Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  ‘What brought you here?’ Sulfin Evend snatched dignity, and blotted damp cheeks. ‘Why do the nomad tribes hold you in reverence?’

  That woke wry humour, mixed with vexed irritation. ‘Though frost should freeze water, I can’t warn them off.’ Arithon tucked lean fingers under his sleeves, discomfited and defensive. ‘Their seers claim a prophecy. There, our interests collide, since I won’t endorse the bizarre obligation.’

  Grey eyes matched green, across open flame, while the well of earth’s silence extended. No man to retreat, Sulfin Evend chose challenge. ‘They say your fate’s written into the flint knife I returned, that Enithen Tuer loaned on my behalf to spare my liege from the Kralovir’s depredation.’

  ‘Did they so?’ stated Arithon s’Ffalenn with soft venom. ‘Perhaps you don’t want to hear this. But the knowledge that founded all three cults of necromancy originated with the Biedar.’

  ‘Three cults!’ Sulfin Evend still refused to back down. ‘With the Kralovir gone, that leaves two more. Carry on.’

  ‘I see why you were set in charge of the troops,’ Rathain’s prince said in nettled rejoinder. Nonetheless, he had the fibre not to recoil. ‘The seals that stay death were once part of a sacred rite, used to commune with the ancestry. The Biedar don’t write. Their tradition is inherited. They waken their talent through a trial of privation that opens initiate memory. Long before mankind settled Athera, Koriathain used arcane channels and disclosed the content. They catalogued everything. By rights, they claimed, since the dedicate purpose laid out by their founders held a mission of preserving all records of human achievement. The library they guarded was not discriminate, nor was it kept with integrity. Somebody tinkered, mixed forms, and experimented. Dark sources were tapped without wisdom. Sigils with binding aspects were forged. Worse forms evolved later, recombined with blood ceremony, which warped offshoot was leaked from the order. As I understand, the breach happened before today’s stringent oath, which shackles each sister to unswerving loyalty. I have observed the knot tied by their Matriarch, first hand. It is utterly unforgiving.’

  Arithon lapsed into silence. Whatever the bent of his personal thought now, Sulfin Evend was loath to disrupt him. Where Lysaer was wont to mask pain behind the trappings of royal deportment, the dark half-brother retreated, inscrutable. One recalled that this creature had endured Davien’s maze at Kewar. He had walked out sane. Mage-taught, and fathomless as a pool of black water, his stillness had walls.

  Shortly, Arithon came back to himself. ‘Biedar would not be encamped on this world, but to see a responsibility to fulfilment. They are bound, so they say, to recoup the mistake that brought their sacred legacy into ill usage.’ A rustle of silk, as he shifted the unsettling topic towards closure. ‘Beyond that point, for my own peace of mind, I informed them I’d no longer listen.’

  Sulfin Evend digested this statement, well warned. ‘The elder said the Kralovir cult had been cleansed. If so, then the danger posed through the Alliance of Light is now culled. I doubt that my liege would repeat his error, or dare give consent to another pandering ally’s dark ritual.’

  ‘Lysaer will remember the knowledge exists.’ Arithon exhorted his half-brother’s officer with caustic honesty. ‘Never blind yourself to complacence: Desh-thiere’s curse will not rest. One day, if we cannot find means to prevail, your liege could be driven to use it. Or I could. The pitfalls if I should become cornered might seed a future that dire.’

  ‘What can I do, except slow down the muster?’ Sulfin Evend responded at tortured length. ‘Though how that could matter, Ath knows, at this pass.’

  The devastation left after the Kralovir’s demise had already branded its relentless legacy: the governor’s command struck dead to a man in the scouring cleanse at Etarra would now set all of the north into flame. Sulfin Evend balked at treason. No matter the cost, he would not reveal Lysaer’s picked target as the citadel at Alestron, since the s’Brydion duke’s family were exposed as spies, bound to suffer the brunt of the wrathful consequence. ‘If I resign,’ he said straitly, ‘or if I obstruct Lysaer’s thrust by an outright refusal to engage you, my liege will be left without any bulwark between Desh-thiere’s geas and insanity.’

  ‘You will not face me,’ Rathain’s prince cracked back. Nor were Lysaer’s martial intentions a well-kept secret, before such piercing attentiveness. ‘Attack the s’Brydion, and nothing you try can draw me out to participate. No alliance exists. I have severed all ties.’

  Outfaced by every unimagined complexity, Sulfin Evend gaped, shocked. ‘You? Turn your back and disown your most steadfast supporter? Forgive me, but I can’t believe it!’

  Shoved to his feet in sharp rage, Arithon lost his carefully held equanimity. ‘After Vastmark? Tal Quorin? The dead of Daon Ramon? For what reason should I endorse another campaign that cannot but end in red slaughter? By Ath, you’re a fool! No less than Duke Bransian, who would not hear my warning to stand down. Yes, I walked away! The man’s damnable pride in his ancestral seat will bring ruin on all of his innocent holding!’ Flame winnowed, as Arithon paced through the cauterized pain of past anguish. ‘Nothing I know could force me to this! No concept of honour will be made the cause to destroy another clan enclave of women and children.’

  Again came that sheet-gold flare through the aura. No matter how brief, the fleeting light showed that Arithon was in fact chafed to exhaustion. His bearing and features were haggard. The nerves that tried his leashed talent suggested the hurt his adamant stance must have cost him. Silenced by pity, Sulfin Evend sat, torn, entrapped by his role as Alliance advocate.

  ‘How can you sustain this?’ he managed at last, when Arithon’s caged movement threatened to scorch the eddyless air with each passage.

  ‘I have seen,’ said the Master of Shadow, worn by the cut of his forebears’ wakened far-sight. ‘To the last slaughtered babe, and the tears in the eyes of the women who will be forced on the hour the siege breaks, as spoils.’ He stopped there. Black hair sifted over lean knuckles as he buried his face in his hands. As though applied pressure could anneal his agony, he recontained his emotion. When next he looked up, Sulfin Evend beheld all the terrible depths that victorious passage through Kewar had cost him.

  ‘I will not live their death,’ said Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn. ‘Not ever by my willing consent, nor as the Mistwraith’s curse-blinded accomplice.’

  ‘If you stand out this war, the citadel must still go down in defeat,’ Sulfin Evend felt obliged to point out.

  ‘I have seen,’ repeated the Master of Shadow. ‘Let the town fall as a monument to stupidity, and not for self-righteous sentiment. Depend on my absence. I will weather the conflict inside the free wilds and assist the escape of survivors.’

  Aware the discussion was finished, Sulfin Evend unbent his sore knees and rose also. Weaponless, empty-handed, he had no solace to offer the initiate master who had saved all of Etarra from an insidious corruption. A man of the sword possessed no statesman’s gift, only the steel to admit his threadbare regret. ‘I would give anything except the life of my liege, that we had never been adversaries.’

  Arithon returned a grave smile, then offered the wrist clasp exchanged between clanborn. ‘Guard my brother,’ he said. ‘If we meet at blade’s edge, I would have you know: you fight as my nightmare, but never my enemy. This much I promise. Though you should pass the Wheel in pursuit of your duty, my blade will not be the weapon to reap Daelion’s justice.’

  Footsteps approached through the underground corridor. With uncanny timing, the dartmen returned to resume the lapsed charge of their vigilance.

  ‘The Biedar revere courtesy,’ Rathain’s crown prince assured as he released his fingers in parting. ‘Give them patience and calm, they must treat with you fairly, since their code demands no act of redress unless they are shown provocation. Rest well. You are safe. Eat whatever they bring you. When the seer’s herb that opened your senses wears off, the tribesfolk will guide you back to your people unharm
ed.’

  Sulfin Evend stepped back, erect but still sickened with vertigo. ‘You’ve had meetings like this one before,’ he accused.

  Arithon’s grin widened with piquant delight. ‘Ath, no! If I had to guess, the old grandame here connives hand in glove with the Warden of Althain. Do you gamble?’

  ‘Not with arcane powers, or seeresses given to drink,’ Lysaer’s first commander shot back. ‘They both want you alive, depend on that much.’ Startled by movement, closed in from behind, he stiffened as the dartmen grasped his upper arms.

  ‘We must use the blindfold once more,’ they informed, their quiet insistence as near as their kind would come to an open apology.

  Against his grain, Sulfin Evend submitted. He did not resist as they led him away. If masked sight spared him from the sting of regret, the knotted rag did nothing at all to impair his sensitized hearing. Behind, in the cavern, the s’Ffalenn bastard who was not his foe engaged his own style of courage. The lyranthe spoke out of the echoing dark. Notes sparkled, and lingered, lilting an exquisite air, plangent with a beauty to transcend all hopeless sorrow.

  Too late, the prisoner recalled the debt still left unacknowledged. Sulfin Evend had neglected to voice decent thanks for his kinsman’s deliverance from necromancy. Now he hoped the lapsed opportunity would stay lost for all time. Strapped by his oaths, burdened by Lysaer’s charge to engage the siege that must raze Alestron’s proud citadel to rubble, the Alliance commander prayed the course of his fate would be kind. Let the Biedar matriarch’s prophetic warning prove to be empty. In life, he wished he might never cross paths with the Spinner of Darkness again.

  Late Summer 5671

  Chase

  Eight days’ rugged travel were required to cross the free wilds, after the belated discovery that took the Halwythwood camp by grim storm: young Jeynsa s’Valerient had not ventured north, after all. Her feckless pursuit of her crown prince had never planned for an apology. Instead, folly sent her due south, with but one of her elders the wiser. She sought a ruler’s counsel in Atwood, where, as she had confided to Eriegal, she meant to press a scathing inquiry into the moral probity of her sovereign.

  Uninvested caithdein to Arithon of Rathain, and still enraged over the death of her father as sacrifice to salvage the royal blood-line, the girl was not faulted for her misplaced flight. Seventeen years of age, and outspoken, the daughter shared the impetuous dedication of her late sire.

  ‘No bad thing, that the minx has the spit to stand up to his Grace’s insufferable temperament,’ her brother, Earl Barach, had declared, astonished to fierce admiration at the time. No coward, his sister, to seize her shirked post with such brazen daring. The result would peel skin if she tried formal stature to cross-examine her prince. ‘The escapade should expose her, red-faced, for a rash idealist run riot.’

  Except for the fatally explosive risk: that the Light’s active muster now converged for war in East Halla.

  Sidir had lost his tolerance. ‘I’ll haul her back, trussed and gagged in a game sack!’ Become the firm arm that supported the bereft mother, the tall, grave Companion had gathered his weapons forthwith. ‘Fiends plague that girl for her idiot timing!’

  Jeynsa’s volatile grief, heated by young-blood ignorance, outstripped the concept of dangerous. Etarra was unhinged by the cleanse of a death cult. Every sword-bearing Sunwheel fanatic frothed to burn suspect talent for liaison with Shadow. No kinsman stepped forward to argue the need, that the Teiren’s’Valerient must be fetched back by the scruff of the hair she had cropped in defiance of custom.

  Sidir was not sanguine with the perils he faced. Now arrived at the verge of wide-open country, he knew that he shouldered an effort predestined to fail. The girl was a fit tigress, and she had an eighteen-day start on him. Worse, his hopeless journey was not made alone: the Koriani enchantress whose fate was entangled with Arithon’s packed her satchel in stride alongside.

  ‘You will need arcane help,’ Elaira insisted, against the innate distrust her kind aroused from the clans. ‘Or else waste the time you don’t have to go wrong, chasing hunches down a cold trail.’

  Since no forest-bred talent could challenge her power, Sidir took charge. He would take her from Halwythwood, if only to keep her order’s suspect machinations under his direct sight.

  Their hot-foot chase after Jeynsa had brought them to the fork in the River Arwent five nights past the dark of the moon. Now that the safe forest coverts must be left behind, the enchantress prevailed against the Companion’s rife urgency: she would take pause and use her arcane knowledge to measure the outlying territory.

  ‘You should heed my counsel,’ Sidir resisted, his impatient grip on his sword reflecting his disapproval.

  ‘We’re not at odds,’ Elaira reminded, loath to rattle the thorns under lying their mismatched alliance. Steamed by worry herself, she crouched with the wood at her back and pressed her spread palms to the earth. ‘I won’t risk letting our crown prince know why Jeynsa’s bolted hell-bent into trouble.’

  The liegeman viewed her stifled need as transparent: to reach for heart’s ease through subtle awareness and link with her distant beloved. The concern was not groundless: her longing desire yearned towards the south. The same, searing stars that Arithon experienced at Sanpashir glimmered here, but not softened by late-summer heat haze. The torpid air would not wear the scent of high grass, or the song of the nightjar that stitched lonely notes through the shrilling of nocturnal insects. Elaira kept her firm hold on restraint. She limited her trace to the deep strata of bedrock, listening for the delicate, shimmering current that carried the local lane flux.

  Looming above her, Rathain’s grim Companion unleashed his overtried nerves. ‘This is no secure place to dally for scrying. We should cross the north ford and push into the Barrens by daybreak to avoid the risk of a sighting by trackers.’

  The enchantress persisted despite sound advice, stubborn beyond her slight build. She did not look the part of the initiate Koriathain. Clad in cross-laced leathers, her braided bronze hair tied with deer-hide, she could have passed for a forest-bred scout, searching for game sign; except her response second-guessed a man’s mind, before he set words to his thinking.

  ‘I won’t need a fire,’ Elaira demurred. ‘This near the fourth lane, just a rock-pool at the verge, where shoaling rocks don’t riffle the current.’

  Which choice seemed the worse, to a forest clansman whose instincts were pressured. In this border-line country, where the Arwent’s deep channel could float an east-bound, keeled barge, more trespassing merchants each year dared to route their perishable freight through the lake-side town of Daenfal. Free wilds or not, no clansman crossed them without an armed company at his back. Never mind that traders caught flouting crown charter must be waylaid, or that the fools born outside of blood heritage did not perceive how their venal invasion disrupted Athera’s grand mysteries. The compact that served the aware heart of the land could not tolerate any compromise that degraded the harmonic flow of the fourth lane.

  All the worse, that Jeynsa had tried this passage alone, when impending war drove invasive town interests to ever-more-vicious reprisal. Sidir shifted his sweating grip on his blade, not liking the fact his back was exposed as quarry for league-hunting bowmen.

  Scalded at last by his smoking unease, Elaira broke off and stood. ‘Sidir, believe me, your fuming is groundless. The flux lines are pulsing in natural harmony. If any townsmen are hanging about, they will be peacefully dead!’ Against his stiff quiet, she finished off, clipped, ‘Anyone living who isn’t mage-shielded would stamp an emotional signature.’

  Sidir raised a dark eyebrow, the silvered hair at his temples distinct even under faint starlight. ‘I should rely on your vision?’

  Elaira sighed. ‘My dear man, are we dancing in blindfolds through hoops? I’ve stood tours of lane watch for my meddling order since I was a starving waif culled from an alley. Seen mirrored in earthforce, your distrust of my character may as well be
a deafening shout.’

  Not caught aback, Sidir chose his words to avoid a pitched fight. ‘I don’t like the fact I can’t fathom your motives.’ Grey eyes that discerned with birth talent for truth never flinched from unkind reservations. ‘If you’re wanting that pool, I’d as soon have this done with.’

  Nonetheless, his guidance was considerate as he threaded the rough course through the overgrowth to the river-bank. Southside of Halwythwood, where Daon Ramon Barrens crumpled against the plateau of Araethura, the buttressed seam opened into a gorge. Beneath, the boisterous sluice of the Arwent thundered over its bed of split boulders. Poured ink since the set of the waxing moon, the misted air smelled of wet mineral. Game trails left by otters skeined through the scrub, raked to a leaning tangle of thatch by the floods at spring thaw.

  Summer’s drought tamed the rampaging spate. Scoured stone scalloped the water’s edge, lapped by the cold depths where the trout swam.

  ‘Here.’ Elaira caught Sidir’s wrist before the tall clansman withdrew. ‘Stay as you wish. I won’t have secrets that fan the least doubt that I’d use my powers to betray you.’

  ‘To seek Feithan’s daughter, perhaps not,’ Sidir challenged. ‘But a man who serves Rathain’s crown has to wonder. Whose hidden cause are you backing?’

  ‘The civilized mask was already stripped, that night in the glen by the Willowbrook,’ Elaira snapped, a touch acid. Day upon day of exhaustive, harsh company chafed the barbs lying under the skin. ‘From chastened, need I grovel to beg a reprieve from the on-going punishment? I have no desire to harm your clan interests! My order’s knowledge will not be engaged, even for straightforward scrying.’

  Sidir watched her elfin features turn haunted as she strained to recoup equilibrium. Not callous, at heart, he stripped away pretence. ‘Dare I suggest your concern for Jeynsa might further your sisterhood’s plot to trap Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn?’