Traitor's Knot (Light & Shadow 07)

by Janny Wurts

  Asandir travelled the icy void without anchor. Into unshielded territory, endangered by questing wraiths, he dared not carry his rapport with the lane's flux. He fared outwards adrift, dropping all but the ephemeral memory of the clay shell left at Althain Tower.

  The adept steadied her breathing and curbed her raced heart-beat. Apprehension would serve no purposeful good. For where the observer constrained to five senses might dimly sense hostile cold, and the emptiness of deep vacuum, the stream of the Sorcerer's unleashed presence would discern vistas beyond. Asandir would re-encounter himself, mirrored in the upper registers. Shifted into vibration and light, his trued self would be redefined: in music beyond hearing and colour beyond sight, he would rejoin the grand spectrum that sourced Ath's creation.

  That siren call could unstring the mind. Even the self-aware spirit might run mad with desire to embrace the sweet ease of surrender. Against the thundering chord that was life, unveiled as exalted glory, Asandir had no more than spare will, and the hard-set choice of endurance. The dragons had bound him. The warp thread of his life had been precisely matched to the weft thread spun by their dreaming. Summoned with such clarity, his nature must answer. Irrevocably, fate had wedded his destiny to the cloth of Athera's existence. If he lost his grip, or let go of himself, there would be no route back, except through tormented insanity.

  Braced for the course of a steadfast vigil, the adept tracked the tuned pulse of the Sorcerer's life chord and committed herself to patience . . .

  An adamant presence hurled outwards across the vaulting dark of the deep, Asandir touched against the protective matrix laid down by his discorporate colleagues. The construct gave him the reference point to leap over the distance at speed. Spelled wardings rang like a cascade of tapped chimes as he answered the challenge and passed, clean as a needle through silk.

  Onwards, he pressed. The crystalline voices of stars braided song all about him. Ahead, if he reached, he could sense Kharadmon, weaving a convolute string of evasions. The inventive working strung a web of entanglements to delay the first influx of marauding free wraiths.

  Asandir allowed that contest wide berth. Even the most shielded contact with his colleague invited the chance of disaster: if such an encounter drew glancing notice, conflict would be joined. The pack that nipped at Kharadmon's heels would turn, with the tenantless husk of the body at Althain posing an irresistible gambit. The tenuous tie between spirit and flesh would lead back to Athera and provide the

  ripe opening for hostile possession.

  The field Sorcerer had no choice but to pass Kharadmon by and hold to his unswerving purpose. With the planet behind no more than an azure chip inset against velvet darkness, his reference became the whisper-thin trace of the trees, a remnant left by the defunct spell once created to call his colleague home from an ill-fated survey of Marak. That cold, icy world had succumbed and died, overrun by the wraith-riddled fogs that had also sourced the Mistwraith's destructive invasion. To the famished horde, cut off at South Gate, the rich life on Athera remained as a prize to be ravaged by relentless conquest.

  Asandir made his way without disturbing the imprinted energies the old spell had scribed through the ethers. If he ranged too near, the wraiths already in progress and tracking might sense him. More than agile opponents, they could slip between time. To evade their keen senses, the Sorcerer upstepped the frequency of his being until he rode the carrier wave of harmonics, octaves above solid matter. Awareness without form, he sailed the vast deeps, whirled in the black flame of the untamed glory that existed before ordered creation.

  Here lay his danger: streamed through the very essence ofjoy, cradled by power to absolve every grievance, Asandir knew a pure exaltation that acknowledged no pain and no boundaries. Marak's wraiths, Athera - the binding charge of the dragons - seemed dwindled to insignificance.

  The ties that sustained vital flesh became both prison and leash, an encumbrance the self-aware spirit might snap as identity thinned and faded.

  For that thread to endure, the Sorcerer must renew his attention from moment to moment. The very act denounced his full Name. Each reaffirmation cut like a betrayal as, steadfast, he refuted the core of all knowing that cherished his greater existence. Asandir suffered a hunger of spirit that transcended all cares of the flesh. Beguiled, then claimed by the might of Ath's mysteries, he drifted, while a whisper arose to sustain him.

  Far behind, so very far, the Sorcerer still sensed the echo of peace set forth by Ath's adept. A spirit entrained by free will and high mastery, she expressed the grand dance while still holding to human form. Her stance extended him gentle reminder: of the body and the frame of intent left behind at Althain Tower. The drakes' legacy caged him in danger and hardship; separation and pain, that knotted his heart to the fate of a world, sliced sharp and deep as old agony.

  Asandir chose.

  The residual spell cast its faint, shining line across the black well of the deep. From his point of raised vantage, through force of bared will, he could trace the course of its reduced vibration. He sensed the wraiths also, knew them by the flat tang of their avarice and their driven, voracious hunger. He hurled his awareness farther out into the dark, searched until he encountered a space where the spell's inactive path was untrammelled. There, he wrenched the frame of his consciousness back into dimensional space. He arrived, tightly shielded. Since a whisper of presence would draw the free wraiths who currently quested in crossing, his deterrent must be worked in stealth, and at speed.

  No use, simply to annul his permissions, or use a forthright rune of banishment. The original conjury was impressed in the memory of Athera's live trees. To impose straight will on their dreaming consciousness, or to refigure the remnant as anything else but a tie of regenerative expression would be an invasive violation. The staid grace of a forest did not comprehend choice. Its tidal cycle of being did not recognize destructive intervention. A tree did not act; it simply was, a reflection of placid tranquillity.

  The Major Balance demanded exacting integrity. What could not be ended must be reworked within the strict frame of harmonic alignment.

  Asandir engaged help from a distant, hot star, one that possessed no fair, spinning worlds to entice the ravenous wraiths. Its gifted fire fashioned half of his remedial warding: a loop of geometry, hard-edged and impenetrable knit into a circle expressed in both darkness and light. From the gap of the void and the stuff of shaped energy, he welded opposition into pure balance: birth and death annealed in the cyclical spiral understood by the language of trees. In consummate mastery, the Sorcerer bound the opposing forces through the torus of time, without end and without a beginning.

  The effort taxed him. Unlike his colleagues who existed as shades, the concentration required to engage his craft must be enacted in dual awareness. Asandir dared not waver, or slacken his grasp on the contrary forces he handled. One strayed thought, for a fractional second, would dissipate the energy field that sustained his untenanted body.

  If he mis-stepped, so far out in the void, Ath's adept could not extend her power to save him.

  Asandir sealed the primary layer of his conjury, aware the foundation he created was vulnerable. Should any Fellowship colleague or adept with initiate knowledge succumb to a free wraith's possession, all that he fashioned could fall to misuse and violation.

  The Law of the Major Balance was a stricture graced on permission, not a limitation based upon force. Its restraint was enacted by choice of free will, without imposing fixed bonds or control. Its wisdom sprang out of living awareness, not a rote rule, or formulation. True order was not subject to knowledge, but arose from the deepened awareness that sprang from coexistence in unified consciousness. Used without due care for consent, the rarefied power the Sorcerer wove could be turned to harmful intent. A pattern of creation in symmetrical balance must also encompass the means to warp, and imprison, and destroy.

  Whole power entrained the hoop of all being and did not deny the constrictive fa
ce of its nature.

  Asandir wrought knowing he could not enact the least set of punitive protections. Not without sullying the dire symmetry of existence and admitting the stasis that seeded all entropy.

  He closed the last rune, worn thin by his labour. Peril confronted him. The new, active matrix now must be conjoined with the ghost imprint of the old homing spell. The surge of live power as he welded the link could not be masked, since the bias of the earlier working had never been meant to impede. Its primary design was a homing call, fashioned to welcome the weakened, strayed spirit, and assist swift return as a carrier.

  At the instant the new conjury aligned with its matrix, the defunct structure would retire, and react once again as a wide-open conduit.

  Asandir took swift pause, scanned backwards, and measured the flesh left at Althain Tower. His breathing and heart rate were slowed, not yet damaged by creeping exhaustion. Beside his stilled form, steadfast as flame, the adept maintained her calm vigilance. The Sorcerer took ruthless stock, as he must. Once he committed, his straits became sealed as his action flagged the wraiths' notice. Outside of his body, he would be raw bait, and starved for fresh prey, they would come for him. He must close the last rune and slip clear on the instant before his reserves were expended.

  Schooled to know his own strength, already tested against the bittermost limits of hardship, Asandir struck with surgical speed. He tapped the older spell's structure, reclaimed his personal permissions, and renewed their validation within an exact flash of thought. He sensed the wraiths also. Their quickened interest woke an insatiable drive to consume the intoxicating power contained in his essence.

  Despite dire necessity, the Sorcerer dared, not rush. Constrained to subtle delicacy, he adjusted the old

  spell's continuity. The pulse of changed energy shifted the imprint, there and gone, as a flicker. He damped what he could, reduced his touch to the barest ephemeral signature. Unmasked and vulnerable for the duration, he seamlessly joined his new crafting into the stream of the structural remnant. He sealed each connection with intricate care, aware of his enemies, closing. Wraiths converged on two fronts: hordes from teeming Marak as well as the pack on his back trail, raging under his colleague's defence. The trace of the homing thrummed under Asandir's touch, plucked like a strand of taut wire. An echo bounced back: Kharadmon's startled cognizance, fired to sharp response, as his colleague redoubled his effort to snag back the free wraiths' converging attention.

  Asandir dared not pause for acknowledgement. If that saving help eased the pressure on one flank, the side facing Marak had no ally. As long as his work kept the spell-craft unsealed, Athera lay open to invasion. Each second, wraiths seethed from the ice-bound waste. They rushed the connection, mad with sentient hate and beyond every power to stem.

  Asandir wove his craft, lightning-fast, sure as granite, even as the homing spell trembled and flared. He marked the approach of the descending swarm, foresaw critical deficit, and, at raw need, expanded the reach of his resource. That resharpened focus took all that he had. Given a narrowed, split-second to finish, he shouldered the risk under fullest command. His body would suffer, but only as long as the moment he needed to lock the last ciphers to forestall attrition. He must take the chance that he could wrest clear in time to salvage the anchor that grounded his absent spirit.

  In that crucial split-second, the adept's brilliance dimmed. Asandir sensed that change. Forerunning prescience detected her influx of clean power, dispatched through his aura, and flung down the breached cord in a gesture of unconditional reinforcement.

  His raw instinct screamed warning. Disaster would follow!

  He reacted before thought, slammed the rune of closure over his almost complete structure. The construct would stand, flawed, subject to decay. That loss had no remedy. Time had run out. Asandir whirled clear of the free wraiths' starved rush. He twisted his being outside the veil, rejected the stream of the prime life chord dispatched by the adept as it happened. Snapped back inside of his damaged flesh, sprawled in the chair back at Althain Tower, he cried out as the pain of shocked nerves whirled him dizzy.

  Asandir was granted no space to prevaricate. A seizure ripped through him. He quelled the convulsed muscles; unsealed stinging eyes, burned his own life-force at reckless need, and shoved back his wheeling faintness. Through needling agony, as his impaired auric field whipped through imbalance, he encountered the adept, tumbled slack in his lap, with her cheek pressed over his heart.

  'No,' he grated. 'I refuse you! This is my clear right!' He raised shaken hands, cupped her face, and stared into her opened, stunned eyes. 'You will not diminish yourself to assist me. Dear one, no. The charge of the dragons was never your burden!'

  'My gift,' she corrected, her whisper all pain. Tears wet her lashes, then spilled over. 'Such pride hurts, that you should refuse me.'

  Asandir held her secure, while his pulse raced, too ragged. His breathing ran rough, as though he had sprinted a marathon. 'What pride?' he gasped. 'Did you not know? Your act invoked the drakes' binding upon me.'

  Her dismay touched him sharply, though she did not speak.

  The Sorcerer sat, very still. He engaged a deft thought, used the spark of the brazier to recharge and

  burn clear his stressed aura. When he moved, he absorbed her jagged distress; but not her tears. There, he had no strength. If he wept for this, the break would destroy him. 'Oh, yes,' he murmured, then stroked the damp hair that escaped from the crushed back cloth of her mantle. 'Even so. The burden I carry can't sanction your sacrifice.'

  As adept, she must bow to the source of his sorrow: Athera's mysteries could not sustain the loss if the grace she embodied within breathing flesh should be dimmed to a less-than-exalted expression.

  'No,' Asandir whispered. He moved leaden arms and gathered her close, while her anguish soaked his rough mantle. 'No. With the Paravians lost, we can't spare you.'

  The adept shifted in protest. 'Your work -'

  'Incomplete.' The admission carried no rage, and no judgement. 'The wraiths are delayed, and the crisis, deferred. That grace of reprieve is sufficient.' The shared grief stayed unspoken: had he not returned to deny her, the remnant spell line would now be fully secured. The closed conjury most likely would not have cost the last spark of life in his body.

  'Such risk as you shouldered was not to be borne.' The adept raised her hand and traced over the seams quarried into the Sorcerer's face. 'Never say you weren't worth the cost of my effort.'

  Asandir could not answer, aware as he was that the library chamber was no longer private. Three male adepts now surrounded his chair, waiting in expectant, grave silence.

  He gave his consent.

  The white brothers moved in, still without speech or censure. They supported their distressed colleague, then eased her weight from the Sorcerer's lap. Constrained by his own formidable dignity, Asandir endured, as he must. 'You have been here at Althain Tower too long,' he informed them in soft apology.

  The elder among them tipped his hood in salute. Since no word could encompass what had just passed, he helped as the others bore up their colleague and tenderly ushered her out.

  For she was unimpaired. The blaze of her light remained brilliant; unsullied. Yet how narrowly close she had come to reducing the glory of her initiate state of high mastery. Asandir bent in his chair, brow rested upon the trembling clench of his knuckles. At the last, none but he knew how sorely he had been tempted to accept the unpardonable gift of a high adept's act of sacrifice.

  By midnight, the lane beacon at Althain Tower was extinguished, with the deserted library left under starlight. Bathed, changed into a soft, dark blue robe, with his silver hair damp on his shoulders, Asandir settled into a stuffed armchair, pulled up beside Sethvir's bed. The Sorcerers were private. The adepts had left a lone candle burning, while two spirits locked by the blows of adversity shared a rare moment in conference. The gilt glow lit the Warden's opened eyes, limpid and clear as a dawn sky viewed
through a crystal.

  An interval passed without attempt at speech. Then Sethvir said, 'You made a right choice.'

  Asandir shifted broad shoulders, to a rustle of horsehair stuffing. More than care-worn, he looked wrung sick with exhaustion. 'That does not make me feel any less like a murderer.'

  The wraiths were curbed, but not thwarted. Further, Marak's hordes had been roused. Over time, as the incomplete warding decayed, Athera would hang in a state of worse-than-redoubled jeopardy.

  'You've bought a reprieve,' Althain's Warden insisted, his scraped whisper that much more determined. 'The future's not set. At the first opportunity, we'll restructure the flaw in that warding and make an end of the problem together.'

  Asandir stilled his impulse to hammer a fist into the moth-eaten chair arm. Once the grimwards were rededicated, he could turn his hands to many a critical task left unfinished. Yet ahead of the urgent work waiting in Lanshire, he had Sulfin Evend, downstairs. While the hiss of the candle-flame sweetened the air with the fragrance of melted bees-wax, his thoughts ranged the dark, where eyes could not see, and fixed on the pulse of men's fears.

  'Where is Lysaer?' he asked presently. 'What safe-guards is he taking, have you seen?' 'You should sleep,' Sethvir whispered.

  The field Sorcerer did not answer. Silence reigned, except for the restless wind, sweeping the bare crests of the fells outside. The candle burned lower. Sethvir closed his eyes. Frail as a thread of unreeled silk, he expelled a reluctant breath. 'Very well. Though you won't be pleased by the bent of the knowledge extracted from Erdane's library.'

  Asandir raised his eyebrows. 'Not the Grey Book of Olvec.'