Master of Whitestorm

by Janny Wurts

  "Ye brought the axe? Good. Then find some decent driftwood and hew us two brace of oars. Bind them in net twine for rowlocks, then dismantle that limping excuse for a mast."

  As the brothers' oaths of irritation fell behind, Ithariel felt gratitude for the grandfather's undying good sense; if they survived to recover Korendir, a hasty departure could save them. When the boy at her side asked a question, the enchantress found grace from somewhere to explain that over soil and rock she could follow Korendir's path without any need for spells. There were advantages to tracking a spell-bonded mate; but as she passed the dunes and plunged into brush and thick forest she sorely cursed the necessity. Twigs clawed her hair and fallen leaves mired her step. A persistent ache started at the base of her skull, warning that at last, Korendir of Whitestorm had encountered the trouble inevitable from the start.

  The enchantress's discomfort intensified as she and her companions made headway into Illantyr's wooded hills. The smell of smoke and burning grew stronger. Then the forest thinned, and they crossed a village byway, where corpses rotted in a ditch by the roadside. One was a woman, with the beetle-crawling remains of an infant wrapped in her shawl. Scavengers had gnawed away her abdomen.

  The boy doubled over and got sick, and with pity in his eyes, the grandfather steadied him to his feet. "Bear up, lad. You'll see much worse if we're delayed."

  The boy peeled his bandanna from his brow and dabbed at his fouled mouth. His fingers shook. "Do you think Mama—"

  The grandfather answered with stony lack of sympathy. "Her, and us, and yer brothers, too, if we don't find that mercenary quickly." He nodded after Ithariel, who waited with anxious impatience. "Get on and follow her, and belay the whining complaints."

  The boy raised his chin. He stumbled ahead while his eyes spilled a flood of soundless tears. Behind him, the grandfather's weathered face showed sadness.

  Beyond the roadway, the trees stood bare; clouds massed the sky ahead, but the going became easier, the terrain cut by woodsmen's footpaths. They crossed the clearing of a charcoal burner's hut, but his kilns were cold, and his family departed. Squirrels had nested in the tree overhanging the chimney, sure sign that desertion was not recent. Sun spilled through stripped branches and scattered bars of shadow across the ground. Through a headache that steadily worsened, Ithariel realized the light lanced straight down; noon had come, and with it, the peak of the demons' powers.

  Any minute would reveal Korendir to enemies as the get of Morien Archmaster. Once that fact was uncovered, the tallix ring with its token spell of blessing was not going to spare him from dismemberment.

  The trees ended soon after; ahead the ground stretched gray, an expanse of wind-sifted ash winnowed into patterns like desert sand. Shivering from pains that now laced like fire along her nerves, Ithariel paused to lay spells. Her skin wept clammy sweat and her hands shook worse than the boy's as she fought to trace symbols in the earth.

  For the vista of wasteland established without doubt that they had reached the leading edge of demon territory.

  At Alathir, Morien had raised magic to challenge and defy this same advance; his defense had been wrought of earth forces, and these the demons had unbound like a snag in a fisherman's knit. Yet where Korendir's father had sought to destroy, his wife wished only to conceal. She tapped the forces of Alhaerie itself to weave a glamour around her companions. Just as a man from Aerith would take no notice of pebbles, or sticks, or roots, so the demons might overlook the moiling, chaotic trace energies transmuted from their native environment.

  Enchantments of this nature were a perilous undertaking in any place; elaborate safeguards must be taken to avoid an imbalance, and caution warred with the pressing need for urgency. Ithariel worked against certainty that time was now ruinously short. Halfway through setting the wards, she shuddered and cried out. Her face went gray and she flung back her head while above her, outlined against sky, the faces of frightened companions watched helplessly.

  "He's not dead," she said hoarsely. "Not yet." And she forced her spells to completion, ringing her fishermen in crackling eddies that snapped and then faded to invisibility.

  Ithariel arose, hunched in pain like an old woman. "If we can keep our advance quiet, we have hope. At the moment the demons are diverted with Korendir. They would make sport with him before he dies. As long as he stays alive, our presence stands a chance of being overlooked."

  She did not add that they tortured him; or that like an echo, his suffering harrowed her. Instead she said he was close by, and as she staggered forward, she felt the arms of the old man and the boy reach out to steady her steps.

  They progressed over ground blasted to the desolation of a volcanic plain. Burned rock and blackened cinders heated unpleasantly through layers of boot leather and hose. The air smelled scorched, and though elsewhere the land was sunlit, the sky here hung gloomy with overcast. Loose hair stuck to Ithariel's temples. Her breath ripped in gasps from her chest and her eyes watered. She blinked away tears, stared upslope to the ridge. Smoke billowed in drifts against the summit. Her stinging eyes could just make out the limbs of what might have been thorn trees at Whitestorm.

  "Up there," she grated, and began the ascent over coarse rocks that gouged at her shins and palms.

  The climb was relentlessly steep, and the grandfather began to wheeze. A simple man, content with his life of toil with bait and nets, he had no experience with enchanters or demons; but danger was a thing he knew well, and he understood the management of men. He held his position with a determination learned from weathering gales and acted as if he had moved through circles of spell-craft since youth.

  "Look you, Oleg, see these stones?" he said to divert the boy who moved in stiff fear on Ithariel's other side. "They're sharp, full of holes like the lava rocks from the Mathcek Isles to the north. Bad shores for ships, those. They say the demons escaped to Aerith from there."

  Ithariel had no breath left to correct that misapprehension, which nonetheless had given rise to the demons' name. The point became moot five paces later when a scream drowned out the old man's chatter. The cry was human agony distilled, then magnified and shattered to a thousand echoes by the riven, lifeless landscape. Ithariel shuddered again. The boy beside her balked on the mindless edge of panic. Though the grandfather had no more bravery left in him, he went through the motions and tried to speak words of encouragement.

  Ithariel fought for grip on the confusion which divided her mind. Aware through the pull of Korendir's torment that around her companions were faltering, she snagged the grandfather's attention with a look and said, "My Lord of Whitestorm is alive." She qualified in a racked and scraping croak, "He's fighting for survival, and that of your loved ones, never doubt. What we hear is certain proof."

  Another scream sheared the air. Ithariel felt the hair rise along her spine. She worked her fingers free of her shirt cuffs, the right one now shredded to match the other in the unthinking clench of her hands. "You must not run," she finished finally. "No matter what you see, I'll need you both to help carry him." She did not add that if she succeeded in reaching her man, the odds lay against getting him out.

  They labored to climb the rugged slope. Smoke swirled around them, wind-eddied into shapes like departed spirits. The rocks rose raw-edged and dark against a sky forbidding with storm. Though elsewhere the hill was scoured clean of vegetation, they came at length upon a hollow that sheltered a stand of living trees. Their branches were cruelly barbed. The crowns which tossed in the wind were green-black, each leaf the mirrored replica of the forest which clothed the cliffs above White Rock Head. The sultry inland air carried an incongruous tang of ocean.

  Stung by the manifestation of Korendir's vulnerability, Ithariel understood how the trap had been sprung. She guessed in advance what must wait beyond the last crest. As if to intensify her dread an ominous silence fell. She and her companions hurried the last steps and breasted the lip of the rise.

  The outcrop fell away beneath
, but not as randomly jumbled stone. Here rose battlements of blue granite, dressed, shaped, and corniced into a structure immediately familiar. The valley amidst the wasteland held a perfect recreation of Whitestorm's inner holdfast. Every detail was accurate, from Haldeth's craftmark on the gate winches, to the patterns of the cobbles in the bailey ; and so they would be, since their shape had been torn intact from Korendir's mind. Yet in this place wrought by demons, the aura of the tallix in the watchtower washed a scene of living hell.

  Shackles had been set into rings in the paving. Pinned spreadeagled in black iron, the Master of Whitestorm struggled with his muscles knotted and his head thrown violently back. The fetters of the demons held him fast; against their powers he never had a chance. Above his staring, wild eyes towered a post set with a hook like a butcher's stall. There a figure of delicate proportions sagged naked and half unconscious from a rope twist. Auburn hair clung damply around her face, and shoulders the color of new pearl were striped and running with blood.

  Ithariel gasped in shock. She had expected to look upon horrors, but no nightmare apprehension could prepare for the vision of herself being flogged until her flesh split by a perfect replication of Haldeth.

  The lash fell with a crack. The demon-formed Ithariel whimpered. Drops of shed blood pattered down on the man who flinched and thrashed and quivered against his chains. For the Master of Whitestorm, pain and death were no match for the crueler agony of helplessness. His protest pealed out like a war cry, but the fury in the sound could not last. Inevitably, his strength would spend itself in useless struggle. Logic could not distinguish the creation of demons from truth, for the chains were genuine iron, and the woman under torture was real. The heart must eventually burst before what was no dream, but the uttermost ruin of hope.

  The whip fell again, wielded by an arm toughened by the drive of a blacksmith's hammer. On the ridgetop, the boy made a sound and slapped his palms over his mouth. Pale as death, the old man knelt to intercede as his grandson crumpled over in dry heaves. He supported the traumatized boy and glanced in appeal to Ithariel.

  "Demons," she gasped. "They deform the nature of Aerith to shape Korendir's worst fear." Wrenched with sickness herself, the enchantress averted her face and strove to rally her nerve. She must not pity her double, but only the plight of the man. "This has to be stopped."

  "How?" The grandfather squinted through a drift of blown smoke. "Where are the demons?"

  "All about you." Ithariel raked back sweaty hair. "Look for ripples, something like heat waves in dry air."

  The old man turned a shade whiter. He had noticed such disturbances, patches that seemed to shimmer across his vision, but he had presumed the distortion to be a natural effect born of smoke. "How can you fight a creature which lacks form?"

  Ithariel shook her head. "Impossible, as Morien proved at Alathir." She qualified as much to focus her own thoughts. "The demons are beings from Alhaerie. While the stuff of our Aerith is malleable to their will, our forms are likewise their chaos. Rocks and stones and clouds lie beyond their understanding." She gestured at the recreated fortress walls. "Our emotions alone lend these meaning."

  She flinched as the next scream harrowed the air. "I'm going to attempt a counter illusion. Better you don't try to watch. But if you must, understand this. Not all you see will be fashioned in malice by demons. Some of the work will be mine. Wait here. I'll return with the man. If not, when darkness falls you must flee for your lives and sail. Stop for nothing, even the rescue of your loved ones, for all of this isle will be doomed."

  The grandfather grimaced as if he thought to protest; instead, he bent to check the boy who huddled unmoving under his hands. "We should help. Or do you have a way to cut chains and drag a grown man up sheer battlements?"

  A ripple shivered the air; the grandfather's query received no answer at all. Except for himself and the boy, the hillside stood empty, as if the enchantress had been less solid than the lies wrought of earth by the demons.

  The grandfather strove to find stability amid chaos. "She's fey, Oleg," he said to the boy at his feet. "How is a man to understand the ways of enchanters? We must be strong and bide here until she returns with her lord."

  The smoke thickened. Clouds lowered, and the wind blew, strong gusts that buffeted the heights. The towers of the fortress gained a sickly violet halo. Though the whip still struck with a fiendish and unbroken rhythm, and the woman's cries cut the air, Korendir lay slack in his chains. His eyes stayed anguished and open, while blood more cherished than his own striped like tears down his cheeks. No sign appeared of the enchantress who embarked upon his salvation.

  Minutes passed without change. Then a ripple passed over his form. Momentarily, Korendir seemed bathed by a lightless tongue of flame. He recoiled as if stabbed, and his chains clanged hard against their fastenings.

  Listening until his ears ached over the ceaseless moan of wind, the old man heard. Despite Ithariel's warnings, he dared a look down from the walls.

  He saw no dramatic rescue. Korendir's head sagged to one side, expressionless against blood-slicked cobbles. Shimmers that may have been demons whirled round his form on all sides. Only the fists dragged hard against his fetters revealed any life remained in him.

  The smoke coiled thicker. Something seemed to flutter, half-veiled, on the wind. Then a billow like refraction passed over the object, and the grandfather's sight became obscured behind curtains of mist.

  The lash fell and the screams continued, and the fisherman understood the White Circle enchantress had failed.

  He sat in despair on cold stone. "She must be in trouble, Oleg. If not, she'd be back by now."

  A brown wren appeared out of nowhere. Perhaps blown off course by the winds, it arrowed through the fog, wings stretched and closing in beat after beat of frantic flight. The leaf of a thorn tree fluttered in its beak. The weather harried it, bent its feathers at odd angles, and thrashed its tiny bones and frail sinews. It struggled, pumped harder, and clawed to reach a landing on the ridge.

  The gusts were too strong for it.

  Moved by a sailor's sympathy for storm-driven birds, the grandfather arose and stripped off his smock. As the wind howled and the little wren pitched sideways, he cast his garment like a net and scooped the struggling body in its folds.

  An unexpected and totally unnatural weight dragged at his wrists. He staggered, caught his foot, and pitched to his knees on sharp rock. The smock and its contents tore from his grasp and unfurled; and the wren tumbled out in a tangle of light and blurred feathers. Its legs kicked once. It tossed aside the twig, and the next instant its form expanded with a lash of spell-heated air into the body of an enchantress, now naked; beside her lay no bit of greenery, but a blood-splashed, unconscious Korendir.

  The enchantress panted as if her lungs might burst. She could not speak her thanks. Unmindful of the open-mouthed boy, she struggled to rise, and managed, with the help of the old man. She leaned on him, shaking, while he bundled his fishy-smelling garment over her shoulders.

  Speech remained beyond her, but her eyes beseeched haste. The grandfather spoke sharply to Oleg, who scrambled up in dazed amazement and drew Ithariel's arm over his back. The enchantress stumbled forward in his childishly awkward embrace, while the elder attended to the man. He lifted Korendir as he had slung countless barrels of baitfish, then hurried downslope toward the forest.

  Dangerously burdened, the party fled over terrain that could kill if a mistep caused a fall. Turbulence laced the air on all sides, distorting the eyesight, and shedding an odor like burned sawdust. Now mindful that these perturbations masked demons, the old man trembled with fear.

  Ithariel began slowly to recover. Mindful of the grandfather's dread, she whispered hoarsely through her gasps, "To the enemy we appear as falling pebbles. Keep on, for the wardspells I set will not last. Our sole hope of safety is the sea."

  Yet speed proved impossible to maintain. Though strong, the old man had limited stamina. Long b
efore they reached the forest, he had to pause and share his burden with the boy. Of necessity, Ithariel struggled on alone. Taxed to exhaustion by her enchantments, she reeled forward, the smock trailed haphazardly across her shoulders. Her bare soles tore on the stones. She could not stop to wrap them, for the demons pressed close on all sides.

  The land at last leveled off. Gray and tired, the old man pressed ahead with bowed shoulders; he no longer spoke to his grandson. Korendir showed no sign of returning life, but hung slack in the grasp of his rescuers as the party labored to take cover in the wood.

  The shimmers followed. Inside the treeline, Ithariel paused with a whimper of dismay, then gritted her teeth and shifted magic. The effort cost her sorely. She spent the dregs of her powers to turn her protective illusion from pebbles to the form of blown leaves. Weary, unsteady as drunks, the four wove their way through forest silence. Though the clouds that had hemmed them on the heights gave way in time to bright sunlight, the encouragement came too late. All were too tired to take notice, and Korendir was yet beyond feeling. Concerned that he showed no trace of recovery, Ithariel contemplated a restorative, then put the thought firmly aside. Only if their straits became desperate would she tap the ward in his marriage ring. The powers it contained were likely too small to offer much merit anyway.

  They plowed on, through brush that endlessly hampered movement, and roots and hollows that treacherously tripped the feet.

  At the charcoal burner's cabin, they delayed for precious minutes to steal a blanket and poles and make a litter. Korendir never felt the hands that bundled his body inside. Slack as a gutted trout, he remained dead weight as the boy and the old man raised the poles to aching shoulders. Forward they pressed, while the louring energies of demons flanked and wove along their course.

  They crossed the lane, and this time the boy passed the corpses with blindly indifferent eyes.