The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  He wormed forward on his elbows and tensed, stock-still. When his movement aroused no disturbance, a crafty smile split his beard. He slipped out of his bedroll, fumbled in the dark for a cloak damply redolent of horse, and groped after his boots.

  Adept enough at sneaking from his countless nightly escapades with paramours, he stole to his feet. Wishing for carpets in place of mouldered leaves, and for predictable furnishings instead of heaped crates haphazardly unloaded from the pony cart, he eased his way ahead in furtive care.

  Harness leather looped his leading ankle and roused a staccato chink of brass. Dakar paused, eyes widened as he mouthed a soundless epithet.

  Nothing happened.

  Only silence abraded his nerves. Convinced good fortune was still with him, he bypassed the obstruction and crept to the mouth of the cave. Mist grey-lit by moon-glow coiled past his silhouette, framed in a backward glance of apprehension with his footgear tucked under his elbow.

  He reached the ravine undetected, jig-stepped a stride in relief, and scarcely minded as mud and bits of gravel sieved through the weave of his socks. To a slither of loose shale, he blundered through a sink hole, found a convenient rock, and sat down to don his boots.

  He fussed a long time with the laces. Breeze lightly spiced with green balsam brushed his hair; above the ridge, an owl hooted. Lifted to giddy high spirits, Dakar thrust upright and pursed his lips to whistle.

  A shadow barred his path: one cloaked in midnight blue and silver, that even the wind treated gently.

  Dakar’s ditty wailed wildly off key and died in a sucking gasp of breath.

  ‘Avoiding nightmares?’ Asandir asked in silken politeness.

  ‘Actually, no.’ A bit too shrill, the Mad Prophet shrugged. ‘I drank too much water before I slept. Could you step aside? I need to -’

  Still conversational, the sorcerer said, ‘You took the money bag with you for that?’

  Through an eloquent, frustrated stillness, Dakar shut his teeth with a click. ‘Merciful Ath, I hate boats! You know how I suffer from seasickness.’

  Asandir sighed over the skein of the wind through damp foliage. This time, you broke more than just my bidding. Your word as given, my errant prophet. You will render the service you promised.’

  Overhead, the clouds parted. Shafts of white moonlight lit the mist beneath the pine boughs and blackened the shadows into velvet. The sorcerer’s spread hand seemed pale and poised as the censure of an apparition. The soundless, lightless burst of conjury that followed harrowed Dakar clean through to the pith of his bones.

  He blinked and stumbled back, struck to wordless outcry. But spellcraft speared through him and passed without pain. In suspicion, he assessed, but nothing seemed changed in him at all.

  ‘What have you done to me?’ Plaintive and shaken, he clenched his arms to contain the dread that yawned a sudden hollow in his chest.

  The sorcerer’s reply came frigidly precise. ‘Nothing, unless you break your oath of loyalty.’

  Excuses died. Dissolved to bleak honesty, Dakar stopped his hand-wringing affectations. ‘You have no mercy and no heart. Why in the breadth of creation could you not see fit to assign me to Prince Lysaer’s retinue? He at least was my friend!’ At the sorcerer’s fixed silence, the Mad Prophet ranted on. ‘Arithon’s a cheat and a trickster. He sent young children out to kill with Deshir’s clansmen. You know this! How can you sanction the works and the cause of such a man?’

  ‘I sanction nothing.’ Asandir caught Dakar’s shoulder in a vice-grip and shoved him back up the ravine. ‘You have only to keep your charge alive.’

  Long-strided, even over rocks in total darkness, the sorcerer made no allowance for the foot-dragging clumsiness of his apprentice. Behind his stony silence lay wider obligations the Mad Prophet rejected in blind obstinacy; laughably ironic, that Dakar himself had been the seer to shape the prophecy which held all their fates in its coils.

  If the last living scion of the s’Ffalenn royal line chose to fare seaward to stall the compulsions of an unnatural geas, the tactic might stave off another war; might with just a little help buy the time for Kharadmon to complete their knowledge of the Mistwraith’s origins. The least upset in unstable chains of event offered quandaries too dire to contemplate: on Arithon’s life and future rested the Fellowship’s reunity back to Seven, and the key to the augury that balanced Athera’s course and restored the lost presence of the Paravians.

  Apparition

  Jaelot’s south towers speared through cobwebs of ground mist, and torches adjacent to the guard posts threw a muted snag of orange against predawn gloom like black pearl. Poised on a rise not far off, Asandir stood in studied stillness. One hand gripped the bridle of Halliron’s buckskin gelding; the other fretted knots from its sweat-damp mane, while farm vehicles gathered and milled in the road for the horn call to signal the gate’s opening. Exposed to plain view on the verge though he was, no one glanced Asandir’s way.

  The air hung dense with sea salt, fragrantly sweetened by summer-cut hay hauled in to stock the lofts above the carriage sheds. The plod of draught beasts and the creak of battered vegetable crates wove through the imprecations of a goodwife who nagged at her spendthrift husband. Not two yards distant from the sorcerer, a courier with the mayor’s lion blazon on his saddlecloth reined in his foam-flecked mount.

  The pony cart might as well not have been there, for all the notice it drew. While Halliron slept under blankets, Asandir measured the timbre of his breathing and swept the sky with anxious eyes. Night was waning too swiftly. The beacon light by the quay shed a sullen, smothered halo, while the dirge-deep toll of the fog bell slammed the air with vibrations. The pony gently lipped the sorcerer’s sleeve, then for no apparent reason, jerked his head sharply and snorted.

  The next instant, an icy lick of breeze showered the dew from the grasses.

  It flattened Asandir’s tunic to gaunt shoulders and flicked the ends of his hair against the weathered hollow of his cheek. Roused in mild query, he asked, ‘Luhaine?’

  ‘Sethvir had a notion you might need me.’ A blot in the dimness resolved into the rotund image of his discorporate Fellowship colleague. Luhaine interlaced plump fingers and reviewed the press before the gatehouse. ‘I gather you’re wanting a concealment ward and probably a diversion for these countryfolk? A spell of misdirection?’ Petulant as a librarian with a clutched load of books, the discorporate mage peered down his nose. ‘Never mind that such arts of trickery are much better suited to Kharadmon’s profligate style.’

  ‘I regret to offend your principles,’ Asandir said agreeably. ‘But Kharadmon isn’t here.’

  ‘No.’ Luhaine affected a sniff. ‘Well then. You can’t very easily attend Halliron’s needs and engage a major power focus while every lout in Jaelot stands as witness. Though truthfully, I shouldn’t mourn the tiniest bit if society here perished from the shock.’

  Confounded by his colleague’s quirky penchant for lofty language and lectures, Asandir ran out of tact. ‘Daybreak is all but upon us.’

  ‘You always did like to rush,’ Luhaine grumbled. ‘If I still lived enfleshed, I should much rather drive Halliron’s gelding than play pranks and spells on armed guardsmen.’

  For answer, Asandir climbed back behind the buck-board, flicked the reins, and rolled the pony cart into the roadway amid its jostling trains of oxen; its high-bred, liveried couriers; and packs of cross-gartered, sunburned farmers who ruminated over summer rains and crop blight.

  Luhaine’s image unravelled into a swirl of cold that caused draught beasts to blow and shy against their traces. The farmers at their lines needed full attention to control their jostling teams. Wives and field-hands brought along as helpers became engrossed in grabbing baskets of onions and vegetables that threatened to topple, or hogs that squealed and suddenly shouldered to burst enraged from their crates. Luhaine’s craft was seamless enough that even little children on their mothers’ knees never blinked as the bard’s painted cart pas
sed them by.

  ‘I suppose you also expect me to contrive something to prod the watch to raise the gates.’ Without Kharadmon’s jibes to divert him, Luhaine liked to complain. ‘That’s a great deal to ask, at brief notice.’

  But then, the grand conjury required to transport Halliron to Shand would become vexingly more difficult without assistance from the dawn-tide surge across the ancient power focus. Resigned to an exasperated eddy, the discorporate sorcerer departed. A moment later, movement harried through the guardsmen on the gate turret. Their captain at arms shouted something querulous up the stairwell, his phrase bent by Luhaine into unintelligible echoes. The misinterpretation did not happen by chance; the horn call for daybreak winded its mournful note with the sky still grey as smoked quartz.

  Over the consternation that convulsed the duty watch to argument, Asandir murmured words that no other living ears overheard. A puff of miffed breeze, Luhaine flicked by in acknowledgement. As the windlass in the gatehouse groaned and turned and Jaelot’s grand portals cracked open, a scowling churl with a cartload of chickens discovered a spurious reason to divert his team and trade gossip with a sheep drover. The sorcerer steered the cart smartly through the gap and trotted the pony through the arch.

  The hanging tin talismans that had failed to repulse iyats jangled sour protest as the draught that was Luhaine trailed after him. Never loquacious, Asandir shot a scathing glance toward the space his colleague now occupied.

  ‘Well, certainly you needed none of my assistance with the gate guards,’ Luhaine admitted. A ribby mongrel scavenging garbage amid the wreckage of a cook shop raised brindled hackles and growled in his direction. A pebble dropped out of nowhere. Lightly rapped on the nose, the cur tucked tail and bolted, while Luhaine resumed, a touch sulky. ‘Let’s say it’s a matter of subtlety. I know what you’ve done to ease Halliron. Don’t pretend that buckskin pony drew this vehicle nightlong without your arcane intervention. Such needs have taxed you, I should think, without the added burden of Jaelot’s hysterical fear of sorcery.’

  Asandir’s lips turned down in chiselled disgust. Above, the sky had brightened. Limned in shaded grey, the thoroughfare ahead lay jammed with flung wreckage where the earth’s heightened energies had surged in exultation on the solstice. Roofs shorn of shingles and planking lifted skyward in spindly silhouette. For the follies of masons grown deaf to the mysteries, for the human obstinacy of blind greed, Asandir loosed a soft sigh. The little cart rattled bravely around a mangled stoop and past a brick mansion with all of its shutters torn off. Where the street cobbles were not ploughed up wholesale, the wheels grated over smashed flowerpots, and crushed stalks of festival poppies whose leaves, against nature, had not wilted. A hacked signpost leaned beside a lilac tree frothed in unseasonal bloom. The perfume thickened the sea air, underhung by rotted offal from the markets.

  ‘Folk here are unlikely to forgive or forget the way Arithon spoiled their holiday,’ Asandir allowed finally.

  He guided the pony down Broadwalk Way, strewn still with petals and scorched garlands, the buckled slabs of flagstone paving stitched through by improbable grass. A lampblack who sauntered through a side alley turned his head at the ring of hooves and wheels. When his searching glance encountered nothing solid to partner the sounds that approached, he dropped his satchel and fled in wild panic. Then just as suddenly he stopped, his fear rearranged to blank puzzlement as Luhaine’s concealing ward touched him. While the byway fell behind, the sorcerers overheard him, scratching his beard and musing on the perils of strong drink as he retrieved his tools from the gutter.

  The cart reached the head of the grand boulevard, masked by a freezing ring of spells. At Asandir’s urging, the pony arched its neck, threw its chest against the collar, and hauled its painted burden up the shallow marble stairway before the entry to the mayor’s palace.

  Glass from burst rows of bow windows gleamed in the growing light. Between skewed columns and pilasters spider-webbed with cracks, the doors gaped apart, wrung half off their hinges and trailing the shreds of blistered paint. The buckskin snorted to a jangle of bit rings, then clattered over the lip of the upper landing. There Asandir steadied the reins. The grate of iron wheels across satin-finished stonework whispered to a stop in the foyer.

  A flare of grease torches burned in the cavernous chamber beyond. Unaware of any visitors, a weary band of drudges laboured with baskets and shovels to clear debris and slagged tiles from the mayor’s devastated banquet hall.

  The icy vortex that was Luhaine poised above their heads, an arc of disturbance only Asandir could see. ‘Now you perceive why Sethvir deemed my presence might be needful. Unless your wish includes transport for twelve local servants to the desert flats of Sanpashir?’

  ‘Confound every one of them to Sithaer!’ Vexed By the jostling Halliron had taken in the course of ascending the stair, Asandir raised his brows. ‘They’re about to be treated to the scare of their lives in any case. At least in the middle of a wasteland, more ignorant talk couldn’t cast further doubt on the character of Rathain’s prince.’

  ‘A most telling point.’ The discorpprate mage winnowed his way to the floor through a gloom mazed in smoke, now steeped in growing blue by the east-facing casements. ‘But do please remember your earlier insistence, that sunrise won’t wait for debate.’

  Already moving, Asandir looped the reins and stepped down from the buckboard. He bent to Halliron, touched the bard’s slackened limbs through the blankets, and measured the ebbing signature of life-force. Where the current snarled or faltered, he trailed gentle lines of power and coaxed the flow even and straight. He set healer’s sigils to stabilize and runes to preserve. His delicate work left trailers like sparks, that faded softly through the wool and revitalized the flesh underneath.

  Presently, Halliron opened his one eye. Above him, etched in sharp clarity against a meaningless background, he beheld the Fellowship sorcerer, Asandir, who regarded him closely in return. ‘Kingmaker,’ he addressed, the title taken from the lines of an ancient ballad. Pained by a voice gone gritted and slurred, he drew breath to clear his throat and was stopped by the barest pressure of spread fingers against his chest.

  ‘Don’t waste your speech,’ said the sorcerer, his eyes as fathomless as silvering on a new mirror. ‘I’m taking you homeward, to Innish. The passage ahead will be rough. Before we go, is there any word you would have me say to your family?’

  Halliron blinked. He showed no distress at the inference that the spell-ridden journey might stress his frailty beyond salvage. ‘I wrote a song for my wife and daughter that I am too ruined to perform. Arithon knows it. Let him sing my words for me, when he can. If he plays just once for my family, they will hear of my love. His art will gain their understanding, that he is my legacy to Athera.’

  Asandir gathered the cold, limp fingers of the hand left nerve-dead from injury. ‘Cherish my hope, master minstrel. You’ll be there to sing for yourself.’

  ‘You sacrifice too much on my behalf,’ Halliron whispered, suddenly adrift in spinning weariness.

  The sorcerer cradled the bard’s temple in one steady hand. ‘For the deep happiness you have lent the Prince of Rathain, and for your years of unstinting service, our Fellowship would grant you sky and earth.’

  The touch warmed like gentle fire through an aching pressure of cold mist. Halliron let the air spin out of his throat. His eye drifted closed. Asleep or unconscious, he never felt the scalding lattice of mage-force that Asandir raised to ward the wagon that cradled him.

  When the sorcerer finished, nothing inside could be seen through the unshielded glare of raw spells.

  Beyond the low stair, two laggard servants departed in haste through a side door; Asandir stifled a grin for the geas Luhaine had chosen, which harried them to leave in a pressing false need that their bladders required relief.

  Then his levity faded. There’s a problem I’ve had to leave unfinished.’ Aware of Luhaine’s attention like a quill prick against expos
ed skin, Asandir qualified. The Duke of Alestron and his brothers were absent when I visited to see if they meddled in forbidden armament. I agree with Sethvir: their evasion hides purpose. Would you mind looking in on them?’

  Then, too pressed to wait while Luhaine assembled his usual lugubrious reply, Asandir stepped to the pony’s bridle and guided its skittery, nervous progress down tiled risers left scoured and trenched with cold scorch-marks. Behind him, the iron-rimmed cartwheels banged and slammed, and chipped parallel grooves of fresh cracks. The vehicle jounced onto level floor and scrunched across fragmented flooring.

  Luhaine admonished on a surly nip of frost, ‘No doubt you want the wardings checked on Desh-thiere’s prison at Rockfell Peak beforehand?’

  ‘Well sunrise won’t wait,’ Asandir threw back, insouciant.

  Overhead, muted light slit the high, lancet windows miraculously still paned in filmed glass. Asandir reached the ash-blackened edge that traced the near rim of the power focus. He stroked the pony’s nose, murmured into its ear, then straightened. He spoke his next incantation in Paravian, each lilted cadence and musical vowel cut and measured to stamp the air into arcane seals like edged foil.

  Power answered.

  Too mighty a flux for concealment, the force rocked a tremor through the building. Now each consonant snapped out and hammered into echoes that sifted falls of plaster from the ceiling groins. Ozone tanged the hazed spill of dust. Then stillness locked down, fixed as light trapped in glass, and the pattern underfoot flared alive.

  A silver-blue shimmer raced through the old runes. The cart rolled over their heatless light, and the pony loosed a gusty, frightened snort. Its hooves jinked and rattled over glassy chips of tile as it sidled, uneasy in the traces.

  Asandir soothed a hand over sweating buckskin hide, his touch now all he could spare to calm the pony’s frayed nerves. For need, he attuned his awareness through his boot soles to gauge the flow of forces in the focus. The static of the lane-pulse jagged in white bursts, sparked by the advent of sunrise. Careful to sound its resonance lest the pattern’s function had been impaired or corrupted by time, the sorcerer quickened step. He crossed the two inner circles, then positioned the cart on the interstice at the centre where the axis of all lines converged.