Traitor's Knot

by Janny Wurts

  ‘You would have more security,’ Lysaer observed, not oblivious. ‘We haven’t much farther. The archway’s just ahead.’

  ‘One crossbolt would kill you,’ Sulfin Evend said, curt. Eyes fixed forward, he stared through the gossamer form of a high king clad in unadorned deer-hide. That royal, also, had walked without arms. In an antique serenity lost with the rebellion, the pellucid imprint of a young woman awaited that forgotten, past home-coming. The young king enfolded her in his embrace. Her loose hair streamed over his shapely, taut hands; words or laughter, their reunion stayed silent.

  At next step, their twined forms flickered, then vanished. The trammelled air cleared. Dropped out of tranced vision, hit by deafening noise, Sulfin Evend swore and recovered himself. His foot columns now crossed over the old city gate, where Avenor’s past keep underlay the new paving. The cavernous new portal of brick just ahead obscured his critical view of the square, foreclosing his chance for advance preparation. Since an ambush might easily lurk behind the effusive welcome, Lysaer s’Ilessid saw reason enough to awaken the light of his gift. Illumination bloomed overhead as the column marched into the passage spanning the four outer keeps.

  Despite flooding brilliance, Sulfin Evend felt cold as his tight-knit company tramped under the embrasured defences. The mounted, caparisoned ranks of Avenor’s royal guard met them on the far side. The moment stung, for the fact there was no princess waiting, and no red-haired crown heir standing tall to greet his father’s return.

  Like a blow, one recalled that Kevor s’Ilessid had been killed by Khadrim fire on a past winter foray through Westwood.

  How Lysaer s’Ilessid managed his grief, no man knew. His beautiful features were forge-hammered iron as the spires of the state palace fell behind, then the pennoned cornices of Avenor’s guild-houses and garrison armoury. Beyond the inner gate and the citadel bastion, the roadway disgorged into the open plaza, its paved sunwheel a dazzling glory of gold-and-white brick, and its central, railed dais with its gilded cupola, shimmering under full sun.

  No more spirit forms lurked. Instead, the cold air abraded the skin with something more than winter’s ice clarity. Here, where a Second Age focus circle underlay the Alliance renovation, the converging flux of the first lane’s current scoured off the wisped cry of past history. On the hour Asandir had arranged the arcane transfer from Althain Tower to this place, Sulfin Evend had encountered no Sighted visions. Only the surging pulse of Athera flowed here, an ephemeral sense of the magnetic forces that shimmered past range of perception.

  By night, stars had burned with unnatural brilliance. Under daylight, without any Fellowship escort, the plaza heaved with movement and noise. A packed mass of pink faces and wealth, Avenor’s court displayed its full plumage to greet the return of the Blessed Prince. The celebration seemed a sure sign that the high council had touted the stalemate at Kewar as a victory for the Light. Effusive citizens stamped and teemed, bearing lit candles or flourishing streamers. At the first dazzling glimpse of the avatar, the barrage of raw sound became shattering.

  Aware, through the tumult, of Sulfin Evend’s locked frown, Lysaer said, ‘What did you expect? No matter how sudden my home-coming, the masses thrive upon spectacle and formal ceremony’

  ‘I don’t have to like it,’ Sulfin Evend snapped back.

  Hand closed on the cross-wrapped grip of his sword, he glanced forward to measure the welcome turned out on the central dais. And there, underneath the domed roof and draped banners, the uncanny danger he feared lurked in state finery to meet them.

  Shade itself seemed to darken in that one place. Unlike the Sighted shimmer of spirit forms, this horrific, smoky roil of trapped shades seemed the dance of the damned out of Sithaer. Their shrouding presence spindled the air like black snags of raw silk, naked forms wound and pulled to distortion. The horror he viewed was no trivial handful of violations enacted on innocent victims. In cold fact, the aberrant corruption of the realm’s ranking peers was entrenched, the work of a cult fed to saturation by long-standing practice of vice. The glittering party arrayed on the dais wore its unseen miasma, thick as the clogged scum on a pond.

  ‘Mercy on us, they’re riddled!’ Sulfin Evend gasped, appalled. ‘Strike them from a distance, I can’t promise they’ll drop.’

  ‘Then we shall close in and trust to surprise,’ Lysaer answered. ‘I refuse to retreat. The fifty we have must rise to the challenge. You hand-picked each one for his courage.’

  Yet a fearless advance could not abrogate danger. ‘You face power enough to make dead flesh walk!’

  The nightmarish warning posed no deterrent. Lysaer held to his steady advance, where even a madman should falter.

  Sulfin Evend swore desperately under his breath. Cult minions relished murder as a hunting sport. They would have their eye fixed on one standing target, where, from a distance, his men-at-arms had no means to differentiate the blameless bystanders from the afflicted.

  His sharp guard of veterans would be utterly hobbled. Puppet shells ruled by necromancy wore their haze of infection beyond range of unSighted vision. No abnormal behaviour marked them apart. They awaited Lysaer’s approach in cold ambush, knowing he had slipped through their cult’s fingers at Erdane, and now lurking shoulder to shoulder with innocents, secure in their mantles of high office.

  Sulfin Evend battled an uprush of nausea. To a seer whose gifted talent was truth, the dais ahead was murky and crawling: a rippling, tormented fabric of shades whose slavery transcended mortality. Smeared faces reflected their ghastly torment, gibbering in silenced agony. Elongated hands snatched and plucked and implored, each pitiful gesture a mute cry for mercy. Women, children, babes, and old men, the necromancers’ captive prey drifted as smoke suspended in swirling oil.

  And through them, a thousand dire sources of threat: the jewelled pins, the ceremonial knives, the gentlemen’s spiked canes, and parade arms—any one of which might be turned to draw Lysaer’s blood. Sulfin Evend wondered in harrowed distress if his sole option would be to throw himself bodily in front of his heedless prince.

  Worse, the palace guard stood at the fore. Well trained, fully armed, their front ranks were equipped with cross-bows. Sulfin Evend saw, horrified, that he could not be sure the elite captain appointed to their command was untouched by the deadly taint.

  ‘Lysaer, your light!’ he exhorted. ‘You have to dazzle them, now!’

  ‘… seems excessive to stage an intense display,’ Lysaer s’Ilessid demurred through the welter of noise.

  ‘Do it, no argument!’ The Lord Commander’s shout was imperative. ‘Fires of Sithaer, this is a staged trap! Your regency ministers are not just suborned, but replaced by cultists who practise enslavement. Fail me once, and you won’t leave this plaza unscathed, nor will one man among the picked company I’ve brought to stand at your back.’

  ‘My high council’s turned? All of them?’ Lysaer’s shock was shrill. Targeted by worse than invasive conspiracy, he did what was asked: augmented the halo cast by his gift. The blast cracked the surrounding air to white fire and unleashed a harsh back-lash of heat. ‘Names,’ he insisted, his face a stamped mask. ‘Give me names! I’ll serve every one who’s transgressed by black arts under the arm of crown justice!’

  The roar of the awe-struck crowd redoubled and slammed like a living wave through the square. Sulfin Evend walked battered and blinded. ‘I would give you corpses, run through with cold steel,’ he snarled, though grisly truth made that promise a mockery. Brute force could not grant his liege a defence, or win his best company their deliverance. Not against a worked evil that fouled the natural turn of Fate’s Wheel.

  Fear numbed the mind, that the horror ahead outstripped every mortal protection. Sulfin Evend was seized by the anguished need for a greater wisdom to stand alongside him. His scalding appeal expected no answer. Yet he walked inside a Paravian focus ring, bound by a caithdein’s blood pledge. An arcane confluence of energy aligned. His acute, inner cry burned into the flux
as it peaked towards crest at high noon.

  Forces inherent in the land itself captured that crystalline thought, and one man’s piercing desire for balance engaged the heartcore of the mysteries.

  Sulfin Evend felt a fist of pure energy punch through the wall of his chest. His breached heart opened up. Ripped through by a thundering wind from the void, he reeled, all but unmoored. The bone-rattling din of the mob fell away. Firm boundaries dissolved into distance. Between one step and the next, he was here and also there, hurled back to the moment at Althain Tower as he spoke a vow to serve Tysan, and a knife in the hand of a Fellowship Sorcerer touched his wrist and cracked open the vault of his inner awareness.

  Then and now, Sulfin Evend’s perception arced upwards. A force outside comprehension embraced him: fluid as light, gentle as breeze, and as joyously silent as dew on a leaf under starlight. The moment here, now, and there, then, became as unknowably vast as eternity: but the Sorcerer who cradled his being was not any longer Asandir.

  Instead, Sulfin Evend knew the Warden of Althain. Sethvir appeared first in his robes of maroon velvet; then as a presence half-seen, bundled into an astonishing weave of soft light; then as a withered old man, pillowed unconscious in the flood of a candle-flame…

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Sulfin Evend gasped, startled. His words echoed. Their form was both spoken and not: he existed in twofold awareness. Both in and not in the King’s Chamber at Althain Tower; and also, amid the winter chill plaza in Tysan’s capital of Avenor.

  Sethvir’s response reflected grave calm. ‘Don’t try. Stop thinking. Just listen. Accept the gift of my experience.’

  Sulfin Evend still heard the din of the throng, registered the passing impression that Lysaer s’Ilessid was speaking. Yet the core of his mind that existed at Althain enfolded him in pristine silence. All else lost meaning. Here, the cold air glued his skin into space. From there, his earth-bound form sheared to gauze, while his unfettered mind spiralled free.

  As well, the dazzle of Lysaer’s gift seemed reduced to translucent glass. Where the cupola loomed, packed to crowding with state figures clothed in gaudy panoply, Sulfin Evend saw outside the shocked shell of his intellect. His greater Sight unveiled all of the names. The creatures entrapped by the cult’s twisted influence stood exposed, their corrosive threat vivid as blight.

  ‘How can I contain this?’ Sulfin Evend quailed, winnowed helpless before the depth of a horror that held force and darkness to swallow the spark of his fragile mortality. ‘Such knowledge lies past me.’

  ‘Knowledge is of the moment’, Sethvir stated in gentle correction. ‘Caithdein, Sulfin Evend, your claim to serve balance has been witnessed and heard. Your oath as permission: my wisdom is freed to stand upon yours. Go forward, self-determined, and place trust in that truth. Let my actions speak through you. Or fail. You act on your merits, both ways.’

  Sulfin Evend knew terror. The withering sense of his personal inadequacy crushed him down. Against cringing retreat, he held one silken thread: a touch sustained in ephemeral connection through the heart of Athera’s grand mystery. Faced by the unknown on both fronts, he chose.

  He answered the force that addressed him with tenderness and supported his short-falls with caring.

  Sulfin Evend advanced, still subsumed by the paradox. The slip-stream of time flowed around him and through the pin-point moment that sealed his blood oath. Caithdein, he had been forged by a Fellowship ritual that made him as vessel and conduit. Amid his drilled column of steadfast, armed men, he heard himself call for a cordon. ‘You’ll surround the state figures installed on the dais!’ His following instructions were fast and explicit: the deployment must happen without fuss or fanfare, an apparent precaution to curb the flash-point excitement showed by the crowd.

  As his armed column closed in on the cupola, Sulfin Evend capped his hurried instructions with specifics for his bursar and both petty officers. ‘By the laws of crown justice, we have thirteen conspirators to arrest before the hour of noon. They will be charged here. You will not touch their flesh! Leave me to set them in shackles. If they resist, or try to flee, by my orders the men will drop them point-blank, using the iron-tipped crossbolts.’

  Netted in Lysaer’s light, enveloped amid the transcendent shimmer of lane flux, Sulfin Evend charged his acting captain to make ready with the silver manacles.

  Then he delivered the list of the conspirators to Lysaer s’Ilessid, beside him. ‘High Priest Cerebeld, and his four senior acolytes. Lord Chancellor Quinold, Lord Secretary of the Treasury Eilish, Gace Steward, the Lord Keeper of the Gates, Erdane’s Guild Ambassador Koshlin, the Lord High Justiciar Varrun, Avenor’s Guild Ministers Odrey and Tellesec. My prince, no heroics! For self-preservation, you will stand out of reach as you denounce each offender for treason.’

  Then the cupola loomed through the fireburst of light. The archers deployed. With the standard-bearers positioned at either flank, Sulfin Evend advanced up the dais stair at the side of the Blessed Prince. Split perception showed him the high council officials in their welcoming row, clad in scintillant finery and squinting into the dazzle of Lysaer’s explosive display. Though he moved, his frame of perception seemed arrested: the twined confluence of lane flux and awareness reduced the flap of the banners to slow-motion ripples; at Althain, the knife-cut still flicked his bared wrist. Framed through sundered senses, Sulfin Evend heard Lysaer’s voice, pronouncing the accusations. Each syllable seemed unnaturally stretched out, sound suspended over the infinite well of a cognizance hurled past the veil.

  In simultaneous presence, the Fellowship Sorcerer linked through his being spoke also: there and now and forever, Sethvir’s phrases in actualized Paravian struck the air like bronze chimes and rippled a wave through the cloth of existence.

  Awareness transfixed, Sulfin Evend shuddered with gooseflesh: for the Sorcerer’s greater knowing arced through him. Eternity held the strung pause between words. Self-doubt burned away in the fire of willed choice. The required authority to secure the land arose from the core of his being. His consent shaped desire to partner the grand dance and see discord reworked into harmony. As Sethvir’s masterful guidance touched through, Sulfin Evend let go in release; and mystery answered, unstoppable.

  ‘… for the crime of conspiracy, murder, and dark practice,’ the Blessed prince was pronouncing; while through a man who stood, blood and bone, as caithdein, Althain’s Warden’s words wound and braided, in and between time and space. ‘…for transgression of the sacrosanct freedoms held by the compact, your rights are called forfeit…’

  Dizzied by the multiplied stream of sensation, awash in the uncanny blaze of the lane flux, Sulfin Evend reached the stair-head. He accepted the first set of shackles. Then he advanced on the creature before him. What had once been human wore gold-edged robes and fair skin. The being that bore the semblance of smiling form was not at one with life, but stitched with dark lines in a scatter of ring-rippled patterns. It moved and breathed, but did neither. Its presence cried wrongness, until the very air drawn into its lungs recoiled from the aberrant state of warped flesh.

  Sulfin Evend met that one’s eyes, saw them narrow with sharp recognition. Braced by the powers of a Fellowship Sorcerer, he moved, against horror, into an aura poisoned by the trapped shades of three women and a girl-child. Wisps though they were, their piteous cries shredded the world, without sound. ‘High Priest Cerebeld!’

  Against his bold denouncement of the accused, Sulfin Evend heard, far distant, from Althain, Sethvir’s voice Name the ghosts of the women, then tenderly claim the small child. Their tears fell and fell, in yet another place; while the lane forces crested in the plaza at Avenor, crackling the winter air into bands of blue-and-violet lightning.

  ‘You!’ gasped the High Priest. His address was directed to something beyond sight, and his outraged stance seemed struck torpid. Sulfin Evend matched the cult puppet’s scorching glare, unafraid: for another presence at Althain Tower also looked out of his eyes. />
  ‘You are doomed,’ he felt himself prompted to say. ‘The blameless spirits your masters have bound are set free, and the law of the compact declares the vessel that used them as forfeit!’

  Sulfin Evend lifted the silver shackles to take charge. Other hands moved, as though covering his own. The Alliance Lord Commander had no chance for wonder. He was kneeling at Althain, and standing at Avenor: one being whose greater existence had burned into form, split by a lens of simultaneity. His fingers and Sethvir’s seemed gloved in white light. In shared volition, Sulfin Evend reached out and bundled the High Priest’s arms behind his back. When he snapped the locks shut over the prisoner’s wrists, runes drawn by the trained might of a Sorcerer flared and sank into the metal. A brief chill swept his senses. The tormented shades dissolved out of bondage, whisked away by a shimmer of opalescent flame.

  Sulfin Evend breasted the scour of lane flux. Each word and step guided, he shackled the next man in line, then the next. As the corrupt accused were bound into custody, he heard the distanced echo, as Althain’s Warden pronounced other names: and the spirits enslaved by the dark arts of necromancy received the mercy of their release.

  Seconds lagged in suspension. Each figure set in manacles seemed a slow-moving wax doll, frozen between breath and motion. Voice spoken in Avenor and voice heard at Althain seemed two dreaming threads spun into a single twined strand. Sethvir’s phrases razed a bell tone through muscle and bone, while ephemeral light scoured, and the lane flux sleeted bands of harmonics through the matrix between body and spirit.

  The twelfth pair of shackles had been set in place when the noon lane tide’s crest waned and subsided. The confluence of the grand mysteries receded. Streaming sweat, Sulfin Evend folded back into himself. Alone as a man, he found himself mortal, and locked eye to eye with the trapped fury of a dozen crown traitors arrested for dealings with necromancy.