Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  The spirit returned from the trials of the maze was not wont to regard life or death the same way.

  Vhandon spun to stalk off, jammed on his course as he all but crashed into Fionn Areth. ‘What are you about, dolt! Better clear out! Keep your wise distance from our liege’s back before someone wrings your damned neck.’

  As the liegeman’s hand snapped to his dagger, Arithon’s grip locked his wrist. ‘Let the fellow go where he will. We’ve no hands to spare to ride herd on him.’

  Vhandon backed down. He could do nothing else. When the Master of Shadow pushed through to the chart room, the grass-lands-bred yokel showed his insolent grin and trailed after.

  Arithon ignored every petty dissension. Through the companionway, limned against the stern window, he seated himself at the narrow desk, grasped the readied quill, and uncapped the horn flask of ink. Fionn Areth took position behind him and hovered, wisely not blocking the light. The subject under his dissecting scrutiny spared not a glance, but dipped his nib and began to inscribe patterns of Paravian runes on the paper tags, glued to the billets of kindling. As each was complete, Arithon cupped his palms over the writing. Eyes closed, he sang notes that caused a man’s nape hair to lift with a drilling, electrical tingle.

  Scowling through his distrust of magecraft, Fionn Areth blurted, ‘You don’t use any blood.’

  Ringless hands moved, baring a construct that smoked with delicate trailers of light. ‘Why should I?’ The crisp phrase seemed deceptively mild. Not waiting for answer, Arithon leaned forward and blew across the inked symbols.

  The air went cold. Sudden darkness fell like a blanket, then blasted away in a star-burst of wild light, there and then gone at such speed that the eye retained no after-burned image.

  Running feet pounded down the quarter-deck stair, the door banged, and Dakar burst in, horrified. ‘Dharkaron’s fell Chariot, what have you invoked? Death and chaos, man! You’ll bring those fiends down on our necks! What you’ve made is a blighted beacon!’

  Unhurried, as he chose his next scrap of wood, Arithon said, ‘My sealed intent is to draw them.’

  ‘What! Are you crazy?’ Dakar yanked on his beard. ‘We ought to be laying down wardings. Ciphers of go-hither, and invisible quiet, set inside a ring of tossed salt to damp down the etheric ripple of our presence.’

  ‘That’s what you’ve done to safeguard the casks?’ Hands poised, Arithon sang a triplet that shivered the air like a bell. More light blazed forth, then wisped away like spent smoke.

  Dakar winced. ‘What I’ve done with the casks doesn’t bear mention. Not set against the mayhem you’ll wake with that working! We’re square in the path of a crisis already. How much more explosive are you going to make it?’

  ‘The quicker the tempo, the more frantic the dance,’ Arithon conceded. ‘By now Talvish should have my three dozen arrows, with the points cut away, and the fletching soaked in hot paraffin. I’ll need them on deck, along with that box of old corks, and the recurve the mate keeps to shoot sharks.’

  ‘Why not send Fionn Areth?’ the Mad Prophet snapped under his breath. ‘Murder and mercy, we need to talk, now. What I have to say should be kept private.’

  ‘He’s not going to leave.’ Through sharp invective, unleashed above deck as a sailhand fumbled a lashing, Arithon qualified, serious, ‘Turn his back for a moment, he’s convinced I’ll be opening some victim’s veins for dark conjury. Therefore, no secrets. The man wears my face. Whatever you say must come to bear on his fate no less than on mine.’

  ‘Curse the moment I said I’d help save him!’ The ship rolled. Dakar snatched a fast handhold and watched with vindictive eyes.

  Sure enough, the green herder was caught off his guard. He staggered, then windmilled backwards into the oilskins packed in the hanging locker.

  The spellbinder relented, flung out a hand, and hauled him up short of entanglement. Yet his glance as he salvaged the younger man’s balance stayed hard with offended contempt. ‘You’re a hovering vulture, discontent not to feast upon carrion.’

  Jaw clenched, Fionn Areth said nothing. Since he lacked the mature grace to help with the errand, Dakar banged outside. He would personally garner the items requested before he exposed his concerns in front of the herder’s pig ignorance.

  Left with the soured pause, still immersed at the chart desk, Arithon stifled amusement. ‘Dakar’s that sore because, once, he behaved just like you.’

  ‘The feat makes you proud?’ As the brig corkscrewed into another swell, Fionn Areth grabbed hold, saving himself from sliding into the lap of his nemesis. ‘You get your thrills luring lesser minds to corruption?’

  Now Arithon laughed outright. ‘Your logic is boggling, since Dakar’s been a Fellowship spellbinder, and therefore corrupt by your posturing Light, for a few centuries more than your avatar’s been alive.’

  A dry wit might have cut back with a stinging reply; Fionn Areth lacked the gift. He clamped frustrated teeth. More than the roll of the ship made him queasy. Whatever occurred under Arithon’s hands, the effects made his skin crawl. Those soft, eerie notes sucked the warmth from the air. Daylight itself altered, until colours appeared dimmed, and the gusting wind seemed to comb with less force through the rigging.

  ‘You’re draining the elements into that stick!’ Fionn Areth blurted out. The discovery appalled him. The brig’s movement was settling: he realized the bucking deck under his feet had quieted until he could stand without effort.

  ‘With due permission,’ Arithon admitted. His fingers poised over the next billet with its fish-glued slip of paper and queer ciphers. ‘Masks won’t keep on shipboard, and I haven’t lied. I’m initiate mage-trained, entitled as Masterbard, as well as birth-born to wield shadow. Those skills are now weaving this vessel’s defence. Stay as you wish. Measure the evidence in front of your eyes. Just remember, when everything breaks into mayhem, and it will: I never abandoned my comfortable haven in Kewar’s caverns for your sake.’

  Through the unpleasant tension that followed, Fionn Areth might as well have ceased to exist. Arithon pursued his inscrutable business. By the time the steward arrived to inform that the stripped arrows and cork awaited on deck, Arithon’s crafted works had shifted the forces of the known world off their accustomed track. Evenstar wallowed amid glassy calm. The long, ocean swell had flattened out. Each comment from the helmsman seemed unnaturally distinct. The creak and squeal of the deck-boards as crewmen secured the aft hatch sounded magnified in the harsh quiet.

  A thunderous splash from the cat-head startled the goatherd half out of his wits.

  ‘That will be the starboard anchor, unshackled and cut loose,’ Arithon stated in swift reassurance. Done with raw conjury, he was now snipping thread: the jet glitter of his onyx buttons were passed off for the steward to secure, followed as fast by his shirt laces.

  The mate’s barked command filtered down from the bow. ‘Sway out and cut loose!’

  A thump, and a rattle, and more splashes followed. The steward added, for Fionn Areth’s sake, ‘None of the hands are abandoning ship!’

  Arithon affirmed this. ‘I asked for the chain to be jettisoned also. The ballast rock is just as grievous a hazard, but the hull would capsize without it.’ He arose, shed his rifled jerkin, and bundled his cache of marked sticks. While the servant moved in to dismantle the lamp, and break out the salt-crusted windows, the Prince of Rathain made his way from the chart room. He bounded on deck, met as he emerged by Feylind, anxiously frowning.

  If she wished to revile him for freeing Fionn Areth, someone had warned her with adamancy Her gesture instead framed the ensorcelled waters, sluggish and flat as pooled mercury. ‘Don’t explain how you’ve done this. I don’t care to know. You’re making my seamen as jumpy as cats!’

  All wind had died also. The air hung like liquid glass. Sounds were now muffled by the oppressive calm. The creak of the ratlines, the groans as the seams worked between deck and bulkhead made the brig seem a ghost vessel, cursed by a
haunting.

  ‘Not only your seamen.’ Arithon took her cold hand, laid her chapped knuckles between his warm palms, and plumbed her concern with unnerving intensity. Vivid and vital, his face had not changed. Beside him, she had matured and grown weathered. The wear of years and a harsh, outdoor lifestyle had stamped crow’s-feet in her rough skin.

  Despite herself, Feylind was shaken. She endured that scouring, mage-trained regard, hard-braced for a recoil that never came.

  Arithon cupped her cheek the way she remembered, when she had used her fresh tongue as a child. ‘You are more than I hoped, and beyond what anyone imagined you’d become. I understand you have two children?’

  Grown taller than he, every inch the ship’s master, Feylind tossed back her blonde braid and laughed. ‘You’d teach them to row, and cozen their loyalty? Well, the fat’s been tossed into the fire, headlong. Dakar’s warned us the iyats are backed by an ambush. First we’ve got to win free of your enemies.’

  ‘Prophets are dastardly pessimists, to a man. “Come hither, wild sprite with the marigold hair.”’ Still quoting ballads, the bard tugged her aft. His swift step partnered hers with a wildness recalled from the sun-washed sands back in Merior. ‘Stand up, front and center, and share the first move.’ He turned his head, shouted. ‘Dakar! You’re needed. Can you invoke the rune that Asandir used to start camp-fires?’

  Response hailed from the quarter-deck, by the stern-rail. ‘Not easily, in this state.’ A mussed, portly figure broke from a discussion on-going between Vhandon and Talvish. ‘Your slings and lead weights are readied, as well, though no one can fathom what madcap purpose you’ve hatched in your tinkering brain.’

  Arithon mounted the quarter-deck stair, with Feylind towed breathless behind, and Fionn Areth trailing, still obstinate. Packing a glower that left no one in doubt that his presence was hostile and separate, the herder hung on the fringes. Yet the activity surrounding the Master of Shadow remained too absorbed to take note of him.

  ‘His royal self stated you would not be touched.’ The unexpected address made Fionn Areth start. Turned, he encountered the Evenstar’s mate, broad-shouldered and affable, with blue eyes that were keenly observant. ‘If you don’t understand what that constraint means, then ask Dakar to tell you of Tharrick. The fellow was once a captain at arms for Alestron, before he ran amok and burned down Arithon’s shipyard.’

  As Fionn Areth surged forward, the mate snatched him back with a biting grasp on his shoulder. ‘You will bide your time until things have calmed down. Else I’ll break your crown stay of protection myself, and nail your skinned hide to the mast-head!’

  ‘You’re corrupt as the rest,’ the goatherd accused. ‘Entrapped by his charm and fell shadows.’

  ‘I am Feylind’s,’ the mate said in acid correction. ‘Which means I will watch the man closer than you to be certain her interests aren’t compromised.’

  Surprised to encounter a possible ally, Fionn Areth subsided.

  The defence of the brig continued, apace. By the stern-railing, Arithon hefted the sling, a cork float strung with its streamer and lead pocketed in the mesh. Talvish, head bent, was stringing the bow. Dakar hunkered next to his feet, fiddling with the blunt arrow shafts, while Feylind made comment that lofty excuses were unlikely to forgive his sick penchant for drink.

  ‘Range?’ Vhandon answered to someone’s pitched question. ‘He’s accurate to one hundred yards, else Duke Bransian would have demoted him.’

  ‘That’s sufficient.’ Arithon straightened, his manner turned brisk. ‘If not, we’re beyond all salvage.’ He whirled the sling. String whistled. His ungainly missile shot aloft in a ranging arc, then tumbled and plunged, dead astern. The strung float of cork tumbled, flailing, behind its tied fish weight, then splashed. Ring ripples spread over the mirror-smooth sea.

  Dakar passed off an arrow.

  Talvish, not fumbling, strung the nock, drew, and fired in practised motion. The arrow leaped out in wobbling flight, its tip whittled sharp, and the cut head replaced with one of Arithon’s queer kindling constructs.

  The shot struck the cork float, and the dipped fletching burst into streamered flame.

  Feylind whooped. Arithon whipped the reloaded sling, and the sequence repeated, with the idle crew taking odds with manic abandon.

  ‘We chose them for nerve,’ the mate said, laconic, then shaded his eyes and surveyed the horizon. ‘Steady on, boy. Take hold of the ship. No mistake, we’re about to get hammered.’

  There seemed no disturbance. No cloud-burst approached. The sun shone on varnish and railings, untrammelled, while the air hung lucent and breathlessly still. Yet the mate’s seasoned instinct had not roused in error.

  Against the horizon, where ocean met sky, an angry, dark band raced over the water to meet them.

  ‘Deck there!’ cried the look-out. ‘Heads up, we have trouble!’

  The mate’s shouted order brought the man down from the ratlines, then rousted the crew. ‘Move now! Dog the hatches!’

  Throughout, the paired missiles continued to fly. The sling whistled and released; arrows launched from the bow, until Evenstar’s hull drifted inside a match-stick ring of fluttering flame.

  Late Autumn 5670

  Assault

  By the time the battened hatches were nailed shut, Fionn Areth had insinuated himself amid the party on the quarter-deck, close enough to track Arithon’s least move, and overhear words pitched too low for the sailhands at large. To judge by Dakar’s scowl, the additional fastenings the ship’s joiner had set would do little to stop iyats from breaching the hold. At best, the deterrent might only forestall air-borne objects from straying above deck, there to inflict havoc, or become dispossessed and tossed past hope of salvage into the sea.

  No more could be done. The band of riffled waters raced down on the drifting brig. Unsettled murmurs arose from the crew; of sharper interest to Fionn Areth, the tension that flared between the Master of Shadow and the Mad Prophet.

  ‘Why did you leave Kewar?’ The scorching intensity of the question was pitched to throw its victim off guard.

  Arithon stood, fingers interlaced on the quarter-deck rail. Stripped of his jerkin, he appeared too slight-boned to inspire dread.

  Yet something caused Dakar to draw a hissed breath. ‘Your response was ill-done,’ he persisted. Straight courage, or some driving weight of cold fear pressed him further. ‘You know what must happen. She’ll be duty-bound, now, to leave her safe place in Ath’s hostel. She has no choice but to position herself at your side. Prisoned under her Prime’s direct order, what can she bring except heartache, and a wide-open door to disaster?’

  Fionn Areth was brushed by an unwonted chill. No name had been mentioned. But the woman implied behind Dakar’s rebuke could only be the Koriani enchantress, Elaira. Her entanglement with the Master of Shadow might not be public knowledge; yet in Jaelot, during a healing to restore his lamed knee, the goatherd had witnessed the Masterbard’s song, invoked by no more than the spirit of her intangible presence. Even in recall, the incident burned: its stark clarity etched by the strain of doomed love and the agony of enforced separation.

  Which cruel provocation turned Arithon’s head: his wide-open eyes brightly incensed, he said, ‘Where did you learn what you know?’

  The Mad Prophet flushed. ‘I partnered Kharadmon through the warding of Rockfell.’ Arms folded, he held his mulish ground. ‘The Sorcerer knows of her worth, and her steadfast quality. His concern matches mine. Her love where you are concerned makes too ready a tool for the Prime to enact your destruction.’

  ‘You’ll not broach those fears, here!’ Though Arithon spoke for Dakar’s ear alone, Fionn Areth shamelessly hovered. Even caught second hand, the warning bristled. ‘Your advice is well-meant. And henceforward, unwanted. I will not be governed. Not by her bravery, and not even once by Prime Selidie’s designs, endorsed by your gutless cowardice!’

  ‘The breathing life on this world lies at stake! Against that, th
e crew on this vessel does not signify!’ Ludicrous and fat, eyes blood-shot with drink, Dakar pressed his point, not courageous, but caring. ‘The Prime covets your capture. To gain that end, every one of us serves as your bait! Had you withstood the pressure to rise to her lure, the Koriani Matriarch would forsake her interest. In time, without provocation from you, we would have all been released.’

  Arithon bent his head, exquisite hands now clenched on the taffrail until every knuckle gleamed white. ‘But the teeth in this trap are armed galleys flying the sunwheel banner.’ Against the savagery of repressed emotion, his last line came wholly mild. ‘Dhirken died, Dakar.’

  The riposte scored too hard, after the horror unveiled by today’s flash of prescience: the spellbinder lost words, while threat grew, apace.

  The voracious fury of Selidie’s assault converged across empty water. No storm of fiends ever rivalled the pack descending at speed upon Evenstar. The front line ploughed in as a breaking wave, rushed by a glassine shimmer of air, fractured to rippling distortion. Yet where a mirage would have settled in silence, the sea heaved, snagged to ominous foam. White spouts trampled skywards. They towered and coiled like whipped smoke, then dispersed as though scattered by whimsy.

  ‘You might still fail.’ The Mad Prophet dug in, his obstinacy tempered by pity. ‘Who loses then?’

  Softly, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn gave his answer. ‘There are many reasons to avoid taking risks. Friendship is not among them.’

  ‘You came for Feylind?’ At next breath, the fiends would be on them. Too ill to do battle on two fronts at once, Dakar blotted his sweaty palms on his shirt. ‘Arithon. You are not free to offer yourself as a sacrifice! Your presence here has raised drastic stakes! Damn your birth-born compassion to Sithaer! What you call a risk is too likely to stage the horrific potential for massacre.’

  But response was eclipsed as the on-coming storm trampled into the floating array of lit constructs. If their purpose had been to delay the sprites, enthralling them with the elemental power compacted by Arithon’s talent, that hope died. Wood, fire, cork float, and marked runes, the perimeter laid down through arrows and spells became shredded. The papers with their guarding ciphers exploded to match-stick splinters and smoke. Wind and heat, every coiled force contained by skilled talent, ripped wholesale out of constraint.