The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Sethvir shook his head in befuddled irritation and fired back visions in jumbled summary.

  The hastily-vacated cottage of the Koriani Senior who inhabited a glen near Avenor; then the old enchantress herself, veiled and cloaked and swathed in sigils of secrecy, on foot to seek her Prime with a message of pressing importances then the bones of a boar in a trampled dell, the skull laced still in the spent, pallid glimmer of the Koriani summoning spell that had goaded it onto the spear. Nearby, abandoned, lay the death weapon, imprinted by the geas-turned hatred that had driven the motive of its killer …

  #x2018;The upshot?’ Asandir prompted, as yet too perturbed by the news out of Camris to track his colleague’s vaulting chains of logic.

  Rare exasperation flared blue-green eyes to full focus. ‘You didn’t note the energy signature for exchange and consent, nor the tell-tale discharge invoked by Desh-thiere’s curse?’ Sethvir qualified. ‘Lysaer s’Ilessid struck some bargain in exchange for a Koriani scrying. He’s certain to know Arithon’s in Merior.’

  ‘At what price?’ Asandir said.

  Distempered enough to tug at the knots in his beard, Sethvir snapped back to the displaced thread of conversation. ‘I don’t know. At the time, I was too deep in trance in search of Kharadmon to track the event at its origin. Whatever mischief’s afoot, the upshot will surface soon enough.’

  That time, Asandir caught the infinitesimal hitch in the fabric of Sethvir’s explanation. ‘Kharadmon,’ he blurted, a stab of alarm through his vitals. ‘That’s what has you vexed! Ath’s infinite pity, what worse disaster did you find?’

  Sethvir shot out of his nook in a galvanic heave of distress. ‘That’s the problem,’ he whispered from the shadows, his mind locked again on the limitless sky through the casement. ‘I found no trace of Kharadmon at all.’

  Asandir braced spread hands against the table as if the very floor had rocked under him. ‘Nothing,’ he mused. The word faded without echo into the dust and trapped heat of the chamber, soured with must and parchment, and the peculiar, gritty reek of years upon years of used ink. No comfort could be drawn from the spin of clean breeze from the hills, nor even from the fast and warded stone that framed Althain Tower’s protections.

  If Kharadmon had suffered mishap, their hope to defeat the Mistwraith’s curse was rendered a lost cause at a stroke. The Black Rose Prophecy, which linked the Fellowship’s return back to seven with the event of Arithon’s willing kingship, became fully undone before time and fate could let it flower. Too fierce to believe the future had been lost on the day that set prince against prince in spelled enmity; too raw now to endure another grief in vanquished stillness, Asandir pushed erect and glared at his colleague’s turned back.

  ‘Let us set such a beacon that the sky will burn,’ he announced in chiselled rage. ‘Wherever Kharadmon has strayed, whatever ill keeps him captive, I would carve out power from the heart of this earth and configure a spell of white light to draw him homeward. Or all we have done to give mankind a home amid the grace of the Paravians has gone for naught but wrack and ruin!’

  ‘We can set the first wards on the solstice tide, but it’s certainly inconvenient.’ Sethvir found an ant fallen trapped in a saucer and ushered it to safety with a feather touch. ‘I hate to undertake such a difficult binding at a time when I’ve run out of tea.’

  Asandir’s mouth twitched. ‘Ath. You know better. Have I ever shown up here without a fresh supply? This must be the first occasion in a thousand years of trials you’ve neglected to know in advance what simples I brought in my saddlebags.’

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ Sethvir said on a wistful, sad note of reproof. Long gone were the days when he had the leisure to grow strawberry leaves and chamomile and enspell them to flower out of season.

  The dungeon chamber in Althain Tower had no windows cut through its white marble walls; and yet, on the eve of summer solstice, while the latent play of lane-force shimmered through the power focus set in its smoky onyx floor, the meadow-rich fragrance of catmint and sweetgrass twined through the storm-charge scent of ozone. As if the cut hay essence of the season itself partnered the forces that coursed through its ancient rune circles.

  Barefoot, draped in an ankle-length robe abraded to threads at the hem, Sethvir set beeswax candles in the black gargoyle sconces arrayed at the points of the compass. Asandir stalked beside him in daunting silence. Stripped down to shirtsleeves and the scorch-marked leathers he had ridden in, he crossed corded forearms over his chest and spoke the incantation to call down a spark from the polestar. When the energy answered, as it must to a mage of his stature, and white starfire burned tame in his hand, he knelt in thanksgiving and homage and ignited the wick of the north taper.

  Sethvir summoned flame to light the south one. East and west were set burning with sun ray and moonbeam, while over the tower’s lofty battlement, the turning constellations spiked and danced the measured seconds before midnight.

  To fashion a beacon-spell potent enough to recall a kindred spirit across the deeps between worlds, the Fellowship sorcerers laced bridles of pale energies through the rune-circles. To each interstice in the focus pattern, they fixed precise markers, attuned to a facet of the mysteries. Through their hands flowed the tides of distilled wisdom: secrets bought from centuries of knowledge and observation, from the filament of silence that enacted the stealth of an owl’s flight, to the quickened burst of seed into sprout. They invoked the endurance of oak trees, singly by Name, until thousands of forest-tapped roots were called aware to volunteer their grounding as anchor. They braided the voices of sweet summer stars, and the staid pull of planets to their courses. Wild wind and grass were coaxed into coercion, and their million, partnered voices whispered measures in counterpoint and litany.

  Mountains were asked to lend solidity, and the dark heart of stone gave back its sure self, to bell subvocal vibrations and waken the somnolent earth. The third lane shrilled now to a higher-pitched current. Waves of summoned energy dashed in succession into the construct formed amid the focus pattern. The Paravian nines glittered, then lashed to spitting life like the splash of molten metal over coals.

  The interlaced mesh of static tore the ears, and the air bled a stinging wash of ozone.

  Unlike a Koriani binding, amplified through crystal and fettered in raw domination, the layered weave of spells conjoined through Althain Tower held no constraint of forced mastery. Asandir and Sethvir worked in strict balance with the signature chord of the earth, reaffirmed in all its grand mystery, then exalted and wrapped through by the untamed exuberance that sourced the light-dance of life.

  Midnight arrived.

  The onyx floor tolled like struck bronze as the solstice charge surged down the lane. Gathered powers seared active with a scream of white light. Partnered in cold concentration, the paired sorcerers encompassed the mesh of their weaving, spoke a word, and on the strength of request, locked the whole into seamless stasis. The air stressed to recoil inside the tower, while the rune circles channelled the lane pulse into silken arrows of harmony.

  Asandir and Sethvir rested for an hour, seated side by side at the foot of the stairwell with their backs pressed against warmed stone. Althain’s Warden used the moment to unfold the clasp knife he used to sharpen pens and pare the yellow rims from his toenails. Asandir settled back against snow-grained marble and slept, his callused hands quiet in his lap. Two hours before solstice dawn, the keening of the setting stars roused him. Sethvir stared into space, his eyes misted over and vacant. Asandir touched his shoulder, arose, and stretched the cramps from his limbs.

  Midsummer daybreak found them back on station at the focus. They repeated last night’s binding in the scald of the sun surge, and again at noon; at sunset; at midnight.

  By then the stone tower sang like a tuning fork to the powers leafed into stasis within. The burn of leashed energies coiled bright enough to blind, and sear unprotected flesh to carbon. The air itself seemed to glister with pent force, and the s
tone of the floor to breathe in counterpoint.

  Heightened to peak activity, the focus could not be left unguarded for a minute. Asandir remained below to stand watch and steady the emergent flaws incited by the lane’s random properties. Sethvir retired to his sanctum in the upper library. There, he brewed tea and pored over books on celestial mechanics, and filled page upon page with columns of mathematical figures in the minuscule, sharp-edged black script he used for his personal notations.

  The navigational wards to guide the spell-beacon required fifteen days to formulate. Sethvir worked alone, ensconced within a subliminal spiral of linked strictures, light-scribed in air and in darkness. He gentled each layer in sigils stamped whole from the elements. Sun and storm lightning; wind and driven rain; fire and water and frost; he forged direction into spells like an arrowhead in flight, then bore the spitting, crackling mesh of sealed conjury down to Asandir at the focus.

  The coupling of raw power to the intricate spell of guidance required another day and a half.

  ‘I can’t recall feeling this tired since the hour the Mistwraith broke our barrier wards at Earle.’ Asandir raked back hair wicked with sweat and gazed askance at the blaze of their parallel conjury. Only a fool, or an unschooled spirit would dare face the construct head-on. A beauty shuttled through its coils to beguile the unwary mind. To stare too long was to risk being drawn in by a harmony that gloved bitter peril, its currents too pure for mortal flesh. Direct exposure would bring blind, witless madness, for reasoned thought could not sustain the unshielded chord of world life-force.

  In the shadow by the stairwell, poised between steps, Sethvir made a small, shocked sound. Asandir spun around, locked eyes with the Warden, and deduced the sure source of his distress. ‘Don’t speak. It’s the Lady Maenalle, is it not?’

  Sethvir said no word, but an image bled through, of a packed square in Isaer, where townsmen thronged before a scaffold hooted and called jibes at the condemned, lashed in cruel isolation to a post.

  Neither sorcerer moved while a handful of seconds shredded themselves in suspension.

  Then Asandir loosed a terrible cry that rocked echoes off close marble walls. ‘Shall we not let her die unremarked?’

  A hammered glint of temper simmered through the mist of Sethvir’s tears. ‘Indeed, let us not.’

  He and Asandir whirled in unison. In flawless accord, they locked step, advanced to the heart of the pattern and joined hands. To the last, unfinished thread of their construct, they laced the signature of Kharadmon’s signal Name.

  Sethvir bowed his head. His consciousness divided into distance and held through his body’s fine trembling; while on that far scaffold, a hooded executioner drew back a silvered blade of steel.

  On the cusp of its fall, the Warden of Althain said, ‘Now.’

  Asandir severed the spell’s ground ties to the trees.

  Power unfurled and howled. Light blossomed until the very air seemed to melt and burn and rage airborne. The beacon spell fashioned to summon back Kharadmon roared aloft toward the stars embedded in its homing. Its grand departure stabbed light across the sky like a portent of Ath’s fury unleashed.

  In Isaer, the scorching banner of its passage was the last sight Lady Maenalle beheld as the sword slammed home through her heart.

  Healing

  Attuned to an herbalist’s sensitivity, Elaira tracked the near to invisible change in the light through the long days, while growing life on the Scimlade peninsula embraced the full bounty of summer. She watched, too, the subtle shifts in Arithon’s mood through the weeks after the solstice. In him, like a breath held suspended against an influx of poisoned air, she sensed the pressure of outside events that passed tiny Merior by. Up coast, in cities plied by the trade galleys, news would be spoken of the muster in Rathain. Arithon sent no overt dispatch to inquire. Nor did he make any obvious effort to gain word of the enmity his acts had seeded in Alestron or Jaelot when the tinker’s wagon visited from Shaddorn.

  He spent his days in gruelling, sweaty labour alongside the joiners who steamed the planks to bend over the trued frames of his brigantine. If a night’s deep talk by the bay shore had caused him to forgo their past hours of foraging, he came every eventide, his hair tousled wet from his bath, and his temper still brisk as sheared granite from managing his disparate teams of shipwrights. While darkness fell, and the gulls over Merior’s fish-market screamed and settled to roost, Elaira instructed him in the healing arts. He learned every nuance she knew to stop bleeding, to splint broken bones and tie sutures. She brewed tisanes and explained their banes and virtues, mixed poultice pastes to ease arthritic joints, and treated the myriad lacerations and small injuries that arose amid the fleet and at the shipyard.

  Wherever possible, she gave him space and distance. If no caring contact could ease his unreconciled agony of conscience, her dry barbs of wit could make him laugh.

  Whether her deepest suspicions were true, and Tal Quorin’s past tragedy had damaged him further, she stifled her desire to pry. Some facts were better off left to bide beyond range of her order’s covetous grasp.

  ‘You aren’t paying attention,’ Elaira admonished on the night he asked what her life had been like as a Koriani novice. ‘We spent a lot of time learning to draw sigils to drive out rats, and if you burn your fingers on that flask, there’ll be no music for the wedding.’

  ‘What wedding?’ Arithon snatched up a linen rag to shield his grip on the hot container.

  ‘Can’t you take pity on the matchmaking goodwives in this village?’ Elaira scolded in fond exasperation. You’ll spoil their gloating over six months’ hard work, then break their hearts since your calls at my cottage create their juiciest hours of gossip.’

  ‘And you told them?’ he said in stifled alarm.

  Elaira returned a glare of owlish propriety. ‘That with Dakar in tow, your new ships were going to need extremely potent talismans to avert incompetence, misfortune, and iyats.’

  Rathain’s prince grinned through the flame-rippled air off the brazier. ‘Plain truth.’

  The sorrow struck Elaira at sudden, odd moments, that such joy must become the first thing to wither when Arithon’s cursed fate overtook him, and the contradictory ironies embedded in his nature came to exert their-inevitable pressures. Bound to a course of inescapable violence as he was, she could not shake her dread that Morriel’s belief would prevail, and his very strengths of character become the catalysts to drive his mind to destruction.

  Whether the compassionate intelligence that sourced Elaira’s fascination had engaged his deeper feelings in return, he lent her no chance to find out. To Jinesse, who maintained a tenuous, dutiful friendship, he seemed as he always had: willing enough to speak when addressed, but disinclined to volunteer his confidence.

  Despite a reluctance too elusive to finger, he played to brighten the wedding of the cobbler’s daughter and the freckled youngest son of the abalone cutter, who had no touch for his father’s trade and sailed as hired crew with the fishing fleet. An adept from Ath’s Brotherhood came to bless the ceremony, hooded in robes of stainless, white linen, threaded at the hems and collar with interlocked seals of gold and silver. The feast lasted long after the summer twilight faded. Dancers whirled in carefree circles around the bonfires, while smoke tanged the humid air, rich with the aromatic oils burned to repel swarming insects. Seen through the celebrants’ capering shadows, the groom looked smart in his new broadcloth jacket, his bride flushed and radiant under curled lemon hair, wreathed in oak greens and scarlet ribbons. The bronze bells sewn on her slippers chimed merry time to her joy.

  Seated by Jinesse, her hands filled with spiced bread and hot fish, Elaira mellowed to the fast-paced, seamless peal of lyranthe notes that stitched out the polished, brilliant rhythm.

  But for the widow who recalled Arithon’s performance on Talliarthe’s deck and again, more forcefully, at Innish, the measures described by the bard’s skilled fingers seemed as mere surface ripples thrown o
ut to mask the grand depths. Where Elaira was drawn by curiosity to inquire, Jinesse chewed her lip and admitted, ‘His mind is elsewhere, tonight. His heart is not in his music’

  The twins chose that moment to badger their mother for taffy. Through their engaging, boisterous noise, Elaira found no graceful way to reopen the lapsed conversation.

  The next week a squall line raked in from the east and upset the run of fair weather. Battered fishing luggers beat under reefed sails for the shelter of Merior’s harbour. In perennial mixed blessing, the fleet’s safe return came accompanied by the indiscriminate misfortune that abounded among men who worked at sea.

  Tinselled with falling rain that hissed through her firebrand, Elaira struggled up the exposed spit toward the shipyard. The night was a roaring black maelstrom around her. Freak winds battered wet skirts against her shins and shredded spindrift in bursting, white sheets off the breakers. Exposed to the storm’s raw brunt, the pole sheds shook to the blasts, while a loosened plank banged a madman’s tattoo, and dilute flares of lightning lit the anvilled clouds to stirred sulphur. Elaira picked an uncertain path between obsidian puddles and dune grass streamered like frayed ribbon. Against the heave of roiled surf, the looming frame of the half-complete brigantine combed the gusts to shrill vehemence. Nearer to hand bulked the mass of the chart loft, needles of candleflame pricked through its ill-fitted shakes. Inside the sole building to be graced with four walls, the yard’s roisterous labourers gathered over trestles to eat supper, compare conquests and shoot dice.

  Arithon’s workers were unattached men. Given an hour of unsupervised freedom, they would drink to ease boredom, and become crapulous; divided by disparate origins and rivalries, not a few were wont to pick fights.

  Resigned to plain fact, that every black eye and skinned knuckle would arrive on her doorstep for treatment come the morrow, and that Arithon’s visits would lapse while the wrongfully battered sued for their rights to restitution, Elaira marched up to the chart loft and hammered a fist on the door.