by Janny Wurts
His bottomless depths and his well-masked emotion stayed opaque to her highly skilled training. Elaira dipped her hands into the chill fall of the water. She managed to ignore his probing regard long enough to splash her hot face. The dousing eased back some of the hollow uncertainty wrung through her displaced equilibrium. She straightened, blotted damp hands on a skirt that breathed an herbalist’s blend of dried lavender and birch root into the breezeless quiet. ‘Why have you come here?’
He raised both eyebrows, not surprised, but for emphasis as his raking gaze held her. ‘Your directness blisters. Are you always abrupt as Dharkaron’s cast spear?’
She regarded him back, unmoved by provocative rhetoric.
His quick laughter burst through then, spontaneous and sultry as heat lightning. ‘Your order might think you a troublesome burr, but I take delight in your company. You asked for guidance, remember?’
Smiling, he waited for her stiff acknowledgment, as she recalled the mental sigil she had sketched in wild panic when the flooding darkness had overwhelmed her awareness.
‘Therefore, I came with an invitation. Like the fresh breeze, you might accompany me on a flight of reconnaissance.’ He extended a lean-fingered, beautiful hand, his palm at ease and turned upward. ‘Would you care to pay a visit to Daon Ramon Barrens?’
Elaira fought past the tight fear in her chest, and finally managed strained speech. ‘You know what happened to Prince Arithon.’
The visitor’s moment of levity faded, not into the withdrawn graveness of Traithe. This Sorcerer towered with an incisive confidence that a lesser presence might misinterpret as braggadocio, or worse, an affronted, bristling challenge. ‘Nothing occurs on Daon Ramon Barrens that the stones of the earth don’t bear witness. Their secrets are plain, to those willing to listen.’ He stood once again, his hand still extended. ‘Yes, I know of Prince Arithon. His fate is unfolding. Come along. If you care, you can observe and perhaps even share in the outcome.’
‘If you promise I’m not making a mistake,’ Elaira said, her words a wry prayer as she clasped her chilled fingers over his in tacit acceptance.
‘Oh, life itself’s a mistake,’ murmured the Sorcerer whose past acts had earned him the title of Betrayer.
He returned a warm squeeze, his pleasure a gift that touched the heart for its mischievous spontaneity. Then the moment ended, too brief. The masked flux of power within him unfurled, demarked as a terrifying ring of forged purpose that commanded a rippleless silence. Centered in a storm without tumult or movement, form and flesh whirled away. His shape as a man re-formed on a breath into feathers and wings, edged in a haze of gold light.
Elaira felt her awareness netted up and enfolded. Gathered into a hold as implacable as steel gloved in trappings of velvet, the seat of her consciousness became snatched from her body. Pale moonlight dissolved. The random melodies of the springwater receded as she arose into air, at one with the eagle whose powerful downstroke lifted, then hurled her up and out of the glade, and into the icy winds of high altitude …
Under the pallid, cerulean sky, the hills of Daon Ramon wore snow rime like snagged silk around weathered rims of bared rock. Experienced trackers avoided the crests, where no cover grew to mask movement. Such country became a commander’s nightmare. Knives of fragmented flint studded the frost-burned mosses and nestled amid the wind-raked tangles of gorse. The low country between ridges cupped a warren of deer paths, unreeled like string through the peat bogs and hummocks, with their winter-dried tassels of grasses. Stands of dense brush welcomed no man’s passage. Witch hazel and brambles choked the throats of the gullies, an intertwined mat loomed by years of wild growth that hid fox earths and badger setts. The veteran headhunters who led Lysaer’s strike force were wily enough to shy clear. Past forays through the barrens had taught them the untrustworthy ground was snaked through by streamlets gushing into the Aiyenne’s looped coils. A horse could break legs, and a man, twist his ankles, where the fast, hidden currents ran armored with thaw-rotten ice.
That left the pitched ground of the slopes, flayed bare by the winds, or else piled with the leavings of storms, drifted snow the day’s sun softened to silver-point lace, refrozen by night to filed iron. Rugged as their mapless territory, the clan war band wore leggings of boiled elkhide and rode range-toughened ponies with thick skin and well-feathered fetlocks.
Townborn pursuers who lacked the advantage of stout leathers drew steel and hacked through obstructions. Their zeal stayed unblunted. Whipped on like hounds on the scent of close quarry, they wrapped the scraped legs of their horses in flannel. At night, resigned, they plied needle and thread, for the obstinate brush tore the stoutest loomed canvas to tatters.
None petitioned to turn back. They ate hardtack, shot deer and hare as they could, and cheerlessly cursed the land under them. Amid their dour ranks, all memory of the golden, wind-rippled grasslands had faded away into legend. Only stone, sleeping under the raced gusts of wind, retained the imprinted glory of past Ages. Apparitions and ghosts were all that remained of the Paravians who had once danced to raise the mysteries to grand harmony. Long gone were the days when their rituals called down the lightning-struck fires that cleared the hills of rank growth and renewed the exhausted soil.
Chafed more than he liked to admit by that lingering presence of history, Sulfin Evend completed his morning review of the company under his command. He found the men fighting fit. Despite the arduous weeks of chapping cold, buffeting gales, and a desolation fit to break sanity, they kept their faith. Triumph lay within reach. Dismounted at noon to water and grain horses, they picked clinging burdock from their kit. Others, just returned from the rigors of scout duty, wistfully discussed sharing beer in the celebrated taverns of Etarra.
Under Lysaer s’Ilessid, their force rode in readiness. No matter the past scores of death and disaster, this specialized strike force was made the forged weapon to hunt down the Spinner of Darkness. Rathain’s last prince was their charge to reap; s’Ffalenn lineage would die, unmourned as the haunts of the ancestors who lurked like caught cobweb amid Ithamon’s razed stone and smashed bastions. Each man had trained in rigorous preparation for the field that would bring the just fruits of their victory.
Sulfin Evend enjoyed no such cocky surety from the post of commanding authority. He had remained at the Divine Prince’s right hand, his night sleepless. Long after sunrise, when Jeriayish’s mad face still ran with tears of rapt bliss, Prince Lysaer had ordered the raving priest bound and silenced. Sulfin Evend attended the distasteful task himself. The issue raised by the uncanny defection was far too sensitive to entrust to even his most stolid officer. Unsettling enough, that the priest stayed unfazed through the course of uncivil handling. Rumpled and subdued in his soiled white robes, he crooned into his gag, trembling in witless, transported ecstasy as Lysaer’s strapping squire bundled him onto the back of a docile horse.
Sulfin Evend clenched his jaw and smothered irritation. Bred to Hanshire’s tradition of liaison with Koriathain, he knew of no arcane binding that should leave the priest shaken so thoroughly out of his senses. Whatever queer force his blood scrying had encountered, one instant’s contact had destroyed his right mind.
A Fellowship Sorcerer might wield such power. Under the pallid sky of Daon Ramon, Sulfin Evend slammed his fist into the palm of his left-hand gauntlet. He barked orders to ease and water the horses, then mounted himself, prepared to ride out and collect his reports from the front line of headhunter trackers. Taciturn face turned into the east wind, he strangled his doubts. Whether or not his proud company held the mettle to destroy the demon Prince of Rathain, faith had blinded them, utterly. They had gone too far to turn back.
The barren land guarded its secrets too well. He saw no trace of enemy movement. Chilled by more than cold, feeling exposed despite his battle-honed weapons and chain mail, the Alliance Lord Commander swept the mottled folds of the hills. Emptiness met him. The morning advanced, with the wind-scoured flanks of the ridges persistently va
cant. The front-rank scouts had encountered the hoof marks of unshod ponies, but the troop’s sharpest trackers could not reach an agreement. One insisted a scant few clan horsemen had recrossed their own tracks. The other argued a larger force had split into flight in small groups.
The mishmash of prints on the streambanks revealed no clear line of pursuit.
Amid frayed uncertainty, the chief headhunter from Narms met setbacks with squint-eyed suspicion. ‘Red-beard’s no fool. He won’t make mistakes.’ Deshir’s war band knew the lay of this country too well, old knowledge refreshed through the years of Etarra’s purging campaigns. Dour as the briar-scarred gelding he sat on, the bountyman spat in contempt. ‘You want the harsh truth, friend?’
His measuring glance matched the Lord Commander’s taut quiet with worldly understanding. ‘I worry we haven’t seen any traps. That’s unlike any clanblood bastard I’ve scalped, not to leave nasty pitfalls or garroting snares, or slip nooses that trip a man’s horse by the fetlocks.’
‘We’ve kept the slinking vermin too pressed,’ Sulfin Evend dismissed, though the prick of his instincts belied such a pat explanation.
‘Better hope so.’ The headhunter scratched at his greasy black hair, then dug in a spurred heel to forestall his horse, which bared yellow teeth at the Lord Commander’s wiry gelding. ‘Me, I’d be worrying what other mischief Red-beard’s plaguing fiends’ve brewed up.’ That said, he reined his irritable mount volte-face to resume his delayed patrol. ‘Sure as fish swim, I’d say that gibbering priest didn’t cast off his faith for anyone’s natural causes.’
‘Double the scouts who ride in the skirmish line,’ Sulfin Evend cracked back, too trail-wise to stew over morbid fears and formless, circling supposition.
‘Done, then.’ The veteran headhunter took his leave, too pragmatic to say if the change had settled his own store of reservations.
Through the interval while the main company with Prince Lysaer ate trail rations on the sheltered side of the crest, Sulfin Evend lingered on the hilltop. A searching, sharp sweep from that desolate vantage did not shake his recurrent suspicion that he did not ride alone.
‘Grace and Light!’ he hissed under his breath. ‘Will you breeding fiends just begone!’ A man did not move in Daon Ramon Barrens, that spirits did not hound his tracks. At length, in disgust, since no shade could wreak lasting harm beyond headaches and unsettled thoughts, Sulfin Evend adjusted his slackened reins. His round of inspection would not be complete until he had checked on the pack train, and arbitrated the day’s fresh complaints from the drovers in charge of the baggage.
At first stride, he hauled his mount back to a halt. Something did watch his back: a massive golden eagle perched amid the dead limbs of the scrub. Its flat, amber eyes seemed to look right through him in that brief instant of shared contact.
Then the raptor unfolded shadow-dark wings. On a powerful downstroke, it launched into flight, the gust whipped up by its passage a lashing slap against the Lord Commander’s cold-reddened cheeks. Sulfin Evend blinked back stinging tears. When his blurred vision cleared, the uncanny creature was lost beyond sight.
In its place a messenger on a lathered horse tore up the scree slope, urgently shouting. ‘You’re wanted back, now!’
Sulfin Evend pressed his mount down the slope. He heard the gist, moving: how the sunwheel priest had collapsed from his fit without warning.
‘His heart stopped, they say, though no one’s hand touched him,’ the messenger gasped through the clatter of scree churned up under cantering horses. ‘Prince Lysaer assayed a blood scrying after that. Now he’s bid for a change in strategy. You’re needed to oversee the division of our forces. By command of the Light, we’ve now got to run down what looks like eight separate fugitives.’
‘Decoys?’ Fastened on the gist of the problem, the Alliance Lord Commander set urgent spurs to his mount. He chose to plow through the next stand of brush. Clawed like fell vengeance by the dense canes of thorn, he vented his grim disbelief. ‘You’re saying the shadow-spinning bastard’s found a way to fabricate false leads that foiled the cast sigil of a blood scrying?’
‘Apparently so.’
Sulfin Evend kept his balance as the horse scrambled over a patch of bad footing and recovered. That dire news drove his spiking dread down to the marrow of his bones. ‘Then you know what we’re facing is a sorcerer’s maze created with fell signs and black spellcraft.’
‘Divine Grace will prevail,’ said the messenger, breathless.
‘Even so,’ Sulfin Evend snapped back, ‘I’ll place my trust in steel before prayer.’ He kept pace with the messenger’s flying mount, now grappling the firm evidence that the stakes were likely to turn for the worse. Lysaer s’Ilessid would not retreat before evil. Riding in the footsteps of his slaughtered predecessors, Sulfin Evend could not shake the ugly foreboding: that the cocksure hunters in their sunwheel surcoats were now being nose-led, the traps for them set by one desperate and dangerous mouse.
A speck against sun glare, the eagle circled. Where a mortal bird might have flapped, unable to rise on the weak winter thermals off the slopes, this raptor soared, unimpeded. His high-pitched cry communed with the winds and invited their dancing partnership. The frigid north air whistled through knife-edged feathers, ruffling the russet-and-gilt hackles on his neck, but causing him no inconvenience. Avid, he watched. His awareness interpreted far more than an avian creature hatched from an egg, and his farseeing gaze missed nothing.
Where the definitive signs of clan presence could be hidden from two-legged eyes, the advantage of height unveiled every stray movement against the crumpled tapestry of Daon Ramon’s stark landscape. In eight tight-knit enclaves, Earl Jieret’s war band prepared for their imminent encounter with the Alliance armed forces. The dulled glint of steel through clumped brush told where leather-clad scouts crouched in ambush. Of the spring traps, the nooses, the deadfalls with trip springs, set where oncoming troops would soon tread, no sign showed; the ground seemed untouched by disturbance. The snares had been laid before the past snowfall, some set under the clairvoyant guidance of Jieret’s dreaming, and others by hunch and conjecture.
Yet the eagle’s uncanny perception read beyond surface appearance. His sweeping overview revealed dangers a man’s earthbound senses would miss. Death awaited the Alliance’s sworn faithful, cunningly placed on rock-strewn hillcrests, or under the innocuous snowdrifts, and on the brush-choked, silted banks of the meandering creek beds. No matter how vigilant, the armed ranks who invaded the sacrosanct wilds would pay with their lives and their blood.
Mage-wise, the eagle discerned the subtler tactics, as well. His peerless vision detected the flaring light of Prince Arithon’s signature pattern, stitched as a fetch into the thin shells of acorns by thread-fine chains of spelled ciphers. He knew the Names of the men chosen to bear the sealed constructs. Moment to moment, he could have listed the ones most likely to die, as the shifting templates of causation and intent laid the map of the unwritten future above the range of etheric energies.
Nor did the bird’s survey miss the lone rider who chivvied two saddled horses on lead reins. He unlocked, in an instant, the arcane connection between one horse’s bundled-up burden, and the silk-wrapped weight of the Paravian-made weapon strapped to the mounted man’s back. What the eagle knew, the Koriani partner he carried in linkage understood just as clearly: his awareness encompassed Elaira’s stricken dismay as she unraveled the import of the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s desperate strategy.
For reply, the raptor circled into the wind and spiraled his flight path still higher.
The horizon rolled back, the earth a broad platter seething with bellicose industry. To the north spread the toiling lines of the Alliance companies from Etarra, their trampled back trail a dimmed swath straggling southward over the snow. Eastward coursed the pack of Darkling’s light horse, streaming through thickets and brush, and relentless as hounds in full cry.
To the south glimmered the entangling s
narl of compulsion cast over Jaelot’s spellbound guard captain and the hard-bitten remnants of his company. The weak or faint-hearted by now had been left by the wayside. The strong-minded and practical voices among them, who had argued the folly of a suicidal advance, were long since dispatched, sent homeward bearing insatiable demands for relief supplies and reinforcements. The zealot survivors had abandoned all reason. Time and close contact had extended the spell’s reach, infecting them with the driving obsession borne by their luckless commander. Beneath the eagle’s expanded scrutiny, their heads seemed entangled in a sickly orange web. In contrast, their bodies appeared queerly darkened, their forms traced like moving shadows against the vibrant aspect of their surroundings.
No hedging protection could mask the blighting signs of dark practice from the probing sight of a Fellowship awareness. The cast sigils that warped them through the discipline imposed by their captain’s chain of command stood out clearly as strung foil on the hazeless, cold air.
Elaira’s shock of recoil was genuine, as her linked vision recorded sure evidence of Koriani meddling in the men’s state of unkempt self-abandonment. She had not known, then; the Sorcerer clothed in the form of the raptor saw into her heart, and was satisfied. If the enchantress also recognized the hand that had wrought such offensive craftwork, her thought remained masked; that license was permitted. In respect for the fact she could not break integrity in betrayal of her order’s vows, the eagle did not pry, though the clean winds of the thermals wafted the taint of that sorry usage: of matted hair rancid with unwashed sweat, and grease from the seared horse meat the men had consumed when supplies ran low, and the lean, barrens deer failed to yield enough fat for subsistence. Like mad animals possessed by some ravening need outside the bounds of their nature, they would course their live prey with insane disregard for survival.
The great eagle quartered the winter-bare landscape. His raking flight swept over the sunwheel banners cracking above Lysaer’s personal troop. On the cusp of the moment, while Sulfin Evend lost his passionate argument against dividing the Light’s forces for a change in tactics at the ninth hour, Jieret’s clan war band wove their desperate, last-minute strategies, aware they could not prevail. Their thin lines of defense could do no more than to stall and deflect, or kill with ruthless invention. Encounter would set off a dog-pack fray of brief but manic intensity.