by Janny Wurts
‘Welcome back,’ stated Arithon softly. ‘For too long, I thought you lost to this world. Thanks to Ath’s grace, you have chosen to stay.’
‘Might come to regret that,’ Tarens rumbled back, ‘if we’re taken from here to the pyre and faced with a Sunwheel executioner’s sword through my heart.’ A bit hoarse, he might have run on, had a bang! from above not warned him silent.
Arithon returned the distinctive, edged smile that his liegeman, Earl Jieret, once had viewed with alarm. ‘I might regret, yes,’ said the Prince of Rathain. ‘But only if we sail to Barish.’
Which murmured admission met blistering threat from the frazzled crew of the lugger. ‘Still yer yapping tongues! Or the captain will have you gagged in a trice, strung up by the heels in the fish locker.’
‘That’s already been tried,’ Arithon shouted back. ‘Or hasn’t anyone gone down below yet and measured the hole in the mesh of your crab sack?’
‘So that’s how you came to dive into the catch?’ Shut in, the poisonous stench was appalling. Nose offended, Tarens surveyed the unkempt person before him, with the shared evidence of recent manhandling livid enough on marked skin. The jolt of incongruity dawned as the crofter sized up the other’s unnatural, complacent composure. Befouled by the dried glister of fish slime, Arithon’s fox features almost seemed amused. In fact, he appeared to be biding his time, relaxed in reserved, alert interest. Which detachment suggested that the lugger’s condition, aground on the reef, may have been a deliberate strategy.
Tarens grappled to guess how the feat with the unravelled lines had been accomplished.
The crew above decks were not reassured, either. As they tackled their morass of needful repairs, they soon found an uncanny finesse that outstripped all credibility. No lines were destroyed. Not a plank had been sprung. The downed spars had not cracked in the violent crash when the stays and topping lifts parted.
In fact, the vessel’s sail rig lay dismantled with dreadfully expert precision. The hull languished without any crippling damage, a selective run of sabotage fit to freeze the blood of any blue-water sailor. Morale turned brittle when someone remarked that no living person aboard had commanded free hands when the owners arrived for the reckoning.
With the mood above decks cranked into fraught tension, Tarens’s frown deepened until his head ached. He threshed through the contrary facts for a plan and found naught but the manic design for a suicide.
‘Light’s blinding glory!’ a distraught hand shrilled topside, apparently sent to haul in the snarled nets. ‘Not a mesh is unravelled. That means witch’s luck, or else a fell trap to swallow us whole for a certainty.’
Then the mate unburdened his rattled report. ‘Every shred of gear needed for sailing’s been messed useless, with nothing burst. That’s not canny! Forbye, a rope doesn’t strap a man’s wrists by itself. Whose dance script to hell are we following?’
‘Best be underway before we find out!’ rapped the captain, then amended his standing orders. The man gone below to sound the bilges for leaks was told instead to remove the gag from one of the jackers. ‘Question the wretch! Find out how a sorcerer’s wiles could make such peculiar things happen.’
When the subsequent blame was pinned upon iyats, the strained oaths from the men assumed a cracked note of hysteria.
Thought clicked into place. Tarens whispered, appalled, ‘You intended to keep us set up as bait?’
Arithon stirred. ‘Bigger fish. Are you frightened?’ Belated confession, or the cryptic apology that he was undone by exhaustion, his response evoked a drawn silence until his avid gaze doused at a blink. Reclined on the cordage, eyes shut, he resumed, ‘No one’s cowed enough to ditch us ashore, as I’d hoped at the outset. We’ll see, very soon, which destiny springs from my sorry effort at meddling. I’d rest, while we can.’ At which point, he bowed to his own sage advice and earnestly settled to sleep.
Asandir sensed the time growing urgently short, his ride to vacate the Kingdom of Havish deferred until the bitter, last moment. Dismounted again to ease his winded mount, he greeted another morning on foot, the sharp wind in his face, blowing northerly. Winter’s persistence yet seized the sere ground where the buckled seam of the steppe west of Scarpdale sheared into the blunt, limestone bluffs that hemmed Mainmere Bay. Here, the lingering grip of the cold belied the thrum of the lane’s flux, agitated to dissonance beneath his steps.
The Sorcerer did not require his colleague’s earth-sense to interpret that drum-beat of war. The limestone ground under him all but rang aloud to the ripples of turbulence. As the risen sun laced the dun landscape dull gold, and spangled the glitter of dusted frost, the wave of energetic convergence that marked the invasion resounded through the subtle web. No moment remained to lament, with its onrushing crest now unstoppable. Asandir’s oath compelled Fellowship interests to cede the field.
Stared in the eye by that bleak course of destiny, constrained to be gone before Rathain’s captured prince came ashore, the Sorcerer abandoned his ninth-hour tutelage and left the inexperienced hands of Havish’s freshly crowned High King with the crushing responsibility of defending the threatened north border. Alone, that serious young man amassed his guard and his clan war bands, a day’s march at the Sorcerer’s heels.
Everything to be done lay in motion. Asandir threaded his adamant course through the cusp as the peace came unravelled. Last night’s brutal ride sped him towards the border by way of the ancient Paravian footpath worn by the past guardian centaurs, whose steadfast tread once hallowed the seasonal Paravian migration along the coast. The shadows of present-day sorrow weighed on the Sorcerer’s shoulders as heavily as the loss of such consummate beauty. His mount’s hooves traversed unmarked turf that might soon bear the wrack of a battleground.
But not yet.
The cloudless sky wore the pale tint of aquamarine, while plump robins hopped over the newly thawed swales, and the melt puddles splashed scatters of liquid diamonds under his black stallion’s hooves. Like secrets, the sheltered hollows lay velvet-clad, tender green and crowned with the budded stars of the snow drops. Life quickened, despite the shadows of violence that streamed through the lane’s flux: and where emphatic human beliefs snapped and sparked, collided to strident contention, without question the cauldron was stirred. Rampant chaos abetted Prime Selidie’s meddling hand as the impetuous shift dealt the world by the drake’s dream in Kathtairr torched mass fear into wildfire crisis.
Sunwheel fanaticism reached fever pitch, with countless innocents snagged in the throes of back-lash paranoia. If crown law in Havish did not persecute talent, Asandir sensed the ranging probes of the True Sect diviners unleashed to purge what they viewed as an outbreak of heretic practice. Past the border at Barish, his attuned awareness traced the rank terror incited by their summary executions and mass burnings. The smoke taint unsettled him, though the gusts that riffled his bare, silver head in Havish blew clean.
‘Avert,’ Asandir murmured. He refused to take stock, or measure the horror, or count how many blameless lives stood at risk if the temple’s false doctrine seized these lands in misguided conquest.
Near Torwent, as nowhere else, the outlying crofters bore the mixed descent of clan blood-lines, exiled in a long-past wave of exodus, or linked by generations of fishing folk whose rooted tradition of amity had forged kin ties with the chieftains in Caithwood. Asandir remounted his rested horse. Agonized, as one of the world’s greater powers, he could do naught but fare through the threatened district unobtrusively.
The free-wilds trail became a dirt lane between stone-fenced pastures. Hedgerows squared the fallow earth of the barley fields, yet to be turned by the plough. Asandir rode plain-dressed. His sturdy leathers matched those the king’s couriers wore, topped by a laced wool jerkin as rough as a mendicant tinker’s. Despite his innocuous, felted grey cloak, his passage raised surly stares from the steaders out tending livestock. None gathered to shout inquisitive questions, or ask him for recent news. Boisterous chi
ldren did not mob the traveller who might pay honest coin for a farm-wife’s meal. Instead, they bolted inside the thatched cottages or ducked behind distrustful parents. The village mill and the smithy lay silenced. Even the elderly idlers clustered at the brewer’s sat close-mouthed under a pall of unease.
A dread not groundless, to Asandir’s eye, as he drew rein before the pale, rocking figure hunched in the brambles beside the road. The woman’s distress personified the upset unleashed by the afflicted lane currents. Out barefoot in her soiled night-rail, with mousy hair fallen over her contorted face, she shivered under the blanket draped over her huddled shoulders. Bursts of sing-song gibberish muttered to herself dissolved into spine-chilling screams, provoked by nothing apparent. A relative had left her a basket of food, ignored, while a rib-thin stray cur anxiously wolfed down the contents.
Asandir swung out of the saddle. He secured the loose reins on his stallion’s black neck and freed it to graze by the wayside. Then, quietly calm, he approached the traumatized woman.
The cur jerked its head up and bolted: not fearful of him, but startled away by the flanking charge of a heavy-set man with a leveled pitchfork.
‘Keep your distance, stranger! She’s got nothing to rob, and a kinsman’s roof provides her with food and shelter!’
Asandir stopped in place. Empty hands raised, unthreatening, he said, ‘She’s your dead brother’s goodwife.’
The distraught relative ploughed in without hearing. ‘Leave her be! Don’t disturb her!’
Asandir agreed, disarming, ‘When approached, she gets violent.’ He arrested the pitchfork poked at his neck with the feather touch of one finger. ‘Be still. I might help, if you’ll let me.’
The farmer blinked puffy eyes, red from weeping. His bristled aggression ebbed, as he fully acknowledged the presence his thoughtless rage threatened. ‘Ath’s glory! I’m sorry.’ The raised pitchfork dropped from his nerveless grasp and thumped flat at the Sorcerer’s feet. ‘Do you know what ails her?’ He doffed his knit hat in distraught respect. ‘Several more in the village have suddenly turned as piteously deranged as she.’
‘This one’s only seeing her ghosts,’ Asandir corrected, but softly. ‘Stand aside, if you would. She’s been much too sharply awakened to talent. Rest assured, she’s not sick, just severely disoriented.’ He knelt, unmindful of puddles and filth, and cupped the woman’s smeared chin. ‘Talla, daughter of s’Criadien?’ he asked, and with tenderness, surveyed her features. ‘You are present and living, not lost in the half-world.’ Through the rope tangles of her tumbled hair, the Sorcerer regarded her eyes. He waited, motionless in the chill wind, till her darting glance steadied to meet him. ‘Anient, Talla. Be as you are.’
She shuddered. Cried out, then collapsed in a heap in the Sorcerer’s arms, which dismayed her fraught kinsman.
‘Fear nothing, she’s sleeping, just as she should.’ Asandir rearranged the blanket, then lifted her raw-boned frame from the frozen verge.
Patient, without censure, he watched the goodman wring his forgotten hat between worried fingers. ‘You would be something of a sorcerer, mayhap?’
Before the fellow bolted in panic, Asandir said, ‘Here. Take her home.’ Still speaking, he transferred the woman’s limp weight to the man’s anxious care. ‘Tuck Talla in bed. Let her rest undisturbed. Her opened awareness will settle, I promise. Three days from now, she’ll sit up and be hungry. She’ll remember her family and friends, and be rational, though I expect her past values will shift. New perception has sensitized her awareness. She may see things you cannot share. Don’t tell her she’s crazy, or isolate her out of ignorant disbelief.’
The countryman’s brow furrowed. ‘Then a Sighted awakening has caused this?’
Asandir sighed, without time to explain. ‘Ask the gifted among the clans. They have the trained background to help, and by charter law, they’re obliged to share their understanding.’ The old blood-lines would realize the markers had moved: that one sweeping peak moment seeded from Kathtairr had reforged the subtle currents that laced the firm ground underfoot. Altered forever, the flux pulsed to a different harmonic register, which revised the staid fabric by which most of humanity mapped its existence.
‘Our village has others in desperate need,’ the crofter ventured, transparently hopeful. ‘Let me show you, once I’ve settle Talla.’
‘I’m aware of which cottages house the afflicted.’ Hurried past courtesy, Asandir pressed his point. ‘I can find my own way. No, I won’t take your coin. Just find a measure of grain for my horse if such stores can be spared without hardship.’
The Sorcerer strode off, nonetheless braced to meet the next round of distrust with sympathy. Rare were the gifted, able to discern the delicately volatile interface between human senses and the world’s energy web. Rarest were the wise healers, who could settle an inflamed awakening of dormant sensitives. Asandir would do all he might to balance and mend the afflicted, even at the high cost of delay. For relief would be scarce, amid a widespread onslaught of epidemic proportions. The lane currents were roiled enough to rattle the deafest of instincts. Even the blinded with no gifted faculties must feel the looming anxiety seeded by cataclysmic upheaval.
‘Cry mercy against the Light’s zealot priests!’ Asandir snarled under his breath. Even as his trained vision assessed the brightened shimmers that marked the prevalance of innate talent, the overlaid stain of the probable future outlined the villagers’ fate. The sight should have raised tears, given room for indulgence. For if Havish’s northern border was breached, the frenzied cleanse by Tysan’s temple examiners must condemn every innocent inhabitant. These people here, interbred with clan lineage, would be haplessly slaughtered by fire and sword. Altogether too little could be done at short term to wrest these folk clear of the blood-bath.
For the critical future Asandir dreaded was sealed well before he completed his business, remounted his horse, and set off on his way. Out of pity, Sethvir’s contact withheld the bleak news after the field Sorcerer remounted and set off alone down the road.
By then, the last daylight faded with sunset, the deep shadows metallic with frost. The Lanshire winds blew bitter and brisk, and rattled the bracken that speared through the patches of granular snow-drifts. Asandir pressed the black horse at speed over the iron-hard ground. His inward eye beheld the turned course at twilight when the lane tide crested, and the darkened train of event became manifest: a spate flushed into crimson and fire, inflamed by the onset of bloodshed and war.
‘You have seen?’ Sethvir’s thought, framed as words, touched his mind with pained clarity. ‘The landfall will happen south of the border.’
‘Torwent,’ Asandir acknowledged, gruff and breathlessly bitter.
‘By Arithon’s doing, yes.’ Sethvir’s fractional pause held sheared steel. ‘The recoil might have gone worse for us.’
‘How, exactly?’ Asandir reined in his restive stallion, not sanguine. He listened, his formidable, cragged features intent, while Althain’s Warden delivered the cryptic summary. The sequenced flow of images showed Arithon and Tarens summarily bullied from the deck of a grounded lugger into the armed custody of the blockade fleet’s flagship. The robbed fishermen’s protests were roundly ignored, until the wracked state of the vessel’s rigging breached the arrogant crust of higher authority. The appalling damage was assigned to an unnatural infestation by iyats, with a witnessed claim that the smaller prisoner’s dark practice had befouled a temple-blessed fiend bane. Appalled by the risk, the armada’s captain dispatched a message by courier sloop. Then he made haste to raise sail and shed the knotty problem of sorcery into the hands of the Sunwheel campaign commander.
Which hair-raising twist would bring the captive pair under the interim custody of the True Sect’s dedicate field-troop: perhaps safest in the short-haul for Tarens. But beyond the custody of Tysan’s established priesthood, the precipitate course only galvanized the swift assault upon Havish. With the Spinner of Darkness headed for To
rwent, the True Sect’s forces marched over the border and attacked to stem the fell threat that evil itself might claim shelter under crown sanctuary.
‘I’m far behind schedule,’ Asandir cracked in summary. ‘How long before Arithon sets foot ashore?’
‘Dawn, latest.’ Sethvir’s assessment ached with regret. ‘If you run northward, your objective is lost. The site of the marker stone at the border is already in the midst of the battle-field. You’ll turn for the focus circle at Fiaduwynne?’
Asandir’s oath acknowledged the crux: he must leave the kingdom forthwith or break his vow, set in stone, to relinquish involvement in Arithon’s embroiled fate. Sethvir’s tacit query implied that the tired horse under him should be reined around and sent at a thundering gallop back towards Carithwyr. A grim expedient, since the Sorcerer’s life-force must be shared to sustain the brutal pace without flagging. The course would bring Asandir to his knees, reliant upon the confluence of lane forces at the Second Age monument to restore himself. The sure choice, that route could enable his direct transfer out of Havish by daybreak.
Asandir drew in a harsh breath, iron-nerved. ‘I am not going south.’ He stroked his mount’s neck, precocious successor of a long equine lineage kept in his service by selfless free will. Then he touched the rein gently and turned the stallion’s starred head towards the east, by the grace of sweet trust, asking everything. ‘I will ride for Athili.’
‘And blaze such a trail as to curdle the moonlight to hammered silver?’ Far off in the library at Althain Tower, Sethvir shut tortured eyes. Distraught, rendered speechless, he ached for the awareness: his colleague’s bold decision risked the life of an irreplaceable equine companion. Just as tautly unspoken, he sensed Asandir’s curse, which damned the feckless name of Davien.
Which vicious sharpness drove Sethvir’s response. ‘You know why, if he prompted Seshkrozchiel’s dreamed action with reasoned deliberation.’
Asandir’s snarled thought blazed with bottled anguish: his grand oath, of course, sworn under stone’s witness before Koriathain surely could tip the balance and plunge the continent’s life web towards entropy. Davien’s unconscionable move had bought time, given the terms that dictated Mankind’s precarious leave to inhabit Athera. Asandir did not have to like the raw taste: the close anger that tore him through stemmed instead from the salvage, now useless, of eight gifted villagers, three of them children!