by Janny Wurts
'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.
'This won't end here, I promise!' snapped Ambassador Koshlin with dipped venom. His acid glance shifted to High Priest Cerebeld, and a silent thought crossed between them. Sighted vision caught the split-second exchange, like the clash of sword steel and lightning.
'But it will end here!' Lysaer s'Ilessid stood at the dais stair, his stainless splendour hard as cut diamond as he regarded the fettered knot of conspirators. 'With a sword through the heart, and a cleansing by fire, as I stand upon the realm's justice before you. Take these murderers away! The sight of them is an offence against nature and an affront to the people of Tysan!'
The thirteenth conspirator escaped the armed cordon. No man knew how. He had been High Priest Cerebeld's least notable acolyte, and his flight went unnoticed as he slipped from the dais through the watchful ranks of the stationed guardsmen.
Left short of temper, Sulfin Evend could not wrest himself clear to give chase. Nor could he delegate. As the only man bearing a Fellowship warding against the fell workings of necromancy, he dared not send his eager, but unshielded, officers into jeopardy to run down the fugitive. Nor could he assign them to watch the chained captives already in hand. Although the creatures were stripped of the enslaved spirits that sourced their dark powers of influence, each had been suborned as a powerful tool, still linked to a practising cult master. If silver chains bound them, they were not rendered harmless. Mind and flesh, they were subsumed by dark forces that fed upon life.
Against every sane argument, their immediate execution had been rejected by Lysaer s'Ilessid.
'No man dies under my rule without trial!' Backed against principle, the Blessed Prince stayed insistent, no matter how urgently he was pressed. 'Justice under my hand is not revocable! The accused have firm rights, first among them that human dignity in this realm cannot be waived for convenience. No. Guilt will be established by means of due process, regardless of whether my tribunal holds their inquiry as a formality. I will not be denied in this matter. We shall not put down sorcery by means of dishonour, or what do you think we become?'
'Survivors with our free autonomy intact,' Sulfin Evend cracked back, and found himself excused from the royal presence forthwith.
By late afternoon, he paced like a surly, caged cat, up and down the cramped floor of Avenor's dungeon ward-room. The frustration that gnawed him had no other outlet. While the relief watch he turned away out of hand whispered that he was overwrought, the prisoners locked in detention appeared passive. Restive senior officers delivered their reports and chafed at his insistent restraint, until their irritation bordered upon insolence.
Sulfin Evend barked back and hardened his will. The men were sent packing, although the deceptive ease of the day's public capture had sapped every warning of credibility.
The captives who importuned using civilized words, or who slumped in their spelled chains, posing the shocked stupor of innocents, were perilous beyond all imagining. Any guard in their presence would be nakedly vulnerable, once the master who ruled them sought contact. As he must: the secretive cults defended their own. The danger would intensify after dark, since the aberrant nature of necromancy shunned the balance endowed by the light.
The shells of the men taken captive, meantime, could not be left unattended. Of them all, High Priest Cerebeld appeared most unresponsive. Unnaturally listless for a powerful man who had been the Light's voice in Avenor, he stayed sunk in a glassy-eyed stupor. The persistent whining arose from Gace Steward, still onerously protesting his innocence.
Sulfin Evend watched, cold. As often as he had seen stress and battle crumble men's dignity, this queer shift in roles between a ranking superior and an underling disturbed his commander's instinct.
As sundown neared, and the sensible order to hasten the trial did not move the wheels of state, the Lord
Commander became pitched to increasing unease. The affray in the square had left him light-headed. Not helped by the fact that he worked on short sleep, he stayed on his feet in a frazzled effort to keep overstressed senses alert.
While the ferrety palace steward launched into another bristling complaint that Talith's murder was none of his doing, Sulfin Evend flung back an acid correction.
'You are all answerable! Lives are not taken to tidy the realm's image! Talith's death was not under the high council's purview, nor any courtier's duty to carry out, ahead of state-trial and crown sentence.'
With his sallow, pocked features pressed against the barred grille, the palace official blinked rat-shifty eyes. 'But I did not kill the realm's former princess. No man here caused her fall. She was alone. Her plunge from that tower was a sorry act, no more and no less than a suicide.'
'No one pushed her.' Agreeable as a viper too chilled to strike, Sulfin Evend took pause. He measured the steward through Sighted eyes, but perceived nothing more than an oily coward, afraid for his mis'erable life. His strung nerves did not settle. Each time he surveyed the group in the cell, his very skin crawled with revulsion. He added, 'Talith fell during an attempt to escape, but a cross-bow bolt sheared through the rope that supported her. We have found your marksman. The payment that bought his skilled shot is already attested under a crown bailiff's signature.'
'Forgeries!' snapped Gace. 'You have been duped by the disaffected in league with the Master of Shadow.'
'Not the case. Your cross-bowman was seized by my men just past noon. His confession has matched what we have seen on paper. That seals your arraignment, and if I could choose, your execution would take place this moment.'
No flicker of reaction arose from High Priest Cerebeld; such lack-lustre response seemed unnatural. Sulfin Evend rubbed his neck until the bones cracked. He could not shake off the nagging suspicion that an unseen current was still at play. A hidden blade that might turn in the hand, or some sly trap, perhaps set by the thirteenth conspirator. Caged here while the rege
nt stalled for no reason, a man could do nothing but probe with lame words, hoping to jab a soft nerve. 'That escaped acolyte will be pursued. If any should shelter him, they'll be put to death along with your other collaborators.'
The upstairs door groaned. Inbound footsteps pattered over the threshold, and mingled voices rebounded downward. Yet one man's tone stood out.
Sulfin Evend froze. Shocked aware as though doused by a pail of shaved ice, he realized that Lysaer s'Ilessid was amid that company of unscheduled arrivals.
Fast as a man moved, loud as a shouted order could peal up the stairwell, the effort to salvage the lapse came too late. Sulfin Evend watched, horrified, as three prisoners in the cell slumped into collapse, then dropped in an unbreathing heap. Gace Steward snapped his jaw shut between words. Wrist chains chinking, he scrambled clear of the barred door, making way as Cerebeld stood up. Now, the High Priest's eyes were wide-open, glinting with unshielded malice. Sighted talent unveiled the hideous moment as his aura streamed unclean. This time, the leaden shadows had faces: the creature wearing Cerebeld's form had subsumed the trapped shades of three of his prostrate colleagues. Their corpses had been drained that fast, with no sign of the vile spell that enslaved them.
Sulfin Evend snatched up the cross-bow kept loaded and ready. The quarrels were tipped with cold iron. His fast shot snapped through the sunwheel emblem on the breast of the High Priest's mantle. Heart's-blood flowered and spurted. Dead, but still animate, the creature came on, teeth bared in a feral grimace.
'Sundown,' stated Cerebeld, haughty with triumph. 'My master rules now.'
Then he wobbled, lurched forward, and measured his length, fettered wrists still linked at his back. His robes pooled on the floor, a muddle of stained white. The air around his twitching corpse seethed with ephemeral movement as a boiling rush of dull silver bled out of his dying flesh. The taint streaked from the aura, no longer bound. The rooted stream of corruption expired from emptied lungs and poured out of nose and slack lips. Like a haze of fine mercury, the reanimate forces coalesced within the locked cell.
Sulfin Evend stared, horrified, as the amalgamate shades of the corrupted dead moved on and poured into the open mouth of Gace Steward, who howled in shock from the side-lines.
Measured and marked, already prepared as the vessel of a practising necromancer, Gace's human instinct to scream became choked. His eyes strained wide open, then bulged as he gagged. The reflex retained no intelligent will: only the animal urge of warm flesh to cling to instinctive survival. The struggle lasted no more than an instant before the assaulted body gave way. Gace's lungs filled. His auric field bloomed like sludge with the haze of its unclean possession, that fast.
Sulfin Evend saw, sickened. Harrowed urgency drove him. He wrestled to span the discharged cross-bow, while the shuddering frame of the palace official completed its grisly transition and became the empowered receptacle. Slack-lidded, replete, it surrendered to the addictive yoke of the master.
Gace Steward straightened to the chime of spelled chains. Infused with the presence of undead magics, he leaned on the barred door. His foam-flecked lips bowed into a smile.
'Sundown has arrived!' The evil he bore was a palpable force. 'Kill us, sweet fool. Did you realize you had left my master's minion in charge of a prearranged stable of surrogates? I have seven other gibbering shells that your heroic work has sucked vacant!' Glittering, dark eyes raked over his adversary. 'Can't you see, bantling? Althain's Warden has failed you. He's left them unsealed and well bridled for riding! We'll just mount another. For each one you drop, our strength will increase! Kill the last, and we'll jump. What can you do? We'll just seize the next whole man we encounter and crush him to serve by strangling his will by main force!'
Less than a second had passed since first contact. Repossession happened that quickly. Sulfin Evend rushed his hands, fumbling the last crank of the windlass in his need to engage the trigger latch. He slotted a fresh bolt. Clammy with sweat, he already saw that his striving was useless. The spells that Sethvir had set into the chains secured no more than the body, with the opportune ending by fire and sword thrown away with the advent of night.
Why had Lysaer s'Ilessid deliberated? Worse yet, why had he broken orders and come, against every adamant warning? For his sovereign step still descended the stair, straight into a morass of danger.
Winter 5671
Gambit
Sulfin Evend gave a frantic shout up the stairwell for the Blessed Prince to stand clear. Then he slammed the ward-room door in between. He could not drop the bar. The panel was designed to bolster security, and never fashioned to lock from within. Shoulder braced to that insecure barrier, loaded cross-bow in hand, he faced the warped creature shut inside the cell, along with four corpses and the shells that
seemed as men, but were no less than a deadly, suborned pack of surrogates. The wrists of each one remained cuffed in silver. Their hands would stay shackled. Stout locks were tongued through the reinforced slot in the barrier that restrained them. Unless this fell cult could walk its possessed through forged steel, the corrupted could not break out of physical containment.
'Give this up,' the Lord Commander said, steady. 'To have Lysaer, you must first go through me. Nor will I let his Blessed Grace cross this threshold while I have one resource to stop him. Posture on, you stick puppet! Rant all you like. That won't change the fact you can't touch me.'
Brave words, or more likely, the stance of a fool. Cult spells, or loosed wraiths might slip through such barriers at whim. Yet a defender with his back to a door, and no options could but hope Asandir's given word backed the truth: that free will held aligned by a Fellowship warding could not be displaced or fall to the crippling coercion of necromancy. For the stakes at play now risked far worse than his life. Should he die under rites, no matter how foul, Sulfin Evend stood his ground on a Sorcerer's promise that his self-aware spirit could not be denied a natural passage across the Wheel's turning.
Behind the barred grille, the reanimate flesh that had once been Gace Steward proffered an oily challenge. 'Guard your prince if you can. Though how can you react? He has not paid heed to your warning.'
The threat was not empty. Outside, the filtered sound of raised voices moved nearer. Descending footsteps came on, undeterred in their disastrous approach down the stairwell. Then Lysaer's called inquiry affirmed that restraint had been thrown to the four winds and jeopardy. Or, perhaps not: the invidious smirk on the face of the captive suggested some form of a lure.
'What have you done?' Sulfin Evend cried, shocked. He had no mage training, could not guess what vicious mischief might have been tried to turn Lysaer's sensibilities.
A desperate, split-second remained to respond. This time, Sulfin Evend must act alone, without the mystical powers of a Paravian focus at lane crest, and with none of Sethvir's strength to back him.
He spun, shoved open the door, and plunged into the gloom of the stairwell. A kick slammed the iron-strapped panel behind him. No moment to spare, to engage bar or lock, or snatch the lit torch from the wall sconce. Ahead, through the welter of uncertain light, four men approached unaware. Only one might be saved. Sulfin Evend's live body must become Lysaer's shield. Without time for outcry, past reach of sane action, the Alliance commander slapped the spanned cross-bow into his left hand. He drew his knife in the course of his pelting dash upwards.
Between the slapped echoes of his own raced strides, he heard his most competent captain call downwards in concerned inquiry.
Sulfin Evend ran silent. He had no breath for grief. Reason and words would be far too slow to deflect the on-coming disaster. He could do nothing. Just hurl himself, sprinting, up the turnpike stair, driving muscles that screamed from exertion. He kept on. Watched the curve of the walls unveil course after course of blank risers. More torches passed. His wake set them fluttering. Warped shadows capered around him. A man who prayed might have beseeched fate. Sulfin Evend drove forward, panting. Let the distance from the cl
osed cell be enough. He needed no less than sixty feet, with an additional margin for safety. He counted each pace, three stairs to the yard. Seventeen, eighteen, with his winded chest tight unto bursting.
Then at last, a clear view: Lysaer s'Ilessid in shining white, his bare head raw gold in the flame-light. By strict orders, three trusted, armed officers accompanied him.
Frustrated agony found no release. Their Lord Commander saw his dread realized. The royal party had already drawn too close, with the tactical blunder past help to reconcile. Asandir had been ruthlessly explicit: under darkness, a cult working could encompass the energy field raised by its operant source. 'There lies the range of an enabled necromancer, and by extension, any thralled subject who has been suborned under his power.'
The abomination in the cell had attached three subordinate entities whose drained corpses had dropped without fight. Cerebeld's death yielded four, then Gace Steward, five; attack, if it came, would be fiercely potent. Conquest might come without warning. Climbing, sides splitting, Sulfin Evend dared not gasp even a last-minute plea. He could only act to ensure Lysaer's safety by the only crude measure at hand.
He levelled the cross-bow. Aimed and squeezed the trigger. Cable spanged in release. The shot bolt hissed upwards and slapped the lead officer in the pit of his throat. His choked, surprised corpse and the discharged weapon fell and struck the stair simultaneously. As the tumbling body and discarded weapon crashed downwards, Sulfin Evend threw his small knife. The missile took the man just behind Lysaer, the blade struck stark through the eye. The kill fell, gouting blood. The dying man's weight jostled the Blessed Prince, just stiffened in shock, and now staggered forward into the last man-at-arms, who led a purposeful half-pace ahead.
While the soldier's rocked frame swayed to recover balance, Sulfin Evend leaped the threshing tumble of dead limbs as his shot officer caromed down the stairwell. Gagging on bile, he charged upwards, sword drawn, and cut down Lysaer's last standing guard: his most trustworthy field veteran. The hard, upward sword-thrust rammed between ribs and pierced a true man through the heart.
