by Janny Wurts
The dragon had traced his meteoric mis-step. A wing-beat, two, and her meticulous awareness restored Scarpdale’s familiar serenity. Trees and dales resurged without any harm done in consequence. Yet the stain, now identified as a human remain, stayed sealed in the weave, congealed into latent potential.
‘Haunts left by your kind,’ came Seshkrozchiel’s thought. ‘The dropped thread of their being cannot be spun free of the angry one’s dreaming without the grace of Paravian presence.’
A circle of Athlien dancers could untangle these mortally shocked spirits, but no such benefit lay at hand, now. As a spark lodged in stone, surrounded by the snap-frozen patterns of five dying horsemen’s rank horror, Davien surveyed the predicament. ‘These lancers were lost in the Korias grimward. Not here!’
Seshkrozchiel snorted a tendril of flame, impatience, perhaps, or else drakish amusement. ‘And have your colleagues not used the skulls of our dead for convenience, as portals of crossing?’
‘That’s Asandir’s purview!’ Davien snapped, tart. ‘He’s our preferred expert on working through the unpleasant quirks found in grimwards.’ Knowledge did nothing to ease present quandary, that the chaos traversed through Seshkrozchiel’s partnership was infinitely permeable, as well as reactively telepathic.
Neither was Davien an accomplished masterbard, with the talent to sound the harmonic balance that soothed fright and traumatized pain. Where such gifted empathy might strike the individualized notes to recapture a mazed spirit’s identity, a discorporate Sorcerer possessed no earthly form to wrest a salvage from drake-spun insanity.
‘My sight holds these beings,’ Seshkrozchiel offered.
No progress without risk: ‘Show me,’ Davien responded.
A hillside dissolved into a snap-frozen tableau, as her precision remembrance mapped horses, marked so, each one differentiated beyond their white stockings and head blazes. Seshkrozchiel respun them in exhaustive detail: from each blacksmith’s nail that crimped on steel shoes, to the odd whorls in each sweated coat. The riders likewise bore distinctions: here, a ring with a topaz setting adorned a grimed finger, and there, a man’s corded neck was strung with a luck charm. One veteran’s nicked gauntlets had fiend banes stamped in tin, and another carried a wash-leather bag containing a worn set of dice. The fellow who turned his fraught glance behind had a scar, remnant of a tumble in childhood. Each blazoned surcoat and horse-troop’s accoutrement was worn with unique flair: the gallant demarked from the dour field sergeant, and the insouciant braggart announced by the cocky hang of his weaponry.
Davien weighed the information, as stone: Kharadmon would have split himself, laughing, and worse, Luhaine’s lugubrious nature would have revelled in such tedious nuance. Patient through desperation, Davien surveyed each being, stilled at the cusp before the agony of violent dismemberment.
The man’s ring seemed the opportune place to begin. Metal imprinted emotion most easily, and gemstone would speak to pebble in congruent reson ance. The genius that crafted the maze under Kewar well knew how to bare the most hidden facets of character. Davien tapped the ornament’s setting and let topaz speak of the wearer, days before this seized fist lashed to drive a frenzied mount for more speed …
* * *
… and like a whisper embedded in calm, the jewel disclosed a gift received from a sweetheart, as a summer-time pledge for an autumn marriage. The trace imprint of the woman embodied contentment, while her intimate smile fore-promised delight …
Where Davien would have reached for the woman as mirror to seek out the name of the man, Seshkrozchiel’s fascination swerved sidewards and plumbed the female yearning displayed by the mate. Dragon embraced those human particulars. Entranced into focus, her power of active creation unfurled.
The remembrance of the rider’s beloved appeared as though enfleshed within the dream’s setting. Wistful, she stood, her hand outstretched, and her blue eyes filled with the unassuaged sorrow caused by her soldier’s parting. She cried out for her husband, torn by her heart’s longing. That charge of pure need resounded across the trapped rider’s inchoate terror: and the lost heard her voice. Love’s potent desire unfurled through the morass, and cascaded change through the polarized flux.
Now, the beleaguered man stood on foot, hard-breathing, bewildered, but cleared in deliverance as the arms of his wife closed around him.
Davien snatched the moment, spoke a swift warding to shield the man’s presence, as the essence of self came untangled. Cut free of over-reactive emotion, the dead man’s stripped spirit recouped his forgotten autonomy, even as his wife’s memory vanished.
‘Why am I here?’ he asked in distress. ‘What fell nightmare entrapped me? I left Valdie at home and rode out on patrol. We were hunting the Master of Shadow.’
‘You entered a grimward,’ Davien responded. ‘There can be no earthly return from this place. To escape, you must claim the grace of your Name and cross over by way of Fate’s Wheel.’
‘Death?’ said the man. Displaced in the dream, he regarded his welted hand, still wearing the token bestowed by his heart’s beloved. ‘My Valdie will be left to mourn as a widow?’
Davien bolstered his warding with all the tenderness left in the gifted ring. ‘Pass on. You will encounter your sweetheart again. The gateway at death is only another form of beginning. Turn around. Step back through, into the hills of Athera. You will find a light there, and a guardian waiting to ease trauma and show the way.’
The guardsman fingered his mauled surcoat, uncertain. The oathsworn duty he owed to Hanshire ought not to stay unfulfilled. ‘We never took down the Spinner of Darkness, or captured the minstrel whose seditious ballads encouraged corruption.’
Davien chose not to argue philosophy, or denounce the cause against Arithon’s life as unjust. ‘There’s no punishment waiting, no failure,’ he encouraged instead. ‘The seat of your being arises from a source that embraces all lives without bias.’
‘You know this?’ The man looked up, torn.
‘Don’t rest on my promise,’ Davien replied. ‘Step through and find out for yourself.’
While the yellow eye of Seshkrozchiel looked on, the battered rider turned on his heel. With Scarpdale’s winter vista a short pace away, he took his reprieve from the harrows of nightmare, moved on by choice, and the dreaming released him. Whatever awaited, his spirit form faded, recouped through a natural crossing.
‘Four more haunts that were human remain, and five beasts.’ The dragon’s admonishment shimmered with urgency. Scarpdale’s threatened stability could not be redressed before each shade’s sundered course was resolved. More, the worst yet lay ahead: a fury that raged beyond reach of the hope spoken by the flutes of the Athlien dancers. Grimwarded haunts were recalcitrant beings, stubbornly wedded to vengeance: an impasse Seshkrozchiel’s might must contest in irreversible challenge.
For Asandir, the maelstrom whipped against his set will without let-up. Now hunched in the lee of a volcanic rock, he tugged free of the drifted sand miring his feet. He had lost sense of time. Nothing resembling diurnal rhythms existed to measure existence. Darkness and daylight occurred without pattern, and the weather changed at the caprice of the haunt’s maddened dreaming. One moment, his skin would be needled with sleet, lashed by a punishing gale. The next breath might bake him beneath glaring sun, or choke him with fouled air poisoned with ash.
Blisters and injuries were sluggish to heal, with his resources taxed to depletion.
Right-handed, he held the fleck of starred light that remained of his cherished black stallion. ‘I will see you clear,’ he reaffirmed, coughing through the rasp of volcanic cinders.
He had to move. Rising gusts made his shelter untenable. The face of the boulder that once gave him refuge now caught pelting sand as a death-trap.
How many times had Isfarenn nudged him ahead, as his weary steps stumbled or faltered? For how many leagues had the horse borne his tired weight, thrashed by the ugly, unbiddable spite that blasted the elements
to primeval havoc? Loyal of heart, more than generous of spirit, the stallion had served until muscle and bravery gave out, for a companion too spent to heal him.
Tears of regret could not ease that sorrow. Some short-falls could never be rectified.
Asandir would not relinquish his protective hold on the horse’s spirit, though such loyalty drove him to ruin. Beyond the rock, the gale shrilled, unrelenting. The Sorcerer wrapped his frayed mantle over his face. Punched and buffeted, he pressed into the tumbling gyre, groping forward as a man blinded. To think at all was to embrace despair, outfaced as the shifting grim landscape transformed into ever more vicious hazards at whim. Always, the rugged conditions got worse near the centre-pin of the spiral. Asandir clutched the spark that remained of the stallion one dogged stride after the next.
No telling how far he had yet to go, and no use to dwell on the failure, that his raw toil here must be repeated. At cost of his care for Isfarenn, he could not divide his resources, even to seal the breached grimward behind him.
Sethvir’s wasting attrition would suffer the brunt.
This time, the blast that threw Asandir to his knees did not fetch him up under a convenient boulder. Not sand, but a jagged scarp tore his palm, while the flaying wind tattered his clothing. Curled against the wrath of the storm, clinging over an abyss that loomed, fathoms deep, Asandir set his teeth. He must rally his resources. Climb the cliff-face, and walk, before the gale ripped away his frail hold, or scourged his exposed flesh to the bone. The Name of Isfarenn still clutched to his breast, and his left palm extended, Asandir clawed the brutal volcanic stone for a finger’s hold to gain purchase. A wind devil tumbled him. Knocked into a slide, coughing out grit, he gouged in his toes and repeated the effort.
Perception up-ended.
The slope flattened under him, and his bloodied hand plunged wrist deep into icy water.
The sting ripped a startled shout from his throat. This was no streamlet wrought from a grimwarded drake, dream-sprung from a single consciousness. The tumbling winter brook carved its course through Athera. Water element splashed across his torn skin, full-bodied and alive with the ecstatic synergy of a myriad creation.
‘How?’ Asandir flung back the rags of his hood. He stared upwards, shocked dumb as he met the massive gold eye of a dragon. She crouched with her fore-talons cupped alongside him, her rampant wings stretched above like curved sails, deflecting the wind.
The pocket of Scarpdale restored by her dreaming had granted his ninth-hour respite.
First things first: the Fellowship’s field Sorcerer scraped crusted dirt from his streaming eyes. Propped on skinned elbows, he croaked a courteous phrase, stunned to gratitude for the deliverance. Then, shaken down to his final, stripped nerve, he opened his fingers. Too beaten to weep, he whispered his grief-stricken tribute to speed his dead stallion’s safe passage.
Throughout, the dragon’s fixated gaze burned with impatient inquiry. ‘Sorcerer! Wisest if you also accept my secured return to Athera’s free wilds.’
‘Sooner would I have abandoned Isfarenn!’ Asandir snapped, unequivocal. His steely glance had not missed the presence lodged in the dragon’s left pupil. ‘Sethvir holds his post at Althain Tower? Then my place is here, without question.’
Asandir gathered his abraded limbs. He arose, braced against an ebon claw to steady his wheeling balance. Already, the ominous change in the breeze revolted his natural instincts. The haunt’s vicious dreaming resurged like flood-tide, a boiling swell to unstring the solid footing beneath him. ‘I don’t need a reason,’ he addressed Davien. ‘No more than you did, when you left Kewar and sealed your unorthodox bargain.’
Asandir bowed to acknowledge Seshkrozchiel. Grave dignity intact, he asked whether she would mind bearing him. ‘I might walk, except my benighted boots are in tatters.’
The dragon regarded his dwarfed presence, unspeaking. Then her over powering fore-talons moved. Asandir found himself caged in a grip that could have cupped a butterfly’s wings without damage. Yet Seshkrozchiel did not spring aloft. Her snout turned, steaming smoke. She presented the huge, yellow disk of her right eye, the slit pupil tall as the Sorcerer. Reflected within that black well of intelligence, Asandir sensed the thundering pulse of her thought. Her awareness stung through him, skin, bone, and viscera, as she contemplated a pattern, not dragon.
‘Loyalty,’ he stated, ineffably gentle. ‘A quality honoured by sages and fools, by which humankind finds the courage to trample the reflex for self-preservation.’
Seshkrozchiel snorted a riffle of flame. ‘Has the sage or the fool spoken for your decision?’
Asandir loosed a gasp of hoarse laughter. ‘That will depend on the outcome, my friend. Shall we brave the endeavour and see?’
Seshkrozchiel gathered the Sorcerer up. Immaculate in finesse, she unfurled the double-layered vanes of her wings and took flight, with Asandir clasped inside of jet claws. Tail lashing, she steered for the turbulent heart of the gyre, while Scarpdale’s sere ground fell away and dissolved. That stabilized presence could not be maintained through the winding last turn of the spiral.
Now, once again, rock-cliffs reared up like ramparts, pocked with fumaroles that belched gritty cinders. The sulphurous air reeked, searing with acid. Asandir tore a rag from his threadbare mantle and muffled his nose and mouth. Spare of word, always, he addressed his discorporate colleague. ‘Your action has salvaged Sethvir, beyond question.’
‘I should feel honoured?’ Davien bit back. ‘Your thanks was more eloquent in behalf of the shade of your stallion.’
‘Isfarenn was steadfast,’ Asandir agreed.
Provocation met back-lash. ‘Surely you long to ask after the fate of your precious crown prince?’
‘Torbrand’s get dislikes officious spokesmen,’ Asandir declared. ‘In the case of Athera’s titled Masterbard, should either one of us dare to presume?’
‘The rogue gift of prophetic far-sight imposed by s’Dieneval sharpens that talent somewhat,’ Davien denounced with sly irony. ‘The headache makes Luhaine chase his own tail like a terrier baited with rat scent. Kharadmon rails with epithets, and Sethvir is certain to try himself, scrying, until he’s short-tempered and cross-eyed. You’re not worried?’
Asandir’s mouth twitched. Stifled amusement made him look raffish, with his silver hair tangled and singed. While the dragon swooped through the noxious clouds, cut by jagged stacks of cooled lava, he said carefully, ‘If we survive, I won’t need the debate. Arithon’s doings have always entangled the hot list of snagging developments.’
Awarded Davien’s nettled silence, Asandir’s threatened smile broke free, brilliant as sudden lightning. ‘Ath’s glory! You’re vexed? Does that mean his Grace has outmatched every test you’ve laid on him?’
‘You couldn’t handle him before Kewar’s maze,’ Davien attacked without flinching.
Necessity cut off the nipping exchange, as the weather-stripped bones of the haunt loomed ahead, tumbled in unquiet death. Athera’s affairs paled as Seshkrozchiel’s flight broached the tumult that seeded the gyre. Gusts snapped at her wings. Membranes strained to withstand their mangling force, while her sleek armour of scales shed the blast. Storm charge struck sparks off the spines of her neck where her being contested the corrosive flux. She looped and twisted the dream to force access, then shot, needle straight, through a vast granite arch. Her wings carved upwards, braking her rush. Neat as a cat, she set down on her haunches amid the remains of Scarpdale’s grimwarded drake.
Eerie quiet descended. No winds rampaged here. A low hillock arose, bleached to powdery chalk by the flare of the drake’s final breaths.
The creature had not perished quietly. Pearlescent shards remained of the rib-cage, tumbled like scythes amid the ridges ploughed up by the thrash of maimed limbs. The tail flukes were a smashed scatter of spines. Even the whorled skull wore the furrows left by gouging talons.
‘No skeleton I’ve seen ever showed such a harsh mauling,’ Asandir ventur
ed in shock.
‘This combatant failed to secure a life mate.’ Here, where the latent charge in the air seemed to strain towards volatile release, Seshkrozchiel constrained her mighty presence to a whisper. ‘Three times the young male fought, and thrice lost the contest to a rival. He died of the wounding, in brooding despair. His agony still howls defiance.’ She balanced the sorrowful note with reproof, since most vanquished/unmated who suffered fatality plunged into the sea, their lives quenched without pain in salt water.
Asandir dared an impertinent question. ‘Do you also carry the Name for the lost?’
‘You presume to know what possesses no substance?’ Seshkrozchiel raised the talon-wrapped Sorcerer, her burning gold eye half-lidded in scorching disdain. ‘Names for our kind are declared, always forged in the act of a triumphant mating.’
‘So we are told by Athera’s historical record,’ Asandir allowed with strained dignity. ‘Yet wise experience takes no fact for granted, even though scribed in the lore books at Althain Tower. Methurien also claim no innate identity. But by my understanding of Paravian law, as derived from Ciladis’s study, that condition is a misperception.’
Steam puffed to the dragon’s incensed reproof. ‘The Athlien singers failed in sounding the requiem here!’
Asandir bowed. Unshaken despite his shattered appearance, he stated, ‘Today, we do not have that option.’
Empowered yet by his quickened flesh, the Sorcerer could have entered the skull’s chamber and effected a transfer back to Athera; yet for Seshkrozchiel to bring Davien through without harm, the discorporate must maintain his subtle awareness amid the dire blast of the haunt’s resistence. Davien would be dependent, until the last, that her living strength could master the challenge, victorious.
Since no outside place in the world remained safe with Scarpdale’s grimward unbounded, Asandir added, ‘We stand or fall here. Our kind do not quench our defeats in the sea! Or forsake a sworn trust by abandonment.’