by Janny Wurts
Arin tidied the tools. He nipped off, long gone by the time the nocturnal sentries reported for duty.
Darkness covered his furtive return to Vivet’s cabin in the settlement. By then, he faced an emptied pot if he paused to wash the guano reek off his person. Famished beyond that civilized nicety, Arin by-passed the well. Perverse windfall, Vivet’s distaste for the stench forestalled the council’s mandate to sleep under her roof.
First light the next morning saw him crammed, shivering, into yesterday’s damp garments. His pace brisk to offset the nip in the air, he reported back to the hidden vale for his second day’s labour. The armed guards admitted him, woodenly unmoved by the madcap greeting he flipped into their teeth. Arin passed the rammed-earth defile, eyes gleaming with suspect anticipation, only to find his way blocked by a shaman.
Regaled in rumpled felt stitched with feathers, and indignantly rattling under strings of bone fetishes, the fellow’s screwed features were suffused with blood and ingrained clay paint.
“The vultures!” he spluttered, spade jaw jutted with fury. “They’re too sulky to eat. The mere sight of their handlers drives them wild. Our falconer’s declared them unfit to be flown!” His tirade stalled, upstaged as another tempestuous ruckus funnelled through the entrance behind.
Arin nipped clear. Bemused by the flailing thunder of wing-beats and staccato outbursts of invective, he watched the owl handlers from the night-long vigil spill their agitation into the compound. The birds on their fists flailed in manic hysteria, fighting the jesses. The commotion shredded the morning quiet, encountered the shaman, and seethed to a halt.
Chilled from volcanic ire to ice, that fixed presence surveyed the uproar and winced as another bird bated. “The owls are distressed?”
The pale sentry in front bobbed with scared deference. “None would settle. Nothing calms them. As you see, they’ve been unmanageable throughout the patrol.”
The shaman in authority asked nothing more. “Carry on as you were. Leave the problem to me.”
The unnerved handlers sagged to a man with relief. While they crowded past, wrestling their disgruntled charges, the shaman glared daggers at Arin.
“Perchance have you meddled? I know Madraega’s ignorance yesterday assigned you to clean out the mews. Our gullible falconer said he heard you whistling.” The shaman stabbed the pertinent inquiry through the retreating avian clamour. “Has a talent fine-tuned enough to sing iyat banes cast an affliction over our birds?”
“I made song for the pleasure of being alive,” Arin allowed without heat. “Why?” Smiling like velvet dipped into poison, he jabbed, “Have you come with a request for my services?”
“Never!” Jaws clamped, the stymied shaman breathed fire. Yet the damage was done: one thoughtless word touched off by s’Ffalenn temper had unmasked the pitfall that yawned unfathomably dangerous and deep. The shaman’s cold gaze reassessed the insouciant prankster, whose effusive joy was not innocent. For his sly provocation keyed to well-being had sparked revolt: all the brooding rage of an enforced captivity turned back against the birds’ abusive masters. That truth danced, unmasked, behind merry green eyes. The jewels that collared Ettinmere’s raptors in fact steered them by spellbound coercion.
Where the fool might crow over the naked embarrassment, the initiate master took warning: two wary adversaries acknowledged their antipathy. The shaman struck back, aggressively fast, sharp and sure as a blade in the hand of a surgeon.
His thrust did not catch Rathain’s prince defenceless, or best the reflex honed by Rauven’s training. But diversion must supplant the sure parry in form, lest the innocent pose of dissembling humour come unravelled at a single stroke.
Arin feinted with a startled glance sidewards, then staggered as though something else had upset his artless equilibrium. His stumble evaded the stiffened forefinger punched at his chest and barely foiled the disastrous contact.
The opponent decked in primal fetishes was no idiot but a focused talent with dangerous strength. He would re-engage to seize the upper hand. Mis-step this fraught dance, break from plausible ignorance, and Arin risked catastrophic exposure.
Not only the stamp of his initiate mastery, his aura bore two adamant seals bestowed by Fellowship sorcery: Davien’s unnatural longevity from the Five Centuries Fountain and Asandir’s mark of crown sanction. Teir’s’Ffalenn, he required a refuge to heal the broken links to his past. But Ettinmere’s isolation could not shelter the impact of his royal heritage. Nor could a pack of bird sentries and crack archers harbour his fugitive identity as Master of Shadow.
Arin scrambled, entangled, his covert chance lost to map the pursuit ranged against him. Buffoonery as his last, innocuous shield from a power not to be trifled with, he staged a hooked heel and tripped in the path of his lunging opponent. Skulls collided with a tooth-rattling grunt. Concentration snapped, the shaman hissed, bowled into a clownish embrace. Jammed at elbows and knees, he could not shed the outlander’s ham-fisted snatch amid toppling balance.
Clawed handfuls of arcane paraphernalia saved nothing. The shaman shared Arin’s bumbling fall, garrotted by his raiment.
His bulk hit the ground, gargling. Cloth ripped, shedding feathers. Parted twine loosed a shower of bone talismans. Pelted by the fall-out, the red-faced shaman wheezed in a starved breath, while the idiot foreigner gasped an effusive apology, clutching his ribs. Choked by the pulverized cloud of clay pigments gusted off the shaman’s clothes, or else snorting back laughter, Arin recovered himself, stood up, and extended a helpful hand gritted with dirt.
The shaman batted the courtesy aside. Purple with fury, he rasped his revised orders before the scapegrace sauntered away. “Not the mews, fellow! You’ve been reassigned.”
The gate guards seized Arin. Their muscled force frog-marched him as far as possible from Ettin’s cosseted familiars.
If the shaman crouched on hands and knees in the dust, rooting for baubles and beads, the stand down was no victory. The prickling itch between Arithon’s shoulder-blades served him with perilous warning: on both sides, the exchange of antipathy remained unappeased.
The small, dark-haired foreigner found himself delivered forthwith to the compound’s warehouse for tasking. Smudged by fresh mud, his shoulders squared, he faced the harried clerk who directed the yearly autumn exodus from a trestle stationed by the entry.
“Arin, you say?” A stooped figure topped with greasy grey hair reared behind the stacks of his meticulous ledgers. Features as crumpled as unfired clay peered over a moth-eaten quill. “Just what I need! An outland jape who can’t read the tags. Bad omen, as well, since Teeah’s wisdom knows a crow’s malign colouring invites the death raven’s curse.” A fishy stare finished with a grumpy sigh. “What use, if you can’t sort bottled poisons from tinctures for tonics and dyestuff? I suppose,” the clerk mumbled, bent sideways to rummage, “you can handle a bucket and swab without careless mishap?”
The scrounged implements were thrust upon Arin with orders to mop the accumulated mouse scat and dust off the shelves detailed for inventory. “Be off, now, and make certain you don’t disrupt the tally in progress.”
Stepped through the door into velvet gloom, Arin sized up a maze of rack shelves, burdened by the lumpish loom of piled sacks, mismatched boxes, and casks. The glow of paned lanterns sliced through the fusty air, distorted by wheeling shadows where the compound’s learned scribes sorted through the collection and packed select items in crates for transport. The cavernous space between groups invited unsupervised mischief. Too tempting in fact, likely posed as an entrapment. If Ettinmere’s shamans tested him to reveal his esoteric knowledge, Arin embraced the challenge with the artless intent to pry, first.
He poked into the stores with inquisitive fingers. Where tacit tingles riffled his mage-sense, he hummed under his breath and sounded the patterns of crafted energies by harmonic resonance. The keys that fired the flux in response exposed the structure of the active enchantments. Most constructs were trif
ling: charms to sweeten unpleasant smells, delay rot, or ward away mishap, the lot easily fashioned by a green apprentice. Nothing approached the honed force of the probe lately launched against his defences. Whatever source buttressed the shamans’ authority, not every working he sounded was clean. Informed by-play staged here potentially could stir far worse than raised hackles; wanton ignorance might inflict harm. Unsurprisingly, also, Arin noted his furtive activity had been observed.
Chased him down from behind, scolded to keep his malingering hands to himself, Arin snapped his clogged rag and pestered his watch-dog with tiresome questions. Shouted down as a nuisance, he staged an injured retreat that upset a tin of lead spheres.
The surprise bout of reliving struck then, amid the enclosed darkness. The sudden, clangorous noise sheared through his awareness and triggered a vivid surge of past memory. Arin swayed, abruptly unmoored as flashback recall hurtled his conscious reach backwards into a shadowed stone armoury. A place also crammed with laden, tiered shelves, rowed beneath massive ceiling beams where, in ghostly monologue, an unseen protester whined through a liar’s protestations of innocence. The sly timber of that disingenuous voice woke a chain-lightning cache of associate memories.
Under his true Name as Arithon, he had been drawn into murderous peril: set up on the pretext of honest business for a vicious betrayal. The very same, unidentified charlatan had double-crossed him as Rathain’s royal fugitive, in fact more than once, and for lethal stakes.
Arin gripped the nearest upright post, wrung by an onslaught of vertigo amid the ping and crack of lead balls tumbling helter-skelter. Caught under scrutiny by unfriendly eyes, he hid the appalling cause of his weakness by letting go. Fainting, he collapsed headlong into a flat iron. Strategically stunned, he flailed and upset a hamper from the lowest shelf. The wicker lid burst. A nestled collection of stoppered flasks clinked, hurtled air-borne, and smashed into the floor-boards. The debris loosed a noxious cloud of ground pigments, to ricocheted shrieks of dismay.
Belaboured by two angry boys bearing brooms, Arin curled in a ball to subdue giddy laughter. Netted in dangerous chaos, he still wrestled with his fractured grip on the present. Ungrounded and reeling, he careened onward by desperate invention and tipped a poke stuffed with puff-balls into a sheaf of goose quills. Displaced feathers kited, and dried fungi shredded. An evil explosion of spores winnowed outward, a choking blight that strangled the bystanders and folded them, helplessly coughing.
Their croaked outcries raised the head clerk from his desk. That bilious worthy stormed into the fray, screeching through the fingers pinching his nose, “Who let this idiot run at large?” Then, to the unregenerate outlander, crouched in faked illness that masked an ungoverned onslaught of flashback recollection, “Arin? Are you trying to get yourself shunned for stupidity?”
The outlander stayed doubled over in paroxysms that mangled his speech.
“Flaming glory! Vivet’s kinfolk are fools. Anyone else would see your wretched get strangled for dog-meat at birth.” Disgusted, the clerk hailed two brawny assistants. “Drag this man out. Let the wagon crew use him for loading.”
Authoritative hands seized Arin’s elbows. Hauled upright, he was dragged stumbling through the tiered shelves on expedient course towards the doorway. Dust swirled in his wake. The exasperated clerk sniffed, and sneezed, then hunched in a hacking fit alongside of the stricken underlings appointed for oversight.
The stout crates for travel were built to withstand mishap, nailed shut with their precious contents cushioned in straw. Those holding the most sensitive paraphernalia also bore copper talismans, enabled with marks of ward and guard. Steadied by daylight and open air, Arin recognized those straightaway, their latent powers striking his initiate awareness with subliminal, warbling dissonance. Prickled to gooseflesh, he sucked a hitched breath and suppressed a curdled rush of nausea. He dared not show distress, far less risk shielding his traumatized faculties after the disastrous mishap in the shed. The least sign of his advanced mastery would spring the disaster of a close inquiry.
“You there!” Bare-chested and broad as a ploughman, the brute with the squint who managed the loading let fly. “Shove off your runt backside and work! Break idle wind on my watch, I’ll mince your carcass for pig swill!”
Some temptations could be too sweet. Prodded to shift the pile of crates into the nearest wagon, Arithon obliged with aimed malice and hefted the box with the most ferocious stays of protection.
“Not that one, pudding-head!”
The alarm saved nothing. The punitive lash of the ward hurled Arithon sideways. Viciously pleased in the throes of discomfort, he dropped the crate, staggered, caught his toe, and crashed flat. Dizzied under the virulent back-lash, he mustered enough dazed presence to sit, knuckles pressed to his temples. Rushed footsteps converged. Through the pound of his pulse, shouts of imprecation shrilled above him like flustered gulls.
Blissfully retching, Arin gathered his blunder had shattered three vials of sunflower oil, and worse, tainted the blank copper beads that the Ettinmere shamans kept purified for the spells that enabled their charms.
Which bumbling might have seen him kicked to a pulp had a spindle-shanked elder not tottered into the moil. Combatants recoiled. Clamoured insults fell silent. A pair of bare feet yellowed with callus shuffled to a halt, attached to knobbed shanks kilted in a blanket fastened with a rusted pin.
Egg-shell frail under his thistle-down hair, and sexless as weathered bone, the ancient declared in a reedy quaver, “The outlander will not be killed out of hand. Not while he’s likely to be healer-trained, and suited for medicinal foraging.”
Arin’s injured retort broke the hush. “Why speak for my vaunted skills now, when my word on the matter was suspect?”
The crinkled face swung in its cowl of wool, gashed lips and underslung jaw crimped beneath the baleful glimmer of rheumy eyes. “You have our wisest matron to thank that you’re not breaking rock in the quarry.”
Caustic grin unrepentant, Arin remarked, “Someone noticed I didn’t trample the pennyroyal when the hamper upset in the shed?”
The eldritch ancient hissed through toothless gums. “Who taught you, fellow?” His question slapped like a blow, bladed by a lightning burst of deft conjury.
The assault pierced through Arin’s froth of evasion. Speech strangled, he found his harrowed awareness darkened as though sucked into a vacuum. Scarcely able to breathe, a whisked moth in a gale towards black-out oblivion, he subdued his trained reflex just barely in time. Though his pretence of sickly distress stayed intact, that thin cover hid very little. This seasoned adept understood beyond question that a tender nerve had been struck. The pause stretched, polarized by the sharp recognition shared between joined antagonists: this war of locked wills would be run to the end with relentless persistence.
“Prove yourself!” snapped the elder. Senior in rank, and wary of a challenge to his rigid authority, he deferred the public pursuit of full closure in favour of stalking his prey from a distance. “Forage alone in the forest until sundown on the seventh day, and be judged by the value of what your knowledge delivers.”
Urgent need to save his threatened privacy drove Arithon into the heights, where the steep vales wore black spruce in speared ranks, and icy streamlets gushed down-slope in silver floss tangles that swirled bubbles across the glass panes of the trout pools. The stand-off interval brought him little relief, even where the bracing gusts off the glaciers wore the perfumes of resin and scoured ice. Neither did the buttressed strength of Storlain bed-rock ground the fraught pitch of his nerves.
Danger still flanked him. The Ettinmere cabal’s invasive interest blazed like a coal at his back. A persistent buzzard circling above kept his activity tightly watched. The entanglement posed him a deadly liability, far beyond the inconvenience of the child-right binding him to the settlement. For a babe very likely not his own get, he tossed dice with antagonists endowed with the vicious potential to ruin him.
&nb
sp; Act he must, and decisively, for vital stakes. Sound sense advocated for flight. The plight of Vivet’s unborn child by due right should be relinquished to Havish’s justice. There, logic collided with s’Ffalenn compassion. Perish the hour he saved his own skin at the expense of an innocent’s fate.
Paused at a rock-spring to splash his face, Arithon measured his unsteady hands. Any concerted assault on his faculties whetted his straits to a razor’s edge. Overreact, and Ettin’s sentinel archers would drop him under orders to kill. Respond too gently, and the shamans’ persistence might provoke a disastrously vigorous defence. The spurious bouts of reliving imposed by his damaged memory undermined all cautious strategy. If he snapped, his volatile past could be ransacked at whim by a murky faction driven by who knew what secretive purpose. Past question their meddling must be repulsed without hazard to his autonomy.
How to rattle the hornets’ nest and disarm the sting after seven days’ trial faced him with the reckoning?
Where resonant magecraft likely would run him afoul of Ettinmere’s extant protections, mastery of shadow left almost no signature, spun directly from the element. The whisper of impact would leave a trace too refined to deflect the Storlains’ disturbed flux.
“Field this and choke,” he murmured, then grinned. His subtle working unfurled on a thought and muffled the jewel collared to the ensorcelled raptor.
The freed bird flapped straightaway and veered off station. Arithon seized the moment. While his morsel of darkness impaired the shamans’ augmented sight, he slipped past the sealed border that enforced Ettinmere’s isolation.
The shamans’ feathered spy banked northward and soared parallel to the ridge. Once it settled on a ripe carcass, its handler ought to be hassled to Sithaer reclaiming its fixed attention. But Arithon’s gratified chuckle was brief, tainted by the farsighted ripple of a catastrophic upset, sown elsewhere …
The shrill scream resounded like a tortured animal’s, caged within close, whitewashed walls stripped as barren as a dungeon cell. Draughts from the gusty weather outside never fluttered the single candle. The dead air entombed a tormented figure convulsed in restraints on the bed. Sodden, fair hair clung to the damp pillow and pasted the slice of pale forehead not swathed in bandages. Strapped amid snarled sheets, a spirit severed from human identity thrashed in a bestial distress at odds with the chamber’s lavish appointments.
