by Janny Wurts
The fidgety spellbinder would have fled from the furious glint that was Jieret’s, ignited in Tarens’s blue eyes. Except that his craven half step backed him into the point of Cosach’s broadsword.
Crept up from behind, Rathain’s double-crossed High Earl glared daggers from under a livid swelling. “You’re a dead man, right here, unless you agree to safeguard my access to Ettinmere.”
Dakar spun, palms upraised. “But Elaira’s turned north of us.”
“To Sithaer she has!” Cosach advanced. His weapon flashed once. The button he snicked off the Mad Prophet’s doublet arced into the undergrowth. “Odds on, she’s already crossed Instrell Bay. No more gad-fly excuses for running in circles! I’ll have his Grace under a proper clan guard! Not wasting his loins on a proxy who’s string-tied to the Koriathain! Therefore, you’ll fashion that talisman, now, to blindside the Ettinmere shamans.”
Tarens sprang for an intervention, while the Mad Prophet stiffened to object.
Yet whether the spellbinder owned the raw power to gainsay cold steel, no man knew. His eyes rolled suddenly back in his head. He toppled in a tranced faint, caught by Tarens before he crashed flat from a prophetic fit. The vision’s intensity seared the wild flux: with Iyat-thos and Cosach both gifted talents, caught by the resonant echo …
… the stray in the Sunwheel surcoat stood out through the drizzle that dimmed the flame-colours of autumn. Noisy as well, he smashed through the wet foliage, calling for his companions.
“Lost,” mused the sentinel scout who poised with the clan squad, observing. “Likely attached to the march out of Morvain until he stepped off the road to relieve himself.”
But even alone, the dedicate trespasser wore byrnie and blade, primed for bloodshed. Halwythwood’s defenders took stringent precautions. Stalking bowmen fanned out, preternaturally silent. Trained and talent-born to the hunter’s gift, they took no chances.
“Pin him down. Alive.” Scout to scout, hand signals passed through the twilight gloom, bidding for restraint unless threatened. A dedicate separated from his armed company might have fellows nearby: zealot recruits, not confused or disoriented, eager to kill for religion. No clansman wished to provoke needless death. Not with the standing garrison at Etarra ruled by Canon law, under True Sect priests.
Like wolves, the scout pack closed on their prey. No ripple from the flux warned their instincts; no glancing wink of bared steel pierced the drizzle. They moved, unaware, as they crossed a set ward. The barrage of enemy quarrels ambushed them from deep cover. The marksmen targeted their grisly spoils, each worth a coin weight’s gold bounty. Then they claimed their clanblood casualties, knives busy before the fallen had thrashed through their final agony amid the soaked leaves …
Cosach aroused from the prescient vision, enraged. “Sithaer’s black death! Those savages are league head-hunters, backed up by the murderous craft of a Sunwheel diviner!”
He recalled the broadsword clenched in his fist. Steel flashed under sunlight as he swung towards Dakar, hunched like a rumpled sack on his knees, eyes shut, and hands clutched to his middle.
Tarens knelt in support. Dizzy himself, with his sweat-tarnished hair pasted to his temples, he spoke quickly to curb the High Earl’s thrust. “Stand down, Cosach! The trees in that vision were turned brown! Which means, for some weeks, today’s Sighted fatalities have yet to occur!”
“Haven’t,” Dakar croaked. “I know where to search for Elaira,” he added, then heaved and rendered his gorge.
Cosach’s fury remained unappeased. “We have drawn down our assigned sentries for this! But no more.” He bent, seized the Mad Prophet’s collar, and hauled him upright. “How far along the Mathorn road? I’ll have the war band on the move straightaway to secure Halwythwood from this predation.”
The spellbinder grunted, beyond incapable. Protest was futile in any event. Cosach rammed his weapon back into the sheath and walked off to forsake the search for Elaira forthwith.
Tarens tensed, braced to fell Dakar by force to forestall a renewed confrontation. With clan lives and a free-wilds invasion at stake, the caithdein might kill the bumbling fool who obstructed his duty.
Yet Dakar did not struggle. In miraculous recovery, his spasms ceased. He swiped his mouth with his sleeve and inquired, “Is his Lordship stomped off in a lather?”
The moment hung, pregnant, as Tarens realized no puddle of vomit fouled the ground.
“Blinding glory!” he gasped. “You couldn’t have faked that display as a ruse?”
Dakar shrugged. His jaundiced glance verified Cosach’s retreat. Then he waited, expectant for the astonished inquiry from the first scout to encounter his battered chieftain.
Soon enough, the woodland quiet erupted.
“Damn the fool mis-step that dunted my face!” Cosach’s blistering salvo called for swift runners to pull back the picket. “Gather the band. We march north at speed to cut down a marauding pack of league head-hunters invading our turf from the trade-road.”
The Mad Prophet’s curved features flushed with relief.
“We’ll follow, apace?” Tarens surmised. “In fact,” he amended in awestruck surprise, “you planned as much from the outset?”
Dakar smothered a chuckle and confided, “Elaira’s cut past us on the Old Way towards Narms. Shut your mouth. You’ll trap flies. Had you any better way to win that snorting bullock’s co-operation?”
“No, in fact.” Tarens laughed. “But Dharkaron’s Black Chariot and Spear save your hide if your crack-brained stunt gets discovered.”
“No stunt, not entirely.” Cold-bloodedly bitter, Dakar admitted, “That posited ambush is coming, and surely will happen without intervention.” Inhumanly calm, he revealed the vicious extent of his scheming. “I had to steer Cosach until we knew for certain that Arithon’s enchantress had evaded the scouts.”
The Mad Prophet brushed the caught twigs from his hose. Unfazed by Tarens’s hard stare at his back, he ambled ahead, jaws clamped with distemper at the grim prospect of crossing rough country apace.
Early Autumn 5923
Circumventions
Elaira might have reached up and touched the tooled-leather scabbard of the clan scout whose stealthy patrol brought him a finger’s width from her tucked frame in the thicket. Wards alone kept her hidden. Burrowed beneath drifted leaves near the northern bounds of Halwythwood, the enchantress surveyed her predicament. Though the man’s ruddy features suggested a temperament inclined towards impudent jokes, he had a scarred wrist and eyes chiselled by ruthless experience. No idle threat, his rapt stance disclosed refined senses, attuned to the flux with a stalker’s focus.
No chance-met sentry, he might be leading the Mad Prophet’s witch-hunt straight to her. Or else the young bravo had pulled the short lot on the watch list, dispatched to assess the league trackers’ foray from Narms. The same murderous bunch had dogged her for six days: no routine squad of head-hunters hot to bag bounties, but a dedicate mission to exterminate old blood talent in the free wilds. The fanatics were guided by a skilled Sunwheel diviner. They also coursed a pack of mute hounds, dauntless enough to be worrisome.
At heavy risk, ringed by passive wards, Elaira breathed in the fust of half-rotted leaves, sweating in apprehension. If the clan sentry so much as moved, he would expose her position. Long since, the damp ground had chilled her to the bone. Exhausted and scraped, she projected calm and peaceful quiet to push the man on his way without incident.
Luck forsook her. The scout lingered, his gifted instincts perversely snagged by the heightened imprint of privacy woven to shield her. Lulled by that false security, the pragmatic fellow snatched the chance to unlace his points and relieve himself. Elaira cringed as his bent elbow grazed the spelled interface and unravelled her cipher of stasis. The coronal discharge from the breach hurled the hapless clansman off his feet.
“Fiends plague!” he yelped, tossed on his rump with his breeches undone.
Elaira ignored his red-faced distress. Fl
ushed into the open, she kicked the placed stone, left engineered against mishap. The rock ricocheted through leafless saplings and dry bracken, miming the zigzags of a startled rabbit. The rustle masked her footfalls, sufficient to mislead the northbound scouts’ picket: though not the flustered sentry thrown on his arse in plain sight.
That one scrambled erect, yanking clothing to rights and annoyed enough to retaliate.
He would not be alone: a set-spell the size of a rabbit would never fool the Mad Prophet’s initiate awareness, or deflect the Sight of the Sunwheel diviner. Worse, the scout in pursuit blazed a wake through the flux fit to flag down a rutting bull.
“Wait, lady!” he pleaded. “Have faith, I beg you! Dakar offers news with your interests in mind, and Rathain’s liegemen are not your enemies!”
Elaira had no breath to warn that his promised amnesty lured the deadlier noose of the True Sect’s trespass to purge talent.
Prepared to run that gauntlet alone, she clawed a second stone from her pocket, infused with neat spells laced over the hair of a deer. That baited construct, shied to her left, unfurled the rattle of an autumn buck, raking antlers in courtship rut against a tree.
The scout laughed at her effort, fit and determined as a cocky predator steadily closing her lead. “My colleagues have twigged to the fact you’re no deer! Why not trust our friendly intentions?”
Elaira gritted her teeth in frustration. Thin from privation and tiring fast, she used unfair tactics and seeded the ground with an ill-aspected sigil. Ath forbid! She empowered the bane, aware the upshifted, free-wilds flux must re-calibrate the response. The scout racing flat out behind in due course hooked his toe on a log and crashed flat. Fortune favoured her, this time: for her act of reckless endangerment, his pithy outburst decried a split shin and not the disaster of a broken neck.
Elaira reeled away, folded over with nausea. However minor, the transgression also branded her as a sorceress. The True Sect diviner would redouble his quest, hell-bent to seize her for dark conjury. Cornered, but not beyond recourse, she risked that encumbrance before entangling the misguided scout: Cosach’s incoming war band had yet to grapple the vicious extent of the Sunwheel incursion. The vales southward of Narms swarmed with enemy trackers, directed by the temple’s arcane talent and backed with dedicate force. The cat’s paw behind which thrust was Prime Selidie, poised to take her pick of the seized prizes.
Elaira clawed through a deadfall and stumbled into a muddy gulch, footprints planting fresh scent in moist ground for the dogs. Dakar must cede his personal chase under the heat of an armed invasion. Surely, if she played the opportune decoy, Cosach’s strong arm could make the spineless prophet grant Arithon his due support.
Whether the scapegrace spellbinder agreed to blindside the Ettinmere shamans, redress for her beloved’s plight must bide in the hands of his loyal allies. Targeted by Prime Selidie’s vengeance, Elaira sought to reach Althain Tower and beg for an audience with Sethvir.
She ran, lacerated by the bleak counsel once bestowed by the Biedar tribe’s elder under last summer’s stars at Sanpashir: “Can you let Arithon go beyond your control? Do you love him enough to keep faith in him, even afflicted by your own loss?” The power graven into those words overwrote dying leaves with the scent of parched sand. “The gifts of his birthright will claim their full due. He will find himself, with or without you.”
Elaira threaded through a stand of young birch, gouged by bare twigs. She must stay the rough course. Committed by the tribe’s heirloom knife, her fate had entangled with an ancient purpose only a fool dared gainsay.
Already, a tracker’s hound crashed down her back trail. She spurred her lagged pace, the full pack seething after her, directed past doubt by the skill of the temple diviner. Against worsening odds, she ducked leftwards and splashed into a mossy ravine. The dogs checked and circled, near enough to overhear the handler’s rank curses through the wheeze of her breath. Elaira plunged waist deep through a trout pool and breasted the icy sluice where a rock ledge spilled into a riffle. Scraped and banged in slithering descent, she ducked behind the rush of a falls and crouched, shivering.
The hounds overshot her chill refuge, confused. Veiled behind the curtain of spray, Elaira huddled against clammy stone and peered outward through the lens of the waterfall. Distorted shadows moved on both banks: trackers and men, arrived in force to cut off her safe egress. Immersed in her natural element, she could turn the properties of running water to her advantage if she acted before the cold impaired her faculties.
Elaira plunged her hands in the foaming current. Jaw clenched against chattering teeth, she engaged a light trance to align herself with the flow of the freshet. But the instant she opened to sympathy, a pulse of heightened energy lanced through her subtle awareness. The bore of the flux burned like oil-fed flame into her unshielded focus.
She flinched in dizzied recoil, struck by an unforeseen set-back. The energetic landscape had changed. Whether the natural resonance had intensified a latent channel, or if, like the aftermath of other ancient cataclysms, the recent upshift unleashed from Kathtairr had deflected the established lanes, the streamlet no longer coursed over innocuous ground. The localized electromagnetics had surged to the potency of a major flux line. Amplified by the diurnal tides, the noon crest already broadcast her presence.
Elaira shoved through the falls to escape the hyper-charged watercourse, and met with disaster: the white-robed diviner poised on the outcrop above, avid features triumphantly flushed.
“There’s the witch! Take her!” His escort of dedicate archers loosed on her from the northern bank.
Elaira dodged their hail of arrows. Her panicked dive into the basin rebounded off a mossy boulder and tumbled her into the buffeting rapids beyond. Threshed head over heels, she twisted her ankle and felt the sickening shock as the bone snapped. The fragmented ends shoved through muscle and skin, and wrenched her to helpless agony.
She choked on inhaled water. Crippled, she fought onward in desperation. The legacies entrusted to her possession must not fall into enemy hands. Elaira clawed for the knotted thong looping the Biedar knife at her neck, hampered as her numbed fingers entangled in her laced shirt. Time ran against her, to hook the artifact free. While she struggled, four dedicates leaped into the shallows and splashed in pursuit.
Spun downstream, wrung stupid with shock, Elaira grasped Arithon’s emerald seal ring with intent to twist the band off her finger. If no hope existed, Rathain’s crown legacy was better off sunk beyond the priesthood’s meddling reach.
Her firmed grip slammed a surprise jolt of power like a thunder-clap through her disabled flesh. Flung into split vision, Elaira beheld two simultaneous scenes: one showed her dire straits, with the dedicates advancing to take her. Overlaid was a second view like etched glass: the uncanny sight of a diminutive, robed figure in a darkened vault. A pearlescent shimmer haloed his presence, fracturing the gloom into rainbows. Unmistakable, the might of a Fellowship Sorcerer, even when encountered through a long-distanced projection.
Elaira recognized the sender’s signature. “Sethvir?”
“Reach, my dear!” Althain’s Warden extended an urgent hand, cuffed in ink-stained maroon wool. “For the sake of the talisman that you carry, I beg you, don’t surrender yourself to the Sunwheel priests!”
Elaira lunged under the gauntlets of the dedicates reaching to seize her. Heart and spirit, she snatched the long shot opportunity and grasped the warm strength of the Sorcerer’s clasp. Light blazed and surrounded her. The sensation of icy immersion spun away into vertigo, pervaded by a harmonic chord, deep and rich as the toll of a bell. An explosive force hurtled Elaira into a storm’s eye of calm. The thwarted shouts of her pursuers fell away like the distanced cries of squabbling gulls.
Then the weightless void shattered. Elaira arrived, soaked, enveloped by the mild fragrance of candle wax, parchment, and sweet herbs, and folded like a storm-thrashed bird in Sethvir’s angular embrace. She glimpsed the
fading coils of energy, down-stepped from brilliant white, to electric turquoise, then subsiding through indigo into the invisible whisper of lane force purled through a Paravian focus.
Sethvir spoke before she wept in stunned gratitude. “Hush! Be still. No matter how brave, we can’t dance for joy with that ankle unfit to bear weight.”
Skin wet, Elaira could have laughed through her agony. But the vaulted ceiling wheeled in dizzied circles, then dropped like felt batting over her head.
In true form for a Fellowship Sorcerer, Sethvir left no untidy loose ends to inflame the True Sect’s trespass of Halwythwood. Where the falls splashed necklaces of pearl foam across the stone basin, four dripping dedicates reported their fruitless search to the fuming diviner who paced on the bank. Since the cresting flux charging the free-wilds streamlet afflicted his talent with phantom illusions, he grudgingly stopped battling his flawed perception and called off the chase, empty-handed.
The expansive discharge from Sethvir’s transfer nullified other ephemeral ties spun for scrying, the flash-point recoil clipping the most troublesome one straightaway. Dakar yelped, dropped like a heap of old rags into momentary unconsciousness.
“Rot take doings of Fellowship Sorcerers!” he grumbled the moment his vision returned.
Dazzled by the afternoon light punch-cut through the autumn canopy, the Mad Prophet sat up. Queasy and skin-tight with undischarged power, he wrestled to ground his deranged senses when Cosach arrived and worried his shoulder hard enough to rattle his teeth. At risk of a bitten tongue, he confessed, “I’m sorry. I’ve lost her. This time, for good.” He added, before the badgering chieftain decided to garrotte him, “Elaira’s beyond the clutches of any Sunwheel diviner. Sethvir has snatched her by a direct transfer to Althain Tower.”
Though how the Warden had finessed the feat, or accessed the prodigious outlay of power defied imagining, given that an engagement of Rathain’s flux lines by way of Arithon’s seal ring remained proscribed under Asandir’s oath. Dakar refused the temptation to pry. Cosach bedamned, only a fool crossed the will of a Fellowship Sorcerer.