Master of Whitestorm

by Janny Wurts

  "I am Korendir, who destroyed both Cyondide and Ishone, and I say your boasts are the bluster of breezes. I did not ask a year, nor all the waters of the world, but only the Tammernon Sea, and just for the span of one day."

  Tolaine ripped out a lightning bolt and parted the waters with a sizzle. "Show yourself, challenger. Where stands this wizard whose presence I cannot feel? Let us duel this instant, and prove for all time whose powers are fit to best whom."

  Ithariel gripped the lateen brace and murmured aloud in despair. "Neth's grace, he's gone too far."

  But her failing confidence affected Korendir's nerve not at all. His reply floated back through the darkness, imperious enough to shame an emperor. "The Master of Whitestorm does not strive against beings of inferior ability. Let Tolaine prove his worthiness by completing the task I described."

  Thunder growled in reply. "Tolaine does not suffer to wait another turning of the sun."

  "Then let the calm become the contest," the mortal called back. "If Tolaine can keep the waters flat through all manner of magics and distractions, Korendir will concede the victory."

  Sullen breezes chivvied the waves. Heat lightning touched the sea pewter against a darkened horizon, and clouds churned, lit to the yellows and grays of boiled sulphur; like the coiled deadness in the eye of a great gale, the elemental cogitated upon the bargain. "Tolaine accepts," the being rumbled at last. "Wizard whose presence I cannot feel, I say your defeat shall be easily gained. At sunrise, let our battle begin."

  The night went black in an eyeblink. Limp and beaten as old rags, Ithariel leaned her cheek against cordage that smelled of mildew. "Do you know," she said weakly, "how close my madman of a husband came to drowning us all in a whirlwind?"

  Canvas slapped, sagged flat under slackening winds. The grandfather squinted aloft, his eyes sparkling by lanternlight. "But we aren't swimming yet, my lady, and a neater spinning of deception I never saw in my life. Your marriage must be a lively one."

  Ithariel allowed her legs to give way; she slid down the lines, thumped on an empty span of pinrail, then laughed in a breathless release of nerves. "Old man, you have that right."

  The grandfather nodded sagely. Droplets blown from wet rigging splashed his seal-slick hair. "Go below," he suggested. "Rest up. You'll need a clear mind come the sunrise."

  But weary as the enchantress was, she balked at the idea of sleep. The grandfather shrugged and offered his oilskins. Ithariel accepted without hesitation over the ingrained smell of fish. While clouds broke over the mainmast and a brave few stars pricked through, she wrapped her shoulders in the garment's humid warmth and listened intently for oar strokes in the night that would signal her loved one's return.

  * * *

  Morning dawned with a quiet that rang in the ears. The sun rose over the Tammernon Sea in perfect double image. Not a ripple stirred; the northeast coast of Illantyr bulked like a bruise in the early, reddened light. The waters surrounding the shoreline stayed polished to calm like a mirror, even when the wingbeats of passing shearwaters tapped the surface in their flight. Tolaine kept the terms of Korendir's challenge with diligent and awesome precision.

  Too unsettled to sit while the men ate breakfast in the galley, Ithariel waited on deck, her fingers running over and over a crudely notched stick of wood. She regarded the burnished ocean with eyes left gritty from sleeplessness, all the while pondering her distrust.

  Though stillness stretched to horizons made invisible by reflection, only vanity bound Tolaine to compliance. The kindling in her hands was a pitiful thing, carved with protective runes, but not yet touched by the spark that would activate its wards. Now the moment was upon her, Ithariel shared none of her husband's brashness. The dictates of inflexible training forestalled his knack for risk. She courted outright disaster, and the knowing jangled her nerves even before she embarked upon the perilous second stage of Korendir's plan.

  The resonance as she engaged spell-craft would inevitably provoke Tolaine. Like all elementals, his dislike of wizardry was total; entirely without warning, he might reject the restrictions set upon this feigned contest of wills. If that happened, no power on Aerith could spare them. The seas would rip instantaneously into storm; smashed like so much flotsam, the boat and her mangled crew would become pickings for crabs and fish.

  Ithariel traced the rune-cut wood. The edge of her nail caught on the sigil for Safeguard, and she bit her lip. Were the Archmaster to guess her intentions, he would without hesitation have condemned her to Majaxin's fate. To the mighty of the White Circle, the survival of Illantyr's villagers was a detail of little account. Ithariel might have agreed, in those days when her mind was more tied to the greater energies of Aerith. Only the spell-bonded Lady of Whitestorm who deliberated on a fishing boat's deck was no longer entirely enchantress. Korendir's ways had changed her. His priorities had become her own, and his perils she willingly shared, but never without fear.

  The cries of shore birds echoed across flat water, almost masking a light tread behind her. Aware who approached, she accused, "You should be resting."

  "Not now." Korendir frowned in faint reproof. He clasped her waist from behind and kissed her neck, and she could smell the sweetness of the grandfather's rum on his breath.

  She stiffened, and as always Korendir's quick wit grasped why. "Our captain insisted his brew was medicinal, and how was I to deny his better judgment? He drank the lion's share." Korendir paused; his fingers curled through the sash that bound her tunic. "You know we're certain to lose this vessel. The wreck might hurt less if the fellow's gone in his cups."

  She faced him, still in the circle of his embrace. "Unless he's a mean drunk. Did you ask?" He had not; Ithariel swallowed, tried to achieve the calm she would need to manage the trials to come. "And the medicine?"

  Korendir released her. He flexed blistered fingers, then tested the muscles of his shoulders, brutally used the night before as he rowed through a league of ocean gale. "Marginal. The stiffness aches less, but in exchange I think my guts have been scalded."

  Ithariel regarded him critically, from damp black tunic to hose which showed rings of ingrained salt. "You'll survive," she concluded without sympathy. The moment the words left her lips, it occurred with poignant clarity that he very well might not.

  The rune stick flexed between her fingers; Korendir restrained her wrists before it cracked. "There are widows and orphans weeping in Illantyr for every moment we delay."

  Ithariel nodded. Beyond speech, she leaned into the comfort of his shoulder, raised her carved bit of wood, and delved inward after powers that were the heritage of White Circle bloodline schooled to remorseless focus. Resigned to bad judgment, inured to the fact that her life and Korendir's and also one drunken old fisherman's hung on untenable faith, she set potency into the first carved sigil. And like calm before direst cataclysm, the ocean held glassily still.

  Tolaine did not bridle at the sorcery. But over the masts sudden clouds gathered, dense and black as woodsmoke. The sun dimmed; the sea stretched beneath, flat as puddled lead.

  Ithariel drew a shaking breath. She set the protections in strictest order, as if the air did not quiver with the fullness of a too-long pent breath. Spell and counter-ward and safeguards, she prepared the defenses that preceded the opening of a wizard's gate in open and unstable surroundings. One mistake could invite disaster. Alathir had fallen in consequence of just such an error, and interruption by an elemental storm could cause a repeat of the same.

  Ithariel sang the seals into being within the warmth of Korendir's arms. He felt fine tremors course through her flesh, and smelled her sweaty fear. He leaned his face into the hair above her ear and began very softly to speak.

  His words banished other, more crippling distractions: worry, and uncertainty, and reproach for follies she knew better than to set into motion. Ithariel completed her preparations. She began the sequence which would open gate access to Alhaerie, while her husband's phrases lapped the edge of her awarenes
s and stabilized concentration.

  "Lady of my heart, they lured me with the shadows of my deepest fears. I saw a Whitestorm more vibrant than life, and a wife more real than woman. The Ithariel they spun to entrap was the essence of self and love and future. When my mind lost perception of the difference, demons set everything in jeopardy." His hands caressed her through the waterstained cloth of her tunic. "But they wrought too well, these beings who dream to deprive us of Aerith. They revealed the despair of their exile, and their resentment of Morien's courage. That showed their vulnerability, and now we shall fashion their downfall."

  Ithariel slipped through his hands and knelt. She laid the carved stick on the deck between her knees. The air around her rippled and burned with ward-magic; her hands glowed faintly blue. Korendir stepped back, left her space to work her craft as she laid her palms together. All her thoughts centered on her fingertips as she lowered her arms and scribed a line which sheared through the fabric of the world.

  Light shimmered where her gesture passed. A tear gaped open between Aerith and the alter-reality of Alhaerie; the oily swirl of otherness that churned beyond the gap splintered the vision to pain.

  Korendir averted his eyes. He had no arcane knowledge, only human understanding of his wife's emotional needs. He settled as near as her conjuries would allow and kept talking. "Let the bait to lure demons befit the crime, lady of my heart. Morien's fortress was razed into ruins; in justice, let us build a memorial. Stone and keep and slate-roofed hall, the stuff of Alhaerie shall be remade to replace what the demons laid waste."

  Ithariel regarded her gate-spell with critical apprehension. She found neither weakness nor fault in her work; the wards contained the contact between worlds and prevented a repeat of the breach that had ravaged Alathir. If Korendir still spoke, she did not hear him. Beyond reach of fleshly sensation, the enchantress delved into mysteries and wrought the consummation of their effort to destroy the demons.

  The slice of Alhaerie visible through her gate underwent a twist and a magnification, then looped through a greater second binding.

  The sea held smooth by Tolaine served yet as a giant mirror; except now the surrounding waters no longer reflected Aerith's sky. Influenced by the magics of Ithariel, natural order was replaced with the seethe and boil of incomprehensible otherness that was the alter-reality of Alhaerie.

  Ashore on Illantyr, demons gathered in a boiling shimmer of air, drawn by the vision of the otherworld.

  On the decks of a painted fishing boat, an enchantress who wrought the deception licked dry lips. The balance of complex spell-craft consumed her concentration totally. One lapse would endanger all the Eleven Kingdoms. She dared not waste concern for Tolaine, whose vain pursuit for supremacy formed the linchpin of Illantyr's salvation. She did not think of the grandfather, asleep in his stupor belowdecks; nor might she spare a word for the husband who sat by her through the moments of greatest peril. Engrossed within the discipline of her magic, Ithariel engaged the last of the sigils on the rune stick.

  She touched through the gate with her thoughts, and re-shaped the stuff of Alhaerie.

  Ithariel wrought with calculated malice. From the oily curl of energies through the spell-gate, she reconstructed in miniature the curtain walls and towers of Alathir where Morien Archmaster had once convened his council.

  Her handiwork was accurate to the smallest detail; and in perfect and magnified illusion, the reflection of Morien's fortress spread across the flawless sea.

  The effect on the demons was immediate. Presented after years of exile with an untrammeled view of their homeworld, then subjected to sight of its desecration by the hands of a White Circle enchanter, they shot in turbid arrows of distortion from the shore. Their world had no solidity, as Aerith understood; no concrete sense of up or down or gravity. The fact that Alathir's battlements speared at right angles to Illantyr's beachheads gave the demons no cause for suspicion. Lashed to outrage, duped by certainty that enemies inflicted atrocity against their universe and kind, they forgot any concept of Aerith-imposed direction. They succumbed even as Korendir had fallen prey to their earlier recreation of Whitestorm.

  The Demons of Mathcek rushed in a horde to succor their violated kingdom. Too recklessly angered to organize challenge, they rippled like a wave of super-heated air and plunged to their destruction in the sea.

  The elements screamed with the demons' passing like hot metal quenched into ice. Water doused their life-energies and added ragged drifts of steam to already glowering overcast. But the sea's tranquillity had broken. Ripples shattered the image of Alathir's fair towers and the stonework dissolved, kicked by gusts to a foam-sheared webwork of waves.

  Startled into failure by the demons' violent demise, the elemental roused to a gale-force pitch of dismay. "Where is the wizard whose presence I cannot feel?" Tolaine boomed on a rising surge of storm. "Hear now that I reject these foolish formalities and demand a straight contest of force."

  Ithariel abandoned conjury and snatched the rail just as the first gust struck. The fishing boat slammed reeling into knockdown. Above the thunder of rising wind, she screamed, "Get the grandfather!"

  Korendir had already left her. He dropped in a leap through the companionway, while at his back, the enchantress expanded her spell-gate in a stopgap expenditure of power.

  The discharge left her dizzied. She clung weakly while waves thudded the timbers underneath her and vibrations shivered the hull. Paintwork cracked and lines streamed loose, to snap with whipcrack reports that unlaced stout splices to tassels. With a groan of stressed wood, the boat labored to rise. Tolaine intervened. Winds slapped back and prevented even marginal recovery. The beamy old hull lay awash like the flank of a wounded whale. Her mizzen gouged the sea and she rolled beyond salvage, battered over further as her ballast clattered loose belowdecks.

  Korendir clawed up the tilted companionway, his legs mired by torrents of incoming waves. The sloop was foundering rapidly. The mercenary struggled to escape her death throes, his back burdened down by the drunken grandfather whose loved ones remained safely ashore.

  "Korendir!" Ithariel cried. "Hurry!"

  Tolaine's wrath whipped around her. She clung like a limpet to the wreck, harried by the seething elements. Lightning laced the air. Bait barrels tumbled from their lashings and battered across the decks to wreak chaos; gear caromed off the masts, snagged in spilled nets and rigging, and splashed into spindrift-torn seas.

  Korendir caught the mainmast pinrail. He struggled up a sagging mesh of halyards. Winds ripped at his hold. The decks canted further, while the slamming surge of breakers shot spray like lacework overhead. Splashed blind, Korendir flung back hair that spoiled his vision.

  "Over here!" Ithariel clung from the uprights of the rail, dangling from slipping hands.

  Beside her the spell-gate shimmered still, an opened maw of force more uncontrollably deadly than any ocean storm.

  Tolaine sensed the resonance of ward magic. He centered the vortex of his anger on the spot, and lightning jagged splinters from the hull.

  Korendir twisted like a cat, flash blind, but unhurt. A monster wave boomed and broke. The hull stove in like the cracked shell of a nut. Planking parted with a tortured scream. Seas trampled over the fragments and dashed the maindeck into submersion. As masts, then pinrail, then decking sucked under the rending waves, the wizard's gate sank also.

  Ithariel lost her hold. Pummeled by a fury of water, she kicked out to reach the glimmer of her spell. Ahead, the grandfather's bulk still in tow, Korendir attempted the same. The span of wood which anchored the safe-wards had long since vanished in the turmoil, every guard on the spell-gate stripped away along with it. Racked to panic by each second that brought Aerith closer to ruin, the enchantress dove for the gap.

  She reached the gate. Korendir was nowhere to be seen. Poised on the bridge between realities, Ithariel sensed the energies of Alhaerie on one side, and the tumble of storm-slashed waters on the other. The latter was letha
lly laced with slivers of decking and ropes. Ithariel spared no moment for thought. She rallied her overtaxed reserves, expanded the gate to encompass a five-span dollop of ocean, then pushed through the other side. She emerged choking within the turbid, gravityless chaos that comprised the essence of Alhaerie.

  She had acted without pause to define a circle. Vulnerable to forces that easily might kill her, she reached but found her strength spent. No resource remained to shape even basic protection. Neither could she spin spells to determine whether her gate had spared any beside herself.

  Ithariel tumbled over and over in the turbid otherness of Alhaerie. Broken timbers drifted with her, along with droplets of seawater like tears. She had no margin for sorrow. Bound by vows and three decades of White Circle training, her priorities were ruthlessly clear. The gate between worlds must be closed.

  She groped with her last spark of consciousness for the key which defined the portal. At risk of losing the life of her husband, and in consequence her own as well, she touched a link across burning forces, then sang the note of unbinding.

  The spell-gate flared out. In a queasy, spilled-marble whorl, Alhaerie closed over the space as if no gap ever had existed.

  Sick and lost and stranded, Ithariel wept in relief. She had dissolved the circle before the sea could surge away and expose an unguarded portal to air. No beings from the otherworld could leak through, as demons once had, to harass and wreak havoc on Aerith.

  The enchantress's senses blurred into dark before she could appreciate that the isle of Illantyr was saved. No more would demons range south to repeat the desecration of Alathir.

  The feat was not accomplished without repercussion. Off the east shoreline, a rage-crazed elemental hammered a riven hull to matchwood. Fragments shot skyward in gouts of foam which spun and twisted into waterspouts. Tolaine unleashed lightnings and whirlwinds in an atavistic display of fury. Unstable in his wrath, he sifted the waters in search of the fleeing forms of enemies. Their presence eluded his grasp. A wizard whose aura he could not feel, an enchantress who provoked his downfall, and a grandfather whose ship was annihilated evaded his killing wrath. Defeated, even as Cyondide before him, Tolaine unravelled his awareness in a crackling discharge of lightnings.