Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  Selidie hammered a tapestry in frustration, the gemstones on her embroidered mitts glittering like lightning unleashed. ‘Bedamned to the defection of Enithen Tuer!’ And worse ill, to plague the lost Sorcerer Ciladis, whose prior meddling in the distant past had denied Koriathain their earlier bid to claim the issue of Meiglin s’Dieneval in the first place!

  While Selidie fumed, raging over old scores, Lirenda sat silenced in passive constraint. She received no order to release her entrained state of tranced subservience. The elderly scryer bidden to serve as her Prime’s eyes was compelled to maintain her rapt focus as well, her quartz sphere attuned to recapture the event on-going upon the sand point at Athir. Patient, she waited, plying her skills, while the Matriarch raved, and the white-out blaze of confluent energies subsided over the Paravian circle. Minutes passed by, before the flux stream calmed enough for trained talent to garner a stabilized image.

  ‘Your will, Matriarch?’ the seeress probed gently. ‘I have regained sighted access to the seventh lane focus.’

  Selidie paused, pale eyes darting with hope. ‘Have we a single point of leverage left?’

  The ranked senior sighed. ‘Matriarch, none.’ Her crisp recap confirmed the rife disappointment: ‘The feal liegeman still blocks the south quadrant.’

  Selidie hissed through locked teeth. No use, to test that stubborn avenue further. All of Lirenda’s usurped power, and every sigil to command binding influence had failed to move Talvish’s character. Unassailable loyalty could not be suborned, or pushed by imbalance to sow errant havoc. Whatever coercion the Prime’s seniors applied, the true liegeman’s aura rejected the conjury slipped through the flux to entrap him.

  ‘Our downfall, that the fellow has no insincere aspect for us to exploit.’

  ‘Then use Parrien again!’ Prime Selidie snapped. ‘That ready pawn should succumb through his livid resentment towards Rathain’s prince.’

  ‘Your pardon, Matriarch.’ The seeress sighed again in pressured distress. ‘The s’Brydion brother has embraced a truthful regret. The latent channel once forged for our purpose has been closed by a healer’s influence.’

  ‘Elaira’s doing,’ Selidie snarled. Where had the chit found such strength, to release the hurt of a man whose crazed passion had nearly accomplished Arithon’s murder? Fuming rage only mounted, as the dismal report kept unfolding. Elaira’s adventurous spiritwalk had ended. She now rested, securely resettled within her own flesh.

  ‘Asleep, even if you elect to recall her, or revise her orders through oathsworn obedience.’ A slight pause, as the seeress hesitated.

  ‘There’s more?’ Selidie kicked a carved footstool tumbling out of her path. ‘Tell me!’

  Head ducked, hands laced to still her scared trembling, the seeress delivered the last snagging detail. ‘The Biedar weaving has unravelled your inset sigil of conception. We cannot shift the course of our current reversal. The protective veil raised by the desert tribe’s ancients will not release Athir’s focus until after Prince Arithon’s waking. If you wish to command Elaira’s return, you must dispatch a galley across Vaststrait to collect her.’

  Pushed to the end of resourceful machination, Selidie lashed out again. An enamel bowl sailed, clanging into the wall, to a chipped scatter of plaster. ‘And Glendien? What about the clan tart borrowed through consent as surrogate?’

  But the scryer’s list remained unremitting. ‘Awake as well. Taken into Dakar’s direct custody.’ No need to belabour the unpleasant fact, that a Fellowship spellbinder of Asandir’s making would grasp the scope of her rights as a mother with child by royal descent.

  Selidie wheeled in livid explosion. ‘To our ruin!’ How much had Davien the Betrayer foreseen, when he had insisted the fire-brand snip of a wife should accompany Kyrialt’s liege-bound course to Alestron? Worse, the feckless young widow could never be touched! The Sorcerers would shelter both mother and babe: a daughter bred for a peerless rogue talent, made and meant to be claimed under oath of debt and subject to Koriathain! ‘Show me something to mitigate this accursed day!’

  But the seeress had no further angle to pursue. Worse, the gloating triumph behind Lirenda’s eyes all but mocked the Prime’s sore ignominy. Of all initiate witnesses, the fallen favourite alone dared to smirk as the grandiose plan spun through years of conspiracy collapsed into savourless dust. Only Lirenda knew of the ruinous augury Morriel once had garnered through the Great Waystone: the latent danger – not yet defused! – that named Arithon s’Ffalenn as the living cipher who could sunder the Koriani Prime’s hope of succession.

  Unaware such a massive threat darkened the future, or that Lirenda burned yet for the chance to wrest back her forfeited access to rank, the dutiful seeress gestured over the image captured in her attuned quartz. ‘My Prime, if you would engage the Great Waystone –’

  ‘Silence!’ Selidie smothered the raced seethe of her blood. She was utterly hobbled, as Lirenda knew also, with fullest demeaning embarrassment! The amethyst focus, which could have enabled a stand against Biedar power, was still wretchedly infested by an errant iyat. No one else was aware of that plaguing mess, inflicted by Arithon after the misplayed attempt to use Feylind against him. Until means could be found to excise the fiend, the order’s supreme tool of mastery remained compromised.

  Selidie whirled and stalked back to her chair, molten magma quenched to white ice. Today’s board had been swept! Naught else could be done but keep cold watch and wait: poise like the spider, and spin a new web, seeking for means to try fresh intervention.

  ‘This round might be finished,’ the Prime Matriarch declared, her barbed malice aimed towards the stilled well of cold no one other than she could discern: the rankling affront, lurking in the room’s corner through brazen, unbearable nerve! That Luhaine’s invasive presence should come prying drove the day’s toll of insult and injury beyond pardon.

  Selidie spat venom between her spare lines. ‘But at what cost, the Sorcerer’s victory?’ Ruined hands tucked in her violet skirts, she glared at the Fellowship shade with fierce hatred. ‘As I live and breathe, mark my warning! After Arithon’s daughter is born, the Seven had best watch her back night and day, and defend her with unbroken vigilance!’

  Luhaine’s sole response to the poisonous threat was departure, at thought’s speed, for Athir. The next instant, the seeress’s quartz sphere went dark, its scried image doused blank by his warding influence.

  Winter 5671

  Dawn-light

  While daybreak infuses the focus at Athir, Luhaine engages the tide of the lane force and transports Glendien to safe refuge at Althain Tower; and while Dakar remains to keep guard at the ruin, he knows his part in the past night’s events have severed a trust, and that his service to Rathain’s crown prince has ended in favour of resuming his former apprenticeship …

  At Alestron, the drums boom as the war host turns out in resplendent panoply to send off the state galley bearing the Divine Prince; and as the flagship’s flotilla embarks, unimpeded, for a return to Tysan to succour Avenor, Sulfin Evend retains full command of the siege as the avatar’s voice for the Light …

  Restored to shelter inside the Second Age ruin, now flushed with resurgent life, Arithon s’Ffalenn wakes under Talvish’s guard, wrapped in blankets alongside Elaira; unaware of the crisis that passed in the night, content in the grace of her presence, he winds her sleeping form in his arms and pillows his face in her perfumed hair …

  Winter 5671

  XVI.

  Scarpdale

  When Seshkrozchiel took flight to challenge the spectre ensconced in the barrens of Scarpdale, her course did not traverse time and distance. Such bounds did not limit the remnant dreams, when a great drake died unrequited. Neither did a living dragon’s perception own any concept for warding or barriers. Form could be made and unmade on a whim. The perception of the world’s eldest beings acknowledged no linear beginning and knew no idea for a finite ending.

  Seshkrozchiel engaged will to encom
pass the ranging echoes raised by the haunt’s vivid yearnings. The vortex spun by its seething restlessness drove her wing-beats across a shifting montage of dreamscape. She accepted the raging discharge at first as whole cloth: whether stilled, moonlit forest, or hail-pelting storm front, or unfolded valley of volcanic cinder, steaming with the mineral geysers that drake kind preferred to polish their scales. Seshkrozchiel gathered in the streaming emanation that loomed ephemeral thought to full-bodied creation, then altered and remapped the framework to restore Scarpdale’s disrupted symmetry.

  For Davien, whose presence lodged in her left pupil, the effect was to watch the ground under her wing strokes pale like dye rinsed by flood from a tapestry. Scarpdale had been laid waste since Athera’s antiquity, an upland plateau scarred into a barrens when two rival drakes had done furious battle. The vales that summer would mantle in wildflowers now wore wind-swept brown grass and scrub thorn. Chill streamlets meandered, scabbed by winter ice, their stony banks clumped with skeletal trees.

  Now, the haunt’s warring rage laced the terrain like shed lightning. Set into flux by the tidal bore of its fury, the solid earth would shimmer, then vanish into chaotic patchwork. Sometimes, such vistas framed fragments of memory, tinted by wistful nostalgia: places where dragons had sailed the world’s winds, or danced in exuberant, winged aerobatics. Then, Seshkrozchiel’s outstretched pinions would glide above forests of towering, summer-crowned oaks. The breeze of her passage rustled green leaves, or else sliced against the screaming gales that combed clouds over serried peaks. Her shadow might ripple across slopes chiselled under groaning, white glaciers. Othertimes, the haunt’s recollection shaped an expanse of violet ocean, hurled into spume by a squall, or spread as a dimpled mirror of calm, under streamers of gold sunset cirrus. Flight scribed through the vault of limitless blue skies, noisy with flocking birds, or twisted through updraughts and thunder-head ramparts. At times, tail sculling in serpentine loops, Seshkrozchiel drifted, serene, above deserts clustered with delicate thorn plants. The hillocks lay paint-box purple and mauve, with dry river-beds that stabbed sudden, sun-caught reflections off mica and glittering mineral.

  Always, her might flowed across the haunt’s errant current of thought. Where she passed, its unquiet creation would fade into shimmering rainbows, then resurge, knitted back into the wintry wilds of Scarpdale.

  The shift occurred without visible seam. So precise was the living dragon’s restraint on encounter with outside awareness, she dropped nothing: no fragment of chert, no bounding hare, and no flying hawk over frost-dormant tussocks. Not even the sleeping mouse in its den became lost from the face of existence. Seshkrozchiel sensed the template for their return: every frail leaf on its unbudded twig, and each rustling stalk of dead grass. Such presence emerged, individually intact. The passage of wind, cloud, and puddle, and the angle of sun’s moving shadow resolved, past reproach for the haunt’s renegade interruption.

  Yet the dragon knew naught of the creatures she shaped, though her eye imprinted detail with rhythms of memorized poetry: she could number the rings on the carapaces of the tortoises, buried in hibernation, and puzzle together the fragments of egg-shells that had hatched nestling birds the past spring. Despite that vast repertoire, she could not recognize the current of spirit made voice, that underpinned a live being. Her ear could not fathom the tuned identity in the vibration struck off a crystal. Seshkrozchiel enacted these things in command of a masterful majesty, but as a mirror would copy reflections. The unfoldment of Scarpdale occurred by rote, a glorious discipline of assembled nuance, unbiased by cognizant empathy.

  Her emotions detected no harmonious communion. Such was the nature given to dragons since the embodiment of Ath’s creation.

  Today marked the advent of perilous change. As Seshkrozchiel raked through the spiralling vortex sown by the haunt’s enraged spirit, she carried the bargain struck with a Fellowship Sorcerer.

  Once she had loaned her vast power to Davien, enabling his translation from spirit back into flesh. Now, as her price, called in to curb the desecration arisen from Mankind’s mishandling of four dragonets, the Sorcerer’s fused being embellished the moving enactment of her awareness. All that Seshkrozchiel perceived shared the dynamic of Davien’s experience.

  She had always recognized the functionality, busyness, and streams of synergistic purpose, where life flourished in crowding abundance. She understood complex efficiency. But this upsurge of surprised pleasure was novel: Davien’s joyful delight in the juxtaposed tumble of landscapes shocked the accustomed range of her senses.

  ‘Beauty,’ Davien supplied, as she queried what was inexplicable.

  His human appreciation was utterly new. The artistic leap, found in colour and form, and the esoteric thrill that sparked in response to resplendent invention was not dragon. Which bursting discovery wrought wonder and change: Seshkrozchiel grappled a concept that altered her innate perception. Another aspect of symmetry bloomed, heretofore unknown to her kind.

  ‘Attend Scarpdale’s wholeness!’ Davien sent in reminder. The intent they pursued must not lapse into bemusement. Else the naked influence of the dead dragon would seize ascendancy and destroy Athera’s myriad continuity. Already, the fabric of Lanshire’s dales failed to resurge into flawless stability. Seshkrozchiel soared ahead, tail flukes lashing. Her intense cogitation generated energies that fuelled the coruscating flame of her aura: and something stayed wrong. Flux emanation streamed from her dorsal spines, as she skimmed the breeze above a verdant prairie. Elk bounded beneath, scattering song-birds. The thickened air languished with late-summer heat, and a clicking chorus of insects.

  Davien damped his alarm. Added emotion could only inflame the drake’s divergent attention.

  ‘Hunting a thing,’ Seshkrozchiel responded. Then, with a snarl that snapped off static charge, ‘Here! Drakespawn. Their presence has acquired an unnatural life by – ? – not dragon. This anomaly snarls my weaving –? – ? – is a discord past my understanding. Human perhaps, and not beauty.’

  The grasses rippled beneath her stretched wing leather, stirred by no errant gust. The predators that had chased the elk herd to flight pursued at a bounding sprint. Their bodies were sinuous black. Manes like lions’ spilled over slab shoulders that were larger, and more dreadfully lethal. If the Seardluin that gorged on the thrill of blood slaughter were now expunged from Athera, the creatures still prowled in the timeless memory of dragons. Seshkrozchiel was too wise to reshape their forms to run rampant. She unmade the scene where the predators stalked. Yet despite her care, a faint texture remained. The hazy patch lingered, spreading a stain upon Scarpdale’s restored continuity. The oddity confounded her effort.

  Whatever had mixed with the haunt’s remnant fury eluded her peerless experience. She could not restructure the imprint found here, which persisted on flowering havoc.

  Yet the Sorcerer’s sensibilities recognized the copper-sharp reek of pure fear. This thread was human, and most hideously lost in a sharp-focused morass of terror. Before Davien could recoil, the dragon’s empathic dreaming captured his distress and loomed the reaction. Creation ensued. The dun landscape of Scarpdale unravelled, stone and tree and frost-hardened earth replaced: by five horsemen outfitted in Hanshire guard’s colours pounding at a breakneck gallop over the copper crest of a dune. Their mounts rolled wild eyes. Soaked coats spattered white strings of lather. Hard after the horses’ streaming tails streaked the pack of Seardluin, slit eyes fixed in chase as they closed in for slavering massacre.

  Davien knew, cause to consequence, that the graphic impression stamped by their kill could reverberate to infinity. Too late: faster than warning logic, the electrified fright of the victims wracked him into hapless concert. Without flesh to slow his sympathetic response, the mortal reflex to survive joined the naked thrust of the trauma. Agile emotion leaped into sympathy, and drowned, identity thrown into blinding eclipse.

  The leading Seardluin bunched its hindquarters and sprang.

&nb
sp; ‘Sorcerer! Beware! I cannot hold your essence against such an onslaught!’ This vivid encounter with human despair far outstripped Seshkrozchiel’s experience.

  Davien heard her distress. His stunned wits strove and failed to wrest clear. Where a being enfleshed used stark panic to focus, the displaced spirit convulsed in response with no footing to react. Swept into the intensity of forming event, the discorporate Sorcerer had no shield to deflect the impact of riveted terror.

  No choice remained except to reach through. Ride the tide’s crest, while grasping for the fragmented template of the riders’ personalities. Before death on the claws of a predator’s blood-lust, these men had memories. They once knew family; had been someone cherished, with the hopes and workaday disappointments that made up a human experience. Somewhere, forgotten, they owned a true Name in the fullness of Ath’s creation. The horses, as well, had been foals by their dams, frisking amid emerald pastures.

  Davien thrashed, consumed by terror as the dream’s volatile interface exploded around him. Struggle fed the tumultuous torrent as the first lancer fell, and pain joined into the clout of reactive sensation.

  No haven existed. Only death and shocked fright, endlessly swirled into an ever-more-magnified echo. All but unravelled, Davien sought the referent matrix of stone. The artistry that had built the haven at Kewar snatched for that protective retreat: a time when his own cry of intolerable anguish sought solace within the Mathorn Mountains. Mineral moved to an altered interface: slower, more staid, intricate in attentiveness, its nature could absorb the back-lashing storm without losing stability. Snugged into the frame of a pebble, frozen into a winter stream-bed, the Sorcerer coiled back into himself. There, he found, watching, the burning gold eye of Seshkrozchiel, laced through his being.