by Janny Wurts
“I am not complacent,” Elaira declared. “More, I have gathered the specific knowledge I came for.”
That challenge snapped Davien’s adamant silence. “Then press your free will and cross mine at your peril! A fool would presume to fathom my intentions, or worse, spurn the privilege of my hospitality. Be sure, Elaira, when the moment arrives, if the opening presents, my colleagues must act in behalf of your crown prince without hesitation.”
“I don’t know your directives,” Elaira agreed, outmatched and outfaced as small prey gripped in the jaws of a predator. “Since the fool lacks your vision, what’s left beyond a supplicant’s plea of forbearance? Forgive the effrontery of short-sighted pain. I fear I might find scant cause to rejoice in the outcome arranged by your Fellowship!”
Davien laughed, his mercurial joy a reprieve against suffocating uncertainty. “My dear, your loyal heart is a treasure! Let’s call an amicable truce and retire. I’d rather delight your sharp tongue with fine wine since the mess of stacked odds at the moment don’t favour anyone’s hope of felicity.”
On last year’s journey to Thunder Ridge, Iyat-thos Tarens and Cosach between them had dragged the Mad Prophet along by the scruff. Not protesting his misery as dead weight, at this pass, the fat spellbinder pushed through his slack endurance by arcane sorcery. Day upon day, streaming sweat in the heat, his choppy jog flanked Tarens’s longer strides in a race against certain disaster. Panting exertion disallowed speech. Spirit acted, regardless, and wasted no breath on the sensible choice to stand down.
The chance to turn back became forfeit, regardless, as the hostile war host coalesced in withdrawal and ravaged the country behind them. Harried by The Hatchet’s armed outriders, Tarens threw off pursuit. His inherited grasp of Rathain’s terrain knew where the gulches softened to bogs, and which windswept hill-tops lacked cover. The rivers dividing the lowlands swirled past their first spate, still swift where the current buffeted, chest high. Forced to swim, the chilled travellers sunned themselves dry. They foraged for berries and milkweed shoots, and stalked game, until the open country made cookfires risky. When their reduced rations gave out, they pushed on and went hungry.
Two dozen leagues brought them to the stony track leading into the Mathorn foot-hills. There, they smoked speared fish over charcoal, nestled in the steep vales with their rucked blanket of fir, spangled white between the top branches where the looming summits wore late-season ice. Higher, they clambered over the treacherous rubble of a winter avalanche, splashed by the frigid, tumbling falls that rushed toward the placid, skeined streams in the dales far below.
Neither man mentioned reducing the pace. They snatched rest in catnaps and ate smaller game caught in the loop snares set at twilight.
Dakar tightened his belt, the slack paunch of his jerkin gathered like frills on a bolster. Privation raised none of his usual complaint. Nose and cheeks peeled the raw hue of blood sausage, he pumped upwards upon drumstick legs until breathlessness dropped him prostrate.
“Grace forsaken!” Tarens exclaimed. Forearms crossed upon his bent knee, he waited, while Dakar whooped, prone in the shade of an outcrop. “You’ll serve no one’s cause if you perish.”
“Longevity training,” the Mad Prophet gasped. “How many sweethearts did you wish you’d kissed? I’ll rally ahead of the short count, for those who’d have slapped you in protest.”
Tarens mopped his brow and raised sceptical eyebrows. “Aren’t you a marvel for slippery deception! If Cosach would skin you from beyond the grave, I’ll corner your pledge of unlimited beer for the fact you’re a lying wastrel.”
Dakar rolled onto his back, eyes pinched shut to escape spinning vision. “If I can’t rise, we’re dead. Or hasn’t your access to Jieret’s awareness checked on our back trail?”
There were hoof-beats, in fact, drummed through the ground and rapidly closing. Tarens swore. “League scalpers?”
“No. Worse,” Dakar rasped. “We’ve got the Light’s best troop of horse at our heels. They’re not scouring the foot-hills for clansfolk. Canon mandate’s dispatched them over the Mathorns for the same reason we’re running south.”
“They aim to take Arithon?” Tarens offered a hand, hauled Dakar to his feet, and towed his reeling frame uphill. “Then we’ll have to outpace them. Or else become a trophy hunt for their trackers.”
Jieret’s wily evasion took them up the precarious trails through the ledges, over trapped ground that might slaughter or save them. There, the mountains buckled into sheer cliffs, and rock slides left treacherous heaps of debris jumbled into surprise bottle-necks. If frost and erosion had not fractured the scarp, a narrow foot track wound into the notches, impassable to mounted riders.
The climb blurred into a misery of windy nights and days of scant food, stitched by the bellows ache of short breath in the frigid, thin air. Between the gales that struck without warning, the cry of the kite split the lucent sky, while the groaning complaint of pressed ice underfoot foreran the grinding thunder when melt split the glacier into crevasses. Always cold, the travellers picked their way where a slipped step threatened a tumbling fall into the abyss.
Even Tarens’s robust strength wore down to gaunt hollows, his scarred nose burned livid above cracking lips, and his eyes glazed to bloodshot exhaustion. Paused to soak blistered feet in a spring, he waited out Dakar’s immersive trance, engaged to sound for the proximity of their pursuit.
“We will reach the divide ahead of the horsemen,” the Mad Prophet confirmed, voice husked to a croak. The Light’s mounted dedicates wound through the deep vales, where milder elevation gave access to fodder. “If we don’t snag the interest of their diviner, we’ll make the clan outpost above Leynsgap before they overtake us.”
One threat less, against the greater concern, that with each passing day since the war host’s withdrawal, The Hatchet’s revised orders sent by advance messengers would be staging Etarra’s reserves to the south. The ranks of the faithful would swell further as the temple’s dovecotes sent off carrier birds, and town garrisons on the Eltair coast answered the imperative call to take arms. Daon Ramon would be swarming with troops, bound to Daenfal and Backwater for the Temple’s muster against Shadow.
Tarens crammed his sore feet back into snagged hose and laced his torn boots without comment. Denial alone dulled the agonized knowledge that their race to thwart a predestined event was a gesture flung against futility.
A day’s travel beyond the Mathorn divide, fogged in cloud where the stripped scarps combed the wind past the timberline, Tarens remarked on the lack of vigilant clan scouts. “They have not challenged our presence. Do we have to build a string clapper and signal them?”
“Be quiet!” snapped Dakar. Bearded and raffish, one ripped sole swathed in rags, he jerked to a stop between steps.
Tarens halted before slamming into him. “What’s amiss? Did we stray?” Jieret’s recall of the back route to Leynsgap was changeable, where seasonal ice savaged the rough terrain, and the dry-wall bridges over the chasms had to be rebuilt every year. His gesture encompassed a site scoured bare of stone markers, customarily stacked to blaze the trail during summer. “I don’t know this place. All broken scree, and no lichen, as if we tread over the aftermath of a cataclysm.”
“You feel unsettled?” Dakar rounded, eyes rolled to the whites. “Wise fellow, you should. We’ve attracted the Sight of an uncanny watcher.”
Tarens scraped at his stubbled chin, his affable nature turned thoughtful as he plumbed the location from Earl Jieret’s perspective. “Might your jeebies have something to do with the fact we’re tramping down the back side of Kewar?”
Dakar smacked his forehead. “The devil!” He cat-footed forward. “Avert the cross-grained eye of Dame Fortune! Please, let’s not reap the whirlwind of Davien’s attention.”
“Too late.” Tarens yanked the spellbinder short by the collar. “We already have.”
A tear in the mist unveiled an immense stone gryphon, carved in detail
enough to seem living. The baleful, slant eye above the raptor’s beak glowed ruby with warning.
Dakar shook off restraint. Shoulders squared beneath tattered clothes, he crept onwards through the chinking slag. “That forsaken thing’s one of Davien’s guardians, spellcrafted to repel trespassers. It’s aware. Very dangerous. Keep a wide berth, show no disrespect, and beg for the forbearance that we’ll be allowed leave to pass.”
Something stirred in the sullen gloom beneath the statue’s mantled wings. Presently, a slight person in a traveller’s mantle emerged, hauling two lumpish packs. The unhooded features were not ascetic, or male, and the long, auburn braid belonged to no Fellowship Sorcerer.
Sight of her froze the Mad Prophet as though a storm crow had fluttered to roost.
“She’s not armed,” Tarens observed, “though she settles the flux as she moves like a clan scout. You believe she’s a threat?”
“That’s Arithon’s Koriani enchantress! Worse than a case of the plague, and forbye, she shouldn’t be here.” The Mad Prophet stiffened, his pudding jaw jutted for a knock-down confrontation.
Tarens regarded the inbound peril with keen interest: an elfin figure with a determined air, not a whit discomposed by her overstuffed satchels. As she neared, he received her intense survey, in turn. Eyes the pristine tint of a dawn sky dominated fine features and the inquisitive, arched brows of an acerbic intelligence.
Dakar cleared his throat, riled pink with embarrassment. “Elaira. You can’t—”
The enchantress breezed past. Ignored him, while the worry that tightened her mouth melted into a welcoming smile directed at the crofter behind him. “Tarens? I am grateful! For the loyal friendship shown to my beloved, now and forever, my help is yours.”
Caught off guard by her grace, Tarens regarded a spirit annealed under sorrow to a tempered courage that left him speechless.
While he floundered, she rescued him with an arid humour that snuffed any trace of self-pity. “I’ve bear-baited Davien with threats to his books until he caved in and released me. I’m free on blind faith, with two parcels of cake, a blanket, and a fly swatter.”
Tarens grinned outright and offered a hand to relieve her of the larger pack. Surprised when the burden tested his balance, he realized she carried trail gear as well as provisions. “My dear, for your wit, you’ll cross Sithaer itself, even if I have to carry you.” Struggling, he hid his dismay; refused by bare-knuckled strength to acknowledge the wretched fact that her mission was hopeless.
Both men were aware: Dakar’s immutable prophecy already forecast Arithon’s downfall. Elaira might believe she slipped Davien’s protection through her own initiative. But by strict adherence to Asandir’s oath, no Fellowship Sorcerer dared to grant her liberty if aught in the world suggested she might upset his Grace’s doomed fate.
As though Tarens’s gloom was transparent, Elaira swore with exasperation, “Don’t think to batten my anguish in cotton! Davien has allowed me to go because Ettinmere’s shamans have already triumphed.”
“What?” Dakar stared, gut-punched. “Then you know the worst? That Arithon’s going to be taken?”
Shocked first by the crofter’s stunned gasp, Elaira glared at the fat prophet, angry enough to rip him to the viscera. “You failed to tell Tarens?” Before anyone answered, she broke her shocking news. “His Grace walked into the trap the shamans had set for him. Sethvir’s confirmed. They sealed his captivity, hours ago.” Then, “Damn you to Sithaer!” she accosted Dakar. “Is there no limit to your shrinking cowardice?”
For a mercy, Tarens kept a level head. He curbed his impulse to broaden her short-term awareness. For as he and the spellbinder were acutely aware, the crisis at this pass presaged a far more grievous disaster. One that, all along, pushed their desperate rush—not to serve a lost cause—but to spare Mankind’s demise under the greater reckoning sprung from the Fellowship’s compact.
Dakar also stood firm before Elaira’s bravery, as much from distrust of her order as to dodge the failures that poisoned his mishandled life. “You realize you’ve leaped into a cauldron of intrigue stewed up for explosive revenge?”
“A pot stirred to the boil by the Prime Matriarch’s long spoon? I know.” The enchantress stopped short of pulling her hair in exasperation. “We might as well give the True Sect diviners a threefold incentive to try for canonical fame.”
Late Spring–Early Summer 5925
Ambush
The false step that brought Arithon’s plunging fall into black-out oblivion had not been caused by a slip in his treacherous ascent of the Issing Ravine. Nor did his disrupted awareness spring from a resurgent back-lash, when the trauma that followed Paravian exposure relapsed into the grief of profound separation.
Instead, Arithon recouped his first glimmer of consciousness in a smothered state of suspension. Mage training failed to define what had triggered his disorientation. Mazed senses encountered no obvious symptoms: not the after-shock sting of grazed skin or the ache of snapped bones that attended an injury. Darkened sight did not clear. Recall yielded nothing beyond his last view, of a slice of night sky strewn with stars, spanning the narrow seam of the river course, with its ladders of flindered trunks, wedged amid the scraped scars of old rock-slides.
In fact, his numbed awareness gleaned nothing. Not the whisper of breath or the rhythmic thump of his heart-beat. The void swallowed all tactile sensation. Trained use of his initiate talent grappled what seemed a pocket of utter oblivion. Even his mastery of shadow failed to harness the featureless dark.
Unable to seize the initiative, Arithon measured the scope of his error in judgement.
He had not tumbled to his demise, broken at the verge of a natural death. Instead, he had succumbed to a snare wrought to paralyse intellect and disable him. Unlike his confinement by the Koriathain, crafted of mirrored light, matrixed in crystal, or the sigils imposed through their Waystone, this working stranded him in isolation, amid a null state of emptiness.
Not a Fellowship construct, laid down in accord with free will, or the seamlessly omniscient weavings of Sanpashir’s tribesfolk. The binding on him matched nothing familiar, which forced the default conclusion: he had been over-confident, and ten times a fool, to have misappraised Ettinmere’s shamans.
Crushed under their aegis, stripped naked of everything but self-awareness, Arithon retained no measure of time. Cocooned, he received no stimulus on which to anchor his human identity. Dread gave rise to whispered despair. As an insensate trophy, he might become subjected to worse than public display and humiliation. Under Ettinmere’s archaic code, council judgement could hang the condemned on a meat-hook, with the living flesh drawn as food for the shamans’ carrion birds. Fear inflated the horror, that his execution may have happened already, with his dismembered consciousness hung at the turn of Daelion’s Wheel.
The fraught terror followed, that he might drift until he went mad, suspended without surcease forever.
Which grotesque nightmare had not occurred, yet! The spiral of irrational panic broke finally, crushed down by stark courage. Arithon rallied his pulverized discipline and sorted the likely facts. His predicament would be a cold-blooded strategy, engineered by the shamans to break him. As a tactical play to destroy his morale, hysteria sprung from the scars of his past surely would strike a blow fit to smash his integrity. If he lost himself to insanity, he might spill his core secrets in raving bewilderment. A lifetime’s initiate knowledge might fall into wrong hands, and be turned to who knew what evil purpose.
Arithon forced himself to shift focus before that peril spurred runaway thoughts. In command of nothing but his active mind, he grappled his prior experience with the onset of total derangement. Disorientation had to be tempered to survive the boundless abyss. Ordeals before this had forged the means to refurnish his threatened identity from naught. If not through the gifted use of his talent, then by bare-knuckled invention.
His command of shadow had not prevailed. The skilled music tha
t had triumphed over the last challenge in Davien’s maze also gave him no purchase, which eliminated an exploratory assay through tone to sound out the trap’s structure by resonance. Denied the method by which he had tamed the lane flux in Rathain during Kharadmon’s crisis at Rockfell, Arithon groped, adrift, tacitly seeking. He encountered no trace of past malice; no unrequite echo upon which to seize the toe-hold for active resistance. If, like the Great Waystone, past spirits had suffered this torment of incarceration before him, their misery left no residual echo.
The miring darkness was untextured velvet, silent as the primordial void. Arithon’s efforts exerted no influence, no matter which angle he tried. The sealed stasis retained no imprint of its maker, which left him no lead to pursue. Naught remained but to resift his predicament with yet more exhaustive precision. A force must exist that negated his influence. Something stabilized his confinement against erosive decay.
Arithon abandoned all preconceived thought and listened with a Masterbard’s ear for nuance. Mage-senses extended, he stretched his perception across frequencies, from the lowest register into the highest, above the extreme range of human hearing. Ettinmere’s cabal did not know his history. Surely, the shamans might fail to fathom the reach of his seasoned expertise. He owned an initiate’s talent enhanced by the practice of centuries, settling hostile free wraiths. More, his blood-line’s resilient attributes had been tested anew by the rarified influence of the Paravians.
Iron will built upon those core strengths a state of absolute stillness that mirrored the vacuous emptiness. Then, Arithon dissolved his active defences. He blended himself into oblivion and let the pervasive absence of pattern absorb his quiescent identity.
He drifted, unfurled, for a timeless age, or perhaps for one magnified instant, unbounded as a raindrop melded into the greater expanse of the ocean. Existence dissolved, until death itself promised the blessed relief of a reawakening. And still, he held, beyond count of endurance.