Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Watch. Wait. Keep your liege wakeful.’ Hunkered under a cowl of blankets, the Mad Prophet sank his bearded chin on propped fists. ‘If aught else can be done, I’ll instruct you.’

  Too upright to shirk while standing on watch, Vhandon raked an irascible hand through grey hair and finally measured his stricken prince. ‘How long can he last, so?’

  Dakar sighed. ‘Five days, supported by mage-trained faculties, if he wasn’t sustaining a siege. Under present conditions, he’ll have bested fate if he can hold out beyond morning.’

  Rocked back on his heels, the scarred liegeman absorbed this. His silence thereafter spoke volumes, while the nerve-wracking hours of vigil began, that unbearably stretched each passing minute, and magnified minor discomforts. The sloshing pound of water on wood, the watch orders called abovedecks, and the stirring pressure of caged iyats played on, a repetitive cycle of unreal dream, cast outside the sword’s silvered radiance.

  Inside, there was nothing to tend but the lamp. Worse, on occasions when movement was needful, and circumstance called upon Arithon’s skills to sound the precise tones for fiend bane: to let a man come or go through the lines, in order to eat or relieve himself. Between times, sunk into his fathomless trance, the Teir’s’Ffalenn huddled without moving. Awareness pared down to a pinpoint spark, he maintained the fragile strand of intent that upheld the warding spun over the sigil.

  As additional iyats converged on the brig, he dared not expend further effort to rout them. The crew must carry on as they could, standing down fresh bedevilment through emotionless boredom. Starved out of reaction, denied prodding sport, the sprites would flit and possess things at random until the forced draw of the sigil eventually winnowed them into containment.

  Fionn Areth stayed complacent. Between catnaps, or loose conversation with Dakar, he reset the wick of the lamp and refilled the depleted reservoir.

  Toward midnight, Vhandon relented enough to try him at arm wrestling. No weakling, the younger man learned from mistakes. Beneath thin-skinned nerves and volatile temperament, his innate perseverance lent him a natural prowess.

  Daybreak arrived. The bosun shouted the change in the watch. Clad in unlaced jerkin and shirt, Talvish appeared at the lower deck-hatch. ‘Relief,’ he called down. ‘I’ve brought cheese and biscuit and a hide flask of rum. That’s if the iyats don’t savage them, first.’

  His voice, or his agile step on the ladder, roused Arithon out of reverie. He whistled the piercing notes of the threnodies, eyes pinched shut, while Vhandon let down his rolled-up sleeves and relinquished his post to his fellow man-at-arms. Given a parting clap on the back, Fionn Areth was left with the cheerless last wish for survivor’s luck on the battle-line.

  ‘Perish the luck, he has my strong arm,’ Talvish cracked in astringent humour. Arrived, intact, through the dense swarm of fiends, he assessed the disparate company. ‘What were you lot doing all night? Vhan, you look thrashed. Glassy-eyed and useless as a hooked fish someone left too long in the creel.’

  ‘Later,’ said Vhandon, ‘I’ll best you at knives. Sixty yards at a flying target.’ He crossed through the ward, urgent with need to spare Arithon’s dwindling strength.

  Affronted by Talvish’s quicksilver tongue, Fionn Areth regretted to see the older campaigner depart. As the bard’s notes of fiend bane echoed and died, the herder waited for Dakar to stop the barrage of vexation.

  Instead, Talvish was greeted with naked relief. ‘He’s losing ground, quickly’

  Eyebrows raised, fair hair gleaming under the glow of the ward light, Talvish peered downward at his prostrate prince. ‘Are you comatose, or just sleeping?’

  However ragged, the faint smile from Arithon showed welcome.

  The swordsman grinned back. ‘My wee man, it’s tomorrow.’ Rejecting every fraught sign of depletion, he shot out a lean hand, snatched the nearest slack wrist, and hauled his unsteady liege to his feet. ‘Bear up. You’ve got enemies counting on you to maintain your half of the contest.’

  ‘Talvish,’ husked Arithon. ‘You rival the night-stalking weasel, my friend, for your hair-raising cures to clear drowsiness. I’d better pace. Less risk, I think, to fall on my face than lie down for your throat-nipping slaughter.’

  ‘Aye, very well. The cockerels upstairs were glad to be rid of me, too.’ Talvish adjusted his taller frame to assist his liege’s uncertain balance. One glance at the other’s stripped face, and he added, ‘Did you know the cook’s fashed because his best pots got swooped by iyats and chucked themselves overboard?’

  ‘I thought things had gotten a little too quiet.’ Arithon paused for strained laughter. ‘I’ll have a set cast, when we get back to shore. Ones endowed with the bell tones for fiend bane as part of the foundry’s bargain.’

  The exchange touched Fionn Areth to mollified silence. He had known Talvish as gaoler, for months. The man had always struck him as cold, each thought, word, and movement precise as though drilled to impervious perfection. As a killer, the creature knew his job too well. Yet here, that rigid perception broke down. Beyond all regard for stripped pride, Talvish laid his heart bare. No ice remained in those eyes, only grief. An observer could not miss the caring concern as this liegeman attended his prince.

  The apparently casual touch; the irreverent reproof: all were enacted with tacit design to lift Arithon’s flagging spirits.

  ‘Well, I feel like the post propped up by the gate,’ the Master of Shadow replied to the latest prodding remark.

  Talvish grinned. ‘If your joints moaned that much, we would grease them.’ Braced against the plunge of the brig, he held on as his weaving charge faltered. ‘Fits and staggers aside, you’re not going to sit down.’

  They walked to keep Arithon wakeful. Tortuous slow-motion, wobbling circles, around and around the stacked casks. Talvish withstood the tireless course. If the mask sometimes slipped, and his smiles were forced, his agile hands kept their gentleness. At intervals, Dakar broke from his naps and made conversation to revive the bard’s slipping focus.

  Fionn Areth overheard disparate fragments, between his moments of blackout sleep.

  ‘…centaur forges.’ A next scraping step, and Arithon’s tentative question, ‘Did you know? About the awareness instilled by the Paravian craftsmen when they forged my Isaervian sword?’

  ‘No.’ Dakar shifted his haunches, uneasy, or else tiredly reluctant.

  A pause, while the lamp-flame flared in the draught. Then Arithon said, ‘Why did Asandir never tell me she carried mystical properties not meant to be sullied with bloodshed?’

  ‘I didn’t know!’ the Mad Prophet repeated. ‘Between us, you were the initiate master. No Sorcerer will offer advanced knowledge unasked. Even if that stricture had not been kept, were you ready to hear, Teir’s’Ffalenn?’

  The glimmering radiance from the dark blade bared Arithon’s unshielded expression: guilt, and black fear, and the suffocating weight imposed by yet another charge of immeasurable responsibility. ‘In truth, no,’ he admitted. ‘Little has changed. I would still refute the entrapment of my crown ancestry’

  The ship rolled. Talvish compensated. Abovedecks, Feylind’s call to the quartermaster demanded another point on the wind.

  Propped upright, brow knit, the Master of Shadow chased the difficult bent of his thought through his fogging exhaustion. ‘Kamridian must have been an extraordinary king to have had such a gift bestowed on him. If I had to guess, I would have supposed the potential instilled in this blade was never meant to be borne by a mortal.’

  ‘You can’t know that, my friend,’ Dakar stated quietly. ‘Kamridian challenged Kewar’s maze and met his destruction. In his footsteps, you have passed through and survived.’

  Arithon winced. ‘If my life was foretold by aught else but your prophecy, grant me the kindness. Don’t say so.’ Yet the shifting prism of his altered awareness threw back the cut-crystal memory: of a centaur guardian’s words in the maze, spoken in tender remonstrance. ‘Fate’s forger, you
were Named. There lies your destiny, ripe for the hour when you finally embrace the full reach and strength of your power.’

  A slow hour passed. The next followed, arduous, as Arithon’s stumbling progress became too harsh a demand to sustain. When the mate returned to give Talvish relief, the whistle for fiend bane was almost too faint to stand down the horde clumped against the lit circle.

  ‘You should stay outside, Teive,’ Arithon grated. He crouched beside the mound of stacked casks, half-unmoored where his liegeman had left him. ‘I can’t last much longer. Feylind ought to have you at her side if the time comes to launch off the boats.’

  The mate’s silenced gesture released Talvish, who had paused in torn question halfway up the ladder. To Arithon, Teive listed crisp facts. ‘It’s midday already. We’re past a hundred leagues off the coast with a following wind, and a bank of high cirrus for warning. We’ve got heavy weather bearing in from the north. Try the boats, we’ll be dead in a day, either from storm, or exposure.’

  Arithon lifted his head, green eyes tortured. ‘Then we’ve won by stalemate. The Prime Matriarch has to know this.’

  Teive clamped his jaw, silent, while Dakar, from the casks, gave a negative shake of his head. Mage-sense informed him: the sigil embedded in Evenstar’s sheathing still emitted its dissonant spell-craft. Hours had passed without any changes. The relentless flux of quartz-driven assault showed no sign of a wavering break.

  Aware of the bane as a continuous ache, drilling each separate bone, the Master of Shadow shared the agonizing assessment. Alone, beaten white, he sustained the blunt weight of the mate’s speechless accusation.

  Unable to bear the inimical silence, Dakar reminded, ‘His Grace is oathsworn, since Athir. The Fellowship Sorcerers hold his bond in blood. He can’t surrender. Not while he still has access to resource, and not for as long as he lives.’

  Spoken words, and the sting of a knife-cut: by such small acts, a sealed thread of intent, that now spun whole cloth into tragedy.

  Yet it was Arithon’s whispered reply that seized the heart-strings and cruelly twisted. ‘Just keep me awake,’ he implored the mate. ‘By my witnessed permission, freely use whatever method that takes.’

  ‘Then, at your word, we’ll proceed as you wish.’ Teive shouldered the watch. The choice was not willing. The dangerous spark of his latent hostility set even Fionn Areth on edge.

  For as Dakar had forecast, Arithon had worn himself down beyond gentle means to redress. Tranced calm could not restore his taxed resource. Beyond walking, past ability to track an intelligent conversation, he would drift when his shoulder was shaken. Cold water came next, until he started to shiver. Dakar called a halt, then kicked the emptied bucket away as the mate bent to scoop from the bilge.

  ‘No, Teive, no more.’ Knelt in the puddle at Arithon’s side, the Mad Prophet gentled the icy, wracked flesh. ‘We can’t. More such mistreatment will just drive him down.’ Extreme chill now would only hasten unconsciousness. ‘Help me bundle him into dry blankets.’

  The abusive measures they had to use next choked Fionn Areth to tears. Snapped back, time after time, from the sliding fall toward oblivion, Arithon set his teeth. He did not complain. Scarred by past horrors he would not repeat, he endured the crude methods, beyond dignity. Too spent to stifle his reflexive cries, he surfaced, again and again, until his body shuddered and shrank, and flinched at the touch of hands on him.

  When the mate finally balked, the Master of Shadow gasped Feylind’s name. For an interval more, that incentive forced shrinking nerves to sustain.

  Then Dakar recoiled. Arithon railed at him through clenched teeth and reviled the weakness of pity. ‘I have survived Kewar. Can you imagine this feels any worse? Then let me correct your tender presumption. Against loss of this brig, and any life on her, your tormenting jabs are a pittance.’

  Yet his jagged appeal could not lift distress. Defeat lay at hand. A bard wracked by such tremors could not hope to whistle the critical pitch for a fiend bane.

  ‘You will not risk her life,’ Arithon insisted, his fury brought to a scraped whisper.

  Propped by the barrels with his head on his knees, he had roused, barely in time. The ward flickered and dimmed, pale as spun smoke. The ravenous fiends sensed that instant of weakness. Closed in, voracious, they darted and circled, testing the integrity of the barrier.

  Soaked in sweat, Arithon marshalled his fragmented will. He reforged the frayed thread of connection. By arduous increments, the sword’s song levelled out, then burned to full strength, and continued. Dakar offered water. Arithon averted his face. His lips moved without sound, in refusal. The lamp touched his sweat-glazed features like varnish. His eyes were black wells, from the pain. Such extreme pallor might have been bloodless, except for the flushed patches where the nerves ran under the skin. The light taps to cause hurt had been done without marking him, a bitter mercy that served to prolong his wretched state of extremity.

  And already, before the next breath, his lifted chin started to droop.

  ‘As I love the captain, I wasn’t made for this,’ Teive objected, wrung sick.

  ‘I’ll say not,’ whispered Arithon, rammed against the stacked casks. His hands rested limp on the boards where he curled, knees to chest in a trembling knot. ‘Feylind would choose a man with high heart, and not an ounce of viciousness in him. Give Dakar a turn. If he can’t, call on Fionn Areth.’

  Yet the drastic hour had come. Further torment could not drive back the abyss or stave off the numbed surge of exhaustion.

  As the damp, black head dipped, and finally nodded, Dakar arose. He scrounged a scrap of silk, wrapped his grip, and reached to take up the Paravian sword from its upright position in the soaked tarps.

  ‘Mercy no,’ Fionn Areth cried protest. ‘He’s helpless! You can’t draw his blood.’

  Reviled past words, the mate surged erect and restrained the Mad Prophet’s wrist. ‘Enough. No more! Any longer will just break his mind.’

  ‘I know.’ Dakar swallowed. ‘Trust me this far, I can’t continue this, either.’ As the mate’s grasp stayed adamant, he worked his arm free. ‘I’m only going to do as Arithon asked, and lay the sword into his hand.’

  Touch masked by the silk, the spellbinder freed the jammed blade. Each juddering movement came scored in light. The steel spun its radiant mystery, unchecked. Starred rays pierced the darkness like opaline glass, and grace sang beyond hearing, alive with a purity that scoured the hidden depths of the heart. Dakar placed the pommel between Arithon’s slack palms and rested the flat of the blade upright against his slumped shoulder.

  Naught remained to be done.

  Helpless, the three standing vigil confronted the uttermost face of defeat. The Mad Prophet knelt. He gathered Arithon’s hands and closed slackened fingers over the sword’s grip. As he offered the warmth of his presence to ease the slide into unconscious surrender, the mate fetched a blanket. He covered Arithon’s contorted body out of unself-conscious respect.

  ‘You are worth her love,’ he admitted, though the ear that received his tortured tribute had all but passed beyond hearing. ‘Ath grant you peace, I wish I had known that in all other ways, except this.’

  The lamp wavered. Fionn Areth seized on the coward’s excuse to adjust the failing wick. He could not stop listening. Nor force back the wretched, salt burn of his tears, while Arithon dragged in a ratcheting breath, then another, and another one after that. As the soft, silvered glow of the sword flickered also, the Master of Shadow recoiled. He battled in desperate, painstaking stages, until the ward was snatched stable again.

  ‘Don’t fail me,’ he pleaded. ‘One minute more. Prime Selidie could give way and free us.’

  Yet reprieve did not happen. The terrible, wrenching shudders slowed down and subsided. Bruised eyelids fluttered and closed. Crushed under by tiredness, Arithon succumbed, spun down into oblivious sleep.

  First the hazed glow from the sword flickered out. Then the faint, sustained thread of
unearthly music faded under the threshold of hearing. The instant before silence let in the fiends, Dakar straightened.

  ‘Douse the lamp!’ he cracked, urgent.

  Clumsy with cold, Fionn Areth was caught unprepared. He fumbled to unlatch the hot casing.

  The mate surged to help. Spurred to panic, aware of the horrific calamity posed by a fire at sea, he tangled his foot in the blanket. His trip pitched him sprawling across Arithon’s lap, just as the wave of starved fiends arrowed in. Their ravenous plunge sucked the flame to an ember as they absorbed light and heat for replenishment.

  Dakar’s cry for retreat arose over the tumult.

  Then the last, static flux of the ward crumbled down, and more iyats swooped in like fell vengeance. The hostile pack punched in from all sides with the howling force of a hurricane.

  The lamp toppled over. Flame and spilled oil soaked the rucked blankets. Dry cloth served as a wick. A whoosh of raised fire curtained the air. On a buffeting, hot breath, the conflagration seared and spread, lashed into an unnatural, crackling scourge by the horde of rampaging fiends.

  Dakar’s cursed exhortations drowned under raw noise, then a pealing yelp, as Fionn Areth jerked back, cut off by a burgeoning wall of inferno as he snatched to retrieve the dropped bucket.

  ‘All hands!’ yelled the mate, choked by roiling smoke. But the crisis had passed all containment. No frantic salvage by Evenstar’s crew could avert the cascade into ruin.

  Except, at next second, the fire snapped out.

  Darkness plunged down. Dense as thrown ink, shadow sliced like a blade through the carnage. Dakar sensed the slamming descent as a blow, as Arithon, wakened, engaged the birth gift of his mastery.

  Night slapped through the raging wildfire like the dread stuff of chaos, unleashed. No mere barrier to quench light or heat, or subdue the maelstrom of roaring air, this conjury hammered with walloping force. Dakar felt his mage-sight go cold, clapped down, then snuffed as though strangled.