by Janny Wurts
The uncanny artifact was far too dangerous to leave at large in the war camp.
The Hatchet spat a ferocious oath. Forced to secure the damnable construct under lock and key, he pursued his disrupted course of inspection in a viciously poisoned mood. Throughout, the anxiety haunted: had his late campaign in Havish been sabotaged, with a victory snatched from his grasp? Who knew what twisted wickedness motivated the Koriathain.
To be wrangled again by their wiles mocked his competence. Worse, fumed The Hatchet, the bedevilling shrew played on his fierce desire to see Lysaer s’Ilessid deposed after the shame of defeat. Hooked bait on that weakness galled his thorny temper.
“Damn your meddling Prime, I will seize my reckoning,” he snarled, then shouted outside and summoned his equerry at a frazzled sprint.
Repercussions touched off by the upset in Dyshent flared more than The Hatchet’s distemper. Across the continent, surrounded by packing crates as the Senior Circle of the Koriathain uprooted itself from their entrenched lair at Whitehold, the Matriarch vented annoyance. “The cagey snake has rejected my overture!”
“Your morning’s work was scarcely in vain,” soothed the attendant, hovering Senior. The spelled crossbolt had stayed in The Hatchet’s possession, a temptation planted in fertile ground. “The game is young. The Light’s prickly commander will surely succumb, if only to upstage the avatar.”
But Selidie’s displeasure rejected optimism. “The overblown martinet lacks respect for our order.” How dared he threaten a reigning Prime with his pipsqueak talk of retribution! She needed the man to react on his merits, not haltered in spells as a puppet.
Her bit players must all be engaged by free will. Anything less circumvented her cause to wrest the sisterhood clear of the Fellowship’s compact. But the very tools to pressure the Sorcerers carried a double-edged price: where The Hatchet’s directive to eradicate clanblood weakened the historic guardianship of the free wilds, such butchery also reduced the available pool of heritable talent. Fewer gifted candidates would survive to be inducted and replenish the order’s strength. Koriathain wrestled other perverse inconveniences: Selidie dared not risk a passage by galley to leash the Light’s mongrel commander herself. The might just restored by recovery of the Great Waystone made the amethyst too precious to hazard at sea.
Her choice to relocate to Daon Ramon imposed an inconvenient journey by land. Hence this invasion of boxes, up-ending her household just as fractious events approached a critical crux.
Lysaer’s double-blind play was exposed: The Hatchet’s over-zealous detail would shortly board a galley held under storm anchorage. When the challenge at the sterncastle door went unanswered, the lock would be smashed by war-bond authority.
Selidie knew, seated amid the echoing chaos of her windowed gallery at Whitehold: the frantic search would find an empty cabin. The Light’s delinquent avatar and his personal servant were not aboard.
On the sore subject of Lord Lysaer’s activity, her own stellar resource fell short. Repeated auguries by Koriani talent sank into murk.
Selidie chewed over her thwarted frustration, irritated by back-ground chatter, and the scrape of filled trunks dragged aside for the porters. Since the scryers tagged the Mad Prophet’s presence well to her west, today’s obfuscation most likely involved a Fellowship Sorcerer’s mark.
Asandir’s ward of guard upon Daliana might be clouding Prime Selidie’s reach. The pesky chit had vanished after her collusion with the Mad Prophet had engineered Lysaer’s abduction from the carnage at Lithmarin. Separated from the spellbinder’s protection in Scarpdale, the inconvenient young woman had never resurfaced, even under an exhaustive search backed by the order’s Great Waystone. Therefore, another bold finger had meddled. Only one other power in reach owned the main strength and audacity.
Selidie called her attendant Seniors to active duty despite the convulsive disarray. “I require an immediate circle of twelve, a cleared room, and the chest that contains the Great Waystone for the purpose of engaging Davien.”
The announcement reeled the room to shocked silence. None dared flout the Prime, no matter the peril inherent in crossing the Fellowship Sorcerers; and of the Seven, the Betrayer was unspeakably dangerous. The most experienced Seniors recalled: last time their Matriarch had wielded the might of the Waystone against him, the affray had seared her to a stub-fingered cripple.
On the moment the Prime Matriarch firmed her resolve, the renegade Fellowship Sorcerer in question stood on a rock slope in the Mathorns, red-and-white hair like a stallion’s mane tumbled over his taut shoulders. Above, like a massive stilled pendulum, a boulder half the size of a house creaked in a sling, cranked vertical by a match-stick brace of fir logs. The stone overweighted its groaning support, suspension maintained by permission and sorcery mighty enough to unravel the mountain beneath.
Being Davien, no such carelessness happened, though from an earth-linked vantage at Althain Tower, Sethvir winced for the timing as Kharadmon swooped in, bristling to level the ancient score of his grievances.
Arctic draught at the nape his first warning, Davien flexed his interlaced fingers in an artistic stretch. “What, no flowering nightshade? No hellebore? Not even the toxic flamboyance of the tiger-lily? Provocative orange would suit us both, if you still style yourself in that obnoxious green cloak.”
Clad himself in autumnal russet and brown, the coarse outdoor wool paired with calfskin boots and cordovan leathers, Davien perched on the pile of casks and provender, stored under tarps in the open. The refuge at Kewar engineered for a shade now required renovation to suit his incarnate release from the dragon’s service. The old entry, drilled out, underwent the critical step of receiving a guardian cap-stone: finicky spells and physical effort interlaced in fraught measure with fatal danger.
Insolent necessity, Davien snatched the interruption to eat. His usual satirical mockery absent, he peeled the wax from a cheese, cracked a loaf of dark bread, and with a thoughtful expression, dug in.
Kharadmon commanded the wind for his voice. The question became, not how many, but which mothballed fight he picked first.
While the shade coalesced for the opening salvo, Davien raised an eyebrow and busily chewed as the tirade unleashed. “Not mentioning your colossal mistakes that saddled us with the rebellion, or the brutal inventiveness that destroyed King Kamridian, sunk in your criminal culpability, what excuse grants you the license to fling Asandir’s gift of survival into our teeth? Also Luhaine’s sacrifice in your behalf! How deadly the irony, that his butchered flesh once paid for your mess at Telmandir, only to lend you the undeserved grace to salvage your reincarnation.”
The Betrayer said nothing. He did not belabour the pertinent truth: that Kharadmon’s culpable action had upset Asandir’s intervention, which would have disarmed Shehane Althain’s sprung defences on the historical hour that he became fatally savaged.
Yet Davien’s weighted silence failed to stem his discorporate colleague’s furious accusations.
“By your passionate claim, our use of clan blood-lines to treat with the Paravians created the schism between town-born and talent. Who’s the yapping hypocrite, now? Your accomplishment’s driven a zealot religion into the bleeding breach. If you’re not shamed by the Light’s slaughter of talent, and while you sat idle as three of us cleaned up the carnage after a drake war, I demand to hear from your lips: by our sworn covenant to protect the Paravians, why have you not stirred to explore what’s befallen the guardian at Northgate? Restored to flesh and bone, can’t you lessen the burden on Asandir? Explain now, in full! By Dharkaron Avenger, why not pursue the reason for Chaimistarizog’s absence?”
Davien straightened and jettisoned his bread-crust. “Sethvir likely knows. And if not, only Asandir has earned the right to inquire.”
Air shrieked to Kharadmon’s incensed recoil. The blast creaked the ropes, and whitened the plies a hairbreadth from flash-freezing the fibres. “Enough cagey evasions. I’ll have answers no matter th
e threat to your self-centred independence.”
“Some other day,” Davien dismissed.
Behind him, the guardian stone slung on its precarious ropes emitted a crack like the snap of a whip. The gryphon his artistry had yet to carve glowed briefly inside the unstructured granite, while the orb to become the watchful eye suddenly flared livid red. The precursor spell seating its protective enchantments scribed a ring of white fire around Davien’s planted stance and also encompassed the indignant swirl of Kharadmon’s indignant essence.
“What outrageous bombast!” The discorporate Sorcerer’s temper cracked before incredulity. “We’re not under attack.”
“We are, in fact.” Etched in the sharp sunlight and shade of high altitude, Davien flaunted an insolent grin. “Try a surprise visitation steered by the Prime Matriarch. She’s trying the might of the Waystone against us, backed by twelve circled Seniors.”
“You’ll have staged that charade,” Kharadmon huffed.
“Do you truly think?” The Betrayer measured the Fellowship entity pinched in the malicious breach. “If you can’t believe me, at least curb your pique. We’re stuck together for the duration. Unless, of course, you snatch your safe exit and flit?”
Kharadmon snorted. “What, turn tail and run from Prime Selidie’s wiles? Try my patience again!”
Davien laughed. “Then stay at your peril. Her sally to test me isn’t a feint.”
No toothless threat: wielded by a Prime at full strength, the amethyst focus packed force enough to endanger a discorporate Sorcerer. Particularly if the Matriarch drained her subordinates to leverage the contest.
Kharadmon’s presence snuffed out, condensed to a frosty vacuum.
Then Prime Selidie’s concerted blast struck and shattered the rudimentary wards laid into the unfinished cap-stone. Spelled ropes and unpolished granite exploded. Shards flew like knives. Planted inside the nexus with folded arms, Davien seemed unfazed as though he outfaced a social embarrassment. Yet the actualized spells that wrested the lethal missiles aside and crashed them impotently at his feet broke a sweat on his forehead.
He mocked, “A stone-throwing tantrum’s the best you can do?”
Reckless strategy, to taunt a powerful rival maimed under his past round of trickery: bolt lightning stabbed downwards out of clear air. Harm deflected just shy of electrocution, Davien held fast, caged in branched forks that scribbled scorched channels of carbon around him. Through smears of wisped smoke, he needled again, “You won’t have your way using pique for diplomacy.”
Yet his challenge just missed the dismissal of sarcasm. His straits were dire. Yield one step, and the entrance to his library would lie open to rifling trespass. Too many dark secrets were cached within: volumes of knowledge too dreadful to be shelved with the Paravian archives at Althain Tower.
Selidie had rancorous bones aplenty to pick with the Seven and a vengeful personal score outstanding against Davien for centuries. Which ferocious awareness scarcely prepared him for her next scalding strike. Dazzled nearly blind and hammered to his knees, Davien seized the moment to palm a flake of stone from the wreckage. The fragment yet retained the grant of permission to stand ward and guard for him in free partnership.
Also, within, the eidetic stamp of the violence that had snapped the harmonic working asunder. Davien tapped the mineral’s matrix and grasped the aggressive thrust of the Prime’s motivation: a fury that echoed from her past failure to best Sulfin Evend. Thwarted plots to separate Lysaer from his steadfast war-captain’s moral influence had balked her order’s intentions. Again poised with the True Sect priesthood as agent under her thumb, Selidie raged to find a new obstruction guarding Lysaer’s vulnerability. Hell-bent, the Prime sought the secret that sheltered the sen Evend heir, Daliana.
Davien sorted his counter-moves, appalled by the stakes. Barraged under the lightning shimmer and crack of the Prime’s hostile charge, he seized the split second and sounded the chip for the remnant of his burst ward. Since mineral forgot nothing, the imprint remained, a plan configured to perfection well before the disruptive attack.
But set-back dealt him an unforeseen shock: the founded circle had included no safe passage for crossing, and Kharadmon’s wise retreat had never occurred. The discorporate’s choice to take cover in hindsight posed a drastic mistake.
Davien dared not risk that appalling disclosure with his resource taxed under fire. Pitched on the defensive with the Prime unaware of his colleague’s collateral peril, he stared down disaster and pressed the end game.
The stone fragment held the template of the wardspells already designed to withstand a hostile assault. Davien wielded the pattern. A further split second’s reckless intent engaged other forces that no Fellowship Sorcerer before this had been hardened to bear.
His hands flared into unnatural fire: a shimmer azure as gas-flame, and reactive beyond all imagining. Naked flesh and blood, Davien’s finger-tips unfurled the prepotent aura possessed by Athera’s great drakes.
The phenomenon, until now kept shrouded, exposed how profoundly Dragonkind’s dreaming had changed him. The volatile power sparked to his will and ripped the air with an ozone-spiked crack. The elements screamed. The staid cliff-face before him ignited to the might of his focused desire and restored the pulverized statue. Reshaped in completed manifestation, the sentinel gryphon gargoyle engaged its guardian spells at one stroke.
Prime Selidie’s thrust tangled in the matrix.
White fire met blue with a shriek that cracked bed-rock. The ground rumbled and shook, while the elements bled light, a wild coruscation that fountained aloft and unfurled the shimmer of an aurora.
Prime Selidie’s lightnings snuffed instantaneously.
Socked by the earthquake punch of the recoil, Davien wrestled, hands locked, and vised his thoughts still. Crouched with singed hair, seared clothes smoking, he regarded the blackened ash dusting his skin.
“I’d rather the meddling Prime was not privy,” he gasped, while a land-slide of stones ploughed into the vale with a thundering roar. “Insolent shade! Were you endangered?”
“The question is moot!” Kharadmon’s presence unfurled with a whoosh. “If the Prime was desperate before, you’ve just torched the core of her insecurity.” The shade added, thoughtful, through a chattering storm of loose gravel and carbon, “I had not expected that move to protect me. If this force-majeure bequest of Seshkrozchiel’s is behind your feckless delinquency, consider my grievance reproved. Your absence from the crisis at Northgate was justified.”
“Do you think?” gasped Davien, unable to muzzle a vicious onset of the shakes. Kharadmon’s damnable perception was true. He had not stabilized even wayward control of his untoward legacy. Until he mastered himself, a drake conflict was the last conceivable place Althain’s Warden would wish to dispatch him.
Summer 5923
Diversion
While The Hatchet’s elite dedicates seized the rogue galley and ransacked an empty cabin, their absent quarry braved the gale’s aftermath aboard a lugger festooned with nets. Another soaked fisherman swathed in stained oilskins withstood the search in plain sight. No one glanced sidewards at men seining cod. Particularly one whose chapped chin itched with several days’ stubble.
Few ever beheld the Light’s avatar without the groomed panoply of his state dress. Yet true human dignity owned no such pride. Lysaer fielded the grimy discomfort with astonishing equilibrium. Instrell Bay tossed to a moil of cross chop, the hazard of a gentleman’s razor apt to risk a slit throat. Vanity cheerfully balked at testing a new valet’s expertise: particularly one curled up in green misery, seasick and suffering the back-lash from a True Sect examiner’s invasive probe.
Dace groaned in a berth, too ill to do aught but heave up his guts in a basin.
The Light’s avatar was not wont to fraternize. Court etiquette instilled by his royal birth maintained a cool distance from the mean lives of his servants. Yet a buried facet of his character emerged under the anonymity
of borrowed oilskins.
Stripped of his state status, Lysaer sat on the drenched deck, learning to mend a frayed halyard from the youngest sailhand, aged nine. Two bent heads and two sets of hands, the smaller pair correcting, spliced the hemp plies to thread the masthead sheave without binding. Lysaer’s care-free laugh floated back on the wind. The boy’s flush reflected no awe. His eagerness guided an aristocrat’s fingers, unfamiliarly shorn of seal ring and jewels under the dousing spray.
The storm eased at dusk. Breeze slackened, and night fell dense as spilled ink. Crammed below with the off-watch crew, Lysaer ate rough fare from a common pot. Dace peered at his liege by the reeling swing of the lamp, braced for patronizing indifference. Instead, blue eyes lifted, Lysaer noticed his servant’s wakeful regard.
“Has the headache eased? Then you need to eat something. Perhaps a bit of broth will stay down?” The hand that offered the bowl lost no elegance, raw with blisters and slivers of rope.
Dace always had grasped the quality that once earned Sulfin Evend’s relentless loyalty. Not before this had he seen the humility behind tonight’s earnest solicitude.
He could not refuse the gruel and spoon, regardless of his queasy stomach. His liege tucked him under the blankets again when the bland nourishment failed to settle. Dace recuperated, excused from his duties, while the fishing lugger ploughed up Instrell Bay, rounded Atainia, and smashed westward into the frigid waters wreathed in pale fog and afloat with the summer’s calved icebergs. Here, where the perilous reefs met the current of the polar ocean, Lysaer tended the nets, glued in fish-stinking sweat alongside the hard-working crew.
Yet shared labour never led him to confide. Whatever purpose took him to north Tysan stayed shrouded in self-contained silence.
A servant dared not presume to venture an inquiry. Though his unsettled awareness suggested the avatar courted disaster, Dace lacked the effrontery to broach the perils of an unknown decision. Close enough to touch intimate flesh, and prized only for quiet efficiency, the steadfast valet must watch what unfolded and hone his perception to compensate.
