TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  'Let it never come to that,' Diegan said in braced resolve.

  Wrung by shared pain, Avenor's Lord Commander dared not touch his liege's shoulder lest one or the other of them break. Against the enemy's abduction of Princess Talith, action must serve in place of comfort. He could lend his prince's torment that much. 'Let me sail north to seek support from Tysan and raise the ransom for my sister in your name.'

  Springtide

  The hour before midnight on the equinox, a full moon licked the dry, tangled heads of dead grass stems like the skipped stroke of an engraver's awl across the hollow which sheltered Althain Tower. Outside the shadow of its sheer granite spire, frost rimed the edges of leaf and stalk, until each one seemed sculpted out of flint.

  A smaller blot of darkness amid the meadow's flooded light, Lirenda, First Enchantress of the Koriani Order, regarded the bastion which had come to represent the Fellowship's inheritance of a power once the province of the Ilitharis Paravians. In First Age Year One, centaurs had forged the grand earth link, the tracks of their spells crossing and recrossing, until lands and seas lay webbed, warp through weft, in shining, linked self-awareness. When Desh-thiere had engulfed the last sunlight under mists, Sethvir had been ceded the grasp of that net by the last old race guardian to leave the continent.

  Well aware she came to trespass, to steal, if she could, from the fastness of the tower's store vaults, Lirenda dared not deceive herself. The Sorcerer whose stronghold she intended to breach would be aware of her presence.

  One could not shield and ward the footsteps on cold ground of the one hundred and eight companion sisters who clustered like a hound pack called to heel. Every scuffed pebble, each frightened field mouse, even the small sprouts of the growing weeds crushed in the roadway: Sethvir could hear any and all of these at whim. It remained to be seen whether his wards were proof against a grand circle of enchantresses, raised to tuned power and fused into one will through the matrix of the Skyron crystal.

  Lirenda presented her back to the fortress, her dew-drenched skirts clinging to bare ankles. Behind her, silent, the accomplices she had chosen awaited, their faces pale ovals cowled beneath dark hoods.

  At her signal, the gathering dispersed.

  The print of their unshod feet and the drag of their hems blotted the moisture from the weed tips and stitched the meadow across its length in dimmed swathes. Still wordless, the Koriani joined hands, their flesh pale as pearl in the ground mist. Not a few palms were clammy with unease; to challenge Sethvir in the seat of his own power was to call down unnameable peril. The women assumed their positions, undaunted. They were dedicated to reclaim their order's Great Waystone from the hands of the Fellowship of Seven, and for that cause, every last sister initiate stood prepared to offer her life.

  Once the enchantresses formed a linked chain, they closed an unbroken ring around the base of the tower. Inside their joined figure, all iron determination, Lirenda knelt upon the earth before the locked grille of the portal and unsealed the coffer she carried. She unveiled the silk-wrapped crystal of Skyron and raised its faceted surface before her. The spring moon shone down, electrum and ice, and roused the gemstone's pale heart to splintered light.

  The First Senior's dark, unpinned hair slipped from her hood to cascade over her forearms. Its warmth licked the ivory bones of her wrists, while her hands, cupped to crystal, felt bathed in ephemeral cold. The dire, stilled presence the stone wore while quiescent was as hostile to flesh as air breathed from a crack in a glacier.

  Lirenda closed her eyes. She inhaled the scents of earliest spring, interlaced with the season's contradictions: the birth of green shoots cross-woven in the detritus of last year's dead growth, dank and rotted in the wake of the thaws. The First Senior's fingers traced steamed prints on the gem's surface as she settled her mind to begin.

  The older the talisman, the more spells and scryings had been aligned into focus through its structure. The Skyron crystal had served in Koriani ritual for so long, no one remembered its origins. The patterns of its matrix were as water-crazed quartz, flecked like darkness in diamond with the coiled, spiteful residue of year upon year of used magic. If the most aged jewels became dependably stable, each flaw in their power fields long since tested and annealed by repeated trials, time lent them a querulous character. They did not tame with use, but grew ever more wayward and dangerous.

  Lirenda cradled the Skyron gem warily, doused in soft chills by its aura of contrary malice. No stone for a novice, even Morriel Prime attuned its deep coils with caution.

  No senior left alive had ever touched the amethyst Great Waystone. Since its loss had occurred three centuries before her birth, Lirenda could only postulate how difficult its matrix was to master. Excitement shimmered underneath her restraint, that tonight's work allowed her the coveted chance to find out. The Prime Matriarch alone recalled how to access the greatest of Koriani focus stones. While Lirenda's worthiness as successor for the post now hinged upon the Waystone's recovery, she refused to contemplate failure.

  Poised in self-command, she aligned herself into light trance and touched her mind to the Skyron jewel's centre.

  Its icy presence pierced her, a sheeting rain of steel needles, there and gone before reflex could respond to cognition of elation or pain. For an instant her woman's outraged flesh shuddered in rebellion. Then discipline took hold. Lirenda damped back visceral, instinctive rejection, and embraced the stone's heart to compel its dread source to subservience.

  Energies snapped forth in vicious protest.

  Invaded by lightnings borne on winds of fired metal, she reversed the thrust on its axis, and claimed her place in rightful domination.

  The moment often swept her to ecstasy as the raw powers submitted to her mind. Mortal frailty felt recast in quartz. Her inner spirit became a pearl window into moonlight, or old, stippled lace, shaken clean of blurred layers of dust. The Skyron matrix opened to her usage, balanced as the shaft of a lance. Through senses reamed open by self-will and training, the Koriani First Senior reviewed the poised powers of each sister initiate in the circle, stitched like ribboned knotwork through the small crystals each wore on a chain at her neck.

  One by one, Lirenda reached out and plucked up the yielding threads of their consciousness. Through the aquamarine she bound them, sealed each in the halter of sigils granted to her as First Senior, and above her, known only to Morriel Prime. Tonight, Lirenda had no space to envy the secrets the order's matriarch held in store until her final rite of passage. Raised to refined vision through the power crystal's focus, she reeled in the gathered energies of each sister in the circle and joined them to the one source. The Skyron gem became the central hub, with the currents tapped out of the living chain of women like the ephemeral, starred spokes of a wheel.

  Lirenda sketched her construct in runes of demand, their drawing properties potent enough to leach spidery shadows from the moonlight. With the tip of her fingernail she skeined ciphers one upon another like fishhooks twined through sunken weed. The gemstone's gravid matrix responded and drew upon the linkage to each individual enchantress.

  Power flowed like poured magma along the lines, then pooled into resonance until the awareness raised by one hundred and eight amplified to unified potential. In time, the crystal held a seamless reservoir of force poised between Lirenda's spread hands. Its aquamarine lattice transformed from a clear, waiting mirror to a smoky, dark nexus submissive to the First Senior's will. Its potency ran in fine tingles through her body. Her lips parted in anticipation akin to the heady, hot thrill of fierce sex.

  Like addiction, the pleasure intoxicated. Lirenda revelled in the unfolding, exquisite rush of strength ceded to her sole discretion. Decades of training had shaped her for this office. She took pride in her disciplined awareness, that could rifle the secrets of the surrounding elements, then bid them to reshape at her whim. Within the Skyron nexus, the might and the trust of a hundred and eight colleagues became hers: she was the key to all the world
's locks, and Althain Tower lay before her.

  No older site of continuous habitation existed upon the continent. For century upon century, the rites worked by Paravians and Fellowship Sorcerers had channelled the natural powers. Here the earth's currents grazed very near to the surface of the land itself. To Lirenda's tranced awareness, the barren hills lay skeined in mercuric ribbons of energy, converging toward the balance point of equinox. In the instant when the transition between daylight and dark changed alignment, its force could be used to heighten spells. The impetus borrowed from natural sources must help her unstring Sethvir's wards.

  Settled on her heels amid a field of weathered stones and moonlight, Lirenda raised the Skyron focus. Her shadow pooled over the thread-tangled grasses. The granite shaft of the tower rose baleful and black as though chisel punched from the sky. Unquiet north winds spooled off the desert and hissed over its lichened walls, while the arrow slits of its chambers peered down on her, darkened and narrow as knife cuts.

  To wrest the Great Waystone from Sethvir's wardship, Lirenda must first lay bare the defences her circle had been raised to unbind.

  Where Koriani spellcraft held predictable structure, each summoned sigil paired to balance with strictures and stamped to submission by seals, Fellowship conjury held a random artistry that resisted mannered effort to decipher. The Sorcerers' bindings could seem enviably seamless, at times fashioned whole from one source. Their works were often Named into being, in complexity as unique as the branched veins of a leaf, no two under Ath's sun alike.

  Paravian magecraft was wilder still: older, more primal, living and fluid as free-running water, or layered like a knurl in ancient oak. Few examples remained unfaded by the passage of time and the sunless decay lent by oppression under Desh-thiere's mists.

  Conjecture suggested that Althain's defences would follow the patterning of other sites ruled by both styles of magic. Like a Second Age focus circle, or the crossing guards set into moss-hoary megaliths, Lirenda anticipated layers of interlocked spells, stitched like snarled knotwork over a span of many years.

  Touched to unease, well warned that the scrying she undertook would try her to the limits of experience, Lirenda braced her nerves in determination. She raised her chin and engaged the Skyron focus. For a moment her form seemed to shimmer as if fused in an uncanny flame. Then she bent the driving weight of her mastery over the force at her command.

  The latent play of current uncoiled with a snap. Power lanced out, a thin, scarlet ray honed into a stylus with which she scribed challenge above Althain Tower's grand portal. The spell she directed was a mere spark, an insolent static intended to tease the ingrained protections to display themselves in response.

  With care, with persistence, as the wards in the stone wakened from quiescence, she could unriddle the secret of their structure.

  Yet no kindly tangle of mismatched spellcraft glowed to meet her testing probe. Instead, a flare of savage, crackling light tore open the fabric of the night.

  Clapped blind and deaf by the discharge, Lirenda recoiled. The Skyron crystal heated between her hands like a meteor. Snapped into reflex, she dropped it. The focus gem struck earth and grounded. Its moil of gathered powers dispersed without sound like ash winnowed off by a wind blast.

  Fired to annoyance, the Koriani First Senior bent to ease her scorched palms in the grass stems. She stopped in mid-gesture, horrified. Around Althain Tower, the senior circle she had gathered stood lifelessly rigid. As if in one instant, clothing and flesh, each sister had been changed by a glassblower's art to a brittle, glittering replica.

  The challenge which followed rang through the air and the earth. Its call was silent, and yet the more terrible for that. The ire battered against bones and teeth like concussion waves through tempered iron.

  'Who meddles!'

  Lashed into mindless reply, Lirenda cried out her name and rank.

  The awful, ringing vibration she had raised brushed her answer aside with what felt like a bruising contempt, but in fact stemmed from power so sure of its place that, like sky, it existed without arrogance. 'Hear then, First Senior of the Koriathain! Your intent to trifle with the wards over Althain Tower has asked no sanction from me.'

  Masked in the tumbled mass of her hair, Lirenda shoved erect, but failed to arise beyond her knees. If she could not subdue the shaking fear in her limbs, she could fall back upon sheer outrage. Yet her attempt at imperious protest came out as a mewling gasp. 'Who are you?'

  A rumbling laugh split the night above her head. 'Daughter of merchants, do you claim to be bereft of your eyesight!'

  Against a wave of overwhelming apprehension, Lirenda clawed back her fallen locks. She dared to look. Black-haired, tawny-eyed, austere as midnight itself, she saw nothing at first. Only the coinface silver of the moon, now ridden high above the hills. Her first casting had provoked far more than she intended. The wards over Althain Tower were fully aroused, blazing in sheets of uncanny flame that threw no emanation, nor lit any feature of the surrounding landscape.

  No sound intruded. Even the whisper of frost-gilded grasses had lapsed into eerie silence. The winds off the Bittern sands themselves had stopped speaking in a place where their sibilance reigned tireless.

  Still trapped in their circle, one hundred and eight Koriani enchantresses stood planted and immobile. Not even the folds of their cloaks stirred. They were statues in time, as if breath and life had been reft away between heartbeats.

  The static play of the third lane itself lay arrested, like a river snap-frozen into a vista of black ice. Shaken by a sweeping, savage chill, made aware she had stepped beyond her depth, Lirenda saw that Fate's Wheel itself had been halted on command by the entity she had wakened from quiescence. In ways she had no knowledge to fathom, it had set her outside the veil, while the world's very substance bowed, waiting.

  Raised to etheric suspension, her altered eyesight recorded the apparition with reluctance: a thing which appeared spun whole from a dust mote, translucent but never fragile. Its presence stunned the mortal mind to awe through an aura of unshakable quietude.

  'Never doubt I am real,' the being admonished. Its speech held no sound, but cast an ache through living tissue like the tolling vibration of stressed earth.

  Foursquare the being stood, like a beast, the boned pillars of its legs flared to silk-haired fetlocks that ended in hooves of cloven horn. Flank and chest were deep as a prize draught horse, but no equine neck arose from the flat-muscled sheen of its forehand. Lirenda tipped back her heart-shaped chin and gazed up, and up; the creature dwarfed her, its mass a tall man's height at the withers. A powerful torso and broad male shoulders reared above, feathered in a mane like flaxen gossamer. The face had human features, bearded like a king lion's, and royally crowned with the branching, tined antlers of a stag.

  'Ath's infinite mercy,' Lirenda breathed, humbled before a majesty that reduced her green pride to dust.

  The creature configured in spirit light before her made reason shudder and fail. Her heart leaped for joy and for pain, wrenched out of rhythm into paradox by a beauty beyond her five senses to encompass. Through the haze of her tears, Lirenda understood that she faced none else but the ghost of a centaur. One of the Ilitharis Paravian race, vanished from the continent since the advent of Desh-thiere's mists through South Gate.

  The creature tipped its horned head. Stars and moon shot like sparks through its substanceless outlines. 'I am Shehane Althain, spirit tied to this place as prime guardian. My bones are this tower's foundation, as its wards are my charge for eternity.'

  Lirenda blinked, her dignity eclipsed by wonder for the first time since earliest childhood. 'You were a sacrifice?'

  The centaur spirit glowered like a thunderhead. 'Never!' His rebuttal rang in a bell tone too deep for hearing, but the frost-touched grasses underneath its planted hooves shimmered like thrown cullet in vibration. 'My life was a gift freely yielded for necessity, that the sanctuary you came here to violate should stand ag
ainst trifling ignorance.'

  At this, Lirenda bridled. 'I came here, not through folly, but to reclaim from the Fellowship Sorcerers what was never theirs to begin with.'

  The centaur bared its teeth in a wolfish snarl. 'The Seven are neither thieves nor hoarders!'

  Never less comfortable for being caught on her knees, Lirenda tried again to stand erect. No muscle in her legs would support her. Rankled to anger for the failing, she said in metallic acerbity, 'Your presumption is false. Or why should the Sorcerers keep our Waystone in their custody since the uprising five hundred years past? Had they deigned to return it, I should scarcely have come to raise a Koriani circle against them.'

  'By our choice we have ceded this place into the care of those who swore to uphold the compact. The Fellowship has stood by their bond.' The centaur folded massive arms, its outlines pale quartz shot with stars. 'The granite blocks themselves gave consent to the bindings which protect what lies inside this tower. The stones' gift was no loan, to be reversed. They would crack and run to sand, ere they yielded their office. Go hither. Any violent use of force in this place is an offence.'

  Lirenda pushed back her hood, her hair a spilled fall of ebony over her back. Sarcasm chipped her reply. 'How else would you make Sethvir give back what is ours?'

  A terrible, fey light glanced through the spirit's eyes. It stamped a substanceless forehoof, its movement dire elegance, and its strength beyond the pale of reasoned vision. 'Does your order spurn the grace of manners and hospitality! What else should you do but knock at the door I Why not make your request when Althain's Warden is present to admit you! Your timing is regrettable, since Sethvir embarked this morning for the court of King Eldir at Ostermere.'

  Lirenda retorted in tart disbelief, 'What surety have I that the Sorcerer will listen?'