shaming failure that would cast her down and deny her the ultimate glory of accession to supreme rank.

  Nor would today's girl-child glance aside from her rapture. Enveloped in bliss, she would not yet comprehend the binding scope of her promise, or fully grasp that a single, willed word from the Matriarch could deprive her of life, or limb, or intelligence.

  The formal investiture wound onwards toward closure: '. . . And should I weaken or falter and come to forswear my commitment, all that I am shall be forfeit, body and mind. This I vow, no witness beyond the Prime Circle, no arbiter beyond the crystal matrix into which I surrender my Name and my imprint as surety through all my living days.'

  As sworn novice, the young girl arose and received the Prime's kiss on both her flushed cheeks. Her smile shone radiant, as Selidie intoned the time-worn phrases of closure. 'Nayla, may you serve peace and charity with dedicate grace. Wear the order's mantle with pride.'

  The hospice peeress released the imprinted spheres into a basin of salt water for clearing, then bestowed a white ribbon, to be sewn on the sleeves of the grey robe today's young initiate would wear until death. The child bent her knee in a dutiful curtsey and received her due leave to depart.

  Lirenda looked on, wrung to ferocious envy for that talentless chit's simple freedom. She suffered the prolonged wait, while the next, raw-boned candidate completed her crystal imprinting. Once the energies in the paired spheres became gravid, Lirenda gathered them back in hand. Th
e girl candidate watched, anxious, as the adult who would determine her future closed the stones in her grasp and engaged trance, then fused her awareness with the replicate pattern imbued within the reactive matrixes that now mapped the flow of polarity between the candidate's right side and left side balance.

  For Lirenda, as always, the moment of full immersion felt as invasively horrid as drowning . . .

  . . .vision turned dim. As her senses became felted under a muddle of random thought and jagged, disordered emotion, she thrashed to escape the suffocating contraction as her state of trained clarity compressed downwards into tight space and muffling darkness. Imprisoned, Lirenda felt her private self strip away, until her eighth-rank awareness squeezed into a mould that was abhorrently other: she knew abuse and cold; the memory of filthy hands, scratching fleas, and smells that revolted the senses. Sunk into a morass of self-pity and need, she lost even the hardened spark of her rage. Defeat became helplessness that numbed, then putrefied, leaving knots dense and solid as brick. Beliefs became walls. Despair framed a cage. Under the murk, just barely smouldering, she encountered one stubborn ember that survived the strangling defeat of adversity. She touched on that point. All but deaf and blinded, she blew the breath of expanded knowledge against that pinched glimmer of hope.

  True talent responded. The small spark became flame. Into that flickering promise of light, reflected in faithful, quartz imprint, Lirenda applied the meticulous discipline of her developed awareness. From raw potential, she mapped the latent channels that opened, then traced where they might be coaxed to expand.

  Yet the narrow vessel reached its capacity too soon. The influx of forces jammed still and backed up. Lirenda suffered the wretched constriction, forced to remain in rapport until she had assayed every sigil of testing, one exhaustive level at a time . . .

  In due course, Lirenda recovered herself. The unfettered range of her power resurged like circulation restored through a cramped limb. Breathless and damp, she pronounced the result.

  'She is for the sisterhouse.' Shown the peeress's smiling pride, Lirenda added the rest. 'A first-rank talent, confirmed, with potential for third, if she masters her fear and responds to the training to release her conditioned resentment.'

  Yet the candidate was not ushered away to declare her obedience over the Waystone. The morning's proceedings had been interrupted when the seeress who minded the lane watch arrived, bearing an urgent report.

  Her hushed phrases threw a scatter of echoes through the vaulted stone chamber,'. . . inbound message from the fifth-ranked, stationed at Hanshire . . . Morriel's past hope is ended . . . now lost our option to secure a possible candidate for prime succession off the branch line of s'Gannley. We are desolate, Matriarch. The effort has failed, in no small part due to a new interference engaged by the Fellowship Sorcerers.'

  The set-back exposed an on-going sore point: that no talent with ninth-rank potential now trained under oath to the Koriani Order. That short-fall had posed a critical problem for the last prime, caught facing the dissolution of extreme old age. Morriel's straits had been desperate enough to risk forcing the birth of an infant candidate, conceived through an oath of debt. The strategy had been set to cover the deficit, should Lirenda's initiate passage to ninth rank fail: a critical safe-guard, made meaningless after the usurpation of Selidie's life-span. Young again, Morriel had snatched the victory from death and bought herself a twisted reprieve.

  Since her heinous crime had gone undetected, the eldest senior delivered her placid opinion. 'The random induction of orphans eventually should provide us with the requisite gifted talent. Let the wretched idea of planned breeding be dropped. The risks outweigh the benefits. That branch lineage derives from a caithdein's legacy, and would tend toward offspring with headstrong will and ungovernable independence.'

  Lirenda wrapped and passed off the imprinted quartz, desperately straining to track the course of the on-going debate. Last chance of reprieve, she raged against ebbing hope, that the proven asset of her eighth-rank talent might see her released from her insupportable punishment.

  Selidie leaned back in her carved ivory chair, bored composure suggesting the set-back at Hanshire posed no more than a trivial inconvenience. 'Wait or not, we have set a better alternative in motion already' She gestured her bandaged hand to cut off the tiresome discussion. 'As prize, or as forfeit, we shall shortly know if the inducement set forth is sufficient. Given development, I fully expect that our sisterhood's short-fall will be most handsomely met.'

  Chafed frantic, Lirenda burned to hear more. But the seeress was dismissed to resume her post. Scheduled business would continue: the screened candidate awaited her oath of investiture, and the last child in line had yet to undergo testing.

  Yet the snap of Selidie's spoken command halted the ceremony forthwith. 'All are excused! I require Lirenda. The oath and the last screening shall wait.'

  The will of the Prime was held above question. The Senior Circle arose, gave obeisance, and filed out, while the sisterhouse peeress hustled to gather her bewildered charges. 'Here, child!' she whispered. 'My dear, ask me later.' Her admonishment silenced the girl's disappointment. 'Our simple task is to obey.'

  Once the chamber had cleared, Lirenda was summoned, her powers to be used as the vessel to extend the Prime's eyes and ears. The demand would be arduous, no sharp surprise. By the terms of imposed sentence, Selidie could expend her schooled talent like riches poured out of a jar. 'You will engage in trance while I align the Great Waystone to cast a scrying over salt water.'

  Lirenda knelt as bidden. Puppet to the Prime's least command, she laid her hands on the stinging chill of the amethyst. Contact wrapped her senses in harrowing cold, a brief agony. The Prime's master sigil reached through with clamping force and claimed her receptive contact. Insatiably demanding, it grappled her being and jerked forth a quickened thread. The unravelling plunge dropped her through spinning darkness. Her being became a spun line that hurled through a portal of purple fire. Now nameless and faceless, poised over what felt like the eye of the world, Lirenda received the Prime Matriarch's directive: 'Find Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn. Watch and listen for as long as it takes! I would have the name of the place where he plans to make his next landfall.'

  A command sigil blazed red as a sign-post. Aimed arrow of purpose, the bound spirit dropped through the gateway framed at its heart. Now tempered as a tool, her consciousness broke through and emerged into the scald of bright sunshine, and ocean-fresh air, spiked with the pitch tang of oakum . . .

  '. . . how aware are they?' Dakar the Mad Prophet was saying. Seated cross-legged on the warmed planks of a ship's deck, he resembled a dollop of suet rolled up in a knot of old rags.

  'I don't actually know,' mused the Prince of Rathain, poised intent by the pin-rail above him.

  Something banged in the hollow space belowdecks.

  Arithon paused. Equally rumpled in torn breeches and soiled shirt, he raised dark eyebrows at the shouts that erupted from the depths of the Evenstar's hold. To judge by the cursing, her sailhands encountered some fouling nuisance involving pinched fingers and ballast rocks. Though the brig where he lounged was left becalmed in the aftermath of a seasonal storm, the cant of the timbers beneath his braced feet bore a distinct list to starboard.

  Planking shuddered to another booming report of a large stone being shifted to port.

  Dakar winced with his eyes shut. 'If the crew keeps on fumbling boulders like that, we'll spring all the dastardly seams in this tub long before the keel's sitting level.'

  Arithon grinned. 'You happen to be sitting on Cattrick's best work. If he ever hears of your slanging remark, you'll become dropped meat underneath his bludgeoning fist.'

  'We have to reach shore, first.' Dakar's jaundiced attention shifted and measured the vital figure above him. 'Who needs Cattrick's rough temper? That look on your face spells trouble, right here.'

  Impervious to rancour, Arithon pursued the lapsed thread of his earlier reasoni
ng. 'Fiends don't appear to originate thought.'

  Dakar's horrified flinch also failed to swerve him off topic.

  '. . . or emotion. At least, when I ply them with musical tones, they don't respond, except by reflection. They experience by imprint, without innovation. Complex patterns will draw them with insatiable greed. That's probably why they fixate upon our intense feelings and delight in our rage and frustration. The innate creativity of conscious awareness lies outside their range of experience.'

  'They are drake spawn.' Dakar's emphatic shrug dismissed a conundrum far better dropped now, without further tinkering speculation.

  'Fragments of awareness,' Arithon ploughed on. His gaze surveyed the sail crew at work on the mast-head, then the drifting, puffed clouds overhead; ignored outright, the Mad Prophet's furious, mouthed cue to be still at once and stop speaking.

  Dakar signalled again, his chopped gesture ignored: as ever, such galling perversity seemed ingrained in the fabric of Arithon's character.

  '. . . beings conceived from an experimental idea that was never balanced into completion.' Through yet another shuddering crash, and Feylind's yell of admonishment, the Master of Shadow reconsidered the shapeless sack by his feet. His mood of suspect mildness remained throughout his bout of oblivious monologue. 'Davien's notes were explicit. He explained iyats as raw energy granted the willful drive to exist. They sustain as parasites, feeding off borrowed charge, but lacking the self-aware memory of an entity able to grow and evolve. That explains how a sigil was fashioned to hold them. And yet, I imagine coercion through force may have been a bullying waste.'