Traitor's Knot (Light & Shadow 07)

by Janny Wurts

  The seaman nodded, unhappy.

  'Good man. Hold the line.' Beyond option, out of time, the Master of Shadow yanked open the grate. Air-borne water sprayed out, mixed into a gyre of splintered staves. He ducked the macerating onslaught, evaded the scything spin of a barrel hoop, and slipped through.

  His agile descent down the ladder was hard followed by Fionn Areth.

  The hold was a jet well, alive with the whining, vexed breezes of iyats seeking invention. Off to one side, a cask creaked and sloshed. The air smelled of bilge, hot steel, and soaked tarps, stitched by the manic splashing of waterspouts looped up in defiance of gravity. While Fionn Areth stood blind, groping clumsily to re-orient, a hardened hand caught his collar and yanked.

  He staggered aside, while something bulky whipped past his head and just missed clubbing him unconscious.

  'Ballast rock!' Arithon snapped in his ear. 'Without mage-sight, you're a helpless target.'

  Again without asking, the grip steered him on. Fionn Areth was shoved the next stumbling step, then roughly repositioned, close enough to his enemy's back that he felt the man's light, rapid breathing.

  'Stay close! The iyats must demand all my attention, and no way else can you hope to survive this.' Athera's Masterbard gathered himself then, and launched into the threnodies for fiend bane. The notes were arrhythmic, and difficult. Their tonal balance ached the teeth. Pressed against the singer's vibrating form, Fionn Areth shared a sense of the coiling tension required to create the exacting pitch. Tuned sound pierced his mind like razor-taut wire. Each fluid, transformational run sieved deranging harmonics through the echoing hold of the ship. The flow pierced pandemonium. Its unsubtle, nerve-cringing tempo disrupted the iyats and sapped the flux of their energies.

  Unable to cross-link their matrix of being into material possession, their hold upon captured objects faltered, then failed. A clatter of noise ripped the dark, as sprung wood staves, whirling barrel hoops and ballast stones, and scooped water sliced out of suspension and crashed. The din was horrific. The brig's timbers rebounded to the bludgeoning impact of who knew what load of dropped wreckage. Without light, the damage could not be assessed. Pelted by spray and oddments of wood, while glued, sweat-soaked, to Arithon's back, Fionn Areth fought blanketing panic as he faced the gravity of his predicament. He knew nothing of ships. The fierce slap of liquid over his feet might have been bilge, or a sprung seam that let in the sea. The blanketing dark left him no choice but to suffer the peril ofjoined battle, tied up by his helpless ignorance.

  Beyond such uncertainty, Arithon sang, now pressing for increased volume. Though such harsh triplets must strain the voice, and unhinge the most rapt concentration, he struck each piercing pitch without cracking. Throughout the dimmed hold, the iyats responded. The freakish swarm shifted, impelled to escape the harmonies that gouged them to entropic destruction.

  And there, true to Arithon's horrific forecast, the Prime Matriarch's sigil recontained them.

  The hold's contents and casks were no longer an arena for sport, but the field of contention for the energy sprites' basic hold on survival.

  Evenstar's stakes were not one whit less. As the trapped fiends recoiled in back-lash, their locked contest with Arithon redoubled. Gathered like wraiths, the unseen creatures closed in, lashing up vicious, hot breezes. Small objects and slivers of wood whistled in, stinging flesh and stabbing through clothing. Arithon changed key, raised his frequency, then sounded a drilling overtone through his teeth. The whistle ran chills over Fionn Areth's skin and ripped like sharp pain through his viscera.

  Rocked to vertigo, he snatched and caught Arithon's shirt to keep balance.

  The soaked flesh beneath was quivering with strain. Shocked by the force of the bard's raw exertion, Fionn Areth almost tripped as a barrel hoop reeled into his feet. As Arithon's fist snatched him short of a fall, then forcibly tugged him a tangential step sidewards, the herder realized: the urgent cue pressed him to move with his protector across the beleaguered hold. The Araethurian was forced to keep pace by touch. Smothered in darkness, he could not guess what bent drove the sorcerer's intentions.

  But the Master of Shadow engaged no dark powers. Through the bruising collisions, the barked shins, and the stumbling recovery of each misplaced step, Fiorm Areth at last discerned the purpose: Arithon laboured to shift the imperilled casks farther aft. There, he padded them under a wadding of tarps and ripped netting, scavenged off the baled silk and sundry crates of stacked cargo.

  Though clumsy, a talentless partner could help. Fionn Areth hefted barrels and lugged armloads of burlap in shuffled steps through the darkness. If the slippery bilge grating was littered with splinters, broken staves, and flung rocks; if he blundered into the sodden wads of dumped grain-bags and snarls of unspun silk, he regrouped, steadied upright by Arithon's shoulder.

  Throughout, the bard whistled his tooth-grating threnodies. Marked as their deadly adversary, the fiends whickered and dived, harrying at his person. They hampered his footsteps and snatched at his flesh, and snapped gusts to hinder his vision.

  He sang them down. Unremitting, his voice drove their railing jabs back, pealing cascades of triplets that stayed achingly pure. As the casks were restacked and swaddled over in cloth, Arithon spared the astonishing grace to bestow the odd back-slap of encouragement.

  Fionn Areth blinked stinging sweat from his lashes; spat the bitter taint of splashed brine. He worked

  himself ragged to distance the thought, that all adamant striving was wasted. How could a man hold those sharp notes without tiring, or keep rhythm with such aching, tight clarity? How long, before Arithon spent his last strength or grew hoarse from extended exertion?

  The ordeal reeled on without sign of requital. Against quartz-driven malice, no flesh-and-blood artistry might wrest back the hope to snatch triumph. Then the moment arrived. Arithon faltered. His exhaustion finally wracked his critical timing off true.

  At the first wavered note, he stopped his fierce keening. Silence clapped down like a shock on the nerves. The restless, enraged pack of fiends came unhinged. Restored to autonomy, they rippled through air, snagging up dropped bits ofjetsam. Ballast rocks, loose bits of wood and snarled cloth, the collection stormed down in a battering wave. The volley of viciously animate debris was aimed to pulverize human resistance.

  Fionn Areth tucked his head under crossed forearms. The reckoning had come. Coerced to abandon his upright principles, he would die here, entrapped in the feuds of a sorcerer.

  'Faint-hearted,' gasped Arithon on a spent breath. 'You don't pray to be saved by the Light?' His manic, phrased mockery masked the movement as he reached, lightning-fast, for his sword.

  Blade sheared from scabbard with a metallic chime, ink against jet in the darkness. Amid mobbing fiends, a pallid light gleamed. The Paravian runes woke, blinding, and pealed out a silvery chord as enchanted steel roused to the starspell inlaid at its forging. The clarion cry sang like the ring of struck bronze, expanded through subsonic registers. Light scattered the dark, and the embattled hold sprang into untrammelled view. Raised bilge wheeled, glistening, through the grinding tumble, as possessed rocks skittered and smashed to fragments. Billows of frayed silk slithered and knotted through the rags of ripped tarps and garrotting swatches of burlap. At their backs, their painstakingly piled casks offered no cranny in which to evade the incoming assault.

  'We're fordone,' Fionn Areth gasped, cringing.

  Arithon's fast glance swept the goatherd's tucked rabbit posture and sheltering fists.

  'No.' The rebuttal raised the hard twist of a smile. 'This is where we snatch respite.'

  Before Fionn Areth expressed his contempt, the Master of Shadow pushed straight. Head bent, grip firm on the humming, live sword, he laid the flat of the upright blade to his brow, and spoke a rapid phrase in Paravian. The actualized syllables maddened the air, and ripped exposed skin into gooseflesh. Arithon shivered. He held to his focus, eyes shut, stripped down to the ruthless poi
se of a marksman offered a life-or-death shot at one target.

  Whatever uncanny bidding he framed, the bare steel in his hands interacted. The sword-blade hummed louder. Its rune inlay softened, eased back to a glimmer pure as a clear shine of starlight. The fiends crowding in to macerate flesh recoiled just outside that ring of cast radiance. The deflected objects they wielded crashed into collision, snapping off static and bursts of singed cloth in balked fits of frustration.

  Saved, half-unmanned by uncertain relief, Fionn Areth unclenched his arms and rubbed clammy palms on his breeches. 'You can stand them down with that sword-blade? Dharkaron's fell fury! For how long?'

  Arithon finished his rapt invocation. Careful movement lowered the weapon. The uncanny steel stayed ablaze with white light, still sounding that bell-toned vibration. Its power surged through skin and bones, and deep viscera, prickling like a wild tonic. Bemused, the Prince of Rathain shook his head. 'I don't know. I've forged an active partnership with the craft the Paravian singers laid down for defence. The engagement can be maintained, at small cost. But to hold the conscious lines of intent, I'll have to keep waking awareness.'

  Fionn Areth clutched himself, shivering, while a ballast rock arced over his head. The thud as the missile slammed into spoiled silk shuddered the keel underfoot. Muffled shouts and the on-going thumps topside bespoke crewmen still wrestling damages. 'If you thought this would work, why not spare us earlier?'

  'I didn't know,' said Arithon in stark wonder. 'We're improvising, remember? I couldn't try out an untested theory. Not while those fiends were rammed full of fresh charge. The bane-song was needful to drain them.'

  'You call these drained?' The smashing crunch of another dropped rock contradicted that sweeping statement. Arithon shrugged. He had no use for argument. Astute observation would show soon enough: the iyats were dropping their possessed grip on the heaviest objects.

  Turned back to attend his hoard of stacked casks, Arithon struck the sword-point downward through his improvised layers of wadding. The upright weapon shed a ghost ring of radiance, thrumming its uncanny song through the oak staves of the water-casks just saved by intervention.

  'What now?' asked Fionn Areth, his explosive relief finding outlet in nervous chatter.

  'Given we have an established defence? First the lure, then the feint.' Arithon hailed to the sailhand still guarding the hatch. 'I want wicking string, oil, and the parts to reconstitute a closed lantern.'

  'Fury and frost!' Fionn Areth exploded. 'You're thinking to risk open flame? '

  Response came from Dakar, just arrived at the hatch, mottled red from the teeth of catastrophe. 'Madman! You won't.' He shoved down the ladder. Now livid with rage, he arrived with a splash in the rippling flood of the bilge.

  The sight of the light-shot sword struck him silent.

  'Ath's undying glory!' Still staring, the spellbinder swiped off a frayed length of twine pinched between the doughy folds of his neck. 'I've never seen Alithiel's power engaged that way. Do you have the first clue what you're doing?' He shuddered, and capped with a quote. ' "On the day Mother Dark chose to couple with mercy, Chaos was born of their union."'

  'The desert tribes' myth of creation? How apt.' Arithon's smile held steel, but no warmth. 'An unpredictably perilous child-birth. If I'm pressed to experiment, why whimper when we have the option to scream? If you plan to revile me using metaphor, it was Chaos that spat out the seed of the sun.'

  'Should I have expected that Davien would tame you?' Bloodied and sapped by his lingering headache, the Mad Prophet recouped his shocked poise. 'You want a lamp,' he repeated. 'In case you fall, someone else ought to know just what messy tactic you're trying.' His thoughtful gaze locked to Prince Arithon's face, he added, 'Do you want my accurate spellbinder's opinion on how long you're going to stay standing? No? Then I'm listening.'

  Words would cost them time. As the sailhand arrived with the requisite items, Arithon opted for demonstration. 'Stay here. You'll see.'

  He accepted the lamp parts and began their assembly at speed.

  The sailhand unreeled the wick string, and nipped off the end with his teeth. 'Feylind says, hurry. We're taking on water. She needs a team down here to man pumps and sound out the leaks.'

  'I won't need a minute,' Arithon replied. 'When you go, tell the mate: he'll be bending on sail. I want this brig on a course due off shore, bearing every last stitch she can carry.'

  The lamp was prepared, and the reservoir filled. Arithon handed the ring off to Dakar, indulging meanwhile, in wry melodrama from an execrable ballad. ' "Strike a spark, my wilding mage, unleash bold conjury! Swords will speak, and women wail, in ravaged misery."'

  'They'll be likelier to laugh as you fry us to blisters,' Dakar said in sour reference to Selidie's witches. He had never yet encountered the iyat that could resist the lure of a fire. Still, he invoked the neat cantrip to spark the lamp, then trimmed the fluttering wick. 'You've left those sprites stripped clean out of charge. Starved to mean aggravation, they'll be drawn down like the Ebon Spear from the fist of Dharkaron Avenger - Arithon! Death and mercy, you can't!'

  Yet the spellbinder's furious screech deterred nothing. The Master of Shadow leaned down and tossed what looked like a tangle of spider-silk through the lantern's opened pane. As Dakar foresaw, the seed flame roared up, bright and hot as a solstice bonfire.

  Fionn Areth bounded back with a cry, convinced clothing and hair had ignited.

  Dakar caught the yokel short before his frazzled panic rallied the iyats. 'It's a petty conjurer's trick of illusion,' he exclaimed in reviling disgust. His soaked beard still dripped, despite the sensation of heat that roared in merry havoc about them. 'A display you could buy at a street fair for less than a beggar's penny!'

  'Well, the iyats seem impressed,' Arithon declared. His smile showed no rancour. 'Could we drop the high dudgeon? I was hoping you'd take the clown's role and keep the appearances going.'

  Dakar shut his mouth. As ever outflanked by that arid humour, he stepped through the crackling mimicry and peered into the hold at large.

  Lamp-flame and pettifogging huckster's trick, the effect on the swarm was profound. The depleted iyats were inexorably drawn to assuage their insatiable hunger. They circled the fake bonfire in flitting frustration, pinned flat against the silvery radiance cast by the Paravian sword.

  Dakar surveyed the resistance, his trained eye seeking flaws. Something beyond natural appetite seemed to be leashing the sprites' feckless nature. More than snagged in by the lure of the fire, they prowled the ring's edge, pulled as though snared in obsession. Paravian craft did not act in that way.

  Dakar grasped the lightning stroke of epiphany and cracked to incredulous glee. 'The sigil?'

  'Dead underneath us,' said Arithon, laughing at last. 'For as long as Prime Selidie tries her quartz binding, her swarm will stay thralled and flat helpless.' While something banged, topside, to unravelling shouts, and a shudder shocked through the brig, he inquired, 'Can you keep the lamp trimmed and sustain the illusion?'

  'That alone, not the sword!' Dakar amended. 'The working you've woven is outside my depth. Ath on earth, I couldn't presume.'

  'You won't have to.' Arithon clapped Dakar's shoulder, prepared to brush past. 'There are fiends still needing a bane-ward. I'll be topside, helping until the brig is back under way' Stray iyats would still be fouling the gear. His threnodies could be engaged to clear them and dispatch their starved husks to share the spelled circle that knotted the captives, below. 'As long as I don't get tossed off the ship, I can hold the intent and keep the blade's warding in active alignment.'

  Dakar parked his rump on the soaked pile of casks. 'I'm sorry,' he said, sobered. 'Inside safe walls at Alestron, I should have cut back on my drinking.'

  'I am not your conscience.' Wrung hoarse, reduced to a tattered form in dripping, dishevelled clothing, Arithon seemed little more than a man in haste to escape the dank chill of the darkness. His soft statement should not have caused a
Fellowship spellbinder to turn his face to hide sudden, shamed tears.

  Arithon murmured a last word in Paravian, then sloshed on due course for the ladder.

  Fionn Areth stirred also, prepared to keep pace.

  His nemesis allowed him. 'If you plan to come, you'll want to stay close. Those iyats are snagged, but not helpless. Only a fool would step outside this circle without ward from a masterbard's threnodies.'

  Aware of the thump of a yard, abovedecks, and the mate's shouted orders to man halyards, Dakar blotted his cheeks and squeezed in a final question. 'You'll draw in the wind and drive us off shore?'

  Arithon nodded. 'The tactic's worth trying.'

  The simple offensive meant less could go wrong. More leagues of salt water between Evenstar and the coast meant Prime Selidie would need to ride her thralled seniors much harder. The massed fleet of galleys lying in ambush also must spread themselves thinner to compensate. Delay would seed fights between captains and crews. If attrition failed, the plot still could be stymied. A lamed vessel's crew would succumb to the elements before they could limp on a jury-rig back to Orvandir. The farther the hard-pressed quarry could run, the less chance the gruelling contest would deliver the prize of a living capture.

  'Bluster and guts,' the bard said with apology. 'We'll lengthen the stakes past the point of futility and wait for the witch to give up.'

  'If she wants you dead, you'll play into her hand,' Dakar cautioned, though the warning in fact was not truthful. He shared an unsettling nuance with the Fellowship Sorcerers that Arithon had never been told: the Prime Matriarch desired Rathain's royal line as hard leverage to destroy the compact.

  Yet the rigors of Kewar had altered this prince. His moment of fierce, introspective attention crystallized all at once to a flash of bale-fire annoyance. 'We sail, rails awash, fast as wind can take us. She wants me alive, beyond question.'

  Late Autumn 5670

  Dusk to Dawn

  By sundown, as Evenstar sustains resistance against the invasion of iyats, Prime Selidie draws more enchantresses from the Forthmark hospice to reinforce her assault; and privy to secrets, aware that Morriel's spirit actually drives her, Lirenda knows the engagement will not relent for less than full forfeit, and final capture of Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn . . .