Stormwarden

by Janny Wurts

  He believed his sister had died, drowned without mercy by Anskiere's hand during the foundering of the galleass Crow. To accept her as alive, safeguarded by that same sorcerer's hand, was to negate what had come to be the foundation of his existence. And though he did not yet know the extent of the wretchedness his suffering had created, Taen beheld the truth the Sathid had foretold. Emien would murder before he would forgive himself the error of condemning Anskiere, even if the life he took was that of his own sister.

  The Sathid poised itself; the moment it awaited had come to pass. The girl's loyalty surely would crumble under the knowledge, and in that instant, when the impact of rejection weakened her, the matrix would achieve permanent dominance over her will.

  Taen felt the first stir of the Sathid's expectancy. She pushed it back, sharply and as unreasonably as a spoiled child. All but undone by the loss of her brother's trust, she did not welcome its intrusive sharing of her grief. No logic could console her loss. The Sathid waited with the cold patience of a serpent. It had measured Taen's vulnerability and extrapolated from there, centering its attack upon the one event which would create her greatest distress; the outcome was as inevitable as frost at the end of summer. After years spent judging Taen's character, the matrix anticipated that pain would shortly break her spirit.

  But the moment never came. To Taen, daughter of generations of fishermen who had braved the caprice of ocean storms, Emien was not lost until he was dead. If the Stormwarden could not spare her brother, at least he would know a way to alleviate the boy's misery. The girl roused herself. She would seek Anskiere. And pressured by the dogged edge of her determination, the Sathid discovered it had underestimated her capacity to hope.

  The conflict now was joined, with no advantage left but surprise. As Taen reached for the power to bridge the distance to the ice cliffs, the Sathid lashed out. It struck with the physical agony she had known when the crate crushed her ankle, its intent to throw her off balance.

  Stabbed by a white-hot wave of pain, Taen perceived the Sathid for an enemy. Although it had merged with her mind, its will was a separate entity, and now it stood as a barrier between her and Anskiere, who offered Emien's sole chance of deliverance. Dizzied by the savagery of the matrix's attack, she clung to consciousness with the desperate grip of a sailor cast adrift on a spar. To yield was to invite oblivion. And having mastered the torment of injury once before, Taen endured. She would not give in to torture. She had seen into Emien's wounded spirit, and death itself could not make her choose the same self-betrayal.

  "I will reach Anskiere." Her words emerged mangled by suffering, but her intent was fixed. "Set me free."

  The Sathid shifted focus, assaulted her mind with a score of hurtful images compiled from her memory. Taen watched the houses of Imrill Kand smashed to a snarl of weathered gray boards by the fury of an ocean storm. The matrix showed her the same desolation the inhabitants of Tierl Enneth had known when Anskiere's powers destroyed their homes and families. Icy gusts flattened her skirts against her knees, hampering her steps as she trod the choked remains of the village streets. Beneath the slivered beams of her cousins' home, she discovered the bones of the Stormwarden she sought, knotted like tide wrack in the tattered wool of his cloak. The skull regarded her accusingly, eye sockets clogged with sand.

  "No!" Taen wrenched against the Sathid's hold, forcing the scene to dissolve. She tried to counter its ugliness with her own memories of beauty, but the images twisted in her mind, corrupted by the matrix; as she reached for spring wildflowers on the tors of Imrill Kand, her hands grasped withered thorns. The warmth of the solstice fires blew away as dust transformed to stinging sleet, and the small violet shells she had once collected on the beaches at low tide rotted as she touched them. The Sathid's malice knew no limits. Unwilling to watch everything she loved desecrated by its spite, the girl sought the coarse mind of the fish trapper Tamlin had often borrowed for her training.

  And as nothing about the fish trapper's existence had ever been dear to her, the Sathid found no hold to exploit. It hesitated, thrown off balance, and in that instant, Taen's will predominated. Her dream-sense cleared. She saw herself once again through Emien's eyes. He sat, limp and trembling on a bench in the palace courtyard. Tathagres supported his elbow, her expression sharply concerned.

  "What happened?" she demanded. "Did you faint?"

  Taen guessed at once that her conflict with the Sathid had not proceeded without effect on her brother's mind. Even as the matrix gathered itself for a second assault, she felt the boy's painful confusion, and saw also that Tathagres' sympathy masked deeper feelings, strung like beads on a wire of mistrust. Yet the Sathid allowed no scope to explore further. Like a swimmer rising for a gasp of air, Taen gripped her brother's mind with inarguable firmness and forced speech past his lips.

  "I'm a little dizzy," the boy replied. "The guardsmen weren't very gentle when they caught me." And before she released him, Taen cast a veil of confusion over her brother's thoughts, that the disorientation he had experienced following his departure from the King's audience chamber could not be too clearly examined. Then as the Sathid sprang to engage her once more, she dove down through a twisting spiral of space and time to the dockside inn of an island village, where a familiar and boring acquaintance clad yet in reeking oilskins stood beneath a shuttered window, begging the favors of a buxom tavern wench.

  The Sathid sensed the fact that its control was slipping. Unprepared for the defensive, it scrambled for strategy, but found nothing in Taen's recollection to suggest her reason for seeking the personality of the fish trapper. Denied any direction, the matrix chose the familiar. In the same manner as it had transformed Taen's memories of the shells and the wild-flowers and the solstice fires, the Sathid fixed on her object of concentration and created the illusion of its opposite.

  Taen's opinion of the fish trapper's method of courtship was precisely defined, no trial for the Sathid to encompass. And the simplistic mind of the fish trapper provided an easy opening. With full command of a dream-reader's skills, the matrix shaped its resistance and altered the fellow's perception.

  Standing chilled but hopeful amid the frost-browned stems of last season's herb garden, the fish trapper experienced brief disorientation. The instant his muddled senses cleared, he discovered a spray of seven red roses clutched in his callused hand. Shocked speechless by the sight of flowers in the dead of winter, he noticed the remainder of the Sathid's illusions more reluctantly. For nothing about him was the same.

  The mildewed oilskins stood replaced by a cloak of brushed gray felt. His hip-high, fishy-smelling boots disappeared, transformed into soft calf leggings with silver buttons and embroidered cuffs. And the wild red snarl of hair and whiskers which habitually buried the man's neck and most of his features appeared clean and neatly trimmed, revealing an expression of bug-eyed astonishment.

  He swallowed twice and raised a trembling finger to touch one of the roses. A thorn scraped his knuckle. Convinced the illusion was madness, he shouted aloud in disbelief.

  The noise displeased the object of his passion. Above his head the shutters banged open and the tavern wench thrust her head out, her mouth opened for carping complaint. With its ruse nearly ruined, the Sathid was forced to intervene. It included the woman in its dream spell and extravagantly added a velvet waistcoat to the fisherman's attire.

  And finding the suitor beneath her window was not the tiresome pest who brought the reek of cod into her taproom each evening, the woman yelled with predatory delight. Here stood a clean, strapping fellow who obviously had wealth by the look of his clothing; and roses in winter were a luxury no island doxie could expect unless she were courted by royalty. This one never hesitated. She smiled, hiding her broken tooth with her tongue, and swooped over the sill to be kissed. The fish trapper's eyes went wide at the sight of what bounced within inches of his nose. And unable to contain her humor over the fish trapper's ridiculous predicament, Taen burst into peals of laught
er.

  The Sathid recoiled in dismay. In the spectrum of human emotions, ridicule lay furthest from the cowering dejection of defeat. And having only Taen's upbringing within the harsh environment of Imrill Kand on which to draw conclusions, it understood very little of humor, except that its attempt to intimidate had failed. Flustered, it abandoned the structure of its attack.

  Caught with her face half-smothered in the greasy beard of the fish trapper, the tavern wench emitted a muffled yell. She tried to yank back, but the fellow by now had thrust a fist inside her blouse. Bleached linen tore with hardly a pretext of modesty. The woman yelled again, while her suitor stared crestfallen at a bodice stuffed with woolen rags.

  The sight reduced Taen to a quivering paroxysm of mirth. In vain the Sathid tried to reestablish its hold; but the comical expression on the fish trapper's face overwhelmed the girl, and her hysterical laughter could not be controlled. Baffled by frustration the matrix withdrew, and above the capsule which sheltered Taen's body, meter after meter quivered and dropped within the green sectors of the dials. The Vaere, standing by, recorded the fact. The girl had triumphed in her struggle for supremacy. Her laughter gradually dwindled to manageable proportions. She had defeated the Sathid and claimed the full command of a dream-reader's powers for her own.

  Taen barely paused to acknowledge the victory. The instant she discovered her will was no longer contested, she collected her scattered thoughts. Though every nerve cried out for rest, she called her dream-reader's skills into focus. For Emien's sake she drove outward once more, and sought the sorcerer Anskiere.

  XV

  Anskiere's Geas

  The ice cliffs reared above Cliffhaven's northern headland, white against the dirtier gray of storm clouds. Beneath, voracious winter seas chiselled the spellbound ice into caverns. Spray struck with stinging fury more bitter than any seasonal cold, and the air bit with the brittle edge of an Arctic night. Here, Taen returned to seek the sorcerer Anskiere.

  This time she saw the wards, made visible through the expanded awareness of the Sathid link. Shifting curtains of blue-violet light radiated like a corona from the cliff face. Taen traced their energies deep into the earth, layer upon interlocking layer, in search of the Stormwarden's presence. Frost pervaded her senses, enfolded her innermost mind with the white desolation of a snowfall. But the energies which had disoriented her before now parted cleanly. Although the powers Taen had won from the matrix granted no influence over weather, Anskiere's works were Sathid-borne; seen through the lens of her new-found mastery, their structure was comprehensible. And following a pattern intricate as the laces woven by the elderly women on Imrill Kand, Taen unravelled the spell toward its source. The whistles of the frostwargs echoed distantly, with overtones as dreadful as she remembered. But Taen passed them by, untroubled by the crippling fear of her former experience. Soon, at the vortex of the wards, she confronted the cone of silence and darkness which had formerly defeated all her skills.

  She paused there to renew her concentration. No cause which held Anskiere confined would be slight. Already weary from her battle with the Sathid, she dared not tap the final ward with less than total caution. Here misjudgment might prove fatal; and a single slip could easily cause damage beyond any power in Keithland to mend. Taen cast forth her dream-sense with a touch of utmost delicacy, and spun awareness like a cocoon around the barrier to sound the most central of Anskiere's defenses.

  The configuration she encountered proved to be strangely familiar. Through the expanded perception of her dream-sense, Taen recognized the triple ring of force which once shot blazing bands of light around the wings of the stormfalcon she had released from the galleass Crow. But now Tamlin's schooling granted her more complete understanding. The interlace of power shaped the defense wards of a sorcerer's staff; a single touch would kill any being not attuned to their resonance. But Taen sensed a flaw in the structure.

  Something about the ward's continuity seemed amiss. Its symmetry stood less than perfect, as if something sometime had struck its harmony slightly out of balance. Taen explored the anomaly with her dream-sense. The wards had certainly been disrupted, if only slightly. Resonance of tampering lingered still, and its nature made Taen spring taut with alarm. Someone with unfriendly intentions had entered here before her. Their passage had left a gap in the defenses. Although Taen held insufficient knowledge to assess the full extent of the damage, she recognized the touch behind the sorcery. Whoever had intruded upon the Stormwarden had been the instrument of Kor's Accursed; the culprit was certain to be Tathagres herself.

  Discovery and revelation roused Taen to rage. When the witch had magically transported herself and Emien to Kisburn's court, the powers she manipulated had surely been Anskiere's; she had once tapped his staff to raise the sea at Tierl Enneth. Suddenly frightened for the Stormwarden's safety, Taen thrust her dream-sense recklessly past the wards and sounded what lay beyond.

  She encountered Anskiere's awareness, sharp and immediate and demanding as the living presence she recalled when the sorcerer controlled the weather on Imrill Kand, but with one difference. Anskiere slept, his will quiescent, as if he hoarded his resources for a day of awakening yet to come. He seemed undisturbed. Apparently even Tathagres dared not disrupt a sorcerer trained by the Vaere. Softly Taen folded her awareness into the Stormwarden's. So light was her touch that he did not rouse from stasis as she joined with him in his dreaming.

  Anskiere's sleep shaped a landscape of broken hopes, sharp with the memory of strife; for seven decades Stormwarden and Firelord had labored, their talents joined to form a single force. Together they had subdued eleven species of Kor's Accursed, and finally undertaken the imprisonment of Keithland's most terrible oppressors, the Mharg-demons from Tor Elshend. Although the two sorcerers had worked, mind within mind, for more years than the life span of most men, Taen found no love between them.

  Half buried in the shadows of emotion which cleft the Storm-warden's dream, the girl experienced the venomous, spiteful twists of Ivain Firelord's character. This malice had wounded Anskiere, for he alone remembered Ivain before the Cycle of Fire forever upended his sanity. Anskiere returned such cruelty with sympathy, and once with a trust which nearly proved his ruin. For Ivain had betrayed him at the height of their contest against the Mharg-spawn. The Stormwarden survived and continued alone until he achieved the demons' confinement, but the scarring left by Ivain's malice never healed.

  Now Taen beheld the implications of the frostwargs' release; shackled by shared understanding, she saw that Anskiere's life was fully dependent on a Firelord's skills. Tuned to the Storm-warden's aspirations, her dream-sense replicated the decision to release the geas to call the heir of Ivain into service. The choice rebounded with echoes of tragedy. Anskiere fully understood that the boy who answered his summons must someday suffer the fate of the father. No man who attempted the Cycle of Fire escaped its mark of madness. For that reason, Ivain's name was remembered with hatred, though the young man who first accepted his training from the Vaere had been loved for his generosity of spirit.

  Burdened by Anskiere's past and by his agonized surrender to the only choice left available to him, Taen tuned her awareness to the spell which shaped his final hope. And since that hope also encompassed the fate of her only brother, she plotted the path of the geas the Stormwarden had shaped to summon the son of Ivain Firelord. The line of force struck out to the northwest, spanning the open sea with the directional clarity of a light beacon. Suspended by the dream link, the girl followed the geas.

  Her search began without effort. Guided by the precision of Anskiere's handiwork, Taen sped over the wave crests with the ease of a skipper bird's flight. She traveled unaccountable distance within a matter of seconds, tracking without landmark beneath the flat overcast of the winter sky. Suddenly the spell wavered. Taen faltered. Wrenched by the resonance of violence, she tried to brake her speed. But the geas suddenly exploded around her, its linear progression jagged like crumpled w
ire into eddies of spent strength.

  Overturned by confusion, Taen lost its track. Through a horrid, stunned moment, she tumbled on the edge of the void, struggling to sustain her contact with the place where the geas disrupted into chaos. Her control gradually prevailed. The dream link stabilized. Oriented once more, Taen drifted exhausted. Below her, the snow-covered roofs of a fishing village nestled closely against the slopes of a mountain coastline. Smoke curled from the chimneys, and through perceptions strangely altered by her dream-sense, she smelled the fragrance of birch logs. A crude road led out of the settlement, its switched-back curves rising tier upon tier up the slope until it lost itself into ranks of stunted evergreens.

  Taen scanned the village inhabitants with a dream-reader's awareness. But she found nothing more than the simple thoughts of fisher folk, concerned with the mending of nets and baking bread and fretting over the thickness of the ice which choked the harbor; Taen felt it improbable that the subject of Anskiere's hopes would be concealed among such workaday folk. More likely the heir of Ivain lived farther distant, well beyond the break in the geas created by Tathagres' transfer. Confident of her hunch, Taen abandoned the village, turned her focus northwestward in a direct line from Cliffhaven. Her search carried her across the high drift-bound passes of the Furlains and on through the hill country on the far side, where the trees of Seitforest thrust matted boughs against the winter sky.

  There above the bare crowns of the beeches, Taen encountered traces of Anskiere's geas. The pattern was hesitant, visible to her dream-sense as snarled trails of light. It steadied as she progressed, gradually becoming structurally intact. No power coursed across the spell. Like a conduit shattered in midspan, the break beyond the Furlains had disrupted the continuity of the geas Anskiere had designed to summon Ivain's heir to Cliffhaven. But Taen easily read the spell's orientation from the segment which remained. Its path resumed, straight as a draftsman's line across the rolling dells of Seitforest, to end at last in the dooryard of a forester's hut.