TWOLAS - 08 - Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

Reversal

  A novice initiate had flirted with one of the Alliance wounded, taken in by Koriathain for healing. Her rash action upset every established activity within the sisterhood's field encampment. Even on distant worlds whose histories predated Athera's compact, the order always had jealously guarded the range of its oathsworn prerogatives. Discipline fell with punitive speed.

  The Prime Matriarch called the session of inquiry, despite the late hour's inconvenience. Lirenda's slaved presence was retained for the demeaning service of verifying the actions of the accused, while the formal pavilion was cleared straightaway. By the time the displaced peeresses scuttled out, bearing heaped armloads of books, Prime Selidie sat enthroned in her chair of state, her delicate shoulders regaled in the purple mantle and scarlet-edged robes of high office. No servant came to build up the fire, though lights for reading still burned in the incense-soaked air. The disgraced initiate was kept standing, bolt upright and trembling with fright as she realized her coming interrogation would be impelled through the matrix of a major focus crystal: a gruelling review that entrained thought and mind, and forced past event into present recall. Such intimate analysis was no choice of the subject's, but a forced subjugation of character, made under the absolute terms of the Prime's claim to oath-bound obedience.

  The Skyron aquamarine was unveiled for the task, frigidly blue as faceted ice, and as unpleasant to handle; the same jewel, once used to query Elaira, when she had been exposed for her budding attachment to Arithon s'Ffalenn. Then, as now, Lirenda clasped the enabled stone between her bare hands. The waves of dire cold raised by its active field punched her skin into gooseflesh and needled her nerves. That whip-lash discomfort concerned her far less than her nettled aristocrat's pride: unlike the past trial that harrowed Elaira, this testing was not conducted under the ritual formality reserved for oathbreaking. The Matriarch administered the questions herself. Lirenda was not honoured as the titled Inquisitor. No more the cosseted, superior favourite, groomed to inherit prime power, she was not charged to wield the tuned matrix directly. Instead, her person was fused into the link, made to serve as both reed and sounding-board for the Prime's stripping analysis.

  As bearer, not master, Lirenda suffered the probe of each question, inducted through crystal. While the miscreant subject sweated under the throes of involuntary reliving, Lirenda also expressed the experience, down to gut-level reaction. Each sordid response became as her own, drawn from the intransigent girl. Tonight's examination carried no heady rush of dominant power, no private thrill of excitement. Instead, the loss of autonomy remade the ordeal into raw degradation.

  No escape existed. The teasing, lustful affray in the hospice tent sprang out of concupiscence. Sickened to trembling, Lirenda suffered the wrenching brunt: an exchange nothing like the lyric affair of the heart that had seeded Elaira's rebellious affection. This raging obsession for sex overturned her ordered mind and rampaged through her virgin's senses. She quickened, then quivered, inflamed by desire, until she felt engorged and sullied.

  The process bore on, unending, while Selidie conducted her methodical inquiry. 'And how did you touch him?'

  A flood of tactile sensation became her heated hands, eagerly fondling forbidden flesh underneath a bed-sheet. The trapped spirit engaged as the proxy witness shivered in mute protest under the relentless onslaught.

  'Hold!' The sudden command shattered the entrainment, channelled from the subjugated novice. Hands clenched to the Skyron crystal by reflex, Lirenda reeled, whip-lashed back into the severed awareness of her chill seat in the pavilion, with its scent of stale incense ribboned across the candle-lit dais and cavernous gloom.

  Against that stilled back-drop came movement and noise: a senior enchantress had dared to enter and risk interruption. While the released novice swayed upon buckling knees, the cloaked arrival curtseyed in rushed obeisance and delivered her breathless report.

  'My Prime, as your will commands. The enchantress posted on lane watch has detected the signature energy evoked by our order's conjury. The signal is the one you predicted, arisen from inside the s'Brydion citadel.'

  Unremarked listener, Lirenda was jolted to riveted interest. This reference applied to initiate Elaira, and the glaring urgency of the Prime's machination to entrap the last Prince of Rathain.

  'The signature trace has been carefully shielded,' the senior disclosed in crisp recitation. 'We needed meticulous care to be certain. But the resonant ciphers driving the power originate from the sisterhood.'

  Selidie's porcelain-doll features seldom showed an expression. The wrapped hands in her lap never moved. But the gleam that sharpened her pellucid eyes shot a flickering charge across the Skyron matrix's active focus. Lirenda sensed also the elated thrill that made her Prime pounce on the news.

  The novice set under disciplinary questioning may retire to closed quarters' Selidie ruled, abrupt beyond etiquette. 'Let the miscreant stay in solitude and consider the gravity of her transgression.' Lest the senior initiate should presume to linger, the next order destroyed the least opening. 'Madam, you will serve as the girl's punitive escort, as well as stay on as her warden. On your way, make sure that the watch is informed. On no account should anyone else broach my privacy until leave is given.'

  'Your will. Matriarch.' The elderly peeress bent in compliance, sulky, since the assignment insulted her station and rank. Worse, the shaken novice required support, not yet able to walk unassisted.

  Lirenda regarded the pair's weaving departure, perversely glad not to have been dismissed, if her role as Prime Selidie's puppet made her party to Arithon's downfall. More rapid instructions rousted the boy page by the ante-room doorway. He returned, scurrying, with the small coffer stored in the Matriarch's day chest.

  The Skyron aquamarine was kept enabled, but relegated to a bronze tripod, while Lirenda's dexterity was pressed to unfasten the chest's warded locks and bronze latches.

  'Lay bare the contents' Selidie demanded. 'But take utmost care! Shield your direct touch as you remove the covering.'

  A crystal, then, would be wrapped in the silk. Lirenda peeled the cloth back, unsurprised to encounter the silver chain and quartz pendant that served in rapport with Elaira. The jewel's linked matrix was active, as well. Engaged with the distant enchantress's working, its raised field whispered tingles over Lirenda's sensitized skin. Just how any junior initiate could wield power without her attuned focus in hand presented a piquant mystery. The feat should be impossible. Lirenda still sweated the harrowing memory, when one of Arithon's arrogant henchmen had stolen her personal crystal. She had never felt more helpless and humiliated, until her current state of disgrace. Yet no chance was given to study Elaira's singular prowess.

  'Our bait draws on her initiate heritage at long last!' The Prime's avid excitement rivalled the cat that measured a mouse-hole for movement. 'Lirenda! You will take up the Skyron focus, again. Search through its kept record and establish rapport through Elaira's vow of obedience. I would tie into her current activity through the matrix of her crystal pendant. Since my subsequent working will be framed through yours, I need a clear line for my purpose. Grant that for me. Absorb the emotional dross through the link we just used to screen the miscreant novice.'

  Lirenda could not escape the imperative to take up the Skyron focus. Puppet to the Prime Matriarch's whim, she submerged for the second engagement: found and locked into Elaira's self-signature, indelibly stamped by the order's oath of obedience. That binding permitted the entry for Lirenda to key into the focal point of the personal quartz that the order held hostage. Concentration had to be forced, inflamed as she was by aroused lust from the acts of the flutter-brained novice. Never her own mistress, body or mind, Lirenda did as directed, and enabled the cleared channel for the Prime's will.

  The dizzying plunge from the familiar came after, as separate awareness spiralled under and drowned in the well of an altered perception. This time, no feat of endurance prepared her. Even the most rigorous course of
experience failed to shield Lirenda's stripped nerves from the glorious havoc . . .

  * * *

  . . . where matched love fabricated a consummate grace, traced to light by a masterbard's music, Dakar stood watch and guard from the side-lines. He had not been idle, since Arithon's word released him from the active circle. His by-standing work had tidied the chamber, then cleared the hazed residue of violent death. The fallen were settled outside the shut door. Talvish would turn the wrapped bodies over for mourning, should relatives come to collect them. No other intrusion could cross the locked threshold. Studded oak had been barred, then warded.

  Now, Dakar held his post with an unblinking stare, apprehensive beyond imagining. The moment had long since passed to turn back. Man and Masterbard, Arithon had engaged every faculty to bind the perilous conjury wrought by Elaira.

  The constructs that sheltered Sidir's aware essence were in place, and the irrevocable course for his healing, already in motion. Night and darkness outside all but ceased to exist. Under the force of raised power, the enclosing walls seemed to shimmer. Mage-sight could discern the latticed geometry, where the subtle protections caused staid stone to sing in sympathetic vibration. Inside, the shadowy forms of the furnishings loomed dense as ink on the outskirts. Against the cold quiet, the guard rings shone gold, as the difficult working unfolded. The killing sword had been drawn by degrees. An acrid taint of cautery lingered, coiled in the blued smoke that drifted through the configured blaze: which was the actualized power, made manifest through the Masterbard's gift, to lift dissonance back into harmony.

  Dakar shivered with awe. What he witnessed exhausted all marvels.

  Sidir's withdrawn spirit slept, secured in comfort, while the Koriani enchantress laboured to mend his riven body.

  Though depleted, the spellbinder was not muddled or drunk. The charged weaving that stitched through the air, and his brief activity had begun to sober his faculties. If he dared not help, his trained awareness could follow the flow of energy, overlaid pattern on pattern. Such dreadfully intricate, dynamic complexity never forgave a mistake. The restoration of organs and internal tissue that Elaira ventured, barehanded, left him dry-mouthed with anxiety.

  For the template that nurtured life was left flickering and drained, or else severed outright by damage. Unerring, her touch traced the structural tears, though the track that she followed was thin as a filament, frayed by patches of darkness. Time and again, her skill faltered, lost. The aching pause followed. She listened, poised in seeking silence: holding the ragged gap until the exacting response from the lyranthe could find and key the lost intonation. Where sound answered, revitalized light bloomed again. Slow as agony, each sequence refigured the conduits where nerve and sinew had weakened past holding the imprint that sourced Sidir's Name. One note played false would distort the faint matrix. One mis-stepped rhythm would snarl the harmonic balance off true.

  One strand at a time, as the ephemeral web was played back to glittering life, Elaira's precision anchored the restoration, defying entropy through the ciphers taught by Koriathain: force drawn from the collective pool of intent, reined into existence by oath-tied sacrifice, and amplified through a crystal matrix.

  Dakar held no illusions. The practice upset his digestion.

  'A morbid transmission' Asandir's patient teaching had explained, long years past on a moonlit hill-side. 'The sisterhood's binding oath forges the transfer of willed choice through constriction. This form of consent always freezes the moment. It anchors, and stops natural expression through movement. Not like a blood-tie, which threads through the essence of Name and draws renewed flow from true being. The promise that affirms the initiate sister stakes life. A fixed structure can never be made to flex. It cannot breathe to admit the spark of unbounded consciousness. Both forms may be reversed, or revoked, if correct steps are observed to unshackle them. But the rigid ones always leave scarring damage, sometimes grave enough to impair survival. . .'

  A split hair, Dakar had dismissed at the time, too scattered by his hectic thinking. Now, sweating in the sealed room, he observed the same concept, enacted. As Elaira stapled the rips in shorn tissue, he saw the black ribbon of dissonant power, sucked through the placed frame of the cipher: a draining tide, that pulled essence from other life and stamped a hard template for change.

  The drawing surge scoured his back-lashed nerves, a wrongness that rekindled his nausea. Dakar repressed his instinct to flinch. The risk ran too steep, that a sanctioned crown prince might fall under sway of an oath of debt to the order. Posted as Arithon's trusted defender, the Mad Prophet dared not look away.

  And there, his stunned eyes watched the miracle happen, as the bard's line of melody captured the sinister threading. Arithon's counter-measure lilted a phrase, evoking a fair, sweetened resonance. Music lifted into a soaring appeal that commanded an answering cry of renewal. Elaira's enchained cipher throbbed, then burned, annealed by white fire into transformation. Dakar watched, spellbound, as the Masterbard's art refigured the oppressive enchantment: captured the framework, unerring, and rescribed his beloved's intent to serve wholeness. Intrepid, his bright harmony sustained until the stricture blazed clean, transmuted to joy through free partnership.

  Sidir's hurt flesh would heal. Not through the chained power of Koriani design, but by intimate love, gifted by an inspired spirit, that dared the unknown to match limitless heart with brave effort.

  Time remained the enemy. Shock had to be settled, and blood loss restored, before the cauterized lung could be reforged in synchronicity with Sidir's being. The enchantress's delicate concentration must not slip. Nor might the bard's fingering fail to match the brilliance of her human focus. The blaze of contained forces swept the shut room, raised sound ringing octave upon octave, until stone and wood trembled to the waves of unseen harmonics. Exhaustion could destroy in one moment all of the night's hard-fought progress. Elaira toiled onward, cranked taut under strain.

  She recognized the looming abyss, before Sidir's traumatized flesh could be stabilized. His vitality ebbed still. The trickling loss might be too great to stem before the tide turned and the body began to recover. This wounding was mortal, far more extensive than the mangled forearm, restored for the stricken young fisherman in Merior.

  Dakar found himself weeping. The striving that staved off total failure wrung him dizzy from holding his breath.

  The moment was cruel for the hostile move engendered by Selidie Prime. Mage-sight detected the taint, a soundless shadow of outside invasion slipped through the immaculate conjury. Elaira noticed the shift straightaway. A shudder swept through her. She dared not glance up, or seek the bard's notice, even in speechless appeal. The disruption inflicted by oath-bound priority could not be broached: not without risking the grace in the harmony that balanced the power between them.

  But as witness and guardian, Dakar dared not abide. His obligation to Fellowship interests compelled him, despite risk to Sidir. 'Your Grace, you have an observer!'

  But whether as mage, or master musician, Arithon s'Ffalenn needed no warning. He chose not to cut off the contact, or abandon the liegeman thrown deeper in jeopardy. With dreadful delicacy, he rose to the challenge and altered his playing to compensate. He added another line, at a whisper, to the fine harmony laid down for healing: a descant theme of close caring, that nipped and darted in playful counterpoint.

  Dakar listened, amazed. The primary composition had not been disturbed. Still, the progression was wholly Sidir's. Only now, the bard built on a love for three daughters, brought up to an independent maturity. Extreme sensitivity adjusted a whole chord: captured the rare, open-handed admiration for the woman who had preferred their raising at Fallowmere, in their father's absence. Interleaved, as well, was the settled male strength that now cherished

  Feithan, and longed for the peace of a traditional marriage. The Masterbard deftly embellished those subtleties above the steadfast foundation.

  Only now, the song made as anchor to sa
lvage a friend also plucked at the heartstrings of the furtive listener ...

  ... the effect on Lirenda was lightning, on thunderbolt. Everything her starved spirit had never known - the matchless love of Arithon's partnership, interlaced with Elaira's unbounded regard; the protective tenderness and quiet pride that inflected Sidir's sterling character; the matchless poignancy, sprung from sharp loss, in his constancy through Feithan's mourning - all the human caring and trust that Lirenda had shoved aside in her grasping pursuit of power now flooded her exposed awareness. She plunged headlong: into a range of exalted experience that her proscribed existence could never own.

  Already stripped, she had no escape. Lirenda became as the mote seared by fire while the might of the Skyron crystal noosed her subjective awareness.

  The dart struck, where no reason might shield the emotional impact. The longing that savaged her broke strength and sanity: sparked the unmerciful heat that remained, unreleased, from her prior linkage with the scapegrace novice.

  Lirenda gasped, riven. The iron bond of her Prime Matriarch's subjugation could not stay her response as she shattered . . .

  . . . while another, maintaining strict watch at Alestron, observed the dynamic unfoldment: Dakar also witnessed, as Lirenda's reserve exploded beyond containment. For one hanging instant, the shocked pattern blazed as a beacon, torched into wild conflagration. Elaira shuddered, rocked by the wave, while again, the bard stretched in improvised fury to compensate. For one, shining moment, the healing was there, etched in omnipresent, cold fire: the ciphers to channel Sidir's recovery also offered the counterpoint pattern to unleash Lirenda's rebirth from love's starvation.

  Yet Prime Selidie lurked, poised as the stilled spider. Her meddling reach was made to extend through the weave wrought for Sidir's recovery. As Lirenda's poise snapped, the Matriarch imposed her overarching directive and engaged the master sigil that commanded all oathsworn initiates, with the power of death over life.