by Janny Wurts
Elsewhere, a warm, falling rain softened the snow to slush and chill rivulets. Over soggy ground, through gray puddled melt, the army of Lysaer s’Ilessid drove north. Their dedication was not blunted, but reforged by fear for the fact that the black-stone peaks of the Mathorns had rung aloud, an ominous, uncanny chord of wild sound named as an evil wrought by the Spinner of Darkness …
At Althain, the male adept closed unsteady fingers over Sethvir’s limp wrist. ‘Enough. We have seen enough.’
His grief had no words, since the full course of the equinox had yet to reach completion. The grand chord of the mysteries had been raised, with the advent of sunset, then midnight to come. The lane crests would rise in bound harmony through two more rounds of exalted confluence.
That blessed passage, so long denied, could not do other than raise mayhem across every walled city in Rathain, a false testimonial of damning proportions.
The witness clasped his beautiful hands over Sethvir’s motionless palm. ‘We must hold out hope. Given such gifts of grace and resourcefulness, and the help of loyal clansmen, surely Arithon of Rathain can be spared from the swords and the hatred of enemies. The light of Ath’s grace moves within him, as a man born to flesh with such talent.’
Sethvir never moved. His seamed eyes stayed closed, but not in the peace of tranquillity. For Ath’s hand was not alone, on that hour, when the course of Arithon’s fate cast him into the dark shoals of jeopardy. Althain’s Warden did not mention the last image withheld, of the Prince of Rathain tossed by the wracking throes of a backlash that mounted to dangerous severity. Nearby, a golden eagle ruffled broad wings in the rain. The bird cocked his head, his avid gaze watchful, while the soft, southern breezes that heralded spring flung diamond-bright runoff from rock ledge and fir branch and spruce.
Spring Equinox Afternoon 5670
First Recovery
Fionn Areth awakened to an indignant slap of cold wind. Bleary with sleep, he grumbled complaint, then snapped open offended green eyes as an intrusive draft whisked off the blankets that covered him. The next gust razed his uncovered cheek, unpleasantly bracing as a facedown tumble into an ice-crusted snowdrift.
‘Fiends plague! Not an iyat!’ he swore on a steamed breath. He pounced, snagged back the errant wool, then waited through a testing pause to see whether the cloth would turn unruly and try to flap out of his grasp. Unpossessed, the innocuous wool remained limp. Alert despite his better sensibilities, Fionn Areth settled back. Eyes shut, he burrowed into the lost warmth of his bedding, not yet reconciled to the intrusive stab of bright sunlight. Cursed if he would surrender the dark comfort of sleep for another inhospitable day in the forbidding heights of the Skyshiels.
A second gyre of air funneled down, its vexing persistence without quarter. The thick blanket was snatched clean away from Fionn Areth’s curled frame. His furious lunge missed.
Then a tart voice addressed through the whistling, rank breeze, ‘Roust up, goatherd! You’re needed.’
Outraged, Fionn Areth shoved tangled hair from his face. He spat out the strands that had snagged in his teeth and blinked into the glare of midday.
‘Piss and white lightning!’ he swore in his thick grasslands dialect. ‘It’s damned well already tomorrow!’ Embarrassment mottled his cheeks to a flush. Never since his last sick day in childhood had he snored like a sluggard past daybreak.
Be damned again if he intended to rise in good temper while a Sorcerer’s haunt tried to accost him. Flat on his back, he sucked in an offended breath. ‘Go away. Flit! I’m not playing the part of your servant.’
Luhaine outwaited youthful rebellion. Poised in sly expectation, he was content to let impatience and curiosity carry the war with recalcitrance.
Fionn Areth hardened his mouth, battling to ignore the enticement of his avid senses. Around him, the air wore the sharp taint of char, touched by a lingering, fresh reek of ozone. He flung a forearm over his face, obstinate enough to reject all morbid view of the immoral doings of mages. ‘Why not leave me alone? Or better, kite off through the sky, and maybe butt-hump a moonbeam. I’m tired.’
Yet even after wrestling the equinox tides through a night and half of the day, Luhaine of the Fellowship was no spirit to rise to a baiting framed in crude language. In arctic agreement, he said, ‘You can sleep, then, and let Dakar die. If that happens, by my personal request, Davien’s sentinel guardians won’t let you depart from Rockfell Peak unchallenged.’
Distempered, distrustful, Fionn Areth sat up. ‘Save your henchman yourself, and your lost prince as well.’ He tossed back his snarled mane of black hair, scratched the stubble erupted like wire from his chin. ‘I’m through being everybody’s string puppet.’
Luhaine forwent argument. Invisible amid the silver-bright sunlight dazzling off Rockfell’s coped cornices, he bided, a pool of frigid calm skirted by the moving play of the winds. A lapis enamel dome of clear sky lay floored in carded fleece cloud banks. The buried valley below, with its blanketing forest, and its secretive life of furred animals, seemed vanished out of the world.
Fionn Areth shrugged his aching, stiff shoulders, painfully aware he had rested too long on chill rock. He disdained to examine the face of the mountain, would not look back to see whether the eerie portal the Sorcerers had opened still existed. First move, the moment he regained his feet, he unbuttoned the flap on his trousers and relieved himself over the brink.
The stream fell a disconcertingly long way, broken like scintillant jewels in the extended plunge down the abyss.
Sensitized to the punch-cut void of permafrost at his back, Fionn Areth damped back a shiver. ‘If Dakar’s in trouble, who’s to blame anyway? Last I saw, your colleague was driving him into a foaming fit of possession.’
The chill at his back grew strikingly colder, more silent than silence itself.
The barren shelf of rock offered nothing by way of diversion. Fionn Areth pridefully mastered the nagging urge to shed his pride and glance around. He felt smug, to be holding his ground with impunity, until the suspended quiet between gusts let him realize the moan at his back was not caused by natural weather.
Unease turned his head, before he could think.
First sight to greet him was a pair of burned hands, groping and scrabbling in distress. Dakar was sprawled facedown in a heap across the mountain chamber’s uncanny threshold. His palms were a weeping mass of raw blisters, and his suffering raised Fionn to fury. ‘Your damned murdering colleague has killed him!’
Luhaine corrected with acidic restraint, ‘Right now, Kharadmon is the only thing keeping him breathing. We can heal the damage, but not before his body has been given time to restabilize. Which is why I’ve respectfully asked for your help.’
Fists clenched on his hips, dark eyebrows snarled with distrust, Fionn Areth vented a barked laugh. ‘What, no apologies for yesterday’s rudeness, or your threats of hurling me over the cliffside?’
‘I won’t change that opinion,’ pronounced Luhaine, as stubborn. ‘You have yet to show you’re worth much at all, beyond abusing the innocent air for uncivil comments and arguing.’
‘Oh, you could puff bladders for floats with such noise!’ His rancor dissolved into startled snide humor, Fionn Areth stretched the last kink from his sturdy frame. ‘I’m not excited. The clerk who used to tally our chamois spoke the same stuffy way. His big, windy lectures used to tie my great-uncle Poirey in stitches till he rolled like a fish on a streambank.’
‘Yokel, I’m not concerned with your mud-wallowed relative,’ Luhaine huffed, at last something more than offended. His presence acquired a shaved edge, brittle as frost strung on cobweb. ‘Yes or no. Will you help Dakar, or not?’
Fionn Areth glared back, still armed in bristled defiance. ‘What do you want me to do?’
He turned on his heel, advanced two mincing steps toward an entry that drove him to gooseflesh and cat nerves. Then he lowered the petrified angle of his chin and gave Dakar’s injuries his flinching inspection.
>
‘Salve and bandages, first.’ Luhaine was ever succinct, when exasperated. ‘Those are strapped in the pack.’ The vexation still galled, that existence as a discorporate spirit made even simple tasks difficult. His flat state of exhaustion pitched his tone to cranked worry. ‘Also, could you fill both the pannikins with snow? While you dress Dakar’s burns, I’ll boil the water. You’ll find herbs in the Mad Prophet’s satchel for tisanes. I’ll say which to use. There’s also a lichen that’s easily foraged at this time of year on the mountain.’
‘Well, if I’m not book learned, you won’t find me squeamish,’ Fionn Areth retorted. Changeable as a weathercock, he could scarcely stem his flooding burst of contrition. Dakar’s welted palms were ugly and seeping. The brosy curve of his cheek sagged, dull gray. The fast, shallow breaths rasped through slack lips, sounding distressed as those animals the goat gelders in Araethura always slaughtered as lost beyond remedy.
Luhaine’s snappish mood eased. In fact, the young man was good with his hands. His rough, callused strength held surprising gentleness as he worked salve into Dakar’s scoured flesh. He made neat work of the bandages, as well, and managed the snow compress, steady enough under Luhaine’s detailed instruction. The brewed remedy dripped into Dakar’s mouth with a twist of clean rag slowly eased the dangerous, raced pulse and stertorous breathing.
‘You count all this worth it?’ Fionn Areth asked later, picking his way in precarious steps over ridged ice and slick rock. He bent, now and then, at the Sorcerer’s direction, and pried windburned lichens from Rockfell’s seamed face with his knife.
‘In fact, yes.’ The nexus of cold that was Luhaine came and went at juxtaposed intervals, tacking over the cliffside below, as he selected which plants should be harvested. Now and then, sheeting flares of gold light marked a pause as he worked minor spellcraft to ease stress from the stone so severely tested at noontide. ‘If Dakar had given one whit less than everything he had, you would have been left with no mountain to stand on. The whole of this world would have perished.’
Close enough to make Fionn Areth start, Luhaine finished, flat serious. ‘We all owe our well-being to your crown prince.’
‘Arithon?’ Fionn Areth clawed for a handhold as he slid on the unstable footing. Still venting mixed feelings, he inquired, ‘Then the Master of Shadow reached safety?’
‘That’s his Grace, to you. Don’t forget, he’s your liege,’ Luhaine supplied in bracing correction. ‘You’ve been his guest, and he once saved your life. And no, to answer your impertinence. His survival is still in grave jeopardy.’
So grave, in fact, that Sethvir had been reticent with details through the disturbing contact exchanged between Rockfell and Althain Tower. Given tacit awareness of just how precariously hard Kharadmon worked to curb Dakar’s raging fever, Luhaine’s soulful sigh loosed a vagrant whistle of breeze. Such a severe backlash was inevitable, wrought by energetic imbalance and a massive exposure to the currents of untempered lane force. The Sorcerer feared to speculate upon Arithon’s condition. Nor had he dared ask what succor might be found on the isolate, high slopes of the Mathorns, with Lysaer’s crack troop of Etarrans bound under Sulfin Evend’s command and marching to claim their blood vengeance.
‘… can leave here,’ Fionn Areth was saying. At some point, scarcely noticed, he had sat down to rest. The ice between his tucked-up feet was jabbed into shards, chipped by his knife in a fit of volatile impatience.
Luhaine gyrated down from a vantage point hundreds of feet in the air. ‘Is your poke filled?’
‘Not counting the gravel bits?’ Fionn Areth raised slanting eyebrows, yanked off his gloves with his teeth, and opened for inspection the small sack that Dakar used to store tinder. ‘Never mind this ledge, anyway,’ he mumbled through wadded leather. ‘I meant, when can we get off of this Ath-forsaken mountaintop?’
‘Take care how you slander the ground where you’re standing. No one’s going anywhere before Dakar recovers.’ Luhaine’s chilly presence sieved through the sack’s contents, ejecting the hollowed-out husk of a beetle, and something else dubious and brown-colored. ‘You can travel anywhere you please after that. No Sorcerer will stop you. But the spellbinder won’t be released from our company until the wardings that guard Rockfell are resealed.’
‘How generous.’ Fionn Areth retied the poke, donned his damp gloves, and scrubbed at the gooseflesh raised on his arms by the Sorcerer’s eddying presence. ‘By that I expect you think Dakar will survive?’
‘He has no other choice,’ Luhaine said, glum. A gyrating wind devil of flurried ice, he crossed the sunlit expanse of the snowfield. The dearth of sound options rankled his methodical nature. Verrain was too beset at Methisle to be summoned to stand as relief. Irony of ironies, the brilliance of Arithon’s success had exacerbated an already thorny list of troubles. The methspawn contained by the late-winter ice were now at large in the hot springs, restlessly seething to launch in migration the minute the spring melt opened the waters of Methlas Lake. As Fionn Areth lagged, the Sorcerer admonished, ‘Hurry on. The lichens you have are sufficient.’
The mismatched pair, spirit Sorcerer and goatherd, picked their separate ways back to the ledge. At the entry to Rockfell Pit, they found Dakar wakeful, and seated inside, enthroned like a toad in a nest made from saddle packs and blankets.
‘What took so long?’ he inquired in Kharadmon’s whetted consonants. ‘If you had to pick daisies and admire the scenery, surely someone could have stayed to assist?’ Ignoring Fionn Areth’s high yelp of startlement, the Sorcerer rolled the Mad Prophet’s mooncalf eyes. ‘If you laugh,’ he snarled at Luhaine, ‘I shall thrash you to a gibbering wisp! Don’t claim you’ve lived as a spirit so long, you’ve forgotten the disgusting necessities attending the burden of flesh.’
‘Should I laugh?’ Luhaine’s prim delicacy would have caused butter to transfigure rather than melt.
Over Dakar’s ludicrous bristle of beard, Kharadmon blushed virgin pink. ‘This body’s too weak to stand upright,’ he growled. ‘That’s a problem, since we’re also splitting with an almighty need to take a piss.’
Fionn Areth choked and sat down like dropped stone. He crushed mirthful shrieks behind mittened hands, until tears streaked his windburned cheeks.
Kharadmon was forced to wait, fuming, until the young man’s paroxysm subsided. The Araethurian arose at due length. Still gasping, he assisted the fat prophet’s bulk onto its feet. He had to manage the undoing of buttons as well, and learned more picturesque language through that undignified interval than Dakar had acquired in five centuries of debauch, perusing the dockside brothels.
Bared at last to seek urgent relief, Kharadmon ceased his cursing.
As his strangling impulse to chortle ran down, Fionn Areth demanded point-blank, ‘What have you done to Dakar?’
Through a grunt as the Mad Prophet’s bladder eased enough to stop hurting, the Sorcerer glowered askance. ‘Address me like that, and the wind might reverse and serve you up a good dousing.’
‘Not if you still want my shoulder to lean on.’ Fionn Areth smiled, his reasonable sweetness all poison.
Kharadmon tipped up Dakar’s tangled head, narrowed bloodshot eyes, and glared into the hovering, arctic silence that marked Luhaine’s watchful presence. ‘Take fair warning, I’ll be nursing a festering grudge!’
Then, as Fionn Areth prepared to repeat his nagging question, Kharadmon let fly with sharp venom, ‘Dakar’s asleep. Yes, and suffering with illness! So be a smart boy and sit us back down.’
When Fionn Areth showed signs of planting his feet, Dakar’s features purpled, straitly vexed.
Before Kharadmon could unleash more invective, Luhaine interjected, ‘We all overreached our wise limits, no surprise.’ He added in judicious explanation, ‘We were handling earthforce enough to immolate half of the continent. The lane currents are settled. However, neither Kharadmon or myself have passed through the process unscathed.’
Fionn Areth crossed his arm
s, stiff-shouldered and still dubious.
Kharadmon provoked with more than his usual savagery, discomfited by pain and sore joints. ‘Fool goatherd, why do you think you’re needed to fetch and carry and wrap bandages? Were we Fellowship Sorcerers whole in ourselves, we could heal simple injuries without medicines! Dakar himself can do that, on his good days. But being a spirit embodied, just now, he’s suffering a physical reaction. This damned raging headache would shame the fires of Sithaer’s eighth pit!’
‘That means, Kharadmon hurts as well,’ Luhaine supplied in salacious remonstrance. His entreaty, ‘Stay wise, boy, and don’t try his temper,’ collided headlong with his colleague’s retort.
‘Since I need a semblance of peace to recoup, and Dakar couldn’t stop bending double to throw up, we agreed. He’s better off out of the way.’ Kharadmon stopped, wrung out a vehement breath, and shook a damp hank of cinnamon hair from the puffy sills of his eyes. Far removed from his preference for cool equanimity, he fixed his predator’s stare on the Araethurian beside him. ‘Now, since those lichens you’ve gathered hold the remedy to lift this crushing headache, will you please unscramble the intelligence Ath gave to live worms? I need to sit down. We’ll all do very nicely if you could find the grace to follow Luhaine’s instructions.’
‘I’m not going up to that portal again,’ Fionn Areth declared, his hot spurt of fear forced through as belligerence. ‘Whatever’s inside makes my teeth hurt.’
‘Mine, too,’ Kharadmon admitted with sudden, limp weariness.
As Luhaine whirled off in a flurry of agitation, the Sorcerer gave up trying to fasten bone buttons with wrapped hands. In response to an unspoken jibe from his colleague, he dredged up the Mad Prophet’s most plaintive shrug, and confessed, ‘Yes, a new leak has sprung in the ward seals. I was holding it stable, before Dakar’s bladder laid siege to my efforts. You think it’s grown worse? Then you’ll just have to hold the breach stable while Fionn Areth mixes the posset for pain. Soon after that, if the sky doesn’t fall, I ought to be fit to resume work.’