Stormwarden

by Janny Wurts

  Poised on her gift like a hawk on an air current, Taen hovered over Imrill Kand, startled to find the keen chill of autumn in the air. Lulled by the magic of the Vaere, she had forgotten that seasons would continue in her absence, and the discovery disturbed her. She would return one day, perhaps; but all she knew would be changed. And like a small girl caught in a nightmare, she fled to the house off Rat's Alley for comfort and protection.

  Her mother dozed in the wooden rocker by the hearth, sheltered still by the brother who had taken her in since the death of her husband. Beloved work-worn hands lay cradled in her apron, and a familiar curl had strayed from the pins which secured her hair; Taen noticed new lines around eyes already heavily wrinkled by hardship and loss. But the women of Imrill Kand were inured to life's deprivations; Leri Marl's widow had endured her personal tragedies without yielding to despair.

  Suddenly uncertain of her control, Taen reached out, tentatively opened contact with her mother's mind. But delicate as her first touch was, she was noticed. The woman's eyes quivered open, blue, but faded now by the first traces of cataracts. Her seamed lips parted into a smile of welcome which changed almost at once to laughter.

  "Taen?" Her mother blinked, spilling sudden tears of welcome. Secure in her island heritage, she never thought to question when the sight was upon her; and no vision ever brought more joy than the assurance of her daughter's well-being. "You are safe, I see, Fires be thanked for that." She paused and smiled again, unabashed by the moisture on her cheeks. "Have you seen Emien? I worry about your brother. He was always brash, and quick to resent what he could not change. I fear he bears the Stormwarden no love, child. And that sets sorrow upon me, for Anskiere was like a father to you both."

  Taen hesitated, reluctant to share what little she knew of Emien. And mercifully her mother mistook her silence for impatience. "Go, child. Seek your brother. Tell him he is missed, and that Dacsen is needed at home."

  But the sloop was lost, cast onto the reefs by orders of a King's man now dead. If the wreckage had failed to wash ashore, Taen could not bear to break the news. Burdened by a sense of her own responsibility, she withdrew from her mother's presence and flung herself headlong into a search for her brother, as if by finding him she could negate the betrayal of his upbringing and the sorrow that knowledge might cause the folk who raised him.

  Darkness closed like a tunnel about her. Suffocated by the sensations of distance and cold, Taen struggled to regain control of her gift. Unlike the old fisherman, Emien's mind was hard and bright, a fierce turmoil of emotional conflicts; the pattern was closer to her than any other. No matter how remote her brother had grown, Taen was determined to find him. She steadied herself with a memory of his face, black hair spilled untidily across his brow, his eyes shadowed and wary since the day the accident had claimed their father's life. And light suddenly exploded into existence around her, as if the association opened a connection between them.

  Centered by the powers of her gift, Taen found herself looking down on the torchlit arcade of a palace courtyard. Two men circled over the patterned brick beyond the archway, stripped to the waist, and armed with practice foils. In a fast-paced exchange of swordplay, the larger man lunged. His blade clanged against his opponent's guard. The smaller fellow grunted and recovered.

  "Mind your footwork, boy," said the larger man, and with a start of surprise, Taen recognized her brother as his partner.

  Annoyed by the correction and unaware of his sister's presence, Emien riposted. Linked by her dream-sense, Taen shared her brother's bitter satisfaction as he hammered blows upon his tutor's weapon. The pace increased. Flamelight gleamed on sweat-slicked shoulders as the fighters wove across the courtyard, graceful as dancers in the rhythms of parry and riposte. The sparring was intended for practice, an exercise to develop sharper skills. But merged with her brother's mind, Taen realized Emien fought for much higher stakes, as if the outcome of this simple match held capacity to poison his future. Wrapped in a black web of passion, he fenced as if his teacher were an enemy.

  Steel rang upon crossguard with a sharp, angry clamor. Both men gasped for breath. Absorbed by the fiery play of light on the foils, each teased and feinted, seeking an opening in his opponent's guard. And drugged on the wine of her brother's hatred, Taen almost missed the raised hand as his instructor signaled the end of the bout. For one ragged, flickering instant, it seemed Emien would not desist. Then he lowered his foil, and rubbed his damp forehead with the back of his wrist.

  His instructor regarded him intently, then collected the practice weapon. "You're getting quite good. With work, you have the potential to be very good indeed. Now get some rest. I'll meet you again tomorrow."

  Emien watched the swordmaster depart with narrowed eyes. The praise was a string of meaningless words in his ears. Still oblivious to Taen's presence, he crossed the courtyard and retrieved his shirt and tunic from a bench. Sewn of soft scarlet material, the garments were bordered with black and gold threadwork, with laces at cuff and neck caught by jewelled hooks. Amazed by his finery, Taen shivered as the sweat chilled on her brother's body. He had risen high since they had parted on the decks of Crow. And somehow, somewhere, along with his bettered station, he had acquired a hunger for power no training at weapons could assuage.

  Numbed by his strangeness, Taen did little but follow as Emien entered the palace. He made his way down a series of ornately decorated corridors and entered a carpeted antechamber. A pair of men at arms guarded the doorway beyond. Emien nodded in greeting and crossed inside, blinking in the sudden glare of candles.

  The room's furnishings represented more wealth than Taen could have imagined in one place; but after three weeks of life in King Kisburn's court, Emien barely noticed the rare wood, the patterned rugs or the fine wool tapestries which covered the walls by the casements. He paused with his tunic and shirt draped over his forearm, embarrassed to discover the chamber was not empty.

  A richly dressed official stood by the hearth, engaged in animated conversation with a woman clad in ermine and amethysts. Fine gold wires bound her snowy hair and the bracelets on her slender wrists chimed as sweetly as Tamlin's bells as she lifted her head and acknowledged the boy's presence. The official faltered and fell silent, plump cheeks quivering with irritation.

  Emien bowed smoothly, as if accustomed to court manners all his life. The easy grace of the movement left Taen uneasy, and worse, the face of the official seemed strangely cloaked in shadow, as if something about his complexion did not agree with the light.

  If Emien perceived anything unusual about the person of the official, he chose not to be bothered. "Tathagres, my Lord Sholl, I beg to be excused. Had I guessed the council would end early, I'd have chosen a different route."

  Tathagres waved him impatiently past. Painfully conscious of her beauty, Emien proceeded to the suite of rooms which served as his own apartment. There he tossed the rich tunic carelessly over a stuffed chair, summoned servants and called querulously for bath water. Appalled by the ease with which he had shed his upbringing on Imrill Kand, Taen watched Emien berate the servants for clumsiness and savagely banish them from his presence. Soured by the exchange, he finished his washing in solitude, then poured himself wine and sprawled, exhausted, across the rich coverlet of his bed.

  He did not immediately sleep, but lay staring with widened eyes at the single candle left alight on the nightstand. Rest came with difficulty, Taen sensed, and troubled by the unhappy changes court life had wrought in her brother, she decided to engage her gift and bring him comfort. Poised like a dream on the edge of Emien's awareness, Taen gathered her powers into tight focus and spread a blanket of peace over his thoughts. She led him back to his beginnings on Imrill Kand. Enfolded in the soft scent of peat and the sigh of sea wind through the chimes on the rooftree above the loft where he slept during childhood, Emien relaxed. Disarmed by the gentleness of her sending, he slipped into sleep.

  Oblivious to the fact that his thoughts were influ
enced by another, he imagined he stood with his sister on a grassy hillside above the village. Summer breezes fanned her black hair across her cheeks and the gray wool of her shift blew loosely about her while the small brown goats left their grazing and nosed her hands, begging for grain. Taen tangled her fingers in their rough coats, a smile of joy on her face. Watching her, Emien could almost forget her lameness and the innocent vulnerability which had permitted her to believe Anskiere's lies; but now she was dead, drowned in a storm like his father. Never again would she play with the goats in the meadows of Imrill Kand.

  Though her memory held nothing but tragedy, in the dream she would not stop smiling. Through the window of her gift, she regarded her brother with eyes of clearest blue and said, "But Emien, I am alive."

  Emien tossed on the bed, struggled to free himself from a torment he now recognized as nightmare. Taen had died; Imrill Kand was forever barred to him. Fevered and sweating, he fought the vision of his sister, insistent in his hatred of Anskiere. The dream would not release him; he could not make himself waken.

  "Emien, no." Taen's voice battered against his isolation, seductive with compassion. "I survived the storm when Crow foundered. The Stormwarden protected me. I am with you now, can't you see? Oh, why must you believe Tathagres' lies? Don't you know she uses you?"

  But her words failed to soothe. The kindness Taen intended brought Emien nothing but anguish, poisoned as he was by his own guilt. For if his sister had been preserved at the Storm-warden's hand, every act he had committed in the cause of her vengeance became evil beyond question.

  He tossed on the bed, sobbing aloud with misery. "You're dead," he accused, and when the image of his sister's presence failed to leave him, his voice went ugly with rage. "Leave me!"

  "But why?" Taen searched his face, her light eyes suddenly flooded with tears. "What could make you turn against the Stormwarden who once protected you? Did you believe the Constable, that he murdered the folk of Tierl Enneth? Emien, Anskiere was innocent. I can show you."

  Confident of his trust, Taen gathered her skills, assembled dream images to prove to her brother how her gift had enabled her to know beyond question that Anskiere had not caused the drowning of helpless people. She touched her brother's mind with truth, utterly unprepared for the fact that her message brought him nothing but guilt.

  Emien's voice split into a raw scream of denial. "No!" Condemned beyond pardon by the vision she wove, he lashed back, set the poisoned dregs of his own warped reason against his sister in attempt to restore the dignity he had lost when he first accepted Tathagres as mistress.

  The dream link reversed itself. Caught in the meshes of her brother's passion, Taen felt herself tossed headlong into clouded skies and the savage, storm-whipped seas of a gale. To the battered, emotionally torn mind of her brother, this tempest seemed more than a natural contest of elements. A squall had taken the life of his father. Hammered by thunderous, foam-laced swells, Crow had foundered, and above the demented howl of the gusts Emien heard once again the screams of drowning slaves and the cries of his lost sister; and with the pinnace's tiller clenched once more in his blistered hands, he watched, helpless, as the seas stripped the lives of the survivors with passionless cruelty. Soon scarcely a handful remained. Always the sea lurked at his back, a tireless, insatiable enemy. Humbled over and over again by its might, and by the powers of the sorcerer who controlled it, Emien wept in frustration.

  Inflamed by the need to retaliate, he raced down a rocky beach on the isle of Cliffhaven. Drawn along by the dream link, Taen felt the icy air ache in his lungs with each breath, through his ears heard the crash as the breakers creamed white against the shore and the shrill calling of gulls. Ahead, cliffs rose like a wall against the sky, lofty stone tiers encased in crystalline sheets of ice. The raw cold of a sorcerer's enchantment reddened Emien's skin, but he felt no discomfort; beyond that bastion of frost lay his enemy, and his obsession for vengeance permitted no rest. He would pierce Anskiere's defenses though he broke his hands trying, and with a separate thrill of horror, Taen realized the glassy abutments of ice imprisoned the Stormwarden who once had protected her from harm.

  She tried to break free, to wrest control of the dream from her brother's maddened grasp. She had to know more concerning the Stormwarden's fate. But Emien's hatred was too strong to resist, and her presence itself threatened his existence. Even as Taen reached to manipulate the fabric of his image, her brother drew the sword from the sheath at his side and lifted it high overhead, point poised for a killing blow.

  "No!" Taen fell back, spreadeagled against the ice, unable to believe he would strike. "Would you murder your own sister? Emien!"

  But the words failed to deter him. Emien seemed not to see her at all, and with a pang of awful horror Taen realized the fury which drove him was directed solely at the Stormwarden of Elrinfaer. Emien would drive the sword home, and never notice she stood in his path.

  Just as his wrist tensed to engage the downstroke, a shout rang out down the beach. Hooves thundered like war drums over the sand. Emien whirled and saw one of the Kielmark's mounted patrols bearing down on him at a gallop. Steel sang through the air as he twisted, white-faced and frightened. But before he could ready himself for defense, a force like white-hot magma closed over him, and he felt himself ripped into transfer by the powers of Tathagres' neckband.

  The dream link carried Taen along with him. Even with her senses overwhelmed by the rush of strange forces, she heard her brother scream aloud in terror, for the memory of his transfer from Cliffhaven to the palace of Kisburn's court recurred to him only in nightmare. Ripped away from the solid ground beneath the ice cliffs, he felt himself suspended as before, in a place where darkness reigned. The air he breathed held the metallic tang of a blacksmith's forge, and dizzied by its heat, his grip upon his own self-awareness wavered. As if torchlit against a backdrop of dark, Emien beheld beings whose features contained no trace of humanity. While the forces of the transfer held him locked and helpless, the black-skinned, red-eyes visages of Kor's Accursed leered down upon him from a high dais of stone.

  Trapped in his frame of reference, Taen also noticed the demons. Powerless to intervene, she stood by as they conferred among themselves, weighing the poison in her brother's soul. And with a horror as great as Emien's own, the girl watched one of the demons rise and point, and pronounce her brother's name as one chosen.

  Revulsion tore through her. The dream link unraveled under a lightning burst of negative force, and flung across distance by an explosion of emotional rejection, Taen shivered and woke in the dell on the Isle of Vaere. Sheltered once more within the grove, she huddled with her arms clenched around her knees. The place seemed less than secure. Taen glanced about her with dream-haunted eyes. Although the link with Emien stood severed, she sensed the resonant echo of her brother's screams as he woke from nightmare on the silken coverlet of his bed in Kisburn's palace.

  Never in Taen's darkest imagination had she guessed her brother might stand in such peril, even when fear and anger had sometimes made him cruel. Troubled, she hesitated to confide her findings to the Vaere. Though quick in his perceptions, Tamlin could often be dispassionate concerning events beyond his island sanctuary. If Emien was to be helped, he would require the care and the compassion of one who understood his difficult nature; one who knew, as his family did, that he had never been able to forgive himself the error which tangled the net and began the inexorable string of circumstances which resulted in his father's death.

  Alone with her dilemma and confined to the Isle of the Vaere, Taen knew only one on all of Keithland capable enough to restore her brother's trust. Without pausing to ask Tamlin's permission, she gathered the battered remains of her dream-sense around her, and launched her awareness in search of Anskiere of Elrinfaer.

  Fragile as fine silk thread, her probe unreeled across the void. Though the Stormwarden's mind had largely stayed closed to her, Taen recalled every nuance of his presence. She searched
for the constant rhythm of surf against the beaches of home; the wild, keening song of the first north wind of autumn, and the sure power of the solstice tides; Anskiere was all that and more, changeless as the renewal discovered each year in the gentle showers of spring. Confident the Stormwarden would recognize her, Taen strengthened her sending and presently located a thin glimmer of daylight. Hurrying now, eager to reach her goal, Taen rushed through the gap, into a reality far distant.

  She was greeted first by the solid boom of breakers and the sigh of breezes combing windswept heights. A moment later, the darkness parted around her, and her dream-sense ached in the glare of sunlight thrown off the sheer, impenetrable heights of the same ice cliffs she had encountered in Emien's dream. The sight dismayed her. Pierced by the plaintive cries of the gulls, Taen felt daunted by unanswerable sorrow. She surveyed that desolate vista, unwilling to believe her search would end here, in a place of deserted wilds. With the care Tamlin had taught her, Taen focused her dream-sense and sounded the place for traces of life, or any clue which might reveal the Storm-warden's presence.

  Almost at once the resonance of Anskiere's power surged through the gate she had opened in her mind. Constant and strong as storm tide, the warding forces he had set forth in that place sang across the channels of Taen's sensitivity. Reassured of his presence, the girl gathered herself and turned her dream-reader's skills to tap the ward's source.

  Darkness met her, deep and vast as night, and seemingly solid as a wall. Taen gasped, unable to orient herself. She delved deeper, sought to thrust the suffocating blackness aside and reach the Stormwarden's awareness. But her meager skills would not answer in that place; the shadow refused to part. Tossed about like a moth in a downdraft, Taen floundered and struggled to reorient. But the wards restricted her, making progress impossible.