Traitor's Knot (Light & Shadow 07)

by Janny Wurts

  Now committed past help, Sulfin Evend gripped the obsidian handle and cut the dressing off his marked wrist. The blind woman's instructions rang still through his mind, their cadence exactingly wary.' 'You will make the last circle, beginning at north. Reopen the wound that you made to swear oath. The rite bound you to the land for a term of life service. Used rightly, its virtues will answer.'

  Sulfin Evend traced out the glistening red line, for the fourth and last time surrounding himself and the comatose prince, stretched naked as birth on the floor-boards. Then he recited the time-honoured words that called the four elements to guard point.

  'The necromancer's victim will regain his awareness, about now,' the elderly seeress had cautioned: and Lysaer had. His sapphire eyes were wide-open. His pupils, distended, were bottomless black, and his limbs, bound in iron possession. First focused by pain, the Divine Prince encountered the horrid discovery that he was utterly helpless. Deadened nerves denied him the power to move or cry out in furious protest.

  'He will feel the halter of-power laid on him, but not recognize you as his saviour. Stay vigilant, young man. Set one foot awry, displace any of your circles, and all your protections lie forfeit. Fail here, and you will fall prey to the uncanny forces that bid to break through. The necromancers whose binding is threatened will strive to reaffirm their disturbed ties of possession. You stand in their way, your work seeks to defy them. They will strike you down, if a slipshod step

  shows them the least little sign of a weakness.'

  Lysaer would be terrified. His irate stare reflected no less than the wracking shock of betrayal. His most-trusted field officer surely appeared in league with a shadow-sent sorcerer.

  Unwilling to suffer that stark, anguished gaze, forbidden to speak the one kindly phrase that might mend broken confidence, Sulfin Evend ripped the silk hem of the shirt into strips. Wedded to his unassailable purpose, he knotted a cuff around each of Lysaer's slack wrists. Then he bound each slender ankle in turn. He soaked the dried sea sponge the seeress had given, and using the cloth to avert a chance touch, washed every last patch of bared flesh with the herbal brew in the basin. He had no time to make his ablutions tender. Lysaer s'Ilessid lay supine throughout, unable to offer resistance. His birth gift of light would not rise through the bindings laid down by the knife-cut circles.

  The defences were holding firm, a back-handed blessing: even minor instruction in arcane knowledge would have allowed Lysaer to snap the stay set on his will. No such knowledge informed him. Bitterly helpless, shamed beyond pride, he suffered the cavalier handling. Those gemstone eyes burned with a cognizant rage that would have raised scorching light on a thought, and blasted his tormentor down to a cinder.

  Silenced by the demands of the ritual, Sulfin Evend could ask for no leave; could not for decency's sake beg understanding or forgiveness. He gathered the four copper nails from the seeress, then the granite stone pried from her hearth. His heart closed to mercy, he pierced the tied knots in the cloth and fixed his liege's cuffed limbs to the floor-boards.

  Lysaer's outrage drilled into his turned back as he hammered. Sulfin Evend held steadfast. The seeress's dry voice instructed from memory, 'You must break the bowl, next. Ah, no! Foolish man, you will never unwrap it! Those sigils incised on the rim channel power. Harm could strike at you, through your unshielded vision, or worse. The unclean powers engendered by necromancy might open a-portal within your defensive circles. Keep the bowl veiled. Use the stone. Crush the clay through the cloth. Now, be warned. The act will cause pain, for the resonance of shed blood on that vessel will harbour far more than residual spell-craft. As the sigils are shattered, their forced bond will release. The matrix that shackles the spirit will break, and Lysaer will feel the unpleasant shock as it happens.'

  Sulfin Evend braced his nerves. Rock in hand, black hair soaked with sweat, he groped through the masking layer of cloth and sorted the ugly contents by feel. Then he aimed for the bowl and brought the rock down with all of his war-hardened strength.

  Pottery smashed with a muffled thump, and Lysaer s'Ilessid screamed. High and thin as a wounded rabbit, his keening note sawed the stark fabric of silence and extended beyond all endurance. Aching, Sulfin Evend crashed the stone down again. Blow after blow, he hammered into the cloth, and pulverized the burst fragments. Lysaer whimpered and cried. He howled in agony. Contorted spasms wracked his splayed form. His back arched. The ties that entrapped him tore his fine skin, as his vibrating heels drummed the floor-boards.

  Horrified, Sulfin Evend pressed on. Lysaer's distress would not ease, while he faltered. Reprieve could not happen before he enacted the full course of the banishing ritual. His hand shook. His eyes blurred with tears. He exchanged the stone for the black-handled knife, and rinsed the blade in the basin.

  Enithen Tuer had warned of worse yet to come. Back in her attic, Sulfin Evend believed that she mocked him. Now all but unhinged by the force of his pity, he realized she had exhorted him out of heart-felt compassion.

  A wiser man might have listened and walked free: more than a life debt attended this balance. Yet the choice of that moment was forfeit, and the hour too late to turn back.

  Sulfin Evend lifted the flint dagger point over his liege's navel. Lips sealed, throat locked, he cut swiftly. The small flesh wound welled scarlet: the indented scar that once tied the cord to the mother filled and ran with the blood of the child. Sulfin Evend pronounced the birth name of his prince, then phrased the Paravian invocation for prime power. He capped his appeal with a plea that was mortal, common to all of humanity.

  'I demand this man's freedom! By right of birth, by right of life, by right of spirit, by the right of the undying light that sources his greater being, let him reclaim the pure truth of his wholeness. He is, himself, sovereign, alive by free will.'

  'You will then cut the cords,' Enithen Tuer had instructed. 'By your born talent, one by one, you must feel them. Leave the one you will find at his brow! You must not touch that tie! If you slip, brave man, if you strike that last bonding, even by chance, you will do worse than destroy the victim you have set your very self at risk to preserve. Not only would you bring yourself under attack, you would call forfeit Lysaer's first claim to autonomy. His will would be lost, forever enslaved through your act to the undying web of the necromancers.'

  Sulfin Evend cleaned the stained knife. Left hand raised, fingers spread, he sounded the space above Lysaer's straining body with testing intent. Where he detected the invisible threads of resistance, he slashed the stream of energy crosswise with the black flint. At each cut, the air thrummed with vibrations past the range of his natural hearing. Lysaer shuddered and cried. Tears streaked down his temples. He recoiled, flinching, as though each encounter that disturbed the cords left him burned. Sulfin Evend barred his torn heart. Beyond mercy, he quartered the prince's stretched flesh, up and down, across the torso, at each ear, and over the crown, then down every strained limb. Each methodical pass, he nipped the bands of spelled energy, however small and fine.

  Dumb exhaustion set in, then shivering nausea. Sulfin Evend persisted, while Lysaer's sobs dwindled. Long before the finish, the flesh he worked over subsided to a flaccid chill. Taut skin shuddered and streamed poisoned sweat, while the pounding pulse in the stretched veins of the neck raced as though the victim was set under torture.

  Sulfin Evend. swiped back his drenched hair. Thread after thread, he tested and sundered, until only the last tie remained. By then, Lysaer's breathing was broken and harsh, beaten down to the verge of extremity.

  'You may think your liege is near death from shock,' the seeress had said of this jointure. 'As you love life, if you care for his spirit, I charge you not to befooled!'

  Set back on his heels, Sulfin Evend regrouped. Weariness wracked him. Every nerve in his body felt sickened. The hearth-fire had subsided to a bed of dull coals, painting the chamber in textureless shadow. Inside the cut circles, the close-woven air seemed as the walls of a tomb, rippled with
sullen heat and cloying with blood smell, wet charcoal, and herb smoke. The single man, striving, sensed the trembling web of the cult's powers coiled tight through the gloom. Sweat burned through his lashes and scoured his eyes, and fear coiled cold in his vitals. Come triumph, or ruin, the dread crux was upon him.

  Direct touch at this stage could not be avoided, a pitfall of consummate danger. Enithen Tuer had told him, unflinching: the salvage he staked his life to complete was all but predestined to fail.

  'There is no. recourse,' she explained, unequivocal. 'The necromancers snared Lysaer by willing consent. Consciously, he must revoke their foul hold. Your prince has to wield the knife by his own hand. His free choice alone can release the last binding.'

  Sulfin Evend braced for the final contest. Straddled across Lysaer's helpless, stripped body, he reached for the left wrist to slice away the silk binding.

  'Your loyal heart will lay open your defences,' the wise old seeress had cautioned. 'Since the first moment you severed the auric streams tapped by the cultists to siphon vitality, you will have unsealed a self-contained line of spell-craft. Touch the victim, and the imbalanced conduit will affix to you. Until the remaining cord is destroyed, your strength will be drained to replenish Lysaer. Each moment thenceforward will sap you, brave man. Your prince will revive, and you will diminish. With no effort at all, the bound victim might bring the enemy's work to completion. He need do nothing more than outlast you.'

  Sulfin Evend had met her concern with his fixed choice to go forward. 'I'll trust Lysaer's innate gift of justice will lend me the opening to prevail.'

  Yet words were not action. No stringent warning prepared: first contact ignited a welter of pain.

  Hard resolve could not reconcile the chain-lightning jolt that slammed through mind and senses. Hurled headlong into vertigo, Sulfin Evend reeled, cut adrift, as the explosive shock flayed his awareness. On blind fear, he grappled. The parasitic evil that leached life and breath could bring him down just as fast as the rush of arterial bleeding. He could not pull back. The die had been cast. Mulish courage was not going to save him. Lysaer would be lost for his fatal mistake: the spelled creature whose savage, blue eyes reviled him would never accept a clean death, far less comprehend the chance of a self-claimed redemption.

  Tonight's ruin would seed a future of ashes.

  The paragon who wielded the power of Light would become a puppet, possessed by the will of reanimate shades. His suborned majesty would destroy the very Alliance whose cause was to banish the oppression of Shadow and tyranny.

  Sulfin Evend locked down his jagged scream. Beyond help or resource, he cut the silk restraining his liege's left hand. Pain slowed his reflexes. With humiliating ease, Lysaer's bone-slender wrist twisted free of his sweaty grasp.

  The commander deflected the fingers that jabbed at his face. War-trained to fight, he discarded the knife. A feint, a wild snatch, and he snapped a fresh hold. His two-fisted grip bore down on Lysaer's forearm, while the spells of the necromancer sucked at him like a lamprey and snapped his live tissue to agony.

  Lysaer bucked under him. With one wrist and both ankles still constrained, there should not have been any contest; except that vile craft-work fuelled his manic strength, and likewise sapped his beset opponent.

  'Your treason won't take me,' Lysaer gasped, enraged.

  Whipped to tears, panting through lancing pain, Sulfin Evend could not snatch the resource for answer. Without words, against hope, he must mend shattered trust, before the fell forces his meddling had unleashed drained off his life and claimed both of them.

  Where muscle failed, he used leverage and weight, jammed the murdering fist to the floor. He knew where the nerve ran, and jabbed, as he must. Through Lysaer's snarled curses, Sulfin Evend bore in. He matched that incensed blue stare until the wrist that he savaged went limp in his ruthless grasp. He

  groped, one-handed, recovered the knife.

  Fury whipped through his liege's taut frame. Sulfin Evend grappled drawn wire and steel. He held on, while faintness sucked at his balance. His stomach felt yanked inside out, while his hands and feet came unravelled and dissolved into substanceless air. Every skilled art of war, all his tricks of in-fighting, ebbed away under roaring vertigo. Rushed witless, he fell back on expedience, and gouged a knee into Lysaer's exposed groin.

  The prince curled, caught short by the cruel restraints. The pinched breath in his nostrils passed, whistling.

  He gasped, while his officer hefted the knife. Grainy flint blade, and sweat-printed obsidian handle: the weapon seemed made for no purposeful good. Yet its foreboding appearance could not compare with the obscene shard of knapped bone that Lysaer had used to enslave himself. The Lord Commander levelled the dagger before his liege's wracked face. Reeling, he waited. Through surge upon surge of debilitating torment, he held on until those gemstone-blue eyes showed the flicker of restored comprehension.

  Moving slowly, he reversed the keen edge, then laid the stone handle in the slack fingers of Lysaer's pinned hand.

  He relaxed his grip slightly, sensed the impulse to kill, and locked his fist down once again. If the venomous, stinging pain was receding, a numbing fog now invaded his being. Sulfin Evend battled its deadening lethargy. He would persevere; even failing, he must. He released his clamped hold on his liege's bruised forearm.

  Lysaer's fingers, too willing, stayed clenched on the knife. Wrung to reeling faintness, Sulfin Evend tried release.

  The blade dived for him, glittering. He parried with his forearm, felt the grazed burn of flesh meeting flesh. His instinctive counter-response proved too brutal: Lysaer's hand released, skating the weapon in a clattering spin over the wax-polished floor-boards.

  Sulfin Evend hurled sidewards, pinned the flying blade before its slide escaped the protective circles. Hard-breathing, his raced pulse a roar in his ears, he battled his up-ended senses. Despair struck: he was not going to rally. The hesitation as he tried to regroup would only sink him, unconscious. He rolled again, used dead weight to bear Lysaer backwards. Lose his hold now, and the other, bound arm would wrestle free of the silk wristband.

  Couched on straining flesh, gut-winded and sick, Sulfin Evend placed the haft of the knife into Lysaer's slack palm once more. The wrist he crushed to submission was scuffed raw, congested with bruises from brutal handling. Beyond pity, the commander grappled his ebbing strength. Each second he succumbed, Lysaer rebounded. The next strike of the knife would be lethal. Exposed beyond recourse, Sulfin Evend locked stares with his liege, all the mute will in him pleading. He forced the awareness that he foresaw his own murder. As his grasp weakened, he stood down, unresisting, while his loosened hand grazed in an unvoiced apology over the welted scars marking the length of Lysaer's forearm.

  - 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 trem
bling, 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.