Traitor's Knot (Light & Shadow 07)

by Janny Wurts

  The girl curtseyed, trembling, as the peeress's touch guided her on to Prime Selidie's chair. At eight years of age, she knelt to swear oath: to grow up and shoulder the menial tasks of laundry, or cooking and child-care, or to fill some minor niche of secretarial work. If she developed gentle hands and a kind nature, she might progress to assume convalescent care of the infirm.

  'Next, please step forward,' Lirenda intoned.

  The skinny, older candidate presented herself. Her hair hung dull brown, and her chilblained hands were a crafts child's. She could have been expelled from apprenticeship for laziness; or her parents might have offered her up in exchange, to fulfill a past oath of debt. The rare applicant, these days, would be a volunteer, encouraged to serve by her family.

  Moved to yawning distaste, Lirenda selected two more quartz spheres cleared to a state of blank dormancy. Careful to keep her touch shielded in cloth, she said, 'Give me your hands, child.'

  The paired crystals were placed into the offered, chapped palms. 'Hold these, place your thumbs on their surface, and wait. When I ask, give them back over to me.'

  Those basic instructions might last for minutes, or extend as long as an hour if a child's grasp lacked the

  vigor to imprint the stones' matrix. Throughout, Lirenda endured her cramped perch, forced to wait in subservient boredom. To her right, the frightened girl-child now taking oath knelt and laid her palms against the faceted Great Waystone. Standing opposite, the house peeress gloved her hands in white silk, then touched the imprinted spheres to each side of the unshielded amethyst.

  Then, prompted carefully, the lisping orphan recited her lines. 'I, Nayla, declare myself free to bind oath to the Koriani Order, From this breath, this moment, and this word, until death, I exist to serve, this I vow. My hands, my mind, and my body, are hereby given to enact the will of the Prime Matriarch, whose whole cause is the greater good of humanity, this I vow. All states of fleshly desire to renounce, this I vow. All ties of heart, of family, of husband and lover to put aside, this I vow. . .

  The raw power of words, spoken over by thousands across a history that bridged generations, unleashed the energy of a living force. The ancient crystal remembered: each named initiate, and each former prime, extending back to the dawn of the order, before cataclysmic war had sent a destitute enclave of mankind to beg for settlement on Athera. The amethyst focus that had recorded the order's past origins retained each initiate sister's embedded imprint. The young, open heart and the vulnerable mind could not be less than swept away by the torrent.

  Lirenda recalled that branding, first thrill. The answer to every stark longing had seemed within reach on the moment when she sealed her oath. Declared as a candidate for the prime succession, she had never foreseen the shaming failure that would cast her down and deny her the ultimate glory of accession to supreme rank.

  Nor would today's girl-child glance aside from her rapture. Enveloped in bliss, she would not yet comprehend the binding scope of her promise, or fully grasp that a single, willed word from the Matriarch could deprive her of life, or limb, or intelligence.

  The formal investiture wound onwards toward closure: '. . . And should I weaken or falter and come to forswear my commitment, all that I am shall be forfeit, body and mind. This I vow, no witness beyond the Prime Circle, no arbiter beyond the crystal matrix into which I surrender my Name and my imprint as surety through all my living days. '

  As sworn novice, the young girl arose and received the Prime's kiss on both her flushed cheeks. Her smile shone radiant, as Selidie intoned the time-worn phrases of closure. 'Nayla, may you serve peace and charity with dedicate grace. Wear the order's mantle with pride.'

  The hospice peeress released the imprinted spheres into a basin of salt water for clearing, then bestowed a white ribbon, to be sewn on the sleeves of the grey robe today's young initiate would wear until death. The child bent her knee in a dutiful curtsey and received her due leave to depart.

  Lirenda looked on, wrung to ferocious envy for that talentless chit's simple freedom. She suffered the prolonged wait, while the next, raw-boned candidate completed her crystal imprinting. Once the energies in the paired spheres became gravid, Lirenda gathered them back in hand. The girl candidate watched, anxious, as the adult who would determine her future closed the stones in her grasp and engaged trance, then fused her awareness with the replicate pattern imbued within the reactive matrixes that now mapped the flow of polarity between the candidate's right side and left side balance.

  For Lirenda, as always, the moment of full immersion felt as invasively horrid as drowning . . .

  . . .vision turned dim. As her senses became felted under a muddle of random thought and jagged, disordered emotion, she thrashed to escape the suffocating contraction as her state of trained clarity compressed downwards into tight space and muffling darkness. Imprisoned, Lirenda felt

  her private self strip away, until her eighth-rank awareness squeezed into a mould that was abhorrently other: she knew abuse and cold; the memory of filthy hands, scratching fleas, and smells that revolted the senses. Sunk into a morass of self-pity and need, she lost even the hardened spark of her rage. Defeat became helplessness that numbed, then putrefied, leaving knots dense and solid as brick. Beliefs became walls. Despair framed a cage. Under the murk, just barely smouldering, she encountered one stubborn ember that survived the strangling defeat of adversity. She touched on that point. All but deaf and blinded, she blew the breath of expanded knowledge against that pinched glimmer of hope.

  True talent responded. The small spark became flame. Into that flickering promise of light, reflected in faithful, quartz imprint, Lirenda applied the meticulous discipline of her developed awareness. From raw potential, she mapped the latent channels that opened, then traced where they might be coaxed to expand.

  Yet the narrow vessel reached its capacity too soon. The influx offorces jammed still and backed up. Lirenda suffered the wretched constriction, forced to remain in rapport until she had assayed every sigil of testing, one exhaustive level at a time . . .

  In due course, Lirenda recovered herself. The unfettered range of her power resurged like circulation restored through a cramped limb. Breathless and damp, she pronounced the result.

  'She is for the sisterhouse.' Shown the peeress's smiling pride, Lirenda added the rest. 'A first-rank talent, confirmed, with potential for third, if she masters her fear and responds to the training to release her conditioned resentment.'

  Yet the candidate was not ushered away to declare her obedience over the Waystone. The morning's proceedings had been interrupted when the seeress who minded the lane watch arrived, bearing an urgent report.

  Her hushed phrases threw a scatter of echoes through the vaulted stone chamber,'. . . inbound message from the fifth-ranked, stationed at Hanshire . . . Morriel's past hope is ended . . . now lost our option to secure a possible candidate for prime succession off the branch line of s'Gannley. We are desolate, Matriarch. The effort has failed, in no small part due to a new interference engaged by the Fellowship Sorcerers.'

  The set-back exposed an on-going sore point: that no talent with ninth-rank potential now trained under oath to the Koriani Order. That short-fall had posed a critical problem for the last prime, caught facing the dissolution of extreme old age. Morriel's straits had been desperate enough to risk forcing the birth of an infant candidate, conceived through an oath of debt. The strategy had been set to cover the deficit, should Lirenda's initiate passage to ninth rank fail: a critical safe-guard, made meaningless after the usurpation of Selidie's life-span. Young again, Morriel had snatched the victory from death and bought herself a twisted reprieve.

  Since her heinous crime had gone undetected, the eldest senior delivered her placid opinion. 'The random induction of orphans eventually should provide us with the requisite gifted talent. Let the wretched idea of planned breeding be dropped. The risks outweigh the benefits. That branch lineage derives from a caithdein's legacy, and would tend
toward offspring with headstrong will and ungovernable independence.'

  Lirenda wrapped and passed off the imprinted quartz, desperately straining to track the course of the on-going debate. Last chance of reprieve, she raged against ebbing hope, that the proven asset of her eighth-rank talent might see her released from her insupportable punishment.

  Selidie leaned back in her carved ivory chair, bored composure suggesting the set-back at Hanshire posed no more than a trivial inconvenience. 'Wait or not, we have set a better alternative in motion already' She gestured her bandaged hand to cut off the tiresome discussion. 'As prize, or as forfeit, we shall shortly know if the inducement set forth is sufficient. Given development, I fully expect that our sisterhood's short-fall will be most handsomely met.'

  Chafed frantic, Lirenda burned to hear more. But the seeress was dismissed to resume her post. Scheduled business would continue: the screened candidate awaited her oath of investiture, and the last child in line had yet to undergo testing.

  Yet the snap of Selidie's spoken command halted the ceremony forthwith. 'All are excused! I require Lirenda. The oath and the last screening shall wait.'

  The will of the Prime was held above question. The Senior Circle arose, gave obeisance, and filed out, while the sisterhouse peeress hustled to gather her bewildered charges. 'Here, child!' she whispered. 'My dear, ask me later.' Her admonishment silenced the girl's disappointment. 'Our simple task is to obey.'

  Once the chamber had cleared, Lirenda was summoned, her powers to be used as the vessel to extend the Prime's eyes and ears. The demand would be arduous, no sharp surprise. By the terms of imposed sentence, Selidie could expend her schooled talent like riches poured out of a jar. 'You will engage in trance while I align the Great Waystone to cast a scrying over salt water.'

  Lirenda knelt as bidden. Puppet to the Prime's least command, she laid her hands on the stinging chill of the amethyst. Contact wrapped her senses in harrowing cold, a brief agony. The Prime's master sigil reached through with clamping force and claimed her receptive contact. Insatiably demanding, it grappled her being and jerked forth a quickened thread. The unravelling plunge dropped her through spinning darkness. Her being became a spun line that hurled through a portal of purple fire. Now nameless and faceless, poised over what felt like the eye of the world, Lirenda received the Prime Matriarch's directive: 'Find Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn. Watch and listen for as long as it takes! I would have the name of the place where he plans to make his next landfall. '

  A command sigil blazed red as a sign-post. Aimed arrow of purpose, the bound spirit dropped through the gateway framed at its heart. Now tempered as a tool, her consciousness broke through and emerged into the scald of bright sunshine, and ocean-fresh air, spiked with the pitch tang of oakum . . .

  '. . . how aware are they?' Dakar the Mad Prophet was saying. Seated cross-legged on the warmed planks of a ship's deck, he resembled a dollop of suet rolled up in a knot of old rags.

  'I don't actually know,' mused the Prince of Rathain, poised intent by the pin-rail above him.

  Something banged in the hollow space belowdecks.

  Arithon paused. Equally rumpled in torn breeches and soiled shirt, he raised dark eyebrows at the shouts that erupted from the depths of the Evenstar's hold. To judge by the cursing, her sailhands encountered some fouling nuisance involving pinched fingers and ballast rocks. Though the brig where he lounged was left becalmed in the aftermath of a seasonal storm, the cant of the timbers beneath his braced feet bore a distinct list to starboard.

  Planking shuddered to another booming report of a large stone being shifted to port.

  Dakar winced with his eyes shut. 'If the crew keeps on fumbling boulders like that, we'll spring all the dastardly seams in this tub long before the keel's sitting level.'

  Arithon grinned. 'You happen to be sitting on Cattrick's best work. If he ever hears of your slanging remark, you'll become dropped meat underneath his bludgeoning fist.'

  'We have to reach shore, first.' Dakar's jaundiced attention shifted and measured the vital figure above him. 'Who needs Cattrick's rough temper? That look on your face spells trouble, right here.'

  Impervious to rancour, Arithon pursued the lapsed thread of his earlier reasoning. 'Fiends don't appear to originate thought.'

  Dakar's horrified flinch also failed to swerve him off topic.

  '. . . or emotion. At least, when I ply them with musical tones, they don't respond, except by reflection. They experience by imprint, without innovation. Complex patterns will draw them with insatiable greed. That's probably why they fixate upon our intense feelings and delight in our rage and frustration. The innate creativity of conscious awareness lies outside their range of experience.'

  'They are drake spawn.' Dakar's emphatic shrug dismissed a conundrum far better dropped now, without further tinkering speculation.

  'Fragments of awareness,' Arithon ploughed on. His gaze surveyed the sail crew at work on the mast-head, then the drifting, puffed clouds overhead; ignored outright, the Mad Prophet's furious, mouthed cue to be still at once and stop speaking.

  Dakar signalled again, his chopped gesture ignored: as ever, such galling perversity seemed ingrained in the fabric of Arithon's character.

  '. . . beings conceived from an experimental idea that was never balanced into completion.' Through yet another shuddering crash, and Feylind's yell of admonishment, the Master of Shadow reconsidered the shapeless sack by his feet. His mood of suspect mildness remained throughout his bout of oblivious monologue. 'Davien's notes were explicit. He explained iyats as raw energy granted the willful drive to exist. They sustain as parasites, feeding off borrowed charge, but lacking the self-aware memory of an entity able to grow and evolve. That explains how a sigil was fashioned to hold them. And yet, I imagine coercion through force may have been a bullying waste.'

  Dakar stared, aghast. 'No,' he blurted. 'You couldn't. Dharkaron's Spear drop you for taking mad risks, you can't try such a damnfoolploy, now!'

  'Iyats crave complex patterns,' Arithon repeated. Eyes level, hard as the glint off chipped emerald, he finished his razor-edged point. 'They might, therefore, respond, led on out of straight fascination.'

  'Arithon! Be quiet!' Harried past subtlety, Dakar ripped at his beard. 'The Koriathain are onto your game-board, again. Their forsaken sigil's turned active.'

  'Some minutes ago, yes. The dissonance stings. But I have no intent, now or at any time, to grant their meddling wiles even one step off my chosen course.' The Master of Shadow turned his head aft. 'Feylind! The men aloft, have they restrung the topsail halyard?'

  'Almost,' the captain's reply floated forward. 'The cracked sheave's repaired. The boy's catching his breath before shinnying back up to the mast-head.'

  Arithon's manic interest flashed into a grin. 'Let's whip up a little experiment, shall we? Could Teive perhaps pass me a suitable line? Then call the hands down from the crow's nest.'

  Dakar loosed a martyred breath through his teeth, then clambered aside to make way for the crewmen descending the ratlines. 'Are you dead certain you ought to try this?' Arithon laughed. 'Sure as the scryer's eye tracking my back!'

  He received the coiled line, then bent and untied the knotted strings securing the sack. A lightning-fast reach, and his fingers emerged, grasping a glint of rarefied light. Two days of experimentation had let him define the precise frequency required to shadow a fiend. Tuned in to the range of their volatile energies, the sliver of effort required to stay them had been reduced to an artful subtlety.

  Trapped iyat in hand, Arithon engaged mastery and tightened his intent into crystalline focus. His etched purpose defined the sequence required to raise and rethread the lift for the topsail halyard. Then, ordered thought framed as template, he let the iyat soak up the imprint.

  'Stand clear,' he cautioned. He placed the flaked rope, then loosed the charged fiend from his grasp.

  The iyat dispersed to a wisped shred of light and faded from view altogether. A d
rawn second passed. The sailhands watched, riveted. Another moment, while the grousing quips from the hold rang on the windless air. Then the rope twitched. Snake-like, its hemp coils stirred in possession. Sprung out of its coil, it unreeled in a vertical rush, aimed for the topmast crow's nest. The end threaded through the appropriate block, swooped back down, then veered awry in a gleeful dive toward the wallowing swell of the Cildein.

  Arithon, laughing, snapped off a fresh shadow. His timely move stripped the fiend from the rope, while Teive's thrifty reflex captured the flailing end before valued cordage lost itself overboard.

  'Feckless creature,' chided Arithon, thoughtful. Mage-sight let him track the creased bolt of distortion left by the fiend's streaking departure. 'We'll just have to try the manoeuvre again.'

  'You shouldn't,' Dakar grumbled. 'You're likely to find the rope turned as a whip, if not hanging you up by the throat.'

  'Free will, my Prophet, in law and with strictures.' The Master of Shadow delved back into his warded sack with enthusiastic delight. 'No starved creature bites the hand bearing gifts. I only have to toy with the mix. You don't think my demand can be tailored to taste? Shall we find out which frequency dazzles a fiend and which drives it to intoxication?'

  The on-going trial required three attempts. The deck-hands observed with opened mouths, then played the stakes, taking bets. They slapped their knees and yelled ribald encouragement, while the fiends that had ripped them to shambles and shreds were cajoled into rerigging the topmast tackle. Arithon plied his mastery and refined his touch. His subsequent pranks grew flamboyant. When he set an even dozen to stitching a rent sail, Feylind whooped and cried tears, doubled over in gales of mirth. If a needle was lost, and three fiends defected, the nine that stayed on did a passable job.

  None complained of the uneven stitching.

  Which dalliance did nothing for Dakar's nipped frown. 'We still have a scryer riding that sigil,' he reminded with acid remonstrance.

  'Trust me, I know.' Arithon caught his breath. A snared fiend in hand, he nodded in deference toward Teive. 'We're fit to bear sail?'