The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  ‘It’s quicker,’ Elaira provoked in the street drawl of her girlhood. Unrepentant, she hurried her curtsey of obeisance to the Prime. ‘Your will, Matriarch.’

  The crone watched her arise with eyes black and colourless as rubbed glass. She did not speak, but studied, ruthlessly practised in the Koriani arts of subtle observation and analysis. Elaira bore up, the more fiercely determined since street-wise bravado could never face down Morriel’s weight of years and experience. As if her very thoughts were stamped into live flesh, the Koriani matriarch could read the question that grieved her; would measure the assault against pride, that eventually must crumple before need to ask outright for the results of last night’s scrying.

  Stiff to her toes before the urge to bolt outright, strained to her limits before a truth that held infinite capacity to wound her, Elaira scarcely heard the words Lirenda used to scold the page. Powerless, now, to assume the blame for the grime on his livery, the young enchantress endured while the hidden handkerchief was discovered and shaken out, to the First Senior’s redoubled annoyance as its six-legged cargo scuttled to shelter under her skirts.

  A glint too cold to be humour touched the depths of Morriel’s eyes. ‘But our scrying was unsuccessful, girl. We haven’t yet managed to discover the refuge of Rathain’s last prince.’

  Elaira could not quite stifle her shuddering sigh of relief. ‘You summoned. How must I serve?’

  ‘Sit.’ Morriel accompanied the command with a gesture clipped short by exhausted tolerance and sore joints. ‘Coir efforts were bent awry by chance interference from the Fellowship. The timing in fact lent us insight and our order has gained in the counterplay.’

  Past the edge of the carpet, First Enchantress Lirenda pulped a last fleeing insect beneath her heel. Intuitively sure the creature’s swift demise was impelled by more than harmless mischief, Elaira clasped her hands in sweating dread.

  ‘Show her,’ Morriel commanded.

  Lirenda dismissed the chastised page. Lips compressed in capitulation that marred her air of hauteur, she stalked across the carpet. The sun at her back scythed her shadow over figured argent sigils and quenched their surface glitter as she knelt in a crisp sweep of skirts before the burning brazier.

  Where Elaira’s elemental affinities predisposed her to conjure through water, Lirenda used fire for alignment. At one with the will of her Prime, she closed her eyes and settled into a light trance.

  As the matriarch’s successor in training, her powers were impressively tempered. Grazed by a thrum of current across her nerves, Elaira struggled to quell her apprehension. Too soon, the red gold blaze of the embers changed character, became charged to cold blue that threw neither light nor warmth. Across the fire’s altered energy, ethereal at first as the spell-thread stitched into the rugs, a pattern formed, fused, and blazed into a fixed configuration. Revealed in clear focus through Lirenda’s consciousness, Elaira viewed a mesh of visionary artistry, then ironies complex enough to storm through will and reflex, and arrest her heart between beats. She recognized the strand pattern analogue of Arithon s’Ffalenn’s living aura, exposed in the fullness of Fellowship perception.

  She gasped. In uncompromising lines, the man’s hidden self lay mapped out in a nuance that damned. As never before, she saw how vision and compassion, power and sensitivity, strength and pity lay paired beyond compatibility. Morriel’s fear was real, that the added burden of Desh-thiere’s curse might anneal the whole into a laceration of spirit with tragic potential to seed madness.

  Since the order’s responsibility had never condoned power with any latent bent toward destruction, the Prime would act before threat became reality. Elaira’s rooted faith, that the Master of Shadow was resilient enough to retain his grip on self-command, became exposed as baseless conviction, too likely the blind offshoot of personal feelings held against the wisdom of her seniors.

  ‘Dharkaron Avenger!’ Elaira blinked through a rising well of tears. ‘How could any man support such a tangle for more than a natural lifespan? Or am I mistaken? Isn’t that arc and counter-seal an imposed pattern for longevity?’

  ‘Your insight runs true.’ Morriel snapped dry fingers, signal for Lirenda to relax her discipline. The development caught us off-guard, but shouldn’t have. Both Lysaer and Arithon came to this land by way of the Red Desert’s World Gate. Our natural assumption should have followed, that they drank from the Five Centuries Fountain and succumbed to Davien’s geas.’

  That’s why you’ve summoned me,’ Elaira said, relieved as the pattern’s cruel quandary erased at last from the embers.

  She blotted streaming cheeks on her sleeve, and so missed Lirenda’s transition from trance to waking consciousness. A jealous, unguarded expression crossed the First Senior’s face, and a glare like distilled venom drilled through the younger woman’s back.

  The Prime watched with hooded eyes as her chosen successor masked the lapse. Grim as steel, she held to her purpose. ‘You were called to serve, initiate Elaira. Since we now know the conflict seeded by the Mistwraith will afflict more than one generation, you are asked to submit your crystal for enhancement. You won’t be forced. Consider carefully. The fate of outliving your peers is not always happy or desirable.’

  Lirenda maintained an elegant, stiff silence. Only the hands pinched in fists beneath her sleeves expressed her depths of resentment, that a privilege reserved for proven seniors was being offered to a girl who flaunted propriety.

  Rough-edged as a hoyden by comparison, Elaira confronted the emaciated crone in her bulwark of robes and the ice-point shimmer of her diamonds. Morriel’s life had extended well past a thousand years; centuries reckoned for in joints worn eggshell thin, and flesh racked and drawn to a husk of brittle fibres by powerful spells of preservation. Unlike the Fellowship of Seven, whose direct grasp of grand conjury could engender lengthened life in concert with physical law, Koriani methods were limited to energy resonance enhanced by a power crystal’s lattice.

  There is pain, at first,’ Morriel continued, ‘but only until the body reaches primary equilibrium with the stay-spells. After the first six months, degenerative ageing is reversed until well past seven hundred years. Since Davien’s mark holds influence for only five centuries, you need not live on to endure the afflictions of secondary interference.’

  Surrounded by the chipped majesty of the initiates’ ancient carvings, never so aware of the fall of clear sunlight, or the chirp of nesting martens in the cornices outside, Elaira hugged her arms across her breast. The warning of her Prime and the antipathy behind Lirenda’s cool façade lost all impact before trepidation from another source.

  Once in dusk by the seaside, a Fellowship sorcerer had offered her counsel in secret. ‘I was sent to you,’ Traithe had said, ‘because an augury showed the Warden of Althain that, for good or ill, you’re the one spirit alive in this world who will come to know Arithon best. Should your Master of Shadow fail you, or you fail him, the outcome will call down disaster.’

  There was no decision to be made, Elaira understood in bitter calm; and so her voice did not shake as she said, ‘I accept the bidding of my Prime.’

  Silk rustled. A breath of eddied lavender twined on the air as Morriel inclined her head. ‘So be it. Surrender your jewel for attunement.’ A wrist like bundled withies lifted from her lap, its claw-skinny hand cupped to grasp.

  Elaira freed a clear quartz pendant strung on braided chain like a teardrop frozen in mid-fall. Small-boned and light-footed and trained to dissemble as a pickpocket, she displayed a courage that embarrassed as the jewel changed grasp. A charged understanding passed between the crone and the young woman who consented to a fate that might ruin her.

  Then Elaira’s lips bent into an insolent smile. ‘I wish this course of change, as well.’

  ‘The more fool you,’ snapped the Prime. ‘You have virtues, but wisdom isn’t one of them.’ She snatched the relinquished chain and jewel to her chest and said in querulous, point blank demand, ‘Tel
l me. Where do you suppose the Shadow Master is hiding?’

  Shocked and stonily defensive, Elaira had no choice but to answer. ‘Where is Lysaer?’

  Lirenda bridled in affront.

  But Morriel judged the query was not impertinence. ‘Tysan’s prince is marching for Erdane to claim his right to Avenor’s charter.’

  Elaira’s stillness turned brittle. In that same forbidden meeting, Traithe had assured her that obedience to her Prime would cause no additional threat to Arithon. Against her deepest inclination, but bound by the perilous nature of her Koriani vows, she answered, ‘Then look for the Shadow Master in any town that borders the eastern sea. He’ll be found, I should guess, as far from Avenor as the confines of dry land will allow.’

  ‘A sensible deduction. At solstice, we shall scry the seventh lane and test the truth of your theory.’ Worn from the interview, Morriel flicked a terse finger in dismissal.

  ‘You too,’ the Prime rapped to Lirenda, who lingered, poised to argue further over Elaira’s longevity privileges. Distressed by an emerging flaw in her First Senior’s character no longer too slight to ignore, Morriel tugged her robes around the thin knobs of her knees. I would meditate for an hour undisturbed.’

  Lirenda curtseyed and swept out on Elaira’s heels, the swish of her silk sending draughts shimmering across the brazier’s live coals.

  Alone with disgruntled thoughts, the Koriani Prime tightened pallid lips. She lacked the time to wait for a more qualified heir; if the current First Senior had flaws needing discipline, she possessed an extraordinary talent. In truth, Morriel conceded, the temptation in this case was not slight. Stamped bright in recall, she held every angle and line and counter-swept curve that configured the s’Ffalenn prince’s aura pattern.

  The strength in the man was frightening.

  Were she not old, and aching, and daily yearning the release of natural death, she might have wept as Elaira had.

  Instead her frail fingers clenched over the spell crystal surrendered to her in forced trust. Her eyes gleamed baleful as arctic night as she muttered, ‘Curse you, son of s’Ffalenn.’

  If by his mere existence Arithon of Rathain came to corrupt more than Elaira’s impulsive heart; if his character upset the discipline of the First Senior chosen to be groomed as prime successor, Morriel vowed by the cold fire in her joints that she would see him suffer in full measure for her misery.

  Should Lirenda fall short in her training, should she fail to survive the trials of Koriani primacy, the added century Morriel must cling to breathing life to select and mould another candidate yawned frightfully cruel and dark.

  Farings

  While the trees unfold lush canopies of leaves, Lysaer s’Ilessid makes his penniless entrance into the city of Erdane; and as the city’s reigning mayor jettisons fixed policy to host a guest of royal birth, Lord Diegan is the sole party unsurprised to learn that although the weaponless mercenaries in the prince’s train have gone three weeks without pay, their loyalty remains Unshaken…

  In the burgeoning warmth of southern latitude, a hand-picked circle of Koriani Seniors leaves Forthmark on an overland journey; by command of Morriel Prime, who rides with them swathed under quilts in her palanquin, their intent bends toward the solstice yet to come, when another scrying will seek yet again to unmask the elusive Master of Shadow …

  Seated in the heart of Alestron’s inner citadel, the Fellowship sorcerer Asandir weighs the claim of the duke’s distraught seneschal, that the lord of the city and his brothers are absent to arrange a betrothal; and though a sweep of the grounds reveals no trace of foundries, nor proscribed treatises on black powder, the official is hedging around the hard fact that the armoury walls bear recent traces of an earth witch’s marks of concealment…

  V. MASQUE

  The door to Halliron’s attic chamber slammed with a gusto that rattled frame and hinges, but failed to disrupt the dancing play of arpeggios through an exercise in descending sevenths. The notes a seamless cascade beneath his fingers, Medlir raised his eyebrows at Dakar, tempestuously returned from the public baths with his nose buffed apple red. His clothing still hung half-unlaced, his hair was a wet, draggled fringe, and a virulent reek of attar of roses trailed from the bristles of his beard.

  ‘I didn’t know we’d given you coin for perfume,’ Medlir said.

  Peevish for being limited to an allowance too small to keep himself drunk, Dakar shoved aside a bundle of Halliron’s correspondence and flopped onto a hassock. Since his liberty relied on the personal bond of the Masterbard, he managed a civil reply. “The stink’s a kissing present from a doxy.’

  ‘Ah.’ The scale chords never faltered in their falling, melodic progression. ‘You’ve brought new gossip?’

  Dakar fiddled to extricate his shirt cuffs, wadded inside the ribboned sleeve of an orange and green doublet he had scavenged from some backstreet used-clothing stall. ‘Well the city alderman’s wife’s giddy with another affair. Dull news, really, since she throws out a lover every month.’ Defeated by a knotted lacing, the Mad Prophet resumed. ‘Better, you know that fat-assed proprietress at Madame Havrita’s? Well, she got herself a bloody eye. Caught the brunt of a scratching battle after insulting that spinster dressmaker on Threadneedle Street. Both claim their shop’s more overworked than their rival’s, and each one insists their designs will set the fashion for the ladies at the solstice feast.’

  The door latch clicked. Dakar swivelled in time to catch the arrival of Halliron Masterbard, back from a shopping excursion with a packet tucked through one elbow. ‘You know,’ the Mad Prophet volunteered through the trill of Medlir’s practice, ‘this fete the mayor’s brewing around your appearance is causing cat-fights in the ladies’ parlours.’

  ‘They can choke on their ribbons and pearls,’ Halliron grumbled uncharitably.

  Critical of Medlir’s touch on the lyranthe strings, he tipped his head. Even his exacting ear could not be other than satisfied. The months cooped up in the inn’s cramped garret had set the finishing edge on Medlir’s style. Drawn in by the liquid transition of sevenths to fifths, the Masterbard felt a shiver thrill through him. He had always suspected his chosen successor might be gifted enough to outmatch him. But actually to hear the notes of repetitive practice raised to a lyric emotion his best technique could not equal stirred him to speechless delight. All he had left to desire in the world was reunion with his estranged wife and daughter.

  Seven days remained until solstice. Then at last he would be free to resume his stalled journey to Shand.

  ‘Look,’ groused Dakar. ‘If it’s sausage I smell in that package, are we going to eat? Leave meals to you, and we’d die of starvation to arpeggios in all eight keys.’

  Dragged back to mundane matters, Halliron wended a path through the garret’s clutter of tin whistles, spools of silver wire and little clamps used to wind lyranthe strings, the faded scrolls Medlir bought from the salvager’s bins, and dog-eared leaves of rice paper with their scribbled variations of old ballads. He elbowed aside an awl and an ink-pot, and dropped his package on the table-top, nailed together from scrap boards on the day the tea upset once too often. The inn’s original rickety trestle had ended up feeding the hearth fire. If his apprentice’s hand at joinery showed a style more suited to a ship’s deck, the result at least was stable. Nothing spilled or fell off through Dakar’s vociferous pounce to be first to lay hand on the food.

  Halliron settled on the hassock left vacant and gave the musician’s labours their due. ‘You aren’t needing my instruction any longer.’

  Medlir rounded off a last arpeggio and deftly damped the strings. ‘I’m not yet willing to do without it.’ His look held more than humour as he added, ‘There’s one ballad left you haven’t taught me.’

  ‘You guessed that?’ Halliron bent his attention to stretching his fingers to keep them supple. ‘What a pity Jaelot’s mayor won’t have you play in my stead.’ He flicked his apprentice a piercing glance, then shrugged. Even
on the edge of summer, stiff breeze off the bay made the streets salt-damp and chilly; the climate went ill with his joints. ‘What’s the rumour in the barracks?’

  Leather scraped a plaintive whine from tensioned strings as Medlir slipped wrappings over the priceless instrument. ‘A scandal’s afoot over coin for the soldiers’ pay.’

  ‘No!’ Halliron slapped his knees in evil pleasure and whistled a fragmented melody. ‘Don’t say! The town bursar’s an embezzler?’

  ‘Better.’ Medlir set the lyranthe safely down in a corner and grinned. ‘Word goes he’s sold his sister-in-law’s ruby bracelets to hire a herb witch to hide how taxes from the town treasury found their way into the coffers of Gadsley’s pleasure house.’

  ‘The one that peddles little boys? That’s rich.’ Halliron spun around in time to snatch a slice of bread away from Dakar. ‘I heard the mayor’s shrew of a wife intends a surprise announcement. Her feast’s to have a festival theme. The page who serves her table told me she intends to cut out any couple who can’t afford to buy a mask.’

  Medlir’s eyes lit. ‘Dakar! There’s a secret you can leak to your doxy. How awkward, if the back-quarter courtesans had the hat shops engaged, and respectable ladies had to settle for second shrift.’

  ‘Maybe Havrita’s other eye will get scratched,’ the Mad Prophet said through a cheek crammed with sausage. He tore off another chunk of bread, quiet as Medlir joined him at the table and exchanged easy banter with the Masterbard. As long and as hard as Dakar listened, he had yet to trace any regional accent in the younger man’s speech. Although a musician with a well-trained ear might be adept enough to change his intonation, the fact that Medlir’s relaxed moments betrayed no distinguishing trait preyed on Dakar’s nerves. Almost as much as the oddity that, throughout an entire year, even since provoking a plague of fiends thick enough to draw reprimand from Althain, Asandir had yet to pursue him. Despite blatant disregard of orders to seek out and protect the Shadow Master, no Fellowship sorcerer had appeared to call down his misconduct.