The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Threaded underneath the immediacy of vision, Asandir’s account wove in sorrow. ‘The Seardluin killed for sheer rapture, as a weasel may, drunk on the thrill of its senses. Perhaps, like the dragons, they could sense forces of animal magnetism loosed in fresh-spilled blood, and such power fed their excitement. Whatever warped inclination drove their nature, they would slay until the soil itself was sodden muddy red. The great drakes themselves lost young to their predation.’

  The rest, written in scripture preserved at Althain tower, told how such depths of misguided ignorance came to be offered enlightenment through the brightest of power and knowledge. The Creator sent a gift to heal the ruin the dragons in their arrogance had set loose. Alone of all worlds, Athera became blessed with new children of Ath’s making. The Paravians became the affirmation that order bound all structure into balance. Their kind embodied the divine example, that the quickened life misbegotten through the drakes’ feckless dreaming might in time be redeemed.

  ‘And so came the three blessed races to Athera,’ Asandir explained. ‘Centaurs, Ilitharis, whose strength was to nurture the growing earth, and defend it with then-blood if need be. Ath sent the small ones, the Sun-children, to celebrate life’s undying joy. Lastly, the Creator gave the Riathan, the unicorns, who formed the living bridge, the linked connection to all that is and will be. To stand in their presence is to know, unsullied, the unconditional love that embraces all things that exist.’

  The histories preserved in Althain Tower catalogued the course of two ages of tragic confrontation. The world was both bright and desolate, since even the shining grace of the Paravians failed to turn the Seardluin’s ungovernable viciousness from the heat and passion of the kill. The creatures organized into armies, and bound the drake-spawn into fell service. Wars were fought, and tragedy abounded, and Paravians lost their lives until their numbers dwindled nearly past hope of recovery; in those days, even the greatest and oldest of drakes mourned and repented for the suffering unleashed by their tampering.

  ‘Our Fellowship was drawn here by drake-dream,’ Asandir confided at last. ‘The power of old dragons has a very long reach, and it chose us because we were deemed masters without parallel in the terrible arts of destruction. The engine we had taken to flee the horrors of our past was plucked from its transit across the deeps between stars. Crater Lake in Araethura marks the site where the forces arisen from the drakes’ desperate need hurled it earthward. We were given our deliverance there from the guilt and the agony that harrowed us since our acts. And though bloodshed by then was abhorrent to us, we fought to ensure Paravian survival until the last of the Seardluin lay dead.’

  For the Fellowship, responsibility had not ended with the Second Age. Men came to Athera, refugees cast loose by the very cataclysm their earlier works had engendered. The home worlds left decimated were cinders, now, and elsewhere, survivors suffered wretched, ugly lives, doomed always to repeat the terror and the tragedy of their past, for they sprang from a society ruled by want and senseless fear, and they knew of no other way to live.

  The Paravian races had fulfilled Ath’s directive by ending the strife arisen through the dreams of the dragons. Since a peace bought through war was never their Creator’s intent, to ease their sorrows and their losses, Athera’s rich lands were ceded to their inheritance. Theirs also, the decision whether mankind should have leave to settle in cohabitation. At the council where humanity’s fate was debated, the Fellowship interceded.

  ‘A covenant was sworn,’ Asandir said, gruff with the wear of a service that spanned inconceivable centuries of strife. ‘We Seven undertook responsibility for ensuring the steps were never taken that could engender the mens for mass destruction, For the sake of the Paravians, this world is protected, and shall be for as long as men endure.’

  Around the oaken table, the s’Brydion brothers sat, dazed sober by the aftershock of visions. Parrien’s knife lay abandoned to one side, its point impaled amid a creped litter of ribbons. Mearn regarded a chewed nail, this once in his life wholly still, and Keldmar’s keen rivalry with his next oldest brother was displaced by unwonted respect. Mollified by visions of unicorns dancing, or stately, tall centaurs with stag-horned crowns and dripping, battle-red weapons, Bransian scrubbed his scabbed knuckles through his beard. ‘Our culverin, then, is to he forbidden.’

  ‘I will say plainly that black powder is a first step on that path that led your forebears to destruction.’ Asandir straightened, as if flicked by a creeping small frisson of chill. ‘A first step, and a tiny one, of seeming insignificance. But the insidious progression of change its use will bring is well known to us. The result over time would spoil the green earth, then breed an enslavement of the mind beyond your most dire imagining.’

  The time had come to broach the subject of choice. Asandir clamped his hands on his forearms, his expression gone desolate as a man eaten hollow by old pain. ‘Your family is not the first. Once, we sent men with inclinations such as yours to dwell in the splinter worlds through South Gate. They, in their turn, built a civilization based upon the machines that are proscribed here. The misguided, self-blinding madness inherent in such ways created the scourge you have known as the Mistwraith, and our greatest grief. The Paravians were driven from the continent by its dominance, and the restoration of clean sunlight has not recalled them.’

  ‘Then the Fellowship’s covenant failed after all,’ Duke Bransian observed, surprised by the poignancy of his sorrow.

  Asandir sighed before that painful truth. ‘Desh-thiere’s ills are ours to put right if we can. The choice you face is no less cruel a quandary.’ He drew a fast breath, backlit now by the beat of noon sun against the stone beyond the arrow slits. ‘You may allow Fellowship intervention to excise all memory of your culverin and the powder that kills.’

  He encompassed the brothers in a glance sheared to purpose that perfectly disallowed pity. ‘Or else you shall not leave this chamber for the rest of the days of your lives.’

  ‘That’s no choice!’ cried Mearn, spiked to his feet by raw outrage.

  Asandir looked at him, desolate. ‘That’s the sole option in the Fellowship’s power to offer while our active numbers are diminished.’ He surveyed each brother in turn. ‘Think carefully. I can’t stay here beyond sundown.’

  Minded to raise protest, Mearn gave way before Bransian’s right to speak first. ‘No need to dally here quibbling. The culverin will be forgotten, as you wish.’ The Duke of Alestron raised his chin in a concession that held bravado and the rags of mulish dignity. ‘You have my consent. Do what you must and be done with us.’

  The others must choose their course separately,’ Asandir said. In what seemed idle habit, he extended a forefinger to configure a pattern on the tabletop. If to direct eyesight, no design appeared evident, the far fringes of peripheral vision sometimes tagged his tracery in hair-fine trailers of phosphor. Upon closer study, the effect would be mistaken for the glister of reflection touched across lines of puddled water.Too earthy to dwell on any puzzle wrought of mage-craft, Parrien pressed his back against his chair, lips curled in a tomcat’s grin. ‘I don’t much fancy being held here while my betrothed ups and marries some beardless rival. It would be a chill bed with only memories of a culverin to lie with. Do as you wish with me, Sorcerer.’

  Keldmar snapped off a nod. ‘Me also, though I won’t pretend I like it. We earned that culverin through five years of hard work, not counting for injuries and the powder burns.’

  Last to capitulate, Mearn said, ‘We’d be free to pursue yon muckle clever spy?’

  Asandir spared no second thought. ‘Pursue all you wish. He’s a difficult man to catch.’

  Mearn gave his scowling, ungracious acquiescence, and for a second the room seemed to blur. The books, the varnished secretary, the bronze stands of the candelabra with their wax-dribbled sockets all rippled as if marred by a wash of pressed air. The smells of baked stone and sheared steel and musty parchment acquired a transcendent edge of clar
ity. Then darkness crossed sight like a footprint.

  Restored to cleared senses, the brothers sat alone around their table. A space lately occupied by a sorcerer lay vacant, the memory of his presence gone with him. Sunlight angled in yellow bars from the arrow slits, shot through a haze of stirred dust motes.

  First to move, Parrien rubbed thick fingers at his temples. ‘Ath,’ he said, bewildered. ‘What possessed me to drink myself stupid on wine?’

  Keldmar’s bleared gaze fixed and focused on the dangling remains of burst straps. ‘Which of you oafs turned soft and released the fat prisoner?’

  Through the vociferous, insult-slinging quarrel that followed, not one of the s’Brydion could agree on any culprit, nor could they recall what had immured them in close conference through a night and half the next day.

  There’s a spy running free while we scrap over nothing!’ Mearn interrupted in withering disgust.

  Duke Bransian shoved to his feet in a jangle of displaced armour, shouldered his youngest brother from the arrowloop, and bellowed down to the sentry on duty to roust out his best troop of lancers. Beneath his enthusiasm like sand in a blister rubbed a queer and infuriating hunch: that the fugitive sorcerer who had ruined his armoury was by now beyond reach of reprisal.

  The double-crossing criminals can’t hide themselves forever,’ said Keldmar, still glaring at a span of empty oak.

  Parrien knuckled bloodshot eyes and ground out a derisive snort of laughter. ‘They will if you don’t stir off your arse. Are you corning?’

  Ignited to a madcap race to muster weapons, four brothers pounded shouting down the stairwell to launch their belated hue and cry.

  Resolves

  ‘We’ve found where to send Elaira on her assignment to compromise Arithon s’Ffalenn,’ the Koriani First Senior announces to Morriel Prime; in hand she holds the day’s report from the sixth lane watch: The smuggler’s brig Black Drake has sailed to recover the riches held for the Shadow Master’s use by Lady Maenalle; and the cove specified for final delivery will be south, at Merior by the Sea…

  In Althain Tower, on the verge of twilight, Sethvir pauses between penned lines of manuscript to receive Asandir’s news from Alestron: ‘The brothers s’Brydion hold no more memory of black powder or culverin; Rathain’s crown jewels are recovered for return to storage at Althain Tower. Luhaine has destroyed the drawings and dismantled the moulds at the bronze founders’. Since the explosion in the armoury was too widely witnessed to recontain, sadly, Arithon must stand as our scapegoat…’

  In a cell beneath Alestron Castle, an imprisoned guardsman languishes with a whip-torn back; and through each hour of his agony, he renews his cold vow of vengeance, to take down the Master of Shadow whose tricks had undone a lifetime of honest service …

  X. MERIOR BY THE SEA

  Immersed in sulky bouts of brooding since the disaster in Alestron’s armoury, the Mad Prophet evolved his own brand of consolation. Since the Shadow Master’s wiles could turn even the acts of an adversary to abet his most secretive design, Dakar would ease his stung pride and blunt the horrid quandary by drinking himself senseless as deadweight.

  Through the four-week voyage down the continent’s east coastline, while Rathain’s prince acquired the crazed instincts of a packrat and a variety of seasoned lumber from the millwright’s in Telzen, Dakar sucked down beer, and rum when he could supply himself, with the joyless abandon of a fish. No brand of liquor could obviate the unpleasant truth: the prince whose affairs he was geas-bound to share was accursed by Desh-thiere. Over time, the destructive drive which had seen thousands slaughtered in Strakewood must re-emerge with intent to kill Lysaer, who once had been Dakar’s best friend.

  Primed to denounce the first sign of geas-bent aggression, the Mad Prophet kept beady-eyed vigilance in those maudlin moments between binges. But the Master of Shadow could maintain seamless subterfuge, as his disguise as Medlir had well established.

  Since patience was never Dakar’s strength, his wits were well sodden on the day the patched sloop engaged to ship the new planks reached the southernmost call on her route. Jostled semi-conscious by a lurch, disturbed further by the muttered creak of towlines rigged to warp the weedy hull hard aground for her yearly refit and careening, Dakar fumbled to discover his flask lay empty. Too bone-lazy to regret the oversight, he lapsed back, eyes closed, and eavesdropped on the conversation currently in progress on the main deck.

  Clear above the cries of gulls, and the thump of sailors’ feet over the pawl of the turning capstan, he heard the Master of Shadow announce his intent to disembark in the tiny cove at Merior.

  Too bored to examine s’Ffalenn motives; fuddled beyond recall that Merior was a sleepy, tropical backwater comprised of little but fishermen’s shacks, the Mad Prophet crawled from his shadowy lair between decks. He wove past piled cargo crates, Arithon’s lashed spruce from the sawmiller’s, and smacked both shins and one elbow in ascent of the companionway ladder. Undeterred by bruises, or by the scathing oaths of sail-hands who sprang to untangle the lines left befouled in his wake, Dakar blundered onward, while at safe remove from the rigging above, other seamen called cheerful encouragement.

  ‘Hold your grief! If the fat lubber’s going ashore, let him take his sandy boots, and good riddance!’

  Dakar swayed on in a reeling cloud of whisky down the newly-set gangway to the beachhead.

  The whitewashed cottages of Merior nestled in a little crescent cove, fringed with sea oats and palms, and notched into the narrow peninsula that bent like a hook to enclose the aquamarine basin of Sickle Bay. Here, the great combers that rolled in off the Cildein’s vast deeps burst white and unravelled against a landspit scarcely three leagues across. Shadowed day and night by their thunder, this village offered the last, lonely settlement. Beyond, a wind-raked ribbon of barrier sands dwindled into bars and scattered coral reefs, where surf churned and creamed at Scimlade Tip. The neat, seaside anchorage was too cramped for trader ships. It boasted no breakwater and dock. The slatted wooden tower burned a beacon light for fishing craft, which moored in bad weather to battered cork buoys scattered like beads amid the chop.

  The instant Dakar’s step met immovable dry strand, he staggered, tripped backward, and sat. A grunt of forced air entangled in his throat, and a hiccup squealed through his larynx.

  The only folk at hand to marvel were two barefoot, tow-haired urchins who sat on a barrel and smirked, then burst into shrieking gales of laughter.

  Dakar blinked at them owlishly. Peevish before ridicule from children scarcely eight years of age, he unhooked a trailer of seawrack from one ankle and clasped his head to ease its gruesome pounding. The sky was blue and cloudless enough to hurt. Against a serried mesh of palm fronds spread a smelly, drying hatch of fishnets, jewel-strung with glass floats and stamped clay seals to repel iyats. A dog’s distant yaps pocked the bawl of a lighterman who ferried another line from the ship. Fierce southern sunlight glared off sugar sands, and other things suspect and glistening strewn amid the jetsam at the tidemark. Too fordone to care if he sat in something noisome, the Mad Prophet flopped back on his elbows. To the sniggering towheads, he said, ‘I don’t see what’s so funny.’

  A shadow darkened his face, cast by Arithon, just come ashore with an unwieldy beam braced across his shoulders. ‘Are you cap’n?’ shouted the nearer child. The pair looked alike as halved oysters, all brown legs and grey eyes and simmering curiosity. Their unbleached trousers were grimy and ragged, and each wore a smock shirt, clumsily cut down from a man’s size. The coltish angles of forearms and shins were sequinned in iridescent cod scales, and the narrow feet with their sturdy, splayed toes had likely never seen shoes.

  ‘I’m not this ship’s captain,’ Arithon declaimed. He sounded as though he was smiling.

  Then you’re captain of a bigger one, surely,’ the other chimed in, while the first interrupted in shrill-voiced, point-blank demand. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘“He’s master of all things bl
eak and dangerous”,’ the Mad Prophet misquoted, inspired by faulty memory of a gate arch inscription on an initiate’s hostel that attrition had degraded to a brothel.

  ‘The master, the master, the master,’ chattered one child in monotone. The other sprang up and awarded Dakar a petulant frown. ‘He’s not Daelion Fatemaster!’

  While fingers slim and dirty as a thief’s entangled in a wisped, sun-bleached curl, the first child intoned in changed rhythm, ‘The fat man’s a liar, the fat man’s a liar.’

  Dakar tucked in his chin, the better to glare down his nose. ‘Boy, you know little, In a contest of falsehood, I would certainly lose to this black-haired mountebank you champion.’ His attempt to defend his impugned character met with indignant failure.

  ‘I’m no boy!’ The urchin shot erect beside her sibling. ‘My name’s Feylind.’

  Dakar raised his brows. ‘Well brat, I’m sorry.’ A scuffed-up shower of grit pattered over the holed knees of his hose. ‘Tell your sister to stop flicking sand on me.’

  ‘He’s not a girl, he’s my brother!’ Feylind shrieked, to her twin’s renewed peals of glee. ‘Are you stupid? You must be, to he in the sun like a sausage.’ This pearl of wisdom delivered, she turned her inquiry elsewhere.

  Arithon had lowered his burden. Braced upright against hip and shoulder, the beam threw his angled features into shadow. Too pert for shyness, the child addressed him. ‘Will you go back on the sloop?’

  ‘I thought I was taking wood off her.’ Apparently not in a hurry, he added, ‘Your brother must have a name, too.’