by Janny Wurts
Arithon!
She sensed him, there, alive and still enraptured. Her yearning spirit reached out to him. First touch, and the tearing sweetness of the chord he experienced ripped down her nerves like white fire. The danger, once started, could not be reversed: that she might not withstand the unbearable edge. Surrender to ecstatic union too far, and she might slip the casing of her borrowed flesh. Lose her tenuous grip in the lane tides at Athir, and she would be swept away, swirled into immersion along with him, there to die entranced to forgetfulness . . .
* * *
Dakar's pealed outburst passed unheard in the torrent. 'Don't try!' he warned Talvish. No hand could reach the twined couple, now. The blast of the flux current would hurl even the strongest man off his feet. Every mind in proximity was reeling, all but stunned into black-out unconsciousness as harmonic forces shimmered towards peak.
Sethvir, at Althain, must be aware. If the Sorcerer heard, the torrent that razed through his earth-sense did not prompt any saving assistance.
Were the Koriani servers still entrained, they would be deafened and blinded. No Matriarch's reach could command the unleashing power that fired the flux. Her most potent sigils would become ripped asunder, undone by torrential harmony.
At the centre-pin of the gyre, the choice was unmalleable. Break the cascade, and flesh would burn, wracked skin from bone by chaotic disruption. Or allow the event its unbridled, full course, and let the two spirits entwined at the focus become swept beyond reach past the veil.
'We are losing them both!' Dakar cried in despair.
He could do nothing, nothing at all! Only watch, aggrieved, while white light and sound rocked into keening crescendo. Joined at the crux, Elaira and Arithon now led the storm that must release a shower of bright exaltation. Unstoppable force, as the star song entangled with the exploding flare that annealed the land circle at Athir. Joined under such influence, a crown prince and mate would enact a royal conception. Rathain's need would bear fruit as due consequence. But at such a cost, the brave heart could not contemplate; nor could thought lament, or seer's talent shift the course of that frightening flash-point...
The crone at Sanpashir alone did not falter. The time and the hour had been her kept charge, since her affirmation as keeper of Mother Dark's Chosen. Her word aimed the might fashioned by her male singers for release at the tingling crest Into the burn of wild forces at Athir, while the lane tide scorched towards peak, the tribe's revered eldest unleashed the full-throated cry that called down the wisdom of Biedar tribe's hallowed ancients. Into the listening pause that ensued, across a gap, torn through time, she also hurled her bold appeal to the Warden at Althain Tower.
'I choose to call in Anshlien'ya's debt!'
Hope's promise, now reclaimed, from another, prior conception enacted five hundred years in the past. When, as an act done in free consent, spun under the influence of the tribes' singing, a young maid who had been the last-born of s'Dieneval's prophets had crossed her blood-line with Shand's royal heritage.
Dari s'Ahelas had sprung from that night's union, and young love, in the heat of Sanpashir's black sands.
Let Sethvir dare to deny the Biedar their right to influence tonight's culmination! The Fellowship Sorcerers would yield their fierce claim. Due answer was owed, far what the desert tribe had granted at the behest of the Ilitharis Guardians: a bright light for the future, and continuance for a kingdom, when Shand's crown succession had been the inheritance facing sure threat of extinction.
Where Sethvir gave naught but cold silence at Athir, the Biedar crone received the sweet gratitude of his release. 'Madam, I daresay I have little choice but to bow to your foresight on all counts.'
The crone chuckled, amused. Her grasp stayed firm on the matrix of power that arrested the trembling moment. 'You have seen where this leads as Athera's caretaker?'
Sethvir sighed. 'Not all. But enough. I will have to accept the bitter-sweet sorrow for what your kind must ask of me.'
The crone narrowed her eyes. Experienced beyond knowing, she never left the least thread of doubt under question. 'Swear your bond now on behalf of your Fellowship.'
'My oath rests, that the father must never hear of the birth, or acknowledge the daughter delivered from this night's mating.' Sethvir's courage was adamant. 'You would not intervene, but through dire necessity.'
The Biedar eldest inclined her white head. While the winds sang over the trackless dunes, and her singers wove skeins of ephemeral light through the gleam of night's constellations, she whispered the one truth she had to balance the Sorcerer's harrowed decision. 'This child shall come to spare her father, one day, dispossessed of his knowledge of her paternity'
In his fast eyrie at Althain Tower, Sethvir's distanced eyes welled over. Tears streaked his worn face. He answered aloud to the same winter stars that shone through his eastern casement. 'Then, madam, I beg that you ask for such grace. In free will, by her royal gift of compassion, let Arithon's daughter choose for herself when the time comes to shoulder her fate.'
The crone's wrinkled smile was gentle. 'Caretaker! We are the sworn enemy of the Koriathain, and never the same, to wield arcane power as unscrupulous tyrants! This child, conceived under the old Biedar cipher, will bear the endowment of our tribal ancestry. She will not arrive breathing, except by consent! Witness my given word! The path walked by the daughter of Mother Dark's Chosen will stay impeccably true, and quite fearless. Let her raising begin as Dari's, under your own peerless guardianship.'
'For her father's life's sake, then, her life path is yours,' Sethvir whispered, saddened. 'Kept under the Balance, our ends are the same. Proceed with my blessing.'
The crone opened her hands. The forces held captive rushed into release. As an arrow shot flaming through the crested surge unleashed by the confluence at Athir, the convergent array of multiple futures resolved into one, with the legacy claimed by the Biedar ancients threading the consummate breach.
A net of gold light unfurled through the cipher Elaira had enacted to share Glendien's flesh.
The binding held true to the cloth of its origin. The enchantress whose intent had reforged the old template stayed entrained by that untarnished thread. Lost to herself, she was not beyond reach of the wisdom that guarded the annals of a mighty tradition. Enraptured by the strains of the star song, entwined with the essence of Arithon, Elaira knew only the strength of her love, while the wrought design of Biedar tribe's making unfurled, then surrounded, and granted the grace of benevolent shielding.
Black-out followed the deluging blast, an unconsciousness deep beyond knowing to shelter the fragile flame of mortality. Elaira's exhausted awareness stayed veiled while the blaze of ancestral protection enfolded her being. She was spiralled down, gently. In silence tenacious as her fierce passion, the consciousness of her beloved was also swept out of entrancement. Realigned under the bliss of grand confluence, anchored into the land by his crown tie of attunement, Arithon's strayed spirit became annealed back into his forgotten flesh.
Where he could not have stayed, too long sundered from reason, the wise of the Biedar sang of an ineffable wholeness. Their healing secured the shocked fields of his aura as the surging crest waned, then coiled back towards quiescence. Since hours would pass before he recovered the stream of resurgent sensation, the desert tribe's elders spun him the solace of sleep. Cradled as though Named by a summoning, Arithon rested under the stars, and no longer enthralled in distanced splendour, scattered among them.
Winter 5671
Stymie
The exalted release just completed at Athir found Selidie Prime balked outright from her prized objective: Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn was not captive or dead. His talented child, of Elaira's conception, would not be born, or sealed under Koriani auspices. 'We've been thwarted! The babe whose future I engineered to acquire will be carried instead by an ignorant, free-wilds clanswoman!'
The Matriarch's astounded fury smashed through her coquette's poise. She erupted from her
seat by the fireside. Her tigerish step and shrill curses disrupted her circle of tranced seniors. A kick of her slippered foot sent two of them scrambling, out of her path.
The dim, curtained chamber, with its wealthy trappings and costly carpet, only heightened her caged agitation. Eyes snapping, Selidie quartered the space commandeered for her use, where the seventh lane's flow crossed through a mansion in the port town of Telzen. The merchant's wife whose claimed debt lent the room had an obsessive penchant for fripperies. A back-handed swipe of the Matriarch's crippled fist sent a glassware vase flying. The trinket smashed against the brick hearth.
Across the tinkling tumble of shards, the Prime muttered, 'Save us all!' This bitter defeat ran beyond inexcusable. One rebellious initiate's deviation from the steps of established practice had wrought a disastrous break! Principles influenced by Ath's adepts had opened the gateway to hamper the order's internal affairs. 'Elaira has aroused the sleeping might of our ancient enemy in Sanpashir!'
Dharkaron's hand on her! No miserable, cross-grained third-rank healer should have mattered enough to raise the attention of old Biedar power! Who could have foreseen such determined invention might thwart a reigning Prime Matriarch?
Selidie hammered a tapestry in frustration, the gemstones on her embroidered mitts glittering like lightning unleashed. 'Bedamned to the defection of Enithen Tuer!' And worse ill, to plague the lost Sorcerer Ciladis, whose prior meddling in the distant past had denied Koriathain their earlier bid to claim the issue of Meiglin s'Dieneval in the first place!
While Selidie fumed, raging over old scores, Lirenda sat silenced in passive constraint. She received no order to release her entrained state of tranced subservience. The elderly server bidden to serve as her Prime's eyes was compelled to maintain her rapt focus as well, her quartz sphere attuned to recapture the event on-going upon the sand point at Athir. Patient, she waited, plying her skills, while the Matriarch raved, and the white-out blaze of confluent energies subsided over the Paravian circle. Minutes passed by, before the flux stream calmed enough for trained talent to garner a stabilized image.
'Your will. Matriarch?' the seeress probed gently. 'I have regained sighted access to the seventh lane focus.'
Selidie paused, pale eyes darting with hope. 'Have we a single point of leverage left?'
The ranked senior sighed. 'Matriarch, none.' Her crisp recap confirmed the rife disappointment: "The feal liegeman still blocks the south quadrant.'
Selidie hissed through locked teeth. No use, to test that stubborn avenue further. All of Lirenda's usurped power, and every sigil to command binding influence had failed to move Talvish's character. Unassailable loyalty could not be suborned, or pushed by imbalance to sow errant havoc. Whatever coercion the Prime's seniors applied, the true liegeman's aura rejected the conjury slipped through the flux to entrap him.
'Our downfall, that the fellow has no insincere aspect for us to exploit.'
'Then use Parrien again!' Prime Selidie snapped. 'That ready pawn should succumb through his livid resentment towards Rathain's prince.'
'Your pardon. Matriarch.' The seeress sighed again in pressured distress. 'The s'Brydion brother has embraced a truthful regret. The latent channel once forged for our purpose has been closed by a healer's influence.'
'Elaira's doing,' Selidie snarled. Where had the chit found such strength, to release the hurt of a man whose crazed passion had nearly accomplished Arithon's murder? Fuming rage only mounted, as the dismal report kept unfolding. Elaira's adventurous spiritwalk had ended. She now rested, securely resettled within her own flesh.
'Asleep, even if you elect to recall her, or revise her orders through oathsworn obedience.' A slight pause, as the seeress hesitated.
'There's more?' Selidie kicked a carved footstool tumbling out of her path. 'Tell me!'
Head ducked, hands laced to still her scared trembling, the seeress delivered the last snagging detail. 'The Biedar weaving has unravelled your inset sigil of conception. We cannot shift the course of our current reversal. The protective veil raised by the desert tribe's ancients will not release Athir's focus until after Prince Arithon's waking. If you wish to command Elaira's return, you must dispatch a galley across Vaststrait to collect her.'
Pushed to the end of resourceful machination, Selidie lashed out again. An enamel bowl sailed, clanging into the wall, to a chipped scatter of plaster. 'And Glendien? What about the clan tart borrowed through consent as surrogate?'
But the server's list remained unremitting. 'Awake as well. Taken into Dakar's direct custody' No need to belabour the unpleasant fact, that a Fellowship spellbinder of Asandir's making would grasp the scope of her rights as a mother with child by royal descent.
Selidie wheeled in livid explosion. 'To our ruin!' How much had Davien the Betrayer foreseen, when he had insisted the fire-brand snip of a wife should accompany Kyrialt's liege-bound course to Alestron? Worse, the feckless young widow could never be touched! The Sorcerers would shelter both mother and babe: a daughter bred for a peerless rogue talent, made and meant to be claimed under oath of debt and subject to Koriathain! 'Show me something to mitigate this accursed day!'
But the seeress had no further angle to pursue. Worse, the gloating triumph behind Lirenda's eyes all but mocked the Prime's sore ignominy. Of all initiate witnesses, the fallen favourite alone dared to smirk as the grandiose plan spun through years of conspiracy collapsed into savourless dust. Only Lirenda knew of the ruinous augury Morriel once had garnered through the Great Waystone: the latent danger - not yet defused! - that named Arithon s'Ffalenn as the living cipher who could sunder the Koriani Prime's hope of succession.
Unaware such a massive threat darkened the future, or that Lirenda burned yet for the chance to wrest back her forfeited access to rank, the dutiful seeress gestured over the image captured in her attuned quartz. 'My Prime, if you would engage the Great Waystone -'
'Silence!' Selidie smothered the raced seethe of her blood. She was utterly hobbled, as Lirenda knew also, with fullest demeaning embarrassment! The amethyst focus, which could have enabled a stand against Biedar power, was still wretchedly infested by an errant iyat. No one else was aware of that plaguing mess, inflicted by Arithon after the misplayed attempt to use Feylind against him. Until means could be found to excise the fiend, the order's supreme tool of mastery remained compromised.
Selidie whirled and stalked back to her chair, molten magma quenched to white ice. Today's board had been swept! Naught else could be done but keep cold watch and wait: poise like the spider, and spin a new web, seeking for means to try fresh intervention.
'This round might be finished,' the Prime Matriarch declared, her barbed malice aimed towards the stilled well of cold no one other than she could discern: the rankling affront, lurking in the room's corner through brazen, unbearable nerve! That Luhaine's invasive presence should come prying drove the day's toll of insult and injury beyond pardon.
Selidie spat venom between her spare lines. 'But at what cost, the Sorcerer's victory?' Ruined hands tucked in her violet skirts, she glared at the Fellowship shade with fierce hatred. 'As I live and breathe, mark my warning! After Arithon's daughter is born, the Seven had best watch her back night and day, and defend her with unbroken vigilance!'
Luhaine's sole response to the poisonous threat was departure, at thought's speed, for Athir. The next instant, the seeress's quartz sphere went dark, its scried image doused blank by his warding influence.
Winter 5671
Dawn-light
While daybreak infuses the focus at Athir, Luhaine engages the tide of the lane force and transports Glendien to safe refuge at Althain Tower; and while Dakar remains to keep guard at the ruin, he knows his part in the past night's events have severed a trust, and that his service to Rathain's crown prince has ended in favour of resuming his former apprenticeship . . .
At Alestron, the drums boom as the war host turns out in resplendent panoply to send off the state galley bearing the Divine P
rince; and as the flagship's flotilla embarks, unimpeded, for a return to Tysan to succour Avenor, Sulfin Evend retains full command of the siege as the avatar's voice for the Light. . .
Restored to shelter inside the Second Age ruin, now flushed with resurgent life, Arithon s'Ffalenn wakes under Talvish's guard, wrapped in blankets alongside Elaira; unaware of the crisis that passed in the night, content in the grace of her presence, he winds her sleeping form in his arms and pillows his face in her perfumed hair . . .
Winter 5671
XVI. Scarpdale
When Seshkrozchiel took flight to challenge the spectre ensconced in the barrens of Scarpdale, her course did not traverse time and distance.
Such bounds did not limit the remnant dreams, when a great drake died unrequited. Neither did a living dragon's perception own any concept for warding or barriers. Form could be made and unmade on a whim. The perception of the world's eldest beings acknowledged no linear beginning and knew no idea for a finite ending.
Seshkrozchiel engaged will to encompass the ranging echoes raised by the haunt's vivid yearnings. The vortex spun by its seething restlessness drove her wing-beats across a shifting montage of dreamscape. She accepted the raging discharge at first as whole cloth: whether stilled, moonlit forest, or hail-pelting storm front, or unfolded valley of volcanic cinder, steaming with the mineral geysers that drake kind preferred to polish their scales. Seshkrozchiel gathered in the streaming emanation that loomed ephemeral thought to full-bodied creation, then altered and remapped the framework to restore Scarpdale's disrupted symmetry.
For Davien, whose presence lodged in her left pupil, the effect was to watch the ground under her wing strokes pale like dye rinsed by flood from a tapestry. Scarpdale had been laid waste since Athera's antiquity, an upland plateau scarred into a barrens when two rival drakes had done furious battle. The vales that summer would mantle in wildflowers now wore wind-swept brown grass and scrub thorn. Chill streamlets meandered, scabbed by winter ice, their stony banks clumped with skeletal trees.