Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  ‘My Prime’s matchless cruelty, what else?’ Elaira touched the anxious liegeman aside, then flicked a drilling, cold stare towards Sevrand. ‘I suggest you let go. We need the Fellowship’s spellbinder breathing. Unless you don’t want your cousin’s doomed march to fetch Parrien curbed?’

  The duke’s heir turned his head and changed target. ‘You have a better strategy in mind?’

  Dropped with a jar to his heels that snapped teeth, the Mad Prophet barged his erstwhile tormentor aside and confronted the enchantress headlong. ‘No talisman, lady!’ he snapped, afraid. ‘You can’t challenge the force of a crystal-sworn oath! Cross your Prime’s will here and now, even as the Fellowship’s agent, I can’t lift a finger to save you.’ His misery palpable, he finished, forlorn, ‘I don’t own the straight access to power!’

  As the plea failed to thaw her fixed stare, Dakar slid to his knees at her feet. ‘Elaira! I beg you. Don’t challenge your order. The horror will ruin your man’s very heart! For Daelion’s pity! Get out while you can! Keep faith, and trust Arithon’s game plan.’

  ‘I won’t forge the talisman,’ Elaira said, clipped. ‘You will, and you can, once you’re given the template. I’ll show you the keys to unlock the seals used to fashion Selidie’s sigil.’ The enchantress bent her head then and stared at the soaked leather that gloved her trembling hands. ‘I am not breaking orders. My Prime’s directive, which has not changed, is to stand guard for Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn.’

  When no one spoke, she swallowed, then added, ‘You know, and I, what this atrocity will do to his mind if Parrien’s warped revenge is not broken.’

  Dakar made a move, strangled short, drained from green to stark bloodless as Elaira looked up.

  He matched her regard, unable to spare her. ‘You realize that your Matriarch desires you here! That she’s driven you back to Alestron.’

  Elaira shuddered. Past tired, wracked by an incandescence of pain, she admitted, ‘If I suspected before, now I’m horridly certain.’

  Dakar stood, spun away, ploughed through Sevrand and Talvish, then ducked Fionn Areth’s rapt interest. Not quite fast enough: he collided with Kyrialt, whose forestborn swiftness clamped an iron-clad fist on his arm.

  ‘What did you see!’ the young liegeman from Shand hissed into the Mad Prophet’s ear.

  ‘Nothing!’ Ripped by the sucking faintness that foreran a true augury, Dakar bit his tongue, hard. He rejected the prophecy! Forced back the shredding clamour of talent that strained to unstring his composure. If he strangled the vision, he could not stem his dread. He knew, Ath he knew, and Kyrialt guessed also: that somehow, an irretrievable nexus had passed, sealing a future that would unleash a fixed consequence, bitterly final.

  Of two destinies, posited, one had been lost when Arithon’s beloved re-entered the citadel.

  Early Winter 5671

  Seshkrozchiel

  Conversations with dragons were never a linear experience, with concepts as words, laid one after the next into a logical sequence. Although Drakish language formed as other tongues, by varied sounds packaged in syllables, the meaning translated through vibration and symbol became enlivened by moving images charged with emotion. Such bursts evoked energy that branched through dimensions, swirling eddies that gathered to nexus points. The reactive tapestry could explode, across time. As the dreaming of dragons directed the power to weave or alter creation, a human addressed them, alive to that peril.

  Davien’s flaunting genius attended the prospect with no less than dauntless focus. Excess passion could kill by such an exchange; and decidedly, he was furious.

  ‘Our Fellowship’s relentlessly difficult trial has been made immeasurably worse!’ His subsequent pause, stark as a walled barrier, marked the deliberate shift: from drakish vowels that scraped like grinding rock, into limpid politeness. He framed the Name of the being he tasked with exacting care: to the least tender nuance of letter and line, his respectful tone matched and then cancelled the discord of his accusation. ‘Seshkrozchiel.’

  The razor’s edge trembled upon the stilled air, and unchained no rash probabilities: yet.

  The dragon crouched with curled tail at the stony crest of a rise. Behind her, the northern ridge of the Storlains thrust upwards, wisped in smoke from a fumarole. Before her slant snout, the flat wastes of Scarpdale unrolled like straw carpet, the dead grass tufted over the swaths of old lava flows pricked with bare trees and leaden patches of ice. To mage-sight, the creature was blinding-bright – cloaked in living fire, laced layer on layer through an auric field that burned like an aurora, rising eighty-five spans from the needle-points of her dorsal spikes.

  Human perception saw only tangible form, and still failed to encompass Seshkrozchiel’s being. Her sheer size, at close quarters, towered over the landscape, massive enough to break rock with the indolent flick of a tail-tip. The curving arc of a fore-claw, alone, stood the height of the tallest man. Golden scales cast a scintillant, unearthly glimmer, with sovereign disdain for the overcast. She burned in mad glory. Blazing yellow, her slit-pupilled eyes held the terrible glare of the sun.

  No need for the scorching, ash-scented breath that steamed on the winter air: where the incendiary puff might blister and kill, her concerted stare could annihilate.

  Davien embraced patience. A pin-point fleck of consciousness cupped within the dragon’s mailed talons, he need not fret over the mishaps prone to befall hapless flesh. Yet even discorporate, he was cautiously wise. Enough not to press like a fool for the answers today’s incumbent peril left dangling. Dragons never spoke without forethought. The eldest of their kind, a hand’s count in number, expressed themselves scarcely, if ever at all.

  Seldom to rarely, when they courted anger, and Seshkrozchiel’s rage towered over his own with a might that could shatter planets.

  Her scaly eyelids lowered, considering. The gesture slitted the blazing, domed eyes, until thought/voice emerged as a whisper, listing reasons with gossamer delicacy. ‘Abuse to kin. These young were stolen, while yet unborn. Murdered! Then left in the horror of death-pain. A malignant threat …’ The pause came, for the balancing. If, in chill fact, her willed choice included reconciliation. Seshkrozchiel’s lids lowered farther, the hot gleam of her glance all but thrown into eclipse. Melody trilled through her finishing phrases, the harmonics precisely intoned to annul the agony fated to the hapless clutch. ‘Ath’s gift to the world being your charge to safeguard, Sorcerer! The Paravians’ survival was threatened!’

  The spark that was Davien did not seethe in response; dared not. Bound to the service of dragons for two Ages, he kept his response hammered level. ‘It is deemed … a wrongness, by humans … to slaughter their living.’ The last word alone wrought the lifting of resonance: and its tonal meaning declared unequivocal terms: that which is individual is precious beyond value. Suggestively gentle, no more than a wisp, the Sorcerer’s thought finished. ‘The day’s two-legged dead were innocent/unaware. Their ten-fingered (individual) hands did not seed this painful dishonour to egg-young.’

  The drake flared her nostrils. Warning only: no breath issued forth. The wait for her reply extended. ‘None of ours, these two-legged.’ A lag, into which more pictures streamed, of offences that stemmed from such (individual!) busyness: of Etarra, and Jaelot, and other – hives – that leached refined light from the lane flux. The drake’s breath released, uncurling fresh steam. Her aura expanded in majestic display, all fire and wrath! Then shrank back to the chiaroscuro emanation of boredom. The debated issue lay beneath her contempt. Source-of-being for such irritation might as easily be deranged on an afterthought, with such upstart two-leggeds erased from Athera’s existence.

  A curl of smoke twined, reeking of sulphur. ‘Mankind!’ the drake hissed in the sting of subsonics. That thought framed a nexus. Near, and present, it stirred probabilities, as though reluctant to dissipate.

  Davien withstood the heat, which ached beyond flesh. He absorbed the left ripple, a contest of wills most dead
ly and real, if not quite permitted to manifest. The Sorcerer outmatched the dragon’s displeasure, though at heart, he was a volatile spirit, disenchanted with stasis. Ciladis was the more gifted ambassador; had excelled at soothing down the dicey nuance encountered in conference with drakes. Here, even Luhaine’s slavish perfection would have revelled in nitpicking details.

  Davien quashed irascibility, that Sethvir, on a bad day was better inclined to manage this perilous dialogue.

  He faced this pass, alone.

  In the calm after impact, he avowed by imperative, ‘I am such a man.’

  The golden eyes shut. More steam wisps vented: the drakish equivalent of laughter, perhaps, or an affronted rejection, coloured by lofty disdain. ‘No such man!’ said Seshkrozchiel in ringing pronouncement, balanced by one word, all harmony. ‘Ours!’ As the dead in the blasted ruin of Avenor had not been; Athera’s dragons acknowledged no compact.

  ‘Ours!’ the drake repeated, a stabbing reminder of a dreaming once spun by an enclave at Corith. Seven spirits had answered: created by dragons, or else summoned into confluency by match, the warp thread of their destiny woven through the weft thread of a fate arisen by their traits of character. The Seven’s origin as free-will beings, or not, did not signify, by Seshkrozchiel’s reckoning. ‘You are ours, made here to defend what is threatened!’ The after-note that described just what was protected sustained a cascade of evocative longing: the ineffable essence of the mysteries and the trifold dancing of Athera’s Paravians.

  Before these, the two-leggeds who despoiled were as nothing, and the workings of them, less than naught.

  All music, Davien contradicted, striking the keys that shouted a triumph. ‘They matter!’

  Golden eyes snapped wide open, ablaze. The dragon regarded the spark of the Sorcerer with blistering query and challenge.

  Davien resisted her thundering expectation, that demanded his chastened retraction. Commanded, in fact, though his stance overturned the bent of his former priorities. He did not retort, as he might have done. Did not satisfy pride through the scathing rebuttal that was the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s aura pattern.

  Out of vital necessity, he would not draw Seshkrozchiel’s attention to that man! Or risk turning her eye anywhere near the bloody affray that contorted Alestron.

  The Sorcerer stilled all concepts. He gave Seshkrozchiel silence. Restraint, quite as terrifying as the coruscating consciousness whose ebon claws and fixed purpose now caged him.

  Davien stayed adamant. Born to free choice, and no creation of drakish dreaming, he knew who he was: had seen his true Name illumined in grace in the presence of Athera’s Paravians. Tenacious, his being reserved that firm boundary, come what may.

  The dragon half lidded her eyes once again. This time, the stiff gust of her breath described whimsy. ‘The task at hand is not one a string-puppet servant might fashion!’ The music that tendered the balance arrived, searing the statement to irony. ‘Daedanthic. Fire Hands! In fullness, your Name is recognized.’

  The discorporate Sorcerer returned no submission, an insouciance to incense Luhaine’s tidy nature. Davien waited, viced into a state that froze thought. Time measured the moments, meaningless to dragons. Their being did not acknowledge the values that gave mortal hours their frantic significance. Despite the pause that expected reply, the Sorcerer stayed self-contained, steadfast as a night-blazing star.

  Above everything, he did not incline towards the east, or ponder the warfront dividing East Halla.

  The dragon Seshkrozchiel abided, poised also. Her sun-shifted shadow etched the cold ground. Yet behind golden eyes, she was no longer still: her thread of awareness longed for the mineral pools that steamed and belched, boiled by the suppressed magma underlying the volcanic crater behind her. The itch rode her to wallow, scour her vanes and wing leather clean and burnish away the tarnish of soot that Avenor had left on her belly scales.

  For all her want, another dreaming demanded, as lane tide, and star flux, and the errant dance of probability moved into a stately conjunction. Seshkrozchiel stood. She stiffened her dorsal spines to a chime of bright scales, lashed her forked tail, and arched her sinuous neck. Wide yellow, her eyes, as she lifted her fore-claw, that nestled the presence of Davien, also known as Betrayer.

  ‘Our portal draws nigh,’ Seshkrozchiel announced. ‘My own, is your mind still committed? Has your heart’s desire stayed true, that we should venture the opening?’

  The blue-white spark, that had seemed imprisoned by curving black talons was not, any longer, in evidence. Its nexus point burned, still vivid, still bright, but no more in the open.

  The Sorcerer’s awareness now seated amid the black depths of the dragon’s left pupil.

  ‘We go forth,’ Davien said, a whisper that scribed a line between warning and caution.

  Seshkrozchiel dipped her horned crest. Not acquiescence, as her answer shrilled danger. ‘Sorcerer! So mote the way be.’

  The great drake reared rampant. Her kite wings unfurled. The movement raised wind. Fanned boulders shot air-borne. Static jumped from charged dust, became lacework and lightning, which crackled across the whipped air. Then came the shattering thunder of lift, as the dragon’s leather-clad down-stroke hammered the elements at full strength. Seshkrozchiel launched upwards, an arrow of gold aimed into the heavens. She slashed an S-curve, roared, and levelled out, spines flat to her back and clawed talons folded, while her whip tail extended, graceful vanes steering. Her course bent over the bared vales of Scarpdale, for the purpose of piercing the moil inside a grimward.

  She would dare to disrupt a ghost-kin from his dreaming. This was no unhatched youngling’s unreconciled remnant, but a grown drake slain in battle whose agonized death-scream stayed unquiet, and restlessly bitter. A living dragon might cross his tempestuous shade and weave new creation to make scatheless passage.

  But the Fellowship’s field Sorcerer, entrapped within, tied yet to his failing flesh, and another, an unshielded spark stripped discorporate, must establish themselves by their own Voice. Seshkrozchiel could grant the safe escort inside, but not guarantee safe return.

  Once any being touched into the fabric spun by a ghost dragon’s insanity, contact triggered a chain of live interaction. Quickened awareness would meet the stuff of raw chaos, and engage an explosive response. The corporate mage held the anchor of his breathing flesh, for as long as life might sustain him. But not the one borne inside as pure spirit: Davien lacked substance, at risk of melding into the mad one’s inchoate pain. The stakes were not malleable, or tame. The two Sorcerers called into service must secure their own Name against the fury of a drake shade’s last reckoning. If they could.

  Early Winter 5671

  War Camp

  After two days of brutal riding, and one night’s snatched rest, demanded by reeling weariness, Sulfin Evend closed the last stretch of road on approach to Alestron. The snowfall had lifted, replaced by a north wind that scoured the air clean as paned glass. Five hours before dawn, the blanketed landscape gleamed, polished to silver and shadow beneath a moonless sky spattered with starlight. The Light’s Lord Commander rode yet without escort, down a swathed thoroughfare bearing no traffic.

  The way seemed too eerily empty, in fact: snow masked the road, unmarred by cart ruts. No trampled trails left by couriers’ mounts rumpled the pristine drifts. If the pervasive desolation sprang from the arcane flood of melody first noted as he by-passed Kalesh, the working strengthened with each passing league. On approach to the citadel, near to the perimeter of Lysaer’s encampment, the surging harmony tugged at the mind with ever-more-insistent urgency.

  Sulfin Evend rode as though wrapped in a dream. The music sustained him, moment to moment. The refined strains soared beyond hearing, alive to the seer’s talent bred into s’Gannley descent: a true gift, once latent, now called into flower by his oathsworn tie to the Fellowship. If the uncanny resonance did not arouse visions, he stayed in the saddle by rote, his hand on the rein insubstantial. />
  The reliable gelding ploughed onwards, trail-wise enough to make its own way back to shelter. Quiet reigned over the frozen terrain, except for the crack of burdened snow sliding off smothered branches. The jinking tracks left by the tumbled-off clods seemed all the movement left in the world.

  Sulfin Evend had stopped counting the sentries absent from check-points and watch sites. The uncanny allure of the conjury sapped any purposeful drive to make war. The beguiling song was not a compulsion; no man had been lured by main force. The summons cried peace, until longing seeded an ache to pursue a life of deeper meaning, and fear dispelled through the release of laughter. Into the night, the mystical weave raised the beauty of bare trees to a presence that tried mortal senses to witness.

  Sulfin Evend heard his true self in that call. He did not serve here as commander at arms, but as a man sworn to the weal of the land, and a friend, devoted to Lysaer’s protection. Almost, he felt lifted with joy for a home-coming, but for the wistful pull of regret, that he had no beloved woman awaiting, and no children to grace him with welcome. Desire beckoned, that he might shift his course, and steer his feal obligations to closure. Infused by such hope, he descended a slope and rounded a bend in the trade-road.

  Ahead lay the site that the caravans dreaded, and a crossing the more-experienced couriers took pains to avoid, after dark. A thicket of young oaks shadowed the thoroughfare where the winding Paravian track from old Tirans merged with the approach to Alestron’s snug harbour. Ghosts from the past often haunted that place, confections of lit floss and moonbeams that might tease the unguarded mind into madness. No such apparitions walked the night, now. Sulfin Evend saw only the vista of snow, painted in mystery and wells of deep shadow beneath the ice glimmer of starlight.

  He forged ahead, while the gelding crashed through the drifts, eager to reach oats and stabling.