Master of Whitestorm

by Janny Wurts

  It struck the monster in the center of its eye and stabbed on through to the brain.

  The great wings clapped down in spasm. Primaries whipped and closed an arc that sheared up snow from the slope. Ice crystals whirled like smoke, and the beak clashed closed with a crack. Korendir flung himself flat. The crossbow dropped from his hand. Steel fell, turning in rhythmic flashes, lost into shadow as the Corrigon crashed against the peak.

  Feathers crumpled and snapped, and scales grated shrilly over stone. The body of the monster hit with a thud of burst bones against slate, and also the vulnerable, exposed, and helpless human body that comprised the measure of its bane.

  Korendir of Whitestorm took the brunt of the Corrigon's fall. Hammered into rock by the force of momentum and mass, he was smashed and then ripped from his hold. The slain beast rebounded and tumbled, a crushed mass of sable and scarlet. Like a mote, the man fell with it.

  "Neth," choked Dalon. "Oh great Neth."

  Numbly Echend drew his dagger and scratched a cross of shame over the tattoo on his forehead. His blood ran, fell in drops on stainless snow, while far below, a great evil and a tragic loss plunged in a shared rush of air toward the distant valley.

  One had time to remember that Korendir of Whitestorm had not failed this, his final contract.

  Fhingold crumpled with his cheek against ice and wept. Blind with tears, overcome with sadness and a conflicting release of joy too overpowering to deny in the same moment, he was the only one of the three who missed the searing flash. Light ripped out of nowhere and obliterated the smaller of two falling rags of black.

  When the disturbance cleared, the corpse of the Corrigon tumbled alone to final impact.

  * * *

  The horrified scream of the midwife echoed over the wind-battered towers of Whitestorm. Waiting with his guts clenched in tension, Haldeth recoiled against the balustrade that headed the stair beyond the lady's chambers. Sorcery burned like a beacon from the slit beneath the door; dazzled, sweating, and harrowed by unnatural dread, Haldeth could bear ignorance no more. Knowing surely was better than this shredding, tormented strain. He unhooked the latch and flung wide the chamber door.

  Chaos met him, a confusion of searing light, shot through with steam from basins that brimmed with heated water. The midwife screamed again, and someone, possibly Orame, snapped out a reprimand to quiet her. From the far side of the place where the bed should be—Haldeth strained to see through the hedging brilliance of sorceries—a child hiccoughed and wailed.

  Someone arose with a bundle that squirmed amid bloodied sheets. Confused by contradictions of brightest light and bleak shadow, Haldeth hurried forward and tripped.

  His fall threw him headlong into a spell-circle woven by sorcerers, just as the counterbalance to the miracle of Ithariel's early birthing flashed and achieved full fruition.

  "We have him!" cried Dethmark's newmade Archmaster. He rose from the dark in one corner and raised hands that seemed rinsed with white light.

  The floor flooded with illumination that swelled for a heartbeat and faded. Ordinary candleflame remained to reveal a bundle, sprawled on a carpet still traced like a battleground with runes and sigils of spent power.

  Haldeth blinked. As his aching eyes adjusted, he made out a jacket of sables sewn skin side out, and sodden scarlet; then a wisp of bronze hair. Korendir. His clothes were raked into ribbons, the flesh beneath not spared; his chest was ripped through with jagged white ends of bone. His sword hand was a bruised mess of pulp, and his legs. . . .

  Haldeth shut his eyes against sight and his lips against an uprush of sickness.

  But friendship compelled him not to run. Numbly, the smith shuddered upright. He clawed forward with intent to fetch blankets. Somebody had to veil the wretched mess on the floor from the wife still weakened from childbirth.

  And yet solicitude occurred too late. Already Ithariel inquired in tired words from the bed.

  "Quickly!" shouted Orame.

  Someone began to sing. Her clear tones were matched by others, and enchantments arose once again. The resonant powers of the White Circle burned higher and flared through the chamber like flame.

  Haldeth forced open stinging eyes. He beheld Korendir's face, still perfect and undamaged. Gray eyes matched his gaze with a look of searching clarity. The lips, very blue, struggled without breath to frame sound.

  "Let them know." Korendir fought through a wilderness of pain to be understood. "Corrigon slain. For the sake of the children of Arrax. Tell Nix that his breathren—"

  Haldeth squeezed the fingers of the left, the sound hand, and nodded through a wretched ache of helplessness. "They'll know," he assured. No more could he force through the pressure that closed his throat. Through a scalding rise of tears, he watched the man whose unique abilities had seen him free of slavery turn and seek the woman on the bed. Korendir's failing eyesight encompassed the form of a beloved face, then abandoned the light of the living.

  "We can still save him," insisted Orame. Light shone steadily between his fingers and traced the scene dazzlingly blue. "Ithariel, call his name."

  The Lady of Whitestorm responded as if in a daze. Propped in a nest of crumpled pillows, flushed yet from the exertion of childbirth, she encompassed the lacerated flesh that rested loose-limbed on her floor. One moment she looked, then averted her eyes and shook her head. "What would you be calling him back to?"

  Orame regarded her, wordless. And the spells he held poised for instant action faded and flickered out between his palms. He waited a still moment, then nodded. Around him, the enchanters broke their circle of concentration and filed in silence for the door.

  "No!" Haldeth's protest pealed out over resignation and set the newborn crying. Into the gathering dark, he pleaded in hoarse-voiced desperation. "His wife and two children, are they not enough?"

  Ithariel regarded him sadly. Her eyes, so like crystal, more than ever seemed to reflect those depths and mysteries the smith had never grasped. Gently, the enchantress let him down. "We were always enough, Haldeth. That's why my beloved went against the Corrigon, and why, if he returned, he would leave us when they asked for him again."

  "I don't understand." Haldeth crashed a fist against his thigh. "Who in Aerith would dare ask? After this, who could ever argue he'd earned his peace?"

  But the lady did not seem to hear; Orame, whose tireless work had accomplished all for this bitterest surrender, answered for her. "He would, of himself, master smith. Since Shan Rannok, Korendir has never been other than driven by his gift of compassion."

  Shivering with long, incongruously fine fingers cooling between his hands, Haldeth drew breath to offer protest: life itself was justification enough, never mind the legacy due the children left a parentless inheritance at Whitestorm.

  But Orame stopped the smith with a glance like winter frost. "Could you have Lindey and your two girls back, would you, if they lived knowing fate must repeat itself? They never suffered the cruelties of survival after murder. Would you teach them your fears, entangled in reaction to memories you could never forget, but only master?"

  Haldeth gasped as if he had been kicked.

  Unnoticed above him on the bed, he did not see the Lady of Whitestorm raise welcoming eyes toward the doorway left open at his back.

  XXVIII. Epitaph

  Ithariel's fingers unwound from the sheets wadded up in her hands. The ruined flesh that stained the weave of her carpet in one heartbeat ceased to have meaning. Sorrow transformed, and mourning absolved, for he awaited her in the shadow past the threshold.

  Korendir still wore black. That could never change, not now; but his face was smiling in an unselfconscious bliss that had never been his throughout life. His eyes were very clear and wide. Like the open sea, or sky at summer dawn, Ithariel thought. An upwelling surge of affection made her push impatiently at blankets that suddenly seemed to burden her like shackles.

  "Are you coming with me, beloved?" Korendir raised two unblemished hands. A hint
of purest mischief suffused his expression as he tilted his head. "We had a wager, and you lost, I think."

  Ithariel laughed. She slipped from the sheets and stepped onto a floor that was not cold, and did not run with fresh blood. She ran one step, two, and the pain of a difficult childbirth fell behind her. In the doorway she threw herself into the arms of her husband. For the first time she could remember on his return from campaign, she did not bash her hip on his sword hilt as he lifted her strongly and spun her.

  "She is Shayna, after your foster mother," Ithariel whispered, naming the daughter that his love and Orame's determination had bequeathed them. Though the emptied body that remained on the bed was forgotten in the ecstasy of reunion, her words were heard by a white-haired smith and a dark, weary enchanter. These left the comfort of an orphaned newborn to the midwife. In homage they closed the woman's eyes. Then they knelt before the mangled remains of a legend and wept for grief.

  * * *

  The White Circle built a tower for them, of the native quartz that veined the cliffs on White Rock Head. When the structure stood completed, the wizards fused the blocks with the combined brilliance of their powers. Ithariel's wardstone they reset into a beaten gold cradle at the top, above a name plaque forged by the dwarves. The memorial faced the western sea and reflected the sun like a beacon for mariners bound for ports to the south and north. The children, Callin and Shayna, Haldeth raised at Whitestorm under the carping supervision of Megga. As adults they would choose whether they wished to claim apprenticeship with the White Circle masters at Dethmark.

  But ten years after the date engraved on the capstone, on the eve when the elder of two grown apprentices celebrated marriage, it was not the children of Whitestorm that Haldeth thought of when he retired beneath the tower with a bottle of Faen Hallir's best wine. The old smith set his shoulders against the stone, which somehow on the chilliest nights never seemed to harbor cold. He listened to the repetitive boom of the breakers and regarded the stars and drank, while the young and the invited guests from Heddenton feasted and celebrated in the bailey.

  Haldeth thought of the pair just married, the flush of young love and innocent anticipation of joy; as always when the wine softened his guard, he fell into recollection of his family. The anger and the grief never left him, that two daughters murdered by Mhurgai should never know feasting and marriage.

  The smith snorted wryly to himself. All his days he had berated Korendir for fleeing the nightmares of the past.

  Shayna and Callin remained; and a grouchy old smith who finally admitted that his obsession for quiet had bought loneliness. He had suffered Mhurgai slavery rather than die, and shunned what he called useless risk. In the end, he endured, but never recovered courage to forget. He could not even bed a whore without being haunted by the screams, two daughters and a wife butchered wholesale.

  Haldeth took a pull from the bottle. The wine warmed his mouth, and settled a glow in his gut, but on this night the alcohol hoarded its magic. His maudlin mood would not lift. He wondered whether the children grown to maturity at Arrax remembered the name of the man who had saved them. For the relief expedition had gone on to cross the Hyadons and deliver their hard won supplies. Echend, for honor, had personally sailed back to Whitestorm to bring word. From his people he left a sigil stone to stand by Korendir's grave; the same slate marker that Haldeth employed for a seat, and which always seemed damp, never failing to aggravate his arthritis.

  The wine was nearly gone. Haldeth wedged the bottle between his knees and sighed. Years late, he sensed the irony of Whitestorm's legacy. Too old, he suspected that Korendir had transcended the nature that had killed him; at the end the mercenary from White Rock Head had found something more lasting than walls of impregnable stone. Growing aged within the shelter of towers that would never know ruin, Haldeth wished he had argued less hotly. Had he clung less to reason, and listened better to fear, the mystery might not have escaped him.

  He might have understood his closest friend.

  Haldeth raised his flask and belted down the bitter dregs. "I wish I knew your secret, you stubborn lunatic," he muttered to the empty dark. "I'll die one day, and I still won't."

  A step sounded on the stair which led to the tower. Haldeth started drunkenly and turned his head. "Who's there?"

  A wave broke loudly on the shore, obscuring the name the man returned. He was young, clad in a cloak of scarlet wool. Haldeth did not recognize the trappings, but the odd silhouette was a giveaway. The angled bulge of the instrument beneath the visitor's arm identified the young harper who had played in celebration for the wedding.

  "Wine's all gone, boy." Haldeth shrugged with unwarranted sharpness. "And sure's I'm here, there's not a young woman to kiss."

  The harper took gruffness in stride and sat on the moss that nobody had time to scrape from the merlons of the battlements. Without rancor, he said, "It's not a young woman I seek."

  Haldeth spun his empty bottle away. It skittered with a rattling clink and wedged beneath the gargoyle Callin had carved on his eleventh birthday. The thing had no beak, because the wood split, and the eyes were crooked as a thief's.

  The smith sighed, his mind still half in the past. "What then? I've got no ear for pretty notes."

  The harper reached out and touched the sealed stone of Korendir's tomb. "You knew him," he said softly. There was reverence in his tone.

  Haldeth raised his head. His untrimmed hair tousled in the breeze off the sea as he answered with rare honesty. "I didn't. I lived with him though, and often wished I hadn't." Grief seeped through his bitterness. Probably because of the wine; under his breath, Haldeth cursed the grapes of Faen Hallir.

  But the harper seemed not to hear.

  "I didn't come just to play for this wedding," he went on, as if Haldeth were listening and sober, and not thinking through his stupor that the boy seemed somehow familiar. The recognition both frightened and disturbed.

  At the smith's continued silence, the harper shrugged with sudden diffidence. "I was born in Arrax," he admitted. "The people of the town paid my passage. They sent me to make a ballad to commemorate the life and the deeds of Korendir, Master of Whitestorm."

  "You don't sound like an Arrax brat," Haldeth observed bluntly. "Every mountain born I ever saw had tattoos like women wear dresses."

  The boy's fingers drummed on his harp. He grinned without embarrassment and settled back against the tomb. "My mother wasn't native. She came from the coast just north of here, where she met my blood father. I learned when my step sire got drunk once that she'd been a sailor's doxie."

  "Black haired," Haldeth said quickly. "With dimples and a way with the cards. I knew one like that once." He did not add that she had left him and stolen with her one oversized cut glass ornament that once had adorned the figurehead of a Mhurgai galley. On this night, the memory was too painful.

  "Tell me about Korendir," urged the harper. "I want to know his adventures before he slew the Corrigon and saved Arrax and freed the dwarf slaves from the mines."

  The sea boomed and broke against the cliff base. Haldeth thought back to a time when ice floes had made a death trap of the harbor. After years of silence and a reputation for surly refusals, he decided on impulse to give in. If the children of High Kelair had not forgotten, perhaps he owed Korendir that much.

  "The Mhurgai took him prisoner," Haldeth said, for he knew no other way to start. "It should begin there."

  * * *

  The smith was hoarse by the time he finished. Cold sober now, and chilled despite the shelter of the tomb's enchanted stone, he sat and watched the sky brighten with dawn. By his side, still maddeningly fresh, the harper picked out his first stanzas. The boy had a gift for verse. If his melodies were a bit overdone, time and imperfect memory would smooth out the pompous ornamentation; the result might be poignant enough to survive.

  Haldeth shifted his stiffened frame as the sun slanted around the tower's base. He glanced aside at the harper, who was swarthy, a
nd frowning, intent in concentration over his strings. His tired fingers missed an easy note. He cursed, and the harp shifted. Light caught and splintered scarlet in the unwieldy jewel set in the boss by the tuning pegs.

  The square cut bauble was painfully, wretchedly familiar. There could never be more than two of them on this side of the ocean, not unless the Mhurgai forswore raids and stopped sailing.

  Haldeth placed a palm over his belt buckle, which held a matching stone. He interrupted the spill of music before he thought to hold his silence. "Where did you find that ruby?"

  The harper's hands flattened and stilled an arpeggio of plucked notes. "Ruby?" He tossed back tangled hair. Then his puzzlement lifted and he laughed. "You mean glass." His supple fingers traced the silver which cradled the stone in its setting. "Silly thing's worthless, if the robber of a dwarf who peddles gems in Arrax speaks words a man can trust. I never bought the thing. It was given to me by my mother, who won it at cards from a traveller."

  Too pale, and sweating out the throes of a particularly nasty hangover, Haldeth stared at the boy. In daylight, the resemblance that had haunted through the night seemed obscured. This harper had dark hair, like the Heddenton whore the smith had shared a winter with so many years in the past. The eyes were different, and the chin, but perhaps the hands were not. The glass gem kept its secret. Through watery eyes, Haldeth acknowledged that perhaps, as final gift from Korendir, he might look upon his own grown son.

  The coincidence was too much to bear.

  "Boy," Haldeth said gruffly. "I warned you I'd no ear for tunes. After too much wine, I've got less. Take your harp, and your strong voice, and move them elsewhere. Leave one sorry old man to suffer his headache in peace."

  The boy raised his brows in a way that caught at the heart, so alike was the mother's expression of reproof. The harper was her child, beyond doubt. Young, unmarked as yet by life, he departed without song or words.

  Alone and more comfortable for it, Haldeth watched the waves at the beach head unravel into rolling scarves of spume. The echo of his past question to Ithariel seemed repeated in the endless crash of surf. Could a man be worth so much?