by Janny Wurts
Brave words, or more likely, the stance of a fool. Cult spells, or loosed wraiths might slip through such barriers at whim. Yet a defender with his back to a door, and no options could but hope Asandir's given word backed the truth: that free will held aligned by a Fellowship warding could not be displaced or fall to the crippling coercion of necromancy. For the stakes at play now risked far worse than his life. Should he die under rites, no matter how foul, Sulfin Evend stood his ground on a Sorcerer's promise that his self-aware spirit could not be denied a natural passage across the Wheel's turning.
Behind the barred grille, the reanimate flesh that had once been Gace Steward proffered an oily challenge. 'Guard your prince if you can. Though how can you react? He has not paid heed to your warning.'
The threat was not empty. Outside, the filtered sound of raised voices moved nearer. Descending footsteps came on, undeterred in their disastrous approach down the stairwell. Then Lysaer's called inquiry affirmed that restraint had been thrown to the four winds and jeopardy. Or, perhaps not: the invidious smirk on the face of the captive suggested some form of a lure.
'What have you done?' Sulfin Evend cried, shocked. He had no mage training, could not guess what vicious mischief might have been tried to turn Lysaer's sensibilities.
A desperate, split-second remained to respond. This time, Sulfin Evend must act alone, without the mystical powers of a Paravian focus at lane crest, and with none of Sethvir's strength to back him.
He spun, shoved open the door, and plunged into the gloom of the stairwell. A kick slammed the iron-strapped panel behind him. No moment to spare, to engage bar or lock, or snatch the lit torch from the wall sconce. Ahead, through the welter of uncertain light, four men approached unaware. Only one might be saved. Sulfin Evend's live body must become Lysaer's shield. Without time for outcry, past reach of sane action, the Alliance commander slapped the spanned cross-bow into his left hand. He drew his knife in the course of his pelting dash upwards.
Between the slapped echoes of his own raced strides, he heard his most competent captain call downwards in concerned inquiry.
Sulfin Evend ran silent. He had no breath for grief. Reason and words would be far too slow to deflect the on-coming disaster. He could do nothing. Just hurl himself, sprinting, up the turnpike stair, driving muscles that screamed from exertion. He kept on. Watched the curve of the walls unveil course after course of blank risers. More torches passed. His wake set them fluttering. Warped shadows capered around him. A man who prayed might have beseeched fate. Sulfin Evend drove forward, panting. Let the distance from the closed cell be enough. He needed no less than sixty feet, with an additional margin for safety. He counted each pace, three stairs to the yard. Seventeen, eighteen, with his winded chest tight unto bursting.
Then at last, a clear view: Lysaer s'Ilessid in shining white, his bare head raw gold in the flame-light. By strict orders, three trusted, armed officers accompanied him.
Frustrated agony found no release. Their Lord Commander saw his dread realized. The royal party had already drawn too close, with the tactical blunder past help to reconcile. Asandir had been ruthlessly explicit: under darkness, a cult working could encompass the energy field raised by its operant source. 'There lies the range of an enabled necromancer, and by extension, any thralled subject who has been suborned under his power.'
The abomination in the cell had attached three subordinate entities whose drained corpses had dropped without fight. Cerebeld's death yielded four, then Gace Steward, five; attack, if it came, would be fiercely potent. Conquest might come without warning. Climbing, sides splitting, Sulfin Evend dared not gasp even a last-minute plea. He could only act to ensure Lysaer's safety by the only crude measure at hand.
He levelled the cross-bow. Aimed and squeezed the trigger. Cable spanged in release. The shot bolt hissed upwards and slapped the lead officer in the pit of his throat. His choked, surprised corpse and the discharged weapon fell and struck the stair simultaneously. As the tumbling body and discarded weapon crashed downwards, Sulfin Evend threw his small knife. The missile took the man just behind Lysaer, the blade struck stark through the eye. The kill fell, gouting blood. The dying man's weight jostled the Blessed Prince, just stiffened in shock, and now staggered forward into the last man-at-arms, who led a purposeful half-pace ahead.
While the soldier's rocked frame swayed to recover balance, Sulfin Evend leaped the threshing tumble of dead limbs as his shot officer caromed down the stairwell. Gagging on bile, he charged upwards, sword drawn, and cut down Lysaer's last standing guard: his most trustworthy field veteran. The hard, upward sword-thrust rammed between ribs and pierced a true man through the heart.
Sulfin Evend met his victim's betrayed glance, eye to eye. The stabbed carcass jerked, cramped to spasms of agony. His sunk blade wrenched away as he hurled the body aside. Strangling down nausea, the Alliance commander bore on. He knocked into Lysaer, slammed the white-clad form backwards and tripped his legs at the ankle. They fell, locked together. For cruel expediency, Sulfin Evend pinned his liege flat amid the splashed filth and blood that befouled the risers.
'Burn the dead!' he snapped, tortured. Though a slaughtered man voided and drummed heels at his elbow, and two others thudded in a downward plunge towards the shut door of the ward-room, he slapped down Lysaer's outrage. 'Torch them! Now! Trust me, trust my Sight! I am not possessed.'
Vivid with fury, Lysaer snarled, 'Are you not? Then why did you send for my presence?' His wrestler's response replaced accusation. He thrashed to hurl what must seem a rogue murderer over backwards down the stone stair.
Pressed to dirty tactics, Sulfin Evend snapped a knee into his liege's groin. Lysaer's resistance broke instantly. His gasping surrender could not last a moment. Even in agony, eyes pinched against tears, he shuddered and clawed to retaliate.
'Damn you, listen!' His relentless strength pinned hard overtop, Sulfin Evend snatched a fist in splashed silk. 'I never sent, do you hear me?' He ripped the Divine Prince's collar. Rich fastenings scattered. The rebounding clatter of flung pearls echoed downwards, each pin-point impact struck like tapped glass through the shuddering throes of the dying.
'Burn my fallen!' Hands still moving, Sulfin Evend spoke fast. 'For the Light's sake! You must do as I say.'
Lysaer bucked, enraged. 'You are not yourself! Or why would you slaughter your best officers!'
His Lord Commander hardened his fists. Stressed silk tore asunder. 'Damn you, liege! Be still. Your life, or theirs, I had to choose!'
Wasted entreaty; Lysaer freed his arm. His punch slammed into Sulfin Evend's left side, hard enough to damage a kidney had the impact not clashed into mail. The Lord Commander hammered in with his knee: again felt abused flesh recoil. This time, beyond mercy, he followed up, ground an elbow into the hollow of Lysaer's shoulder with a pitiless force that would paralyse.
No more pleading leave, he grappled through the ripped tunic. His bracer gouged scrapes into fine-grained skin. Heedless, he burrowed beneath snagging silk, seeking a hide thong and slung knife sheath. Lysaer's ragged gasps were obscured by the scream of rent fabric. Sulfin Evend bared the Biedar knife at long last and closed his desperate grip on the handle.
Already, wisps of dull shadow moved at the corner of his eye. Something unleashed by the necromancer's craft encroached on his peripheral vision. Lysaer jerked. Perhaps aware that an uncanny invasion nipped through his aura to claim him, he tried a mad wrench to break free.
'Damn you, hold!' Sulfin Evend snagged the desert-worked knife from the sheath. While his instincts cried scintillant warning of danger, he laid the flint weapon crosswise against Lysaer's throat.
Barely in time! The creeping invasion of uncanny forces coiled above the unwarded victim's nose and mouth. Past reach of finesse, Sulfin Evend bore down. He sliced a shallow nick through fair skin.
Lysaer recoiled.
Desperate to keep contact, and not cause lethal harm, Sulfin Evend pressed the warded flint against the seeping
edge of the wound. 'Hold still!' he pleaded. 'You are under attack, and this blade frames your only protection!'
Lysaer shut his eyes, then grated, choked short, 'If you're not turned by the enemy, what do you See?'
'A spirit or vile sending of some sort. I'm no sorcerer! Damned if I know what ugly powers have stirred, or what creepish force has come stalking. Don't move!' Still winded, Sulfin Evend fought each word through agonized, galling bitterness. 'Breathe the thing in, it will taint your blood. Your heart might be touched. This blade is your warding. Contact is binding your fragile protection, so sting and be grateful, your Grace. Why didn't you trust me? Under no circumstances were you to come down, far less seek this place after sunset.'
His anguish towered: three brave men were dead.
Now the horror that might yet enact a possession was arrested just barely from flooding its victim. It poised in mid air, a sinuous veil, arrested by unknown eldritch powers worked into a tribal dagger. 'A page brought your summons,' Lysaer said at strained length.
'His name?' snapped Sulfin Evend. 'One of ours, or from the palace?'
'Does that matter?' Lysaer ground out. Dispassionate ice-blue eyes raked back. 'How do I know that you're not corrupted?'
'Sithaer's damned! Have you heard me? My best men were killed because I had no means to defend them!' No protection existed within this bleak place that could spare them from becoming taken in thrall to a necromancer. 'You have just one knife,' the commander appealed in snatched grief. 'I had to choose which life should be saved. Now burn my casualties! I won't see them rise! You owe them that much, for their sacrifice.'
Lysaer coughed, his tangled head jammed against the stone stair, sullied gold in the glimmer of flame-light. Whether he sensed the threatened invasion, or whether the harsh knock-down had dazed his wits could not be determined.
'You must raise your light!' Sulfin Evend insisted. 'Tysan's safety right now depends on your gift. Or your hope to rout out this corruption is ashes!'
'You have lost hope, regardless,' declared an intrusive voice from below.
Sulfin Evend froze. Through his strained breathing, he heard furtive movement, then an uncanny shuffle. One of the freshly killed corpses had stirred. Puppet to the black will of a necromancer, it would mount the stair and wreak every form of fell horror.
'Burn them!' he gasped. 'Lysaer, do it now!'
Whether or not his liege meant to comply, the reanimate body kept speaking. 'I have news of the Master of Shadow, Blessed Prince! Arithon the bastard has flung you a challenge!'
Which statement changed everything. A repeat of the horrific event in Daon Ramon, Sulfin Evend watched a terrible, sweeping change eclipse the reason in Lysaer's eyes. Asandir had declared the effect was a curse, laid on by the Mistwraith's malice. Cast geas, or mad principle, the effect was the same: ruling power tossed like straws on a game-board set for unbridled disaster.
'Lysaer!' Frantic, Sulfin Evend bore down until the flint blade razed into raw skin. 'You are being played for strategic diversion. Tell yourself the truth! Fight back, man. Hold your rage. Don't rise to the bait of an enemy!'
The plea fell on deaf ears. Lysaer's features contorted to a rictus of fury, while down the stairwell, an obscene aberration with a hole in its heart staggered erect and continued in monologue, 'Did you know you are betrayed? Arithon s'Ffalenn has suborned the s'Brydion of Alestron. They have sheltered your renegade shipwright, Cattrick, and more. Your wife, in their hands, is now being dispatched to a hostel of Ath's adepts. The master I serve could hand you the victory. The death of the by-blow who has shamed your name could be delivered into your grasp.'
'Lies!' cracked Sulfin Evend. 'Burn the dead, or we're lost!'
Lysaer heaved. An animal whipped to an insane pitch of fury, he battered to dislodge the stone-knife from his throat. Sulfin Evend wrestled the slighter prince down. His ruthless fist hardened against Lysaer's neck, now become as much a deadly liability as an indispensable stay of protection. 'Hold, liege! You must! You're being reeled in like a fish!'
'Let go.' Implacable, Lysaer clawed to throw off restraint. 'Stand down. Or burn! I will not be thwarted.'
'I will not see you make an alliance with havoc!' Sulfin Evend used his studded bracer as a club and tried to stun his liege unconscious. The effort fell short. The knife gouged and slipped. Blood pooled in the hollow of Lysaer's throat, while the unmanageable grip of Desh-thiere's curse trampled down ethics and reason.
The crux wrung the loyal heart beyond bearing: to burn alive in Lysaer's crazed assault, or to drive home the knife like a butcher. Yet even the choice to serve death had not spared the other three officers trapped in the breach. Black spell-craft had claimed them in ruinous usage, a fate now poised to overtake the most powerful ruler in the five kingdoms. The weal of the Alliance, and who knew how many innocent lives, hung in the horrific balance.
'Lysaer!' Sulfin Evend shouted to break concentration, any effort to redirect the burgeoning rip tide of light. 'Fight your war! But not this way! Don't join hands with the dark cabal whose twisted acts drove your wife and your son into danger!'
Slammed into a riser, battered half-dizzy, the s'Ilessid prince sucked a wracked breath. 'They were pawns. Stand aside! Don't think to obstruct me.'
Out of the cold dark, the spelled voice kept taunting. 'But your son's name is not on the rolls of the dead. This I vow! The master I serve could tell you what forces have laid claim to Prince Kevor's destiny.'
Sulfin Evend felt the hardening under his hands. 'No!' His scream shattered the welded tension with echoes, while his liege's mad fury unleashed. Lost beyond hope, the lord commander cried out, 'Lysaer! Destroy the conspiracy that murdered Princess Talith! Then handle the Spinner of Darkness in a conflict at arms, untainted by black ties of necromancy!'
Success or failure, the shocked air burned white. Dazzled blind, scoured by heat, Sulfin Evend hung on, as hammer to anvil, the percussive clash of Lysaer's raised light smashed down. He heard ragged speech; realized his liege was weeping the name of his departed beloved. For Talith, the force of Lysaer's outraged assault turned upon the worked tool of the grey cult below him.
The strike roared through the keep like the fires of Sithaer. Flash-point heat glazed the lower cellar to slag. Both ward-room and dungeon were scoured. Doors, walls, and steel glistened red, then ignited. The unnatural fires belched up a curtain of black smoke, as razed masonry bloomed orange and ran molten. The stairwell above became a chimney, blasted by the winds of inferno. Clothing smoked. Skin blistered. Whipped hair singed in the blast. On the landing below, the downed guardsmen sizzled, flesh and bone seared away, while the stink of the fumes ripped the guts of the living into paroxysms of nausea. Retching, flash-blinded, Sulfin Evend slammed his liege into the stone step with stunning force. Then, scoured fingers still gripped to the knife, he locked his left arm and dragged his unconscious charge in a stumbling rush up the stairwell. He reeled ahead, hauling Lysaer along with him. Hot air seized his throat. Swirling fumes turned his senses. Sulfin Evend could not see, only grope his way upwards. If the mercury shadow of spell-craft still stalked, his gifted talent was blinded. He could but hope the uncanny assault had been thwarted when the necromancer's string-puppet cabal had been consumed.
Fire raged, beyond salvage. Bricks shattered, red-hot. The dungeon was blasted to ruin.
Coughing, stung bloody as the blast fragments raked him, Sulfin Evend rounded the bend. He saw torch-light, then the pallid square of the upper postern, stamped amid the morass of churned smoke. Cradled in his locked grasp, his liege lay rag-doll limp, a wound running red at his throat. Ahead, faint shapes against the trammelled twilight, he saw his posted guardsmen, responding. Their distressed shouts seemed far off. Sulfin Evend had no voice left to cry warning. He was fordone. If wisps of vile spell-craft streamed through the murk, no recourse remained. He could not enact further remedy.
Above, the grand hall of state was in flames, gone up like a torch to the roof towers. The
foundations already crumpled, below. In moments, the whole lower stairwell would give way and collapse into crumbling ruin. Sulfin Evend could not do any more than continue his harried flight upwards .
The men reached him. Hands fumbled and grabbed. Their touch woke his seared skin to agony. Sulfin Evend cried out, even as saving strength hauled him up, then dragged him along with his unconscious burden in a careening rush towards the doorway.
'That's the Blessed Prince himself!' someone cried. 'Mercy on us, he's bloodied! What ill force attacked him?'
'Get him out!' Sulfin Evend managed to gasp. He could scarcely see, barely hear, while the wheeling roof seemed to plunge in a downward spiral upon him. Before farntness claimed him, he croaked, 'Chain my liege in bed. Strap this knife to his skin. My orders, on pain of treason! No man is to take me away from his Grace's presence!'
Aftermath left the harsh, appalled silence that followed an earth-shaking thunder-clap. The blackened, raw scar of the grand hall of state still belched sullen fumaroles of black smoke. Ash sifted over Avenor's smudged roof-tops, while the smouldering talk in the streets placed the blame on the Spinner of Darkness.
There would be war.
Clad in stark white with a discreet, buttoned collar masking his bandaged throat, Lysaer s'Ilessid confronted his Lord Commander, who lay swathed in dressings soaked with medicinal unguents to cool the raging sting of his burns. 'I will not deflect the course of this outrage,' Lysaer declared with crisp sovereignty. 'This nest of conspiracy at Avenor is cleaned, but connections remain under question. If corruption did not work hand in glove with the Spinner of Darkness, ties existed. Find my wife, or my son, and I'll prove them.'
Prostrate on pillows, and sweating in discomfort, Sulfin Evend glared back. Hoarse, he still argued. 'Etarra, first, liege. More trouble lurks there. If the corruption we just defeated has tapped into Raiett's massive network of spies, the connection you attribute to Shadow is falsehood.' He held firm on that point. His harrowing acts in the stairwell granted his claim to that licence. Yet the privilege did nothing to lessen the force of his liege's imperious displeasure.