Master of Whitestorm

by Janny Wurts

  Korendir turned awkwardly from the cliff edge. His eyes quite pointedly fixed on Haldeth's left hand. "Did you hit yourself by accident, or did you bruise that thumbnail purple to attract a lover? The whores of Arhaga started the fashion, but they generally use paint for the purpose."

  Haldeth's roar of outrage became swallowed without echo by empty sky. Through swelling and bruises, and a forehead still scabbed from mishap, Korendir might have smiled. "Be more careful of the axe, my friend. And don't forget where you drove that piton. Our lives might soon depend on it."

  * * *

  Korendir's strength returned gradually. At first unable to manage the heavy labor of raft construction, he spent his days exploring the cliffs of Whitestorm, both the inside chains of caverns and the crags without. The treasure proved too extensive to tally; and freed of Cyondide's influence, the headlands themselves embraced change.

  Summer winds blew the chill from the air. Though the flinty, white rock remained armored in ice, the soaring lift of the crags caught the eye with a stark and forbidding beauty. Korendir roamed across the heights, the thorn trees an impenetrable tangle at his back. Where Haldeth cursed the inhospitable barbs, and twisted black branches that seemed to claw like tortured spirits at the sky, Korendir saw a bastion against invasion. He listened for hours to the cries of the gulls, and was moved. Whitestorm haunted him, waking and sleeping, until finally he set words to his thoughts.

  "I want to build here," he announced over the flames of a late night fire. "This is the most perfect site in all Aerith to raise my holdfast."

  Startled in the midst of cooking, the smith spilled an overdose of herbs in the stew. "Neth!" He scooped with the ladle, but bungled the recovery; glumly he watched the seasoning sink beneath the gravy. "You're mad. Mad! And possessed with the gall of Cyondide. How do you propose to match the wrath you've stirred up among the elementals? Mhurga's hells, man! We have gold enough to build mansions and stuff them to the eaves with pretty servants. Can't you choose a plan that won't wind up getting us both killed?"

  "You shouldn't have smashed your thumb," Korendir said obliquely. "Are you going to mix meat with the rosemary, or should I make bannock in self defense?"

  Haldeth looked blank. Then, red-faced, he threw down the ladle and spattered the campsite with broth. "Suit yourself. Burn the gravy." Explosively, he stood up. "You can bet on the fact I'm not hungry."

  Unruffled as his companion stormed out, Korendir slung the pot back over the coals. Soon the sounds of furious hammering drifted down from the cliff top; Haldeth expended his temper upon the boards cut from thorn forest. If, beyond an hour, he had not recovered his appetite, Korendir resolved to toss their overspiced supper off the cliff side.

  Four days later the raft was completed and launched. Burdened low on the waterline with treasure, the craft proved unwieldy but stable. Korendir and Haldeth attempted the return trip to Carcadonn at ebb tide. The sun struck patterns in the shallows, and the drip of steadily melting ice spilled melodious trickles down the rocks. Though treacherous still with ice floes, Whitestorm's natural patterns of surf and current proved mild and unthreatening. The sloop remained secured to her moorings; but the winds of Cyondide's departure had dismasted her ten feet above the decks.

  Haldeth climbed the strakes. He fought his way aboard through snarls of stays and thrashed rigging. Bedecked with gold chains, and sporting a twisted string of pearls for luck, he managed to withold any curses until the companionway was unsealed. Water had overrun the bilge and soaked his favorite blanket; the fact that Korendir already manned the pump did little to ameliorate his temper. If flooding was reversible, matters of scarping and carpentry were not so easily solved. Timber was needed from Thornforest before Carcadonn could carry sail. Their departure must be delayed at least several turns of the tide.

  "Sathig will have you murdered when he sees how you've treated his brightwork!" The smith withheld what he knew was the truth; more likely they would not live to make port at Fairhaven at all. Foolishly, boastfully, or maybe from surly stubbornness, Korendir had set his heart on winning the coast of Whitestorm from the elementals.

  "The luck of the dragons is on this place," was all he would offer for excuse. Haldeth abandoned argument, too chary of his friend's chancy temper to point out that nothing remained of the dragons beyond tales and unburied bones.

  VI. Master of Whitestorm

  Cyondide returned to Whitestorm just at the fading of twilight. Haldeth and Korendir were caught exposed on the ridge, sweaty from the labor of cutting timber. Warned by a sudden plunge in temperature, and a scream of wind-whipped water that bounded across distance to reverberate beneath the cliffs, they dropped their tools where they stood. Side by side they bolted for shelter, leaving planks cut with adze and plane abandoned half-dressed on the ground. They took refuge in the depths of the caverns. The lair they chose was dry, smoothed by time, and well removed from any opening to the outside.

  The whistling cold of the elemental's breath touched them, even there, while the smash of ice-ridden waves beat a furious tattoo through the rock. "Mortal! Cyondide duelled Ishone, and triumphed. Ishone is now nothing but a lament sung by the breeze. Ishone, delivering to Cyondide his final word, said no envoy had been sent in his name."

  A gust eddied snow across the outside cliff face. The melted runoff from the glaciers froze instantly to the hardness of quartz. "Mortal, you have lied. Cyondide will pick apart the rocks to find you. Cyondide can hear the whisper of your breath."

  Korendir flung off his cloak. He glanced at his nervous companion and said, "Loan me your torch. I'm going to take Whitestorm from Cyondide."

  A gust drove a rattling fall of hail against the cliffs. "Mortal! You progress from lies to insolence. Cyondide will tear away your life."

  A sudden snap of frost pried an avalanche from the heights. Boulders fell, tumbling and grinding down the slopes to splash geysers of spume from the sea. The spray blew in sheets on the wind. Droplets iced into hail which battered the cliffs with a rattle like shaman's bones. Gale winds tossed through the thorn forest, and the ancient network of dragon caves rang like a flute to its passing.

  Korendir threaded through the gusty drafts of the caverns. He passed through an opening of natural stone and entered Sharkash's lair. The bones of the King Worm remained there, entombed on the mound of his hoard. Korendir climbed a hillock of priceless treasure. He threaded a path through the dead dragon's ribcage, and gold coins, rang beneath his boots. The torch burned raggedly above his hand. His breath plumed like smoke in flickering, wild light, while relentlessly, Cyondide sucked the warmth from the air.

  Korendir swung his leg over the barrier of the skeleton's breastbone, then vaulted over razor-finned vertebrae to reach his objective. Ahead, above the vacant eye socket of the skull, a shaft rose into the ceiling. Korendir set the end of the torch between his teeth and clambered up a ladder of reptilian incisors. He stood on the dome of the dragon's crown and felt amid cobwebs and darkness until his fingers touched cold metal; the piton Haldeth had driven when he mistakenly hammered his thumb.

  Korendir approximated the stance the smith must have assumed to set the pin. As he did so his ears were battered by the tumultuous thunder of the elements. He listened to the effects of Cyondide's rage as if he stood exposed upon the cliff face level upon level above. The illusion was uncanny. The scream of the winds and the crash of storm waves sounded real enough to provoke a shiver of dread.

  Korendir gripped the torch in sweating fingers. He raised his voice with all the contempt he could muster and directed a shout up the shaft.

  "Cyondide!"

  Like Haldeth's curse, the acoustics of rock deflected the sound. Korendir's outcry reverberated through tangled, dragon-smoothed passageways to the outer cavern once used as a campsite; ringing defiance, it broke over the cliffs of Whitestorm, audible even over the roar of gale and tide.

  Cyondide responded instantaneously. A shaft of lightning seared the ledge from whence the
sound issued. Thunder snapped and rolled, shaking the caverns and deafening the ears of the man who stood with an upraised torch many yards beneath the surface.

  Korendir filled his lungs with air that held the sheared scent of ozone. "Weak are the lightning bolts of Cyondide, that a mortal stands against them!"

  A howl of rage tore the night. The darkness cracked open, flickering and lurid as full noon as charge after charge of electrical force hammered the ledge. The growling crash of thunder shook rock and ice from the heights, and debris plummeted downward into the mill-race of current beneath.

  "Weak is Cyondide!" yelled Korendir. He dropped the torch and flung both hands over his ears. The endless, rumbling boom which followed all but shook the life from his body. He sank to his knees, curled with his face against the bone of the king dragon's skull. Still the thunder pealed. The brimstone smell of scorched rock wafted down the shaft. Sweat dripped from his brow and heated air stung the linings of his nostrils. Huddled and helpless before a violence that paralyzed thought, Korendir closed his eyes.

  A final, smoking bolt tore across the ledge on the clifftop; enraged beyond self-preservation, Cyondide channelled the sum of his being against the mortal who had mocked him. The rock glowed red, melted, and reformed into a permanent epitaph of wrath.

  Thunder slammed like a blow upon the air. Echoes bounced and roared across the cliffs of Whitestorm, then faded away into silence. For a time, nothing moved along that gale-whipped coastline except the dash of waves and dwindling eddies of wind.

  Cyondide the elemental existed no more.

  Far beneath the earth, Korendir stirred. He lifted trembling hands from his ears, then fumbled among the time-polished horns of a dragon and recovered his fallen torch.

  "Great Neth," he said gently.

  His words roused nothing but stillness. Korendir leaped to his feet. A smile surged over bruised features, and a wordless shout of victory escaped his throat. Funnelled outward by the very rock which had tricked Cyondide to his end, the cry reverberated like the triumph of a god over the crags of White Rock Head. The weather-stripped skulls of a thousand dead dragons rang with the sound, and spirits whose fires had been quenched by an elemental's icy tyranny at last were freed to find peace.

  * * *

  The warmth of high summer cracked the ice from the cliffs of Whitestorm. Frost left the ground for the first time in fifteen decades, and life reawakened in the thaw seemed all the more vibrant for its dormancy. Grasses raised blond heads to the breeze and spread a living, sun-burnished carpet over the heights. The close-woven boughs of Thornforest burst into blue-violet blossom, then shed scented showers of petals to unveil shiny, black-green foliage. Overnight, White Rock Head transformed from the frigid, wind-ridden hell of an elemental's caprice to a wide place between sea and sky where the seasons turned with savage, unspoiled grace.

  Yet nature no longer ruled the site undisputed. A jumble of great, gray blocks had been imported by sea from Southengard, then raised by means of ox-driven winches to the summit of Whitestorm cliffs. There, Korendir raked a hand through sweat-tangled hair. Shirtless, clad in breeches dusty and torn as any craftsman's, he regarded the line of foundations newly laid for his holdfast. For a heartbeat his features softened with contentment as deep as the summer.

  Baileys, walls, and keeps had been designed in harmony with the landscape. Though the levels of gold coins in the coffers decreased with shocking speed, Korendir had not compromised. Whitestorm keep on paper promised the most impregnable defenses in all the Eleven Kingdoms. The ring of the stone mason's mallets, the creak of the massive winches, and the calls of the oxdrivers blended to rhythms like music in Korendir's ears. As he measured the progress he had earned with his hands and his wits, his spirit knew rare satisfaction.

  Haldeth saw, and paused with his mallet poised over his chisel. The moment of apparent fulfillment did not fool him. The adventurer who had three times accomplished the impossible still woke sweating from his sleep, the outcries from unknown nightmares stifled behind iron control. Other nights, Korendir avoided his dreams altogether; hours at a stretch he would pace the cliffs by moonlight. Through days of summer dust and weeks of backbreaking labor, the restlessness never left him.

  Once the walls were raised, with roof slates secured and great engines of defense set in place behind the battlements, Haldeth prayed to Neth the tension would pass. Likely his hope would prove futile. Like a wound that festered beneath an apparently healthy scar, the driving recklessness which had won their freedom from the Mhurgai lay dangerously near the surface; however much Korendir might yearn to settle behind secure walls, Haldeth wondered how long such a life could hold him.

  As if he sensed the observer at his back, Korendir suddenly turned. "In that pose, you'd make a splendid model for a gargoyle."

  Haldeth shook off a shiver at the intensity of his friend's gray eyes. "The moment I hauled you out of that blasted, water-cursed shaft, I knew I was going to regret it." He lifted his mallet, prepared with all of a smith's trained strength to direct a stroke onto his chisel. But his arm poised at the height of an arc that never completed. Around him, the clang of the stone mason's sledges wavered and died. Silence descended over the construction site, heavy with the muffled beat of the sea.

  Korendir's levity faded. His eyes darkened as he looked to the edge of the clearing. "That's no craftsman of ours."

  His tone had changed like a blast of cold. Haldeth followed his companion's gaze in time to see a hunched, miserable figure stumble through a gathered crowd of craftsmen whose tools hung idle in their hands.

  "He looks like he just crawled through Thornforest," Korendir observed bleakly. He threw down his measure and chalk and broke headlong to a run.

  Haldeth dumped his mallet with an oath. The statement was no exaggeration; even from a distance, he could see the unfortunate's clothing lay shredded almost to ribbons. The flesh underneath would not be much better. Beneath their mantles of shiny leaves, the trees atop Whitestorm were close-woven, impenetrable, and vicious. Not even deer inhabited Thornforest's dark depths. Whoever the stranger was, and whatever his reason for hacking a passage through the briar wastes, Haldeth already hated him for shattering the peace.

  The smith shook stone chips and dust from his apron. He threaded his way reluctantly between ditches, granite blocks, and the abandoned teams of the oxen, his heart braced for trouble.

  The masons had closed about the stranger by the time Haldeth arrived. Unable to see through the crowd, he waited on the sidelines while others took matters in hand. Presently his forebodings were confirmed.

  "Fetch Jonnir's wife," said Korendir, his voice raised and terse. "Tell her to come with her herb basket."

  "If her bread burns, there'll be hell to pay," remarked a man from the middle ranks.

  Korendir's reply drove every other worker within earshot to an involuntary step back. "Fetch her now!"

  A mason broke away at his bidding. The crowd parted to let him through, and Haldeth stepped into the gap. He saw what prompted the call for a healer's skills, and immediately wished he had not.

  Supported in Korendir's arms, the stranger knelt on the beaten soil. His jacket and tunic of cured leather hung in tatters from shoulders gashed bloody from the thorns. The fleece lining dripped dirty crimson, and a clotted snarl of hair obscured the man's features. Yet when he raised his head, the onlookers shuddered with horror. One eye had been gouged from the socket. Weeping tears of blood, the man drew breath and spoke in the accent of a farmer. "I seek the Master of Whitestorm."

  "You've found him." Korendir accepted the title as if destined to position from birth. "Your need must be great if you saw fit to crawl the breadth of Thornforest."

  "No ship out of Northengard would sail the coasts of White Rock Head." Self-conscious embarrassment showed even through the stranger's pain.

  Haldeth considered the man's raw courage and felt cold. By now, Korendir's reputation for perilous undertakings must span the breadth
of two continents. Sailors who hailed from Fairhaven had loose tongues and a penchant for sharing tales; that folk threatened with disaster now came asking at Whitestorm for assistance should come as no surprise. Haldeth studied the bleeding, hopeful face of the farmer, and bit back an oath of sheer anger. At the least, he wished the inevitable could have waited until just one building had a roof.

  A shout from Jonnir's woman broke the spell of horrified fascination. "Move aside! Sure's thunder, I won't be walking over any man's backside, not for some clumsy lout what's bashed his thumb."

  Bent beneath her wicker herb hamper, the frowsy, frizzle-headed woman cleared laggards from her path with the tongue of a harborside fishwife. As the onlookers thinned to let her pass, she realized her patient was no careless stonecutter. The railing string of oaths that followed drove all but Korendir from the site.

  A safe distance removed, Haldeth watched the confrontation.

  "You're going to need help," the master said as the plump, diminutive healer shook her fist in his face. "This man is my guest. He'll not be treated like a horse, in the open."

  "Stubborn, you are, and quite justly you'll die of it," the healer snapped. But even she could not hold that steady gaze for long. Defeated, she knelt and examined the stranger with hands that were learned, and astonishingly gentle.

  Haldeth moved off after the departed workers, grateful to escape the task of bearing the litter. His own past held tragedy enough. Determined to avoid involvement, he applied himself wholly to the shaping of stubborn gray granite. Later, when muscles and fury both failed him, he would drink himself into a stupor. If he was lucky, the stranger would perish of Jonnir's wife's rotten tongue before he gave voice to his plea. Then Korendir could dig a new grave at Whitestorm, and the fortress with its promise of impregnable safety could be completed without interruption.

  * * *

  Sundown forced an end to the labors of Haldeth the smith. Tired, but not from exhaustion, he laid aside hammer and chisel. Clouds crimsoned the sky above Thornforest. The wind off the sea blew damp with the promise of rain. Resigned to another night of wet blankets in a tattered tent that would chill him to aches come the morning, the smith stretched, then sauntered off. He did not go to the fires to share laughter, complaints, and boiled stew. Instead he sought his ale jug, fortuitously refilled the day before by the master of a ship out of Fairhaven.