TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Yet no barbarian ambush lurked at the height of the pass. Only the whine of the winds met the scouts sent to search, and white mist, and cruel scarps, and dark rock.

  The cavalcade crawled on through the defiles. The challenge appeared first as a shadow sketched against darker grey: the caithdein herself, clad in no finery at all. Lady Maenalle's leathers had never been dyed, a significant slight, though perhaps only Lysaer understood. This time their meeting did not signify even the dignified colour of her office, the black traditionally worn in the presence of sovereign blood.

  The badge of Tysan's regency was sewn at her breast, indigo and gold: the hues of sun and sky that shone through and framed her between precipice and vertical rock.

  Straight as a sword, but weaponless, the caithdein of Tysan stood afoot in the path of the advance riders, the standard-bearers, the tall lancers three abreast that formed the block of the elite royal bodyguard. The officer in the vanguard drew rein before her and signalled his column to a halt.

  The crack of hooves subsided. A horse snorted to a jingling chime of bit rings. Silence abided, shrill with the mewling cries of hawks. The gusts of high altitude moaned across stone, while the tight-meshed columns behind disarranged to make way for Lysaer s'Ilessid.

  Caithdein, Lady Maenalle, offered the prince no obeisance. She stepped forward, her cropped hair windwhipped and bare of even a circlet. She offered no royal address, but glanced in contempt at the golden bloom of light sheeted through the breaking clouds overhead.

  'Does your Grace fear an ambush? Send out scouts. Search the rocks. They are empty.'

  'Once before they were not.' Lysaer reined back his mount, who protested restraint and jibbed sideways. 'Your clans have earned little footing for trust. Do you presume and come asking my forbearance?'

  'You have my word there are no archers in this pass,' Maenalle replied.

  'If there were, they would be dead men.' Lysaer lifted a gloved fist. The ward he had raised as a shield against arrows flared white-hot, then burned away in a dazzling snarl of sparks. While the horses in his company shied and plunged at his back, and his officers steadied them, cursing, he added, 'Speak quickly. My mood isn't kindly or patient.'

  Maenalle met his arrogance as she might treat with an importunate child. 'You've dared to claim Avenor and stand to arms by right of your bloodline, although you're unsanctioned for ruling power. As a man who would wrest advantage from this realm in pursuit of a personal feud, I make my formal protest. For the good of this kingdom, I demand you abandon your campaign to kill the last Prince of Rathain. Arithon s'Ffalenn is no threat to Tysan. The Fellowship of Seven has named your cause false, and my duty lies first to the land.'

  Lysaer gave back cold contradiction. 'In that loyalty you are forsworn already.' Breeze ruffled his hair and the trappings on his mount in a running, pale fire of stirred gold. 'What are the Fellowship, if not in league with the Master of Shadow? You also have lent him your support. Against that specifically, I warned.'

  Maenalle's hawk-yellow eyes never wavered. 'Coin and goods levied in Rathain were sent back to their sovereign prince, through the sorcerers' auspices. To what end the Teir's'Ffalenn disposes of what's his is no affair of mine, nor yours either, get of s'Ilessid. This I will say, before witnesses. If you are still the man you were born to become, a prince true to your heritage with Tysan's given charter as your law, you will turn about. Command your captains to retire your troops and leave Rathain's affairs in peace.'

  Lysaer inclined his head in heavy sorrow. 'You ask too much. Arithon s'Ffalenn is a danger to us all. For the safety of innocents, no scion of my line worth his name could stand down.'

  'Dare you be first then, to spill the blood of a caithdein of the realm?' Maenalle said.

  'I'll do less.' Lysaer s'Ilessid uttered sentence. 'I will invoke town law and bid Isaer's executioner to end the life of a thief who plunders caravans.' He gestured to his officers, gloved fingers a raked blaze of jewels against a sudden lance of full sunlight. 'Take her.'

  Two captains dismounted at his bidding. At need, they borrowed lead reins from their mounts' harness in readiness to bind a prisoner.

  Lady Maenalle spared their approach not a glance. Bred to serve at the right hand of princes, her pride of bearing approached a near physical force, tempered well to stand royalty down. 'Think what you do! Appoint my death and you forswear guest oath, given in amity at my hearthstone.'

  Over the heads of his hesitant officers, Lysaer snapped a rebuttal. 'Better I be forsworn as a man than the justice of this realm become debased. No affectation of courtesy will mitigate the punishment due for your act.' Implacable in regret, he added, 'Who am I, to uphold my personal honour before the protection of my townsfolk? They are untrained in magecraft, reliant upon my gift for their defence. Are Rathain's people any less helpless than they, to be abandoned to a sorcerer turned criminal?'

  Unbending, Maenalle gave him back her freezing silence.

  And still her captors vacillated. A sharp word from their sovereign was required to jolt them to resume their given duty.

  The elderly woman did not flinch, even as they laid hands on her unadorned wrists, jerked them together and bound them in leather. Throughout the course of their handling, while the gold star blazon was torn from her jerkin, Lady Maenalle's wide eyes remained locked upon Lysaer's face.

  Only when they finished and cast her trussed on her knees before the hooves of the royal charger did the caithdein deliver her last word. 'Beware, oathbreaker. The authority of my office shall pass through the Fellowship sorcerers to my grandson. Tysan's clans remain loyal to your line, false prince, but for you, our goodwill is forfeit. From this day forward, expect an arrow from the shadows, poison in your cup, and a knife at your throat, among my people. My life is offered, that they will know you for what you have become: no saviour, but the slave of the Mistwraith's design.'

  Lysaer regarded the woman he had ordered broken through a moment of pitying quiet. Then he said, 'To your sorrow, brave lady, and to the waste of your life, you are misled. I ride to war as defender of peace against a man who was born with no conscience. The great of this land, of which you were one, diminish us all when they fall sway to endangering influence. If the crown of this kingdom was once under Fellowship province to bestow, for the good of all people, I claim it back.' He gathered his reins without triumph. 'Where lies the virtue in tradition and what good is law, when its use has been turned to threaten innocents? I give you my hope, that when the Master of Shadow has been thwarted, your clans may one day come to welcome me.'

  'They may live to swear fealty to your sons,' Maenalle said. 'If my life should fall to the sword of Isaer's headsman, on my heart's blood, I promise, never you.'

  * * *

  The vision snapped apart like age-rotted tapestry scattered to dust in a gale. Sethvir hunched by the casement, his beard clasped in thin, inkstained fists. He said in haggard grief, 'Lysaer was prince enough to keep his men in hand. They did not mishandle her beyond the indignity of shackles, but placed her under guard in a mule cart to bear her for formal arraignment.'

  Asandir locked his fingers, knuckle on bone, in a white mesh of fury on the tabletop. Head bent, eyes shut, he scarcely felt the stroke of desert air across his skin. While the power in him shimmered in leashed stasis, and his flesh, a vessel too well-tempered to crack, stayed locked into stillness, he wept in straight sorrow, and lamented an event his Fellowship could not stay.

  True sight must not be undone before emotion. Root and cause for Maenalle's downfall lay in the Mistwraith's curse. Even if the means lay at hand to sunder its hold upon the princes, for the lady who was the dedicated caithdein of Tysan, salvation must come too late.

  Fifteen days would see her dead on a scaffold in Isaer, by town law and s'Ilessid command.

  A caithdein with the courage of lions and an integrity more steadfast than diamond, struck down in dishonour by the hand of her own prince: the epitaph carried a venomous sting. For
Maenalle, there could be no more ugly an ending, no more bitter a wreckage of cherished hopes.

  'We are indeed come on ill times,' said Asandir, chastened by remembrance of the Mistwraith's first entry through South Gate, then the uprising that dethroned the high kings. Beset by such trials five centuries in the past, not a living member of his Fellowship had conceived how the tangle would breed tragic consequence.

  Now, he dreaded to ponder what shape the future might take.

  Huddled by the casement, Sethvir turned his old man's profile toward the first, scattered stars, his beard like hooked yarn in the pestering play of the wind. Better than any, he knew Maenalle's mind. His sighted talent had tracked the bitter hour as she had weighed her course of action, then made her choice to dispatch her messenger to Althain Tower. As if his train of thought had been spoken, the Warden of Althain concluded, 'She saw in the Teir's'Ffalenn a hope of protection for her clans, should the worst befall and Desh-thiere's curse lead to more cruel persecution. I could do no less then, but match her steel courage and see her missive passed on to Arithon.'

  Given the burdens inherent in his post, Sethvir's pragmatic wisdom displayed daunting toughness. Pained to humility by the decisions borne alone by Althain's longsuffering warden, Asandir forced a change of subject. 'What do you know of Kharadmon?'

  Sethvir shook his head in befuddled irritation and feed back visions in jumbled summary.

  The hastily-vacated cottage of the Koriani Senior who inhabited a glen near Avenor; then the old enchantress herself, veiled and cloaked and swathed in sigils of secrecy, on foot to seek her prime with a message of pressing importance; then the bones of a boar in a trampled dell, the skull laced still in the spent, pallid glimmer of the Koriani summoning spell that had goaded it onto the spear. Nearby, abandoned, lay the death weapon, imprinted by the geas-turned hatred that had driven the motive of its killer ...

  'The upshot?' Asandir prompted, as yet too perturbed by the news out of Camris to track his colleague's vaulting chains of logic.

  Rare exasperation flared blue-green eyes to full focus.

  'You didn't note the energy signature for exchange and consent, nor the tell-tale discharge invoked by Desh-thiere's curse?' Sethvir qualified. 'Lysaer s'Ilessid struck some bargain in exchange for a Koriani scrying. He's certain to know Arithon's in Merior.'

  'At what price?' Asandir said.

  Distempered enough to tug at the knots in his beard, Sethvir snapped back to the displaced thread of conversation. 'I don't know. At the time, I was too deep in trance in search of Kharadmon to track the event at its origin. Whatever mischief's afoot, the upshot will surface soon enough.'

  That time, Asandir caught the infinitesimal hitch in the fabric of Sethvir's explanation. 'Kharadmon,' he blurted, a stab of alarm through his vitals. 'That's what has you vexed! Ath's infinite pity, what worse disaster did you find?'

  Sethvir shot out of his nook in a galvanic heave of distress. 'That's the problem,' he whispered from the shadows, his mind locked again on the limitless sky through the casement. 'I found no trace of Kharadmon at all.'

  Asandir braced spread hands against the table as if the very floor had rocked under him. 'Nothing,' he mused. The word faded without echo into the dust and trapped heat of the chamber, soured with must and parchment, and the peculiar, gritty reek of years upon years of used ink. No comfort could be drawn from the spin of clean breeze from the hills, nor even from the fast and warded stone that framed Althain Tower's protections.

  If Kharadmon had suffered mishap, their hope to defeat the Mistwraith's curse was rendered a lost cause at a stroke. The Black Rose Prophecy, which linked the Fellowship's return back to seven with the event of Arithon's willing kingship, became fully undone before time and fate could let it flower. Too fierce to believe the future had been lost on the day that set prince against prince in spelled enmity; too raw now to endure another grief in vanquished stillness, Asandir pushed erect and glared at his colleague's turned back.

  'Let us set such a beacon that the sky will burn, announced in chiselled rage. 'Wherever Kharadmon strayed, whatever ill keeps him captive, I would call out power from the heart of this earth and confgure spell of white light to draw him homeward. Or all I have done to give mankind a home amid the grace or the Paravians has gone for naught but wrack and ruin!'

  'We can set the first wards on the solstice tide, but it's certainly inconvenient.' Sethvir found an ant fallen trapped in a saucer and ushered it to safety with a feather touch. 'I hate to undertake such a difficult binding at a time when I've run out of tea.'

  Asandir's mouth twitched. 'Ath. You know better. Have I ever shown up here without a fresh supply? This must be the first occasion in a thousand years of trials you've neglected to know in advance what simples I brought in my saddlebags.'

  'I've been busy,' Sethvir said on a wistful, sad note of reproof. Long gone were the days when he had the leisure to grow strawberry leaves and chamomile and enspell them to flower out of season.

  * * *

  The dungeon chamber in Althain Tower had no windows cut through its white marble walls; and yet, on the ere of summer solstice, while the latent play of lane-force shimmered through the power focus set in its smoky onyx floor, the meadow-rich fragrance of catmint and sweetgrass twined through the storm-charge scent of ozone. As if the cut hay essence of the season itself partnered the forces that coursed through its ancient rune circles.

  Barefoot, draped in an ankle-length robe abraded to threads at the hem, Sethvir set beeswax candles in the black gargoyle sconces arrayed at the points of the compass. Asandir stalked beside him in daunting silence. Stripped down to shirtsleeves and the scorch-marked leathers he had ridden in, he crossed corded forearms over his chest and spoke the incantation to call down a spark from the polestar. When the energy answered, as it must to a mage of his stature, and white starfire burned tame in his hand, he knelt in thanksgiving and homage and ignited the wick of the north taper.

  Sethvir summoned flame to light the south one. East and west were set burning with sun ray and moonbeam, while over the tower's lofty battlement, the turning constellations spiked and danced the measured seconds before midnight.

  To fashion a beacon-spell potent enough to recall a kindred spirit across the deeps between worlds, the Fellowship sorcerers laced bridles of pale energies through the rune-circles. To each interstice in the focus pattern, they fixed precise markers, attuned to a facet of the mysteries. Through their hands flowed the tides of distilled wisdom: secrets bought from centuries of knowledge and observation, from the filament of silence that enacted the stealth of an owl's flight, to the quickened burst of seed into sprout. They invoked the endurance of oak trees, singly by Name, until thousands of forest-tapped roots were called aware to volunteer their grounding as anchor. They braided the voices of sweet summer stars, and the staid pull of planets to their courses. Wild wind and grass were coaxed into coercion, and their million, partnered voices whispered measures in counterpoint and litany.

  Mountains were asked to lend solidity, and the dark heart of stone gave back its sure self, to bell subvocal vibrations and waken the somnolent earth. The third lane shrilled now to a higher-pitched current. Waves of summoned energy dashed in succession into the construct formed amid the focus pattern. The Paravian runes glittered, then lashed to spitting life like the splash of molten metal over coals.

  The interlaced mesh of static tore the ears, and the air bled a stinging wash of ozone.

  Unlike a Koriani binding, amplified through crystal and fettered in raw domination, the layered weave of spells conjoined through Althain Tower held no constraint of forced mastery. Asandir and Sethvir worked in strict balance with the signature chord of the earth, reaffirmed in all its grand mystery, then exalted and wrapped through by the untamed exuberance that sourced the light-dance of life.

  Midnight arrived.

  The onyx floor tolled like struck bronze as the solstice charge surged down the lane. Gathered powers seared a
ctive with a scream of white light. Partnered in cold concentration, the paired sorcerers encompassed the mesh of their weaving, spoke a word, and on the strength of request, locked the whole into seamless stasis. The air stressed to recoil inside the tower, while the rune circles channelled the lane pulse into silken arrows of harmony.

  Asandir and Sethvir rested for an hour, seated side by side at the foot of the stairwell with their backs pressed against warmed stone. Althain's Warden used the moment to unfold the clasp knife he used to sharpen pens and pare the yellow rims from his toenails. Asandir settled back against snow-grained marble and slept, his callused hands quiet in his lap. Two hours before solstice dawn, the keening of the setting stars roused him. Sethvir stared into space, his eyes misted over and vacant. Asandir touched his shoulder, arose, and stretched the cramps from his limbs.

  Midsummer daybreak found them back on station at the focus. They repeated last night's binding in the scald of the sun surge, and again at noon; at sunset; at midnight.

  By then the stone tower sang like a tuning fork to the powers leafed into stasis within. The burn of leashed energies coiled bright enough to blind, and sear unprotected flesh to carbon. The air itself seemed to glister with pent force, and the stone of the floor to breathe in counterpoint.

  Heightened to peak activity, the focus could not be left unguarded for a minute. Asandir remained below to stand watch and steady the emergent flaws incited by the lane's random properties. Sethvir retired to his sanctum in the upper library. There, he brewed tea and pored over books on celestial mechanics, and filled page upon page with columns of mathematical figures in the minuscule, sharp-edged black script he used for his personal notations.