Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  Arithon wrenched. Ripped by gagging nausea, he found no relief. His gut was long emptied. Choked by the burn of heaved bile, he wracked with dry heaves until he sank, wrung limp by wheeling vertigo. The nightmare of abusive practice continued. A soaked finger traced over his brow, while the metallic tang of fresh slaughter savaged his mind and his senses.

  The phosphor shine of animal magnetism whirled away like blown dust, and trained mage-sense exploded with knowing: the blood was a child’s. The odd, sucking sound he had struggled to place was her slashed-open heart, still beating in convulsive reflex.

  Arithon cried aloud. Overcome by revulsion, he blacked out as his hammering pulse rushed him giddy, then drained his head.

  Sensation returned in shimmering patches. He had to fight for each breath. Whirled by a roiling rip tide of faintness, he clawed his way back to cognizance. A cold weight burdened his unsettled stomach. Someone had rested a clay bowl on the flat muscle beneath his rib-cage. The rim was inscribed with baleful ciphers. Their power glared as a coal in the night, shedding ripples like miasmic blight. The emanation laced into the gravid dark and combed streaks through the vapor from drug-scented candles.

  The child sacrifice had ceased her tormented crying. A gulf of unnatural quiet remained. Amid the fraught singing of blood in his ears, through the rags of his disjointed vision, Arithon saw the nacreous flicker of ghosts: children bearing the lead-foil seals that bridled the spirit beyond death. Snared shades had no voice. Without sinew to scream, their desperate, mute writhing became rendered in graphic silence.

  Arithon strained at the knots on his wrists until exhaustion threatened oblivion. He could not pull free. Eyes shut, lips parted, he sought the dropped threads of his mastery. How had he come to be here? Swimming senses ravaged all cohesive thought. The harsh ciphers written at chest, throat, and brow stained the clarity of his mage-sense.

  Through dizziness, he felt heavy fingers close on his bare arm, followed fast by the sting of sliced skin.

  Shocking pain ripped a gasp from his throat. Though shallow, the cut hurt like the jab of a hornet. Arithon thrashed, yanked up short. The ties pinned him, utterly helpless. His attempt to turn his head was clamped fast. More voices whispered. Smoke and black robes swirled at the edges of vision as someone raised a ceremonial candle. Heated wax dripped across his fresh wound. The scald was followed by the imprint of a seal and given closure by lines of cold conjury.

  Arithon howled as a sleeting needle of ice shot into the bones of his wrist. The sensation ripped through nerves, bones, and viscera, then stabbed as a spike through his heart. The left upper quadrant of his body went numb, more void than a sucking vacuum. As though flesh had vanished, Arithon was no longer aware of his arm. Worse, the hand still roped to the slab remained oddly unaffected. By the trickle of warmth tracing over his palm, he still felt the inflicted gash, copiously bleeding.

  Something coiled as though alive through thick smoke. Its dull silver cloudiness made the burdened air seem too dense to draw into his chest. Raced pulse, panted breath, Arithon shuddered. The cowled figures moved a step widdershins. Scarlet fingers rose overhead. They clasped the hilt of the dripping blade, now streamered like flame with blued phosphor.

  The horror broke Arithon to shivering sweat. Initiate sight recognized the effervescent stain unleashed by the act of blood-sacrifice.

  More hushed incantation; the gleaming bone-blade was consecrated by the black art of necromancy, then rinsed in the bowl on his abdomen. The liquid inside captured the resonant imprint. Sigils inscribed in the vessel’s clay rim entrapped Arithon’s individual signature. Named consciousness recoiled. An invasive spider dropped onto a web, the thrust of warped conjury lanced a shard of ice through the victim’s exposed navel.

  Arithon screamed.

  This, his first experience of dark sorcery: a separation from the stream of grand harmony that shattered the hoop of his being. The fissure expanded. His innate wholeness felt sundered in ways that left him no grasp to recover. The abyss sucked him down. Plunged into a gulf of imprisoning fear, shown helplessness beyond imagining, he howled. Initiate mastery could not reconcile the tear. He bled energy through the rent at his wrist; drowned in the dire void in his belly.

  More voices muttered. A clammy touch handled him. A necromancer’s spell infused the wax seal set over his bleeding wrist. The arcane closure set into the wound solidified the dissociated feeling. His torpid hand now felt cast in lead. Skin and joints were alive, but now sheared from the command of his natural reflex.

  The rift hurled disarray through Arithon’s aura. Wracked, he could not shed the shackling weight as the binding laid foul hold upon him.

  Nor could his desperate tears be contained, as once again, he found himself reft from the use of his birth-gifted talent. To extend his awareness beyond the veil, he must first cross through the ring of a necromancer’s sigils of binding. There, his striving blundered like a winged bird wrapped in felt. His bard’s mastery of sound became warped into dissonance. His innate awareness of light did not sing. A prison conjured of cruelty and domination held him as captive inside of his flesh.

  Now the streaked hands bore down on his right arm. The bone-blade bit again. Its virulent sting touched his nerves to dipped acid. Arithon writhed. Again, the flame of his beingness flickered, and again came the punch as the force of wrong conjury skewered his heart. But for his two hands, his torso went dead. A torrent of harsh words, and the wet knife was dipped. The swirl of stirred fluid unleashed its forced seal, and fell power lashed into his solar plexus.

  The blow thrashed the breath from stunned lungs. Arithon’s gasp was a moan of stark agony. ‘Mercy,’ he pleaded through hammering pain.

  But the guttural voices over his head called only despair from the darkness. The whirlpool of grim force tugged him down, and down, while the fingers that tapped and prodded and stroked moved on and clamped his right ankle.

  The next knife-cut came, and ripped frost through his groin, and hurled him further into imprisonment.

  Light-headed, Arithon drifted. The pain that intruded in scintillant flashes leached his being into gapped fragments. Relentless, its current scoured through hollowed bone, and dissolved the firm ties to identity. Four-square, the seals with their haltering sigils bore into his suffering flesh. The inexorable drag of the filled bowl soaked him in, until he felt snuffed in silk batting. The suffocating numbness spread inward, leaving his hands and his feet as islands of truncated feeling. Unmoored, he could not track the self-aware life that drove his reflex for breathing. As an unravelled yarn from a knit, his spirit became drawn out of the gravid shell of his trunk.

  Grace died, by dread increments. Awareness of light left his eyes. His hearing frayed into silence. The clay bowl on his stomach bore down like poured stone, absorbing his flickering consciousness.

  Vertigo spun him as the vessel was raised. Cowled figures leaned over him, chanting. The print of spread hands that he could not feel froze the streaming sweat on his abdomen. Oblivion beckoned. The shrill warning of instinct whirled away.

  Then the bone-knife nicked into Arithon’s navel.

  Pain entered him, new-born. Its drilling force reawakened nerve, bone, and sinew, a molten lava that flensed him, spirit from tormented flesh.

  This was not the kindly crossing known to the bard. No natural death, where the life-conscious essence gathered itself and in gentle parting, cast away mortal ties and slipped free. Instead, Arithon experienced a forced separation, a tearing of continuity that despoiled right order and savaged all rhythmic relinquishment. His husked body shuddered. Wrenched by the throes of that merciless back-lash, the knotted ropes strained, while the incised bowl held above his splayed form wound in the peeled stream of his consciousness and plunged him, drowning in blood-murky broth.

  Arithon fought the induction, to no avail. As though his life-cord was reeled onto a spool, the dominant imprint infused in the vessel dragged him headlong into bondage.

  He could
not burst free. The refined shift in resonance that would buy his clear passage across Fate’s Wheel could not rise into completion. His essence stayed tethered. The nailing spells fixed by the wax seals locked him into etheric connection. The auric remnant anchored in his extremities pinned him yet to his brutalized flesh. Constrained as a bead upon a plucked thread, Arithon’s imprint became seized into a liquid-filled bowl for a diabolical sacrifice.

  A cult parasite of the Kralovir would drink him down.

  No action might save him. The black grimoires told over the hideous fate of human prey taken by necromancy. Their lost spirits became a fused part of the creature who partook of the vile sacrament. Hung in crossing between death and life, the immutable aspect of Arithon’s being would remain enslaved. Like the children before him, his bound shade would be tapped, tormented, and wrung as emotional fuel for a cult host’s unnatural immortality.

  A last invocation would frame the ritual. Arithon felt cased in harrowing cold. The spells in the bowl were as knives, fencing his signature presence. His still-quickened hands and feet would not let him tear loose, though the suspension that shackled him to his dying flesh lashed his psyche to untold distress.

  Then came the horrible, sloshing tilt, as the clay bowl was given over to the warped creature who would absorb him. Stopped lungs could not scream. A stilled tongue raised no utterance. The cult master’s hissed recitation reached full closure, unchallenged. Arithon felt his consciousness pour into dark, a bright current spilled out of a jar.

  Agony milled him. He became a thousand hurled shards of remembrance, vivid as light through stained glass. Wrenched from trued flight by wrists and sealed ankles, he felt stretched. A wire filament cranked to the verge of release, he was unable to let go, or snap, but could only be drawn and pulled under.

  The spirit granted existence within Ath’s creation was of itself too immutably real to rend from the span of the infinite.

  Far off so far, the Warden of Althain heard the shrill cry of vibration struck off by Arithon’s ordeal in Etarra. He listened, knowing the moment was nigh. Anxious, he awaited the word of appeal to enable his Fellowship to react…in Jaelot, drawn tense, Luhaine watched a smiling priest tuck into the banquet on Lysaer’s table…while in Darkling, under the dark of the moon, Kharadmon fretted out the delay, tracking another priest who shuddered on his knees, eyes closed for the jolt that presaged an addictive ecstasy…

  Falling…falling…falling…the crux of one instant extended beyond bearing as seizing forces spun their vortex about him. Arithon dwindled into the clutching embrace of the host who inducted him. Strung out of body, stripped of physical senses, only mage-sight recorded his transit as the filament of his essence streamed through the mazing sigils stamped into the bowl. He could not break their grasp. The higher octaves of his awareness had become torn beyond reach.

  Below him, the dark chains wrought of symbols and blood, that tethered him to his quivering husk: the naked form strapped to cold stone, now beyond help to release. He existed in terror, suspended, while the weave in spilled liquid winnowed him away, making him as a stranger unto himself.

  Arithon fought to recall his beloved. Her features came to him faded, cheeks streaked with reproachful tears. ‘Above any-one living, I trust you…’

  Not real: her voice was no more than an echo from memory. His heart’s flame stayed shackled. Even Elaira could not reach him, here. No tie to the living might rip him clear: not his grant of permission to Dakar, nor the blood bonding, enacted by oath, made to a Fellowship Sorcerer. All aspects were lashed into subjugation. The imperative seal of Davien’s longevity imposed by the Five Centuries Fountain did little more than prolong the dragging torment of transition.

  Regret raised still more cries in scalding protest. Most wrenching of these, the death-wish of Earl Jieret’s deceased war captain: ‘Say to Prince Arithon, when the Fellowship Sorcerers crown a s’Ffalenn descendant as Rathain’s high king at Ithamon, on that hour, he will not have failed me…’

  Caolle’s accusation was hard-followed by Jieret’s: ‘Make me one promise, that after my death you honour my daughter with the same pact you gave me as a child in Strakewood…’

  Swallowed away with the ingested potion, Arithon still sensed the tug of that oathsworn commitment. His grant of protection to Jeynsa s’Valerient remained intact. Initiate master, he had set his intent in clean form. His binding cord to her must dissolve on the moment his mangled flesh perished. The incised wax ciphers holding him to the body would be broken once the collection of life-force was finished. The necromancer would go on to burn the left husk, or else call forfeit the robbed power he sought to exploit.

  Though Jieret’s young daughter would escape without taint, no kindly reprieve might erase the ripping trauma of dissolution. First link in a seeded chain of disasters, the fate of the Teir’s’Ffalenn at Etarra brushed against her clanbred gift for true vision…

  Asleep in the prow of a waterman’s craft in swift passage across Daenfal Lake, Jeynsa shocked awake, screaming. The prophetic dream that had broken her rest continued to rake her with gooseflesh. As the boatman’s son tried to ease her discomfort, she swiped back her ruffled hair, panting to the raced pound of her pulse.

  ‘No, you can’t help me.’ Arms tucked to her breast, stunned to horrified fury, she shot a glance towards the northern horizon.

  No shadow pursued her.

  Only white needles of reflected starlight scribed the boat’s foaming wake. Terror rode her, regardless. The scene exposed by her clanbred talent had been all too graphically damning: of her realm’s crown prince, ringed by the rippling presence of ghosts. Girls, women, and boys, each had been entrapped by the black craft of necromancy.

  The kindly boatman importuned her to sleep.

  Jeynsa refused. She feared to close her eyes. The crushing dread rode her, that the nightmare just glimpsed in the crypt at Etarra would return to harrow her further. ‘Just row! Save us from evil, I must reach the shores of West Halla at speed.’

  Her Sighted dream had laid bare the hideous concern, half-suspected since the clandestine conversation overheard in the camp lodge tent. Past all question, Prince Arithon of Rathain had become seduced by a practising cultist. Caithdein’s successor, Jeynsa’s office was plain: charter law forbade unclean works. The gravity of her errand now carried extreme stakes and a desperate urgency…

  Lost, Arithon tumbled. Jerked under, then drowned, he thrashed, entangled within his captor’s aura. He tasted despair, revolted by the corrupted taint of a life preserved from the grave. The future promised no hope, only desolate suffering to breed madness. Noosed tight, he howled alongside the innocents chained into bondage before him. Immersed in their agony, he could scarcely feel the ephemeral string of connection that linked him to his dying flesh. The actualized thread of selfhood that streamed from the infinite whole and rooted the seat of his being had been drawn too far beyond reach. The shackling hoop invoked by the bowl dismembered every harmonic alignment with the prime life chord. Ensnared by that garrote, he could not cross the gate through the veil, or access the higher mysteries.

  Grace was absent. Dignity died. Light dimmed, and joy became a dumb figment. All that he was now existed for naught but to feed a blighting corruption.

  Vile wretchedness claimed him: Arithon saw through the black cultist’s eyes. He spoke with the creature’s rough voice. In words that engendered no music, he recited more lines of ritual. He was the pale hand gripping the sacrificial knife to enact the final stroke over the heart. He slavered along with the diseased awareness that would shortly destroy the wax ciphers dribbled over the husk’s bleeding limbs on the altar…

  At Althain Tower, Sethvir masked his face, while a weeping adept braced his shoulder. Her steady question could not mask her dread, that no earthly recourse might salvage the balance of Athera’s signature resonance. ‘You fear that your crown prince has crossed into irrevocable jeopardy?’

  In the mountains of Darkling, obser
ving the enraptured priest, Kharadmon clamped a fierce grip on himself to contain his scalding distress. ‘Teir’s’Ffalenn! The time to remember your training is now!’

  While at Jaelot, a pin-point vortex of cold nestled inside a candle sconce, even Luhaine’s staid temperament cracked. ‘Arithon’s left his resistance too late! Show us all mercy! The drakes’ charge is broken, and we’re left four-square in the breach of a grievous disaster!’

  Beyond thought, the shared dread, that the bright weave of the world stood at risk if the heart seed of the last s’Ffalenn prince became severed past reach of a Fellowship intervention…

  The bone-blade touched the breast of the bard, then scribed the last of the dread ciphers. No whisper rose from stilled lips in protest. The incision seeped, nearly bloodless. By now, the victim’s heart-beat had stopped. His nerves ceased to register feeling. Residual sensation had drained out of fingers and toes, though the wax seals still conserved the trapped trace of etheric connection.

  Commingled as captive within the grey cultist’s aura, Arithon sensed the corpse chill of his abandoned flesh as the creature whose foul practice had stripped him of will laid a splayed palm over the wound on his sternum. Forced symbiote, he shared the chant to unhook the heart spark of his being: the foundational core that guarded his earthly awareness.

  Darkness beyond cognizance crushed his self-contained thought, as chant and cipher made contact. The necromancer’s power closed in as a prisoning fist. Pinned at the crux, then dragged past the bleak threshold, Arithon melted into the array of knotted sigils that joined every Kralovir necromancer into energetic communion. His suborned shade would suckle the cult in an initiate order of hierarchy: from established master, to consecrate initiate, down to the least servant held under compulsion, and even unto the planted sigils that marked others, hooking them to an unconscious state of potential. The surge as his induction completed was going to recharge the whole web.