Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  After all, he could not bear to watch, as this uncrowned descendant of Shandian royalty surrendered himself to the glade. Arithon would be at the mercy of who knew what powers, with the Paravians gone from the land, and the old ways all but lost to the discord of strife, desperation, and short-handed neglect.

  Sunset came and went, a raw glory of scarlet that faded away through the black silhouette of the oaks. The breezes stilled. Dew fell, moist and cold as beaded quartz on the lichened face of the slab. Arithon lay on his back. The desert robe gave no more than a thread’s width of comfort, beneath him. He had been trained. Rauven’s schooling let him abide in deep stillness and sustain the relentless chill temperature. He could not withstand such cold for too long. Not without taking sustenance, after the day’s rite of fasting depleted his reserves. He settled the unquiet fields of his aura and held on to the calm of deep centring. Mage-taught discipline must see him through until sunrise if he was not to burden his trustworthy liegeman with arranging a funeral.

  Stars burned in the cobalt sky, their magnificence only slightly dimmed by the ascent of the last quarter’s moon. Arithon had chosen his timing with purpose: the flux lines ran thinnest, poised between the nadir at dark face, and the white tides that blazed highest, at the full. Even still, the scald of the currents by night laced his nerves with the rush of their passage. The memory still hurt, of past crisis at Rockfell, when the surfeit of lane flow he had sustained had all but torched his breathing flesh.

  Arithon viced his errant thoughts still. Whether he left his eyes open or shut, mage-sight unveiled the King’s Glade about him, ablaze with the glory of life. Here, the whisper of grasses spoke out loud. The chorused chord of the trees formed the bass notes that anchored the harmony of the risen stars: voices that presaged the onset of winter, and that stone recorded, eternal.

  Wide open to nuance, Arithon lay quiet, every part of him listening. His masterbard’s ear for subtlety plumbed the glade’s stillness to fathom its pulse and gather its rich lines of melody. Time passed. The heavens spun. While the pole-star glimmered above the north axis, the icy half-moon passed the zenith and sank towards the west. The trees spilled their plinking mantles of dew. An owl called, hunting mice. Deer crossed the glade, twice. Antlered bucks sniffed the air and stood guard, while the does and weaned fawns grazed the grasses.

  Arithon poised, suspended in mage-sight, waiting for song amid silence.

  On the far side of midnight, the whisper of mystery plucked his poised mind like a quivering string. He experienced, past sound, what ears could not translate: the swell of the grand chord that ranged the realms past the veil. He saw beyond vision, engulfed by the scalding light struck through the unseen deep. Shuddered to ecstasy, Arithon fought the pull of sublime desire. He had to hang on, stay grounded to the stone that supported his prostrate frame. Gently still, he regarded the forest, and looked for what eyes could not see: the path, that would leave its etched imprint in time. He sought the way that the centaur guardians had used, when their grace was petitioned to act in behalf of the realm.

  The place where the majesty of Ath’s living gift had stepped from the deep wood, and communed with the waiting, crowned kings.

  And there, to the south, like a wisp of caught flame that shimmered indigo in the darkness, Arithon read the trace that he sought. The remembrance, where an exalted presence had walked, the brush of its passage etched like hazed phosphor beneath the shadow of the eldest oaks. Memory remained, stamped in pebble and earth: the key to the mysteries lay open before him, who had asked without raising his voice.

  Arithon arose. Weak at the knees, he swayed and stood upright. Leaving the mantle on cold stone behind him, and skirting Kyrialt’s tucked form, he strode from the low mound and ventured the forbidden deeps of the night forest. Where no man had gone, this one dared to tread. Bare-skinned, on naked feet, he entered the path towards the heart-wood that was the sole provenance of the Paravians: once sent to Athera as Ath’s living gift, in flesh-and-bone congress with powers beyond the pale of mortal imagining.

  Where, behind, the flux had surged like live flame, now the currents roared through like a tidal bore. Arithon moved, lashed and winnowed by storm. As though lifted by tienelle, he fought the flare of his initiate sensitivity, reamed wide open and drowned to immersion. Yet where the drug’s nonselective effects hurled the mind to explosive, raw chaos, this shift was ordered, a ripple of subtlety fit to unstring the frail bounds of the flesh.

  Arithon reeled. Scarcely able to set one tender footstep after the next, he had no choice but to lean on the trees to stay upright. Light and sound swelled into a bone-shaking chord. Mage-sight unravelled to wonder. Ripped ragged by overlaid layers of perception, he went with closed eyes, and sensed his way forward. The play of the mysteries scalded his heart. Desperate, but not frightened, he held on to his boundaries. Used discipline to keep his aura in place, with the utmost, aware care and tenderness. He battled to hold to his human separation, as the stones and the plants and the teeming of life threatened to unstring his whole being with welcome.

  As he moved, one fraught pace to the next, he understood that the sacred glade was not passable to flesh-and-blood form. For his kind, the place would react as a portal, that led to the realms past the veil. Long before he reached the heart-wood’s surrounds, his firm substance would sublimate, absorbed by the greater chord of Ath’s mystery into spirit, then streaming consciousness. The thought seemed detached, and the peril, unreal, that he might pass too far to return.

  Only mage-taught purpose sustained him, a ghost pattern of embedded reason. To survive in this place, all thought must be leashed. The chance slip, and the unbridled fire of mind would react like volatile flame. Here, the least inclination of will could ignite the live flux to explosion. The tiniest whisper of wrongful intent could seed discord, and touch off unravelling damage and shattering harm.

  Arithon went forward, too aware of the penalty he might invoke, inadvert ently. His brash, human trespass could blight the clean flow of Selkwood’s inviolate balance. He inched onward. Another step, trembling, until his overstrung mind and assaulted senses dissolved at the boundaries of dream. Neither waking, nor sleeping, he stopped at that point. Gently, he moved to the verge of the path and set his back to the first mature tree. Stilled once again, he held, poised as silk, his masterbard’s heritage open and waiting.

  Black-out claimed him, perhaps. He could not track time. The white burn of the flux, and the shattered rainbows of energy that strung the web-work of all solid form lured the mind, and wore the will towards an unwary peace. Glassy-eyed, sated, enraptured past thought by the ringing chime of the mysteries, Arithon drifted. He sat finally, unmoored, the plumes of his breath silvered by the last glow of the moon’s light.

  There, like the gossamer cascade of sweet harmony, he heard the first notes of a crystalline flute.

  The sound tore his heart. Brought tears to his eyes, for its exquisite tones of enchantment. The pure melody rushed his nerves and blazed through his bones, and rocked through his quivering viscera. He listened, struck helpless by cascading joy, as the sunchild stepped from the wood.

  She was delicate, tiny, a sprite no more than a cloth yard in height. Her lucent skin seemed fashioned of mother of pearl, agleam in the soft, phosphor moonlight. Her step made no sound. Her least movement suggested the grace of a dance, spun from the moving breath of the wind and alive as the sparkle of gemstones. She had small, song-birds’ feathers caught in her long hair; slanted eyes, porcelain ears, with cheeks and fingertips brushed with the delicate tint of blush coral. She approached through the trees, ablaze with her own light, while the quartz flute rang and trilled an exalted response from the ether.

  Then she lifted the instrument from her lips.

  The cessation of her sublime melody scalded a musician’s spirit like a whip-lash of pain. Arithon felt the air stop in his throat. Hurled into blind dark, he fought to exist, through a weight like a fist at his heart-strings. Numbnes
s threatened to sweep him away, run him through, and unravel his being. The howling void beckoned.

  Arithon yanked back his slipped discipline. Barely in time! he stilled the raw cry that burst to escape his locked throat. Into silence that hung fragile as the symmetry in a snowflake, he bowed his head in hushed shame.

  The sunchild paused.

  Sight recovered, with her not a pace from his feet. The lit warmth of her aura caressed the stilled wood and soothed his wracked nerves like a tonic. Arithon still reeled. Unmoored, and flat helpless, he fixed on the jewels caught like stars in her midnight hair. The perfume of her presence overwhelmed sense, a blend of sweet summer that hung between sun-drenched meadow grass and evening rose.

  ‘Are you real, Exalted?’ he asked, not in words. His tears fell, that the coarse grain of his reverent thought slapped the flux as a shouted intrusion.

  The Athlien Paravian cocked her pert head. Eyes bright as green opal regarded him. Since her stillness inquired, he gave her his Name. Her perception, which unravelled his being past form, already welcomed the purpose that brought him. She would see the raw coils of Desh-thiere’s curse and know the flawed turmoil that rode him. ‘I am your sent answer,’ she told him at last. ‘You have asked to be freed?’

  His tears fell and fell. He turned his scarred palm, knotted, long past, by a light-bolt unleashed by a half-brother’s entangled malice. ‘With all my heart, Blessed. I rest in your care.’

  She lifted her flute, breathed one note on the air. Yet the charge in the sound loosed a levin bolt. Light burned, then burgeoned, and smashed like the sun through the held focus of initiate mage-sight. Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn did not see her move. Only felt her brief touch, that cleared the raging heat from his brow with a caress of insatiable tenderness.

  More of her kind must have joined her, although by then, he was hurled beyond seeing. He felt other small fingers trace over his skin, then many hands, insistently lifting him. More flute song arose and joined hers in the night. A music beyond sound wove a net of wild harmony. The sweet tones spun a magic that drew down the dark, and dropped a veil like a nimbus about him …

  Arithon awoke to the first blush of dawn. He lay on the stone slab, with the desertman’s robe wrapped over his shivering nakedness. The gift of the sunchild had been no figment of promise, or wistful remnant of his unhinged senses. His breath flowed in and out, as though his lungs filled his flesh to the soles of his feet. Beyond the miracle that had scoured his aura clean of the Mistwraith’s entanglement, he noticed the second gift, rested beneath his crossed arms.

  He cradled no less than the Paravian blade, Alithiel, that he had left secure, back in Halwythwood. The scabbard that covered the steel was the same: a sturdy sheath of black leather, fashioned by the Fellowship Sorcerer, Davien.

  Arithon clutched the sword. He gasped, wrung to dizziness. As the world brightened around him, and brushed the King’s Glade in Shand with the blaze of new day, he mustered the shattered rags of his will. Trembling, he stirred and sat up. Before Kyrialt roused from oblivious sleep, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn lost his poise. Overwhelmed by a gratitude beyond words, he gave way, then shuddered, riven through by an unutterable loss that now left him in desolate separation.

  He bent his dark head. With the Paravian weapon braced across his knees, he broke down and wept like a new-born.

  Autumn 5671

  Response

  The ripple unleashed by the event within Selkwood resounded bright echoes the length of the seventh lane. The stone ruins at Ithilt and Athir rang like a bell to the tones of grand harmony. Ath’s adepts in their hostel north of Shaddorn were rocked to their knees by a wave of blind ecstasy. In sheltered anchorage under the walls of Ishlir, the Prime Matriarch shouted to summon her seers, then embarked on a fierce course of augury that extended well into the day.

  Farther afield, other factions took note of the cascading impact. In Atwood, within the seclusion of a tumbled keep set amid the old ruin of Tirans, a raven fluffed up black feathers. Crest raised, the jet bead of his left eye cocked upward, he sounded a note like a struck bronze chime.

  Traithe stirred in amazement. Caught in conference with the crown council of Melhalla, he raised his silver head, listening through his bird, while the brisk wind outside flapped the canvas securing the gap where the roof-beams had rotted.

  ‘Are we endangered? What more’s gone amiss?’ asked the commodious, fair woman who wore the realm’s blazon as steward. Her generous heart melted: too quickly, the Sorcerer’s kindly brown eyes had widened with shock. ‘Can my people lend help?’

  ‘Ath’s presence on earth!’ Traithe exclaimed, while around him, the chieftains attending their caithdein stopped speaking, alarmed.

  Caught in midtirade, the distinguished High Earl of Atwood shoved straight. ‘You’ve received more bad news?’ he snapped across the sap-sticky boards, cut in haste to enlarge the main trestle. A competent man tasked by fraught crisis, he snatched for his field-worn weaponry.

  Around him, the clan elders displaced by armed invasion dropped their on-going concerns. Strapped without supply, they foresaw that their cloth goods and food stores were too scanty to last out the winter. The desperation that heated their arguments died, rendered grim before the Fellowship Sorcerer’s stretched silence.

  The dank, mossy keep contained their stark quiet. Another set-back could unstring morale, if not press shortened tempers to outright explosion. The scourge of Lysaer’s war host blighted the countryside beyond their protected forest. A nightmare invasion, come after a decade of fear: when too many strained families who guarded the realm’s blood-lines had become relentlessly threatened as Alliance gold spurred on the headhunters’ leagues.

  Anxiety built, until a smile of wonder lit Traithe’s features like sunlight burst through a cloud-bank. Shaken to laughter and confounded joy, he spoke in quick reassurance. ‘It’s Arithon, blast his nerveless s’Ffalenn effrontery! He’s just gone and torched the rule-book, again. Where our Fellowship’s arts were not sanctioned to act, he has dared the razor’s edge and won triumph.’

  Tension broke. The caithdein masked her pale face in plump hands. The earl, who had stood for years as her consort, touched her shoulder in shattered relief. He folded his lean frame back onto the bench, while speculation buzzed through the gathering. Heads turned, most of them bitter and scarred, or turned dour by recent hardship.

  Traithe rose, dark as shadow stamped into gloom; but not his announcement, which rang off the ruined walls. ‘Here is hope to lighten your hearts! The crown heir of Rathain has broken the hold of the curse that Desh-thiere laid upon him.’

  Through surging uproar and somebody’s wild applause, Traithe found himself importuned.

  ‘How has this happened?’

  ‘What custom’s been flouted?’

  ‘Can the s’Ilessid half-brother also escape the horror of cursed domination?’

  Traithe related particulars, to more shouts of stunned disbelief, underrun by elated excitement. The Teiren’ s’Callient was the first to steady rocked nerves. The earl at her side matched her startled glance. She met the round of shattering news with a caithdein’s due consternation.

  Her insistent grasp touched the Sorcerer’s sleeve. ‘You say that Prince Arithon called a Paravian presence to step from seclusion in Alland?’

  That precedent rocked, for its arrogance. Still smiling, Traithe turned his wrist and clasped the soft hands of Melhalla’s crown steward. ‘His Grace raised an Athlien circle of dancers, but they’ve gone. We were blessed by their singing for only a moment, as their healing invoked divine balance.’

  Yet the acting authority for a kingless realm was not to be swerved from tight inquiry. ‘His Grace did this, you say, for the sake of the headstrong s’Valerient daughter who has placed herself at risk in Alestron?’

  No fool, she had grasped the mad implication: Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn now would be bound north. The woman who bore reigning title for s’Callient had met his Grace onl
y once, an uneasy encounter that stayed acid-etched in her memory. Her canny perception had measured the man, and seen a fated spirit whose determined character would brook no traditional constraint.

  Rathain’s prince meant to plunge into the scene of armed conflict. He would come, despite the might of Lysaer’s war host, and the insane risk posed by fifty thousand spouting fanatics, swayed by the directive of Desh-thiere’s curse. The shrewd mind never rested, behind the munificent warmth that the Teiren’ s’Callient poured from her tender heart.

  She appealed to the Sorcerer, while the bird on his shoulder observed through unswerving jet eyes, ‘Just how much did your colleague foresee, back in Daon Ramon Barrens seventeen years ago? Did Asandir read today’s outcome when he chose Jeynsa as a caithdein’s successor in her infancy?’

  ‘Did he or Sethvir forecast these straits?’ Which had brewed a dilemma of such daunting scope to force Arithon’s reckless hand; and launched this monumental, extreme bid to escape from the Mistwraith’s binding.

  Against the posited risk, that might have disrupted Athera’s sacrosanct mysteries, even unravelled the stability of Alland, Traithe looked bemused. ‘In truth, I can’t say.’ While the raven fixed his disconcerted review with a gimlet stare, the Sorcerer admitted, ‘If such an exchange passed between Asandir and the Warden of Althain, they never discussed the outcome.’

  Traithe refused to qualify further. Too many crises still jeopardized his Fellowship’s resource: looming troubles that today’s stunning triumph could not hope to alleviate. At Althain Tower, Sethvir was still sinking. The adepts at his bedside reported that he had not aroused: only wept in his sleep, when the flowering resonance of Arithon’s victory had streamed through his earth-sense. If the flutes of the Athlien dancers could not lift him to partial recovery, some other relentless draw on his reserves pressed him into dangerous depletion. Little else could be done to relieve his blanketing lethargy.