Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Davien’s bargain with me was none of your making,’ Seshkrozchiel hissed. The provocative thrust of her phrase was kept open, a deliberate danger left dangling.

  Asandir raised his eyebrows. His eyes dauntless grey, every whiplashed nerve steady, he sealed her reactive statement. ‘Differences don’t grant me the arrogance of dismissal. I will honour my colleague’s endeavour without prejudice. Let him argue my born right to choose! Free will says I stand at his back.’

  Davien kept his own counsel. Even Sethvir never gainsaid the gift of Asandir’s forthright commitment.

  ‘Such force could shape diamond.’ Seshkrozchiel dipped her massive, horned head. After beauty and loyalty, she acknowledged adamance. Things not dragon, but concepts that fitted together in patterns whose nuance was pleasing. She opened her clutched talons and invited the Sorcerer to stand at liberty, nested inside the spiralling curve of the dorsal spine at her brow. Once his perch was secure, she settled from rampant crouch onto her forelimbs. Her back arched. Snake quick in movement, she darted into engagement: to shatter the derelict skull if she could, and dream the haunt’s bones out of Athera’s existence.

  Where live dragons closing for battle would lunge with a roar that shook sky and earth, this strike was eerily soundless. One moment the emanation off Seshkrozchiel’s spines was restrained to luminous quiescence. The next, as though torched to an indigo bonfire, her auric field flared and unfurled. Everything shattered, swept into pulsating rainbows. Through the deluge of energies, the bones of the drake lit and gleamed golden red as forge-heated metal.

  Force met bared force! with a clap like explosion. Although no thunder marked the event, Asandir felt the recoil sleeting chill through his viscera. As Seshkrozchiel’s dreaming sought to unmake the wracked skeleton, its wraith arose in pealing wrath to contest her. From nothing, a spirit form burst from the ethers. Neat as a bared sword-blade, vicious in splendour, the haunt appeared as a lambent form, wrought out of crystal and gossamer. Its whipping plunge for Seshkrozchiel’s throat was ravening fury, distilled. A bolt to serve ruin from bared fangs to lashing tail-tip met indigo fire with a grappling shock. Seshkrozchiel’s ebon spines crackled with lightning. Fast as she absorbed the attack, deftly as the electrified blaze of her aura knitted chaos back into stability, the strike sowed rippling back-lash. Asandir and the dragon were buffered by flesh. But Davien’s lodged spirit was a naked mote, hurled through the moiling flux. His reactive sensitivity possessed no anchor.

  So had Isfarenn’s spirit been left vulnerable to the erosion of bounded identity. Alone until rescue, Asandir had staved off the stallion’s attrition. Yet no brutal trial by experience prepared for the task of safeguarding his threatened colleague. Failure awaited if he did not try. Sethvir’s survival must not come at the cost of Davien’s reckless sacrifice. Disruptive, creative, unbridled in passion, his rogue genius had always been the breath and light that impelled fresh angles and change.

  Asandir shouted, but words did not carry.

  Seshkrozchiel already mounted the hillock, unravelling the bones of fore-claws and rib-cage, and blasting comet-tail bursts towards the skull. She could not disengage without risk to herself, while her dream and the haunt’s focused fury collided. Bones re-formed and melted. Shattered glass rainbows warred with lancing dazzles of light, scattershot as hurled mercury. As the haunt raged in spiteful counterpoint, human senses found no familiar expression. Sound could not hold the texture of language. Davien rode without shield at the forefront, embedded within the rampaging thought-stream of the live dragon’s visioning.

  He could not withstand the naked interface.

  Hesitation would kill just as fast as wrong action. Wrapped in the crackling coil of Seshkrozchiel’s leading dorsal spine, surrounded by bursts of indigo flame and violet lightning, Asandir shoved his hand into the streaming flux of her aura. He closed his seared fingers. Shut his scalded eyes, gathered his will, and imagined the most vivid encounter snatched from the shared annals of Fellowship experience …

  The year was Third Age 5129, when the inquiry that had turned so terribly wrong convened at Althain Tower. That solstice summons came wrapped in dank chill. Despite the fragrant heat of the birch fire ablaze in the King’s Chamber’s hearth, Desh-thiere’s leaden mist leached the warmth from the inside air. Outside, its blight dimmed the waning moon, arisen past midnight. Yet the flames in the candle stands were torn by more immediate draughts, as Davien paced in caged fury before the high table, which seated Sethvir, Ciladis, and Asandir. The discorporate witness of Luhaine and Kharadmon breathed a disapproving cold through the gathering.

  Only Traithe had been absent. His delay leaving Morvain looked to become chronic, since few deepwater captains dared the risk of lee shoals, left only fog-bells by which to navigate. A century, since the fall of crown law, and a year shy of three troubled decades since the departure of the last Ilitharis guardian: how blindsided their beleaguered Fellowship had been, to presume that their straits could not turn for the worse.

  ‘You might sit,’ Asandir snapped, ‘since we’re asking an honest effort from you, and a fresh avenue for resolution.’

  ‘Hold your council without me.’ Davien turned his sharp profile, haggard despite the livid cast lent by the fluttering candles. ‘Your hope of a compromise courts disaster.’ Hands clenched, black eyes harrowed, he defied with a cornered wolf’s wariness. ‘I will not be a consenting party to ruin. Or watch as the town populace slides deeper in jeopardy.’

  ‘Then the door must stay barred, until we have your word,’ Sethvir declared, pushed at last to consider a drawn line. ‘No one but you spurns our Fellowship’s covenant. None, since the dream of the dragons laid claim on us! You are the first who has acted outside of our informed backing.’

  ‘I will not cede my liberty,’ Davien bristled. The lynx gold of his jerkin no less than immaculate, and his footfall warningly firm, he spun away from his fellows. ‘Bedamned to your pussyfoot need to mince through a formal emascu lation with manners! I’ll leave you the choice. Since I won’t serve your course to reinstate the crown heirs, you’ll just have to step aside gracefully.’

  ‘Not after the bloodshed unleashed by your hand!’ Kharadmon hurled into the breach. ‘How many infants and children were murdered because the cabal at Hanshire was allowed the free rein to disseminate havoc? Luhaine’s left discorporate. Our pussyfoot mincing where you are concerned has been al together too forbearing! No thwarted ideal can excuse your decision to harbour that nest of bigotry and provocation!’

  ‘I’m not laughing,’ cracked Davien, ‘but surely you jest! Has five thousand years, bearing the trials of high kingship, not killed our precocious crown talent off any faster?’

  ‘Kharadmon speaks out of turn.’ Who had the heart left to defend but Ciladis? The most gentle, and the quietest, whose laced brown fingers were trembling still from the intricate spells that fired the sunloop. ‘In fact, Davien, you have not been accused. We are hoping you’ll explain what went wrong. To weep is not weakness. What price, for our patience, that this cankerous grievance can heal and reach wiser consensus?’

  ‘What’s left for me that’s not already been said?’ Davien stalked to the ebon stone mantel and poised there, whipped to scalding bitterness. He could scarcely speak: the sorrow that shadowed Ciladis’s joy posed a misery beyond endurance. Overcome, he buried his face in long fingers, while his shoulder-length tumble of hair caught fire in the uncertain light. ‘Shall we perish of tedium?’ he asked, hammered flat. His nerve-wracked hands moved. ‘Sit and grow moss, while I yap myself silly? Well, I am not yet the lap-dog, too inbred to have any teeth!’

  Again, Ciladis addressed the sore point, disarming the cynic with gentleness. ‘You insist we were wrong to demand the service of mankind’s birth-gifted talent.’

  Davien exploded back into his tigerish stalk. ‘The split that’s evolved between town-born and clan is a widening schism that begs our destruction. I will not stand down. If respect for the free
wilds’ existence cannot be learned, we are lost!’

  Luhaine’s effort at censure was trampled over by Davien’s blazing frustration. ‘Have you bothered to think beyond rhetoric? Won’t you realize we’ve sent the wrong blood-lines to exile on Dascen Elur? Let the townsfolk who’ve grown blinded to Athera’s mysteries be dispatched through the West Gate, instead. They will learn the faster to manage themselves on a world of more limited resources.’

  Before Luhaine could defend with a lecture, or protest that harsh trial by privation, Davien razed through. ‘We have lost our living contact with the Paravians! What’s next? How long will you nurture the bones of past policy? Because the more dire disaster will strike! How far should we drift, till we’re driven to forsake a bad call and change course to salvage the future? Our burdens here have grown far too weighty to keep the lame pretence of vigilant oversight.’

  ‘Law cannot replace the responsible choice, willingly made out of freedom,’ Sethvir agreed with wide-open, mist eyes. He paused through a taut interval, groping to bridge thorny impasse. ‘If more problems arise for every solution, we must become more creative. Your wild-card methods have always inspired. If Hanshire’s conspirators were left unbridled, you will have had profound reason.’

  Davien arched his eyebrows.

  Whether or not he meant to provoke, Luhaine pounced to attack. ‘Did you hope to incite the towns until we were obliged to revoke their claim under the compact? If so, Paravian presence is gone! We’re left to strike balance across the raw ground that hatred has soaked in fresh bloodshed! Does that condemnation suffice, by your lights? You’ve unleashed enough impetus to force our hand, and not left any avenue open for guidance.’

  ‘How your words in my mouth raise my hackles!’ Davien threw up his hands. ‘Say again that this is not a staged trial, tailored to fit the renegade criminal roped in for summary judgement! I find the role that you’ve scripted too pat. Your string-puppet accused will not dance for the question!’ Quick as the turn of a leaf in a storm, the Sorcerer spun on his heel. He strode towards the doorway with a fierce glance back, talking fast to jam Luhaine silent. ‘You don’t need my presence to bandy conjecture. Carry on, by all means. Enjoy your salacious dissection of character without the bother of my protestations.’

  Sethvir’s fraught cry for restraint went unheard. His tenure as Warden was too recent, yet, for his colleagues to grasp full significance. Or perhaps Davien sensed the overshadowing gravity. In his wild rage, he might have left the warning sui cidally disregarded. The heated moment had fanned Fellowship tempers too high for clear sight: that Althain Tower’s Paravian defences had stirred active by their raw dissension.

  The warding seal at the doorway had never been meant for restraint. Sethvir’s token binding was symbolic, a sincere gesture to confront wounded trust and reforge a confidence torn by the pressures of Desh-thiere’s invasion.

  Davien broached the drawn line and stepped out. Brilliant as autumn, he vanished into the stairwell, without second thought crossing the focused will of the appointed Warden of Althain Tower.

  Asandir was alone, as he leaped in response to the unforeseen crisis. Chair slammed over backwards, the field Sorcerer vaulted the ebony table and launched off in desperate pursuit.

  He might have overtaken Davien in time. Intervention, at speed, perhaps could have checked wounded pride and stopped his colleague’s incensed departure.

  But Kharadmon slammed the door in Asandir’s path. ‘Let the betrayer go his own way!’

  Luhaine’s victimized feelings agreed. ‘Davien’s incessant meddling brings naught but dissent! He’ll break our hearts, arguing, while new packs of head-hunters are reiving through the free wilds slaughtering clansfolk –’

  ‘Shehane Althain’s aroused!’ Sethvir’s shout at last broke the clamour.

  But the fortunate moment was already lost. Davien encountered the raised might of the tower’s guardian centaur, and the vigorous reflex for self-preservation entrapped him, past any recourse save one: the ceremonial dissolution his colleagues enacted to spare him, that stripped the spirit out of living flesh …

  Convulsed by the acuity of remembered agony, Asandir kept his hand immersed in the violet flux streaming off Seshkrozchiel’s dorsal spine. He sustained the recoil. Endured, braced, as the scream of the colleague he would have spared, whole, reechoed across his stretched nerves. If Asandir wept, if he also recalled Ciladis’s tears for a judgement forced into premature closure, the hour for grieving was over. The field Sorcerer embraced the experience without falling to the harrowing onslaught of guilt. He had wrestled such emotional echoes before, immersed in the coils of grimwarded haunts. While the imprint razed into the unfolding flux, he knew the live dragon’s engagement would capture the shattering resonance.

  No barrier deferred the tangling impact. Creation must follow, as the tumultuous, past trauma fed the storm of reactive event.

  Davien’s conscious memory was swept along. His threatened cognizance became riveted as the horrific shock of his error resurged, nightmarishly vivid as direct experience.

  Asandir held the line. Fist still clenched in the crackling forces thrown off Seshkrozchiel’s dorsal spine, he added his heart-felt appeal to her dream-weave: that explosive recall of Davien’s fatal severance would seed enough charge to bind a discorporate spirit to self-awareness amid lawless upheaval. And that if his drastic tactic sufficed, such searing coherency might last long enough for Seshkrozchiel to unspin the vengeful haunt’s fit of battle-fury.

  No thought and no time could be spared to examine for wide-ranging consequences. The Fellowship’s past action to appease Shehane Althain’s defences had been the same: a heart-rending choice of expediency seized in a split second’s opening. Crisis had not let them salvage the mis-step that threatened Davien’s destruction. Nothing else, now, might shield him from ruin through the bid for Scarpdale’s restoration.

  Asandir stretched his practised faculties, counterworking the whip-lash effects of grimwarded dissonance. He recognized peril: at no time had the shade of his stallion been cross-linked with a living dragon’s awareness. No Fellowship Sorcerer might foresee the outcome sown by Seshkrozchiel’s perception. Nor had Asandir witnessed the prior banishment of Hanshire’s strayed lancers, or tracked the speed at which her avid attention could freeze the progression of breaking event. Her close survey, by which she mapped the essence of all things not dragon would have left even Sethvir’s resources reeling.

  Asandir received Davien’s conflicted torment, rocked by a fear that fused thought and will into ruthless concern for the future; while Davien saw beyond his branding need for redress with a merciless, refigured clarity.

  If Kharadmon had been incensed from pain, and Luhaine, still mad with grief for the rebellion’s harsh losses, the luminous care behind disparate view-points now eclipsed every meaningful truth. Beyond the cruelty of Davien’s wracked horror, sparked to salvage abraded identity, Asandir brought the quickened, yearning frustration that once dead-locked the Fellowship’s impasse: Ciladis’s joy, never robbed by disdain, but overspent by driven exhaustion; the suffering born of Traithe’s crippled perception; and not least, the most disastrously misappraised stress of them all: Sethvir’s harrowing struggle to master the augmented stream bestowed by the earth link.

  Davien’s stunned recoil, and Asandir’s shock, had no chance to recover. Seshkrozchiel did not perceive as Mankind. Her intent acknowledged no course beyond victory. Thus, the entangled energies that were not dragon became seized and recast, made her own. A recombinant pattern, snatched from the throes of the Fellowship’s failure, would resharpen the cascading thrust of her assault.

  ‘Yours to choose, ancient!’ Asandir whispered, undone if his stop-gap strategy should overturn to the detriment of all he held dear.

  Seshkrozchiel dreamed.

  The resonant print of the warding raised by Shehane Althain struck skull! and bone shattered; while the matchless depth of Ciladis’s patience overwrote the
sting of an unmated defeat into a poignant longing that eased bitter rage into loneliness. The crazed haunt had no footing to stand before love: a concept, not dragon, strung through Asandir’s adamance, and Sethvir’s loyalty. The onslaught awoke flooding sorrow, for beauty lost: and the inspiration of new understanding broke the grip of riled insanity. Refigured by change, the intractable drake-spirit knew the unfolding grace of release. It embraced death such as no dragon had known in the course of evolving creation.

  While Davien, whose hot-blooded urgency had once impelled a tragic disaster, met the shearing crux of his past ruin again in the flux of a live dragon’s dreaming.

  Watching, the golden eye of Seshkrozchiel encountered his human regret.

  The flame of lost desire stood stark as cut diamond. Force kindled reaction, unstoppable. Davien’s present, discorporate consciousness launched across a threshold of shifted event. Devoured by a coruscation of rainbows, he passed through the King’s Chamber at Althain Tower. Then the fleeting impression plunged into oblivion dense as the dark of the womb.

  Winter 5671

  Redemption

  Tradition held that change always followed the footsteps of Fellowship Sorcerers. If Glendien had never troubled before with the gravity of ancestral warnings, that reckless attitude had withered amid the blustering days of midwinter. Her capricious exchange with Davien the Betrayer had led to the siege of Alestron and loss of her husband in Rathain’s crown service.

  Now her womb harboured the next s’Ffalenn heir. Such ties to crown lineage evoked privilege: Glendien accepted the offered grant of a protected residency. The explicit need for her informed consent might have caused her to weigh that decision more carefully; or not. Scoured by grief, she would have seized upon any distraction to numb her fresh heart-ache.