by Janny Wurts
He proved a man slight in stature. A disarranged swathe of black hair could not quite mask green eyes, or the steep, angled features that marked the royal bloodline of s'Ffalenn.
'Ath preserve us all!' Morriel Prime's appalled outrage cut like glass through the Skyron link. 'A city has been all but destroyed! Innocent people have suffered! How much unconscionable meddling shall this prince be free to inflict upon our world before the Fellowship sorcerers deign to admit their mistake?' Harsh as scaled iron, she added, 'Last of his line or not, Arithon s'Ffalenn shall be curbed. Dharkaron as my witness and be damned to the Seven, who would in blind folly preserve such dangerous stock.'
That moment, with scarcely a flicker of warning, the Athir contact cut off.
Released to the scent of summer flowers, and the night quiet of her bed in the hospice, Elaira stifled a shuddering sob against the heel of her hand. The terrible wait was over; her peace irrevocably fled. The Master of Shadow was betrayed, not by her, but worse, by his passionate love for the music he held dearest to his heart.
Awed and shaken and concerned for him, Elaira turned her face to bury her misery in her pillow, and froze, her skin pricked to shivers by a draught.
Her room was no longer empty.
A figure poised by her bedside: not the initiate healer who brought her tisanes for the pain, but the uncanny presence of a broad, bearded man too ghostly still for breathing flesh. His florid features held a frown of thunderous proportions. He stood, fists planted on a belt like an ox collar, his eyes trained upon her as lightless as new sable velvet.
Elaira blinked. The creature she confronted could be nothing less than the wraith of a Fellowship sorcerer.
'The diligence of your senior enchantresses has been rewarded,' Luhaine opened, the shyness he held for outsiders girded behind unimpeachable ceremony. 'Arithon has been found in Jaelot.'
The sorcerer's portly form looked somehow tired, standing. Elaira started to slide over on her pallet to allow him the space to sit down, then recalled; a disembodied spirit would retain no need for such comfort. 'Why are you here?'
Wind from the casement brushed through Luhaine's image without stirring his wiry beard. 'To warn and to help.'
'I can already guess how Morriel plans to use me.' Elaira was careful to muffle her voice. To be caught in conversation with a Fellowship sorcerer would call down the direst consequences. 'How are you minded to help?'
Had Luhaine still been enfleshed, he would have rubbed the pink knob of his nose. 'Well,' he said, abashed to evasion. 'Sethvir said you were direct.'
'I'm afraid,' Elaira admitted. 'If the duty-watch chances to see you, I could be broken for treason.' Her initiate's ties to the Koriani Order went beyond fleshly obedience; should Morriel exercise the extreme penalty, the vow Elaira had sworn over crystal could be turned to reduce her to a mindless husk.
'Whoever should glance through this doorway will assume you talk in your sleep,' Luhaine said, deeply miffed. 'I was never sent to endanger you.'
'That's scarcely flattering, and I'm not reassured.' The logic seemed sound, that without trouble pending, no sorcerer at all would have visited. Elaira regarded Luhaine's scowl, her care for the Shadow Master's safety too burdensome to contain. 'I think you should worry for your fugitive.'
His lecturer's condescension back in force, Luhaine stirred an impatient half-step that raised no echo from stone walls. 'Lysaer's still amassing his army. Unless your sisterhood informs him, he won't know Arithon's been unmasked.'
A pitifully small consolation; Elaira shuddered through a spasm of discomfort, penalty of the crystal's reattunement. 'Don't tell me anything more about either half-brother.' She averted her face, ashamed as she admitted, 'Morriel will use every asset I have, no matter who comes to be hurt.'
'Not quite,' Luhaine rebuked softly. 'Some things you'll keep for yourself.' His image never stirred against starlight. But the unseen power he engaged in gentle pity folded the enchantress on the pallet into a painless sleep without dreams.
Elaira gave way to his mastery with a whispered sigh of release. The strain that pinched her eyes and mouth settled and slowly relaxed. Entangled amid a sweep of auburn hair, a nose and chin too angular to be delicate smoothed over like fine-polished ivory. When she was not frowning, Luhaine thought, her allure was mischievous and innocent, touched as though from within by the promise of lyric passion. Determination lent her the illusion of ruggedness; and the burden of betrayal that Koriani service set in conflict with her empathic link with Arithon.
Against the sworn obedience that ruled this woman, Luhaine could do nothing. But the longevity realignment she had undertaken for the sake of Sethvir's augury: that was another matter. Fellowship intervention had set stakes on the attraction that tied her to Arithon's fate. For that she would not be left to suffer; nor would his Fellowship colleagues sanction the surrender of her spirit to a second life binding to a Koriani spell crystal.
Elaira was not conscious to feel the warm swell of power that licked beneath her bandaged wrist. Closed eyes could not track the lacework intricacy of the spellcraft Luhaine wrought in her behalf. She would wake in the morning and feel refreshed, and even Morriel would never discern that the crystal's unnatural attunement had been arrested, then erased, its forced effect of lengthened lifespan realigned to a kinder patterning sourced by the laws of grand conjury.
She would live the same years as Arithon, but suffer no ill effects. If the hour came that conflicted interests broke her faith with the Koriani Order, the Prime who presided in judgement would gain no further power through the white quartz matrix of Elaira's personal crystal. Her vows of initiation upon the Skyron jewel alone would hold influence against her.
'Serve your Prime matriarch as you must,' Luhaine murmured in words that arrowed across the veils of sleep. 'But for the sake of your care for the last Teir's'Ffalenn, the Fellowship may sometimes intercede.'
A second later the apparition left her side, faded with as little ceremony as a star in the grey chill of dawn.
Nightmare
Lysaer s'Ilessid snapped awake with a coarse, ripping gasp. Bathed in sweat and shivering violently, he thrashed off the bedclothes that constricted his legs and chest. Driven nerves and instinct shot him halfway to his feet, one fist ablaze with a halo of light he had not consciously called his gift to raise. The darkness that threatened to suffocate him shattered, and with it, the last, vicious remnant of the dream that had torn him headlong from sleep.
Scalding glare bit flashes of reflection off gilt moulding and from the garish enamels of the cloisonne washbasin his valet had left by the window-bay. Lush woollen tapestries muffled the cries of the sentries, alarmed from their posts on the walls outside by the fiery glare through the casement. Lysaer squeezed his eyes shut. The appointments of the state guest chamber loaned by the Mayor of Erdane mocked him in undisturbed quiet. Subsided to his knees on the mattress, the light still cupped in his hands, he loosened locked jaws and forced in a deep, calming breath.
Memory of his black-haired nemesis hovered still in his mind, secretive, elusive, and maddeningly removed beyond reach. 'Dharkaron as my witness,' he swore to the empty room. 'By your shadows and fell sorceries, you can't evade justice forever!'
An instant later, the latch clicked.
Lysaer started sharply. The light in his hands scalded into actinic brilliance before he caught back raw reflex and curbed his fury to a force less likely to ignite the bedclothes. The whipcord tension in him relented a mere fraction as Lord Diegan rushed into the room, his dark hair tousled from his pillow, and his body halfclothed in last night's crumpled hose and shirt.
One glance at Lysaer, and he snatched an unlit candle from a wall sconce, crossed the carpeted floor, and tipped the wick into the flash-point corona that yet burned between the prince's palms.
Over the hiss of hot wax as the candle flared into flame, the commander of a cityless garrison said in caustic care, 'If you dreamed of the Master of Shadow again, tha
t makes the third time this week.'
'I don't need you to remind me.' Lysaer parted his hands, and the light shredded asunder and quenched like a beacon fire doused before an enemy. Surrounded now by soft dark that did nothing but exacerbate his edginess, he launched off the bed and strode to lean out the opened casement.
To the guardsmen clustered in agitation on the embrasure below, he called, 'Naught's amiss. Feel free to resume your patrols.'
While they dispersed, Lysaer remained at the window, no longer shivering, but chilled to the bone none the less. He tried to ignore the brisk footfalls as Diegan spiked the candle in a holder on the carved oak table, laid over with the drawings and maps that outlined his new city of Avenor. The flick of wool cloth passed unacknowledged as a cloak was unfurled over his nakedness.
At his shoulder, Diegan said, 'If the strain's been too much, at least take Talith to your bed. Your hand fasting's lasted for years. As her brother, I won't stand on ceremony now if you decide not to wait for the wedding.'
'She's to be Avenor's queen, not my courtesan.' Distraught enough that it showed, Lysaer scrubbed his knuckles over his stiff face. 'She'll have a state ceremony in my rebuilt capital. No vagary of the Shadow Master's will drive me to consider any less.'
Diegan reached across caught the frame of the casement, and pulled closed and latched the mullioned panes. 'If you're going to talk sedition over mayoral authority in Tysan, at least try not to be overheard.'
'I won't need to supplant any trade city's governance.' Lysaer straightened tense fingers and blotted icy sweat on the gold-edged weave of his cloak. 'Once the Prince of Rathain makes his move, his sorceres will drive town loyalty into my hands by itself. I alone will command the resource and the light to combat him.'
Diegan sought out a cushioned chair and wearily folded himself into it. 'Ath, he's been hidden for six years. if I hadn't been at hand to witness the slaughter he effected in Deshir, I'd wonder, as your new mercenaries do, whether Maenalle of Tysan was right in her claim that Arithon had no wish for war at all. Man, you can't gather crack troops, then sit them idle indefinitely!'
'We've been quartered in Erdane far too long,' Lysaer agreed. He chose not to mention the balance o€ his fear, nor the dream-image that moved in locked step with remembrance of his enemy's secretive ways. His thoughts were harrowed in equal measure by the blood that had soaked Tal Quorin's river banks in the first battle fought against the Shadow Master.
Thousands had died. For the sake of those lives thrown away through irresponsible haste, he must hold fast to his plan.
Arithon was ruthless, a sorcerer.
No matter how eager the troops were to fight, their commanders must never again be left at liberty to underestimate the foe they raised arms to destroy.
Lysaer snapped away from the window to pace the carpet. Beyond the shut casement, a homeward bound drunkard riled the headhunters' tracking dogs. The kennelled pack erupted into sharp, excited barks, answered by every alley-strayed mongrel, and the shriller yaps of a lapdog cooped up by a merchant's wife. As frustrated by his own inactivity, vexed still by overplayed nerves, the prince caught up a dozen fresh candles and lit them one by one. Rinsed in patterns of moving flamelight, he brooded over certainties he could not put into words: that the needling, insatiable drive that ate at him day and night, to seek out the Shadow Master and see him dead, was not a force to heed reason.
He controlled the urge by iron force of will, his every act bent to serve the people whose safety was his pledged responsibility. If he weakened before the drive of antipathy, if he gave way to the exhortations of Etarra's Lord Mayor and allowed the combined eastern garrison to march too quickly, many more lives might be ruined.
Even still, the need to wait for new gold to be levied through Rathain to fund his endeavour in Tysan chafed raw holes in his patience. The passage of solstice had - spurred a restlessness in him that mounted now to a screaming ache. He started under sunlight at ordinary shadows. He sweated each minute in directionless certainty that some new development was afoot.
The letter just delivered by west-bound courier, that affirmed the dearth of rumour concerning any sorcerer who matched the Master's description, did nothing to ease his conviction. Despite the unified support of Rathain's cities, Pesquil's headhunters had routed out no barbarian camps through the past three summers' campaigns. Their scarcity compounded his certainty that the clans had organized as well.
Lysaer beat down his angry passion. The lesson instilled by Tal Quorin's massacre was his charge and his personal burden. The lack of any target to strike at was a frustration his allies must be cajoled to abide. Against the Master of Shadow, any weakness in them would be turned to grievous liability. The campaign that succeeded must have no such flaw to exploit.
Lysaer well respected the two-edged, deadly game the Teir's'Ffalenn was wont to play.
Restored back to regal equilibrium, he caught the cloak's rich fabric about his damp flesh. A small smile turned his lips as he reviewed the engineer's drawings of Avenor's proposed fortifications. However well-intentioned, his commander at arms was mistaken. A woman in his bed could never blunt his ardour to see Rathain's prince bleed on his sword. Yet by Ath, if he had to set the example of restraint, a gesture was needed in counterbalance.
'I shall send a rider west to Karfael tomorrow,' Lysaer resolved. 'Let my writ be given to the merchants' guilds, that a thousand royals in gold will reward any man who brings back confirmed news of any unnatural event. Arithon of Rathain is a sorcerer. Sooner or later, he must make a mistake, or be forced by circumstance to show his hand. The Mayor of Etarra will send out additional couriers. Our troops can train here while Avenor's rebuilt.'
Made aware by the stillness that his frustrated humour had transferred like contagion to his commander at arms, Lysaer tossed back gold hair and laughed. 'Don't you see, Diegan? We'll twist even time to our advantage. The longer Arithon hides, the further he runs, the larger the army we'll have ready on the field to slaughter him.'
'I don't know where you find your tolerance.' Diegan arose in one nettled movement, jerked open a cupboard, and hooked out the flagon of wine he needed in sudden desperation. He scrounged up two goblets and poured. 'But no doubt that's the only way we'll have a net strong and wide enough, that a conniving sorcerer can't slip through.'
Lysaer accepted the glass he was offered. Candleflame burned hot reflections in his eyes and bloodied the depths of the wine as he touched unsmiling lips to the rim and swallowed. 'Depend on that, Diegan. Let's both drink a pledge to that end.'
Cross-currents
Diverted from his course to check on the Mistwraith's prison at Rockfell Peak, Asandir drives his black stud at urgent speed through grey dawn over the long unused southern pass through the Skyshiels toward the lowland road that skirts Eltair Bay . . .
Lee-rail awash against whipping morning winds, a trim brig under command of a laughing captain threads in dancing flight between the shoals that whiten the channel through Vaststrait, while three galleys packed with armed men and bearing official requisitions for boarding and confiscation of contraband thrash to windward in futile pursuit . . .
Under summer noon on the arch above Erdane's west wall, Lady Talith watches her betrothed and a picked guard of troops begin their march to the ruins of Avenor; and though her finger bears the diamonds and royal sapphires as token of Lysaer's pledge, she twists the jewelled ring in stiff outrage, that his will to keep her safely sheltered has compelled her to stay behind . . .
VI. CRUX
Armed guards swept house to house through Jaelot. The shaking pound of their boots up loft stairways, and the mailed assault of fists on wooden planking disturbed sleepers, as they banged open root-cellar doors and riffled through dusty attics in search of last night's fugitives. Their fervour suffered frenetic confusion as city officers in charge of the hunt embroiled themselves into vociferous, fist-waving arguments. By daybreak, in cold reason, no two groups could be reconciled over the p
hysical appearance of Halliron Masterbard's apprentice.
The criminal fact remained that his sorcery had dismembered half their city.
Eyewitnesses from the mayor's feast hall only convulsed the quarrel to fresh hostility, a complication that provoked disgruntled shop owners; ones whose wares had been spared from the vortex of the lane surge, only to be ransacked and turned upside-down to satisfy the suspicions of furious officials.
The prime suspect stayed undiscovered, along with Halliron and the stout convict for whom his Masterbard's word had sworn surety.
Half the morning passed before the meaty-faced ostler who ran the livery stables by the gatehouse was shaken awake to be questioned. Twitching straw from the clothes he had slept in, and belligerently cross from a headache, he worked his stubbled jaw around a yawn and frowned at the captain who pressured him. 'Pony cart? Yes, one was quartered here last night. A dark man came for it, very late. A fat man was with him.'
'Dark?' yelped the beribboned secretary of the alderman. He bounced on his toes and flapped his hat behind a stifling press of bystanders. Since no one gave way to admit him, he jettisoned dignity and burrowed like a mole through the ranks of gawping grooms and nervejumpy men at arms. 'How do you mean, dark?'
The ostler hawked, spat on the cobbles, and squinted as though at an imbecile. 'Black hair. Do I look blind?'
'You're sure?' the secretary pestered. 'It was night. You aren't mistaken? His colour could have been brown?'
'Dharkaron! Do I look stupid too?' The ostler jabbed off an obscene gesture. 'The man was dark as coal soot. Green eyed, he was, and quick with his tongue as a flayer's knife. Lordly bad tempered, not to be denied, and no, he didn't say where he planned to be going!'
'Sorcerer's likely past the gates by now,' yelled a drayman perched on his load of corn sacks. 'You want him, why not chase him down?'