by Janny Wurts
The Hanshire officer who commanded her escort seemed to share her high-handed disdain. “Send a man to summon the Lord Mayor.”
The Etarran ignored him. “Where’s the Prince of the Light? I still hold his orders to seal off these gates.”
“Be still!” snapped the enchantress, imperious. “Our snare to entrap the Spinner of Darkness was never meant to close here. Lysaer of Tysan is scarcely so reckless! Blameless lives are at risk if there’s bloodshed. Your liege is a just prince, and merciful. He would never corner an unprincipled sorcerer in the midst of an innocent populace. ”
“I don’t trust what you say.” The Etarran stayed planted, arms folded over his breastplate, while his men in the gate towers clasped dampened hands to their weapons in chill fear of provoking fell sorceries. “Show me you carry Prince Lysaer’s authority.”
The Koriani senior regarded him, tranquil. As if a man’s history lay etched in a face, she said, “You may address me by the formal title of First Senior. I admire your staunchness, but don’t be a fool. In this, we work for the same cause.” Her eye for detail sought the root of his obstinacy and as swiftly divined the reason. “We know you for a veteran who survived the fight at Tal Quorin.”
When her uncanny statement redoubled his unease, her cut-coral lips framed a smile. “Fear nothing. No one expected to take the Shadow Master unaware. We have him hazed into open flight, and the moment shall come when he’s vulnerable. Do you hear? The s’Ffalenn outpost is offshore, in the Isles of Min Pierens. Prince Lysaer has already sailed west with his war fleet to intercept him. The Master of Shadow will fall to an ambush at Corith. Now send for Riverton’s mayor. We require his council’s sealed writ to proceed.”
While the Etarran capitulated and called for a runner, a dry-voiced observer remarked from the postern. “You intended the Master of Shadow to slip through?”
“But of course.” Lirenda disdained to glance at the speaker. She guessed his name already. The Prime’s initial scrying had shown her his presence. He had an indispensable role yet to play to ensure the trap against Arithon. Through the bustle as horses were led off for stabling, and the bristling talk to establish a hierarchy between the Etarrans and the guardsmen from Hanshire, Lirenda’s reply filtered back. “The cordon here is set by design to take down all of Arithon’s accomplices.”
Her curious exchange with the s’Brydion envoy became supplanted as the scryer touched her elbow. “The liegeman from Rathain you asked me to track has been moved from the inn where the fire struck.” She finished in soft urgency, “He’s been sheltered in the cook’s quarters on Haymaker’s Lane. We haven’t much longer. He’s dying.”
First Senior Lirenda murmured a terse reply, then amended her instructions to the guardsmen. “When Riverton’s Lord Mayor answers my summons, inform him to gather his magistrates and have them await my arrival at the shipyard.”
The three Koriani commandeered a guide from the local garrison. Through imperious autocracy and the well-oiled use of their power to intimidate, they swept smoothly on to their business inside the city gates. The main body of their escort from Hanshire remained at large, without assigned quarters and food. Beset by their flood of unscheduled demands, the Etarran commander took harried notice that fortune still granted small favors. The temperamental clansman with the waspish tongue had finally removed himself elsewhere.
Lirenda’s small entourage sought the burned shell of the Laughing Captain Tavern. By now, the fire had played itself out. Smoke smudged and coiled through a rickle of fallen beams and the last sullen pockets of shimmering embers the bucket brigades labored to extinguish. Persistent questioning led them at last to the bedside of Arithon’s stricken liegeman.
Caolle sprawled like felled dough on a ticked straw mattress in the kitchen annex left standing untouched by misfortune. The scullion sent for candles never came back, no doubt out of fear his petty thefts in the buttery might be disclosed by some trick of divination. The room that held the pallet remained dimmed in shadow, the squalid miasma of old grease and turned onions congealed in the heavy, close gloom. At the First Senior’s bidding, the Koriani healer knelt to perform her examination.
“Burns and blood loss,” she concluded. “He’s in shock still from cautery.” She laid down the rawboned, sinewy wrist she had clasped to take Caolle’s pulse. Her thin face turned toward the stray quill of light which fell through a knot in the shutter. “In an hour, perhaps two, his spirit will cross over, however he fights the Wheel’s passage. ”
In fact, his obstinate flesh would stay breathing until sundown, one of a laddered array of small details embedded in Morriel’s grand scrying. Lirenda stirred, a form out of place against plaster whose grimed coats of whitewash were streaked where condensation had rinsed through the tallow soot. Her long, sculpted fingers flicked ash from her mantle, and her face showed supreme unconcern. Through the ongoing grind of the salvager’s wagons across the cobbled yard without, and brief outbursts of oaths as men soused the timbers that stubbornly sprouted new flame from the ashes, her voice was enamel and silk. “Could you save him?”
The healer’s hands hesitated, paused, returned to trace over the stained linen bindings swathed around Caolle’s flank. Her cape-cut gray sleeves stirred the scents of goose fat and seared tissue, and roused a sullen chink from the chain mail no one had dared to remove for fear they might restart the bleeding.
Lirenda smoothed down her disarranged mantle. Her eyes antique gold and her face like milk cameo, she watched while the healer touched her crystal and traced through an array of testing runes and seals.
A drawn moment passed before the enchantress dared a prognosis. “His wound was taken in the name of his liege. There lies our opening. A binding tapped into his past oath of fealty might command enough power of obligation to stay him. But he’s dangerously weak. A forced regeneration of the blood must come first. If we stabilize his condition, his body could recover. Wards and sigils can be used from there to arrest the infection and fever.”
The Koriani First Senior folded her arms, her fine, sculptured nails sheathed under her cuffs. Her banded silk hems caught on the board floor as she crossed and surveyed the man on the pallet. The glamours set by Dakar to mask clan identity had dispensed in the spell-binder’s absence. Caolle’s strong hands rested slack on the coverlet, scabbed on three knuckles from the trials of an impatient character. The cantankerous clefts of hard living and grief were brought now to unwilling release. Lastly she studied the indomitable broad chest, where the heart beat unvanquished through the draw of each stertorous breath.
Lirenda shut her eyes. Her fingers, masked in silk, dug the flesh of her forearms as a white force of rage arrowed through her. An unswerving devotion to Arithon s’Ffalenn had wrested this clansman from life.
She could not stop the hurtful comparison to herself. The felled liegeman lay oblivious in extremity and mocked her, that she might become just as haplessly subservient to the drawing force of the same master. Unlike Caolle, she lived in resentful rebellion, a latent pawn with potential to be claimed as a vulnerable, unwilling sacrifice. Just once, she desired to reverse her own punishment, to humble Rathain’s prince and make him suffer the impacting cost of the loyalty he won and then spent without thought.
Moved to a vicious, inspired stab of impulse, Lirenda seized her initiative. “Do all you can,” she charged the healer at her feet. “If the clansman survives, I would take him captive to sail with us on the chance he may yet prove useful.”
The woman bent her head and took up her quartz crystal. “Your will shall be done, First Senior.”
By the order’s own tenets, no subservient enchantress could question her decision. Lirenda shared nothing in confidence. She took satisfaction in her autonomy, that the crowning fillip to Morriel’s grand design would bear a twist of her own devising. The defeat of her nemesis would bring sweet revenge by the deferral of one clansman’s death. Caolle would make a devastating addition to the shipyard’s score of host
ages when Koriani power at last cornered Arithon at sea.
Quarry
Early Spring 5653
Two hours past daybreak, the mist broke and rolled, torn as snagged knit, over the fields which rimmed the shore of the estuary southbound from Riverton. The trade road to Middlecross at the mouth of the bay snaked through rutted mud, bounded by timber fences to keep cattle, and hedgerows of thorn, budded with clockvine and bittersweet. The terrain was flat. Trees grouped in huddles, salt burned and stunted on the ocean side by gales, and raked like a drunkard’s grope to leeward. The blue pan of the sky held the swirling black flocks of swallows returning to nest in the hay byres, swooped and chivvied by gusts off the Westland Sea. Just past spring equinox, their winter-sharp edge could still flay through a drover’s cloak of oiled wool.
Before the uprising threw down the old rule, the mild, boggy summers grew the bull grass shoulder high. Here, the secretive hare had grazed, her black-edged, velvet ears attuned to the speech of the breezes. Midges and dragonflies danced in the sun which streamed like gold oil, and daylilies had bloomed like outbursts of wildfire. Now, across the wide vista where young dragons once stretched drying wingleather and flew, wattle-and-thatch farmsteads clumped like brown mushrooms, surrounded by goose pens and pigsties. The rustling, graceful stands of bull grass had gone. Reseeded pastures were grazed to shorn stubble, or chopped into hummocks by the milch cows who plodded their mindless daily rut from farmyard to gate.
The stiff winds of equinox did not rustle and whisper off the sea, but burned over the razed ground with flattening force. The squat drover of the oxcart narrowed his squint eye and muffled reddened hands in the rug thrown over his knees. His beasts nodded onward in their yokes, their vast, splayed hooves chinking through glaze ice where low sun had yet to thaw the puddles. The wain racketed behind them, a rattletrap conveyance of squealing, pegged boards and spoked wheels which sucked and dragged through black muck and runoff to a labored creak of worn axles.
Hunched over the lines, the drover looked as if he suffered the pangs of a pestilent headache. He did not look up as the armed riders streamed past, to shouted orders and a military snap of royal banners. Nor did he curse the mud spattered up by their hooves, or protest as they waved whips or weapons and demanded he roll his cart to the verge to make way. Had he carried apples, they might have stopped him on demand for provender. Since the wain’s unsavory, manure-stained bed held nothing but musty sacking and an empty goose basket chalked with guano, no guard seemed minded to search. A straightforward cipher which prodded the senses to revulsion was all any competent spellbinder needed to be left to resume his interrupted way south.
As the sixth such patrol galloped jingling by, the drover cast a soured eye across his load of potato sacks. “You have no idea just how lucky you are.” He received no reply. Only the grinding chirp of the axles and spring birdsong, blithe, from the hedgerows.
The rider who passed an hour later came alone on a lathered chestnut. The saddlecloth bore the guard’s emblem from Hanshire, but the man wore nondescript leathers beneath the braid of his captain’s cloak. Nor was the blade hung by rings from his baldric the issue of any town cavalry. The acerbic scrutiny he gave wain and drover could have scraped verdigris off a bronze tack.
Then a grin like a whip disarranged his thin lips. “Ath, it’s yourself. I thought the stink was by lengths too extravagant. Where’s that shadow-bending little bastard you nursemaid? I bear him a pressing message.”
By the sniping humor and an accent like shot darts, Dakar recognized the s’Brydion scion who had been the first man in twelve decades to fleece him at both cards and dice. “I’ve disowned him.”
But Mearn had not missed the sidelong glower directed at the ruckled sacking.
“He’s there?” The s’Brydion blasphemed through six sentences of admiring incredulity.
Drawn pale by the drummed-out dregs of a drink hangover and the diminishing spasms of palsy, Dakar shrugged. “I’m not at all certain I’m going to survive the invective when he wakes up.”
The clan envoy’s gaze lingered, riveting sharp, while his forced stab at levity floundered into brooding, and his eyes stayed trained ahead, circled and darkly haunted.
“Bad, was it?” The chestnut shook the bit to a spatter of white foam, while Mearn played her sideways to keep her abreast of the creeping oxcart. “You won’t like what I have to tell you any better.” Never one to hold off delivery of ill news, he plowed on. “You’re caught in the teeth of a Koriani conspiracy, did you know? They flushed you from Riverton in full expectation of netting your Teir’s’Ffalenn in an ambush off the Isles of Min Pierens. Lysaer’s been at sea for six days with trained navigators. His fleet’s destination is Corith.”
Dakar swiveled sideways in dumbstruck shock. “At sea? Lysaer s’Ilessid? Ath, he can’t be! Arithon was driven to break his disguise by full onslaught of Desh-thiere’s curse. Only Lysaer’s immediate proximity could provoke such a fit of murdering insanity!”
Mearn shook his head, the thick stubble on his jaw graining the hollow of his cheek. “Spells and trickery.” He suddenly sounded every inch as tired as he looked. “Yon curse was triggered by Koriani intent. I saw the accursed tangle of hair and silk scraps they used to shape Lysaer’s proxy.”
Horror whitened Dakar’s rumpled features, and the cloudless spring sun sparked small, silver glints on the hair roots at his temples, changed from ginger to white overnight. “You’re saying the witches brought on the whole incident by means of a conjured fetch?”
“Why else would their First Senior be carrying a wee doll made of tied rags and blond hair?” Since the ramifications were too grievous to grapple, that Arithon could be hazed hither and yon by a bundled spell created by a Koriani whim, Mearn traced the flight of a marsh falcon who snapped from its high, lazy spirals to stoop. “His Grace can’t flee to Corith. He’ll find Lysaer waiting with a war fleet well primed to carve his s’Ffalenn liver into stew meat.”
Dakar glowered down the roadway, which unreeled straight ahead, between the capped horns of the oxen. “I won’t ask what you risked to deliver the warning.”
Mearn laughed. “There’s not enough gold in Ath’s whole creation to pay the whores to preserve my randy reputation.”
“What?” The starting ghost of a dimple dented the cheek above Dakar’s rumpled beard. “Past experience should have taught me. The s’Brydion line runs to madmen who are born addicted to danger.”
Mearn’s grin widened, then became the triangular smile his brothers had learned to regard with extreme trepidation. “You never saw me,” he said. “For the past seven days, I’ve been in bed at Avenor jousting the lights out of three willing doxies.”
“I see.” Dakar rolled a walleyed glance of apprehension toward the muddle of lumps in the sacking. “Forgive me when I tell you I wish that had been the plain truth.”
“Oh man,” Mearn agreed, turned sharply restive as the horse which stamped and curvetted underneath him. He glanced over his shoulder, and the Mad Prophet heard too: through the weave of the gusts, the oncoming hooves of yet another patrol sent to scour the roads out of Riverton.
“You should go,” he advised Mearn. To be seen under questioning by a man with Hanshire trappings would draw perilous attention to them both.
“As you suggest.” Mearn’s humor changed to a wicked slice of malice as he gave rein to his head-shaking mount. “I leave you the road, and wish you joy on the moment when yon testy mountebank wakens. Upset his temper, he’s got a tongue can raze scales off the innocent fish.”
The ox wain rolled on into the afternoon, while the blue sky clotted with high-flying clouds, and the sun dimmed and vanished into haze. Dakar ate cheese with the gritty, hard bread provided by the farmwife whose goodman had sold him the wagon. He absorbed himself licking sticky crumbs from his fingers. The lines threaded unattended through the fist on his knee when a sneeze and a shudder beneath the potato sacks reminded of his fugitive passenger.
Dakar tossed off the last crust for the birds and halted the oxen. He considered, then decided against releasing his mild spell cipher.
The next moment, the burlap stirred and parted. An angular face shaded in beard stubble emerged, capped by moldered stems of oat straw stuck through untidy black hair. Eyes of a burning and terrible emerald blinked and regarded the wind-flattened briars in the hedgerow, ragged border to a ladderworked mesh of fallow fields, then absorbed the rutted groove of the roadway. The intelligence behind stayed mercifully baffled and blank.
“Potatoes,” the bard murmured, puzzled. His glance turned to Dakar, inquiring, and his light touch explored a clotted scab on one cheekbone. “No doubt a just punishment for tupping the farmer’s eager daughter, except that I can’t recall the chit’s face.”
A pause; hands that in daylight showed the scuffs and congested bruises of a ruinous combat received an absorbed inspection. Reassured at last that all his joints flexed, Arithon raked clinging chaff from his collar and lapsed back to a dusty puff of rot from the sacking. “Dakar,” he said, muffled, “the guano is a stroke of pure brilliance, I admit. But may we dispense with the manure and the offal? If I suffer my fair deserts from a hangover, I could manage rather well without the stink.”
Then, from a shattering and sudden break in thought, a ripped intake of breath: Arithon s’Ffalenn came fully and finally awake. His next words reviled in distilled venom. “Should I curse you or thank you for my deliverance? Or better, give you the whip hand to send me straight on to damnation and Dharkaron’s black vengeance?”
His unspoken anguish hung on the pause, ‘For Caolle, there exists no redress.’
Dakar clamped helpless fists to the lines and slapped the worn leather over the backs of the oxen. “You swore oath at Athir,” he reminded through the squealing protest of stressed wood as the wain sucked free of the mud and rolled onward.
