by Janny Wurts
Lysaer shivered amid his despoiled bed-clothes, clotted nose and bitten lip purpled with swelling. But the smouldering rage in his single blue eye was no longer curse driven. Dace confronted the ire of lordly affront: murderous offence for the dedicates’ handling, further incensed by the demeaning shame of bodily failure. Dace approached with respect, his unruffled calm pitched to placate. “My Prince, your dignity’s in no fit state. Allow me?”
The good eye snapped shut, a tacit permission less pathetic than the mangle of attempted speech. Lysaer’s wounded mind had not spared the awareness of his damaged intelligence. The proud statesman grasped how drastically far he had fallen. Granted royal prerogative since birth, Lysaer suffered the excoriating self-contempt that he could not escape his own squalor without able assistance.
Dace unlaced and removed the soaked night-shirt. Practised tact knew where firm support was required, and understood without condescension when to let impaired function strive without coddling. Lysaer endured the staged labour that eased his frame off the stained sheets. Propped upright on fresh pillows, he tolerated the undignified touch that sponged him clean and reclothed his humiliated nakedness. While Dace mopped the floor and disposed of the soiled linens, Lysaer’s laboured breaths eased. Rigid tension unwound. His overtaxed body ceased trembling.
Dace found a fresh towel, refilled the wash-basin, and set gently to work on Lysaer’s battered face. Thankfully, the split lip had not torn through. The straight bones of his nose were unbroken. But the sculpted male beauty that once had stunned sight sagged yet from atrophied muscle. A full year since the wounding, the ravaged right eye socket dripped fluid down the caved cheek. The skull beneath wore flesh like melted wax where the major nerves remained severed. The internal brain tissue scarred by the arrow also left an arm and one leg nearly paralysed.
Day upon day, Dace marked the raw courage: as by naked will Lysaer refused the cowardly snatch for the shaving razor plied by his hand. Pity could not have reacted in time, had the determined grasp of the unimpaired fist turned the steel for a suicide. Functional cognizance was not intact; in painful, slow stages, the long convalescence was barely underway. Yet mindful courtesy was never absent.
Dace sensed the gratitude for his loyalty. He read the moments of lucid embarrassment, and longed amid heart-break to whisper a word of tacit reassurance. He would never forsake his guard over Lysaer’s integrity.
Yet he dared not speak. High Priests came and went at all hours to pray at the altar in the shrine outside. The chance could not be risked, that he might be caught apostate inside the Light’s holy sanctum. Reduced to the infantile language of touch, Dace extended his tender care to the wreck of the man in his keeping.
One day, given time, Lysaer would rise whole. Meanwhile, the steadfast valet kept his invalid master’s volatile secrets. The Exalted Examiner had failed at this pass, not because the Light’s Divine Prince did not track the affairs of the Spinner of Darkness. Lysaer’s mind might be dimmed, and his tongue denied speech, but Desh-thiere’s curse still branded its brutal directive into living flesh. Any night spent in the avatar’s presence revealed where the source of his unrest walked abroad: just now, far south-eastward and moving, expressed by the whimpering outcries wrenched from Lysaer’s wracked throat. Verified with a weathercock’s clarity, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn was bound straight cross-country towards Rockbay Harbour.
The Mathorn uplands were a miserable place for a lone traveller in late autumn, as the short days approached winter’s edge. Clouds bleak as cold iron lidded the peaks. Frost sculpted the landscape beneath to a netherworld, black rock and sere ledges keened over by gusts. The bite of an on-coming blizzard knifed cold like a blade through the lungs. Elaira huddled into her cloak, her clouded breath shredded in the thin air. Seasoned by her reclusive years at high altitude, she recognized the urgent need to find shelter.
But the sealed entry to Davien’s retreat presented a stark lack of options. A barren site, scarred by recent cataclysm, the surrounding slopes were scraped clean by rock-slides. The sheared cliffs wore cracks left by earthquakes, pocked by glassine scars where tumultuous forces had pummelled slagged stone into craters. Amid the colossal rubble, a sculpted gryphon mantled spread wings above a square opening, incised between the talons that flanked a stairwell’s descent into darkness.
The monstrous statue was not ornamental. Carved eyes gleamed with the restive spark of a guardian spell. The boundary where its latent defences lay coiled in check chafed the nerves and raised gooseflesh. A coronal flare blazed if Elaira approached, a proximity warning that days of initiate survey had failed to disarm. Her knowledge fathomed no means to gain entry. Outmatched, with her supplies now exhausted, she relied on skilled hunting to forage. But pending bad weather drove the sparse game deep into sensible cover.
Hungry and tired, Elaira rejected a retreat to civilized shelter. The unwieldy mass of The Hatchet’s balked war host clogged the Mathorn Road, an obstruction that narrowed her unsavoury choices: withdraw from Davien’s lair and hunker down at the risk of starvation. Or else cross the ridge against worsening weather and seek the dread portal to Kewar’s maze, seven leagues off as the crow flew over desolate, alpine terrain.
“Death and death!” she snapped, still wrung pithless by her memory of Arithon’s harrowing experience.
The exasperated assessment found her near the end of her resources. Lowered clouds promised the oncoming storm would smother the peaks before nightfall. Elaira took bitter stock. She might try a brief, last attempt on the wards before hunkering down in the wilds. Her one, untried avenue at least required only a short invocation.
At the wardspell’s edge, Elaira engaged her refined senses and assayed the sealed circle until she located the point of closure. There, she sketched an opening rune, attached a precise chain of ciphers, and probed as a locksmith might ply a wire by delicate touch through a keyhole. When she encountered resistance, a whispered charge breathed into a sigil enacted her query for access.
The wards woke in defence, interference struck down with Dharkaron Avenger’s unrequited ferocity. Reamed through, up-ended, and slapped dizzy, Elaira discovered that Davien’s protections were forearmed against even the mildest use of her third level artistry. Grounded awareness and discipline failed as the recoil hammered her senseless.
Her first moment of conscious recovery brought darkness. Shrouded in textureless oblivion, Elaira grappled dismay. Patience changed nothing. Her featureless disorientation suggested Davien’s working entrapped the primal essence of her being. Hunch also implied that she had been graced by fortune to have survived.
Davien the Betrayer had no mercy to spare for the Order of the Koriathain. Though a probable ally against the sisterhood’s interests, Elaira’s appeal for his help might be claimed through renouncement of her initiate’s oath. Yet such a Fellowship grant of severance carried an interlinked consequence. Beyond her well-being, the fate of her personal quartz rested on the outcome. Its loyal service, gifted in trust, imposed a steadfast obligation. The Biedar crone’s advice from Sanpashir had claimed such a quittance would shatter the crystal: “… no more to shine as a beacon in darkness …”
A warning grown weighted with poignant significance, since the pendant had passed into Arithon’s keeping: his sole access to unfiltered memories of her resided in the mineral’s matrix. That precious, true record of her affection offered his life-line to heal the wrecked trust imposed by the sisterhood’s meddling.
“Should your Master of Shadows fail you, or you come to fail him, the result will call down disaster,” Traithe once had cautioned, based upon Sethvir’s earth-Sighted augury.
Elaira rejected the choice to cause harm as the price of her own salvation.
Resolve sealed her fate. The void that cocooned her dissolved, her released awareness jolted back into sensation and breathing flesh. Punishing cold shocked her fully awake. Sprawled in collapse, she was numbed to the bone and wretchedly shivering. Gale-force wind strippe
d away what little core warmth remained, broken by nothing but the drifted snowfall banked against her crumpled cloak. Through dulled shock and exposure, she recognized her narrow escape. A less subtle test of the Sorcerer’s wards would have unravelled her body into a haze of primordial elements.
The storm kept her in jeopardy. Elaira fought the exhausted urge to surrender and sleep. Prolonged chill had sapped her. Locked muscles almost balked her effort to rise. Hunched on her knees, fingers numbed to dead wood, she reached for the last object in her possession that might best a Fellowship Sorcerer.
Elaira hooked the thong slung from her neck and clawed the flint knife from its deer-hide sheath. Biedar leave had been given. Allowed one boon in her own behalf, she resorted to the wild-card of their Eldest’s cryptic promise.
Snow mired her ankles. Unbalanced, without ten steps left in her, Elaira shoved upright and staggered ahead until she felt the wards flare. Then she slashed the stone blade with the reckless intent to sever Davien’s grand conjury.
The weave parted. Elaira overbalanced and crashed face-down. Too depleted to rise, she crawled under the gryphon’s spread talons. The nine-yard marathon wheeled her dizzy. Finished off if she succumbed in the open, she wormed to the entry on her belly and stared down into fathomless darkness.
No way to discern how far down the shaft ran; descent of the stairs lay beyond her. Lost without shelter, she shoved over the brink and let gravity take her. The bruising tumble broke none of her bones but found a soft landing, caught by a pair of capable hands.
“By glory,” Davien declared in dry welcome, “come this far, couldn’t you wait to be decently met at my threshold?”
Elaira managed a breathless reply. “Does civil propriety honour a break-in?” Set back on her feet, her overtaxed sinews unravelled. Polite determination frayed like blown smoke and spiralled her into oblivion.
Recovered under the suspect kindness of Davien’s hospitality, Elaira sat tucked in a cushioned nook, nestled under a vaulted ceiling upheld by enamelled posts. She was reclad in a laced jerkin, dark trousers, and a white shirt with tailored cuffs, likely cast-offs from Arithon’s past residence. Her Sorcerer host lounged nearby, eating toast, his back braced against the arched door-jamb. His lion’s mane of shoulder-length hair lay tamed at his nape with black cord.
His preference in colours stayed autumn and gold, no more the conjured whim of a shade but clothing a flesh-and-blood presence. The change was not settling. His inscrutable mantle of power in close quarters still rattled quick wits.
Davien’s genius had been dangerous, always. But the creature made reincarnate by Seshkrozchiel exceeded the compass of arcane experience. As if the unruly flare of cobalt flame imbued by congress with a dragon might lick through his aura at the drop of a pin, each word with him carried a heft and weight, the collateral peril of light conversation more abstruse than ever before.
Courage restored by food and drink, Elaira broached the thin ice with impertinent inquiry. “You’re not annoyed that I trespassed your wards?”
The Sorcerer stopped chewing and stared. “No ward is proof against the Biedar crone. As you saw, her will surpasses a force of nature.”
Elaira rasped on through a throat dry with nerves, “You’re not disturbed by my ties to Koriathain?”
Davien’s eyebrows rose. “The old Matriarch of your order never learned when to keep her wise distance. If her successor sets foot on my turf, she’ll receive her comeuppance as well. Do you fear her intrusive reprisal?”
Better sense fled. Elaira deflected the personal question and attacked her priority headlong. “Are you unconcerned for the implications of Asandir’s standing oath?”
“Not to assist with Prince Arithon’s survival?” Evasive, amused, Davien shoved off and paced. “But this is the crone’s business, make no mistake. You realize her tribe’s involvement precedes Athera’s Second Age record?”
Still seated, unsinged, Elaira tried tact. “The Eldest informed me. Jessian’s plight and her conflicted secret provoked the sisterhood’s undercover society to coerce the Biedar for access to their ancestral knowledge.”
Impatience spiked Davien’s riposte. “Since that flint knife’s history binds one of your own, you’ll want to pursue the forbidden diaries inscribed by the former initiate you knew as Enithen Tuer.”
Elaira gaped. “Erdane’s ancient seer? She was Koriathain?”
“Much more.” A vexed predator, the Sorcerer spun to a stop. “The renegade woman’s account is shelved here because the better part of her heritage could not stay with the Paravian archive at Althain Tower.” Black eyes bored back with a nettled gleam. “You aren’t going to ask about Ettinmere’s shamans, or the consequence of your beloved’s breached promise?”
Barely, Elaira smothered her flinch. Rattled by the abrupt change of subject, she stiffened her guard, sorting her thoughts for response.
Davien thrust through her recoil, “The Fellowship were not your friend, or Arithon’s, regarding the seduction assayed by Vivet.”
“Stale news! You Seven desire a royal conception, almost at any cost.” Flushed down to her collar, Elaira hit back. “Had the hussy wrangled her way with his Grace, don’t posture. Your colleagues would have claimed her issue as Rathain’s crown heir with scarcely a pause for permission.”
Davien’s salacious smile raked over her flaming discomfort and chastised, “Think again, worthy consort. You were a signal party to the burden of debt invoked under crisis at Athir.”
Elaira tallied the fine points. “I had Dakar to swear in behalf of the crown to avoid the attachment to Arithon’s person.” The life restored to him by her healer’s work as the heir slammed home the barbed summary. “Ath wept!” Sethvir’s innuendo had implied the same. “Should the prince sire a natural child, the term of the quittance sworn by Asandir becomes invalidated?”
Not precisely; under Davien’s fixed regard, Elaira dissected the question again with the scrutiny of a lawyer. “You’re saying the runes laid in stone at Whitehold, that verify the Fellowship pact of nonintervention apply to Prince Arithon as Rathain’s crown successor?” The conniving atrocity wrung her to shaking. “Then your Fellowship could condemn a royal-born infant to salvage his mastery of Shadow!”
Davien never blinked. “A moot speculation since no s’Ffalenn offspring exists.”
Elaira glared at his impenetrable sang-froid, gripped by the effort to curb her runaway fury. “Your riddles annoy like the cockleburr,” she snapped, ridden by the abrasive certainty Davien’s comments never lacked purpose. Sketched between lines, crafted with artful subtlety, this was not a cloaked warning for her nor a caution aimed at any posited offspring begotten by her beloved. But perhaps—oh, yes, surely!—a sideward appeal made on behalf of the Sorcerers. The shift in topic was not a non sequitur. What had seemed two different conversations, in parallel, actually threaded one strand.
Elaira pounced. “You want the crippled remnant of the Order of the Koriathain broken forever!” Biedar interests and Fellowship need were the same: the crone’s knife had cut through Davien’s wardings, past doubt, but only by his back-handed invitation.
As though her dumb-struck conclusion had been spoken, Davien’s grin lit with crocodilian delight. “You are my honoured guest by your own design, and Asandir’s oath is inviolate.”
Elaira knuckled her eyes, dragged the candle-lamp closer and worked the next line in the leather-bound diary into translation: “Requiar, male adult of Lassiver’s heritage, stood surety for Jessian’s secret. Next generation, the offspring of Hasidii’s lineage birthed the weak link that broke covenant.”
“Lineage would seem the predominant theme,” she murmured, then blotted her quill before dried-up ink clogged the nib. Closeted with Enithen Tuer’s proscribed library, she memorized the historical names, stretched a cramped shoulder, then pored over the next faded entry.
While the old seeress had a clear hand, the desert tribe’s obscure language imposed the hardship of an e
ncryption. Elaira sighed, dragged open a weightier tome to her left, the parchment pages musky with age and deckled by nibbling rodents. A sneeze watered her eyes as she referenced a new word, entered in crude characters that appeared to derive from symbols scratched upon rock. Plainly, penned records were not the Biedar’s archival preference.
“Responsible charge to mend the breached integrity of the tribe therefore claimed both lines of descent, and laid the ancestral burden upon future progeny.”
Elaira paused. Thumb marking the page, she flipped back to the inscription on the diary’s fly-leaf. “Written by Audua Sedjii an Teshua, last-born of Hasidii’s heritage.”
Audua, who had answered to Enithen Tuer after Asandir freed her from oath-bound service as a Koriathain. Why the woman should have forsaken her creed in exchange for the sisterhood’s rigid hierarchy seemed senseless! The Prime Matriarch was the Biedar’s avowed enemy, a perverted practitioner of their sacred knowledge. Unless, mused Elaira, Audua’s wayward intent aimed to redeem the ancient score against the Hasidii blood-line. Answers, if they existed, called for painstaking work.
“The flint knife was knapped, shaped in blood and fire, the soul mark of responsibility bonded in perpetuity to both lineages until the hour of reckoning.” Elaira eyed the sheathed artifact beside her and exclaimed, “Do I take this to mean the disembodied spirits of two persons inhabit this blade? One Hasidii progenitor, and one Requiar?” Shuddered by revulsion, she added, “Wouldn’t such practice involve necromancy?”
“Assuredly so,” Davien confirmed from a stance behind her, “had a bonding ritual of dark coercion occurred.”
Elaira started nearly out of her skin and swivelled her chair to face him. “While we’re speaking of ghosts, did you have to creep up unannounced?”
The Sorcerer’s mantle of sere black and silver wafted the outdoors scent of snow as he advanced. “May I?” He presented an inquiring, opened hand in request to receive the flint dagger.