Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  The ritual joined in the circle still ruled him. Sulfin Evend sensed the imprint of his own touch. He recorded each unpleasant, tingling snap, as his fingertips grazed the healed lesions. Lysaer felt the sting also. Hazed into recoil, he must know the intrusive sensation was nothing natural. The man in him had to acknowledge the queer, creeping wrongness that suffused his intimate flesh. If his s’Ilessid lineage ran true, he would respond through his forebear’s gift of true justice.

  The demand of the ritual disallowed speech. Shoved hard against the last rags of awareness, Sulfin Evend mimed the cut through the air that would sever the tie set by necromancy. Propped, shivering, on his spread hand, he pointed to Lysaer’s damp brow, then repeated the gesture, just short of disturbing the unseen cord that rooted the source of vile conjury.

  Strapped logic could not find a second approach. Win through, or fall woefully short, the commander could do nothing more. Crouched on his tucked heels, he waited.

  The knife thrust at his leg. Sulfin Evend flung himself clear. Design, or plain accident, as he sprawled, his bent elbow rammed into Lysaer’s exposed thigh. The blow shocked the nerve. While his liege moaned in spasm, Sulfin Evend dragged himself back upright. Reeling, he caught the freed forearm. Again, badly trembling, he hefted limp weight and laid Lysaer’s slack knuckles in place. The dropped knife seemed beyond him. Twice, he fumbled before he managed to capture the obsidian grip. Rocked by shuddering gasps, he pressed the weapon back into Lysaer’s clasp.

  By then, the hardened blue eyes showed recovery. Taut fingers closed. The flint edge of the blade jittered red in the hellish glare of the embers.

  Light-headed, unmoored, Sulfin Evend owned no last stock of resource. He braced, streaming sweat, wracked hoarse by the rush of his breathing. Throughout, the victim of necromancy watched him, deadly and poised as a predator.

  Naught else could be done, except tip back his chin, shut his eyes, and invite the quick strike to the throat.

  Caithdeinen offered their lives to test princes, if no other means lay at hand.

  Stung by that edged truth, the doomed man might have laughed, had the irony not robbed him of dignity. Chance ruled the moment, as he embraced his fate in sacrificial surrender.

  Through that last, drawn second, while risen darkness choked down swimming vision, Sulfin Evend tracked the pattern of Lysaer’s forced breaths, brokenly rising and falling. His own chest ached to bursting. Every joint hurt. The spurred beat of his heart stabbed pangs through his breast, while his ears rang with the memory of his own voice, swearing the time-worn oath by which every sanctioned prince of the realm had been tested. He clung, while life trembled upon the snapped thread of a mad prince’s forgotten mercy.

  Crippled, exposed as bait for a necromancer, Sulfin Evend felt the cold ribbons of sweat stripe his back through fast-fraying awareness. He measured the acid-etched stir of the air, as Lysaer firmed his grip on the knife. No coward, the commander opened his eyes and welcomed the stroke that would take him.

  The aimed point of the dagger snatched short in mid air. Sulfin Evend stared full into Lysaer’s face, while the tears he could no longer contain spilled and ran down his cheek-bones. His terror could not be masked, or his pity, sustained in the locked stare between them. He bowed his head, waited, and again sensed the move as the knife settled trembling. Razor-edged flint pressed the side of his neck.

  Sulfin Evend lost his will to move. Resigned beyond even wrenching despair, he could no longer endure the crazed light in his liege’s eyes. Nor would he reason with suborned insanity. Undone by weakness, trembling with terror, he swayed under the dissolving pull of the spells. At the last, the frail stay that kept his upright posture was the bruised and tenuous trust he owed for the discharge of life debt and service.

  The blade moved. Sulfin Evend lifted his chin, just in time to see the black knife drop down. The stroke followed through and slashed across the last binding, rooted at Lysaer’s forehead.

  An electrical snap sheared the air. Pain followed. The tearing onslaught as the spell sundered arched Lysaer violently upwards. The knife left his contorted grasp and flew wild, while Sulfin Evend ripped in a cramped breath and gasped the Paravian word, Alt! His scraped whisper finished the ritual, one split-second shy of disaster.

  Then the hurled knife crossed the fourfold line of the circles. Dimmed hearing rushed back, shot to crystalline focus. The embers in the grate seemed the blaze of a holocaust, and the chamber, hurtfully solid enough to confound the overstrung senses.

  Yet the peril was over.

  Sulfin Evend felt the crushing weight of dissipation lift away. Retching, still dizzy, he raised his marked hands and caught Lysaer’s thrashing head. If his strength was spent, he could still lend support. Weeping, he could muffle Lysaer’s fraught screams against his shoulder and chest.

  ‘Here!’ he pitched his hoarse command toward the chair, where the valet presumably still kept his vigil. ‘Fetch dry towels and a blanket.’

  As the commander’s battered awareness slid back into focus, he flexed his left hand and picked at the knots confining Lysaer’s right wrist. Holding the Blessed Prince propped upright against him, he let the valet assist with the cloth that collared the bone-slender ankles. Then he waited, recovering, as towels were brought, one thoughtfully soaked in cool water.

  ‘Make up the bed,’ Sulfin Evend ground out, while a competent touch wrapped the prince’s flushed forehead in soothing folds of wet cloth. ‘I’ll help attend to his Exalted Self. He is freed, but not likely to stay conscious.’

  ‘You don’t look much better,’ said the servant, distraught. He shuddered, exclaiming, ‘Merciful Light! Just what manner of foul apparition did you banish?’

  The Alliance Lord Commander stared back, battered blank.

  Wordless, the valet struggled with his wrecked poise. His large hands were shaking, and his chattering teeth hampered his stumbling speech. ‘There were things, icy cold, crowding outside that circle. Unearthly, ill spirits, and Sithaer knows what else.’

  ‘You didn’t bolt,’ Sulfin Evend pointed out.

  The prince’s serving-man brushed off the praise. ‘His Blessed Grace has been unwell for some time. What else could I do, except stand by your word, that those horrors were sent here to claim him?’

  ‘Well, they failed!’ Jabbed to vicious distaste for the fact he could not subdue his own trembling, Sulfin Evend realized the prince had gone limp. The gold head lolled, hot and damp, on his shoulder, while the skin cut he had made at the navel dripped blood with sullen persistence. ‘Your master’s ill, now. He requires our cosseting. Meantime, I don’t wish to burn for a sorcerer’s workings in Erdane! We’ve got this chamber to set back to rights. No one must see what’s occurred here.’

  While the anxious servant took charge of Lysaer, Sulfin Evend untangled his legs, stood erect, and forced his unsteady feet to bear weight long enough to rub out the spent circles. Next, he recovered the spoiled silk that contained the bowl shards and bone-knife, scrounged up a coffer, and dumped out its load of state jewellery. After he had secured the ill-fated bundle under lock and key, he towelled himself dry and wrestled back into his breeches and shirt. The valet was no slacker. By then he had the unconscious prince bathed and groomed, and installed in warmed comfort on the bed.

  Lysaer himself remained senseless throughout. Until he roused in his collected, right mind, his keepers could do nothing more than watch and guardedly wait.

  As the windows were thrown open to dispel the herb smoke and the rug was spread over the scuffed flooring, the valet exchanged a tenuous glance with the Alliance Lord Commander. Neither man spoke. The next trial was inevitable. Until Lysaer recovered, they would have to fend off the mayor’s house staff, and worse, the inquisitive pressure applied by Erdane’s ambitious officials.

  For that, Sulfin Evend chose to rely on the battle-trained wits of his field captain. ‘No one else will come in,’ he assured the stressed servant. ‘There’s not another damned thing w
e can do but try our utmost to maintain appearances.’

  Wrung out and tired enough to fall down, the Alliance Lord Commander left Lysaer’s bedside and unbarred the shut door to the antechamber. No help for the fact he looked washed to his socks; raked over by the avid, curious eyes of the men under orders to keep vigil till dawn, he could but hope that the room at his back revealed nothing more than the brushed gold head of divinity, lying at peace on the pillows.

  Still alert, his ranking officer stepped forth, expecting the word to stand down.

  Sulfin Evend spoke fast to stall questions. ‘Send every-one back. The crisis is over. We’re into convalescent recovery, but for that, the prince must have quiet.’ He finished his orders in a lowered voice. ‘The page and the chamber servant must stay here in seclusion. I won’t have them abroad to spread idle talk. Let your day sergeant assign that detail. He’s capable. You are not excused, meanwhile. I plan to sleep here in Lysaer’s close company. This door remains tightly guarded, throughout. Not so much as a rumour slips by you. Have I made my needs understood?’

  ‘No one comes in?’ Honourably scarred from a dozen campaigns, the grizzled veteran flushed with dismay. ‘Plaguing fiends, man! I’ve no glib tongue, and no stomach for mincing diplomacy.’

  ‘That’s why I need you.’ Sulfin Evend returned his most scorching grin. ‘If the petitioners get testy, let them try your sword. Since when has the Grace of Divine Blessing on Earth been required to answer to any-one?’

  Dawn arrived, pallid grey. Light through the fogged casements spat leaden glints on the mail shirt and sword, still draped on the chest by the armoire. Its unflinching candour also traced the gaunt face and dark hair of the Lord Commander, who watched at the bedside with steely, light eyes. Aching and sore, awake by the grace of a tisane mixed by the self-effacing valet, Sulfin Evend watched the new day expose a divinity no less than mortally fallible. Left burning with questions he had no right to ask, he guarded his charge with the dangerous calm of a falcon leashed to the block.

  Morning brightened. The watch-bells clanged from Erdane’s outer walls. When the rumble of cart-wheels racketed echoes from the cobble-stone yard by the kitchen, the Blessed Prince still had not stirred. For the first time that any man could recall, Lysaer s’Ilessid slept soundly past the hour of sunrise.

  Westward, the velvet shadow of night was just lifting in Tysan’s regency capital at Avenor. There, Cerebeld, High Priest of the Light, attended his custom of daybreak devotion. A florid man with a dauntlessly focused intelligence, he sat, knees folded in meditation, the drape of his formal robes like sunlight on new-fallen snow. Four alabaster bowls on the altar before him contained his daily offering: of clear water, sweet herbs, and a wool tuft infused with volatile oils, commingled with a drop of pricked blood just taken from his lanced finger. Now immersed in deep trance, he waited for the ecstatic communion with the Divine Prince of the Light.

  Yet this morning, the contact never arrived. No distinctive presence invoked his true visions. Cerebeld received nothing, while the minutes unreeled, and the flood of cold fear filled the vacancy.

  ‘My Lord, my life, why have you forsaken me?’

  No answer followed. Only an empty and desolate silence that reduced him to anxious distress.

  ‘My Lord!’ he appealed, shaken. ‘How am I to enact the work of your will?’

  Aching, Cerebeld hurled his mind deeper. He extended his awareness through the limitless void, but no bright power rose up to meet him.

  Instead, something other stirred out of the dark. Alone, driven desperate, Cerebeld embraced the encounter that, after all, was not threatening or strange, but offered his name back in welcome.

  Then the rapture struck in a welling, sweet wave, as always. Cerebeld shuddered, swept up in sublime content, as he had each day since his investiture.

  He surrendered. Swept under, he shivered and gasped in the silken rush of a pleasure that ranged beyond reason. The moment of joined exaltation sustained until sunrise, then peaked, and faded away. The High Priest at Avenor tumbled backwards, recalled to himself. Ahead, he faced the dull framework of duty: petitions from council-men, and charitable dispositions, and the ongoing difficulty posed by an absent princess, still missing.

  Cerebeld opened his eyes to the shearing, intolerable pain of his solitary awareness. He arose from his knees. No witness observed him. The oddity passed without pause for question that, today, the Prince of the Light had not spoken.

  Late Spring 5670

  Wakening

  On the unsteady moment when he had sworn his guest oath, the Prince of Rathain had not realized the extent he would need to rely on Davien’s hospitality. The safe haven offered within Kewar’s caverns gave his exhausted faculties time to recoup from the devastating trials of the maze. Soon enough, he encountered the unforeseen changes stitched through his subtle awareness. After years of blank blockage, the healed access that restored his mage-sight required an interval of sharp readjustment.

  Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn was not the same man who had crossed Daon Ramon shackled by guilt and the horrors of loss and bloodshed.

  Nothing was as it had been. With each passing week, he encountered the odd rifts shot through his initiate awareness. His waking thoughts tended to stumble without warning, unleashing a mind-set that was not linear. The least supposition, no matter how trivial, might touch off an explosion of thought. He saw, perhaps, as the Sorcerers did, in vaulting chains of probability. The sudden shifts became disconcerting. Overcome, seated at breakfast one day, his inward musing upon his borrowed clothes showed him vision upon vision, overlaid.

  Arithon viewed himself, using knife and needle to shorten his oversize sleeves; then observed Davien, who could sew as well as Sethvir, poking fun at his sail-hand’s stitching. In future imprint, he watched as he was offered a green-velvet tunic edged with ribbon and emblazoned with the leopard of Rathain. That raised his hackles. The jolt of his visceral rejection became an electrical force, impelling him into chaos…

  … even as he thrashed to recover himself, Davien laughed again, while his unruly mind raced on and leaped to reframe his adamant preference: of simple, dark trousers and a loose linen shirt. Unreeled thought patterns streamed past all resistance. Left no choice, except to close down his mage-sight, Arithon tumbled back into the confines of his five senses. Even as he wrenched himself back in hand, he heard echoes: the loom in a weaver’s shop, and behind that, like crystalline imprint, the singing of country-folk, pounding raw flax into fibre…

  Reoriented, gripping the edge of the table, Arithon sat, hard-breathing and deeply disturbed. He clung to the moment: as though the smells of bread and honey and fresh fruit could reweave his form out of something more solid than air.

  Across the breakfast nook, an inquisitive Sorcerer regarded him, arms folded and dark eyes amused. ‘My shirts are too large?’ Davien raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ve been remiss? I’m expected to see you reclothed in state?’

  ‘If you’re offering, I’ll take plain linen,’ said Arithon. ‘The simplicity would be appreciated. It’s the cloth of my mind that won’t cut down to fit.’

  Davien suppressed laughter. ‘Not if you try to cram yourself, wholesale, back inside the same vessel. You have much more than outgrown your past, Teir’s’Ffalenn. I daresay the puzzle enchants me.’

  Fast enough, this time, to check-rein the surge of another spontaneous trance, Arithon reached for the bread knife. He buttered a crust, as though that one act might anchor the spin of turned senses.

  ‘You can’t live, shut down,’ the Sorcerer prodded.

  The faintest of smiles bent Arithon’s mouth. ‘I can’t starve, overset by unbounded visions. That would demean your hospitality’ He bit into the morsel and regarded the Sorcerer, who watched him, each move, with tight focus. ‘I intrigue you that much?’

  Davien found the jam jar and shoved it across the table, unasked. ‘Wrong word. You amaze me. But that’s the least point.’

  Arithon
set down his bread crust. ‘Why do I sense this discussion is verging on dangerous?’

  ‘Words are dangerous,’ Davien agreed. ‘Thoughts, even more so. That’s why, when mankind first came to Athera in need of a haven, I stood opposed to the compact.’

  ‘Your one vote, cast against your other six colleagues.’ Arithon accepted the preserves. ‘That fact is on record at Althain Tower, and truly, I’d prefer you kept out of my mind.’

  Davien’s interest expanded. ‘You read into my history?’

  Arithon regarded the enigmatic being before him, wrapped in the fiery colours of autumn, with a wolfish, lean face and the shadowed eyes of a creature that had lived for too long by sharp wits. ‘I saw enough to realize you wished to guard against the horrid expedient, should the terms of the compact break down.’

  ‘Expulsion, before enacting humanity’s extirpation from Athera,’ Davien summed up with steel-clad dispassion. ‘You believe what was written?’

  In fact, the historian had condemned Davien’s stance: that twenty thousand refugees should be left to perish, before risking the reckless endangerment posed by the acts of their future descendants.

  ‘The suppositions on paper were damning.’ Arithon retrieved his knife, slathered his bread crust, then halved the unseasonably ripe peach set before him. ‘Doubtless your own words cast a different light. I don’t think you rejected compassion.’

  The Sorcerer blinked. ‘I voted to replenish the refugees’ supplies and send them onwards, before risking the potential abuse of Paravian territory’