Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  The instrument leaned against the far wall, its lacquered wood inset with a shimmer of jewels. Sulfin Evend shivered. The instrument owned a spare symmetry fit to pierce a man to the heart. Such beauty bespoke nothing less than the grace of Paravian craftsmanship.

  Startled to find an heirloom beyond price in this unlikely, rough setting, Sulfin Evend peered into the gloom. There, he picked out a supine form, sprawled on a woven blanket.

  The stranger the elder dispatched him to meet was no swarthy offshoot of tribal heritage. This man was pale-skinned. His arched feet were bare. Healed abrasions gleamed white on his ankles. The rest of his frame was obscured by the loose, silk garb of the desert. He did not seem either unsettled or dangerous. Asleep, his slight stature and angular face appeared refined, even strikingly vulnerable.

  The contrary fact that he looked unimposing jarred every natural instinct.

  First the glossy black hair, then the savage old scar, half-twisted the length of his right forearm, cued the uncanny awareness. Sulfin Evend realized he beheld none else but the Master of Shadow: for three decades, the author of unconscionable massacres and the sorcerer whose conniving wiles had once lured an elite band of Hanshire light horse to a nightmarish ruin inside a grimward.

  Reason fled. Tied wrists notwithstanding, Sulfin Evend surged forward. His graphic memories of lost comrades, undone one by one, and consigned to hideous slaughter, lit his primal urge to retaliate.

  Fierce hands jerked him backwards. Jabbed at the knees, knocked down by brute force, Sulfin Evend was cuffed and pinned flat by the hands of his wrathful escort. The tribesfolk were not a forgiving race. They gagged his mouth, trussed his legs, and rendered him helpless before they abandoned him to his fate. Their matriarch’s decree left him sprawled at the feet of his liege’s most merciless enemy: the same wanton criminal he had striven to destroy on Lysaer’s failed campaign in Daon Ramon.

  The last warrior to leave shed his dusty robe and tossed it over the prostrate outlander. ‘To spare the sight of the one you offend, since our revered eldest has charged us to keep you here!’

  Summer 5671

  Encounter

  Hard-breathing and furious, Sulfin Evend could not thrash off the light cloth draped across him. Its clinging folds masked his prone body and face. Each breath, he inhaled the barbaric musk left ingrained by its owner. The mélange of strange herbs, ginger spice, and old wood smoke added a vicious kick to his vertigo. He found no recovery. The chill stone where he lay seemed alive with queer flashes of light, while his ears became overwhelmed by the force of plain silence.

  His effort to curse entangled a tongue that rejected the habit of speech. Such uncanny malaise had to mean the old woman’s welcoming drink had contained a narcotic infusion. Sulfin Evend regretted his manners, too late. He panted, pressed prostrate by his gravid flesh, while the bounds of his mind came undone, then up-ended, and dissolved his perception into spinning confusion.

  He reeled, unmoored, beyond count of time. The earth did not measure by minutes. Magnified senses marked each indrawn breath, then entwined them with those of another man, sleeping. Identity blurred. The Light’s Lord Commander lost track of himself. When his enemy shuddered, gripped by black nightmares, Sulfin Evend felt his own heart constrict. Shared dread rode him, roughshod. He quaked with terror. Tormented shadows that he could not see gibbered and wailed, hounding him into a darkness more vast than the deep. No fight availed him. He could not break free. His raced pulse drummed to his shredding fear, while his staked spirit languished, shackled between his locked limbs.

  Far worse than helpless: Sulfin Evend felt as though drawn on unseen wires out of his hapless flesh.

  The throes of rank horror would not release. Without training to harness the gifts of his outbred clan blood-line, Sulfin Evend lacked the self-command to awaken. Suffering entrapped him in vivid distress. Every nerve he possessed felt redrawn in flame, until he lost his grip, crushed to madness. Shattered past recourse, he floundered, unstrung, when a lyranthe note speared through the dark.

  Its ringing, sweet pitch snapped out of nowhere and sliced the unravelling thread of stark terror.

  Another note followed, then another, cascading into a seamless run of ineffable, scalding purity. The graceful progression burgeoned into a chord that engaged formless dread, and from nothing, raised a bulwark of shimmering harmony.

  Suspension ensued, upheld by a steadfast commitment that denied the chokehold of despair. Hope danced, forged into melody that rejected insidious dissolution. Where abased torment reigned, beauty unfurled the adamant fire of will.

  Lifted free, Sulfin Evend wept without sound, while the cry of the other man’s heart refigured itself in the soaring majesty of music. Fingers wrought light out of silver-wound strings and invoked exaltation through Ath’s gift of unvanquished freedom.

  Peace returned. What darkness remained had been cleansed of all stain, reduced to mere shade cast by moonbeams. The master musician laid down his last line. Exquisite, his closing chord faded. The quietude, after, still gleamed with raised power, even when he damped off his strings.

  Left with a fragile, cathartic scar to offset an experience of lacerating separ ation, Sulfin Evend heard the sigh of stirred air as the superb instrument was set aside. A whisper of fabric described movement. Senses torn raw caught the near-soundless step that approached. Through drug haze and dull sickness, the shock of encounter carried an unbearable clarity: the looming fierce presence of the sorcerer took pause, brought short by belated discovery. An explorative touch traced the mantle that masked Sulfin Evend’s prostrate shoulder.

  ‘Dharkaron Avenge!’ swore the Spinner of Darkness, sharpened to startled annoyance. ‘A bound prisoner? What uncivil trick left you here?’

  The robe draped over Sulfin Evend’s gagged form was grasped, then snapped away.

  Since nightfall left the cave dark as pitch, the initiate mind would use mage-sense: the Master of Shadow surveyed what lay at his feet. Wide open still, sensitized by his music, he exclaimed in shocked anguish, ‘Ath’s mercy forgive! You’re the same one who maimed Jieret!’

  Talented Sight and narcotic trance brought the past to collide with the present: still snagged into unwitting rapport, Sulfin Evend was hurled back into grisly recall, as a red-haired victim’s hot blood splashed from the vengeful cut of his dagger.

  He curled on his side, retching, while his enemy recoiled above him.

  Barraged, caught stripped of defences as well, Arithon sucked a fast breath. He owned the strength of training to wrestle his unleashed emotion, but not the gush of a far-sighted talent, run irretrievably wild: for he was not yet healed. The traumatic assault on him by dark necromancy still faulted his natural barriers. The breach entangled his crown gift of empathy with flaring aggression and rage.

  No less volatile, and just as viciously mirrored: he matched an antagonist also unstrung by deranging hallucination.

  Equanimity shattered, Arithon gasped, staggered by the blazing ferocity that reached for instinctive revenge. Brute discipline triumphed. He did not strike to kill. The curbed stress discharged into his auric field and released as a burst of gold light.

  But the stripping exposure laid his face bare to the force of his unassuaged grief.

  Then darkness resettled. Sulfin Evend braced for a knife in the ribs, or a fist, as such a fury of towering, unexpressed pain triggered reflexive violence.

  No mangling blow fell. The stilled, charcoal air gave nothing back. Not a sound, or a breeze, or a footstep. Unable to fight, unable to speak, unable to vent through his helplessness, Sulfin Evend shut his eyes. Strapped hand and foot, teeth clamped against nausea, he feared to breathe lest the tension should break him in pieces.

  The touch, lightly trembling, grasped his shoulder again, to a ragged line spoken in Paravian. Met by a flinch, the Teir’s’Ffalenn cursed. Then he said, still distressed, ‘Relax. I wasn’t expecting the Alliance Commander at Arms as my afternoon’s idle company.’ A deep
ly drawn breath, and his composure steadied. ‘Despite what you’ve heard about my reputation, I’m truly not planning to murder you.’

  But of course, Sulfin Evend held no grounds for trust. A confirmed enemy must understand that. Trussed as he was, he could do little but heave and try not to choke on the gag left by the barbaric dartmen.

  There came, moments later, the soft hiss of flame: Arithon had rekindled the coal-pot. ‘Drugged and held speechless? No wonder you fear. The flashback similarity to your mishandling of Earl Jieret must sweat you with dreadful anxiety.’ To the whisper of silk, he came close. His agile fingers loosened the knot and unwound the uncouth strip of rag.

  Despite nausea, Sulfin Evend twisted his head and glared up at his looming nemesis. ‘I don’t fear death. You won’t hear me beg.’

  Slight of bone, neat of movement, the Master of Shadow tossed the fouled cloth aside in distaste. Unfazed, he moved on, then released the rope that restrained the Lord Commander’s numbed ankles. ‘Shall we drop the predictable, boring exchange? The pain my caithdein suffered is past. The same for your uncle, dead at my hand. He might have been saved had he not been so quick to dismiss the goodwill of an adversary.’

  As his wrists were freed also, Sulfin Evend discovered he needed an enemy’s help to sit up. Stiff from confinement, embarrassed by shame that thwarted all rational courtesy, he rubbed his gouged skin to restore circulation.

  Scrambled wits forestalled even tact. He could not contain reckless bitterness. ‘Where was goodwill, when Lysaer s’Ilessid was tricked into burning his own troops in Daon Ramon?’

  The mistake was immediate: mention of that name with hostile intent could not do other than trigger the curse of Desh-thiere.

  Arithon froze. Eyes darkened, he transformed on a breath to a mindless predator coiled to spring. Too late for even foolhardy regret, Sulfin Evend stared at death, poised to rend him apart without conscience.

  There, the savage moment suspended. The inflicted pattern that sparked deranged madness hammered into an initiate sorcerer’s singular will. The Master of Shadow shuddered. Griped as though body and spirit knew agony, he twisted and rammed his outflung hands against the jagged stonewall. Braced there, hard-breathing, he turned into himself with a focus no less ferociously frightening. His form appeared fleetingly wrapped in white starlight; or perhaps the unearthly effect was another offshoot of drug-birthed imagination.

  Watching, transfixed, Sulfin Evend felt his hazed senses flung wide. Gooseflesh raked over him. As though he heard strains of intangible music, or pursued the cry of a thought hurled beyond reach of the mind, he gasped to a burst of wild ecstasy.

  Ephemeral, sourceless, the emotion fled.

  Arithon’s tension snapped all at once. He sustained a series of disciplined breaths. Then he blotted his face on his sleeve, shoved erect, and crossed to the far side of the fire-pot. There, he sat down with his quivering fingers laced on his drawn-up knees. As though no break had happened; no razor-edged conflict had danced at the abyss to drive him to geas-bent violence, he resumed the brutal interrogation.

  ‘Should I answer, for Daon Ramon?’ His cool regard assessed his adversary, alert, but without sign of rancour. ‘If you want to pick fights upon treacherous ground, I’ll walk away. The bully can’t punch with no victim to hand. For the dead on both sides, I have no stomach for mud-slinging, self-righteous argument.’

  ‘I have earned my demand,’ Sulfin Evend declared, shaken. ‘The curse-driven killer did not arrange the acts of piracy that happened at Riverton. Nor its cold-blooded aftermath. Of forty good men, I alone survived your run through the Korias grimward.’

  ‘The fox called to blame for the huntsman’s demise?’ Arithon laughed. ‘That is a bit specious, since after all, the whim of the Biedar arranged this encounter.’ Aware Sulfin Evend’s suspicious regard sought to measure him for concealed weapons, he stood up, then hooked off his sash. His loose robe fell open. The unclothed flesh beneath served his bitter assurance that he was unarmed. ‘My half-brother hates me because Desh-thiere wants us dead. Tell me, or better, examine yourself: what reason do you have to follow him?’

  ‘Should I answer?’ Sulfin Evend shot back.

  Not large, though endowed with a neat, feline grace, the creature that four kingdoms raised arms to destroy resettled himself, stripped of humour. The thin glaze of flame-light played over his ironic gaze as he added, ‘No just cause exists. No rhetoric can brighten the geas the Mistwraith has dealt, and no redeeming virtue at all can excuse the debacle between us. If this was a lie, you would be cut dead. Not invited to juggle a trying conversation.’

  Such stabbing satire strangled reserve.

  Sulfin Evend rested his forehead on his marked wrists, while his naked unease battled reason. When he found his voice, he dared a cautious truce. ‘I have seen enough to allow you that truth. My best efforts have failed. I could not make Avenor’s crown regent hear sense or abandon pursuit of his blood feud.’

  Green eyes resurveyed him, sharply awake. ‘Ath’s sweet grace! You have tried?’ Through a moment of desperate, excoriating pain, the Teir’s’Ffalenn dropped his glance to his unrelaxed hands. ‘You could gain a knife through the heart, for that risk. We are cursed, and not trustworthy, though we are both served with the gift of such adamant loyalty.’

  ‘I swore oath to the land,’ Sulfin Evend admitted, too mazed for the sense to withhold the confidence.

  ‘Caithdein, to my half-brother?’ Now, Rathain’s prince stared, shocked. ‘And the Fellowship backed this? You split your loyalty with the Sorcerers at Althain Tower?’

  Sulfin Evend folded his abraded wrists in his lap, too flat tired for subterfuge. ‘No way else could I spare the guiding light of the Alliance from falling to usage by necromancy.’

  ‘Brave man! Since you have accomplished your victory, you also must know that the aftermath dooms you to failure.’ Neither man courted pretence. The Alliance’s troops were already marching. Towns in all three of the eastshore kingdoms now girded for war to take down this calm, dark-haired criminal. Given a stubborn lack of response, the Master of Shadow laid open his heart and bored in. ‘An end like Jieret’s could become your lot. You might die on the sword of a vengeance-bent clansman, or worse: Desh-thiere’s geas can’t honour your principles.’

  ‘So Asandir warned.’ A coal popped in the fire-pot, flurrying sparks that blinked into darkness. Sulfin Evend said carefully, ‘My lord’s fits of madness notwithstanding, I find that I still have to try.’

  ‘Who else has the fibre to shoulder the load? I salute you, and grieve,’ stated Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn. ‘Before s’Ilessid, you could break my spirit.’ He tightened his sash, perhaps reamed by a chill, though the desert air wafted in through the cleft carried the baked warmth of summer. Then he said, ‘I am glad that you’re with him. His ruler’s vision has become so dreadfully lost. Lacking the disciplined guidance of training, my half-brother has little chance to resist. Past question, such caring as yours could offer the stance for salvation. As Earl Jieret’s did, thrice over, for me, not least on the field at Daon Ramon.’

  Sulfin Evend winced, wounded afresh by the genuine absence of anger. Drug-heightened perception made him see too far. Now, the yoke of old enmity haunted, that had led him to cut a courageous man’s tongue; made him part and party to grotesque hatred, waged upon twisted political viciousness and geas-bent misunderstanding.

  Nor could this unwanted, intimate encounter do aught to ease his raw conscience. ‘How can you sit there and not break my neck?’

  The creature that Lysaer named Spinner of Darkness did not take offence at the outburst. ‘Within Kewar,’ he said gently, ‘I accepted the gift offered up by a centaur guardian.’

  Sulfin Evend hauled in a shuddering breath. Fists jammed to shut lips, he stamped down the sudden upsurge of past vision: of a presence and majesty beyond the bounds of his mortal mind to encompass. He had witnessed such wonder: been overawed and crushed to his knees. Every day since, he su
rvived by the sword, and the force of his abject denial.

  This moment, as well, he could not match the grace of an enemy’s sorrowful understanding. The drug’s effect heightened their entwined emotions. Set under such stress, Sulfin Evend could not bear the tearing weight of remorse. Not without smashing the foundation that saw him oathsworn to command the Light’s armies.

  ‘Death can’t restore what’s already been lost,’ the Master of Shadow declared. ‘Does vengeance or blame ease the sorrow of heart-ache? We all make mistakes. Life can’t be lived without harm to others. Worst of all, I have seen Jieret’s path was self-chosen. That sting was the hardest trial to bear. We can’t buy self-forgiveness. Can’t pay for redress through our sorry penchant for guilt-fed lament and self-punishment. I would have you set free,’ said Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn, ‘since the man you support with such steadfast care is none else but birth kin, and my brother.’

  The tears welled too fast, for that tender release. Sulfin Evend masked his wet face, while the soft voice resumed, and pierced his remorse with compassion. ‘Some gifts of friendship cannot be earned. They exist, beyond price, and we cannot hope to match up to them.’

  Never so clearly exposed to the debt he might leave to his liege, as survivor, the Alliance Lord Commander crumpled and wept. Did this adversary not know? Sulfin Evend lost the frank speech to inform that he held the sealed order to raise all of the southcoast to arms, a duty now made insupportable by the perverse strait of his quarry’s free-will absolution.

  The initiate master whose work had undone the Kralovir’s deadly incursion, in cold fact, was no prejudiced town’s mortal enemy. A bard of such gifted stature would have loved peace, before the pointless strife of Desh-thiere’s cursed war had upset his natural destiny.