by Janny Wurts
At Avenor, High Priest Cerebeld addresses the Light’s inner cabal, his gold-and-white robes tainted crimson by the failing light through the tower casement, ‘I know there’s been war, with blood spilled on both sides. The Master of Shadow is flushed, but not taken. Further word from Etarra’s high priest says that our Blessed Prince moves to join the dedicated arm of his sunwheel companies, and renew the pursuit with sharp vigor …’
On Daon Ramon Barrens, under lashing snowfall, the scattered survivors of Earl Jieret’s war band huddle in fireless cold, unable to know how many kinsmen their desperate strategy has kept living; and they pray that abroad in the howling darkness, a sword-bearing liegeman still braves the storm, driving three horses and standing staunch guard on the cloak-wrapped burden of Rathain’s unconscious crown prince …
Late Winter 5670
X.
False Step
The storm churned the night to a black maelstrom, snow lashed horizontal by howling winds armored with flaying, chipped ice. Harried in flight by the fury of the elements, the eagle banked in descent. He folded long wings and settled to roost on the gnarled root of a deadfall. Ephemeral as a shadow cast on dark felt, he fluffed gold-tipped feathers and kept unseen watch on the campsite a stone’s throw away.
There, Lysaer s’Ilessid sat huddled before the whipped warmth of the fire that Sulfin Evend maintained with hard labor and dogged persistence. Dry hardwood was scarce on the barrens; green sticks of hazel and ice-crusted rowan would not take a spark in such weather. The blaze was kept fueled by scrub evergreen needles and a scavenged collection of pine knots, streaming vile smoke and shot sparks from the high content of volatile resins. Naught else could withstand the blizzard’s wild onslaught. Twice in an hour, Lysaer roused and shook piled snow from his shoulders.
Despite his meticulous care to mask weakness, he showed all the suffering signs of a backlash provoked by overextension. The massive flux of energies he had channeled in blind rage had upset his auric balance. Vertigo skewed his senses. He started at ghost movement and sprang tense as phantom sounds grazed his hearing. Subject to bouts of spinning faintness, followed by shuddering palsy, he handled himself with eggshell tenderness and kept still as much as he could.
The gloved fingers tucked in his lap were still trembling. Nor did the incursion of Paravian haunts fade for the sake of infirmity. Lysaer felt them, sometimes pressured by an intimacy that made him gasp as they grazed his sensitized skin. His untrustworthy vision failed to dismiss the discomfort, but tended to remake the darkness and blown snow into patterns of leering ghosts. Minute to minute, the day’s toll of dead seemed to hound his presence in reproach. Their hands, clothed in wind, plucked at his clothes, and their gaping mouths moaned for vengeance.
Lysaer rejected their burden of grief. The ruler who bogged himself down with past failings inevitably lost his vision. A man’s death, or a company’s, must be measured by how many others their sacrifice could keep safely living. The Shadow Master pinned under pursuit in this wasteland meant the blameless, walled cities were spared. The strong heart must not falter in chastisement of evil. Only stern measures could wrest the future away from the influence of fell shadows and sorcery.
The Narms headhunters had not given their lives to no purpose. Today’s slaughtered dead had sprung the first line of the Master of Shadow’s defenses. A vigorous scouring of Light had cleared the landscape of lurking barbarians. Now, arcane subterfuge broken, the quarry was stripped of defenders. Lysaer huddled under the damp silk of his mantle and counted the effort a victory. If his searing assault had spared any clansmen to stand in the enemy’s defense, they would be scattered and few. Set on the run, they would lack the stamina and resource to turn the flower of the Alliance: crack troops he had groomed from a decade’s summer musters, and marched well equipped from Etarra.
Sustained on taut nerves and anticipation, Lysaer regarded the gust-snatched streamers of flame. If his trembling sickness relented a little, his blue eyes burned too fearfully focused and bright. While the drive of his cause consumed every thought with an addict’s obsessive intensity, he weighed the tactical worth of the captive, tucked against the rock outcrop.
The clan chieftain still lay where his knees had buckled. His great frame shuddered in a shivering daze, listless since Sulfin Evend had bound his ankles. More stout lashings anchored his wrists. Stretched spread-eagled between two stunted alders, he could not crawl away. The afternoon’s stint on horseback had exacted a punishing cost. Despite the Lord Commander’s brusque ministrations, and a second round of cautery to stop the fresh flow of bleeding, Jieret languished. The throb of his injuries pressed him to silenced misery. By the fireside, Lysaer could have counted each one of his laboring breaths.
‘Relax and stop frowning, he’s not like to die on you.’ Wet and tired himself, pitched to a moody alertness that promised no tolerance for setbacks, the Alliance Lord Commander slogged in from his latest scavenging foray into the brush. ‘Give him a night’s rest to let his wounds close, he’ll be past the worst danger of bleeding.’
Sulfin Evend unburdened his bundle of cut pine boughs; then the prize of his search, a twisted branch snapped from a scrub oak. While Lysaer tracked each movement with eyes like chipped sapphire, his officer brandished the stick like a wand and inscribed a circle around the fire. Lips moving as though in prayer or incantation, Sulfin Evend sealed the crude figure that enclosed himself and the Blessed Prince.
‘What foolery is this?’ The rough indignity of the setting stole nothing from Lysaer’s regal authority.
‘Protection, plain and simple.’ Sulfin Evend poked the stick upright into the flank of the snowdrift beside him. ‘Koriani witches employed by my father say a circle drawn with cut oak, and spoken over with words, will turn aside the simpler forms of dark spellcraft.’
Prince Lysaer bridled, his attack the strung reflex of a spider caught on a jerked strand of web. ‘You feel yourself threatened?’
Sulfin Evend paused. Cat tense on his feet, he snapped a gesture toward the chieftain he had bound captive. ‘He’s clanbred, and sired as well by a bloodline not to be trifled with.’
When that terse explanation failed to lift Lysaer’s censure, the Lord Commander beat the ice from the folds of his mantle, and sat, riled to a pang of rare temper. ‘What, did you think I would cut a man’s tongue for sheer spite?’ He sustained his prince’s displeasure and pressed back in deliberate sarcasm. ‘You can’t believe that I buckled before the trifling fear that some fool might be swayed from the Light by a spurious claim that the Spinner of Darkness could possibly be your close kin?’
Lysaer averted his face, a sharp break that gutted the offensive from the bearing assault of his scrutiny. ‘But the enemy is my half brother, more’s the pity. The sordid fact’s not well-known.’
Sulfin Evend’s determined jaw sagged, stupidly open with shock. Then he closed his mouth, gathered himself, and strove to assimilate the impact of what he had heard.
A gust dulled the flames. For one fickle second, storm and illusion prevailed: the wet hair plastered against Lysaer’s turned cheek appeared tarnished, his invincible shoulders bowed down by the ache of a grinding human weariness.
On a ragged note far strained from his usual poise, the avatar who bore title as Prince Exalted delivered his distasteful explanation. ‘The infamy happened when I was three years of age. My mother was raped by a brigand. Her get of that union became a living aberration, raised and trained at the knee of an unprincipled sorcerer. At the outset, the nightside of power was needed. You’ll have heard how my gift of light was interwoven with spelled shadow to restore Athera’s choked sunlight.’
‘I was a child,’ Sulfin Evend admitted. ‘The news we received at Hanshire was embellished, a wild tale of supernatural acts, bought in blood sacrifice and enacted by foul pacts with demons. Most folk believed such. For a year or more, my nurse scared me silly by using the sun as a threat to forestall my penchant for mischief.’
&nb
sp; ‘She’d claim that overexposure to light would eat into your flesh until nothing remained but a skeleton? I heard that one as well, though in my case, from irate citizens who blamed my hand for the frightening change in the weather.’ Lysaer’s warmed, lifting humor ebbed away, unveiling a gravity as jagged with pride as chipped flint. ‘No bloodshed happened, in fact. No one’s act of conjury raised demons. But the use of black practice engendered corruption. The s’Ffalenn bastard proved as morally derelict as the blackguard who fathered him. When the mist was defeated, he cozened the Fellowship Sorcerers to endorse his claim to royal birthright. In conspiracy with his clever machinations at Etarra, they sought to insinuate a reign of terror and darkness.’
The damped embers rebounded. In the gold wash of flame light, Lysaer’s determined composure seemed touched to etheric sorrow, the fallible mold of bone and flesh sustaining a spirit that burned too pure for the clay of mortality. ‘What use to weep? My gift of light became rededicated as this world’s hope and shield.’ His scarred past sustained by a reserve of stark courage, he finished, ‘Athera is now threatened, and kin ties lie forfeit. My given charge is to destroy an aberrated creature who should never have seen birth, or lived to draw breath in the first place.’
The tragic history, so long silenced, had been presented uncolored by melodrama. Annealed by his years of solitary shame, Lysaer never softened his commitment to defend. His staunch quiet disallowed the inner ache of betrayal; before the festering sore of a mother’s violation, he displayed no weakness of human character. He met stoic self-sacrifice with matchless grace, until the observer who shared his secret burden of pain could not escape feeling awestruck.
Lysaer was Light, a being of quickened inspiration whose magnificence was not dimmed, but lent force and weight by the contrast of tawdry blankets, and the earthbound drape of his snagged and cinder-burned clothing.
Unshrinking, the Blessed Prince faced his Lord Commander. With the attentive humility that melted stone hearts, he gave his sad past a swift closure. ‘I surely owe you an apology.’
His blue eyes maintained their unwavering sincerity as he unlaced the gloved fingers locked over his tucked-up knees. ‘Athera is not the world of my birth.’ His contrite gesture encompassed the marked circle in the snow that earlier had raised his contempt. ‘I’ve disparaged your effort, presuming clan rule was deposed for reasons of tyranny. The sorry practice of raiding and headhunting led me to believe the atrocities were the offshoot of feuding hatreds handed down since the uprising. Your action, tonight, bespoke more than prejudice, and your remark on clan heritage perhaps sprang from a threat that’s outside my awareness. What has you concerned? If your fear has substance, then why has the reason been quietly held in obscurity?’
‘Avenor’s records were destroyed.’ Discomposed to embarrassment by the sympathy in Lysaer’s diligent regard, Sulfin Evend took an awkward moment to rise to the change in subject. ‘Like most old towns, the royal seat of s’Ilessid was burned. Later, in case any fugitives survived, armed zealots came back and leveled the walls, stone by stone.’ He cast an uneasy glance at the barbarian prisoner, roped like a steer by the outcrop. ‘Wait. First let me dose Red-beard with a posset. Sorcerers and seers always hear what concerns them. If we’re going to broach ancient history in depth, I don’t want to feel that one’s eyes boring holes through my back.’
‘Seers?’ Lysaer’s startled wariness raised a shiver that ran, head to foot, through his seated frame.
Sulfin Evend raised ice-flecked eyebrows, unamused, while the tireless wind whirled snow like white gauze between them. ‘You never suspected? Barbarian lineage inevitably carries a strong latent measure of mage talent.’
Lysaer jammed rigid hands through his hair. As though the strain all at once overwhelmed him, he demanded, ‘How do you know this?’
‘By well-established fact, though for years the remembrance has fallen into obscurity. Dark spellcraft can use ready fear as a weapon. Now the victim of their own paranoid silence, most town councils have long since forgotten.’ Granted the nod of permission he required, Sulfin Evend dug the tin flask from the saddle pack. In straightforward competence, he set about mixing a soporific he kept at hand to speed healing. Storm filled the interval as he arose. Shrieking gusts deadened the grunting scuffle as he forced the bitter draught upon the captive.
Returned to the fireside, the Lord Commander piled more evergreen onto the embers. Smoke boiled up, pricked sultry with sparks, as the resinous flames flared and crackled. ‘It’s a close-kept secret,’ he began, ‘but my family carries the strain of an ancient bloodline from Westwood. Not prevalent, mind. We’ve had generations of outbreeding since the ancestor who got a child of rape on a captive. But now and again the traits of that heritage resurface, sometimes in force. You’ve admired Raiett Raven, even leaned on his talent. The most prosaic Mayors of Hanshire have ruled by uncanny instinct. We still retain a Koriani seeress to advise our high council.’
Lysaer’s rapt regard became piercing to sustain. ‘You yourself bear more than a trace of the taint?’
‘The old lines breed truest,’ Sulfin Evend admitted. Restless or self-conscious, he reached, caught a pine bough, and cracked off needled twigs with brisk fingers. ‘In the first years of the compact, the clan forefathers and -mothers were selected for talent. A sworn covenant with the Fellowship has kept their marriages all but pure for a span of five thousand years.’
‘An inhumane practice, the controlled breeding of dynasties,’ Prince Lysaer said, thoughtful. A fresh tremor shook him. ‘No wonder the citizens revolted.’
But Sulfin Evend jerked his chin in rebuttal. ‘When outcrosses happened, there were no reprisals. The myth may persist, but actually, the archives that survive attest that no babes were ever put to death.’ He tossed the stripped handful of fir needles in the flames, his hawkish features branded in flaring light as he qualified. ‘If the town parent raised the offspring, quite often the Koriathain claimed the girl children for training.’
Lysaer stirred. The soaked gilt braid on his surcoat threw off a subdued glitter as he brushed settled snow from his lap. Sharpened to insight, he ventured, ‘Is that why relations with the sisterhood soured?’
‘Not at all. To become an oathsworn initiate in past years was considered the highest honor.’ As though the conversation nipped close to the bone, Sulfin Evend busied himself, rummaging through the supplies in the saddle pack. He pulled out a linen-wrapped packet of flour and two leathery strips of dried meat. ‘Their midwives keep meticulous records of birth, even now. They must snatch their girl novices as they can, from the pool of available throwbacks. Oh, never doubt, the witches still know which gifts the clan lineages foster.’ He paused, hissed an oath against Shadow, then lamented, ‘The flat griddle’s lost with the pack train. We’ll have to fall back on the headhunter’s practice of toasting salt bannocks on the tread of a stirrup iron.’
Not deflected one whit, Lysaer levered off the saddle he employed for a seat. Snow spangled his shoulders like gemmed lace, and his leather-gloved fingers shook alarmingly. He masked the infirmity abetted by the covering darkness as he fumbled to unfasten the cold buckles. The gusts hounded his effort as he pried the damp-swollen leather from the tangs. Unwilling to attract a measuring survey of fitness from his Lord Commander, he passed over the freed stirrups with the provocative comment, ‘What became of male children left at large in the towns?’
‘Most returned to the clans. A partbreed of any generation could bid for reacceptance, had he the courage to test his inherited talent.’ Sulfin Evend scooped out a pannikin of flour. He drew his belt knife and stirred in a dollop of snow, then shaped the thickened dough with the same fussy concentration that made him a superior marksman. ‘In fact, all clan children underwent the same rite of passage, to ensure that their lineage bred true.’
Sulfin Evend cast about, but found no object handy to dangle the stirrups over the fire pit. He rejected the convenience of using a sword blade, since heat
could spoil the steel’s temper.
‘Never mind. I’ll take my bread blackened.’ Lysaer snugged his forearms under the blanket, then pursued the original topic. ‘What was the trial?’
‘Exposure to the living presence of the Paravians.’ Sulfin Evend placed two bannocks on the bars of the stirrups, then nested the precarious array amid the coals. When he looked up and caught Lysaer’s sheared gaze still upon him, he bristled, ‘What other test would be valid?’ It went without saying that those lines kept purest posed the least risk of breeding up aberrant stock.
‘What was the penalty for a failure?’ Lysaer pressed, not about to back down before the bent of his inquiry was satisfied.
‘Madness. Or a yearning of spirit too overwhelming to remedy, that would waste the flesh unto death.’ Resigned as he watched the wind-ripped flames lick their meager dinner to carbon, Sulfin Evend shrugged muscled shoulders. ‘The insane could take charitable refuge in the towns. Others found peace in Ath’s Brotherhood. Those branch lines died off, as a rule. Even today, the adepts shun the attachment of children.’
‘Powers of Darkness!’ Lysaer shoved to his feet. ‘Are you suggesting the rogue mage talents that riddle our society all originate through the inherited taint of clan forebears?’
Sulfin Evend hefted his knife, stabbed up a burned bannock, and extended the smoking morsel as offering. ‘Even so.’ His flint-pale eyes nicked with reflected firelight, he added the razor-edged irony, ‘You never wondered why Hanshire’s mayors don’t fraternize with Erdane’s council? Or why High Priest Cerebeld and his acolytes are decidedly unloved by the secret factions who pressure town politics? Their flow of gold helps proliferate the leagues of headhunters, and their sworn purpose is to hound the old blood to extinction.’