by Janny Wurts
At Avenor, the royal guard rides out in glittering force to search the hamlets in the countryside; galleys comb the fishing coves on the coastline, and the inner cabal meets under candlelight to report all comings and goings from the city; yet frantically as High Priest Cerebeld drives the search to recover the missing princess, he fails to find any trace …
A fair spider in a spun web of spellcraft, Prime Matriarch Selidie confronts the sisterhouse peeress: ‘You are required to stand witness,’ she pronounces, her command lent incised clarity by the phosphor array of fine sigils surrounding the enabled Great Waystone. ‘Earl Jieret must be tracked. As Rathain’s caithdein, he now bids to secure the Master of Shadow’s escape. I hold the firm hope that adverse circumstances will draw Elaira in as accomplice …’
Late Winter 5670
IX.
Caithdein
With the consummate care that marked the skills of a forest-bred clansman, Earl Jieret urged his winded pony into the stand of a hazel thicket. He broke no twigs. The respect his kind tendered toward all growing things gave apology to the frozen moss crushed under his silent step. His knowing instinct avoided loose rock. Since he had never asked more than the pony could give, it followed with herdbond trust.
The stillness man and beast wore like a cloak wove them as one with the landscape. Jieret’s dull leathers blended into the gully that seamed the swale. As the pounding roll of inbound hoofbeats neared his exposed position, he stilled all fear. He did not withdraw, or huddle up and shrink inward. His woodwise heritage used Paravian wisdom, and expanded the fabric of his awareness outward, merging his humanity with the fabric of Daon Ramon until his poised presence wore the staid patience of stone.
Versed in the lore of his people since boyhood, Jieret used such ancient skills to make himself seem invisible. He stilled all thought, all concept of danger, as the band of Alliance trackers crested the barren ridgetop. Through the bustle and commotion as they overtook and swept past him, his mentor the hunted hare, the caithdein relied on thin camouflage: the ceaseless thrash of the wind through bare twigs broke the outline of his motionless form. Whining gusts over gorse and rock masked his horse’s labored breathing. Crouched low, his face tucked deep in the hood of his mantle to shadow the tone of pale flesh, he stood his ground as two enemy riders clattered a spear’s length to either side of him.
Headhunters, both, the men did not speak. Vigilant and thorough as hungry predators, they quartered the ground on patrol, thrashed through the gulch, then clambered up the lichened scree that crowned the low rise beyond.
Jieret waited, immobile after they passed. He listened for the cheeps of foraging sparrows to mark the moment he could safely emerge. The triumph bought by his minuscule victory brought no smile to his set lips. Now slipped inside the vanguard of Prince Lysaer’s company, his peril would vastly increase. A chance sighting or an unlucky encounter would see him cut off with no line of retreat.
He still seized a moment for the time-honored word of respect, giving thanks to the scrub growth and cragged rock whose presence had granted him shelter. He left the requisite token of offering: a strand of hair nipped from his clan braid. Yet on this day, when necessity brooked no delay and the future course of the kingdom hung on the thread of its crown prince’s safety, the traditional rituals that honored the balance triggered a barrage of expanded awareness.
A wave of indescribable sensation flowed upward out of the earth. Startled by a tingling rush that blasted away equilibrium, Jieret reeled. Embraced by the clarity of conscious being, he shared the impact of his own gratitude, as plant and soil and stone acknowledged the human need in his thanks. Each spirit responded by its true nature, as doubtless it always had. Only now, the latent talents of the mage had crossed the threshold of initiation. His retuned ear heard the voice of the land speak with a living presence.
The reedy stems of dry grasses now whispered the language of wind, their summer green memories aged into wisdom. Frozen streambeds promised the cascade of fluid emotion, and their power, the catalyst to key unformed expression to the alchemy of creation. As Jieret gasped, dizzied with shock, stone steadied him, earth’s presence giving the love of a mother, guiding her child’s first footstep. Jieret marveled, entranced as the cradling embrace of the hazel boughs cherished him in a communal embrace.
A man could lose himself amid the loomed threads of Ath Creator’s diversified joy. No singer, Jieret felt the wild urge to open his throat in a burst of unfettered laughter. As though every nerve had been painlessly stripped, he became deluged in a lucent gold sleet, as the forces inlaid through sunlight and air whirled him into their dancing spiral of regeneration.
Overset by the lure of a dangerous fascination, Jieret fought back the sweet waves of abandon. He drew a succession of steadying breaths, aware he must recover his concentration. The wonders he witnessed already blurred his prudent discernment. Under mage-sighted influence, he would regard an enemy’s bared steel as a friend, seeing no more than a sorrowful ignorance in the hand that acted with hatred and malice. Temptation tore him. He could so easily marry his thoughts to the wind, casting aside the bothersome needs of survival.
Jieret shivered, jostled as his pony butted him in impatience. Perhaps the creature understood by herd instinct that its rider grazed too near the razor’s edge of stark peril. A man cloaked in mage-sight perceived how a wrong word or thought could be crippling. At one with the mysteries that nurtured his very being, he faced the interlocked recognition that the mere influence of his will could unbind. Jieret realized he must disengage from his state of heightened awareness, yet the shift must be done with delicate care. His state of connection lent every choice the brute force of a sharpened impact. If he shut down the cataract of sensation through fear, his mind would accept his perception of threat, and reseal the open door after him.
He risked being blinded. Without access to mage-sight, he could never complete the worked plan that enabled Prince Arithon’s escape.
‘Merciful maker,’ Jieret whispered. He floundered far out of his depth. Arithon had opened the keys to the mysteries, with no time given to enact proper safeguards or begin the basic sound teaching to use them.
Jieret squeezed his eyes shut. No improvement; masked sight only wakened his inward, seer’s vision sprung from his talent for prescience.
Caught in unalloyed solitude, Deshir’s clan chieftain crumpled to his knees as his outer perception dissolved into silvery dreamscape. Like trained adepts who could forecast at will, his refined gift reattuned to match the cascade of the lane currents. Ancient powers became manifest. Jieret beheld the vibrant, living matrix of the earth, which combed through the land in bright channels, with himself as a being of shadow and flame embedded within the flux.
His confused thoughts cast shimmering, concentric ripples. The rings fled away and collided, entangled with other sets roiling from elsewhere, their vast confluence a sea of quivering, mercuric energy. Man and beast with their stirred-up moil of emotions impressed that smoothed flow into moving spikes of interconnected response.
Jieret experienced each singular disturbance as a feather brush down his scraped skin. Split away from the familiar, solid world he had known, he felt the tug of a burgeoning undertow as senses he never knew he possessed transmitted the warning of pending danger. Unease ripped his gut as the converging flows revealed Lysaer’s Alliance allies as they closed their advance to take Arithon.
Fear refined that raw vision. Jieret perceived the blood shadows of dark magics that sent the seer priests the simultaneous command to re-form their massed ranks for battle. Suspended in earth’s energy like an insect on a pool, he traced the sinister change in the lane currents as armed companies paused and mustered into coordinated patterns of assault.
Ripples became arrowed waves of raw force: this marring flow from the south the ragtag guard troop from Jaelot, haltered in the tangle of the Koriani sigils that drove them under geas to attack. Farther east, another influx lit by rage and
sharp vengeance, the survivors from Darkling’s garrison advanced, hazed on by the comet-blaze of conviction raised by a fanatical priest.
Sharp knots in their path, the determined bands of clan scouts, standing ground to obstruct where they could. The lane’s flux revealed their inadequate numbers; without mercy exposed the futility of their fierce dedication and bravery.
Desperate with grief, Earl Jieret buried his face in his hands. Though the horsy taint of his deerhide gloves touched his senses with near-painful clarity, his Sight did not change. His awareness found no firm foothold. Terror washed through him, snagging static through the flux, as again, he fought to reorient. Entrapped in deep vision, he was left vulnerable as a babe to the enemy. Though he worked himself dizzy, he found no relief. Inner sight only shifted his vantage.
Northward, he sensed the elite sunwheel companies dispatched out of Etarra. The trained ardor of the Light’s foremost field troop had knit the lane’s flow into an axe blade of unified purpose. Its passage razed onward, distorting all patterns found in its path. A wall of sharp minds, brought to welded purpose, eclipsed the webbed traceries of rocks and plants under a stain of penumbral shadow.
Before them, like hapless prey set to flight before the assault of beaters and hounds, the fired spark of purpose that was Braggen and three horses, bearing the spelled sword, Alithiel. His plight appeared hopeless, snagged as he was between Lysaer’s advance and the inexorable crush of the Alliance’s closing forces.
Jieret battled despair, that his night of high risk and desperate planning now seemed an act of futility. The rage all but seared him, that his liege’s painstaking strategy might send valiant men to their deaths, all for naught.
Too late, he recalled his connection to the mysteries, as the bursting dam of his anger incised the live flux of the lane force. Instant impact slammed him to jangling discord. The crosscurrents tumbled him. Plummeted downward, as though his awareness plunged from great height, he drowned, immersed in a vast ocean of feeling.
As stone, as plant, as the body of Athera herself, he ached from the vibration of townborn feet. As the interlocked weave of sand grains and soil, he flinched to the pained grunt of spurred horses. Empathy savaged him, as thorn branch and mosses shrank from shared awareness of plant cousins callously trampled. Sucked under by the whorled tumult of distressed energies, Jieret suffered direct pain, a burning recoil lashed through mind and spirit where the companies of sunwheel men-at-arms forced their self-righteous passage. Bursting panic could not break the sequence of altered perception. His senses wheeled free. Reft from his humanity, he experienced with utmost, faithful clarity, as the wind-raked, barren hills of Daon Ramon responded in kind to the drama of hunter and prey.
Earth was anything but blind or deaf to the deeds of her two-legged inhabitants as enemy met enemy in first contact.
The moment erupted in graphic display, the whirled sparks of each man’s individual being fanned into explosive conflagration. Hatred and fear launched their savage attack. The staid hills resounded to the pound of sped hearts, each flesh-and-blood drumbeat mirrored threefold in the sensitive purl of the lane pulse. The event scored the flux as a fraught cry of light, tortured to raging disharmony. Scattered before the fury of the charge, ephemeral as moving shadows, Jieret recaptured the dedicated purpose of Rathain’s fleet-footed clan scouts.
His throat closed in anguish. Haplessly trapped, he stood as eyewitness, shaking with impotent grief. The Companions who survived the fell slaughter at Tal Quorin had replaced the kinship of lost family. Tragedy bound them closer than brothers. Wrung by their plight, Jieret felt the torment of hearts pressed to bursting. He ached with the burn of each desperate, fast breath. His inner mind blazed with the pain of shared fears. Fired by sympathy, his mage vision flowered into Sight.
The immediate influx of smell touched him first, a musk of sweat-lathered horses. He felt the wind next, a raw blast of biting cold. Before him, etched into a clarity like torture, he beheld his war band’s best scouts, standing their ground for Rathain. Jieret braced to endure as the staunch spirits his ironbound duty had sent into trial were called to play out the sacrifice.
The moment engulfed him, as Eafinn’s son’s party burst out of cover as decoy, their assigned task to lure the fanatics from Darkling into a preset array of spring traps. Jieret’s pulse leaped to the panic of hill ponies pounding across frozen ground. He heard the shouted command as the townbred captain wheeled his mounted lancers. The hammer of shod hooves bearing down in pursuit rocked his mind, until all other senses rang, deafened.
His gift rode him, relentless, while new mage-sight exposed the blued fire of spirit light, warped and muddied by the savagery of human will bent upon killing destruction. He flinched with the shock of steel meeting steel; felt the wrenching jar of the first woundings. Around him, the stark horrors of death and the fierce passions of the chase exploded to blazing chaos. The fury of Sithaer itself was unleashed as plant, and dumb animal, and motionless stone ignited in subtle recoil.
The warriors enclosed in the clay blindness of five senses saw only the deadened reflection: the impacting force of their actions escaped them. Snapped bone and burst flesh became as crude overlays, masking the lights of more subtle energies, whose existence played through all form. Their voice was not dumb, but mistaken for empty silence. Through the window of mage-sight, their racked pain resounded, octave upon octave above the fixed range of flesh-bound, mortal perception.
Jieret experienced the unseen devastation firsthand, felt the spill of torn life crying out for cessation and peace. But hatred stopped ears, even to the screams of the wounded who writhed dying on the chill ground. Whipped on by self-righteous convictions, the townborn poured down the ridge in a frenzied rush of pack violence. Not one checked his mount as the first horse seemed to trip on its forelegs. It tumbled, kicking. None noticed the sharpened stake through its gut, until the heightened thrill of the hunt changed to horror as the next concealed snares dropped their prey. Sharpened wood, notched with barbs, had been lashed to green saplings, bent to the ground in brute tension. No trace of tampered ground granted fair warning: the sun-crusted face of the drifts shone pristine over the buried release strings.
Earl Jieret, who had helped lay those snares himself, now suffered the mage-sighted shock of his handiwork. He wept without voice, that he could not cry warning to enemies. By ruthless design, the trigger ropes mired the destriers’ oncoming strides. Rope traps whipped taut. Horses hurled head over heels with noosed fetlocks, and their riders crashed, crushed and broken. They screamed, the potential invention of intelligent humanity reduced to burst organs and snapped bones. Their blood stained the ground as they whimpered. Enraged beyond mercy, the rear ranks rode over them, a howling storm that would not be assuaged, except by quenching cold steel in hot vengeance.
Jieret fought to breathe. Crushed under the milling storm of his visions, undone by the scope of shared suffering, he crouched, unaware, his face pressed to the earth. He could not detach. Nor could he endure, as the unraveling burn of torn life force marred the unseen world like a blighting, white mist, and the lane’s pulse imploded to disharmony.
The killing raged on. Jieret suffered the full gauntlet of sorrows that left him unmanned and weeping. Each rag doll in armor who perished had Name; each crushed moss and lamed horse and chipped stone sang in pain, as death by willed violence sliced black wounds through the interlocked heart of the mysteries. Guilt choked Jieret’s throat, a revulsion so deep the world’s gift of free breath seemed to brand his rank tissue with self-hatred.
Nor were his personal ties dimmed or lost in the throes of expanded vision.
Earl Jieret sensed the individual desperation of the clan scouts his engineered tactics set to rout. He tasted the bitter courage of the archers waiting in ambush, who held to their obdurate discipline; who set aside fear and girded themselves with the love they held for their families. Their chieftain knew them, each man. He called their Names, helpless, while
they fired their last arrows to unravel the enemy’s charge. He felt them, each one, taking fatal wounds upon lance point and sword as their positions became overtaken.
Their deaths were quick, but not kind. Each man passed the Wheel aware that his sacrifice would not spare his fleeing companions. Cut down, abandoned, they spiraled into final unconsciousness, knowing their spilled blood snatched no more than the hope of diversion.
Time for Braggen with his burdensome custody of Alithiel to seize chance for the opening to slip Lysaer’s cordon. Time that might win another precious league of distance for the hunted Prince of Rathain.
Earl Jieret muffled his choked-off sobs, as Eafinn’s son met the same death as his father. As brave, that true spirit would pay his respects to Daelion Fatemaster twenty years younger than his late sire. Nor did his release at the turn of the Wheel absolve him of this life’s responsibilities. He breathed his last agony upon ice-chill ground, unable to know if his wife of three months had quickened with the seed of a child to succeed him.
That peal of unquiet pain did not cease with the young scout’s death. His sorrow endured, a cry of imbalance, recorded by stone in the stained ground beneath his torn corpse. The creatures who dined upon carrion would partake of that essence, and the winds that swirled over the site would be tainted, their song soured by unfulfilled purpose. Once, such lingering malaise had been cleansed by the rites of Paravian dancers. Now, Jieret perceived with a poignancy that striped his chilled cheeks with fresh tears: the path that promised to right the land’s balance yet relied on the hands of Rathain’s restored high king.
To that end, more clanblood must soak frigid earth.
‘No!’ The tormented whisper of Jieret’s rebuttal ripped through vision and, finally, shocked him awake. Shivering in clammy runnels of sweat, he recovered his senses, curled on his knees on cold ground. For a long, wrenching moment, he could do nothing but weep for his lost equilibrium.