Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Get up!’

  The shout drilled his ear, dissonant through the music’s beguiling majesty. Dakar groaned as the busy clasp of chilled fingers tugged at his flaccid hands.

  ‘Get up! Now! I will need your help.’

  Elaira’s features swam into view, with her determined strength forcing him upright.

  ‘Back me!’ she snapped. ‘I will forge the focus. Just follow my lead and grant me an anchor.’

  Grounding, Dakar realized through fuzzy awareness. She asked for a corded tie to the earth. Any means to resist the ethereal harmony that scattered the senses. The stone tower itself might fulfil that need. He only required the presence to work and establish the link by permission. The staid shadow arrived at his side would be Kyrialt, fighting for the recovery to help brace his reeling balance.

  That human support lent the foothold to rally his frayed self-command. Dakar tightened his boundaries. While the sword’s song rushed through him, he narrowed his focus upon the blocks of sturdy Elssine granite beneath him. This would not be the interlocked masonry of the citadel walls, crafted by Ilitharis Paravians. The spellbinder prepared himself for the brute difference: a man-made shaping, chiselled by force. Teeth set to endure, he reached for the impacting stress of close contact.

  Instead, all his references were swept away by the torrent evoked by Alithiel.

  Dakar tumbled into a living framework, immersed in the structure of mineral itself: a joyful dance that rang, layer on layer, multi-faceted beyond imagining. A play of consciousness, never dormant or fixed, but aware of itself across the full arc of eternity. The requisite permissions were given, a shout of vibration that knew him and acknowledged his kinship, under true Name. Welcomed by the comfort of a seamless partnership, Dakar offered Elaira the haven to launch her vaulting leap to seek Arithon’s subsumed awareness.

  Where she went, how far or how perilous the mystical course of her journey ing, the untrained onlooker lacked the resource to see. Yet none standing witness escaped the moment when Alithiel’s unfurled power snuffed out.

  Light failed. Exquisite harmonics collapsed, torn to silence. Heart and mind, the uplifted spirit was pitched back into earth-bound existence. The pain of separation wrenched out a scream, as ecstasy dissolved into inconsolable weeping.

  Unable to withstand the shock, traumatized by a tumbling fall that slammed like the bars of a cage, Dakar embraced the faint that hurled him into oblivion.

  Early Winter 5671

  Shock Wave

  The scream as the silenced cry of Alithiel stranded Lysaer s’Ilessid at the mercy of Desh-thiere’s curse carried far beyond the coast of Melhalla. In distanced Atainia, within the hushed chamber where vigil was kept in the fast quiet of Althain Tower, the adepts attending Sethvir sensed the anguished echo. The forceful surge of event stamped the flux, resounding through the tenuous tie linking the Warden’s earth-sense.

  The young man posted as listener for the Sorcerer shared the inconsolable impact as the baleful scene blazed into vision …

  … wracked by an onslaught of agonized pain, Lysaer pitched to his knees on the deck of the Sunwheel flagship. The officers at hand for his ceremonious departure stared in shock, unaware as his compromised will battled to resist his doomed plight. Desh-thiere’s curse made a mockery of his human effort. Weeping, he scarcely heard the shouts of his trusted honour guard. Before the stunned deck crew, poised to cast off for the run down the estuary, he fought the unnatural urge to wreak violence, to no avail. The blind thrust of aggression inside him broke into ungovernable rage. The rags of held sanity shone through, even then: the light-bolt unleashed as he shattered ripped off his fist and burst harmlessly skywards.

  The star-burst explosion raised cheers from his dazzled following, and cast crazy-quilt shadows from the towers of the besieged citadel.

  The planned retreat to Avenor could not happen now. Lysaer’s cruel defeat, made precipitate by Alithiel’s silence, would spare the innocent lives, already in flight to escape the blood conflict; but at the cost of a dire set-back for Sulfin Evend, and the remaining s’Brydion defenders whose choices had committed them to the battle-line …

  ‘Merciful grace! Ath grant a redress from the throes of such suffering!’ murmured the robed adept.

  His colleagues bowed their heads, rendered speechless by the news of Lysaer’s relapse. Their pause acknowledged sorrow upon sorrow, while their tireless care served the Sorcerer’s dwindled vitality. If hope had diminished, they refused despair. Sethvir was kept guarded. His blankets were constantly warmed by the fireside to drive the creeping chill from his flesh. Day and night, fragrant herbs burned in the grate to freshen the sick-room air.

  ‘Our Fellowship cannot help spare the princes entrapped by the siege at Alestron.’ The rust-grained cry emerged from the pallet, where voice had been dormant for weeks. Sethvir of the Fellowship opened blank eyes. Unseeing, his gaze stayed fixed on the ceiling, beyond the least spark of cognition.

  The female adept posted by his pillow did not try his taxed spirit with questions. Frightened, she turned in appeal towards the listener, calm as carved onyx beside her. ‘Bear only passive witness, I beg you. Althain’s Warden must not arouse! In his state of suspension, the transition to wakeful awareness might finish him.’

  The gifted young talent raised a hand in acknowledgement, while still immersed in deep trance: and another shimmering shower of vision cascaded from flux current to imprint …

  … washed, but not sanguine, Parrien s’Brydion accosted the duke in black anger over his compulsory home-coming. ‘Since when do we crawl belly down like whipped curs before meddling Koriathain? For shame, brother! Our father would weep, or disown us all for a pack of slinking cowards. Here’s half the prizes we seized, scuttled outright! Holed and sunk in the channel by our own hands, and all for your cosseting me like a girl who’s never been tested by bloodshed!’

  Elbows braced on the tactical maps heaped in his private study, Bransian sighed. He looked aged. Full chainmail and surcoat no longer filled out his angular frame, or the unmasked bones pressed against haggard flesh. Despite wasting hardship, with no end in sight, Bransian matched his sibling, stare for accusing stare.

  Then he said, against an unnatural quiet that blistered for deathless conviction, ‘Ath above, Parrien! I happen to know just how foul it feels, to be used as a witch’s kicked game piece!’ He could never forget: the dismal hour on a Vastmark slope, when his own coerced hatred had launched an arrow to murder the last Teir’s’Ffalenn. ‘Did you really think I could stand back and permit the same hideous plight for a brother?’

  Parrien swiped at the wet snag of hair missed out of his hasty battle braid. ‘May Daelion Fatemaster’s two-eyed vigilance drop the pox on all Koriathain!’ He shrugged. ‘If weapons would serve, I’d exterminate the lot.’ He caved in with the bad grace of a dog dragged off a bitch in ripe heat. ‘I don’t like being caged in a broody hen’s box, to peck, cackling, over the nest-eggs. If you don’t mind, I’ll just duck the wife’s lashing tongue and join Sevrand to belt down neat whisky.’

  Which was a fine intention, to tame disgruntled spirits, if the citadel’s stores had not been hoarding the last jug for medicinal emergencies …

  As the image frayed into the entropy imposed by Sethvir’s draining illness, the listener stirred, his dusky skin ruffled up by a chill. He measured the expectant faces around him. As though hope breathed through heart-break, his fellow adepts shared the moment’s spontaneous suspension. Gathered to honor the Warden of Althain, they understood without words, the atrophied flesh left so frighteningly uninhabited could no longer be eased by their ministrations. After long months spent enduring the downward spiral, the awareness drew their senses into collective alignment.

  Today, the cosy room with its tidied clothes-chests and lit candle seemed touched by more than stilled air, crawling with empty shadows.

  ‘Change,’ murmured the elder adept on guard at Sethvir’s right side. ‘Death or life, th
e balance stands poised.’

  The white brotherhood understood hard-fought passages. Wise to the mysteries, trained healers without parallel, they knew the failing body often gathered its reserves, prior to passing the Wheel. The departing spirit would rally one last time before crossing over. Sethvir’s opened eyes showed them no change. His marble pallor as yet displayed no rosy tinge of quickened pulse.

  Yet again came the sense of a resharpened shift toward purposeful focus. The listener recorded another flare from the frayed web of the Sorcerer’s earth-sense, then the upwelling flash of evocative vision …

  … Dakar the Mad Prophet, tucked abed and undone by despair. The loss of Alithiel’s music inflicted a lethargy too wide to bridge over. The ache sliced his heart, inconsolable. He had no wish to live. The savourless air he drew into his lungs felt darkened to desolate silence.

  The song that flooded his being with the wonders that danced past the veil had ceased. Life itself paled before such grand invention. All determined endeavour seemed diminished, as vacant and pointlessly wasteful.

  Hands shook his slack shoulders with biting force. ‘Dakar! Get a grip, man.’ Arithon’s badgering urgency stung. ‘Rouse yourself, now! You must raise active will. Make the effort, or you won’t survive this!’

  But the future extended, lightlessly bleak. Dakar shut his eyes in rejection.

  ‘Fetch my lyranthe!’ snapped Arithon, angry. ‘I am not resigned! If I could withstand a sunchild’s presence and return from the King’s Grove in Shand, you can pull yourself back from the edge and rejoin the fight to stay with us!’

  ‘For what reason under Ath’s sky?’ Dakar shivered, weeping. Crushed under by shame, he covered his face before bearing the burden of his inadequacy.

  ‘Your master would tell you.’ Arithon answered through slicing harmonics, as his deft hurry tuned silver-wound strings. ‘A transcendent encounter’s dropped you at the crux where too many aspirants give way. All your hard-won wisdom is needed, my friend. You can never rest, after what you’ve experi enced. Rise to the fresh challenge. Even though you can’t see, yet, search for new and deeper meaning! I promise this much: the way cannot open unless you stay present!’

  The lyranthe spoke then, as the Masterbard’s talent lifted sound and harmonic into evocative fugue. His song blazed a course of unparalleled courage: that today’s wakened pain and solitary separation carried a meaning beyond present knowing. Amid the unassuaged, longing awareness – that now understood an existence surrounded by still wider grandeur – must refound its pioneering delight. Seek, anew, the profound recognition: that each individual was cherished by Name, and supported to further its quest for adventure, fired by limitless welcome …

  * * *

  The tonic surge evoked by the Masterbard’s artistry rushed through the listener’s poised focus, and sparked joy like the chiming note struck off a tuning fork.

  On the pallet, Sethvir caught his breath with a gasp. ‘Ath iel i’cuel’an alesstaierient, Teir’s’Ffalenn,’ he whispered in awe.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Cloth rustled, as the female adept by the Sorcerer’s feet shot up straight, surprised by the flush of revitalized energy that flicked through his weakened tissues.

  The listener shook his head. ‘I’m not sure.’ Past question, the erratic images framed by Sethvir’s earth-sense were not due to Arithon’s unfolding melody in distant Melhalla. That healing was pitched for Dakar’s affliction, with the Warden’s spontaneous response no more than a grateful acknowledgement.

  Now, against waiting stillness, the north wind hissed over Althain Tower’s obdurate stonework, and scoured the glaze ice off the high sills. Inside, nothing stirred but the candle-flame, fluttered by draughts through the casement. Sethvir’s opened eyes remained vacant. His slow breaths subsided, with his snowy hair and combed beard spilled like floss across the crisp linen. The adepts maintained their tuned attention, beyond the expectation that the Sorcerer’s consciousness might ever spiral back into quickened awareness.

  He would cross the Wheel. The adepts braced for that grief. Their creed disallowed intervention, even for a parting that would rock the world.

  Alone, the listener applied his superb talent. The vast well of the Sorcerer’s earth-sense stayed drained, but the silence was no longer empty. Something stirred there. An inchoate, foreboding sense of near movement, elusive beyond known experience. Frowning, his folded hands quiet, the adept groped after the source. Echoes scattered before him. His deft probes shot back, rebounding as though, from the source of unformed possibility, a rolling wave sharply crested.

  And broke!

  The listener shouted, whirled into confusion by a surge of raw power beyond his trained depth. His warning cry left no chance for his fellows to dissolve their rapport. Interlinked, they were also flung into recoil as Sethvir’s submerged consciousness snapped free, the live thread of his essence slung out of the fatal entanglement that bridged the gaps in Scarpdale’s damaged grimward.

  The catalyst driving the frightening change stormed over distance and flooded the scent of ozone into the chamber. Sethvir’s flaccid fingers bunched into fists. The adepts stationed next to his pallet cried out, tossed by the shock wave as he arched into convulsion. Smoothed blankets dragged. Arranged pillows tumbled. The paroxysm wrenched tremors through the Sorcerer’s frame, while a fiery shimmer wrapped his skeletal form, head to feet. The adepts’ refined senses were bedazzled. Their wide-ranging quietude shattered. As the Warden’s dimmed auric fields roared up into searing brilliance, the blast all but knocked his wise healers to black-out prostration.

  A static play of small lightning laced through Sethvir’s presence. Everything touched by the arcane display lost form, solid outlines dissolved into coruscating energy. The dissolute patterning changed just as fast, respun back to firm continuity as though the whole cloth of existence went fluid, or turned itself inside out. The transition crackled like sparks leaping a gap, with familiar experience reshaped afresh by split-second frames of remembrance.

  The only spirit not frightened witless was the Sorcerer, wracked in con tortion on the mussed bed. Then the fire-storm subsided. The harsh spasm let go. In candleless dark, Sethvir lay quite still, his wide-lashed, turquoise eyes fully awake. ‘Seshkrozchiel!’ The unaccustomed speech grated. ‘Ware dragon!’

  While the six adepts strove to rally dazed wits, the ranging link of the Warden’s earth-sense resurged. His split-second awareness sorted and mapped the locale of three other Fellowship colleagues: Traithe, still in Atwood, protected by the raised bounds of Paravian wardings; Luhaine, traversing the sea-bottom to relieve a fault-line that threatened an old Paravian binding; then Kharadmon, rousted at need from the task he assisted at Methisle Fortress …

  His summoned arrival raised a shriek of wind through the shutter no one had time to unlatch to admit him. Rushed, even for a discorporate spirit, he cracked, without greeting, ‘I’ve noticed the active vortex in Lanshire. Do I gather the Betrayer’s rash bargain came due?’

  Sethvir coughed. ‘Yes.’ As the great drake had served in the caverns at Kewar, respinning lost flesh from the void, now the pacted reckoning reversed, and burdened the renegade Sorcerer. ‘Davien owes Seshkrozchiel his promised repayment.’

  ‘A momentous achievement,’ Kharadmon declared, tart. ‘Don’t, please, expect me to feel sorry for him.’ A clipped pause acknowledged the assembled adepts, whose healing care should have been supported by that errant spirit’s delinquent service. ‘I cannot sympathize with Davien at this pass. You were left too far gone!’

  Sethvir raised his eyebrows, and husked, ‘You won’t shed old grudges? We were not abandoned. Our colleague left Kewar and responded in time.’

  Kharadmon huffed. ‘In time?’ Blankets flapped. A dropped pillow tumbled, and Sethvir’s beard became whirled into snags by the breeze of that scathing rebuttal. ‘Not by my lights! Never, while you are weakened enough that a shade has to sit on your atrophied chest to keep you pinned flat in a si
ck-bed.’

  Moved at last to steady the ruffled adepts, the discorporate Sorcerer ran on, ‘Sethvir’s in recovery because the wardings that secure Scarpdale’s grimward are down. Yes. Dismantled. The leaks aren’t just breached, they’re eliminated.’

  Against the collective, rapt stares of dismay, Kharadmon completed his heckling reassurance. ‘My word, you are safe here! Athera won’t face destruction by rampant chaos. Not today, anyhow. You have never witnessed a live dragon dreaming the active thread of creation?’

  But the listener already beheld the effect. Tuned into rapport with Sethvir’s earth-sense, his awed witness shared the vast hole, punched through Lanshire’s winter terrain …

  … a coruscating blackness shimmered and flared, ringed by live fire and ominous lightning that pulsed like a heart-beat.

  The rippling edge altered perception like smoke: as though the framework that underpinned form ran fluid as moving thought. Stones and trees came and went, reft by curtains of light, clothed and reclothed by the warp and weft currents of consciousness.

  Beyond that strange boundary, nothing seemed touched. Not an errant breeze stirred the sere grasses. Each rock and scrub tree, cloud and live creature of Scarpdale’s landscape unreeled, serene and intact by the cataclysmic might of Seshkrozchiel’s will …

  The listener bowed his head. ‘Events move beyond the sage reach of our counsel.’ His fellow adepts must acknowledge: such raw power as this eclipsed them. Seshkrozchiel’s dreaming outstripped the mystical light, held guarded within the groves of their brotherhood’s hostels.

  ‘Our commitment is final,’ Kharadmon affirmed as his essence settled to rest. ‘Fellowship destiny lies with the dragons. Their dream aligned us for Paravian survival, and even a strand casting can’t show the outcome Davien’s unleashed in our midst.’