Keeper of the Keys

by Janny Wurts

  Jaric started, and belatedly noticed he had strayed beyond the carpet. The floor beneath his boots was configured like a seal. A polished mosaic of lapis lazuli and agate depicted Kordane's Fires as they first arced across Keithland's sky, condemning mankind to exile until such time as the last demon was vanquished or killed.

  'I'm sorry.' The boy stepped back with an embarrassing chime of sword steel. Painfully diffident, he stilled his swinging blades and found the Grand High Star smiling at him.

  'You don't need those in here,' said his Eminence softly. 'But keep them by you if you feel the better for it. Only sit, please. I've a stiff neck from looking over accounts, and watching you walk circles is a distraction I'd rather avoid.' Strong, pale hands lifted a chair from the corner and thumped it on the carpet before the books. The Grand High Star seated himself on a nearby divan, his attention apparently fixed on the wrought-brass candlestand which supported the only light in the chamber.

  Jaric slipped his baldric from his shoulder. He looped the leather over the chairback and settled stiffly on the seat, the Keys to Elrinfaer and the stormfalcon's feather clenched in white knuckles in his lap. Then, granted audience with the man in the highest echelon of Kor's priesthood not sworn to seclusion, the boy struggled for words to begin.

  The Grand High Star rescued him from discomfort. 'You are the heir of Ivain?'

  Jaric flinched, wishing he had the courage to lie; but the eyes of the priest on the divan were unforgiving, behind their kindliness. 'Eminence, how did you know?'

  'You look like him,' the Grand High Star said bluntly. 'And Cliffhaven's news ofttimes travels in the gossip of sailors. The priesthood has heard that the curse pronounced by Anskiere at Northsea had been loosed within Keithland.'

  'I never knew either sorcerer,' the Firelord's son admitted miserably. Wariness showed in his bearing as he opened his fists and bared the Keys to Elrinfaer and the feather.

  'No, boy,' said the Grand High Star. 'The Brotherhood cannot shelter those things in your care.'

  Jaric returned a stricken look. 'But-'

  The Grand High Star waved him silent. Then he rose and crossed to the doorway. After a few quiet words to the secretary standing without, he nodded, shut the panel, and promptly returned to the divan.

  'Ivainson, the works of Kordane's Brotherhood and the doings of sorcerers have never intermixed. By oath an initiate must maintain, nurture, and defend. But sorcerers, particularly ones trained by the Vaere, seem compelled to meddle, so far to the detriment of mankind. The destruction of Elrinfaer should have taught your Stormwarden the futility of challenging demons. It did not, and four thousand more innocents died at Tierl Enneth.'

  'But I have no wish for a sorcerer's powers!' Jaric burst in. 'Instead I seek means to avoid them.'

  The Grand High Star tapped his signet with its carven seal of office. The boy seated hopefully before him never moved, even as he sighed and spoke. 'Firelord's heir, the priesthood cannot help.'

  That moment a knock sounded at the door. Jaric started, hands tightened convulsively on the Keys to Elrinfaer. But the panel only opened to admit his Eminence's secretary. The man carried a tray laden with sweet pastry, cheese, and ale. He set this on a side table and, with a bow to his superior, departed.

  The Grand High Star smiled as the latch clicked shut. 'You seemed hungry,' he said to Jaric. 'If my order can do nothing else, at least I could be certain you got supper.'

  The solicitude was impossible to refuse. Jaric returned Keys and stormfalcon's feather to the pouch on the string at his neck. He reached tentatively for the cheese knife; and the Grand High Star of Landfast waited without speaking while the boy shed his self-consciousness and ate. Only then did his strength become apparent, innate, but too often obscured by uncertainty. His hair needed a trim, and his clothing was simple, but the manner in which he broke his bread would not have been out of place in a king's hall.

  Anxious not to tax his host's attentiveness, Jaric soon set his ale mug aside. 'The sanctuary towers of Landfast are the most secure stronghold upon Keithland. Why not safeguard the Keys to Anskiere's wards there?'

  'Because demons covet the breaking of those wards, Jaric.' The Grand High Star settled back. Carefully, patiently, for he understood the disappointment his words would bring, he explained that the knowledge stored in the sanctuary towers was too vital to be risked. 'The priests who enter there stay for a term of life, and not even I know what secrets they guard. Were they to add the wards of a Vaere-trained sorcerer, demons might attack to gain possession of them. Better the Keys fell to Shadowfane than that the legacy of mankind became jeopardized.'

  Jaric forgot the half-eaten pastry in his hand. 'But I thought the outer defences-'

  The Grand High Star seemed suddenly burdened with sadness. 'Jaric, what I'm about to tell you is unknown to men on the streets, and in peril of your soul you'll never repeat it. But the ward you encountered upon entering Landfast waters was no defence at all, only a screen maintained by the more talented initiates of the Brotherhood to detect the presence of demons. Should Kor's Accursed send spies, or even an attacking army, no disguise will shelter them. Our citizens will gain warning of invasion. After that, defence of this city must rely upon ordinary force of arms.'

  Crumbs jumped as the pastry dropped from Jaric's hand on to the tray. He stared, shocked, at the haunted countenance of the Grand High Star, and suddenly understood: this man's fatalistic serenity and Ivain Firelord's contempt of the priesthood both stemmed from the fact that mankind's survival hung balanced on the most fragile of threads. The impact of implications stunned the mind. For if this priest spoke honestly, the bulwark of Landfast's defences was based on bluff. In all of Keithland only the Vaere-trained owned effective powers against demons. The enormities of Elrinfaer and Tierl Enneth gained a new significance, and, almost, the Cycle of Fire seemed less a mad recourse, and more a remedy of desperate necessity.

  Jaric forgot courtesy. Miserable with fresh doubts in the one place he hoped to find solace, he rose and grasped his sword belt. But his move to depart was caught short by the steely voice of the Grand High Star.

  'Ivainson Jaric, listen well. You came to Landfast to gather knowledge. Wise or not, your quest shall not go unsupported. There are treatises in the secular archives pertaining to Keithland's defences. These will be made available to you for study.'

  Jaric spun just short of the doorway and bowed. 'I am grateful. Eminence.'

  'Don't be.' The priest seemed suddenly remote behind the badges and signet of his office. 'I must also restrict your stay here, since your presence shall inevitably draw unwanted attention to this city. Felwaithe's royal seer already warns that the compact at Shadowfane seeks your whereabouts. You have leave to remain until the fall solstice. After that, I recommend you apply to the enclave of wizards at Mhored Kara, and beg them to offer you shelter.

  Jaric accepted this banishment with startling poise. His dark eyes remained steady, and the hand on his sword no longer trembled. 'Like you, the kingdom conjurers can warn. They have little ability to guard. If demons overtake me, and the Mharg fly free, how long do you think your sanctuary towers will stay standing?'

  The question was impertinent; the highest-ranking priest in Landfast answered through white lips. 'Until eternity or man's salvation, by the grace of Kordane's Fires.'

  'I hope so,' whispered Jaric. And he spun with the reflexive grace of a swordsman and departed.

  All the way home, through streets bustling with Landfast's frenetic nightlife, Jaric thrashed through the facts revealed by the Grand High Star. Jostled by sailors on shore leave, and whistled at by more than one ageing prostitute, he shut his eyes, sweating and cold and angry by turns. Who enacted the greater injustice against mankind, he wondered: the priests with their fabrication of illusions, or the Vaere-trained, whose perilous powers sometimes killed the innocent? The question nettled like a thorn, his own fear a litany beneath. The only surety in Keithland was the tireless hatred of the demons.


  'Anskiere forgive me,' murmured the boy, surrounded by strangers; for like the righteous, ignorant populace of Keithland, he had condemned what he had not understood. Tierl Enneth's deaths might perhaps be justifiable; but in terror Jaric knew he could not accept such responsibility for his own. The Cycle of Fire was a curse he would escape if he could. And he would, he must, though the demons crushed him to powder as he tried.

  * * *

  Ivainson Jaric never spoke with the Grand High Star of Kor's Brotherhood again, but the next day after sword practice, he called back at the shrine. Now the acolyte at the entry greeted him with solicitous respect, and conducted him to the librarian in the chamber of secular archives. There, by the command of the Grand High Star, an impressive collection of documents and books had been compiled. All were bound in black leather, and not a few had locks.

  Though the chamber that housed them was vaulted with high, airy domes, large enough to diminish the tallest of men, Jaric felt confined. Here, for the first time he could remember, he found no security in a place of knowledge and learning. The evil and the doom threatened by Shadowfane's compact seemed to poison his heart against hope. Inexplicably he thought of Taen, even as he perused the first titles. Haunted by growing doubts that his search would prove futile, he barely noticed the librarian behind him raise crossed wrists in the traditional sign against evil. Need to escape the Cycle of Fire overshadowed any social stigma of Ivain's inheritance. Jaric lifted the first book from the shelf and retired to an alcove overlooking the merchants' wharf. There he wedged his sword in a notch between cushions and, with feet braced against a worn corner of wainscoting, began to read.

  Sundown came quickly. Beyond the window the city towers streaked shadows across the hump of Little Dagley Islet. Carts rumbled away from the dockside, and as the harbour beacons glimmered orange through twilight, the whistles and shouted jokes of the longshoremen faded as they sought their wives, or refreshment in the taverns. Jaric squinted in the failing light, and barely glanced up as the librarian brought a stand and two spare candles. He managed a nod when the man retired for the evening, leaving instructions concerning the visitor for the night watch.

  Jaric read as if the treatises and the essays were not longwinded, or repetitive, and tediously interrupted with religious overtones or outright misconceptions. He dared do no less. A paragraph carelessly skimmed might contain the one fact he needed. Some of the works on the hilltribes' rites were available nowhere else on Keithland; the wild clansmen who practised them were easily provoked to killing, and their ways were little known to outsiders. Evangelists of Kor's Brotherhood were among the few to venture among their camps. Jaric studied until his eyes stung and the light wavered. He finished the first book in time to light a fresh candle from the failing wick of the last. He reached next for a collection of essays, absently kneading a cramp in his thigh. The words were archaic and stiff, difficult to follow. Jaric persisted, while the second candle burned down to a dribbled stub. In time, the third and last of his lights flickered out. The glow of a rising quarter moon lit his way as he returned the books to the librarian's desk.

  Jaric pushed open the wide double door, and caught the watchman napping at his post.

  'It's after midnight, boy,' groused the man as he shuffled yawning to his feet. He fumbled at his belt ring and the rattle of his keys echoed down deserted corridors as he unlocked to let Jaric out.

  The streets outside were equally empty, except for scavenging dogs and disreputable sorts who rummaged in trashbins for their livelihood. Ivainson walked between shuttered houses, past lamps with their wicks trimmed low. He kept one hand on his sword to deter footpads, but his thoughts were detached as he contemplated the rites of the clansmen, whose chosen high priestesses were ritually blinded as maidens. The barbarities described in the texts were disparaged by the priests; yet the visions experienced by the women after their cruel initiation were indisputably true seeing. They possessed power to unmask demons, even shelter their folk from the malign influence of dream-image that Kor's Accursed sometimes employed to lure isolated humans to their deaths. Whether the Presence behind the springs that were the centre of the clan priestess's devotions truly held power to guide, advise, and protect was a claim no devout missionary dared endorse without risking trial for heresy. The point was moot, from Ivainson's standpoint. Valid as a religion or not, the clan tribes' beliefs were not adequate to safeguard the Keys to Elrinfaer, or stay frostwargs and win Anskiere's release.

  Jaric's curse of frustration rang in the emptiness of weavers' alley. His quest was a vain one, surely. If the clansmen, or any conjurer, priest, kingdom, or alliance within Keithland held force or knowledge enough to suppress the demon compact, they would have done so. Unbidden, the thought followed that Anskiere and the Vaere-trained who preceded him had courageously endeavoured the same, despite the mistakes at Elrinfaer and Tierl Enneth.

  'No,' said Jaric aloud. An alternative to the Cycle of Fire must exist. Yet the suspicion his conviction was false drove him into a run.

  His baldric and weapons chinked faintly in the dark, and his footsteps echoed like whispers against the locked doors of the buildings. Rats dashed from their scavenging, and the glassless lanterns of the poor quarter flickered to the disturbed air of his passage. The boy pushed harder. Sweat stung his eyes, and the breath rasped his throat. The pouch on its knotted thong swung to his stride, the Keys to Elrinfaer banging painfully into his breastbone. Jaric closed his hand over sharp corners of basalt with a half sob of panic. Why should he be chosen to shoulder such a burden? As a child, he had been weak, ridiculed by his peers, and inept at anything resembling conflict. What talent had his mad but gifted father owned, that the pain of a sorcerer's legacy should fall to a son he had never known?

  The empty streets held no answer, only the reminder of humanity's fragile and inadequate defences. Still running, Jaric could not escape facts. Centuries had passed since Kor's Fire had fallen from heaven. Demons whose numbers had once been small had multiplied, even as men had; Shadowfane's strength increased with each passing year, while mankind's defences had evolved very little. One day the balance would swing. The compact would strike, and under attack by powers of mind and sorcery, men would strive and perish. Was he, Ivainson Jaric, by himself responsible for light and darkness, good and evil, survival or death? The question ripped him with anguish and doubt, and he ran faster, his feet a blur over the cobbles. The poor quarter fell behind; smells of sea-rotted timbers and waste faded, replaced by hearth smoke and new paint. The houses of rich merchants arose on both sides of the street, each with stoutly shuttered windows and inset dooryards planted with shrubs. Sometimes a light shone through, where a man or his wife tallied accounts in the lateness of the night. Oblivious as insects before the killing advent of frost, they went about their industries unaware of the doom which threatened. Jaric gasped. His chest burned with exertion, yet he raced onward, past a crossroad with a shrine to the Sacred Fires. Beyond, scrolled columns rose amid pools of lamplight; a wrought-iron gate spanned the roadway between, blocking the path of his flight.

  'Halt!' cried a voice from the shadows.

  Jaric stumbled, caught short of a fall by unyielding bars of iron. He hooked his fingers to stay upright. Dizzy from exhaustion, he recognized the perimeter defences of the sanctuary towers guarded by the highest of Kordane's priests.

  'What passes? Are you in trouble?' demanded the sentry on duty. Pressed against cold metal, and numb to most else, Jaric lifted his head. Thinking the boy fled from footpads, the soldier had stepped from his post to survey the street for thieves, or maybe a murderer.

  'I'm alone,' said the boy between gasps.

  The soldier returned a puzzled look.

  Jaric chose not to explain. He leaned his cheek against the gate to recover his breath, his eyes fixed on the tiled court beyond. Torches blazed over the entry to the towers where priests guarded knowledge too precious to risk to demons. The brightness seemed to sear his eye
s. He closed them, even as the grief of a sorcerer's inheritance ached in his heart. Willing or not, Ivain's heir must answer to his father's legacy; accounting would be exacted for Keithland's need.

  'You can't linger here, boy,' snapped the sentry. He lifted his halberd to prod, and Jaric nodded.

  Certain of nothing but his own weaknesses, and the inescapable probability that his search of the libraries was wasted endeavour, he loosed his grip on the grille-work. Anskiere's curse would never leave him. By burden of blood relation, he must act; but only when hope was exhausted. Responding at last to the impatient shove of the sentry, Ivainson Firelord's heir straightened. He began the long walk to the boardinghouse, where a bed waited, and the transient oblivion of sleep.

  Yet now even that peace was denied him. The leathery smell of aged books followed Ivainson into rest, and that night, for the first time, he dreamed of demons. They sailed in black boats, toadlike forms with webbed fingers hunched in silhouette against the lacy foam of the swells. Pale eyes glinted in the dark of the open sea, and the hissing croaks uttered in place of language threaded menace through Jaric's sleep. He tossed in his blankets, threatened by a purpose remote and pitiless as the constellations which shone unchanging overhead. Elusive, evil, dangerous in the extreme, Thienz demons lifted blunt snouts to the south. The thrust of their intent stabbed outward, searching, circling, frustrated to bitter and repeated fury by the wards which protected the isle of Landfast. 'He is there,' Shadowfane's chosen whispered among themselves, mind-to-mind, as one being. 'Ivainson Firelord's heir hides there.'

  And from the boats on the open sea, cold reached out and touched Jaric, sending chills over his sweating skin.

  The vividness of the nightmare wrenched him awake. Soaked and shaking, he threw off his sheets and paced the floor. But the worn pine boards beneath his feet did not reassure. The solidity of the boardinghouse walls seemed somehow less substantial than the lift and hiss of waves beneath the keels of Shadowfane's black ships.