by Janny Wurts
Fear itself lay unmasked by the ancient’s soft words. Elaira’s unrestrained tears fell and fell, her pallid cheeks striped with glistening ribbons, each one vivid with sting as a whip-lash. ‘What are you asking of me?’ she gasped, hoarse.
Her plea brought no quarter.
‘Can you let Arithon go beyond your control?’ the crone questioned. ‘Do you love enough to keep faith in him, even afflicted by your own loss? For he will seek his fate. If he can invent a fresh course by his wits, he will try to resolve his own happiness. Stand or fall, his life’s path shall be forged in this world. The gifts of his birthright will claim their full due. He will find himself, with or without you.’
‘I will not let him down,’ Elaira insisted, stripped to the steel of stark character. ‘I must back his claim to contentment first, whatever becomes of our union, which as his sworn mate, he has left in my protected keeping.’
‘That could cost you dearly,’ the eldest warned with a snap. ‘Would you find yourself left aged and alone, forgotten by him in obscurity?’
‘I might die unrequited.’ Elaira swallowed, huddled against the cruel chill that speared her through bone and viscera. ‘That is why Arithon trusted me to guard the one vulnerable flaw he knew he lacked the stern fibre to shield.’
The ancient Biedar woman cupped her seamed palms. She might have raised an ephemeral flame that burned beyond the range of visible eyesight, or perhaps she awaited an offering with bare hands that might never be filled. ‘Your beloved would surrender himself to your Prime before letting any harm come to you.’
Wrung past words, Elaira managed the nod for that insufferable affirmation. ‘If he should fail me, or I fail in him, the Warden of Althain assured the result would call down a disaster. I would break in two,’ she admitted, sapped dry. ‘But the hurtful stakes if I fall are not malleable. I’m not callous enough to withstand such a course. All the wrong parties would triumph.’
The crone clapped, to a clash of the glass and copper bracelets that weighted her stick-thin wrists. For a split second, the black sands seemed rinsed white by a deluge of illumination: where the inn stood intact, a young woman emerged, bearing a laden supper tray. Her face was turned towards the hollow where a young man glistened, naked and wet from a wash at the well, his dusty clothing slung over one shoulder . . . then the echo raised out of sound died away. The night was the same: darkened and ordinary under the blaze of the wheeling stars. The crone pronounced, ‘You will stand the course.’
‘Ath wept!’ Stripped beyond subterfuge, Elaira exclaimed, ‘I shall try. At best, I am human. No less subject than any to mortal limits and fallible resource.’
‘Mother Dark’s mercy walks even where no light appears to be found. The grace of the heart is not subject to boundaries, and witness is made and sealed by the moment.’ The crone’s sudden smile appeared as a balm. Her touch cupped Elaira’s salt-wet chin and lifted her tormented face. ‘Biedar do not exclude other folk as outsiders. But we hear them only by the awareness they carry directly from spirit. You are not known to abandon a friend. Or wont to leave a stranger in need out of self-absorbed callousness. Actions colour your purpose more clearly than even the most honest talk. Arrogance does not admit to its weaknesses. But love does, respectful for fear of love’s absence. You are true, by our measure. Therefore, you are destined to blaze the way as our emissary.’
The statement took a leaden moment to penetrate. ‘What?’ Elaira blinked. ‘Emissary to whom?’
Spry fingers brushed away her last tear. The ancient reached into her loosely layered robes and drew forth a wrapped object, fringed with decorative shells and glass beads, and hung with esoteric small talismans. ‘I speak for my people, whose stolen covenant was sworn to be satisfied in the breach. You are tasked to put right the consequence of Jessian’s unintentional legacy.’ Upraised again, the seamed palms offered what starlight revealed to be a stone knife, beautifully wrapped and sheathed in laced deerskin.
‘Is this a burden or a signal honour?’ Elaira asked, shaken and wary of accepting a hallowed item, freighted with an unknown consequence. ‘I did not know Jessian. You’ll need to explain.’
‘Once, your Koriathain but trifled with power,’ the Biedar eldest revealed, her uncanny gift not withdrawn. ‘Persecuted, then imprisoned for sharing our ways as a witness, Jessian died with the secret behind an enigma. Her victory over an unsatisfied Prime Matriarch drove the Koriathain to pursue a reckless policy of acquisition. The order’s ranked Seniors grasped after power without any thought for their impact. They abandoned scruple, struck bargains even with factions they deemed moral enemies to seize more and more dire means of extracting domination through forceful control. When they gained what they wished, they turned false on their allies. Acts they claimed as necessity were justified to enforce their own mission, declared for the greater good. All of the significant arcane knowledge in the sisterhood’s annals stems from a pack-rat cache of suborned sacred writings, and theft.’
Sorrow bled through, as the matriarch finished. ‘Biedar were never their willing participants. We do not broker initiate knowledge. For that, our kind suffered abuse without conscience. Koriathain made use of drugs, by extortion. They entrapped innocents and applied twisted means to rifle the sacred ancestral lore of our tribe.’
‘I haven’t the background to understand all of this,’ Elaira protested, dismayed. Cut so far adrift, never made privy to her order’s vast store of closed records, she felt bereft of informed guidance, and helpless.
‘The hidden past shall be exposed in due time,’ the old woman declared with complacency. ‘Some of the historical detail you seek will be found with the Warden of Althain. Search there, first. Bide in patience. Take our knife with my blessing. Know that the purpose behind the blade’s shaping one day will make itself known to you.’
Further avoidance somehow seemed uncouth. Elaira accepted the weight of the offering, braced. But no shock of encounter met her anxious touch. The deerhide stayed cool. The beaded patterns glittered, at present just ornamental embroidery fashioned of shell and plain glass. The stone blade inside stayed inert in her grasp as she took possession. Since thanks seemed displaced for a duty laid on her, Elaira settled for humour. ‘Just how much blood, or which finger must I offer in sacrifice?’
The crone chuckled, brim-full of amusement. ‘You hold a Biedar artifact made long before our people arrived on Athera.’ Beneath the brow-band of her mantle, the crone’s jet eyes caught the reflections of the overhead constellations as she tipped her head to the sky. ‘I will tell you this much. The blade is a talisman, made ages ago for one purpose only: to end the defiled practice your Fellowship Sorcerers decry as the abomination of necromancy.’
Elaira sank onto her heels, jolted spineless. ‘Grey Kralovir perished. Their remnants were cleansed.’
‘Two offshoot forms of the vile discipline remain,’ the First Eldest corrected with sorrow. ‘Affi’enia, for our sake and your own, trust that your steps will be protected. Have you not guessed? Your Prime Matriarch fears that blade above all things, except perhaps the Named life of the one whose forepromised task is to wield it.’
‘Arithon?’ blurted Elaira, appalled.
The crone would not confirm, but said only, ‘Our charges are these, laid on you as bearer. You will carry the knife and deliver it into the living hand of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn at a time of your choosing. Until then, you may use its virtues but once to take action on your own behalf. Decide wisely and well by the love in your heart. For Prince Arithon’s fate is entwined with your life-course. Mother Dark’s mystery walks in his tracks. But you, Affi’enia, are the shining Light on the path come before him.’
Before trepidation found voice for protest, the ancient ended the audience. ‘Accept your role for the sake of my people, that the wrongness done with our blameless heritage may be ended, put right, and reconciled.’
‘I will agree to consult with Sethvir,’ Elaira allowed, which was far as she dared
to promise.
The crone bowed her head. Behind her, the black sands remained empty of dancers. The melodic clash of their brass cymbals stayed gone, replaced by the moan of the wind across the stone ring that rimmed the ancient well-shaft. Where the young women had been, a ring of male elders now stood, robed from head to feet in dark silk. Whether they sang, or dreamed, or chanted in whispers, Elaira was not permitted the licence to know. A wave like a ripple passed over the scene, clouding her arcane awareness. The strange disturbance passed in an eyeblink. When full clarity surged back, the surrounding dunes were swept clean of tribesfolk.
Not a footprint remained, and no impression showed where their cherished Eldest had sat to pose her stern questions. The breeze riffled over the old inn’s forlorn foundation, where the scoured stones trapped the shifted sand like bunched felt, as they had for centuries beneath twinkling starlight.
Dawn paled the eastern horizon. Alone as the early glimmer of day burned into a mercury haze, Elaira regarded the primitive knife, laced into its barbaric sheath. The talisman was all that had stayed, nothing more, as a worldly power beyond her ken set her hand to pursue a frightening task by her merits.
Elaira slipped the knotted loop over her neck. She tucked the wrapped heirloom beneath her travel-stained blouse, aware she was horseless, and hungry, and tired, and shivering from the chill. In these times, no inns relieved the trade-road between Atchaz and Innish. Where the route sliced across the westernmost rim of Sanpashir’s arid waste, travellers preferred not to linger amid the wilds claimed as the tribe’s sovereign territory.
The site was as far removed as might be from Althain Tower in distant Atainia. Elaira hiked back towards the marked route, resigned. The next passing caravan would determine whether she fared northward by land or turned left to seek an extended passage by way of the galleys that moved silk bales and spices and Southshire’s famed oranges by sea.
But unlike every other dawn before this, a spark of renewed hope lightened her weary steps. Whether the knife’s possession brought fortune or bane, its legacy promised a future encounter with her heart’s most beloved.
Early Spring 5923
Scourges
‘But our long-term interests are served by the upsurge that Sorcerer’s dragon wrenched through the flux!’ Prime Selidie declaims, anxious to counter the dangerous threat posed by Elaira’s meeting with the Biedar Eldest. ‘The families of the afflicted must look to us to spare their stricken kin. Our debt lists will swell under their obligation and better, our shelter can spare their threatened daughters from the Sunwheel purges and bolster our aging ranks with youthful new talent . . .’
The watch runner’s breathless news shatters the precarious peace at the Camris outpost: that the black-market exchange of raw pelts for supply has ended with a massacre by Sunwheel soldiers. ‘They march on the clans to purge what they name a lethal outbreak of black sorcery. We’re blamed, they say, for the madness provoked by the lane surge. The war band assumes the rear-guard in attempt to buy time to empty our low-country settlements . . .’
Althain’s Warden bows his head on clenched fists, beset by the whip-lash of recoil set-backs: while traumatized fear wracks Etarra with riots that reinstate the Light’s canon against Lysaer’s edict, elsewhere in Havish, the Sunwheel dedicates drive their whirlwind attack to seize Torwent; by temple directive, they cordon the harbour to secure their flag galley inbound with the Spinner of Darkness . . .
Early Spring 5923
XI. Upheaval
A
t Althain Tower, Sethvir paced the library floor. Too swiftly, the convergent speed of events unfolded the moment that fueled his darkest foreboding. The war galley entrusted to bear the temple’s ill-omened freight of bound prisoners nosed against the stout wharf, locked down by armed conquest at Torwent. By then, the quay seethed with threat great enough to wreck any hope of reprieve. The town’s bewildered faithful had not been restrained by the Light’s imposed curfew. Shaken by the recent outbreaks of madness, too many welcomed the Sunwheel presence with bewildered relief. Hecklers stirred by the fraught threat of Shadow jeered from the water-front lanes, fractiously jammed against the armed muscle charged to safeguard the newly raised scaffold. Those grim tripled ranks were not complacent regulars drawn from garrison posts, but life-term veterans hand-picked from the precipitous thrust that had burst the defensive lines at the border of Havish. If their blooded weapons were oiled and cleaned, the lethal edge was scarcely restored from the whirlwind attack. Their buffeted stance sealed the fishers’ wharf as the day inexorably brightened.
Where Mainmere’s fleet should have tied up to unlade, the clay-tiled roofs notched a scrim of sea-mist. Girdled by pyramids of stacked barrels, the bait seller’s shacks wore a tarnish of dew, board shutters barred against commerce. The cod-oil reek of the idle presses stained the sea air, thickened to redolence by the vacated chopping blocks where, today, the shawled circle of women did not gossip to the flicker of knives, dicing raw fillets for market. Instead, the cobbled apron at the water-front heaved, the drab wool of its seafaring residents splashed with gaudy colour where the Light’s true believers unfurled Sunwheel pennants. More flags marked a second phalanx of foot-troops, which guarded the dais that seated the war host’s attached priests, and a high temple examiner. Before them, the massive log pyre with its raised post to shackle the prisoners and the yellow timbers of the executioner’s platform, still pocked by salvoes of hammering and the saw-cuts of last-minute carpentry.
More pennons streamed from the parade rows of socketed spears, where a light horse division reined into place to forestall the botched handling that had shamed Kelsing. Also present to ensure the minions’ demise, the Light’s Supreme Commander of Armies fumed in ceremonial dress, couched in an armoured war-chariot drawn by four white geldings. The glittering wedge of his entourage crammed the harbour-master’s handkerchief lawn, gilt-trimmed by his herald, his standard-bearers and trumpeters, and above these, deployed like ruffled steel lace on the overhead widow’s walk, a reserve squad of archers on station in case the spectacle started a riot.
But the True Sect conquest that choked Torwent in pageantry went unseen by the prisoners locked below deck on the galley.
While the brawny stevedores warped the flagship to a readied berth, Tarens and Arithon languished in darkness. The impotent yells and catcalls shrilled from the landing carried faintly through the thumped bangs of the hull, and the squeal of taut hawsers worked in frantic haste to end what the vessel’s officers named a cursed passage. Odd, sweating nightmares plagued half of the crew. Two maniacs raved in the surgeon’s care, roped harmlessly into hammocks. Rumour laid blame on the small, dark-haired prisoner, with no credence given to fact: that the plague of such ills had started before his incarceration aboard. More, the condemned had done little else but sleep off profound exhaustion. But too many fearful eyes had beheld the fisherman’s lugger said to be thrashed by his infestation of fiends.
‘Can’t be quit of yer hell-spawned hides fast enough!’ swore the burly armed guard assigned watch on the ship’s brig.
The partner too jumpy to risk shooting dice also vented his spiteful boredom. ‘Half the Sunwheel brass in creation’s out there, sworn to cleanse the wickedness of yer dark arts!’
‘The sooner the sword’s pierced your black hearts the better,’ the ship’s mate agreed, a spidery fellow with a skewed eye, who waited to a fidgety jingle of keys. ‘Burn quick and bedamned before others get moonstruck by such as your tricksy foul practice.’
‘Our dock rats at Barish aren’t this tar slow,’ the nervous guard fumed, impatient.
Amid the industrious scrambles above decks, an officer blistered, ‘Stow that line, damn you! I’ll flay living skin before risking the captain’s vile temper!’
The gangplank rattled out to a priest’s chanted prayer and the restive growl of a populace primed to witness brutal justice. Wracked by the aftermath of the lane shift, folk demanded redress for the unhinged kinsmen
recently put to the torch. They would seize retribution, with or without the law blessed by the temple canon.
Confined in expectation of their barbaric fate, the doomed minions did not pass their last moments of penury lightless. The eerie bands stacked upon Arithon’s finger cast a subtle glow amid gloom. Tarens’s scarred profile loomed a cold azure, sweat-burnished and tinged to corpse pallor.
‘You’d best have a plan,’ the big crofter ventured against the ominous uproar topside. ‘At least, don’t pretend the role of the scapegoat hasn’t turned upside down while you slept.’ When his jagged dread received no reassurance, he lashed out, ‘The numbers won’t give! If we’re going to escape from this mess alive, you must wield your talent to kill.’
Chain chinked in sour protest.
Ripped to frayed nerves, Tarens blurted, ‘Man, this isn’t the place to be hobbled by the tender guts of the healer!’ He added, bidden by uncanny instinct, ‘I was told to remind you, if you thought to cringe: once, you swore a blood oath to a Sorcerer that you would do all in your power to survive!’
The brazen moment of recoil hung, followed by a ripped catch of breath. Then a convulsive movement doused the faint glimmer on Arithon’s left hand. ‘Who told you this?’ Under darkness, his tone was sheared ice, surely stressed from an unveiled memory.
Too late for regret, that the cruel admonishment blindsided a man’s inner privacy. Tarens reeled also, defenseless to soften the prompts of an arcane perception too fresh to assimilate. Past question, he knew: the cut of a blade upon Arithon’s wrist once had set ruthless terms on a binding to live, no matter the means or the cost.
Belatedly, he sought to soften the wound. ‘High Earl Jieret s’Valerient informed me. He claimed to have been your sworn friend and the voice of your royal conscience.’
