by Janny Wurts
Townborn rancor ran deep as the root of the Fellowship’s compact. A man who preferred his grudges blood fresh, Mearn doused pricked temper to taciturn silence time and again, while the courtiers spun to their hatreds like weathercocks. He observed, his knife hand locked into stillness, when tempers flared up during councils of state. Always some merchant who lost goods to Maenol’s forest raiders would yammer the old accusations. Then every pigheaded guild minister in sight would ignore five centuries of history: s’Brydion of Alestron had never preyed upon caravans. Mearn met each outburst and pigeon-brained insult with cynical, ingrained suspicion. Since even his most innocently posed inquiries were likely to worsen his questionable clan standing, he chose to sidestep the quagmires of intrigue. The bare-handed adventure of scaling the tower held much more to his taste.
A gust hissed over the cornices and snapped the royal pennons on their lanyards. No comfort-loving sentry would stand his watch exposed to such lacerating cold. Mearn snatched his chance to cross the roof peak unseen. By touch, he avoided the patches of glaze ice; his soft soles made no sound against slates raked bare by the elements. Below him, the snow-covered gables of Avenor wore the night like a mantle spun from frost opal and woodsmoke.
To the west, his view commanded the black sweep of the sea, flecked by carnelian watchbeacons. Eastward, over the square walls and past the crowned turrets of the gatekeeps, a ragged mound tore a scar in the flank of the hill. There the Paravian stones cast down by Lysaer’s builders lay jumbled as lichened bones, silted in rubble where the crumbled Second Age towers had been razed off the foundations to make way for his grander design. The dells the ancient ruin once defended fanned inland, pocketed in winter-silent drifts. Forest had encroached on the older boundary where mankind’s tilled acreage ended, and the inviolate expanse of Paravian provenance once began. Horned centaur guardians no longer trod under the massive oaks crowning the hillcrests. No sunchildren danced in the vales, with their tangling skeins of shallow streams. The glens where Tysan’s dead high kings had met to hold council with Athera’s lost races lay grown over with holly and briar, forgotten except by the deer and the hare, the mice and the night-hunting owl.
Clansmen might stubbornly adhere to past ways, but inside town walls, the land’s former heritage was scorned. A carriage clattered over the cobbles, bearing some late-going gallant to the sea-quarter wineshops where friends met to vent youthful spirits. A cur yapped, down by the exciseman’s sheds. The commotion set off an answering chorus from the stables next to the barracks, where Lysaer’s coursers were kenneled alongside the lean hounds bred by headhunters to worry the fugitive clansmen.
Among them, deep toned, Mearn’s own couple of deerhounds gave tongue. For their heart, he loosed breathless laughter. While his dearies kept up the commotion and diverted the bored wits of the sentries, he tucked up against the beaded cornice where the tower joined with the roof.
Kiln-fired masonry offered no purchase to climbers, an advantage for defense. To offset its prime weakness, that brick inclined to shatter under stoneshot launched from siege catapults, the vulnerable angles had been laid and faced with blocks of field-hewn granite. Scarcely as inviting as a stairway, Mearn thought as he sighted aloft to weigh his prospects. The mortar at least was unlikely to crumble. No standing structure in Tysan’s restored capital had stood for more than a decade. Though exposed to the elements, the roof line of the council hall masked the first stage of the ascent. The blast of the wind would press him into the wall, and drive the keep’s anonymous, paid guards to huddle on the leeward side.
Since Mearn looked on caution as a mealymouthed word for gutless procrastination, he tightened the laced wrists of his sleeves and stripped off his gloves. Hands hooked to chill stone, he wedged his toe in the crack of the first course of granite and forsook his safe stance on the roof. Either Princess Talith was locked away in seclusion above, or he could send honest word back to Arithon s’Ffalenn that she was nowhere inside of Avenor.
Shouts from the kennels at last quelled the deerhounds. Mearn’s raised vantage over the wall walks chiseled even the small sounds into unnerving clarity. Above the hiss of his breath through locked teeth, he picked out the warbling flute of distressed pigeons, wakened by a thief in the falconer’s dovecote.
Clamped to exposed rock, shivering from an unrelenting exertion that scarcely left room for thought, he could do little else but cling and hope the desperate wretch would wring the birds’ necks with dispatch. Never mind the s’Brydion posture of alliance, now placed in irrefutable jeopardy. Mearn set his jaw and groped another determined handhold, then forced burning thighs to straighten. The breast of his jerkin scraped another foot up sheer granite. For pure, demented folly, he resisted the breathless urge to laugh. His brothers would gripe themselves prostrate should he become caught by some guard rousted up for a servant’s inept pilfering.
If risk of ignominy was not bad enough, an unexpected light flared scarcely ten yards above. Mearn flinched like a cat. Reflex alone saved his balance. A fleeting glance upward showed a gleam of new flame behind a row of slit windows.
Someone had entered the keep’s third-floor chamber.
Mearn gasped out a virulent oath, wishing pustules and pox on palace officials taken with urges to burn candles in towers past midnight. No afterthought, he added his prayer that the crazed individual disregard any notion to admire the stars or the view. The niches where the sills pierced the wall offered the only secure ledge for him to pause. His predicament was not mutable. Not through an unbroken ascent, with the next set of casements a distance of forty feet higher up. Fatigue already ran searing tremors through his limbs. His own labored breath turned his head. He must snatch that stop to rest, or succumb to exhaustion and fall.
Wind hissed across masonry and thrummed the thick frames of the casements. Mearn shut his eyes against a blurred sting of tears from the cold. On a grimace of effort, he unlatched his numbed fingers from a handhold, fumbled, then hooked the rough edge of the sill.
The light flickered. A thickset body shadowed the glass, and a complaining voice Mearn recognized as Quinold, Lord High Chancellor, drifted to the casement overhead. “Beastly drafts at this season.”
Behind diamond mullions, a scant span apart from the knuckles which suspended the climber from a lethal plunge to the roof slates, Lord Quinold’s pudgy hands seized the tasseled cord to draw the curtains. Brass hoops slid on the rod and a heavy fall of velvet doused the candlelight down to a slit.
Mearn hissed with relief. Shaking and runneled in icy sweat, he shifted his weight, hitched himself up the last, saving foot to the level stone of the window ledge. The knifing winds which had been his ally now sheared through his clothing. His skin had worn through at the fingertips. A forthright inspection revealed flesh underneath gone too numb to feel the abrasion. Mearn’s heart raced with the unpleasant awareness that nothing more than thin rondels of glass and the untrustworthy mask of a curtain guarded his niche from discovery.
Let him be caught inside Lysaer’s guarded precinct, and no tribunal would trifle with charges of treason. Town law was explicit. Execution of clansmen brought public dismemberment without benefit of a hearing, followed by death from a sword blade run through the heart.
Mearn wrapped his forearms around his tucked knees, as much to contain his outright contempt as to foil the ripping north wind. His diplomacy at Avenor could scarcely bend five centuries of ingrained disrespect. The ways of city governance confounded and astonished him, that these twit-brained townborn with their manned walls and libraries, their obsessive filing of ledgers and written record, could so arrogantly disown the founding facts of their heritage.
The fugitive forest clans their conceit named barbarian kept no inscribed histories. Persecution by headhunters denied them safe haven to live in shelter and comfort, yet they preserved memory of the purpose behind their unmixed bloodlines and ancestry. Mearn’s restless penchant to challenge authority made him rage, that unbridled greed coul
d ever have raised this bloodletting rift between factions.
As if to bear out his cynical view, the Lord High Chancellor stumped past the gap in the curtains, his diction precise as he resumed brassy carping. “Ath, there’s no wine. Some dimwit neglected to restock the cupboard. Damn those breeding pests of barbarians, you know how I hate climbing stairs for these meetings.”
A gravelly voice Mearn did not recognize answered too low to overhear. Pricked to curiosity, well practiced from a boyhood spent eavesdropping on his short-tempered older brothers, he set his ear to the glass.
“…scarcely a matter of clan raiding this time,” the bass speaker finished in stiff censure.
A chair scraped. Lord Chancellor Quinold sat down, his next line filtered through a barrage of squeaks wrung from rush caning and wood. “No wonder you’re thin, Vorrice. You fret like a nesting pack rat. To judge by your maundering, one might mistakenly think the Fellowship Sorcerers were omnipotent. Or are you worried the Paravians might return in their full and fatal glory overnight? Really, we’d all fare better if you could relax your obsession with burning convicted talent. The perils posed by the Shadow Master are far more immediate, since his overt collaboration with Maenol’s clansmen.”
“But the old races aren’t dead,” the one named Vorrice lashed back. His grainy voice stabbed with conviction. “If they were, the accursed taint of practicing magecraft would be banished from the world altogether. Obstructions by meddling sorcerers would be ended, besides. Until that day comes, public cleansings become my bound duty.”
Outside on the sill, a chill gripped Mearn that bit deeper than any assault of mere wind. He had watched Lysaer’s interdict against sorcery seed spurious arrests across Tysan. On the street, not a whisper of rumor had emerged to suggest a fanatic invested with high office to enforce a campaign of persecution.
A knock sounded at the door to the inside chamber. “That must be Tellisec and the other guild ministers,” the Lord High Chancellor surmised, then huffed through the bother of raising his bulk to admit them.
From below, a ruddy flicker in the stairwell arrow slits warned of another imminent arrival. Mearn hunkered down against icy granite, amazed to have stumbled upon a clandestine conference between Lysaer’s trusted inner circle. He listened to their exchanged greetings, and by names and accents identified the realm’s Lord Justiciar, Avenor’s High Gate Keeper, and Lord Mayor Skannt of the headhunters’ league. Tysan’s ranking seneschal was away with Lysaer in the east, but his appointed seat was not empty.
Another man with soft, fruity vowels assumed the authority to officiate. “Where’s Gace?” that one snapped. “He’s late. Does anyone know why?”
Gace was Prince Lysaer’s household steward, a closemouthed, stringy wisp of a creature who tended to slink. Mearn misliked the man’s habit of lurking in dim corners, unblinking and watchful as a rat.
“If Gace is delayed, he’ll have sound reason,” Vorrice made grating objection. “We need his goodwill. As the Prince of the Light’s closest servant, it might be politic to trust him.”
A whining blast of wind obscured the reply. Mearn braved the brunt, given no other choice. Meeting or conspiracy, he needed to tell which, then make clean his escape. Cold and inactivity were now deadly adversaries. Prolonged exposure on a north-facing ledge would soon impair his reflexes. He dared not linger beyond the point where he became too chilled to climb.
“Our man has arrived,” announced the fatuous spokesman. Inside the chamber, the door from the stairwell opened to a decisive click. Pressed to the casement, his breath fanning frost rime across rippled glass, Mearn snagged the newcomer’s name from the brisk exchange of introductions. A frown nicked his brow. What breeding mischief would lead a rich trade minister to leave his plush comforts in Erdane to convene with Avenor’s cabal of power? Mearn gave the quandary ferocious thought. He had never met Guild Master Koshlin, but clan rumor from Camris linked the title to a bullish, short man with sly eyes and a penchant for endowments in gold to further the headhunters’ leagues.
While chairs bumped inside, and the cozy assembly settled itself down to deal, Mearn chafed stiff fingers, riled to slit-eyed concern.
“Your welcome is accepted here only because of your overtures to support Prince Lysaer’s alliance against evil,” the man in authority addressed, his peach-syrup inflection at chilling odds with a bluntness that ran contrary to the ingrained town penchant for stylized manners and ceremony.
“By all means, let us speak plainly.” Lord Koshlin’s ruffled suavity trailed through a considering pause. “Your prince shall have gold in support from a faction in Camris I have been asked not to name. The moneys will come with no strings attached. If your self-styled savior can bring more than folk at Miralt Head to hail him as an avatar, no one of us will denounce him.”
That raised a bristling rustle, as someone of size roused himself to take umbrage.
Ever smooth in diplomacy, the High Chancellor intervened. “Let us not quibble over unfounded truths, Vorrice. We few are privileged. Elsewhere, the awareness of Lysaer’s blessed heritage has not been made common knowledge.”
“Divine will shall triumph, but the time must be right,” a supporter chimed in to placate Erdane’s minister. “His Grace has promised each man must find faith and belief for himself. Until he wins due acclaim, our prince poses as mortal.”
Lord Koshlin pressed on, impatient. “Why waste any breath on theology at all? Let your prince inspire the whole world to bow to his moral righteousness. Every conversion he makes serves our need, in turn. We are dedicated men bound to break the constraint of the Fellowship’s compact. Our followers in Camris already have instructions. They’ll serve your Alliance of Light in coin and information, and even raw resource. By whatever means, they want sorcery suppressed and the old clan lineages eradicated. The s’Ilessid claim to immortal birth is not germane. We view his criminal charges against the Shadow Master’s allies as a powerful political convenience.”
While Mearn battled the rise of his gorge, Vorrice raised abrasive opinion. “Your hatred of Maenol’s barbarians runs deep. Do we also surmise you fear the restoration of the Paravians?”
“Don’t mistake, we fear nothing.” Koshlin paused through what felt at second hand like a lingering, oily smile. “Let me suggest, any force in Athera who stands for the old ways poses a dangerous impediment. We wish the Second Age mysteries forgotten.”
On the sill, tucked and bitter, Mearn squelched seething fury, while Koshlin’s bland monologue expounded upon the self-blinded creed of the townborn.
“Those bygone beliefs stunt the interests of trade. Why should a hidebound adherence to past ritual disallow more seaports and better roads?” A fist thumped on wood, to a flickering splash of leaked flame light through slitted curtains. “Since the Paravians abandoned the continent, mankind should claim rightful use of the land.” Koshlin cleared his throat. “The faction I speak for will back Lysaer’s cause. In secret, we’ve labored to abolish the compact since the over-throw of the last high kings. Those of our heirs who incline toward religion will scarcely care which name they invoke when they mouth their prayers to a deity. Once humanity is free to reap this world’s wealth, society will flourish. You wish the Prince of Rathain brought down and his supporters suppressed to save the peace. We wish to escape the Fellowship’s tyranny. Our ends lie along the same course, won’t you see?”
“You want the slinking barbarians dead,” Lord Mayor Skannt observed in his drawling, perpetual contempt. “For that end, I’ll take in any man’s gold. But first, I’d hear your conditions.”
The proposal branched into particulars and questions, while Mearn shivered and fretted on the ledge. The moment had arrived to press on, or jeopardize all of his success. Against the murmured backdrop of debate, then the Lord High Justiciar’s scathing accusation to the realm’s chancellor for fence-sitting, the clansman eased his tucked stance. A second he lingered, heart torn into conflict by blood loyalties.
> “Damn all your shortsighted bickering!” Vorrice burst through in surging vehemence. Mearn started tense. Inside, a chair rasped back from the table. He flattened against stone as crisp footsteps carried across the chamber. An angry hand snapped the curtains aside and bared the centermost casement. Time froze. Cramped against the adjacent lintel, Mearn stopped breathing, pinned down a fatal handspan away from the executioner’s suffused profile.
“Barbarians or sorcerers, their twisted nature is the same.” Vorrice jabbed passionate fingers toward the gathering behind him. “The sooner they’re exterminated, the better.”
Escape was not possible. Mearn clamped his quivering sinews into rigid stillness. If he moved, if capricious luck left him now, he would be caught as a spy. All Vorrice need do was glance sidewards.
Unblinking, Mearn memorized the man’s jowled features. If by Ath’s grace he came through unscathed, he determined to know this new enemy.
Vorrice’s pale eyes fixed unseeing upon the frost-sharp sweep of the rooftops. He worked fleshy lips, pinched to tight discontent at the corners. His stance seethed with nerve-fired agitation, the stalker’s impression intensified by a thin nose, and eyebrows napped like wet burlap. He wore his hair cropped. The thoughtless clench of his fist to fringed velvet contrasted a manic neatness. White robes and gold band of office hung stainless and straight, glittering with the golden sunwheel device.
“We should take the Lord Master’s offer, believe this.” His adamant diction flecked spittle as he gestured his conviction. “Let his coin help rout out the canker of sorcery. What should we fear? Prince Lysaer will shine as our maker intends. Let the faithless beware. The light of his presence shall banish corruption wherever man’s works embrace evil.”
“Vorrice,” admonished the unseen authority, his fulsome voice glacial with command, “this is not an inquisition. No sensible gift will be spurned by this gathering. Not if the coin and the services offered are being presented in good faith.”
