Keeper of the Keys

by Janny Wurts

  She tried to stir, and could not. Her limbs felt locked in lead. Afraid now, for the chill might certainly kill her, she struggled to lift her head. Her vision became patched with darkness. Dizziness wrung her senses like grass stalks swept up in a whirlpool, and a fierce attack of nausea left her gasping. Jaric, she thought weakly, but could not rouse enough to focus her warning into dream-call. As the void swirled and engulfed her, Taen heard laughter from the man she had once called a brother. Then the sound shattered to echoes. Her awareness slipped sickeningly into night, even as the last terrible fact crackled across the link: the Demon Lord of Shadowfane wanted more than the Keys to Elrinfaer. He had commanded that Jaric be taken alive. Ivain Firelord might have been hated, even cursed for his cruelties and his malice. But the son bequeathed to Keithland might do worse; enslaved by demons, the boy and his prodigious potential for a sorcerer's mastery might be turned like a cataclysm against his own kind. A Firelord dedicated to destruction would surely end hope and extinguish humanity's chance of survival.

  Had Taen retained even a glimmer of consciousness, she would have wept for sorrow, that the greatest fear of Jaric's heart should now so terribly become real. But her awareness extinguished like candle flame slapped by a downpour.

  * * *

  Night fell over the tors of Imrill Kand. The broken clouds of afternoon fused into darkness and whipping rain that slashed the rocks, and beat in icy sheets over mats of flattened grass. Bracken bent to the storm, and run-off drummed over a mud-spattered goat-fleece cloak that only that morning had been new. The Dreamweaver of Imrill Kand lay beneath, unmoving. Her hands glistened with rainwater when the lanternlight fell across them; the hair plastered sodden to her cheek swallowed reflections, seemed a shroud cut from the very cloth of death.

  'Fires, she's here, then,' said a soul-weary voice edged with bitterness.

  A shout followed, and a rustle of oilskins, as the small band of searchers clustered together around the site.

  More light flooded the cranny in the rocks where Taen lay. Evertt stamped mud from his boot soles to be sure of his footing on the rocks. Grim as the granite he trod, he set his storm lantern in a cranny. Then he bent and gathered his niece in his arms exactly as he would have hefted a net of fresh-caught cod, except that his movements were awkward with a grief only his dead brother might have recognized.

  Her skin was very cold.

  'We're too late,' someone murmured. Already the dour men with their flickering lanterns dispersed to descend the tor.

  'Perhaps.' Evertt lowered his head against the driving rain, the girl cradled limply against his chest. 'She breathes, but her spirit rides the winds.' He said no more until he reached the doorstoop in Rat's Alley where Marl's widow waited in an agony of silence, even as she had for the husband and the son fate had torn from her before this.

  Now, the same as then, Evertt could not meet her eyes. He stepped full into the light which spilled from the kitchen, Taen bundled loosely in his arms. The mud and the wet spoiling the cloak which had not protected made the mother gasp, but she did not ask. Still, beaten and worn with years, she did not ask.

  Her aching, terrible courage made Evertt feel inadequate. Rage at his helplessness made him gruff, for he knew no other way to treat the humiliation, and the endless, grinding tragedy of life as he understood it. 'Found her on the tors,' he snapped. Then, sorry for his harshness, he tried to ease what he could not change. 'Taen is too small for her task. But like her father, she won't believe it.'

  Which was Evertt's timeworn bitterness finding expression, as it always did, that his brother had been born knowing how to find joy in the face of adversity.

  Marl's widow stiffened. 'The sorcery could not kill her, any more than the storm did Marl.' Bravery had, though, and now might do so again. Abruptly Marl's widow discovered she was not too hardened for tears. 'Bring her in, then.'

  Evertt stepped into the dim warmth of the kitchen, and for once he was not nagged about the mud he tracked in with his boots.

  * * *

  Taen wakened to dry blankets and the dull red glow of the hearth fire. She lay on a cot by the settle. Her cloak hung on a chair, filling the air with the reek of damp wool, while wind and rain slashed the windowpanes, jangling the luck charms intended to ward storm violence from those within. Taen stirred under the coverlet. Her eyes stung. Her body ached, as if savaged by fever, and her heart bore a burden of pain greater than any she might have imagined when she accepted her training from the Vaere.

  'Don't speak,' said Marl's widow.

  Taen turned eyes that were too old for the years she actually carried. Restless on her pillows, she framed a tortured question. 'How long?'

  Marl's widow found herself crying again, not in relief, but for the mysteries which burdened her daughter she would never again understand. 'Your spirit has ridden the winds through a day and another night.'

  Taen grew very still. Her blue eyes acquired depths that wounded, before she closed them. Too late, too late for Jaric. Thienz had taken him as she slept, and the Keys to Elrinfaer with him. Even as the Dreamweaver's mind encompassed the knowledge, she sensed the demon boats which dragged Callinde in tow. Defeat had sharpened her dream-sense to knife-like clarity, and an image formed, of Jaric battered helpless by the vindictive triumph of the Thienz. His body lay wrapped in sailcloth, trussed in spare cordage purloined from Callinde's lockers. But far worse, his mind was left aware. The fate he would embrace at Shadowfane was known to him, and the horror of his knowing was reflected inward over and over by the mirrorlike spell of his prison. The demons could not kill him, by Scait's express command; but in bloodless malice they tortured the mind of their victim past bearing.

  Taen could not penetrate Thienz' defences with her dream-sense; that she saw at all was a cruelty arranged by the one Shadowfane named Maelgrim. Powerless to intervene, ravaged by the failure of her talents as never, ever before, the enchantress knew Ivainson Jaric well enough to guess the depths of suffering he could not express. Behind the glassy blankness of his eyes, his heart was screaming.

  'When the net grows too heavy, the wise fisherman seeks help,' said Marl's widow from the shadows by the cot in Event's cottage.

  Taen swallowed, willing the images to leave her. She opened eyes flooded now with tears and forced her hands to unclench. 'Who is left to help?' She stared at the roofbeams, hating the whipped sound of her words even as she spoke them.

  Marl's widow leaned forward and rested work-weary arms upon the shelf of her knees. 'The sea itself, if the powers beneath so choose.' Then she abandoned the solace of proverbs with a sigh of exasperation. 'Daughter, must you always seek to bend the wind?'

  The words were very near the ones a Dreamweaver had offered Jaric in the burrow of the Llondelei. Now that time felt far distant, a child's dream of happiness. Taen kicked the memory to quiescence, before sorrow could choke her heart. The Keys might be taken, but the Mharg had yet to fly; leagues of ocean remained to be crossed before Jaric reached the dungeons of Shadowfane.

  'So like your father you are,' Marl's widow began, and stopped, for a glance towards the pillows made her breath catch. Taen's tears had stopped. Her face was no longer that of a girl, or even a woman, but that of an enchantress trained by the Vaere. Power rang from her, even as sound reverberating from steel under the hammer falls of a smith's shaping. Yet even now the familiar was not entirely lost; the Sathid-born force of the enchantress held that fierce, indomitable hope with which Marl had tempered the hardship of his days upon Imrill Kand.

  'The sea will help, if the powers beneath so choose,' Taen repeated. She turned a shining look to her mother. 'Callinde's provisions were low, her casks nearly empty. If the demons bear the Firelord's heir to Shadowfane, they must make landfall, somewhere, for water.'

  Her mother made the sign against evil, for the mention of perils beyond her understanding. She turned diffident eyes to her daughter, who was no longer of Imrill Kand, but inextricably bound to the turning of the wor
ld beyond. Only Taen did not see her mother's uncertainty. Her Dreamweaver's mind was already far removed by the powers that marked her craft.

  * * *

  Taen's awareness sped outward from Imrill Kand, straight as an arrow's flight. She wasted no time with openings, but roused the captain of the Kielmark's brigantine Shearfish with an urgency that shot him bolt upright in his berth. He narrowly missed slamming his head into the deck beams overtop, but purpose overrode his annoyance.

  'Weaver of Dreams, I have patrolled the northeast reaches in the area you named,' he thought in answer to her query. 'My men saw no mists. If there were demons, they are gone.'

  But the negative report was a thing Taen had expected, since learning that Maelgrim's talents directed the powers of the Thienz. He would surely be sailing where her dream-sense had seen the fogs of cloaking illusion, and through mind-trance with the second fleet of Thienz to the south, his powers had augmented the trap that had sprung on Jaric. The eyes of men would see no trace to mark the boats which sailed from Shadowfane; but a Dreamweaver might. Taen bent her focus to Cliffhaven. If Shearfish bore her south, and the Kielmark mustered his men at arms, the chance existed that she might track the demon fleets. Though the sea was too wide, too open, to launch an attack upon enemies men could not see, on land, with the aid of her dream-sight, an army might manage an ambush when dwindling provisions drove the Thienz ashore.

  The Kielmark sat at dinner. Before his table, an uncomfortable merchant captain stood with the bare steel of two captains pricking the back of his fine brocade doublet. He had thought to run the straits with impunity after sending ingots lined with lead in his tribute chests, and now was regretting his scam. Though the meats and the wines were very fine, the Sovereign Lord of Cliffhaven was not eating. For the merchant, that sign boded ill, but the judgement awaiting him was summarily put off. The King of Pirates sprang to his feet even before Taen had completed her message. Wine sloshed in the goblets as he shoved away from the table, yelling for his captains to leave the merchant in irons, and follow him afterwards to the bailey. The Dreamweaver's rapport faded as he called for the saddled horse. Shouting commands to his captains even as he gained the saddle, the Kielmark wheeled his mount with a crack of hooves and galloped for the harbourside gates.

  Taen relayed another of his orders; and far north, the brigantine Shearfish came about with a crack of canvas and steadied on a new course for Imrill Kand.

  But in the end all the flurry of preparation proved useless. When the Dreamweaver turned her perception south, the demon fleet which guarded Jaric did not ply a northerly course for Shadowfane, as anticipated. Natural wariness perhaps made them shun the lands of men; their stores might be too depleted to reach the mainlands which lay between the south reaches and Felwaithe's distant shores. But far and away more likely, with the Keys to Elrinfaer taken at last, the demons intended to ply north to free the Mharg. Taen saw with bitterness that the black ships with Callinde in tow sailed due east, for the southwest shores of Elrinfaer. No army could be gathered there to do battle for the rescue of the Firelord's heir; those lands had been stripped of habitation since Ivain's betrayal, and Anskiere's contention with the Mharg.

  Skilled as the Kielmark's captains were, they could not outsail the winds. No fleet and no fighting men, no matter how well trained, could possibly cross the Corine Sea in time to matter. Even the wizards at Mhored Kara could not help, with trackless leagues of wilderness lying between their stronghold of towers and the western sea. Beaten, cut by cruellest despair, Taen rebalanced her powers. Nothing remained but to recall the Kielmark's brave ships. Afterwards, defeat like ashes in her mouth, she gathered weary resources to frame one final message. This one sapped her in more than content, twisted as it must be across barriers of space and time. Tamlin on the Isle of the Vaere was last to learn of her failure. Once the demon fleet sailed from Elrinfaer, no force in Keithland could prevent Maelgrim and his Thienz from delivering Ivainson Jaric to the Lord of Demons at Shadowfane.

  XVII

  Lady of the Spring

  Taen's sending reached the Isle of the Vaere in the still hours before dawn, yet no shadow of night darkened the grove on the fabled isle. As always, the oak trees stood without a rustle in silvery, changeless twilight, where nary a grass blade stirred. No little man with clothing fringed with feathers and bells manifested in response to the Dreamweaver's tidings; yet the being known as Tamlin of the Vaere received word of Jaric's peril and the Keys' loss nonetheless. The extent of the damage was no sooner understood than the entity which inhabited the grove sent a second call forth into Keithland. Directed to a certain spring in the forests southeast of Elrinfaer, this was a summons of desperation; for even the Vaere could not be certain the initiate of the mysteries there would accede to the demands of necessity.

  * * *

  The storms in the south reaches of the Corine eventually broke, but the swell took far longer to subside. The black fleet from Shadowfane tossed on a beam reach, and the jerk as Callinde rolled and snapped short on her towlirie became torment without surcease for Jaric. Each surge of the sea fetched his limp weight against the comfortless angles of wooden ribs and floorboards. His cheek and shoulder quickly chafed raw from the pounding. He could not move to ease his misery, even to turn his head. Demons had trussed him in sailcloth and cord. They had lashed his wrists to the mast, then imprisoned his mind with ties more ruthless still. Fully aware of his battered and aching body, Ivainson Jaric was deprived of any control of his limbs. His thoughts were left free to agonize over his helplessness.

  Defeat and humiliation became suffering from which no surcease existed. The Thienz sailed for Shadowfane, to deliver him alive to Lord Scait, along with the cloth sack which contained the stolen Keys to Elrinfaer. The seals over the wards which imprisoned the Mharg now hung at the neck of a demon; more terrible still, the critical potential for his Firelord's mastery would be enslaved, even as the Llondelei farseers had forewarned. Jaric cursed the wind that bellied the black boats' sails. As Callinde was dragged inexorably northwards, he ached for Taen, whose death at the hand of her brother would proceed undisputed. He thought often of the Stormwarden, whose geas of desperation had failed to bring rescue, and whose doom in the ice now was sealed. All the while Jaric's Thienz captors gabbled among themselves. They praised each other for the defeat of Ivainson Firelord's heir and they jabbed energies at his mind to taunt him. A day and a night passed before they gave him anything to drink, and then he suffered the indignity of rough handling as they poured water down his throat. The demons did the same with the food, an ill-smelling paste of raw fish that they chewed first to soften, their poison sacs sphinctered shut to prevent contamination that might inadvertently kill him. Had Jaric been left any physical response, he would have gagged rather than swallow; but even that reflex was denied him.

  The winds held fair from the west. Spray fell full in Jaric's face, and his hair trailed in the bilge, which unavoidably came to reek of urine. The Thienz seemed unfazed by the stink. They gloated, and they trimmed sails, and they checked often to see that the towrope dragging Callinde and the fines binding their prisoner did not chafe.

  Day followed day in a misery of animal suffering. Nights became a terror-ridden procession of nightmares as, over and over, Jaric relived the destruction of Keithland as foretold by the Llondelei dreamers. He saw Taen bleed under the knife of her brother; Anskiere's bones became trampled by frostwargs; and the jewel-bright scales of the Mharg flashed in sunlight over withered acres. Other times, his captors crafted images to torment him, of Scait Demon Lord on his throne of human remains, and of the dank dungeons carved beneath the foundations of Shadowfane. There, most horribly, the heir of Ivain would come into his inheritance; in mind-rending agony he would suffer the Cycle of Fire for the vengeance of demons against humanity. Powerless to move, unable to weep, and denied any means of dying, Jaric endured. He burned in the sun's harsh glare and shivered, drenched, through the squalls. There seemed no relief
, except at rare intervals when exhaustion overcame discomfort, and he slept. Then his wretchedness receded before a dark like the void beyond eternity.

  During such a time the Thienz reached the westernmost coast of Elrinfaer, their purpose to refill depleted water casks. Jaric did not rouse when the lookout croaked from its perch in the rigging. He did not feel the short, sharp tugs as Callinde's towline was snubbed short, nor the bang of sails as the black ships jibed to run before the wind. The first he knew of the landfall was the jar and the grinding scrape as Callinde grounded on the shoaling sands of the barrier bar. The Thienz at her steering oar responded clumsily; the heavy craft slewed sideways, and all but broached as breaking surf boomed and exploded into spray against her portside thwart. Jaric was thrown hard on his back. Impact knocked the wind from him, and his bonds jerked his arms at excruciating angles beneath his body. He could not curl to protect himself. Callinde rolled queasily through the trough, while the Thienz at the helm whuffed alarm and tugged to straighten the helm. Before it succeeded, a second wave hammered down. Bruised against the mast, Jaric choked helplessly on the flood of water through the bilge. Soaked and limp as flotsam, he felt Mathieson's forgiving old fishing boat swing and plough like a dolphin for the shore.

  She grounded with a jolt in the shallows. Jaric lay gasping as his captors seized the towline and dragged the ungainly craft ashore. Dazzled by the glare of noon sunlight, he heard the thumps and bumps as others boarded. Soon busy, toad-fingered hands untied the lashing which secured Callinde's casks. More Thienz scrabbled over the gunwales, these to stand guard while the others searched for a clean spring ashore. Jaric endured their cuffs and their kicks, his opened eyes filled with sky, and the sour, reedy smell of marshland strong in his nostrils. Flies crawled on his scabs, and mosquitoes stung his face. Swarms clouded the air around the Thienz also, but the insects seldom fed, for the demons snapped their jaws and ate them. Queasy from thirst and days of unsuitable food, Jaric wished desperately for the freedom to close his eyes voluntarily.