Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  “Be seated,” Morriel commanded. When she asked them to assume a deep trance, they knew, but dared make no protest. They would not take active part in this spellcasting, but serve as its passive binding. As their Prime required, energy, talent, even life force itself might become siphoned from them. By the strict oath of obedience to their order, their Prime Matriarch could demand any sacrifice against the needs of greater humanity.

  “For the mercy of the world,” Morriel exhorted them, “do exactly as you are told. I will be threading your personal energies through the Great Waystone. No margin exists for your weakness.”

  Minutes passed, sluggish under the weight of pent powers. The Prime visited both initiates in turn and collected the summoning crystal each one wore at her neck. She traced each with a sigil, then performed the Prime’s invocation to claim and attune their personal powers under her dominion. Time assumed the drugged torpor of dreaming as the circles upon the observatory floor were called active and dedicated to the secret, dark side of the moon. Mystery pulsed through the febrile veil which tied life to its housing of flesh. The paired initiates felt as though a misdrawn breath might shatter the whole firmament of creation into eddies of glittering current.

  Then Morriel spoke a word in command. She clapped withered hands, and the spells of prime power claimed the girls, spirit and mind.

  All now lay in readiness. The Koriani Matriarch advanced to the tripod. She slipped off its covering cloth, the smoothness of silk a cruel contrast to her ruined flesh. Her skin had grown so translucent with years, at times, she seemed but a spectral shadow, unreal to her own tactile senses.

  This moment the allure of death’s peace left her hollow. She sorely missed Lirenda’s support. If a relapse of blocked memory should claim her now, she had no one to anchor her through the perils which lay ahead. Each time she raised the Waystone’s great focus, she shouldered the risk that her will might become overwhelmed. Yet the stakes at play to arrange tonight’s plot had never before been so dire. Age had unstrung her sure grasp of self-awareness. Should the cross-grained old jewel finally defeat her, the Koriani Order must continue. Lest this hour’s work come to frame her last act, the untried girls who backed this spell’s pattern were expendable, as the handpicked successor to prime office was not.

  Steeled, heart and will, by fatalistic resolve, Morriel cupped fleshless palms around the faceted amethyst. Its cold pierced in dousing waves to her marrow as she eased into trance. Perhaps for the last time, she locked horns with its spite and grappled to wield its dire focus.

  If Fellowship meddling had curbed the stone’s reach, its innate strength was untouched. Charged to the familiar, freewheeling exhilaration, restored to the pinnacle of power and command, Morriel bent will to accomplish her desire.

  If Sethvir had granted the earth backdoor wisdom to encumber the stone with permissions, the works of man were exempt. She still ruled quarried stone and the milled timbers of buildings, bridges, and diked roadways. The signature energies of individuals left vulnerable through trusting, blind ignorance remained subject to the Waystone’s spelled influence. Although the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s training as a master mage made him elusive prey, his return to the continent had occasioned him to accept other company on the road. The former clan war captain, Caolle, offered as volatile a personality as any tracking enchantress could wish. The signature seals of the spellbinder’s glamour which disguised him with scars and slurred speech tagged his presence. Each move he made flared small pulses of static through the world’s tracery of magnetic current.

  Searched out by the Waystone’s piercing focus, Caolle’s course blazed like a beacon. Past, present, and future, his movements could be scryed as cleanly as text marked on parchment.

  Given such infallible guidance to dog his liege’s footsteps, the Prime became the more cautious. The weavings to entrap the Master of Shadow must be wrought with consummate care. Dakar was a Fellowship spellbinder, and guarded. Though Arithon’s talents were left blank and blinded since his past misuse of grand conjury, he still held a masterbard’s arcane hearing and a trained mage’s eye for nuance. The disharmony raised by hostile intent would unsettle his keen sense of empathy.

  The interface must therefore be indirect. In velvet-gloved delicacy, Morriel wrought. From the riverside tavern where her quarry last slept, she quested among the dust in the floorboards. Her search yielded three flecks of stubble left from Arithon’s grooming. Before the inn’s chambermaid arrived to sweep, minute sparks of energy flared in the candleless gloom. The Prime’s first tendril of spellcraft embraced those cut snippets of hair, then wound their purloined essence, ephemeral as spun moonlight, into a personal signature to guide the course of her snare.

  Next, the Prime Enchantress launched into deep augury. She traced the course of event yet to come, sounding the probabilities of Arithon’s close movements as he mounted his foray in Tysan. She narrowed the vast might of the Waystone into tightest, fine focus, and targeted those actions her quarry was likely to take. Then she played the full range of probabilities and allowed for the utmost array of contingencies.

  A trap of such delicacy could not follow a schedule. Chance action held too wide a range to predict the precise timing of event. Rather than structure her plot into a single, inflexible binding, the Prime instead tied its course to multiple chains of tagged markers.

  This board in a bridge that Arithon might cross on his travels: Morriel set a hair-fine tendril of spellcraft into the wood’s grain that would trigger in response to his passage. Here the wax lamps in a tavern’s taproom were hazed in small spells of recognition; there, a ferryman’s rope on the shores of the Ilswater became twined in ciphers of watch. Next, signposts en route to Riverton were tied into the growing tapestry, then people drawn in as well. That official in the royal shipyard who would need to be bribed or misled; a cipher of listening was laced through his jeweled chain of office, keyed to Arithon’s voice. Specific cobblestones in certain city streets; the carvings on doorknobs or lintels; then the gate latches of every harborside inn: all became knotted into the weave of an ever so subtle array of spellcraft.

  Morriel was patient. She had need to be thorough. One overlooked possibility, and the whole linked network would fail. Her grand construct was shaped, one step to the next, through infinitesimal increments of care. Then each separate facet was masked in a glamour. Dakar’s watchful eye must be made to turn elsewhere, through a loosened board set to cause him a stumble; or else the lurking presence of her embroidery of seals must be groomed to mimic the natural resonance of stone, or wood, or wrought metal.

  Across the path of Arithon’s future, Morriel seeded her small barbs and hooks. To these, in ingenious, connected succession, she attached the seals and small ciphers to drive Arithon into her net. This rumor would find its way to the lips of a street beggar; that hunch would prompt a certain volatile clansman to raise a round of inquiry and search. When the orchestrated moment arrived for the coup, Arithon s’Ffalenn would be flushed from cover and hazed into desperate flight.

  Morriel burned reckless power, affirmed and cross-checked every venue of possibility. Her labors cased options until no choice her quarry might try could win free of her invidious design. She adjusted and fine-tuned; twined tortuous traps in tight spirals.

  On this hour, when every likely auspice came aligned, an ancient book from the Koriani Order’s closed libraries would fall into the hands of a scholar who owed a sworn debt of service. The knowledge and the man would make their way to Lysaer; then war galleys would arm and cast hawsers and sail. The Mistwraith’s curse would engage with its victims, and in the heat of its geas-bent obsession, the s’Ffalenn pawn could be spirited away.

  A criminal who endangered society would be curbed, and the Fellowship of Seven be served its timely comeuppance.

  Only the last, great sigil of ending remained to seal the chain of augured event. Tinged nitrous violet by the glow of the Great Waystone, Morriel grimaced like a skull. Never had
she worked so elaborate a conjury upon resources pressed to such limits. While the daylight hours fled into night, then the starry sky paled and birthed the new dawn, she sensed a deep-down, burning discomfort. She had drained reckless power and now suffered sharp warning her strength ran dangerously low.

  She pressed on, wrung what she needed to steady herself from the pair of initiates bound to her use through the Waystone. Were the crystal not restored back to unfettered potency, mankind’s rightful legacy would stay jeopardized; the Koriani charge to restore civilization to lost grace would remain threatened by Arithon s’Ffalenn. Morriel did not equivocate. She spent ruthless force to shape that last cipher, and set final linkage between the disparate, trip-wire elements arrayed to bring Rathain’s prince to defeat.

  At the last, the squared circle of sigils dragged at her mind like spilled needles. Exhaustion leached her will, pulled like unseen fingers against her weak housing of flesh. Willful as old iron, the Koriani Prime reached out again to tap the initiates who stood as her anchors.

  Something went wrong. The smooth flow of power summoned to her hands ripped through a sharp hesitation. One of the young women rejected the sacrifice, perhaps touched by the sudden, cutting panic of instinctive self-preservation. Betrayed in her need, Morriel felt the balance of raised spells veer awry. She screamed in rebuttal. The forces she grappled seemed shadow and flame, two opposite elements bent toward unbiddable destruction. Lacking her flawless and rigid control, the whole construct could fold into backlash.

  Morriel perceived no safe avenue. Poised at the crux, taxed past the limit of her visceral frailties, she grappled harsh fact: without months of recovery, she could never retrace all the steps of this complex conjury. Should this construct tear itself asunder, the jagged vibrations of its collapse would burst even the most rigorous protections. Sethvir would stand warned. The priceless opportunity to suborn the Fellowship would be thrown away for one faithless initiate’s weakness.

  Fury seared through Morriel Prime. Well aware her demands must claim the life of the loyal enchantress who held firm, even still, she engaged her act for necessity.

  Power flared up, too bright, too frenetic. Morriel lashed lawless forces into order, used the channel of the Waystone to reaffirm her cleared will. She joined the last sigil. Her drawn-out, wrenching cry of effort rocked the room. Then the dregs of her strength bled away. Slumped in collapse, her cheek laid to rest on the burning-ice sphere of the amethyst, she gasped out the ritual chant to blinder the jewel’s roused focus.

  No space to wonder, that these words might shape her last act. Her heart raced and throbbed. Each breath rasped like steel filings in her throat. Vast blackness devoured her senses. While the fires in the heart of the great crystal blazed low and flickered at last to quiescence, the spark of her will bled away.

  Morriel Prime closed her eyes. Alongside the risk she might never reawaken, she measured the sum of her efforts.

  A momentous labor was done. Time and the unwinding course of events would spring string upon string of chained triggers. Let the scryed snares in her construct play through, and Arithon s’Ffalenn would walk a doomed path into capture. First Senior Lirenda would be called to assume the mantle of prime power. If she held strong, if she proved a fit vessel, the memories of past Primes locked into the Waystone would rise up to channel and guide her.

  Morriel rested content with the chance she had snatched back lost hope, and salvaged the legacy her sisterhood preserved for posterity. With the Fellowship brought to heel and the Shadow Master curbed, the Koriani Order could preside over mankind’s freed future.

  Marvel

  Autumn 5652

  For his diplomatic visit to Etarra in the eastern Kingdom of Rathain, Lysaer s’Ilessid and his sumptuous state retinue would avoid the Thaldein passes. Ship’s captains seldom dared the North Cape, where tidal rips cut the inlets of a savage, volcanic shoreline. The overland routes through Camris to Miralt Head were preferred by the autumn caravans, as wayfarers and trade goods raced to meet the last of the outbound trade fleets. Before winter churned Stormwell Gulf to a stew of ice floes and spindrift, a raffish breed of northcoast galleymen indulged their sharp rivalries, driving their oarsmen in relentless, fast passage to the ports across Instrell Bay.

  Late warmth was wont to linger in the scrub-grown flatlands of Karmak. Each year the alkaline soil of the plain lay ground to fine powder by the ox drays. Leaves and brambles entangled on the verges and wilted under a coating of grit, while air draped like gauze in late-season haze bore a windborne tang of churned dust. The progress of Lysaer’s cavalcade raised muffled thunder in the powdery footing. The endless squealing of cart axles, the chink of brass harness, and the sifting grime fouling their trappings drove the prince’s guard to clenched teeth. Tempers flared, and armor chafed, and meals came infested with sand.

  Six days beyond Erdane, the low ground still stretched the same on all sides. A tireless sun stabbed glare off the rocks, and the horseboys were too parched to whistle.

  Here, the mettlesome company chosen to spearhead the prince’s retinue rode in a squinting, watchful wedge. They slapped at the flies which lit on their horses and cursed others that escaped to bite flesh.

  “We should make Miralt Head by tomorrow noon,” ventured the company’s captain, a grizzled former headhunter with a craggy profile and tough hands like silk on his reins. The hair on his wrists sprang in tufts through caked grime as he scraped gritted sweat from his chin. “That’s if the camp cook can pack up his crockery without hounding his fool scullion for laziness.”

  “That scullion’s my friend, and no layabout,” the prince’s page boy defended. “And anyway, how can you tell where we are? This blighted plain has no landmarks.”

  “Used to trap wolves here,” the captain replied. “Packs swarm like vermin, come the snows. A man knows where he is, and how far to shelter, or he’s like to find his horse hamstrung.”

  At the page’s unsettled review of the landscape, the man-at-arms loosed a gruff chuckle. “Before sun, there’s the truth, and may Light strike me down if I’m lying.”

  “Have a care. His Grace might hear your profanity.” The page tipped a weighted glance behind, where Prince Lysaer rode a horse length to the rear of his standard-bearer.

  Through the sulfurous silt of puffed dust, the Prince of the Light rode bareheaded, his gleaming, fair hair a diffracted halo in the citrine glare of strong sunlight. Even through dirt, his presence seemed uncanny, a master-work wrought of alabaster and gilt against the monochrome landscape. The bullion-fringed banner and the stitched silk of its sunwheel seemed brass without luster in comparison.

  Voice muffled to awe, the page boy ventured, “Do you believe the realm’s seneschal, that his Grace is sent as Ath’s servant to drive scourge and shadow from the land?”

  The burly captain shrugged mail-clad shoulders. “I couldn’t speak the creator’s intent, boy. But Prince Lysaer, now, he’s real. His powers can be seen and felt.” Eyes trained ahead, he finished in respect, “Whether his Grace has divine origins or not, I’ll swear by his name as our given defender against evil.”

  A barely sensed movement flicked a leaf by the verge. To a whickered puff of dust, a whine creased the air.

  Stabbed by keen instinct, the guard captain shouted, “Archer!” He reined his horse back, sent it crab-stepping sidewards; screamed for his men to close in. “Move! Shield the prince!”

  Scarce time to notice the page boy’s mount, shying, and the lad unhorsed in the roadway.

  Next a searing, actinic crack whipped the sky. A charge of bolt lightning scalded everything white. Then a slamming report like the hammer of doom thudded echoes across the bare flats. Men were yelling. Their formation erupted to mayhem as they fought the eye-rolling panic of their mounts.

  But no casualty had fallen to bowfire. The prince remained astride his blooded cream charger, stopped in the middle of the roadway. Amid a cavalcade churned into panic, he sat with a statue’s composure.
No mere assassin’s ambush held the power to ruffle his uncanny poise. Heaven’s own lightning must leap to defend him, and out of a cloudless, clear sky.

  The arrow lay banished to a lacework of blue smoke and a fading whiff of dry carbon.

  “Angel of Ath!” the guard captain swore.

  He stilled his sidling mount between bit and spurs, dimly aware of the men staring dumbstruck beside him; of the page boy’s loose horse still plunging against the reins looped through its pasterns. The flat taint of dust and the tang of sweaty leather seemed disjointed and wrong, too earthy a setting for miracles.

  Lysaer commanded the tableau like a stage, his lofty magnificence set apart. The moment hurt for pure splendor. For a handful of heartbeats, time’s flow seemed erased, the lesser movements of men and beasts jarring.

  Then Lysaer s’Ilessid commanded his guard with their half-unsheathed swords to stand down.

  The unseated boy moaned and struggled to rise, the fall having injured his shoulder. On Lysaer’s gesture, the royal valet scrambled from the baggage train to offer him succor; the loose horse was caught and soothed quiet by a groom.

  Still awed beyond speech, the troop’s guard captain swallowed in flushed shame, faulting himself for slack vigilance.

  Yet the Prince of the Light offered no reprimand as he stirred from that terrible stillness. Swathed in the blinding, stitched glitter of his surcoat, he urged his charger toward the verge. Where the crumbled old tracery of wheel ruts gave way to the tangled brush of the plain, he drew rein. The object of his gaze might have been some beggar’s bundle, discarded among the bent weed stalks, except for the hand flung splayed on the earth, blistered with weeping, raw burns.

  A barbarian archer, the troop’s captain surmised with a horrible twist to his gut. An assassin struck down by what seemed a godlike manifestation of wrath, his bow a charred ruin beside him.