by Janny Wurts
His aware foreboding would not be dismissed. He stalked the circle of fervent disciples attached to the sunwheel banner, a purposeful current that stitched between the carved sign-boards and threaded through the stone finials of ivy-clad buildings. His eavesdropping raised no trace of disturbance. If years of sly practice had taught him to hoodwink the Koriani Council, that expertise did not ease his inherent distaste for skulking.
His caustic complaint spanned over distance and ruffled his colleague, on stationed surveillance in Darkling. This pursuit is rank madness! Sethvir was insane to believe Rathain's prince should have risked the least part of our charge to purge the Kralovir from the Alliance.'
'So what's wrong with blood sport in front of the chase?' Kharadmon flipped back in double entendre. Ensconced like a wisp of caught shade in a crack in the mountain-based citadel's curtain wall, he tracked a ferrety sunwheel devotee, as well. This one's mettlesome clairvoyance had once launched an armed company to hunt down the Master of Shadow. Since the disastrous outcome had left the Barrens littered with the bones of both horses and men, the reminder should have squelched Luhaine's grumbling dissatisfaction.
Yet today the scholarly spirit posted at Jaelot harboured a foreboding too jagged to still. Davien. That's what's wrong. He's juggled the stakes. Without his inveigling, do you truly think Arithon would have dared -'
'We're past second options, ' Kharadmon flared back. The surprise change in planning could not be undone. The Betrayer's hand had already meddled, with Arithon's life immutably thrown into jeopardy. ' Best stop wafting loose wind and mind the fat priest that you came for. If that latent sigil he carries turns active, we'll be in the proverbial muck-heap over our heads.'
Never less than meticulous, Luhaine huffed. ' Lose Rathain's prince, your revolting point's moot.' The burnished procession he followed now arrived on Jaelot's palace stair. As Lysaer commanded the predictable pause to address the fawning crowd, the watchful Sorcerer blended his essence into the wood grain of a lamp-post. 'No sanctioned crown heir should have been asked to redress Etarra's cult pestilence in the first place.' Kharadmon could never resist casting bait. ' You'd rather watch the prince speared on the run by the swords of a corrupted army? That's scarcely fair play. One against twelve makes far better odds than one set against fifteen thousand. '
Yet Luhaine in pursuit of a chokehold concern could outlast the clamped jaws of a bull-dog. ' Your charge is asleep? '
' Behind darkened shutters inside a locked keep, and sitting a clutch of ominous portents,' Kharadmon allowed on a rankled shift into wariness. 'Don't rush to commiserate, or better still, volunteer to exchange places.' Unlike the priest counterpart with Lysaer in Jaelot, his own charge bore the lead-foil haze that demarked a fully consecrated practitioner. Past question, the bad lot resided in Darkling. The inequity left all too little tolerance for the wool-gathering indulgence of worry as the crucial hour approached.
Moment to moment, the crept line of shadow engulfed the surrounding slate roof-tops. Alpenglow briefly burnished the Skyshiel peaks, then dimmed into featureless gloom. As night followed sundown on the dark of the moon, the pair of discorporate Sorcerers held their vigilant ground: one immersed in the speeches and pomp of a state celebration in Jaelot, and the other, standing guard in the dour, walled town that straddled the notched pass on the road to the Eltair coast. There, as cold dew-fall pewtered the cobbles and dripped from the gargoyle gutters, the priest immured in the closed keep stirred awake.
Servants regaled him in his gold chain and sunwheel mantle behind his latched door and bronze shutters. Moments later, their helping hands were dismissed. The cult minion emerged alone. The terraced courtyard he chose to enact his dire sacrament was enclosed by thick walls, and bordered by tended flower-beds. Around him, lavender and foxglove and phlox shed their fragrance in earth-bound silence. From the street, far below, the grind of a dray and the dicers' whoops from a packed tavern seemed a life set apart. Under black sky and glittering starlight, the corrupt priest stepped onto swept stone and invoked his ritual circle.
'They've started, ' Kharadmon signalled to Luhaine.
Still nestled into his niche in the masonry, the Fellowship Sorcerer watched the Kralovir cultist strike a spark to a stinking grease candle. Sullen red, the lit wick hissed and spat. As if ill-set flame resented its tether of string, it took hold and burned as though feeding on light. The priest drew a bone-knife. He whispered in monotone, then pressed the point to his arm. One drop of let blood, a last guttural word, and the dark birthed a host of capering, unclean shadows.
These, the priest breathed in like perfume.
Kharadmon coiled in readiness . . .
At Jaelot, the first harbinger did not seem momentous. Beneath the wax-lights of the sumptuous banquet given to honour Prince Lysaer, the smiling, fat priest accepted a seat with his fellows at the Lord Mayor's high table. Yet where any latent sigil of necromancy seeded potential for threat, the Sorcerer keeping watch in concealment knew not to place trust in appearances. Luhaine lurked with taut patience, prepared, as Sethvir's tacit contact came through and revealed the events in lock-step, at Etarra . . .
Darkness shot through with the smell of damp stone infused the glimmer of returned awareness. Arithon swallowed. His scraped throat was dry. Somewhere, forlorn, a child was crying. Befogged by lassitude, he realized her wailing had troubled him for some time. His disturbed effort to rise was caught short by fixed rope: a wrongness. Bound at ankles and wrists, he was splayed naked across a stone slab. The taut cords stretched his joints and pulled at his throbbing left forearm. The hurt arose from a scabbed-over cut; more wrongness.
He did not remember receiving the wound.
Arithon wrestled his spinning senses to sort meaning from febrile chaos. Shadows moved, near him. Male voices were chanting in scratched whispers that conjured; a worse wrongness still. A sullen flicker of flame burned nearby. He lay enclosed by a circle of candles, breathing in grease-stinking smoke. The pall burdened his lungs and shot queer, leaden murk through his mage-sight. Lids cracked as he peered through the whirling haze, Arithon made out the forms of his captors.
Their heads wore an unpleasant aureole of dull mercury, streaming in shadows above him. Each face was cowled. Bare arms were circled with inscribed copper bracelets, and drenched: ringless fingers touched, coated bright red. While the crying child wailed, Arithon felt them stroke his strapped flesh. The whispered chant rose and fell in the background as his person was painted over with uncanny symbols, rendered in blood.
Arithon wrenched. Ripped by gagging nausea, he found no relief. His gut was long emptied. Choked by the burn of heaved bile, he wracked with dry heaves until he sank, wrung limp by wheeling vertigo. The nightmare of abusive practice continued. A soaked finger traced over his brow, while the metallic tang of fresh slaughter savaged his mind and his senses.
The phosphor shine of animal magnetism whirled away like blown dust, and trained mage-sense exploded with knowing: the blood was a child's. The odd, sucking sound he had struggled to place was her slashed-open heart, still beating in convulsive reflex.
Arithon cried aloud. Overcome by revulsion, he blacked out as his hammering pulse rushed him giddy, then drained his head.
Sensation returned in shimmering patches. He had to fight for each breath. Whirled by a roiling rip tide of faintness, he clawed his way back to cognizance. A cold weight burdened his unsettled stomach. Someone had rested a clay bowl on the flat muscle beneath his rib-cage. The rim was inscribed with baleful ciphers. Their power glared as a coal in the night, shedding ripples like miasmic blight. The emanation laced into the gravid dark and combed streaks through the vapor from drug-scented candles.
The child sacrifice had ceased her tormented crying. A gulf of unnatural quiet remained. Amid the fraught singing of blood in his ears, through the rags of his disjointed vision, Arithon saw the nacreous flicker of ghosts: children bearing the lead-foil seals that bridled the spirit beyond death. Snared shades h
ad no voice. Without sinew to scream, their desperate, mute writhing became rendered in graphic silence.
Arithon strained at the knots on his wrists until exhaustion threatened oblivion. He could not pull free. Eyes shut, lips parted, he sought the dropped threads of his mastery. How had he come to be here? Swimming senses ravaged all cohesive thought. The harsh ciphers written at chest, throat, and brow stained the clarity of his mage-sense.
Through dizziness, he felt heavy fingers close on his bare arm, followed fast by the sting of sliced skin.
Shocking pain ripped a gasp from his throat. Though shallow, the cut hurt like the jab of a hornet. Arithon thrashed, yanked up short. The ties pinned him, utterly helpless. His attempt to turn his head was clamped fast. More voices whispered. Smoke and black robes swirled at the edges of vision as someone raised a ceremonial candle. Heated wax dripped across his fresh wound. The scald was followed by the imprint of a seal and given closure by lines of cold conjury. Arithon howled as a sleeting needle of ice shot into the bones of his wrist. The sensation ripped through nerves, bones, and viscera, then stabbed as a spike through his heart. The left upper quadrant of his body went numb, more void than a sucking vacuum. As though flesh had vanished, Arithon was no longer aware of his arm. Worse, the hand still roped to the slab remained oddly unaffected. By the trickle of warmth tracing over his palm, he still felt the inflicted gash, copiously bleeding.
Something coiled as though alive through thick smoke. Its dull silver cloudiness made the burdened air seem too dense to draw into his chest. Raced pulse, panted breath, Arithon shuddered. The cowled figures moved a step widdershins. Scarlet fingers rose overhead. They clasped the hilt of the dripping blade, now streamered like flame with blued phosphor.
The horror broke Arithon to shivering sweat. Initiate sight recognized the effervescent stain unleashed by the act of blood-sacrifice.
More hushed incantation; the gleaming bone-blade was consecrated by the black art of necromancy, then rinsed in the bowl on his abdomen. The liquid inside captured the resonant imprint. Sigils inscribed in the vessel's clay rim entrapped Arithon's individual signature. Named consciousness recoiled. An invasive spider dropped onto a web, the thrust of warped conjury lanced a shard of ice through the victim's exposed navel.
Arithon screamed.
This, his first experience of dark sorcery: a separation from the stream of grand harmony that shattered the hoop of his being. The fissure expanded. His innate wholeness felt sundered in ways that left him no grasp to recover. The abyss sucked him down. Plunged into a gulf of imprisoning fear, shown helplessness beyond imagining, he howled. Initiate mastery could not reconcile the tear. He bled energy through the rent at his wrist; drowned in the dire void in his belly.
More voices muttered. A clammy touch handled him. A necromancer's spell infused the wax seal set over his bleeding wrist. The arcane closure set into the wound solidified the dissociated feeling. His torpid hand now felt cast in lead. Skin and joints were alive, but now sheared from the command of his natural reflex.
The rift hurled disarray through Arithon's aura. Wracked, he could not shed the shackling weight as the binding laid foul hold upon him.
Nor could his desperate tears be contained, as once again, he found himself reft from the use of his birth-gifted talent. To extend his awareness beyond the veil, he must first cross through the ring of a necromancer's sigils of binding. There, his striving blundered like a winged bird wrapped in felt. His bard's mastery of sound became warped into dissonance. His innate awareness of light did not sing. A prison conjured of cruelty and domination held him as captive inside of his flesh.
Now the streaked hands bore down on his right arm. The bone-blade bit again. Its virulent sting touched his nerves to dipped acid. Arithon writhed. Again, the flame of his beingness flickered, and again came the punch as the force of wrong conjury skewered his heart. But for his two hands, his torso went dead. A torrent of harsh words, and the wet knife was dipped. The swirl of stirred fluid unleashed its forced seal, and fell power lashed into his solar plexus.
The blow thrashed the breath from stunned lungs. Arithon's gasp was a moan of stark agony. 'Mercy,' he pleaded through hammering pain.
But the guttural voices over his head called only despair from the darkness. The whirlpool of grim force tugged him down, and down, while the fingers that tapped and prodded and stroked moved on and clamped his right ankle.
The next knife-cut came, and ripped frost through his groin, and hurled him further into imprisonment.
Light-headed, Arithon drifted. The pain that intruded in scintillant flashes leached his being into gapped fragments. Relentless, its current scoured through hollowed bone, and dissolved the firm ties to identity. Four-square, the seals with their haltering sigils bore into his suffering flesh. The inexorable drag of the filled bowl soaked him in, until he felt snuffed in silk batting. The suffocating numbness spread inward, leaving his hands and his feet as islands of truncated feeling. Unmoored, he could not track the self-aware life that drove his reflex for breathing. As an unravelled yarn from a knit, his spirit became drawn out of the gravid shell of his trunk.
Grace died, by dread increments. Awareness of light left his eyes. His hearing frayed into silence. The clay bowl on his stomach bore down like poured stone, absorbing his flickering consciousness.
Vertigo spun him as the vessel was raised. Cowled figures leaned over him, chanting. The print of spread hands that he could not feel froze the streaming sweat on his abdomen. Oblivion beckoned. The shrill warning of instinct whirled away.
Then the bone-knife nicked into Arithon's navel.
Pain entered him, new-born. Its drilling force reawakened nerve, bone, and sinew, a molten lava that flensed him, spirit from tormented flesh.
This was not the kindly crossing known to the bard. No natural death, where the life-conscious essence gathered itself and in gentle parting, cast away mortal ties and slipped free. Instead, Arithon experienced a forced separation, a tearing of continuity that despoiled right order and savaged all rhythmic relinquishment. His husked body shuddered. Wrenched by the throes of that merciless back-lash, the knotted ropes strained, while the incised bowl held above his splayed form wound in the peeled stream of his consciousness and plunged him, drowning in blood-murky broth.
Arithon fought the induction, to no avail. As though his life-cord was reeled onto a spool, the dominant imprint infused in the vessel dragged him headlong into bondage.
He could not burst free. The refined shift in resonance that would buy his clear passage across Fate's Wheel could not rise into completion. His essence stayed tethered. The nailing spells fixed by the wax seals locked him into etheric connection. The auric remnant anchored in his extremities pinned him yet to his brutalized flesh. Constrained as a bead upon a plucked thread, Arithon's imprint became seized into a liquid-filled bowl for a diabolical sacrifice.
A cult parasite of the Kralovir would drink him down.
No action might save him. The black grimoires told over the hideous fate of human prey taken by necromancy. Their lost spirits became a fused part of the creature who partook of the vile sacrament. Hung in crossing between death and life, the immutable aspect of Arithon's being would remain enslaved. Like the children before him, his bound shade would be tapped, tormented, and wrung as emotional fuel for a cult host's unnatural immortality.
A last invocation would frame the ritual. Arithon felt cased in harrowing cold. The spells in the bowl were as knives, fencing his signature presence. His still-quickened hands and feet would not let him tear loose, though the suspension that shackled him to his dying flesh lashed his psyche to untold distress.
Then came the horrible, sloshing tilt, as the clay bowl was given over to the warped creature who would absorb him. Stopped lungs could not scream. A stilled tongue raised no utterance. The cult master's hissed recitation reached full closure, unchallenged. Arithon felt his consciousness pour into dark, a bright current spilled out of a jar.
Agony milled him. He became a thousand hurled shards of remembrance, vivid as light through stained glass. Wrenched from trued flight by wrists and sealed ankles, he felt stretched. A wire filament cranked to the verge of release, he was unable to let go, or snap, but could only be drawn and pulled under.
The spirit granted existence within Ath's creation was of itself too immutably real to rend from the span of the infinite.
Far off, so far, the Warden of Althain heard the shrill cry of vibration struck off by Arithon's ordeal in Etarra. He listened, knowing the moment was nigh. Anxious, he awaited the word of appeal to enable his Fellowship to react. . . in Jaelot, drawn tense, Luhaine watched a smiling priest tuck into the banquet on Lysaer's table . . . while in Darkling, under the dark of the moon, Kharadmon fretted out the delay, tracking another priest who shuddered on his knees, eyes closed for the jolt that presaged an addictive ecstasy . . .
Falling . . . falling . . . falling . . . the crux of one instant extended beyond bearing as seizing forces spun their vortex about him. Arithon dwindled into the clutching embrace of the host who inducted him. Strung out of body, stripped of physical senses, only mage-sight recorded his transit as the filament of his essence streamed through the mazing sigils stamped into the bowl. He could not break their grasp. The higher octaves of his awareness had become torn beyond reach. Below him, the dark chains wrought of symbols and blood, that tethered him to his quivering husk: the naked form strapped to cold stone, now beyond help to release. He existed in terror, suspended, while the weave in spilled liquid winnowed him away, making him as a stranger unto himself.
Arithon fought to recall his beloved. Her features came to him faded, cheeks streaked with reproachful tears. ' Above anyone living, I trust you. . .'
