Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  Unremarked listener, Lirenda was jolted to riveted interest. This reference applied to initiate Elaira, and the glaring urgency of the Prime’s machination to entrap the last Prince of Rathain.

  ‘The signature trace has been carefully shielded,’ the senior disclosed in crisp recitation. ‘We needed meticulous care to be certain. But the resonant ciphers driving the power originate from the sisterhood.’

  Selidie’s porcelain-doll features seldom showed an expression. The wrapped hands in her lap never moved. But the gleam that sharpened her pellucid eyes shot a flickering charge across the Skyron matrix’s active focus. Lirenda sensed also the elated thrill that made her Prime pounce on the news.

  ‘The novice set under disciplinary questioning may retire to closed quarters,’ Selidie ruled, abrupt beyond etiquette. ‘Let the miscreant stay in solitude and consider the gravity of her transgression.’ Lest the senior initiate should presume to linger, the next order destroyed the least opening. ‘Madam, you will serve as the girl’s punitive escort, as well as stay on as her warden. On your way, make sure that the watch is informed. On no account should anyone else broach my privacy until leave is given.’

  ‘Your will, Matriarch.’ The elderly peeress bent in compliance, sulky, since the assignment insulted her station and rank. Worse, the shaken novice required support, not yet able to walk unassisted.

  Lirenda regarded the pair’s weaving departure, perversely glad not to have been dismissed, if her role as Prime Selidie’s puppet made her party to Arithon’s downfall. More rapid instructions rousted the boy page by the ante-room doorway. He returned, scurrying, with the small coffer stored in the Matriarch’s day chest.

  The Skyron aquamarine was kept enabled, but relegated to a bronze tripod, while Lirenda’s dexterity was pressed to unfasten the chest’s warded locks and bronze latches.

  ‘Lay bare the contents,’ Selidie demanded. ‘But take utmost care! Shield your direct touch as you remove the covering.’

  A crystal, then, would be wrapped in the silk. Lirenda peeled the cloth back, unsurprised to encounter the silver chain and quartz pendant that served in rapport with Elaira. The jewel’s linked matrix was active, as well. Engaged with the distant enchantress’s working, its raised field whispered tingles over Lirenda’s sensitized skin. Just how any junior initiate could wield power without her attuned focus in hand presented a piquant mystery. The feat should be impossible. Lirenda still sweated the harrowing memory, when one of Arithon’s arrogant henchmen had stolen her personal crystal. She had never felt more helpless and humiliated, until her current state of disgrace. Yet no chance was given to study Elaira’s singular prowess.

  ‘Our bait draws on her initiate heritage at long last!’ The Prime’s avid excitement rivalled the cat that measured a mouse-hole for movement. ‘Lirenda! You will take up the Skyron focus, again. Search through its kept record and establish rapport through Elaira’s vow of obedience. I would tie into her current activity through the matrix of her crystal pendant. Since my subsequent working will be framed through yours, I need a clear line for my purpose. Grant that for me. Absorb the emotional dross through the link we just used to screen the miscreant novice.’

  Lirenda could not escape the imperative to take up the Skyron focus. Puppet to the Prime Matriarch’s whim, she submerged for the second engagement: found and locked into Elaira’s self-signature, indelibly stamped by the order’s oath of obedience. That binding permitted the entry for Lirenda to key into the focal point of the personal quartz that the order held hostage. Concentration had to be forced, inflamed as she was by aroused lust from the acts of the flutter-brained novice. Never her own mistress, body or mind, Lirenda did as directed, and enabled the cleared channel for the Prime’s will.

  The dizzying plunge from the familiar came after, as separate awareness spiralled under and drowned in the well of an altered perception. This time, no feat of endurance prepared her. Even the most rigorous course of experience failed to shield Lirenda’s stripped nerves from the glorious havoc…

  … where matched love fabricated a consummate grace, traced to light by a masterbard’s music, Dakar stood watch and guard from the side-lines. He had not been idle, since Arithon’s word released him from the active circle. His by-standing work had tidied the chamber, then cleared the hazed residue of violent death. The fallen were settled outside the shut door. Talvish would turn the wrapped bodies over for mourning, should relatives come to collect them. No other intrusion could cross the locked threshold. Studded oak had been barred, then warded.

  Now, Dakar held his post with an unblinking stare, apprehensive beyond imagining. The moment had long since passed to turn back. Man and Masterbard, Arithon had engaged every faculty to bind the perilous conjury wrought by Elaira.

  The constructs that sheltered Sidir’s aware essence were in place, and the irrevocable course for his healing, already in motion. Night and darkness outside all but ceased to exist. Under the force of raised power, the enclosing walls seemed to shimmer. Mage-sight could discern the latticed geometry, where the subtle protections caused staid stone to sing in sympathetic vibration. Inside, the shadowy forms of the furnishings loomed dense as ink on the outskirts. Against the cold quiet, the guard rings shone gold, as the difficult working unfolded. The killing sword had been drawn by degrees. An acrid taint of cautery lingered, coiled in the blued smoke that drifted through the configured blaze: which was the actualized power, made manifest through the Masterbard’s gift, to lift dissonance back into harmony.

  Dakar shivered with awe. What he witnessed exhausted all marvels.

  Sidir’s withdrawn spirit slept, secured in comfort, while the Koriani enchantress laboured to mend his riven body.

  Though depleted, the spellbinder was not muddled or drunk. The charged weaving that stitched through the air, and his brief activity had begun to sober his faculties. If he dared not help, his trained awareness could follow the flow of energy, overlaid pattern on pattern. Such dreadfully intricate, dynamic complexity never forgave a mistake. The restoration of organs and internal tissue that Elaira ventured, barehanded, left him dry-mouthed with anxiety.

  For the template that nurtured life was left flickering and drained, or else severed outright by damage. Unerring, her touch traced the structural tears, though the track that she followed was thin as a filament, frayed by patches of darkness. Time and again, her skill faltered, lost. The aching pause followed. She listened, poised in seeking silence: holding the ragged gap until the exacting response from the lyranthe could find and key the lost intonation. Where sound answered, revitalized light bloomed again. Slow as agony, each sequence refigured the conduits where nerve and sinew had weakened past holding the imprint that sourced Sidir’s Name. One note played false would distort the faint matrix. One mis-stepped rhythm would snarl the harmonic balance off true.

  One strand at a time, as the ephemeral web was played back to glittering life, Elaira’s precision anchored the restoration, defying entropy through the ciphers taught by Koriathain: force drawn from the collective pool of intent, reined into existence by oath-tied sacrifice, and amplified through a crystal matrix.

  Dakar held no illusions. The practice upset his digestion.

  ‘A morbid transmission,’ Asandir’s patient teaching had explained, long years past on a moonlit hill-side. ‘The sisterhood’s binding oath forges the transfer of willed choice through constriction. This form of consent always freezes the moment. It anchors, and stops natural expression through movement. Not like a blood-tie, which threads through the essence of Name and draws renewed flow from true being. The promise that affirms the initiate sister stakes life. A fixed structure can never be made to flex. It cannot breathe to admit the spark of unbounded consciousness. Both forms may be reversed, or revoked, if correct steps are observed to unshackle them. But the rigid ones always leave scarring damage, sometimes grave enough to impair survival…’

  A split hair, Dakar had dismissed at the time, too scattered by his
hectic thinking. Now, sweating in the sealed room, he observed the same concept, enacted. As Elaira stapled the rips in shorn tissue, he saw the black ribbon of dissonant power, sucked through the placed frame of the cipher: a draining tide, that pulled essence from other life and stamped a hard template for change.

  The drawing surge scoured his back-lashed nerves, a wrongness that rekindled his nausea. Dakar repressed his instinct to flinch. The risk ran too steep, that a sanctioned crown prince might fall under sway of an oath of debt to the order. Posted as Arithon’s trusted defender, the Mad Prophet dared not look away.

  And there, his stunned eyes watched the miracle happen, as the bard’s line of melody captured the sinister threading. Arithon’s counter-measure lilted a phrase, evoking a fair, sweetened resonance. Music lifted into a soaring appeal that commanded an answering cry of renewal. Elaira’s enchained cipher throbbed, then burned, annealed by white fire into transformation. Dakar watched, spellbound, as the Masterbard’s art refigured the oppressive enchantment: captured the framework, unerring, and rescribed his beloved’s intent to serve wholeness. Intrepid, his bright harmony sustained until the stricture blazed clean, transmuted to joy through free partnership.

  Sidir’s hurt flesh would heal. Not through the chained power of Koriani design, but by intimate love, gifted by an inspired spirit, that dared the unknown to match limitless heart with brave effort.

  Time remained the enemy. Shock had to be settled, and blood loss restored, before the cauterized lung could be reforged in synchronicity with Sidir’s being. The enchantress’s delicate concentration must not slip. Nor might the bard’s fingering fail to match the brilliance of her human focus. The blaze of contained forces swept the shut room, raised sound ringing octave upon octave, until stone and wood trembled to the waves of unseen harmonics. Exhaustion could destroy in one moment all of the night’s hard-fought progress. Elaira toiled onward, cranked taut under strain.

  She recognized the looming abyss, before Sidir’s traumatized flesh could be stabilized. His vitality ebbed still. The trickling loss might be too great to stem before the tide turned and the body began to recover. This wounding was mortal, far more extensive than the mangled forearm, restored for the stricken young fisherman in Merior.

  Dakar found himself weeping. The striving that staved off total failure wrung him dizzy from holding his breath.

  The moment was cruel for the hostile move engendered by Selidie Prime. Mage-sight detected the taint, a soundless shadow of outside invasion slipped through the immaculate conjury. Elaira noticed the shift straightaway. A shudder swept through her. She dared not glance up, or seek the bard’s notice, even in speechless appeal. The disruption inflicted by oath-bound priority could not be broached: not without risking the grace in the harmony that balanced the power between them.

  But as witness and guardian, Dakar dared not abide. His obligation to Fellowship interests compelled him, despite risk to Sidir. ‘Your Grace, you have an observer!’

  But whether as mage, or master musician, Arithon s’Ffalenn needed no warning. He chose not to cut off the contact, or abandon the liegeman thrown deeper in jeopardy. With dreadful delicacy, he rose to the challenge and altered his playing to compensate. He added another line, at a whisper, to the fine harmony laid down for healing: a descant theme of close caring, that nipped and darted in playful counterpoint.

  Dakar listened, amazed. The primary composition had not been disturbed. Still, the progression was wholly Sidir’s. Only now, the bard built on a love for three daughters, brought up to an independent maturity. Extreme sensitivity adjusted a whole chord: captured the rare, open-handed admiration for the woman who had preferred their raising at Fallowmere, in their father’s absence. Interleaved, as well, was the settled male strength that now cherished Feithan, and longed for the peace of a traditional marriage. The Masterbard deftly embellished those subtleties above the steadfast foundation.

  Only now, the song made as anchor to salvage a friend also plucked at the heartstrings of the furtive listener…

  … the effect on Lirenda was lightning, on thunderbolt. Everything her starved spirit had never known – the matchless love of Arithon’s partnership, interlaced with Elaira’s unbounded regard; the protective tenderness and quiet pride that inflected Sidir’s sterling character; the matchless poignancy, sprung from sharp loss, in his constancy through Feithan’s mourning – all the human caring and trust that Lirenda had shoved aside in her grasping pursuit of power now flooded her exposed awareness. She plunged headlong: into a range of exalted experience that her proscribed existence could never own.

  Already stripped, she had no escape. Lirenda became as the mote seared by fire while the might of the Skyron crystal noosed her subjective awareness.

  The dart struck, where no reason might shield the emotional impact. The longing that savaged her broke strength and sanity: sparked the unmerciful heat that remained, unreleased, from her prior linkage with the scapegrace novice.

  Lirenda gasped, riven. The iron bond of her Prime Matriarch’s subjugation could not stay her response as she shattered…

  … while another, maintaining strict watch at Alestron, observed the dynamic unfoldment: Dakar also witnessed, as Lirenda’s reserve exploded beyond containment. For one hanging instant, the shocked pattern blazed as a beacon, torched into wild conflagration. Elaira shuddered, rocked by the wave, while again, the bard stretched in improvised fury to compensate. For one, shining moment, the healing was there, etched in omnipresent, cold fire: the ciphers to channel Sidir’s recovery also offered the counterpoint pattern to unleash Lirenda’s rebirth from love’s starvation.

  Yet Prime Selidie lurked, poised as the stilled spider. Her meddling reach was made to extend through the weave wrought for Sidir’s recovery. As Lirenda’s poise snapped, the Matriarch imposed her overarching directive and engaged the master sigil that commanded all oathsworn initiates, with the power of death over life.

  ‘Avert!’ shouted Selidie.

  The linked tie to the music’s entrainment tore away, leaving Lirenda scorched to a cinder. Her unleashed longing found no safe renewal, but fell back, burned to ashes and withering envy.

  Now bare-handed amid the core of the storm, the Prime Matriarch held the emotional leash to Elaira. The move became Selidie’s, to break the connection to Arithon’s heart. Rip through the seamless current of union, that the ciphers suborned from Koriani influence could no longer regenerate through a masterbard’s harmonic infusion. Selidie would snap love’s cord. Claim her due oath of debt over Rathain’s foremost Companion; or else take Sidir’s life, and drive his confirmed prince to stand in challenge against her.

  Dakar foresaw no victory. ‘On your crown oath, Teir’s’Ffalenn!’ he cried, weeping.

  The warning preceded the crude intervention as he braced to invoke the permissions held in his hands. The act ran beyond desecration. The astounding, grand pattern raised up in clear light held too aching a beauty; a brazen feat of sheer innovation that had seemed too magnificent to fail. Yet before the shining coils became poisoned by Selidie’s influence, Dakar was obliged to step into the breach. As a Fellowship spellbinder, he must impose Arithon’s tie to royal lineage, then back that crown oath and shield Sidir’s threatened integrity.

  The bard’s sensitivity captured the pause before the irrevocable shift. Choice had been forfeit. Law-bound, the crown’s watch-dog must serve. The cry that pealed from Arithon’s throat held a note of pure despair. Music accompanied. His stark pain, clothed over in melodic sound, wrung protest from the thrumming strings under his hands. The burst shattered air; awoke fire; and bounded through the staid stone of the tower that housed such insufferable dichotomy: that love for a friend, and a kingdom, and a heart’s consort should not be string-tied in duty, but unfettered, and joyful, and free!

  And steel answered. The Paravian sword clasped in Sidir’s limp hand blazed incandescent and sang. The wild chord that once Named the winter stars razed into the channel suborn
ed from Elaira’s intent. Selidie was forced to match, then counter the risen torrent that refired the contested ciphers.

  In her desperation, she reached too far: pulled on the resource lying nearest at hand, that empowered her to drain life from her serving initiates. As her twisting demand gouged through Lirenda and Elaira to fuel her battle for conquest, the sword screamed.

  The very air lit, scalded to searing brilliance. The tonal dissonance of beauty and pain, of bright harmony and disruptive violation twined together and hammered vibration through the stone tower. The uncanny shriek ran into the earth. It shuddered the citadel’s bed-rock. Far under the threshold of human hearing, it woke the bell-tones of an answering chord, this one shaped by chisel and hammer, through the artistry of centaur masons. Too deep to detect, but apparent to mage-sense, Alithiel’s wards summoned a subliminal tremor from Alestron’s ancient foundations. Walls raised to protect drummed back their subsonic, bass tone in defence.

  Dakar shouted, astonished. All reason had fled. He could not react, could not think, but only rejoice, undone by wonder as the mystical wardings sung into Alithiel’s black steel first meshed, then married with the peerless enchantment once wrought to safeguard the life sheltered inside the fortress…

  … Prime Selidie’s purchase sheared off at one stroke. While the faceted cut of the Skyron aquamarine failed to chime in concert, its clipped resonance too short to encompass the full range of vibration, her linked senses exploded. Shocked to her core, the Koriani Matriarch was flung backwards, slammed short by the carvings upon her state chair.

  Her breathless scream was an animal’s.

  The icy expanse of the pavilion surrounded her. Not the ringing voice, called from living stone. Never, the shimmering cascade of tone and light that had bespoken the mysteries at the dawn of creation. An old woman, lodged in a young woman’s flesh, she was left abandoned in darkness. Inside and out, she felt bereft, desolate as Lirenda’s choked sobs, wailing unabated beside her. The moment gave nothing. No victory and no triumph. Only the emptiness of disappointment, as the fleeting echo of exaltation faded to deadening blindness.