by Janny Wurts
This was the first diplomatic visit he had paid to Rathain since the catastrophic loss, when the Master of Shadow had bogged down his great war host on the shores of Minderl Bay. Letters and gifts had kept feelings running high in the Alliance’s favor, even after six years. Well cognizant of the snares of intrigue and politics still left to surmount to bring the Spinner of Darkness to destruction, Lysaer stood, feeling leaden. The luxuries placed in the room for his pleasure did not comfort, an oddity that jarred after the privations of a rough and arduous sea crossing.
Then memory smashed through the warm haze of wine. On his last pass through Narms, his best friend and confidant had still been alive. Now Diegan was dead, and Lady Talith estranged. Lysaer had no antidote for the loneliness, except to carry forward the cause of the Light. Arithon’s ruin became the last thing in life to have meaning.
Oppressed by the cloy of patchouli on his skin from the smothering admiration of several trade ministers’ wives, Lysaer waved off the servant, who moved to close the dagged velvet curtains. “Just crack the latch. I need the fresh air.”
Tired, made tense from the drag of his diamond-and-gold collar, Lysaer closed his eyes and surrendered his person to the ubiquitous care of his valet. Stripped, bathed in warm water and clove oil, and reclothed in silk, he settled under blankets loomed by the finest craftguild in Cildorn.
“Leave the one candle burning,” he instructed his servant, though the silent, trained staff who attended him since Vastmark all knew: the one light was never permitted to go out. The prince never slept in darkness lest he suffer the torment of recurrent ill dreams. His servants were discreet. They did not speak of the fear that Lord Diegan had shared like a brother; that the fate the prince shouldered for the greater good of humanity might prove too great a destiny for one man. Lysaer stood apart with his given gift of light. He lived by his promise as defender of the innocent, though the burden to banish threat of sorcery and shadow at times seemed to sear through his blood. Diegan alone had tempered those moments when the mere sight of darkness could fracture his reason and drive him to targetless rage.
Now, Lysaer took no chances. His driving will to see his nemesis dead must not slip his control on the unquiet wings of night’s shadow.
The servants had stopped suggesting that he take a mistress. After Talith, no woman born could ease the cruel quandary of his solitude. New staff were warned not to question. Since the friend who had been his right hand died in Vastmark, ever and always, Lysaer s’Ilessid passed the hours before daybreak alone. His honor guard knew to stand fast at his door. They would admit no one short of a messenger bearing word of war or disaster.
Tonight, Lysaer did not sleep. Weary as he was, relaxed to pampered lassitude, an indefinable edge kept him wakeful. The odd feeling plagued him, as though something unseen and unheard lurked in the dimness and watched him. Since the momentous occasion when the shade of a Fellowship Sorcerer had visited with news of his wife’s abduction, he did not feel the fool for indulging in paranoid fancy.
For at least the third time, he surveyed the sumptuous appointments of his bedchamber.
The painted door was still closed and latched. His jewels and clothes from the feast had been tidied and folded into the chest by the armoire. The ironbound coffers with his tactical maps and correspondence were locked and stacked in neat order. His servants were efficient. In well-oiled habit, they had arranged the basin and stand with clean towels. The floor gleamed, mopped clean of slopped water, and buffed with a shine of new wax. Beyond the cracked casement, the late-burning torches by the quayside taverns wore cocoons of rising mist. The harbor was peaceful. At the mouth of the inlet, the signalman’s bell clanged to guide inbound ships through the channel. A dog barked, and a carriage ground past. Through the distanced chatter of departing celebrants, the rhythmic tramp of a wall sentry carried in on the breeze from the tideflats.
The night seemed tranquil and ordinary in the port city of Narms.
Lysaer combed a last glance through the corner which held the pearl-and-lacquer gleam of the secretary’s desk. And this time, he saw that in fact, the room where he lay was not empty.
A woman sat on the lion claw stool. Her pose was so still the hands clasped in her lap might have been shaped of smoothed ivory. Her face lay obscured, sunk in the depths of a hood of violet silk. Her sleeves and hemline wore six bands in silver, the sheen of metallic cloth like chrome ribbon snap-frozen into black ice. Only the quartz pendant on its chain at her breast moved in time to her breathing.
“Koriani,” gasped Lysaer. Woolen blankets tumbled over his knees as he jackknifed erect in hard startlement. “What are you doing here? How did you get past my guards?”
The woman’s hood dipped to a fractional tilt of her head. “They knew only as much as I wished them to see.” One finger flicked straight in sudden, sharp censure. “No. Don’t call. I’m not here as your enemy.”
“You were not invited,” Lysaer said, his consonants clear as chipped crystal. “Let me be plain. The Alliance of Light is opposed to the tyrannies imposed by the practice of sorcery.”
“The glamour which allowed me to slip in with your servants encroached upon no one’s free will.” The hands were a young woman’s, which lifted and removed the dark hood; underneath, a face of baby-smooth skin and a coil of salt-and-pepper hair neatly sculpted with tortoiseshell pins. The eyes were clear brown, and direct, and not youthful at all. She had lips like the pink underside of a conch, turned up in a half smile of irony. “Credit me with some semblance of courtesy. I could have made my presence known while you were engaged in your bath.”
If the enchantress sought to unbalance him, the effort fell short. Lysaer turned not a hair, nor blushed, but regarded her with a calm that transcended small vanity. “Under any circumstance, I would have refused your public petition for audience.”
The Koriani laughed, a peal of joy like the struck tone of bronze bells. “You fear for your image of morality, I see, far more than for your male pride. Very well. Since I have obtained your close company on my own, you might as well sit and listen. I’ve came to offer you my order’s help to bring down the Master of Shadow.”
Lysaer stood up. The quilt slid from the mattress and puddled on the floor, while his hands closed to fists defined in white knuckles and hard tendons. “I am listening,” he assured her. “But I warn, be very careful what you say.”
He crossed the thick carpet, turned the stuffed chair by the casement, and seated himself on the opposite side of the secretary. An unearthly gleam seemed to burn in his eyes, the pinned highlight touched by the candle as hard as a cut facet in sapphire. His damp hair clung in fronds to his head, tarnished and heavy as spilled varnish.
Through a grave stillness, the enchantress took his measure. Her smile was gone, and her hands cupped the quartz crystal pendant strung on silver chain at her breast. “Our kind make no bargains,” she said at chill length. “Nor am I here by any other will but the bidding of Morriel Prime. She would have you know that she shares your conviction. The Master of Shadow poses a threat to the free growth of society. Koriathain will assist your Alliance against that one enemy if you ask. Remember our pledge. Keep your captains at arms vigilant, no matter the season. We have cast auguries on the future. My Matriarch would have me say that your opening to take down Arithon will come far sooner than you think.”
The question burned through even Lysaer’s state discipline. “When will this happen?”
“You shall have fair warning.” The enchantress raised a finger and traced a sigil in burning lines on the air. The glyph flared bright violet, then flashed, shocking sight with its blinding intensity. Lysaer threw his hands up to shield his face. In the second he was dazzled, the light burst and vanished into a soundless clap of heat.
The stool where the enchantress had been seated stood empty in the draft-torn flutter of the candle.
Lysaer shot from his chair. The beautiful carved back smashed into the wall, raising chips and a
small puff of plaster. Barefoot, sweating, all over unclean from his bone-deep revulsion for magecraft, he paced over the floor. He searched every corner, banged open the doors to the armoire, even hurled the bedhangings free of their tasseled silk cords. He found nothing. No sign remained of the enchantress who had invaded his chamber. The stuffed cushion on the stool felt ice chill in the breath of the drafts. The street beyond the casement lay shadowed and dim, empty of mongrels or carriages.
Lysaer crossed to the nightstand, uncorked the wine bottle, and sucked down the vintage red from Orvandir in gulps. The dry heat that curled in his belly did nothing to settle the prickle of fear on his skin. He fought for cool reason. The wild heat in his blood was not rational, he knew, but extended back into childhood. The distrust that ripped him began with his mother, a s’Ahelas witch who had married a king, and then undone her vows in betrayal. Her perfidy had created his nemesis, the bastard born Master of Shadow.
Unsettled, Lysaer paced to the window again. The bite of the sea wind bit through his thin silk and set him shuddering in waves of reaction. Too tense to be dreaming, he decided the Koriani presence must have been an apparition, brought on by a waking illusion.
Real or not, her words remained with him, a branding gift of live coals well designed to ignite the full flame of his passion. Consumed by the spark of his secret desire, Lysaer stared unseeing into the fog which settled over the dark harbor. He could not rest now. Sleep lay past reach, while the greater good of moral justice did battle with his most staunch private scruple. He sweated and shook, brought to his knees by a need that wrung merit from even this unsavory liaison.
In the self-searching depths of a tormented honesty, he allowed that perhaps his harsh judgment had been premature. Spellcraft could become a tool or a weapon. The outcome depended on whose hands guided the range of its power. The Koriani Order long claimed to champion the cause of humanity. In all fairness, he must grant them their chance to stand by compassionate principle. Now that their arcane support had been offered, he could turn down no prospect of help to bring Arithon s’Ffalenn to destruction.
Dualities
Late Autumn-Early Winter 5652
In Narms, after sunrise, when the royal valet undertakes the prince’s dressing, he finds his charge in a rare, testy mood; too timid to gainsay the direct order not to speak, he does not mention the oddity that only a personal servant might notice: sometime in the night, a small lock of hair has been snipped from the nape of the royal neck…
A fortnight after Arithon’s arrival at Riverton, the master shipwright, Cattrick, sits morose in his quarters, head pressed between his huge hands; diligently he has tried, and failed, to provoke Arithon to distrust, and now time runs out to thwart the betrayal demanded as service for a Koriani oath of debt, sworn years ago to save a young sister stricken with fever in childbed…
Far south and east, oblivious to the greater machinations of her order, the enchantress Elaira smiles upon a black-haired child and promises on the day of his fifth birthday she will saddle her fat gelding and begin his first lesson in horsemanship…
VI. Tangle
Early Winter 5652
Snow silted over the rooftops of Capewell and frost-chilly light poured in with the drafts through the tower’s misfitted casement. On the landing beneath, First Senior Lirenda stood shivering in her layers of travel-soaked woolens. Before her loomed the observatory door, laced still with the tracework glimmer of seals kept undisturbed since Morriel Prime’s fateful conjury. Raised power had charged the air over time. Even the dust held a singed, acrid tang of charred carbon. An unsettled presence in the gloom of the stairwell, the peeress of the Koriani sisterhouse and her staff of enchantresses hung waiting.
The dignity of privilege bred into her long bones, Lirenda at last gave opinion, her husky, bronze tones sheared into a thousandfold echoes. “The chamber must be unsealed, no matter the risk.” She inclined her head toward a spiderworked nexus of sigils. “I sense stayspells in play, ones powerful enough to bend the forward flow of time. That lends cause to hope. Our Prime might still be alive.”
The peeress advanced, her soft, oval face dimpled with apprehension. Small need to stress that if the Prime lived, the least upset to a meshed net of wardfields might compound disaster and kill her.
Well aware the woman’s silence masked censure, Lirenda faced about, all poured grace in her travel-muddied mantles. “What of the two initiates trapped inside when the spells sealed? Should they also be left entombed alive? Mercy on them, in the absence of our Prime, the burden of their fate becomes mine.”
The peeress curtseyed, her deference made awkward by the steep, narrow stair, and the enchantresses close pressed behind her. “First Senior, no one questions your judgment.” For more than the lives of three colleagues were at risk; the order’s Great Waystone could scarcely be abandoned in the resonance of malingering influence.
A spell had gone wrong within that sealed chamber. Behind seals that blocked scrying, who knew what raised powers might escape conjured channels and run wild. Such deviated forces could not disperse naturally, hemmed in by wardfields of containment that time and attrition would destabilize. Leaked vectors of current might resurge decades later in unpredictable, even lethal flares of backlash. Had Morriel engaged the Waystone’s grand matrix to frame the main axis of the construct, a derangement of unbalanced forces could seed anything from cyclones to broadscale cataclysm.
The wise old peeress harbored nothing but dread for her First Senior’s designated duty.
Lirenda bent her head and raised her banded hood, but never to hide trepidation. She might wish heart and mind to share the peeress’s grief for the fresh risks to Morriel’s plight. The icier truth eclipsed sentiment: the challenge ahead did not daunt, but instead, incited the First Senior’s strung nerves to a guilt-fed flame of excitement.
On a threshold of perilous responsibility, when the innate flaws of mortality should have shaken self-confidence, Lirenda felt estranged from the shrinking caution of her peers. Authority and rank of themselves did not distance her. No; what marked her apart was her sinful, fierce lust for the chance to acquire supreme power.
Lirenda well knew the deep pitfalls of ambition. Her craving for control could calcify pity, even grow to undermine the Koriani creed of human mercy. Through the long, lonely nights after trials of initiation, she had battled her willful nature. Yet like the addict’s secret pleasure, need chafed at restraint. The drive to grasp the reins of command found neither outlet nor surcease; self-contained as the hunting tigress, Lirenda understood herself very well.
She would rule the pack rather than serve.
“I will rest and eat,” she informed the peeress and the anxious coterie of enchantresses. “By the advent of noon, I want a containment seal wrought at the head of the stairwell. Set a second one at the lower entrance. Then my work to breach the wards on the observatory will begin.”
Reclothed in an overrobe of lavender silk stitched with the silver bands of her rank, Lirenda withdrew from her survey of the stiletto bars of light which demarked the seal construct just raised between the stairwell and the warded threshold of the observatory. The protections laid down by the sisterhouse’s senior circle proved flawless, each detail precise in execution. Lirenda had cross-checked each interstice. Should any skewed force slip past her control, the sisterhouse residents and the citizens of Capewell would be safe beyond sound defenses.
“Well-done,” she said in perfunctory praise, then opened the box at her side to unveil the quartz point which would channel her will for the conjury.
The senior enchantress inclined her gray head in acceptance, then motioned her twelve colleagues forward to their places. She unmasked a wand crystal to cut and mark the boundary of containment for the conjury about to commence.
No need to review every nuance and precaution; from here, all proceedings would follow an age-old, proscribed set of rituals. Each initiate chosen for the task was experienced with the peri
ls of unstable conjuries. Their nerves or trepidation stayed masked in decorum as they knelt in a rustle of purple skirts to serve the greater good of the Koriani Order. Arrayed in the traditional circle, each one cupped her personal quartz and murmured a cantrip of opening. A slow minute passed, the crystals a mute spark of light between each pair of hands. Then their solitary wills caught and engaged with the energetic matrix of the stones. Each enchantress spun her awareness in trance to channel through the master crystal held poised between the First Senior’s palms.
Lirenda engaged the sigils of command to capture each individual thread. Then she framed the binding seals to comb disparate energies into aligned subservience. The familiar, tingling build of drawn force poured down her nerves like a tonic. Her own senses heightened in link with the quartz crystal’s burgeoning resonance. The air gained a transcendent clarity, then transformed, a shimmering veil through which the webworked lattice of raised power seemed as ribbons of laced silver light. Lirenda’s sole will linked her circle of sister initiates until their collateral talent framed a spearshaft of balanced intent.
Cipher and rune, Lirenda wrought the last seal. Through the moment of consummation, stray thoughts dissolved. Here, at the heart of Koriani ritual, linked with an empowered focus crystal, she found the unalloyed thrill of fulfillment. All the aching, hollow yearning inside her lay banished by absolute control.
Her touch, and no other, could order the moment. She was the nexus to spin that reservoir of force and break Morriel’s wards of privacy over the observatory door.
The sword-edged delicacy of that unbinding took most of the afternoon. Those seniors who assisted emerged from tranced melding exhausted and pale with relief. They grounded their energies, disbanded their circle, then asked formal leave with a dutiful lack of curiosity.
