Keeper of the Keys

by Janny Wurts

  A gust of heated air stung Anskiere's face. He blinked away tears from the blast. Outlined in glare, the first wings arose, stretched upward, and beat strongly amid the fumes. The fact the Vaere had warned that victory would be difficult made the moment no easier to accept. Wings cracked as the Mharglings scuttled clear of the smoke. They took flight, utterly without scathe, except for scales which glinted a hot reddish yellow where the flames had touched them.

  At once Anskiere knew he must merge minds with Ivain. Their skills must answer as one to counter the Mharglings' deadly speed. Fire daunted the creatures not at all; the air currents already cooled their heated scales. The Stormwarden buffeted them with gusts, yet they stayed separate from each other, knifing through turbulence like quarrels shot from a crossbow. Tire them, he decided, confident Ivain would catch his thought. Wear them out and try to survive, and when they weaken, seal them living in a tomb of rock.

  But when Anskiere extended his awareness to mesh with the Firelord's mind, his linking thought touched emptiness. Mharg-wings flogged the air with the sound of storm surf battering sand. The creatures spiralled upward with a rattle of scales, and yellow fumes billowed from their mouths. Anskiere turned, fearful the silence in his mind meant he would find his companion injured.

  Yet the Firelord stood unharmed, with his thumbs hooked negligently through his belt. His chin lifted as Anskiere faced him.

  'We should teach those priests a lesson,' Ivain said. A mocking smile spread over his lips. 'The event would be sporting, don't you think? A Mhargling against a prayer?'

  Flicked by a monstrous shadow, Anskiere whirled. His cloak snapped like a flag as he raised a gust to drive off the poisonous fumes. Still his eyes stung and watered, and the blown ends of his hair turned from silver to black. 'That's madness!' he shouted, for a moment unwilling to face the Firelord behind him. 'You'll kill us all, and for what? Simple jealousy?'

  Ivain's eyes narrowed. 'Not of the priests' popularity. Kordane's faithful are inserts, to a man. Should we prevent demons from swatting them?'

  Anskiere jerked and spun around. For an instant Stormwarden and Firelord regarded each other, one with outrage, the other with naked enmity. Then the Mharglings screamed and swooped for the kill; Anskiere experienced a tangible dissolution of resistance as Ivain relented. The sorcerers' powers merged.

  Power coursed through Anskiere's body with the inexorable force of the tides; nerve, sinew, and bone sang with stresses never meant for mortal endurance. Yet the Stormwarden held firm. He joined with Ivain and fought the Mharg with the combined masteries of earth and fire, water and wind. The battle spanned hours, or maybe days, without surcease.

  Anskiere called up tempests, and rain fell. Lightning slashed the sky, striking sword-metal highlights on scaled hides. Still the Mharg flew. The temperature plunged, and hail rattled into the ground. Battered by ice, the Mharg howled but did not land. Ivain split the earth. Lava spurted from the rift, red as an opened artery. The Mharglings yowled, enraged. They shot straight up. Anskiere belted them with a downdraught, without success. The Mharg-spawn hissed and wheeled northward, over the hills of Elrinfaer. Through a murky rain of ash, forests withered. Pine trees crumpled like sodden silk, and the wind reeked of death.

  Racked by exhaustion and inflamed nerves, Anskiere pursued. His eyes became blinded by tears, that the land he was once to rule should suffer such ruin as this. Tired feet stumbled over blackened earth, and his robe clung to shoulders which steamed with sweat. Caustic slush blackened his boots where the Mharg had passed. The leather softened and dissolved and the slime burned his bare soles. Beaten by sleet and wind, the Stormwarden paused to wrap his blistered feet in his cloak. A Mhargling hissed down out of the dark. In an instant the ground became an inferno as Ivain chiselled an outcrop into lava and drove it off. Still the demons flew. The Vaere had warned that their strength arose from a world never inhabited by men. Tortured by fatigue, Anskiere wondered whether the creatures would settle at all.

  'If they land just once, we have them.' Ivain's face glistened with rain and sweat. Mharg-breath had long since singed his cloak to rags. 'Did you notice? They don't care for molten rock.'

  Anskiere grunted assent, his throat too raw for speech. With a shiver of foreboding, he raised his eyes skyward once more. Repeatedly the Mharg-demons retreated to the north; if they were not brought to ground very soon, their rampaging would destroy the orchards which were the pride and the wealth of Elrinfaer. And close by lay villages and farmsteads he was bound by birthright to protect.

  Aching, the Stormwarden rose to his feet. As he raised his powers to renew the fight, Ivain regarded him with curious malice. But the dream which unfolded through Llondian influence was nothing more than a memory. No warning could alter the past.

  Sudden fire flared. The earth spewed forth dust to clog the Mharglings' lungs, and the Firelord's face became veiled by grit. Powers burned through Anskiere's hands, vast and wild as a cataclysm. He needed every scrap of concentration to manage them. No resource remained to examine Ivain's vagaries, and of necessity his peril went unnoticed. Storms shook the ground. A forest burned, branches seared to skeletons against a wall of glare. Still the Mharg flew; but at long last they showed signs of flagging. More often they glided, as if resting tired wings, and their attacks became sporadic, even sluggish compared to their earlier efforts.

  Dawn broke. Dust drifted in the air. The sun glowed sullen orange above fields scorched to stubble. Anskiere pounded the air with gusts, and the Mharglings cut and wove in maddened circles to stay airborne.

  'Open a shaft. They're slowing.' The Stormwarden shaped his request to the Firelord in a croaking whisper, unable to manage more. His skin was patched with abrasions. Sparks had scored holes in his clothes, but his eyes were alight with the triumph of victory.

  Ivain faced him over the gutted remains of an oak, hair streaked with grime. 'Do that yourself.' A smile brightened his smudged face. 'It's not my kingdom at stake.'

  Anskiere stared, speechless with shock. At first he refused to believe Ivain's words were not simply another malicious taunt. But the face confronting him was that of a madman. Overhead the Mharglings screamed, banked, and shot off to the north. Torn between rebuke and compassion, the Stormwarden searched for means to restore Ivain's lost reason and stave off the destruction of Elrinfaer.

  'Your countryfolk deserve the lesson.' Ivain spat on the broken soil. 'They should never have refused me hospitality last solstice.'

  'Vaere witness, you wrong them.' Anskiere managed, his voice mangled with pain.

  Ivain perched insouciantly on the fallen oak, his hands lax at his sides. With terrible finality, Anskiere felt the presence of the Firelord dissolve within his mind. Grief caught him like a blow. Separate and alone, Anskiere turned quickly lest the Firelord laugh at his sorrow. Elrinfaer still lay dearest to his heart; the Mharg-spawn would make a desert of the land, farms and cities and wilderness, and all his Stormwarden's powers could not prevent them . . .

  * * *

  Bound into sympathy by the Llondel's link, Jaric screamed over and over in anguish. Never in life had he known such suffering as the Stormwarden experienced at Ivain's betrayal.

  There seemed no end to such agony of spirit. From the depths of trance, the Firelord's son flung a desperate appeal to the entity which imprisoned his will. 'Free me!' Jaric's cry battered like a moth against lantern glass, seeking light though it killed him. For an instant, he thought he glimpsed stars and the crashing of waves smoking over the reefs of Cliffhaven. His throat was lacerated from screaming, and his lips stung with the taste of tears. He rolled, gasping from the cold, and saw two eyes glaring down at him with baleful and inhuman indifference.

  'Let me go.' Jaric shivered. Lashed raw inside by the demands of forces he had no schooling to understand, and terrified of that legacy as never before, he was aware Anskiere's struggle to save Elrinfaer was doomed; whatever powers the Stormwarden summoned, their fury was surely more than a boy's untrai
ned mind could support. 'Do you wish my death?'

  'No,' sent the Llondel.

  It flicked grey fingers, and Jaric tumbled back into darkness. Through Anskiere's eyes, he watched Elrinfaer die, slowly, inexorably, like embers beaten to ash by rain.

  III

  Warning

  No longer could Anskiere influence the direction of the demons' flight. Without Ivain's command of fire, the Mharg drove across inhabited lands unhindered. Their wake became a wasteland of towns filled with smeared corpses and rotting bones. The Stormwarden stumbled over broken ground where only minutes earlier a flock of sheep had grazed, guarded by a dog and a boy with a reed pipe. Livestock, grass, and child were now dead, reduced to unrecognizable masses of slime by the Mharg. Bereft of alternatives, the former Prince of Elrinfaer tried desperate measures to preserve his land from ruin.

  Anskiere called down the cold. Power answered, streamed like water over a rockfall from his raised fists. The temperature fell, and fell again. Spring transformed to winter; in the space of a single breath, the heartland of Elrinfaer silvered under a spiked mantle of frost. Cattle stampeded in the pastures. Inside town walls, parents hustled children from the dooryards and slammed their shutters in fear. Anskiere shouted again, and the skies darkened. Rain fell in white torrents and froze to a glaze of ice. Apple blossoms wore hardened fists of glass; animals fled for shelter only to stiffen like statues in their tracks. Field hands died at the sowing, and women washing on the riverbanks cried in terror, their wrists trapped fast in black ice. Grim as death itself, Anskiere tightened the bindings of cold over Elrinfaer; crops might fail and people perish, but an armour of ice might possibly shield the land from the total devastation of the Mharg-breath. Seeds would survive the cataclysm, and some of the plants, and surely the majority of the people, enough to rebuild their losses after the crisis passed.

  But the tactic failed. Mharglings swept from the sky and attacked an isolated homestead. Their poison reduced the ice to hissing steam and razed everything beneath to stinking slush. Anskiere wept. All his Storm-warden's powers could spare neither land nor people. Nearly broken by defeat, he splashed through a pool of filth. His foot snagged on metal, a gate hinge cast loose when the wooden post which supported it dissolved into soup. The sorcerer stumbled, caught himself short of a fall, and continued, trying not to think of the dead who had raised that fence for their cattle. Inflexibly schooled by the Vaere, a part of his mind still sorted options. His final resource, and Keithland's sole hope, rested in the sea. If the Mharg flew over ocean, one chance remained that Anskiere might trap them through water.

  The western coastline lay over mountains, weather-stripped rocks with snowbound passes where roads stayed treacherous even through high summer; to the east, fifty leagues of farmland sprawled towards a shore settled by fisherfolk. Anskiere rubbed the blistered skin of his brow. The Mharg flew where they would; he could do little but follow and ply the winds, try to keep them airborne as much as possible.

  The trials which followed melted one into another; Anskiere's days became a misery of existence between terrible events of loss. Storm force resonated through his body. The terrible ebb and flux of power heated nerve and sinew and spirit to pitiless agony, burning away his identity until he could no longer separate which pain was his, and which his kingdom's. Days melted endlessly into dark and time itself lost meaning. Still the Mharg flew. Events became jumbled; scenes lapped together like patchwork, each one a vignette of tragedy.

  A city fell and a sister died, the same a young prince had promised to defend when he left seeking the mysteries of the Vaere. Her image haunted his memory, girlish fingers clenched around a sceptre she had never wanted, and her fears checked by nothing but royal pride. She had been born with the sight. Now Anskiere wondered whether she had known she would die while he slept. The first night he succumbed to exhaustion, the Mharg had veered east and brought death to the fair court of Elrinfaer. Anskiere clenched his fists and the sky spat lightning. Flash after jagging flash split the dark as he stumbled through courtyards littered with bones. In grief the sorcerer summoned storms to cleanse the streets; his tears became the drum roll of rain.

  Summer came, and dust blew over wasted acres. Anskiere climbed a rock face, barefoot, his fingers lacerated from gripping cruel stone. The Mharg circled lazily on an air current, jewel-bright against the zenith. But so long had Anskiere been immersed in storm-weaving, his eyes saw no sky but patterns of tangled light that mapped the force lines by which he read the winds. And his weather alone kept the enemies airborne, harried them westward over the peaks to the sea.

  He knew hunger then; days of snow and sun glare and gale-driven ice. Some nights he was too tired to deflect the temperature enough to keep warm. Clothed in little but rags, he rested, shivering on bare rock. The Mharg roosted on the peaks and preened like painted gargoyles. The voracious demand of their appetites would drive them to the air before long. Anskiere forced himself to his feet. Solitary under glittering pinpoints of stars, he traversed a slope of moraine. Pebbles scattered dangerously under his feet, and the air rose cold off the snowfields. Under the cliffs where the demons slept, the Stormwarden raised a fist and summoned his powers.

  Wind arose, howling over the rocks, and slapped the demons from their perches. They launched with a screeling wail and turned downward towards the sea. Anskiere pursued. His memory of that night's run blended indistinguishably into the tormented days which followed. Storm-torn, savaged by the forces he shaped with his mind, he existed only as a tool for his craft. For a time he lost all awareness of self, his mind blistered beyond mortal recognition by too much power.

  Later, bone-thin, the Stormwarden huddled on a beach, his head cradled on crossed wrists. Waves thundered over rock bare inches from his body. Matted hair clung to wet skin, and he breathed in sobs, too spent to move. Sixty yards offshore, a waterspout raged, battered by a screaming howl of elements. In its heart, the Mharglings lay trapped at last, but a week passed before Anskiere recovered enough presence to balance the forces which held them. The months of his labours had taxed him. He could not weave the energy strong enough to perpetuate itself. Daily he had to strengthen his handiwork, and he dared never leave the site.

  Anskiere scavenged the beaches. Filthy as a shipwreck victim, he ate raw fish. Dragging the waterspout and the Mharg it confined up the coast, he at last reached a derelict light station on Elrinfaer's northwest shore. The keeper dwelling there was senile, a hermit who had neglected to tend his lamps for half a score of years. Clicking, muttering, and running his tongue over toothless gums, the man still had wits enough to listen when Anskiere asked him to brick every window in the tower with stones. The lightkeeper scratched his groin and spat. But he helped until the task was finished. The moment the last chink was sealed, Anskiere summoned his powers. He heated the air to a blinding inferno. Reft of Ivain's talents, he drove himself until, at the uttermost edge of life, the stones of the tower melted and fused, leaving no break in the walls. The new-made prison rose sheer and black from the cliff, and there Anskiere confined the Mharg. They would fly no more. In time, only eggs might survive, but the sorcerer cleansed the place with wind, leaving no moisture within to trigger a second hatching. The Stormwarden sealed the entrance, rested, then plied his mastery once again. When he finished, the Tower of Elrinfaer held secure under the strongest wards ever forged by a weathermage.

  He wept at the end. Battered, ragged, and blistered from his labours, he sat on the cliff's edge while the waves creamed over the beaches and the gulls squabbled over flotsam in the tide wrack. In fingers that shook he turned a small basalt block which had once been a trinket of the lightkeeper's. The facets flashed over and over and over. Absorbed by the play of the light, Anskiere never heard the footsteps of the visitor who approached. Nor did he guess he was no longer alone until a familiar, sardonic voice called out to him.

  'You did admirably.' Ivain paused, thoughtfully tossing pebbles from hand to hand. His hair gleamed coppe
r-bright in late sunlight. 'Wrecked yourself, truly, and for what? The survivors will say you caused the devastation. Their priests will curse your name in song, and children learn to fear you.'

  Anskiere rose, clumsy with exhaustion. 'There were no survivors. That's why the Mharg sought the sea. Nothing else remained for them to spoil.' He paused to control an anger he lacked the strength to express. 'You're lucky the destruction didn't spread beyond Elrinfaer.'

  'Why?' Ivain's hands stopped in the air, and the stones fell rattling to the ground. 'I'm tired of working for the Vaere.'

  Before Anskiere could respond, the ground parted. The sorcerer who was both Firelord and Earthmaster vanished beneath the soil, his laughter ringing like curses upon the air.

  'I'll find you,' whispered the Stormwarden. 'When I do, I will bind you with a geas so potent you'll never forsake your kind again.'

  So began the hunt for Ivain which culminated at Northsea; forced at bay against the ocean, the Firelord crouched at the Stormwarden's feet. There, under duress, Ivain completed the bindings, stabilizing the enchantments which prisoned the Mharg-demons. The powers of his Earthmastery impressed the Keys to the wards into the cube of basalt that once had served as the lightkeeper's door stop. After, Anskiere had pronounced his sentence upon the Firelord who had deserted him at Elrinfaer, the bitter effects of which were to pass through the next generation, to Jaric.

  That instant, the dream shattered. Flung precipitously out of the Stormwarden's memory, the son of Ivain tumbled through blackness. Sound, sight, all sensations were lost to him. The Llondel withheld any guidance. Abandoned to some nightmare pocket between his own existence and the sorcerer's past, Jaric cried aloud. He struggled to reorient, half-deranged by panic.