Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  The fiends fed. They gorged, soaking up the burst energies like the howl of an indrawn breath. Beyond sated, the creatures shed the excess in shearing knots that thrashed up whirling water-spouts. The air itself burned. Sound grazed the ears, too high for natural hearing. The buffeting horde shot off acrid smells and hurtful, sharp flashes of light.

  ‘Merciful mother of invention,’ swore Dakar. ‘We can’t survive this ferocious an onslaught!’

  The first fool who panicked would bring the swarm in.

  And yet, no voices raised outcry. Every man present witnessed the force that razed the scrap billets to flotsam. Yet none showed distress. Far from unhinged, Fionn Areth found himself swept by a puzzling bout of deep lassitude. Suspicious, he shared the piquant discovery with Dakar, that the Master of Shadow was not, after all, doing nothing.

  Those disingenuous fingers were cupped at the rail, with Arithon, head bent, singing into them. His melody seemed little more than a whisper. Yet that light, keening sound ran into the wood, arousing a tonal vibration. Fionn Areth sensed the low notes through his feet, as the deck-planking shuddered to resonance. Phrased in rhythmic song, the bard’s spell of calm used the whole brig as its sounding-board. Anxious men who should have quaked outright subsided to half-lidded drowsiness.

  The spellbinder deduced the primary intent. ‘A sleep summoning, surrounding Prime Selidie’s sigil? That’s an ambitious innovation.’

  For the reactive sprites were not clever. Reeled in by the Matriarch’s lure, their interest would hook first on the reckless energies offered by Arithon’s smashed constructs. Though powerful spells of attraction bound the iyats to the Evenstar’s presence, the harmonics of calm now laced through her timbers would offer no sport, by comparison. The swarm might well overlook the hushed ship, or abandon its deadened temptation without contest.

  ‘We won’t be invisible,’ Dakar pointed out, though the bard he addressed stayed engrossed. ‘The line that you draw is critically fine. How long do you think that you can sustain? There’s small chance you can hold your rhythm and pitch without falling prey to distraction.’

  Even Fionn Areth grasped the frightful extent of the danger: if the brig’s crew became too deeply enthralled, or lapsed into an unnatural sleep, they might stagger overboard and drown before they recovered their wits. Yet Arithon’s art shaped the sole, fragile stay, sparing Evenstar from the trap. Dakar was left to stand guard by default, while the first questing fiends flowed across the ship’s decks and explored every object and cranny. All they encountered roused tinkering interest. Their invisible prickle played over the skin, frazzling nerves and striking up gooseflesh. Their invasive tickle poked into men’s ears, and their unpleasant, charged warmth flicked the stilled air to whistles and smears of distortion.

  Despite the close timing, no loose ends remained to tempt the caprice of the sprites. The pin-rails had been stripped. Sail halyards, sheaves, blocks, and running tackle were all stowed out of harm’s way. The galley fire was doused. Ship’s bell and binnacle were unbolted and wrapped under ward, yet the dearth of fodder did not defer exploration. Iyats combed through every spooled rail and bare spar with indefatigable curiosity.

  At the helm, one hand lifted to smother a yawn, Feylind watched the compass lose orientation. The needle revolved in erratic circles, with no quiver to suggest true north. The ship’s wheel spun next. Though its squealing gyrations plumed smoke from the bearings, no crewman risked breaking a hand in prevention. The mate’s astute forethought had seen the rudder pins locked and the steering cables unshackled.

  Eyes shut, Arithon stayed unmoved by the diversion. His lyric tones flowed unimpeded, evoking a powerful symmetry that remade all the world as a formless dream. Apprehensive anxiety settled and faded, as thought and senses spun down into blanketing drowsiness.

  Time passed without measure. Dulled awareness suspended. Fiercely as Fionn Areth resisted, the melody lulled him until he succumbed. He drifted, lost in a somnolence that lasted until a shadow scythed over his face. The brisk slap of wind that rode in its wake jolted open his drooping lids.

  Before him, the startling form of an eagle folded bronze wings on the taffrail.

  The bird was not canny. Preternaturally aware, it swivelled its sleek head. A golden-brown eye fixed on Rathain’s prince. As though called by name, the Master of Shadow fell silent. While the ringing vibrations he had struck through wood dwindled down to a diminished whisper, Arithon matched that intelligent glance. Deep thoughts were shared in communion.

  Then the bird peered askance. Fionn Areth found himself raked in turn by a survey of scorching irony before the sorcerous creature took off. The thunderous launch whipped Arithon’s hair and moved Dakar to shake an impotent fist at the fan of departing tail-feathers.

  ‘Temper, my friend!’ the Teir’s’Ffalenn warned. ‘You don’t want to risk reckless offence in that quarter, or feed the Prime’s crazed visitation.’

  ‘Iyats!’ Dakar slapped his forehead and accosted the prince. ‘Death’s fist on Fate’s Wheel, they’re the least of the dangers you court!’ Perhaps unwisely, since nervous crewmen were listening, he ran on in acid remonstrance. ‘A madman knows not to consort with Davien! His meddling bargains will tear you apart. Who can guess what terrible price you might pay when the hour comes due for the reckoning?’

  ‘To date, Davien’s been the party enacting his dealings with me.’ Arithon stayed disengaged from his spelled defence, though the running vibrations that thrummed through the brig rapidly passed beyond hearing. ‘I hope,’ he said, bland, ‘that your touch with iyats has improved since the last time I saw you.’

  Dakar’s eyes widened. ‘What do you know? What ill-advised counsel has that feckless Sorcerer whispered into your ear?’

  ‘That Prime Selidie has whistled in fresh reinforcements.’ Arithon shared that nuance with Feylind and the mate, then pitched his tone for the crewmen at large. ‘The Koriani Matriarch has raised the stakes and engaged an additional ring of enchantresses. Their meddling has hazed in a new pack of iyats and dispatched them in pursuit. We won’t have an hour. The next wave will strike the ship within minutes, and the unconsumed fuel that’s left from my constructs won’t be enough to detain them.’

  ‘She’ll bid for your capture.’ Distraught, the Mad Prophet jammed his loose shirt-tails into his buttonless waistband. ‘We’re lame chicks in a maelstrom. What under Ath’s sky can you hope to do?’

  Arithon raised his eyebrows. ‘Ever played “duck, duck, goose, who jumps for the wolf”? What else but give three dozen pullets the headache they richly deserve.’ While the deck-crew pressed close, the better to hear, he grinned with insane provocation. ‘Listen up, sluggards! We’ll need softened wax.’ His glance toward Feylind begged her indulgent apology, as, speaking fast, he listed necessities. ‘Plugs of cotton, perhaps torn from the stuffing inside a dry fender, do we have it?’

  ‘We do,’ said the cook, ham fist stroking his beard. ‘Is it ear-plugs you’re wanting, mannie?’

  ‘Some of the men might require that protection.’

  Not waiting for Arithon’s clipped affirmation, the ship’s cooper already leaped to draw the spelled nails from the hatch. Accosted at once by a loose bar of soap, and a barrage of spools, thread denuded, he cursed, batting objects, and descended.

  ‘You’ll have to hang on and ride out the storm,’ the Master of Shadow explained while the anxious deck-hands clustered about him. ‘It boils down to a brute trial of endurance.’ With the Koriani sigil set under the water-line, and inside the hull’s copper sheathing, no hurried remedy could destroy the source. His counter-measure must be diffused through the brig, which meant, as before, the unfiltered effects would also trouble the crew. ‘I’m going to try dissonance. The back-lash may hurt. A few sensitives could suffer headaches, or dizziness. Can we manage to endure a few fiends, and perhaps, a rough spell of dry heaves? Whatever we suffer, I promise, the enchantresses will feel that much worse. The craft they’ve engaged keeps
them linked, in reverse. As long as they test us, they’re vulnerable, and while they work to shepherd their spells, they’ll be held at my mercy, unshielded.’

  The mate’s boisterous guffaw shattered the tension. ‘It’s a straight game of knock-down with thirty-six ladies!’

  As chuckles broke out, Captain Feylind retorted, ‘Dharkaron’s black vengeance, that’s scarcely a contest!’

  ‘Oh, aye.’ The mate elbowed her ribs with good cheer. ‘Hardly worth spit in the wind, for a wager. Not with a lot that’s stone-cold in the twat from a lifetime as tight-lipped virgins!’ He glanced at the men, stoked to brazen challenge. ‘We’re agreed? Let the Prince of Rathain serve the mim-faced old sticks their comeuppance!’

  Handclaps and cheering broke over the deck. Fionn Areth did not share the coarse round of bravado. Far more than alarmed, he glared at the figure still braced, with his unruffled back to the rail. Arithon’s expression showed inquiring diffidence, the deft handling of an appalling dilemma underplayed to the point where his steadfast concern appeared genuine. In fact, he had done little to win peerless loyalty from these rough-cut men, who were strangers.

  ‘They forget they would not be endangered at all if their captain wasn’t enthralled by a felon’s unsavoury company!’ Mistakenly, Fionn Areth had grumbled aloud, raising slurred contradiction from the side-lines.

  ‘He leaves them the dignity and freedom to choose.’ Flushed red, stout arms folded, the Mad Prophet still nursed his sour disapproval. Yet his planted stance—that the Master of Shadow outweighed the game-piece of this one brig, and all of the living aboard her—did not extend to supporting a herder caught up past his depth.

  ‘What makes you defend him?’ Fionn Areth asked, desolate. ‘His criminal record of killing inspires no standard of morals. He enacts no grand cause. Nor does he make any offer of betterment, or promise prosperity, or safety’

  Dakar sighed, then winced for the daylight that mauled his insufferably sore head. ‘Stay your tongue for one day, drop your infantile ideals, and you might understand why those exact qualities make an unimpeachable crown prince.’

  ‘So does frost kill the grass!’ exclaimed Fionn Areth. ‘I might have been cozened to wear a spelled face, but you people react to unnatural straits as though you’ve been bound in possession!’

  The assessment seemed accurate at surface appearance: the helpless brig bobbled like a cast-off cork, bombarded by whizzing fragments of wood, and the random buffet of infested waters. Yet her terrified deck-hands still acted in concert. The hatch stayed unsealed. Brave men went below to net the strayed gear and refasten burst lockers. Look-outs ran aloft to check damages. Each one knew he might face death, even drowning, if the hull sprung her planks or lost caulking. Yet Feylind’s haranguing steadied them on, and the mate seemed at hand to lend help wherever activity faltered. Such team-work, deployed amid staring disaster, did indeed bear the stamp of the prince, self-contained where he knelt, hearing out the stammering distress of the ship’s lad.

  Arithon’s patience was more firm than complacent. His words to the boy were not honeyed with false reassurance.

  Yet where Fionn Areth misperceived the exchange as a sorcerer’s ploy to weave delusion, the Mad Prophet recognized instead the rejection of officious authority. From earliest childhood, Arithon had taught Feylind to know her own strengths, then apply them. He had backed the bold means for her to step forward, and abandoned support, if she shrank. Idolize him though she would, her life in his absence remained self-complete. From the crew she had chosen to man her brig, to the mate who had fathered her children, she had matched the example before her.

  ‘His Grace doesn’t pander to weakness,’ Dakar said. ‘Until you stop reasoning with other men’s thoughts, and start to stand on your own, you won’t see. A hollow mind makes you too ready a dupe. You will dance on the puppet-strings of his enemies, dumb and blind, for as long as you choose not to think.’

  ‘You hated him, once,’ Fionn Areth retorted.

  ‘I also took the Prime’s bespelled arrow in my back to keep him this side of Fate’s Wheel.’ Dakar added, not flinching, ‘My death at the time would have left no regrets. Had Arithon gone down, a true light would have been lost from the world, with the balance tipped toward disaster.’

  Unimpressed, Fionn Areth scoffed. ‘Now who speaks like a hothead fanatic!’

  ‘No, numbskull,’ Dakar snapped, done with futile argument, ‘I speak with the ice-cold eyes of a seer!’

  Fionn Areth was left to himself. Unmoving amid the rush of activity, he stayed fastened on Arithon, now repositioned behind the wheel mount on the quarter-deck. Head tipped askance, the bard appeared to be gathering himself. The flitter of iyats tweaked at his hair, plucked his shirt, and lashed at his unstrung cuffs. He paid them no heed. Stark stillness reflected his focus. A moment passed; two. Then he uttered a line in Paravian, whether prayer, or spell, or outright malediction, Fionn Areth could not determine. Yet when the Master of Shadow clapped his palms on the stern-rail, the thump seemed to shudder, length and beam, through the brig.

  If the frequencies left from his first conjured song had dwindled into subsonics, there was change: the human ear sensed the silence. For an instant, the air hung like crystal. The hustling sailhands ceased movement. The spell-driven fiends also noted the shift. Amid splashing gyrations, they dropped all pursuits as one mind. Wood fragments pattered into the sea and showered the open deck. The ship’s timbers creaked, and her tarred ratlines hummed as the swarm reconverged on their drifting target.

  Their passage flicked skin, tugged at clothing, and rushed the nerves to alarming sensations. Fionn Areth saw their descent as patchy riffles of distortion. The master initiate’s self-aware presence was instantly recognized: Arithon stood erect, his form rippled and hazed as though viewed through a pane of blown glass.

  Frightened, but not enough to stand down, Fionn Areth held his post, while the fiends bore in and gadded. Forced to slap down his sleeves, then snatch at his billowing shirt-tails, the herder huffed curses. His irritation incited the harrying swarm. His hair was tousled, then pulled, and snarled to elf locks. More sprites descended. Reaction did nothing but spur on their mischief. Fionn Areth found himself pinched and prodded, tickled and stung, bedevilled as though plagued by hornets.

  If Arithon accomplished aught by the stern-rail, his conjury brought no relief. Iyats flitted at will through the ship, indulging their penchant for havoc. The cook’s shouts arose as they accosted the galley in a swarm of manic fury. Possessed pots clattered and clanked, and whisked air-borne, until the jarring clash of repeated collisions made the men wish they had been born deaf. Elsewhere in the forecastle, a sea chest was breached. Loose playing cards kited and fluttered underfoot, and a stray set of dice chased them, rattling.

  The mate shouted to the Mad Prophet, ‘Fiends are fouling the mainstay. Can you do aught to lay down the splice and keep it from coming unravelled?’

  ‘Hung-over and sick?’ Dakar snarled through his teeth.

  Yet the mast could come down, if the troubled rope parted. The spellbinder ground the six of clubs underfoot, wiped his hands, and manfully hauled his fat carcass into the rigging. Battered and poked, then drubbed by hurled water, he clung in the main-top crow’s nest. Ill though he was, with raw talents depleted, he did what he could, spinning small wards of binding to prevent the whips on the splices from coming unlaced in the maelstrom.

  The iyats kept coming. Their relentless invention kinked the lower yard lifts into knots, and rummaged and thumped through the lockers. The objects meticulously battened inside thrashed to burst free, breaking latches. With time, the assault would exhaust the charms of protection set into the nails. No harassed crew could long retain equilibrium amid the unravelling mayhem.

  Even a landsman could see that the Evenstar was outmatched. Against mounting despair that would shatter morale, Arithon started to sing.

  As before, his grasp of trued sound translated itself throughout the b
rig’s timbers. The effect harrowed every-one, a harsh, hurtful dissonance that invoked a stinging range of harmonics. The buzzing frequencies stunned thought and nerve, then trammelled, aching, through bone. The bruising vibration deepened and built. It swelled, relentless, acquired jangling overtones, then drilled into reverberations like mallet-struck iron.

  Men winced at each movement. The most sensitive clapped tormented hands to their heads, as their skulls went to war with their ear-drums. Others lost balance and tempers. Frayed emotions in turn spurred the sprites to more mischief. Energy-gorged, they scrambled their mad acquisitions on tangents, or plunged them into the sea with vehement spouts of shot spray. Soaked where she knelt, striving to free a man’s jammed boot from a scupper, Feylind gasped with breathless laughter.

  ‘Dharkaron’s vengeance, if we feel this bad, imagine how wretched those witches must be, linked as they are to a forsaken sigil that’s fastened against our ship’s timbers.’

  ‘Remember, we only have to outlast them!’ the mate cried to back her encouragement.

  More fiends descended. The assault gained force. Battered and wrung nauseous, Fionn Areth backed against the mizenmast pin-rail. Whirled dizzy, he could scarcely stand up, far less command the concentration a bard must sustain to unreel his bane-song. The effort behind that seamless delivery defied every concept of reckoning. Yet Arithon’s stance showed no drastic change. He remained poised with bent head, flattened hands braced on the wheel mount. Around him, the air was pock-marked with ripples. The iyats detected his adamant presence. They pestered and pried, testing the least tiny fissure of strain stitched like unseen thread through his aura.