by Janny Wurts
Sick at heart, Jaric turned to Landfast. Spires there lay tumbled like the sticks of a bird nest abandoned to winter. Waves combed vacant beaches, and the crabbed, uprooted apple trees of Telshire mouldered like arthritic skeletons in dusty beds of soil. Spurred by distress, Ivainson quartered the length and breadth of Keithland. Desolation filled his vision. Not a man, woman, or child would survive the devastation to come. He recoiled in horror, hounded by prophecy, of the failure that had shattered him hideously made real. Energy cracked in white sparks around him as he dispersed his focus.
The dusty stillness of Shadowfane seemed suddenly unbearably confining. Ivainson Jaric pressed his cheek against stone and shuddered. The shadowed, sunken sockets of Scait's skull seemed to mock him from the floor. Though the compact itself was obliterated, the Morrigierj would complete the extinction of mankind. No Vaere-trained sorcerer remained for defence; the wizards of Mhored Kara possessed mettle, but little means to ward. Keithland stood open for conquest. Whipped to frenzy by their overlord, the Gierj might ravage and murder at will.
Shadowfane's stillness abruptly acquired overtones of menace. Jaric flexed scarred hands and pushed himself off from the wall. Light flared golden around his person as he pitched the force of his mastery against his prison door. Iron glared briefly red. Wood steamed, and counterweights trembled on their moorings. Then a high-pitched whine sliced the air. Planking and chain ripped apart, solidity scattered to a drifting billow of dust. Too concerned to be unsettled by the violence of his work, Jaric strode through, into a vaulted hallway where gargoyles leered from the cornices.
The light of his presence dissolved shadows from his path. Although the demon fortress was convoluted as a maze, expanded perception lent bearings. Jaric moved through passages of checkered agate, and turnings carved with runes. Slim as a wraith, and bathed in power, he sought the uncanny circle of stillness that harboured the source of all danger.
His steps reverberated through empty halls, unchallenged. Beyond a triad of hexagonal portals, he climbed the spiral staircase that pierced the inner core of Shadowfane. No demon emerged to battle him. Jaric heard nothing but the moan of wind through bleak towers; the expanded sensitivity of his mastery detected no life but the scurry of foraging mice.
The great hall of Shadowfane rose high above the level of the fells. Ivainson Firelord strode through the entry where Marlson Emien had once been dragged by the grasping fists of Thienz. No carpet remained to soften his footfalls. Shadowless amid the natural glow of his wards, he crossed an echoing expanse of marble. The chandeliers over his head hung dark on dusty chains; lancet windows outlined an overcast sky, and clouds light gleamed cold on the floors. The silvered surface of the mirror pool reflected the soaring lines of columns and a vacant expanse of dais. Scait's throne stood tenantless, a knife blade thrust through the leather of a human wrist.
Chilled to a halt by the sight, Jaric took a moment to sort the shadow ghosts of past events and recall the present. Scait Demon Lord could threaten humanity no more. Only dust remained of the compact that had hated and plotted vengeance through the centuries since Corinne Dane's luckless wreck.
Yet through the emotional afterimage left by Kor's Accursed, Jaric's heightened senses picked up resonance of something stirring, the ruthless and alien force that lingered yet in Shadowfane's halls. His mouth went dry. Humans had been pawns in the demons' bid for power, yet the Morrigierj made no distinction. For the transgressions of Emien and Tathagres, who had manipulated and abused the Gierj, the desecration of Keithland would inevitably come to pass.
The Firelord whirled. The flurry of his footsteps rebounded from rock walls as he fled urgently toward the passageway. Once he might have summoned Earthmastery and stepped through stone in his haste. Now the intensity of his powers overwhelmed him to the point where he required the ordinary for reassurance. He ran like the simplest clansman. His breath rasped through scarred lungs as he plunged through the archway leading from the great hall.
The stairway beyond lay dark. Jaric needed no torches. The diffuse glow of his presence rinsed shadows from his path and shed clear, unsettling light over carved and inlaid risers.
Ivainson had not far to descend. The eerie circle of stillness began on the level below; between the posts of the first landing massed a horde of glowing eyes. Gierj gathered like clotted ink in the gloom of the stairwell, barring the way down. Above them drifted a featureless sphere. Its surface was polished ebony, and it spun in midair with a whine like swarming bees.
Jaric jerked to a stop. Sweating, ragged, and winded, he reached reflexively for a sword that was not there. The lapse made him curse. Every principle taught him by the Vaere, every painstaking refinement gleaned from Anskiere's instruction, now failed to apply. No discipline in memory could guide him. The complexities of multiple mastery were too vast to be encompassed, and even the simplest thoughts overreached his intent. Yet against the Morrigierj he had nothing else.
Jaric braced his feet upon the stair. Humanity would perish if he hesitated. Desperately seeking redemption for the lives his illicit mastery had cost, he gathered courage and raised sorcery. The Sathid glow that surrounded him split, singing, into hard-edged haloes of force.
Inscrutably spinning, the Morrigierj acknowledged his presence. Ruby light pulsed beneath its surface. The glassy outer shell maintained its rotation, but the glow, like an eye, swivelled and steadied, scanning the nature of the being who trespassed within its lair.
A tingle coursed through Jaric's mind. Warned by impressions of near-infinite force and imminent danger, he attempted a counterward. Sathid-born energy defended with a snap. The alien probe disengaged. Unbalanced by the abruptness of its withdrawal, Jaric recoiled. His heel snagged on a riser, and he stumbled, shoulders rammed against the wrought-iron scroll of the balustrade. Below, like a matched horde of puppets, the Gierj advanced with a scrabble of claws on stone.
The Firelord did not give ground, but straightened and flung tangled hair from his eyes. 'Demon!' he called hoarsely. 'I challenge! To ravage Keithland, you must first contend with me.'
Wary within the golden blaze of his wards, Jaric awaited the nerve-rasping whistle that heralded attack by the Gierj. But no sound arose. The Morrigierj melded its underlings and struck with none of the preliminaries required by Maelgrim or Tathagres.
The air went suddenly brittle. Warned only by a tingle of prescience, Jaric sprang tense. Then a flash of white heat stripped his shields. Had he not owned a Firelord's trained resistance to burns, his flesh would have seared instantaneously to ash. Instead, blinded by a flux of light, he tumbled over backward into eddies of deflected energy.
Risers banged his head, then his back and shoulders. He hooked the rail to break his fall. Backlash sizzled around him, slagging stone and jagging sparks the length of the balustrade. Cut like a whip across the palm, Jaric cried out. He curled protectively into a crouch and waited for the sally to end. But strength flowed from Gierjling to Morrigierj, there to be channelled into violence with the unassailable surge of the tides; no direct measure could stem the onslaught. The assault raged on without let up.
Driven to act, Ivainson Firelord shaped a defence from the materials nearest to hand.
Earth wisdom answered. Power roared forth with a vehemence never equalled among mortals. Stone exploded; a storm of spinning, knife-edged fragments raked the front ranks of Gierj. Howls tore from the throats of the mortally wounded. The grazed and hale alike screeched in fury, while the Morrigierj zigzagged in the air, its aggression blunted by a fraction.
Ringed by a turbulent corona of light, Jaric struck again. His sorcery wrenched at keystones and pillars, exploding them to vapour with a force that negated sound. Stone rumbled; cracks ripped across vaulted ceilings, and the central edifice of Shadowfane shuddered toward collapse. Sand showered, rattling down the stair, followed by a grinding avalanche of rock and debris.
Yet even as the stone crashed downward, Jaric understood that he would fail. His Sathid
-born gift of prescience read the outcome. A split second before reality, he knew the rubble would slow and tumble in the air, arrested in place by the Morrigierj.
The event followed like a double image; Gierjlings scrabbled from beneath tons of suspended stone. As they scuttled like rats toward safety, Jaric gained an instant to regroup. He moved to steal the advantage and, with a Firelord's defensive reflex, blasted the keep to inferno.
The sorcery struck in a white flash of heat. Stone ruptured. Lava dashed airborne with the fountaining force of storm spray. The walls ran red and crumpled. Isolated on an island of stairway, lit scarlet by currents of molten stone, Jaric closed his eyes. Desperate and blistered by heat, he pitched the sum of his vision into the future. There he sorted through meshes of pattern and outcome for a reality that left Keithland safe under sunlight.
His thoughts expanded with a rush that left him dizzied. The space of an instant showed him eons, a thousand times a thousand overviews of destruction. Scoured by the grief of uncounted deaths, he saw cities swept clean of life, whole planets overcrowded and enslaved. He watched great metal ships fire bolts that exploded with eye-searing brilliance against an ocean of darkness and stars. The images spanned all, from the infinite to the infinitesimal.
Houses burned, and forests withered. Stunted, malformed humans scratched crops from dusty furrows. Men in metal armour hunted other humans with nets, then lit cookfires to roast the meat of their skinned and slaughtered quarry; in another sequence, people crawled on all fours, eating roots torn raw from the ground. Their eyes were placid and dull as cattle, and their young grew to maturity without laughter. Jaric perceived all this and a multitude of other futures instantaneously. Hard on the heels of vision, he understood that the Morrigierj itself intervened. Its presence robbed him of inspiration, pinched off all possibilities that offered untrammelled outcomes of life and success.
The Firelord's heir knew anger then, resentment deeper than any experienced by Ivain. Power amplified his emotion, and the entire spired citadel of Shadowfane exploded in a focused discharge of fury. Rock melted and glazed, and the scream of tortured elements jarred on the air like a blow.
Still the battle raged. The circle of stillness that surrounded the Morrigierj stayed unbreached, while Gierjlings danced across lava with complete and terrifying impunity.
The counterstrike came without warning.
One second, Jaric stood juggling for balance against the flux of heat and chaos whipped up by the ferocity of his attack. The next, the whine of the Morrigierj changed pitch.
Reality altered.
Hurled adrift in a dimension beyond grasp of human logic, Jaric strove to recover orientation. Sensation was lost to him. His vision seemed smothered in felt. No awareness of his body remained, and other than the golden haze of his Sathid wards, he retained no concept of self beyond a spark of conscious will.
Energies flashed, blue and violet and ruby. Uncertain how to battle the intangible, Jaric tuned his perception to search for the enemy who stalked to kill. Darkness swallowed his attempt. He blundered, lost, and his uncertainty drew immediate attack.
Malice arose, cruel as the bite of a strangler's cord, and throttled his right to exist.
'No.' Jaric steadied his wards.
The Morrigierj pressed a ruthless demand for proof of his worthiness.
Jaric countered by instinct, the shield he raised the constancy of his love for Taen. Too late, he realized his mistake; what had been his innermost strength now reflected his gravest shortfall. The Morrigierj granted no quarter. With a terrible, twisting sense of vertigo, it caused the darkness around Jaric to dissolve. As a man he found himself standing naked and alone on heated stone. Before him rose the ruined watchtower at Cliffhaven.
His breath caught in his throat, then exploded in a scream of anguish. 'No!'
Protest changed nothing. Between himself and the tower's seared stairway loomed weakness he could not face: the meanness of spirit that had destroyed Marlson Emien, Merya Tathagres, and, not least, the firelord who had sired him. Behind, blocking retreat, waited the Morrigierj and the threat of humanity's downfall. Jaric must go forward and confront the wreckage of his dearest dream, or bring total devastation upon Keithland.
The conflict beggared pride, left both spirit and dignity in shreds. Having given in once to cowardice, he found the first step a hardship of unbearable proportion. Jaric threw back his head. Tears spilled from his eyes and dampened the hair at his temples. No death or threat of bodily torment seemed worse than the condemnation that loomed beyond the tower's dark entry. The reality was double-edged. Either he would discover himself guilty of Taen's murder, or, worse, he would meet stinging accusation in her eyes, the wholeness of her love poisoned to loathing. More horrible still, she might live, and be piteously maimed.
Sooner would he have endured another trial by Sathid.
No such option existed. The Morrigierj pinned him without quarter. With a cry of unmitigated despair, Jaric regarded the tower. Anskiere and Taen had already suffered for his weakness. The rest of humanity must not be left to share the brunt of the consequences; greater evil could not be imagined. The son of Ivain Firelord renounced his last vestige of pride. He gathered his screaming nerves into something that passed for resolve, and started toward the tower's bleak doorway.
His next step proved no easier than the first. Shadows at the threshold seemed to wring him with sorrow. Stone heated still from the chaos unleashed by the Sathid blistered his soles as he set his feet on the stair. Almost, that pain became welcome, a distraction to blunt the greater wound in his heart. As Jaric climbed, memories arose to haunt him, of Taen's teasing laughter, the warm weight of her as she pressed into his arms: 'You worry for three people, Jaric,' she had said in her berth aboard Moonless. 'Keithland won't collapse while you smile.'
Yet no joy remained for him now. If he hesitated, the existence and the memory of humanity would be obliterated.
The end of the stairway loomed ahead, wreathed in clearing smoke. Through wrung and twisted lintels lay the chamber where Anskiere of Elrinfaer had raised his staff to end the life of Ivainson Firelord. Now the place semed to echo the boom of the sea, as seared timbers settled. Warped stone translated the aftermath of violence into a miasma of suffocating heat. Sweating, Jaric reached the doorway. Punished beyond anguish, he raised his eyes and looked through.
The floor was a slagged and buckled ruin. Off to one side, through a drift of fine dust, light from the blasted window touched the place where Anskiere had raised his wards. A smouldering parcel of cloth marked the spot. Jaric made out the prone form of the sorcerer, then the outline of one lax hand. The fingers were horribly burned. Sickened, daunted by a hammer blow of grief, he almost missed the second figure, kneeling as she was in the shadows.
Taen sensed movement in the doorway. She raised her chin. Singed hair tangled over her shoulders, framing a face smeared with soot and the tracks of uncounted tears. She was not crippled. Yet as she bent over the body of Anskiere, her blue eyes reflected level upon level of anguish.
Ivainson Firelord expelled a shuddering breath. Helplessly exposed amid haze and debris, he forced himself steady through a moment of racking self-hatred. Against the gibbering dread in his heart, he remained until Taen Dreamweaver recognized his presence.
She did not recoil. Neither did she speak in condemnation.
Instead her face went transparent with hope and disbelief. 'Jaric? Jaric! Kor's grace, is it possible you survived a multiple bonding?'
She rose awkwardly, reaching for him; joyous at his recovery, even though he had found death and evil in his heart, and given them both free rein.
Shame shackled him in place like new chain.
The Dreamweaver sensed this on an intake of breath. As always, her perceptions unveiled his innermost self. The darkness there made her stop, and frown for the space of a heartbeat. Then she stamped her foot with a curse of exasperation. 'Jaric! You're a man, and men make mistakes. Those wit
h more brains than a fish get up afterwards, having learned something. Did you learn something? Or will I have to walk barefoot across hot stones and kick you to get a kiss?'
Jaric opened his mouth. Speech would not come. Impossibly, beyond belief, love seemed great enough to overlook his transgression.
'Kor's grace, Jaric,' cried Taen. Impatience drove her to a gentle fit of fury. 'You only have to forgive yourself!'
At last he found strength to raise his arms. She ran then, laughing with a relief edged with grief and hysteria. Warmth, healing, an end to inner suffering lay but a single step away.
But the Morrigierj stole the moment. It wrenched away Jaric's presence with a violence that cancelled thought. Cast once more into the void, he shouted in anger. Now he was offered a measure of reprieve for his wrongs, the cruelty of denial sparked rage.
The glow of his wards blazed incandescent. Granted Taen's forgiveness, he added to his shield the sacrifices of a swordsman, a forester, and an aged, arthritic fisherman. But the bastions of his defence availed nothing. The Morrigierj glibly seized another imperfection to exploit.
The chill of deepest despair rocked his being. Jaric became subjected to ruthless judgement; as a man, he stood condemned for the barbarity inherent in humanity.
The Morrigierj pressed its claim. Mankind owned no civilization. Driven by greed, habituated to murder, no end of evil shaped their deeds. Sealed and sentenced, Jaric saw Morbrith wither under the malice of Maelgrim Dark-dreamer. The towns-folk of Tierl Enneth joined the rolls of the dead, with the captains and crews of Kisburn's fleet of warships added to humanity's account. Merchants plundered by the Kielmark were compiled indiscriminately with the crimes of every felon accused by the courts and councils of Keithland.
The tally was bleakly damning. In icy superiority, the Morrigierj demanded retribution.
