by Janny Wurts
Yet her dutiful step to seek counsel already chased the turn of event. The Waystone cradled above Arithon’s brow crackled with sudden static. Disturbed vibration stuttered against the bronze tripod, then ranged into a buzz as the quartz sang aloud.
The Prime did not require an informant. Prodded awake, Selidie bashed through her privacy curtains, her pale hair wisped over her night-rail. She rushed across the pavilion, hindered by her huddled Seniors, aroused also, and stirred to alarmed inquiry.
“Douse the Waystone immediately!” the Matriarch shouted, while the crystal’s piercing emission scaled upwards.
“Move aside! Clear my way!” The Prime lashed out, barefoot, and kicked a stool from her path. Deafened, her crippled hands tucked to her chest, she elbowed through her drowsy, disordered subordinates, slowed by their belated responses.
“We’ve already tried,” despaired the seniormost talent in crisp response to the crisis. “The stone does not answer. More, the sigils constraining your captive are unravelling and nearly inert.”
Shoved past the press, Selidie accosted the distraught healer. “Use your knife! Damn the excuses. Go and find one. Kill the prisoner, forthwith!”
Shock defied comprehension, that Arithon s’Ffalenn had achieved the impossible: subverted the great amethyst, a convolute feat far beyond the best of the order’s Senior talent. An unimaginable coup, given the jewel’s notorious attributes doomed most candidates groomed for the trial of ninth-rank initiation. “Curse the bastard’s meddling cleverness!” swore the Matriarch in strangled rage. Crowded by her flustered adepts, she lunged for the bound form on the trestle to wrest back usurped charge of the Waystone.
Her command of the focus must be re-established straightaway. Selidie claimed the healer’s vacated seat, frantic to salvage the remnant impression of Arithon’s consciousness before the knife-thrust dispatched him. Her planned triumph was ashes, unless the Waystone yielded to her signal will before he died.
The Matriarch clasped the resonant jewel between her deformed palms. Determined to crush the reversal, she threaded the matrix and shaped the Prime’s ciphers to harness the focus, each master sigil handed down peer to peer through the course of millennia. Assured of her supremacy, she enforced her due claim under her Named identity.
But the rite to subjugate the Waystone failed. Her bid for dominance floundered amid a cast net of harmonics. No rogue diversion, the working of a bard’s tuned ear for sound: Arithon’s lyrical invocation framed the unique pattern for one living spirit. Morriel’s entrenched shade, knotted over the strangled spark of Selidie’s self-awareness, sieved headlong through a razor-edged cry that winnowed seed kernel from chaff. The result ripped their entwined identities to instantaneous separation.
Wrenched back to split consciousness, the dominant matriarch recoiled too late. Her grasp on her host’s enslaved flesh slipped momentarily beyond her control. Selidie’s repressed spirit snapped free, while the sundered shade of Morriel encountered her true Name, transfixed within the ruthless coil of the Waystone’s compromised matrix.
“You will not survive the audacity,” she snapped at the bard, set aback, inconvenienced, but unvanquished yet by the imprint of his feckless melody.
“I beg your pardon?” Arithon’s retort was stripped of amusement. “For the black practice of necromancy, and the brutal enslavement of a young girl, on the sovereign soil of Rathain? There’s a flagrant breach of charter law. Which criminal offence I am oath-bound to prosecute under a Fellowship mandate. Dare to leave the confines of the Waystone, and crown justice condemns you.”
“I think not,” Morriel’s dispossessed essence rebutted. “Your cited authority has no jurisdiction over the affairs of the Koriathain.”
“No? In your seat, I’d not care to test that assumption under the Sorcerers’ scrutiny. A fussy point of conjecture in any case, since I’ve picked this fight for a different priority.” Arithon quenched his crafted melody with a flourish of acidic irony. “Madam, by free-will preference, in trade for your bond on the actualized surety of Selidie’s due liberation, I surrender Rathain’s lawful claim on your life and cede your fate to the Waystone forthwith.”
“I should stoop to a ludicrous bargain with beggars?” Rankled enough not to wait for the healer’s blow to dispatch him, Morriel’s thrust snapped his hold on the crystal’s focus. Whether or not his threat carried weight, hesitation placed her at risk of imprisonment with the damned souls trapped within the great amethyst. Furthermore, she must recoup swift possession of the donor initiate’s natal body. A ruinous exposure, if the girl rallied her browbeaten consciousness, cried foul, and demanded a summary impeachment for perverted practice by the Senior Circle. Exigency required swift action to gag that felonious secret.
Morriel attacked through the jewel’s poised focus, hell-bent to expunge the bard’s meddling influence. No remedy for the collateral loss, that her riposte would annihilate the snared identity of Rathain’s precocious crown prince.
The blast of her strike should have expunged every tie to Arithon’s mortal existence; and would have, had the crystal’s enabled channel not rejected Morriel’s entitled command. Instead, the destructive blow twisted against her.
Flayed by the fatal stroke of her own making, the ancient Prime registered fleeting dismay in the riptide before dissolution. Destroyed by one perfidious dealing too many, she met her end as the victim of the vow engaged through the Waystone itself.
Suborned tool of the order, the crystal unleashed the actualized penalty for the forsworn promise made to Elaira: never to seize on her love as the tool to engineer Arithon’s downfall.
Consequence hit, lightning followed by thunderbolt.
A whining snap creased the stillness that riveted the enchantresses in the pavilion. Then a splitting, electrical crackle erupted, pierced by a shriek as the Waystone shattered. Raked in the throes of befuddled recovery, the traumatized spirit of Selidie recouped conscious awareness with a scream of agony. Static charges raced up her arms, laced her head, and rammed her erect.
Locked rigid as the Great Waystone’s matrix unravelled, the pent forces layered throughout the course of millennia hurled the victimised woman bodily from her chair. Bloodied and limp, nerves seared beyond function, she tumbled face-down amid the glitter of crystal shards on the floor.
The shock wave of release raked across the attendant Prime Circle caught in proximity. Torn spirit from flesh in an instant, they crumpled like rags, heart-beat and breathing suspended. The impact hammered Lirenda unconscious and swept outward through the surrounding encampment. Every enchantress stationed within range buckled at the knees, knocked senseless under the surge through the corded ties of bound service.
Lirenda recovered awareness past daybreak, her first impression the rank reek of death trapped beneath sun-heated canvas. Swimming vision revealed the fringed hem of a tapestry a handspan from her opened eyes. The encampment outside the pavilion walls seemed deserted, the industrious churr of summer’s cicadas eerily undisturbed by human activity. Inside, only flies buzzed in the gloom, disturbed to a gyrating, silvery cloud when she stirred and rolled over. They flew in manic circles and alighted on the filmed eyes of the corpse tumbled amid crumpled skirts an arm’s length away. Others flitted like motes between the half-lit furnishings, pausing to feed on the noisome stains of gushed effluent soaking the carpet.
Gagged by the stench, and appalled by the toll of strewn casualties, Lirenda surveyed the butchered forms of her sisters, slumped in disarray against table legs, or fallen across upset chairs, or sprawled without dignity amid the crumple of red-banded mantles. Her stunned wits struggled to number the fallen, while horror reeled under the import of the disaster unfolded within the Prime’s private quarters. A moment passed before the survivor recognized the profound change: the master sigil of the Koriathain no longer enslaved her free will.
Lirenda blinked through an uprush of tears. Her innate choice of expression and speech were released from duress after
two hundred and forty four years.
At long last, the Matriarch’s downfall had ended her imposed ordeal of punishment. Selidie’s body lay grotesque in death, naked in the flayed shreds of her night-rail. The pearly perfection of youthful skin was despoiled, bloodied from the explosion that dusted her surrounds with pulverized crystal. Arisen amid the charnel-house quiet, Lirenda picked an unsteady path between the winnowed husks of her cohorts. Her hesitant footfalls on the warded carpet incurred no punitive censure. No voice of authority challenged her progress. She moved from one prone form to the next, and encountered cold flesh, limbs locked in rigor. All of the Senior Circle lay dead. None of the order’s top-tier enchantresses had escaped the past night’s debacle.
Triumph was absent. The wild exultation that should have uplifted this spurious victory dissolved as Lirenda grasped the extent of the order’s most irreplaceable loss. The sharp fragments crunched underfoot were not glass but shards of deep purple: amethyst. She trod over the wreckage of the Great Waystone, by lengths the most powerful focus in Koriani possession. The atrocity of the sisterhood’s murdered talent paled before the blow imposed by the jewel’s destruction.
Eyes shut, teeth clenched in mute rage, Lirenda shuddered with suppressed nausea. Granted her coveted position as the ranking initiate, she cursed fate.
Always, she had intended to seize her due claim to the succession. But never amid her dark hope of revenge had she envisioned taking the Prime seat with the might of order’s inheritance gutted.
Matriarch in fact, Lirenda became the sole party responsible for steering the sisterhood’s future. Her task alone, to shape the response and redress today’s ghastly atrocity. History would measure her fallen predecessor harshly: the bare plank, and the dangling, broken cuffs that remained of the enspelled restraints held no culpable prisoner. Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn had snatched his villainous advantage from the lap of opportune chance.
A cursory survey of the pavilion exposed the burst wards and smashed lock on the coffer that guarded the former Prime’s paraphernalia. Lirenda trod through the wrack of the murdered dead. Deaf to the wakeful stir risen outside, as the encampment’s uninvolved residents stirred from the seizure that had stunned them senseless, she knelt and surveyed the chest’s rifled contents, relieved as she found most of the critical inventory left undisturbed.
Selidie’s select cache of minerals still lay secure in their ties and silk wrappings. Except for the one crystal of choice significance to Rathain’s prince, gone missing from the collection. No coincidence, that the stolen quartz pendant had served as Elaira’s personal focus.
The flare of Lirenda’s fury defied words. Never mind that Arithon’s striking reverse had brought a corrupted Prime to her demise, his revenge at one strike had reduced the Koriathain to a minor power on the proscribed world of Athera.
Goaded beyond rage, Lirenda slammed down the coffer’s lid. She shoved erect and vowed over the unshrouded bodies of her slaughtered sisters, “I will see you undone, Teir’s’Ffalenn, and savour my satisfaction in full when the woman you love before any other gets cast down into witless misery.”
Hardened by hatred kindled long before the blow dispatched on this day, Lirenda crossed to the wardrobe and appropriated the deceased Matriarch’s costliest purple silk mantle. She shouldered the weight of all nine bands of office, retrieved the order’s swan seal from the chain at Selidie’s neck, and took brisk command when the first distressed sister parted the privacy curtain and called in frightened inquiry.
Lirenda shaped her first directive as the Koriani Prime Successor with granite resolve: to mete out devastation in equal measure, with every resource the order possessed aimed to bring down the renegade enchantress, Elaira.
Late Summer–Early Autumn 5924
Vexations
Morning gilded the tatters of cloud, while the droplets clinging from last night’s rain winkled glints of citrine across the heath. Althain’s Warden sat, oblivious to the view, a tucked silhouette in the ward-room’s cushioned window-seat five floors below the draughty height of the tower library. He appeared to be drowsing. Only the crabbed grip on his tea-mug marred the tranquil illusion of sleep. Though the gruelling tension of Arithon’s escape had resolved by up-ending the Koriani Prime succession, Sethvir refused to stand down. Against sense, he stayed upright, alert despite the bruised lines of exhaustion knifed into his cheeks.
No better rested, Asandir perched with folded legs on a hassock. Silver hair plaited behind his bent head, he whipped the last seam in the unfinished leathers hastily cut to his measure. The piece-work was Sethvir’s: a pilferer’s penance, done in contrition for the worn garment just filched to cut patches for the tower’s rickety hand-pump.
No bath-water would become drawn tonight. The ancient contrivance lay stripped to loose parts, the failed gaskets not yet refurbished with the newly greased set of replacements.
The punch of the awl and the whisper of the field Sorcerer’s stitches clocked the tense silence, while the after-shock storms of causation rippled across Daon Ramon, and the Warden’s fixated attention mapped the hazards of Arithon’s flight against the on-going momentum of probable event.
Sethvir’s tears marked the moment of blessed relief when the crown prince took cover at last in a bramble-choked gulch in the Barrens. No hostile scryers hounded his trail. The bid to secure an unsanctioned accession anchored Lirenda’s attention. The foreseeable future would keep her hands tied, reining in distant rivals while she firmed her grip on the order’s affairs. Which pause granted a moment for additional insight.
“The wraiths released at large when the Waystone broke asunder?” Asandir asked with tart delicacy.
“All have crossed the veil,” Sethvir confirmed. “Poor, sad creatures. No credit to us, their hideous torment is ended.”
Asandir whipped a knot into the tail of his thread, each movement brisk with annoyance. “A sorry hour when we have to scrounge our accomplishments by default!”
His outburst dangled without further comment. Enough dire factors left in loose play might yet hurl the world’s course to disaster.
When Sethvir’s eyelids snapped open, Asandir’s alarmed start just missed jabbing the awl through his finger. “What’s afoot?”
“Kharadmon, inbound,” Althain’s Warden declared, nettled nerves evinced by his owlish stare. Then a cut rose dropped from clear air and bounced off his head. Tumbled to the floor, then snap-frozen to glass, the bloom shattered to fragments as quickly erased by a whirlwind of arctic displeasure.
“You kept him uninformed!” howled the Sorcerer’s shade to Sethvir in a blast that shuddered the casement.
Althain’s Warden sat up and blinked, discomposed as a badgered poet.
Before his dissembling fuddle absorbed the angst behind Kharadmon’s tantrum, Asandir spoke, his challenge cold iron hurled into the tempest. “You reference the war host at large in Daon Ramon? My view is current in fact.”
The self-contained wind devil raked across the chamber. Quill pens whisked air-borne. A loose parchment flurried. The sturdy clothes tree festooned with torn bridles tottered, snatched back into testy stability with a clashed chime of buckles and bit rings. The breeze ran on, riffled the linen on the spare cot and batted a miniature blizzard of eider-down from a moth hole in the pillow. A hamper of socks crashed against Asandir’s saddle-bags. Thrown a steel glance for importunate insolence, the shade said in breezy retort, “You’re dispatched to handle the war host, I see?” Sarcasm bleak enough to snap crystal huffed on into accusation. “We’ve inflated our brazen self-importance to nose-lead humanity’s choices?”
Sethvir salvaged the hackled pause. “You’ve come to belabour our share of the blame for Davien’s twisted forecast?” That tired debate, which claimed the compact reduced Mankind’s free will, in practice, to the role of playthings and puppetry. “Asandir acted on that threat three weeks ago, while you raked muck with Verrain, nose deep in the black pools at Mirthlvain.”
; “I find breeding monsters and pestilence less twisted than two-legged sheep! The crankiest snakes strike for self-defence. Unlike human intelligence that sickens on fear, then turns rabid over a semantic difference in principle.” Except Kharadmon’s hyperbole was misplaced. He knew best of any: the suspension of Fellowship stewardship exposed more than humanity’s short-sighted prospects to ruin. Deflated to grumbling, the Sorcerer’s shade spiked tendrils of hoar-frost on the paned lamp. “In case you haven’t checked, clan numbers may not withstand the massacre. The Hatchet’s mandate from the temple includes a directive to derange Halwythwood’s wardings. To that end, he’s poised his dedicates at the verges for ravening slaughter.”
“Our choices had to be weighed against back-lash,” Asandir pointed out, the bitter, immediate losses in Rathain laid against the long-term reprisals incited by a True Sect recoil. “A strong intervention would pitch the fanatical cry for extermination worldwide.”
“We’ll grapple that anyhow,” Kharadmon snarled, unappeased by dispassionate logic. “Has Sethvir mentioned Saroic s’Gannley’s heroic evasion in Camris has fuelled the dismal strategy?”
“Asandir lent his escort to Traithe, leaving Morvain,” Sethvir pointed out, oblique reference to the flotilla of galleys requisitioned for troop transport across Instrell Bay. Armed companies mustered for The Hatchet’s attack: the reinforcements withdrawn from north Tysan had stressed passage through the port towns for a fortnight.
“A bolstered campaign, launched near the onset of winter called for a revival of Earl Jieret’s crafty tactics. My counsel sent Tarens,” Asandir confessed. Whether that gifted resource equipped Rathain’s clans to deflect the brunt of The Hatchet’s offensive, the broad-scale deployment certainly poisoned the last-minute prospect of peace. The Fellowship’s field Sorcerer tied off the last lace, unfolded lean shanks, and stood. “Travel takes me through Rathain in fact, though my purposeful business lies elsewhere.” A quicksilver glint nicked his glance as he belted on his new leathers and hefted his packs for departure. “By the roundabout route my black horse will rejoin me.”