TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  'You'll need to see what you're doing,' he murmured in a musical, deep tone that stroked over wrought nerves like a tonic. He fished out a tie string from his cast-off cuff and knotted his work, then tossed the soaked towel on the stool.

  Elaira quivered through a long, wretched spasm and discovered the space to unbend screaming tension and relax.

  To the boy lying white-faced and bleeding, Arithon said, 'Lad, I shall need to hear your name.'

  'The wedding,' the boy gasped. 'You played for me.' Attentive to the ruined limb lying cradled in its slit shreds of sleeve, a mangled mess of wrecked meat and bone beyond help of splint or compress, Arithon replied, 'So I did. But knowing what you're called is scarcely the same as the way you would say it yourself.'

  The boy heaved in another taxed breath and whispered his agonized answer. Arithon said something back in a murmur of syllables, too softly for Elaira to understand. Then he moved off a step, caught up his instrument and untied its storm-drenched wrapping.

  In Paravian, he added, 'That's a very ugly injury. The bones are too shattered to set. I presume you plan to draw his spirit from his body and knit the torn sinews by surgery?'

  'Surgery won't be enough,' Elaira gave terse reply. 'I'll have to set up a power field and sigils, to force a regeneration. The spells by their nature are cross-grained and difficult. We very well might lose him.'

  'Don't even think that.' Arithon reappropriated the stool and couched his shining instrument on his knee. A harmonic pealed through the rattle of freshened rain on the shingles. The wind's sour moan wove in ragged refrain, then a spill of notes like dropped crystal, sliced by a tingling play of chords. One by one, fourteen fine strings were adjusted to stinging, true pitch.

  Then Arithon tested the mettle of his instrument as Elaira had never before heard him.

  The whining complaint of the gale seemed immediately diminished into distance. Braced by a framework of ringing, clear measures, Elaira fetched kindling and lit the brazier. With hands that shook less, she set clean water to boil. From her hampers she selected her stoppered flasks of tinctures, then patterned a ritual blessing to enhance the virtues of a chosen mix of restoratives: wild thyme and tansy to ward against infection; goldenrod and black bryony for poultice; betony and devil's bit to speed healing; groundsel to slow bleeding and dittany to ease fever. In an unremarked moment between ordinary tasks, the trial flow of melodies reached a consummate perfection, then slid through a figured change of key.

  Heightened to preternatural focus by the sound, Elaira had no space to question the nature of the change that flowed through her. On a square of bleached linen, she shaped the sigils to deaden pain. Against the white cloth, in ordinary candlelight, the silver-weave mesh of the foundation spells took shape under her hands. The spiralled configuration of renewal grew in painstaking steps like linked chain. Each subsequent ward traced its own signature of energy, fine-drawn as silk from her fingertips. Where her own skills left off, the spell weave became snatched and quickened into resonance by the emergent, cascading harmonies that reeled from Arithon's strings.

  Keyed by pure sound to primal potency, rune meshed to rune, the pale, phosphor glimmer of the set-seal at last joined complete and burned active in a fired surge of light. Through vision left fractured by welling, sudden tears, Elaira gasped, touched to awe. In perfected beauty to wound the imperfect mind, she saw the delicate interstice of her sigils bend into balance with the lyranthe chords, then lock against themselves and spark into flares of raised power.

  Channelled into depth by bardic talent, the refigured mystery of wards she had handled half her life spiralled into coils of contained force. The very air seemed to vibrate, its essence shaved thin, as if chiselled by frost or high altitude. The life-force that flowed through her veins and her bones felt recast to silk and white diamond.

  The impact on breathing flesh was too wild to sustain. Like a stress tear in tissue, her concentration wavered. Elaira cried out to warn that her art had slipped her grasp. Her hold on tuned energies buckled. The next instant would see her share in the work crumple in a roaring flashburn of backlash.

  Arithon murmured a Paravian encouragement. His limpid flow of music changed pitch.

  A soaring progression of chords razed the dross from her mind, firmed her courage, then whirled her to rarefied clarity. Resteadied in a step, then launched still further, into resharpened vision akin to the scope of a tienelle trance, Elaira clamped aching fingers to her temples. Scarcely able to breathe, she battled to ground the intensified nexus of awareness cast into her hands by a channel carved out of clean sound. Whirled into trance, inspired to join the musician's lightning dance and pair her energies to a limitless flight of skeined song, she let go and rode the wave of her instincts.

  She came back to herself on her knees, chalk in hand.

  Where each patterning had started and finished, she held no clear memory. Yet the figured circles now blazed complete under her hands: of watch and protection, each safeguard to cradle a spirit drawn out of the flesh.

  The alien, vital splendour of her handiwork and Arithon's shimmered in joined vibration, to etch weary sight and half-blind her.

  Shaking, Elaira recouped scattered wits and arose. She lit beeswax candles to mark the major points of the compass. Peril stalked her. The cottage was a vessel aflood in roused power. Sharp currents nicked over her skin and jagged sparks from the lyranthe's silver strings. The four walls enclosed a space etched in vibrant, poised arrows of dire force. Now she dared not suffer misstep. The parameters she trod were unforgiving. Arithon also must not fail to be aware that his slightest slipped note might strike a dissonant tangent and lash up a lawless burst of ruin.

  The gale outside seemed faded to insignificance, the drumroll of wind-driven downpour made deadened as if swathed under a caul. Lapped in thick shadow, the musician bent over his lyranthe, arched fingers a flying, deft dance over frets nicked gold in tepid flame light. Drawn on by his knife-edged harmonics, teased by rolling roulades of bright chords, the forces that gouged the wild limits of chaos were coaxed stable, then teased into balance.

  Then the bard raised his head and locked eyes with the enchantress whose gifts interleaved with his music. The contact set off a small shock, a prick like a needle through fire. Elaira sensed in advance the precise instant when Arithon flattened his hand and silenced the ringing call of his strings; melded in wordless awareness, she felt every barrier and bulwark of the mind shred between them.

  No wall remained.

  The art that his masterbard's skill had seized into resonance had been her own, made malleable like metal in a crucible, then recast to intensified vibration. The drawing force of the music had fused their two spirits into a single current.

  Afraid to move, hurled beyond the tears that ached to be shed, Elaira stood transfixed, his touch softly still in her mind. The unveiled compassion in the contact stopped her breath; would through sheer force have felled her, had the lyranthe not spoken again.

  The measures woven now shaped a clear affirmation, notes layered into patterns that invoked Name. Compounded through remembered strictures from his mage training, and the deepest gift of bardic empathy, Arithon recaptured in song the essence of the boy's self-perception.

  This he framed into a mirror turned inward against itself.

  To theme, he added slow, tolling chords to lull the mind. Coaxed past reach of worldly pain, the injured boy on the table eased into sleep. The lyranthe cajoled, then beckoned, each progression of chords netted into beguiling illusion that lured the tranced spirit and enfolded it in a clarion blanket of ecstasy.

  Led to stunned awe by the sensitivity of Arithon's perception, shown wonders through the vision of trance state, Elaira saw tight-laced bundles of notes strike and winnow the uncertain air. The forged lines of power called forth from bare elements unreeled into ribbons of refined light. Blind to his own gifts, the bard perceived none of the form wrought by his genius. He played on by instinct to fashion
a spell as unerring as any construct brought to focus by a master of magecraft.

  Arms hugged to her chest, Elaira endured the precise, tearing force as vibrations pealed out like fine wire to halter the boy's stunned consciousness. She watched the musician draw, like thorns from bleeding flesh, the life essence out of breathing tissue.

  A snap cracked the room.

  Her spell circle flared like wind-fanned coals. Each painstaking sigil blazed and closed fast, to contain the unmoored spirit of the boy.

  The bard's line of melody trod one last measure, them dwindled away into silence. A fearful weight of leashed force charged the cottage. All that tied the boy to the vacant housing of his body was a filament spanned over oblivion, less tangible than a spun thread of thought.

  'Merciful Ath,' Elaira cried on a scraped whisper. She had witnessed spells cast by senior enchantresses, through crystal resonance and amplified alignment; she had studied under healers in the greatest hospice in Athera, but nothing in her grasp of the mysteries prepared her for the frightful turn of mastery Arithon had shaped and then strung to binding ties through an intuitive rendition of pure melody.

  'Rare lady,' he answered in response to shocked thought. 'Have you not guessed? Your vision itself was my sounding board.'

  Through a ripped hitch of breath, meaning reached her: his mind was with her still, a bright, steely line sheathed deep inside her awareness. Hand in glove with that presence, she saw beyond the veil, past the privacy he kept before every man living.

  Shattered in reaction, then answered warp through weft by response like a peal of wild harmony, Elaira felt the tuned chord inside her arise to accept its perfect match.

  She understood unequivocally and finally, that the conduit forming the bridge to the man was emotion: affection of equal depth and breadth to the regard she already held for him. She saw the love he had systematically, even ruthlessly stifled before the damning assumption that her interest was no more than a ploy arranged by Morriel Prime to track his personal affairs.

  Elaira had no chance to savour the exultation of their mutual rapport.

  All wonderment became reft from the moment by need: the injured boy's condition was too critical to suffer even the smallest delay.

  Years in the healers' wards had shown how the diurnal shift in the mysteries could blur all boundaries. The bindings between spirit and flesh lay the weakest while the balance between dark and dawn hung poised on the axial turn of the earth. Through the nadir of night, the mortally ill were most wont to strike fleshly ties and pass beneath Daelion's Wheel.

  If the boy on her table was to survive, her work must be prompt and precise.

  Elaira bludgeoned stunned wits back to sharpness. With her spell crystal cupped between her damp palms, she bent once again to her invalid. The damage looked all the more daunting for the boy's scarce-breathing flesh. From Arithon she borrowed the courage to ignore the clamour of better sense, that for prudence and safety, such a mass of mangled tissue should be dressed out for a clean amputation.

  Nothing if not stubborn, whipped on by the cry of her heart for the waste of a life at the threshold of uselessness, Elaira hurled her will through the core of her crystal's white focus. For whatever end, she shouldered the supreme risk and began the arduous course to align sigils with seals, then pair their arcane forces with the properties of herbs to rebuild the boy's mangled wrist.

  Bone, blood, muscle and cartilage, each required separate sets of spells. The delicate flux of forces brought to bear must align to match the body's own magnetism.

  Elaira scarcely marked the moment when music first partnered her efforts.

  But when her hand trembled in closing a difficult sigil, a chord rang out to steady her. If her heart sped in fear, if strain threatened to crack her for the complex flux she must guide by trance through her spell crystal, reassurance pealed back and enfolded her in a shower of calming notes. Again and again her disciplined suspension was annealed through the focus of Arithon's playing.

  The miracle shimmered through air and through flesh. As slivered bits of bone were slotted one into another like puzzle pieces, then stapled in place with fine magic, perfection ruled every move. Like a construct of engineered geometry, Elaira held her grasp on the multilayered balance of spells. The bard's gift sustained her hands and her mind as she reconstructed ripped cartilage and restored the ligaments to rebind each disarranged wrist bone. Her sight did not blur through meticulous removal of flayed bits of rope fibre, any one of which might seed a lethal infection.

  Then each vein and capillary had to be refigured; riven sinew repaved in light-tracks to reconnect the ends of sheared nerves. Tendons must be sewn whole, and frayed muscles drawn together m painstaking rows of stitches. Elaira toiled on in agonized concentration. Sweat dewed her temples and rolled down ber Jaw. Yet the needle in her fingers did not slip that a dancing, merry measure did not shepherd her back to dexterity.

  Sweet melody braced her still as she slathered the closed wounds in poultice paste and bound on splints and clean bandages.

  The candles by then had burned low. In shadows that flickered to each breath of draught, Elaira pushed herself unsteadily erect. She snuffed the wax lights on the spell circles. Tired beyond grace, strained past clear thought: she fumbled and found her reed broom and dusted away the grand axis that sealed the power in the ritual chalk lines.

  Still tranced through the lattice of her spell crystal, her consciousness moved in wage-sight. As pent forces and stay-spells gave way, a sound like rent fabric sheared across the throb of blood in her ears. The wards burst asunder and the spirit bound captive reeled free.

  Seconds passed, measured in uncertain terror, that flesh might cease effort, unquickened. Then the boy on the table stirred and moaned.

  Elaira felt the breath reel out of her. She slid to her knees, lost to dizziness. This time, no music leaped to ease her. She found herself too drained to rise, too spent to insist that the invalid stay quiet while she mixed the necessary draught to bring sleep. The enchantress buried her face in laced hands, unstrung by a running fit of trembling.

  The boy could die yet. She wept for frustration as exhaustion yawned an impossible gulf between what was needed, and a vacuum that sucked away energy.

  Too late, too faintly, a gilded play of lyranthe notes rocked through the span of stilled air. Elaira struggled to rise and recover the willpower to match them.

  Failure dragged her down. The grand nets of harmony seemed frayed beyond reach, diminished and tinny with distance.

  Pressed by the fogs of unconsciousness, she grasped after the bard's measures and understood: his melody was not tuned for her after all. The irresistible call of each fretted chord was pitched to settle suffering and smooth her patient into sleep.

  Elaira thrashed against the honeyed compulsion to surrender all ties to awareness. Arithon must not be abandoned with the burden of securing the boy's weakened life signs. Hours would pass before his body stabilized from the fluxes of a major, forced healing. But thought bled away in a fierce, sucking rush. Thrashed by the demands of channelled power, bruised by the after-tides of a backlash too savage to grapple, the enchantress collapsed against the grain of cold floorboards, beaten down into darkest oblivion.

  * * *

  The febrile flutter of a single candle became the first harbinger of an awareness that returned in slow stages. Her lashes cracked open. Still set adrift in a welter of confusion, Elaira clung to that pinpoint of light. She sensed like an odd and unwonted peal of sorrow the silent absence of a melody.

  As stunned senses rearranged to sustain reason, she pieced together bits from her surroundings: the storm had abated to a fitful splash of droplets off the shingled cedar of the eaves. The shutters of her bedchamber, swung and latched open, let in the raw thunder of the breakers churned up by strong winds. Each contrary draught came freighted with smells of salt and tidewrack and soaked foliage.

  A solitary cricket rasped from the cranny behind her cloth
es chest. Its song sounded racked out of true, a coarse intrusion after the masterful play on fret and string that had beguiled her spellcraft in sweet-ringing waves to new heights.

  Best not to recall that partnership too clearly; Elaira squeezed her eyes closed. The sting of loss lanced her, regardless.

  The grinding, dull throb of taxed nerves released her one limb at a time. She noticed she lay half-supine on her pallet. A warmth beneath her cheek held a scent of clean skin and the muffled rhythm of another heartbeat. Snapped back on a breath to full consciousness, Elaira came aware that she rested in the circle of Arithon's arms.

  He had not taken time to retrieve his damp shirt. The same hands that had commanded the lyranthe to high art cradled her cheek and her waist. The disfiguring scars on his wrists were left unabashed in plain view. His hips were twisted underneath her, his bare feet still braced on the floorboards; as if he had sat, her weight borne in his arms, with intent to settle her to rest.

  And a phrase, not her own. rose and burst across her thoughts: some temptations could be too sweet. Languid in the throes of exhaustion, Elaira absorbed the possibility an empathic link might still be in place between herself and the Shadow Master. The spells they had handled in paired resonance had been strong ones. The aftershocks to the mind could hitch and start in a thousand unpredictable directions.

  Content with inclinations left in harmony with his, she melted to the pleasure he drew from this brief, stolen moment: the comfort of her body secure within his care, her narrow, lean limbs folded neatly.

  Man and prince and musician knew peace. Arithon held in the tender awareness that this happiness might never come again.

  Elaira cherished each detail along with him. The rich, auburn hair he had braided while wet now spread, combed and shining, to mantle her shoulders. No drag of wet skirts weighted her ankles, only the nap of a blanket. Underneath, she wore very little beyond the linen of her shift.