Keeper of the Keys

by Janny Wurts

  That night, wrapped in the damp shelter of the mainsail, he dreamed of black ships, a fleet so vast that the ocean was sheared into foam by the streaming lines of wake. Wind moaned through a cabled forest of rigging, and through its dissonance, Taen's voice cried warning. Maelgrim Dark-dreamer sailed with these Thienz. If Jaric was overtaken by the brother enslaved to Shadowfane, Keithland's future would be irrevocably lost. Then the voice of Taen was joined by the wails of the hilltribes' dead. And always, relentlessly, the demon ships converged upon the southwest reaches.

  In the dream, Jaric hardened lines until his hands bled. He guided Callinde's steering oar with hairsbreadth precision, and coaxed maximum advantage from each gust. Yet old Mathieson's boat was too clumsy. The demon fleet gained effortlessly. Enemy sails swelled and eclipsed the sky, blanketing Jaric in shadow. Somewhere he heard Taen shouting frantic instructions; but the dark smothered her words beyond all understanding.

  That moment someone kicked his ankle. Jaric started, roused, and shot upright amid a clatter of sail hanks. He blinked sweat from his eyes, breathing hard, and by the canvas that slid loose around his shoulders recalled that Callinde lay beached on the shore of south Elrinfaer. The seeress of Cael's Falls stood over him. Her scarred eyes were tied with a veil that streamed in the breeze like smoke; stars shimmered faintly through gauzy folds, jewels for the unseen face beneath.

  'Ciengarde, you are leaving at sunrise.'

  Startled afresh by her prescience, and wrung with the horrors left by dreams, Jaric nodded. He dragged himself warily upright and braced his weight against the back-canted shaft of the steering oar. 'I must. Lady.'

  But the seeress had not come to deter him. 'You seek the Vaere, Ciengarde.' Away from the echoing grotto, her voice seemed unfamiliarly thin. Yet with none of the uncertainty of the young, she raised her blowing veils and regarded him with eyes that saw no living boy but a spirit-world of mysteries.

  Jaric shivered.

  The seeress ignored his discomfort. As if speaking to air, she repeated a directive given her by the Presence within the shrine of Cael's Falls. Then her dispassionate recitation ceased. With the faintest rustle of gauze she lowered her veils and departed.

  Jaric watched her go, a shadow against the scrolled curl of waves breaking upon the sands. In time her form merged with the black circle of ash, and she seemed to vanish from the face of the earth.

  Her presence might have been a vision; Jaric regarded the lift and surge of the breakers, and the sliding, silvery rush as the backwash slid seaward to mesh with the foam of incoming waves. He wept then, not for the dead, but for the aching rebirth of hope. Without doubt the black ships and Taen's warning had been true dreaming; the Lord of the Demons had sent Maelgrim Dark-dreamer forth from Shadowfane to hunt him. But the most powerful priestess to serve the Presence had spoken from her shrine for the second time in the long memory of the clans, to grant a city-born the most significant guidance so far received from any source. It might, perhaps, be enough to thwart the Dark-dreamer and the designs of his demon masters. In terms a sailor could understand, the Lady of Cael's Falls had given Ivainson Jaric the location of the Isle of the Vaere. She had not done so for the sake of dead clansmen, nor even for the continued security of humankind. She had gifted the Firelord's heir because he had learned to embrace his destiny, fully and finally, for his own sake.

  Jaric surged to his feet. He banged open the chart locker and rummaged within for a map of the seas south and to the west of the Free Isles. There and then in the starlight he made a calculation, and estimated a crossing of three weeks, provided the winds held fair. Too restless to sleep, he arose and checked Callinde's stores; then, grateful for the water and provisions already laid in by the generous hands of the clansmen, he stamped on his boots. West winds tumbled the feathers on his warrior's wristband as he rigged blocks to drag Callinde towards the sea. Jaric set his teeth against the lingering weakness of the Thienz venom. Determined, pressured by hope and the bitterest of goals, he laboured through the effort of launching.

  At last, sweat-drenched and panting and ready to board, he stood in the shallows and looked back. The beach spread pale by starlight, blighted by the fire scar that had honoured the bravery of thirty-eight dead. Jaric repeated their names one by one, then hauled his tired frame over Callinde's high thwart. His hands trembled as he shook out canvas, and his head swam with dizziness. Slowly, painstakingly, Callinde's bow swung. Her sails slapped taut to the wind. With apparent reluctance,

  Mathieson's ungainly craft responded to the shove of the breeze and gathered way, her wake a faint lisp over the deeper boom of surf.

  Jaric turned his face to the sea. No longer did he sail for Taen alone, nor for the civilization so precariously preserved within the painted towers at Landfast. The wild tribes of Keithland had sacrificed loved ones for a future. To them he owed a blood debt that only the Cycle of Fire could absolve; lastly, for himself, nothing less could bring peace.

  In the morning, when the two brothers assigned watch over Jaric returned to their post, they found the beach deserted. The dark, seared circle left by the fire for the slain was slashed across by the white drag mark left by Callinde's keel.

  * * *

  The early part of the crossing passed smoothly. Mild weather lingered, and the winds blew steadily from the east. Days, Jaric basked in the sunlight, warily watching the horizon for sails that never appeared. Nights, he thought of Taen, while the stars wheeled above Callinde's masthead, and the sails flapped gently to the dance of breeze and swell. Slowly the strength sapped by the Thienz venom returned. As league after league passed under the old boat's keel, Jaric's bouts of dizziness subsided; the morning came when navigational sights no longer blurred his vision. His shoulders and back deepened with new tan, except for reddened, angry weals left by Thienz teeth in his flesh. But now the scars itched more than they ached.

  When the weather finally broke and rain rolled in from the south, the Firelord's heir had regained most of his health. Though his hands blistered upon the steering oar, he did not complain, but meticulously minded his heading, and checked and rechecked the horizon. No black fleet appeared. The sea heaved grey and foam-flecked, league upon empty league. Shearwaters wove like weavers' shuttles through the warp and weft of the swell, and once a pair of dolphins came to sport in the bow wave. Jaric watched their antics with poignant longing, aware as never before how circumscribed his own freedom had become.

  Callinde crossed the latitude of Islamere. Jaric celebrated by eating the last of his dried apples, for the crossing to the Isle of the Vaere was now over halfway complete. No black fleet breasted the horizon to waylay him. Sunset spattered the waters bloody bronze, while a full moon rose like a pearl on grey velvet in the east. Jaric washed his shirts and tied them to the backstay to dry. Then, soothed by the familiar flap of laundry, the slap of loose reef points, and the creak and work of the hull, he settled bare-chested in his accustomed niche at the helm and waited for dark.

  At midnight he awakened with the chill certainty that all was not well. The moon shone bright as new coin-silver overhead. Callinde's decking gleamed in planes of shadow and light; no weather threatened. Each sail carried its burden of wind in perfect trim. The boat breasted the crest of a swell. The ropes bracing the steering oar creaked taut and slackened, and the yard bumped as Callinde dipped towards the trough, all sounds repeated a thousand times, but now their rhythm did not reassure. Jaric swept his eyes across a horizon etched white by moonlight. He saw no silhouettes of dark boats bearing down from the west. Only the sliding crosshatch of ocean waves met his search, yet for some reason that set his teeth on edge.

  He rose, and started violently as a damp shirt sleeve slapped his throat. Callinde splashed over the crest of another swell. Jaric yanked the offending laundry down and screwed it into a ball, which he wedged beneath the aft thwart. Jumpy as a cat, he paced port and starboard, checking sheet lines as he went. Nothing required adjustment. Finally, in sharpest unea
se, Jaric hooked the thong at his collar and closed his fingers around the hard basalt edges of the Keys to Elrinfaer. The stone felt cold beneath the leather; and the horizon showed no change.

  Demons were there nevertheless, awaiting him. Jaric sensed their presence as surely as he breathed, and that certainty threatened to suffocate him. For this encounter, his peril was tenfold greater, since the weeks he had lain ill of Thienz venom had granted Shadowfane's second fleet time to ply south. Maelgrim Dark-dreamer sailed this time to intercept him. Jaric returned to the steering oar and gripped its solid wood with hands gone slippery with sweat. He owned no sorcerer's training to defend himself. Doomed by his human frailty, he bent his head and apologized for the hilltribes' dead, and old Mathieson, and Anskiere of Elrinfaer trapped in the ice. Then, as if memory were a catalyst, the thought of the Stormwarden gave rise to a desperate expedient. Jaric reached again for the pouch at his neck. With shaking hands, he jerked the thongs open and drew forth the black-and-gold barred length of the stormfalcon's feather. It gleamed silver-black by moonlight, seed of the most ruinous gale ever bound to a weathermage's bidding. Once that same storm had smashed a war fleet; another time Jaric had battled the edge of its violence on a hell-ridden passage from Mearren Ard to Cliffhaven. Callinde yet bore the scars from the batter of rampaging seas. In his hands Jaric cradled all of nature's most killing fury, conjured with the powers of the Vaere-trained he had most sworn to abhor; yet no other option remained. Here, alone, as prey of demons and the target of Maelgrim Dark-dreamer's hate, the feather and its potential for destruction offered the only weapon to hand.

  Jaric dared not pause for second thoughts. If he did, cowardice would surely unman him. With a harsh, unsuppressible quiver of apprehension, he lifted the knife-keen stormfalcon's quill between his fingers, waited for a gust, and released it.

  The feather skimmed away across the wave crests. Jaric watched its flight with his heart pounding, but no blue-tihged aura of force snapped into being. The weathermage's power did not manifest to whip wind and wave to violence and storm. Agonized and uncertain, the heir of Ivain stood with his fists glued to the steering oar. Powerless to change the inevitable, he steadied to meet his fate. For Taen, for the dead clansmen of south Elrinfaer, for the sorcerer doomed to the ice, for his own integrity's sake, he must not quit until he had met his measure. Callinde would sail until the killing dreams of Maelgrim and his pack of Thienz manifested for the victory. Then Jaric resolved to hurl the Keys to Elrinfaer into the sea; afterwards, if luck favoured him, he might act swiftly enough to run his rigging knife through his heart, even as his father had before him, to spare the men of Keithland from the Firelord's powers which would assuredly ravage and destroy.

  * * *

  Far downwind from Callinde's course, the stormfalcon's feather fluttered and spun, and settled finally upon the breast of the sea. It did not sink, but drifted there, a line silvered like a pen stroke in moonlight. But to a Dreamweaver's perception, the quill appeared as a bar of etched blue, haloed with the fainter lattice of wards that held its violence in check. Only one sorcerer in Keithland could unleash the great tempest from its bonds.

  Far off on Imrill Kand, Taen drew a shaking breath. Wind teased her hair from her hood and set it streaming over her cheek. She brushed the strands aside and her hand came away wet with tears. Days she had watched, agonized, while Jaric closed the distance between Elrinfaer and the demon fleet. Though he sailed to certain defeat she had dared not intervene, even to offer the boy the comfort of her awareness. If she tried any contact at all, her brother's twisted talents might sense her probe. With his pack of Thienz to augment his powers, Maelgrim could obliterate her control and, through her, strike Jaric down. But now the stormfalcon's feather and Ivainson's brazen courage offered dangerous and desperate hope.

  Taen clenched her hands to still their shaking. Alone on the moon-blanched tors above the harbour, she gathered her powers as Dreamweaver and disturbed the sleep of Anskiere of Elrinfaer. For the continued survival of Keithland, she begged that he unbind the wards which curbed his most terrible gale.

  * * *

  Dawn failed to brighten the southeast reaches of the Corine Sea. Mantled in clouds and sooty darkness, wind howled and slapped down out of the north. Callinde's spanker banged over into a jibe with such force that her hull keeled and pitched Jaric off his feet. He fetched up against the sail locker, knocked breathless, while the steering oar wrenched loose, and two tons of antique fishing boat wallowed and careened through the spray. The next gust nearly swamped her.

  Jaric received a dollop of seawater in the face. Spitting and coughing, he clawed through falling spray to the mast. He dared not think of bailing before he reduced sail. Already the halyards hummed, plucked by the unseen hands of the gusts. Dirty fingers of cloud streaked the sky to the northeast and waves from that quarter raised ragged crests that exploded into spindrift off the stern. Squinting against the burn of blown salt, Jaric hauled the main down in flapping disarray. The forces of Anskiere's storm had assuredly found release, for since dawn the weather had deteriorated with unnatural speed. If Callinde were not quickly stripped to bare poles, she would be battered to slivers.

  Skinning his fingers in his haste, Jaric bundled the spanker beneath the stern seat. Forward, the jib banged and jerked in rising gusts, slamming fearful vibrations through the hull. The main yard thrashed against the mast, and the waves seethed and hissed, bearded angrily with whitecaps. Jaric wrestled the buck of the deck, and managed to furl the square main. But the jenny fouled with the head stay, and the whipping loops of her sheets had to be cut before they snapped themselves to tassels. Bruised from crashing against stray bits of tackle, Jaric stumbled aft. Water sloshed and sucked at his ankles. The curved stempost kicked and dipped against sky as Callinde careened down a trough. Fighting for balance, Jaric slashed the lashings on the helm and struggled to wrestle his boat on a downwind course. Within an hour his hands were bleeding; still the waves steepened, until the bow dipped low and the surfing slide of Callinde threatened to punch her prow headlong into the sheer rise of the sea.

  She would have to be slowed lest she pitchpole. After struggling to lash the steering oar, Jaric tore a length off the headsail and rigged a sea anchor. Though the safest course was to hang bow to and ride out the storm, he cleated his line to the stempost. Then, shaking wet from his eyes, he braced his feet between the binnacle and the chart locker and grimly took the helm once again. If Anskiere's tempest were to founder him, he intended to go down on course for the Isle of the Vaere.

  But the hours that followed became an agony of endurance more terrible than anything he could have imagined; the demands of his boat increased to a succession of critical disasters, each one of which threatened survival. The wind increased and buffeted his ears near to deafness. Seas heaped up in green, towering mountains whose heights wore spray like snow blizzards. To leave the helm under such conditions invited disaster. Yet as fittings tore loose, and lines frayed, Jaric had no choice. He lashed the oar, and relied on luck to keep his craft from broaching. Through the maelstrom of boiling foam, Callinde corkscrewed and thrashed, trounced like a chip in a millrace. Her mast whipped violently against her stays, stretching stout cable like taffy. Jaric looped belaying pins through and twisted up the slack in a terrified, stop-gap attempt to keep his spars aloft where they belonged. And he bailed, miserably, until his back muscles quivered with the weakness of exhaustion. If he paused, even for a minute, the weight of shipped water might founder his tiny craft.

  Still the storm came on. Rain lashed down and lightning ripped the sky. Mathieson's stout planks flexed and sprung, and Callinde's caulking loosened like wisps of dirty hair. Submerged to his elbows in bilge, Jaric laboured on his knees to slow the leaks with oakum, then patched with old canvas when his earlier remedies failed. Above him, the compass spun like a drunk. The steering oar banged until the fittings threatened to crack, and to preserve those parts he could not replace, Jaric was forced to
draw the pin and lash his rudder inboard. Tillerless now before the might of Anskiere's tempest, Callinde reeled her hapless way west.

  Once Jaric saw a length of dark timber adrift in a snarl of cord. Through bruises and misery, and weariness that ached him to the bone, he managed a ragged laugh. At least one demon boat fared worse than he; yet if Mathieson's handiwork escaped ruin, the Dark-dreamer also might survive. Taen's brother was a sailor born; on board the pinnace from Crow, he had weathered this tempest once before. If Jaric were to reach the Isle of the Vaere to gain his mastery, he would still have to win past Maelgrim.

  The eye of the storm passed over on the second morning, bringing a sickly, yellow-tinged sky, and a lull that left the seas sloshing and confused as the tilted contents of a witch's cauldron. Jaric seized the interval to whip Callinde's sloppy stays; then he bailed, endlessly, his torn hands bound with wisps of frayed sail. He ached for sleep as the dying might plead for light. Instead he worked like a madman; by the nature of great gales, he could expect to be hammered with redoubled violence on the west side of the storm. Then the wind would reverse direction, against his desired course. Now, if the watery disc of the sun glimpsed through the clouds at noon could be trusted, the storm had driven him all but aground on the Isle of the Vaere.