by Janny Wurts
The Sorcerer’s mantle of sere black and silver wafted the outdoors scent of snow as he advanced. “May I?” He presented an inquiring, opened hand in request to receive the flint dagger.
Not quite reconciled to his lack of apology, Elaira hooked the deer-hide thong, and surrendered the heirloom flint dagger in trust.
Davien’s clever fingers enclosed the laced grip. He unsheathed the ceremonial weapon halfway, stilled for an instant of piercing survey, then slid the blade home. “No unrequite shades are lodged here, either by willing consent or attachment. The Biedar tribe doesn’t embrace dire artistry, far and long as anyone knows.”
“Then they’re unparalleled masters at forging talismans,” Elaira mused, wise enough to be wary of the potent protections enacted against both the Grey Kralovir and Desh-thiere.
“You hold something more than a powerful token.” Davien’s precise touch returned the ancient stone knife to the table-top. “The tribes perfected consensual avenues to interact with their ancestry.”
“By an impeccable standard of ethics?” Elaira digested that concept, now awed. “You imply this flint knife embodies such a key?”
Davien gestured towards the massive volume before her, whose dry pages preserved more than history. Two-thirds of the chapters mapped centuries-long columns of births, exhaustive genealogies predating the Biedar’s residency on Athera. “That book was not sanctioned by the tribal elders. Its summary content derives from stolen knowledge, transcribed from an original record preserved in crystal. Koriathain versant with the antiquities understood that the Biedar disciplines were passed down by direct initiation, descended through kindred.”
Elaira considered, raked over by chills as she measured that implication against the Eldest crone’s interest in Arithon. “Perhaps I ought to be looking at the Third Age chronicles of the royal families as well.”
Davien shrugged. “Those lineages are common knowledge. When you’ve exhausted Enithen Tuer, you’ll find copies of the crown registers shelved in the east vault, beginning with s’Ahelas.”
The piled weight of obscure familial heritage already warped a sag in the oak trestle. Promised the long-term ennui of a siege, Elaira jabbed ink-stained fingers through her wisped hair.
“Quite.” Davien laughed. “Unless you prefer camping in blizzards to the provocation of my hospitality? Snowfall has buried the high Mathorns in drifts. Sethvir’s last assay of near probabilities suggests the Koriathain won’t pose a significant threat to Prince Arithon before he eludes their short reach altogether.”
The sameness of days ran one into the next, and weeks became months. At first hand, Elaira came to appreciate Arithon’s suppressed exasperation concerning his stay with Davien. The Sorcerer’s wayward appearances and his duelist’s style of debate tested both nerves and intellect. Sharp wit met his arid ripostes like crossed blades, with the sting of perspicacity gloved in slight comments and sudden humour. Challenged relentlessly through every sally, Elaira developed the opaque stare of the owl ruffled awake in broad daylight.
“I haven’t an unrankled patch of skin left,” she confessed at the Sorcerer’s latest inquiry after her comfort. Spread under her forearms, in dog-eared notes, lay the salient facts cobbled from the accounts of Enithen Tuer’s long life.
Davien poised by the mantel, his ruddy, streaked hair underlit by the rebuilt blaze at his back. The delicate fragrance of birch cheered the room, further softened by tinselled silk cushions and tapestries. The bronze rods and candle stands gleamed, without tarnish, and exquisite Vhalzein lacquer-work furnishings shimmered with mother of pearl.
Elaira felt like a toad in a flower-bed, her mussed dressing-robe thrown over an indigo shift, and the plait untidied since morning twisted up with a haphazard pin. She could not recall when she had taken a meal not encumbered by musty, old books.
“Your translation’s completed,” the Sorcerer observed, black eyes wicked. “Have you connected the missing bit of the puzzle?”
Sparked to rueful annoyance, Elaira glanced up. “That’s an opening play for your next blood-sport game of intellectual chess? I’m too tired. Unfit to challenge anything stiffer than yesterday’s custard.”
Time tended to blur in the sanctum of Kewar. Davien acknowledged her dark-circled eyes, aware she had been reading all night. “Does a breakfast of pastries and poached eggs sound better?”
Elaira waved off the kindly retreat. Undaunted, the Sorcerer unlatched a cabinet that surely before had held only books. He removed two clean goblets and a corked bottle of cider, chilled to sparkling beads of condensation. Where Asandir prepared meals like a peasant, Davien stocked his larder through mystical conjury, food and drink proffered with such nonchalance the uncanny process seemed natural.
Temptation triumphed. Elaira accepted the elegant, filled glass. She sipped tart perfection, long since grown accustomed to what seemed a feckless practice. The caustic ascetic in other ways, Davien’s extravagant gestures might be an honest preference or another sly means to provoke. Or perhaps, in this case, the excuse for a tonic that banished her fog of fatigue.
Elaira saluted the subtlety of her defeat. “Point and match.”
The Sorcerer’s interest was not passive. Wraith-quiet, he claimed the seat opposite and savoured his share of the cider.
Elaira fortified herself with another swallow and shouldered the contest. “Audua was a birthborn tribal seer. If I’ve interpreted rightly, something prompted her to swipe a hallowed artifact from her Elders. She ran and joined the Koriathain, likely not seeking sanctuary from a theoretically awful reprisal.”
Davien smiled. “Go on.”
“Audua was Hasidii by direct lineage.” Braced for ridicule, Elaira summarized the damning account handed down through generations. “That heritage bore the stigma of weakness. Whether some foreseen disaster motivated Audua’s rift, or whether she meant to redeem the family’s ancestral burden because Requiar’s blood-line was ending—”
Davien levelled a glance past the rim of his goblet. “You would stake your life on the veracity of that translation?”
Elaira shivered, took pause, then corrected herself. “No.” Precisely, the choice of phrase stated Requiar’s lineage ‘was gone from the world.’
Which fine point the inscripted genealogies confirmed: among living Biedar, the blood-line that claimed surety for Jessian had dwindled to a single, feeble old man. Elaira laid her glass down before her trembling fingers created a spill. “The arcane properties attached to the flint dagger answer to only two lineages. Let’s suppose Audua forecast the debacle unleashed by the True Sect religion. Maybe she feared the Light’s examiners would target her tribe for extermination. Or else, in-breeding and low birth-rate might take their eventual toll. Afraid her family’s debt might never resolve, perhaps she tried to take down the Koriathain from within the sworn ranks of the order.”
The diaries’ statements, sparse in detail, were unequivocal on the outcome. “She failed,” said Elaira. “Audua might have misjudged the forceful hold the Prime’s master sigil held over her. Or worse, she encountered a ward wrought at strength that the flint knife’s endowment could not outmatch.”
“The artifact’s properties never fell short.” Davien lifted the bottle and replenished Elaira’s half-emptied goblet to ease her dry throat. “Audua’s defeat was a matter of scope.”
“Impossible to gain covert access, therefore, she could not destroy every defended cache of knowledge guarded by the sisterhood’s administrative rank? That occurred to me.” On her own account, Elaira had grappled that impediment to an effective subversion. “Audua’s duplicity was discovered. She fled the order to evade punishment, and since Mother Dark’s grace had been declared forfeit upon her defection from the Biedar, she pleaded for a Fellowship intercession. Asandir answered and severed the grip of her initiate’s vow. Once the master sigil’s hold became broken, the Prime Matriarch dared not attempt a reprisal. As Enithen Tuer, Audua settled in Erdane, likely because the tow
n’s policy is bitterly hostile to Koriathain.”
Against silence dense enough to freeze air, Elaira carried the tale towards its lonely closure. “The dagger was not returned. Audua thought she alone possessed access, as the last living Hasidii, Requiar’s lineage being absent. She engaged its power once to free two orphaned children from a binding wrought by the Kralovir. One act, done for pity, earned her that deadly sect’s lifelong enmity. She kept the knife afterward for her own protection, justified by her certainty its properties would become useless after her death.”
Steady as steel, now arrived at the crux, Elaira faced Davien and finished. “The brave woman believed no harm had been done, that Hasidii was the only surviving lineage, until the day Asandir brought two princes under her roof, half brothers matrilineally related.” The last riddle loomed too large for denial. “We know Lysaer s’Ilessid invoked the properties of that consecrated knife. Both by his own right, and in direct behalf, through an intervention certainly made on the let blood from his navel, by Sulfin Evend. Lastly, to me, the Biedar crone asserted the knife’s purpose is destined for Arithon s’Ffalenn.”
The circumstantial link remained to be verified. “Therefore,” challenged Elaira, “exactly how did Requiar’s line get entangled with the s’Ahelas descent? I’d hazard there’s more to the record than a rote pursuit of the royal genealogy.”
Davien laid down his cider, his upright form chiselled against the back-drop of an antique tapestry. “Have you the ironclad bravery to see?”
Elaira raised her goblet in irony, then tossed back the dregs. “I’ve accepted the charge of an artifact, what, a bit shy of nineteen thousand years old? Whether I lack the brass nerve is moot. I must shoulder the course, if only to resolve how to serve Arithon’s better interest.”
Straightforward as the task seemed, access to the Fellowship’s documentation of s’Ahelas genealogy gave up no secrets. Elaira chased down every branch since Queen Cindra’s accession in Third Age Year One. Nothing surfaced, until after the breaks in descent caused by massacre through the rebellion.
“Fiend’s plague!” swore Elaira, irked enough to kick herself, or better, blister Davien in foul language for cryptic omission. “I ought to have chased the subject of royal issue backwards from the present day!”
For the notation inked amid the heraldic seals was obvious, when viewed in hindsight. Only one match in Atheran history had defied the strait-laced precepts of Fellowship policy. “Custom forbade caithdeinen from marriage into the royal families.”
The unique exception being Meiglin s’Dieneval’s conception of Princess Dari s’Ahelas. Left no other heir after the youthful death of the last sanctioned prince, the Seven had been without option. And from that cross, which surely did more than raise eyebrows, sprang the infamous, rogue talent for augury that made the mind-set of today’s cursed descendants intractable.
When Elaira presented her belated request for the caithdein’s lineage of s’Dieneval, Davien never blinked. He tossed her the key to access the locked aumbrey beneath the s’Ahelas archive.
And there she uncovered the volatile connection: an outbred boy by a Biedar mother, couched in what first seemed a tragic account of forbidden love. One of Ath’s white adepts had cared for the father, a young clansman stricken to madness during his trial of exposure to the Paravian presence. She had fallen from her exalted state into a carnal liaison, then relinquished her half-breed offspring to the Biedar for nurture. The boy-child never developed the requisite talent to integrate with the tribe. The Eldest crone banished him. As an exile, he became the progenitor of the caithdein’s line of s’Dieneval when the prior lineage ended by mishap. Centuries later, his sole, surviving descendant, in ignorance of her family heritage, had conceived to the royal lineage.
Meiglin’s congress with Shand’s sanctioned crown prince had birthed Dari s’Ahelas, trained at Althain Tower by Sethvir, and related in direct matrilineal descent to Prince Lysaer and Arithon.
A cross check with the ancient Biedar genealogy yielded the finalized proof: Rayar s’Dieneval, through his desert-blood mother, claimed a Requiar line of descent.
Elaira shut the antique volume with a thump. “Both half brothers share an ancestral claim to the key in that Biedar knife. Ath’s glory, how much of that convolute history was planned?” Influenced, surely, by the Biedar crones, and quite likely abetted by Fellowship oversight. Fed up with research, Elaira chased down Davien and pitched him the searing question. “How much did Meiglin know, and did she ever grant her permission as an informed participant?”
This time the Sorcerer eschewed the sugared overture of refreshment. “Meiglin was a true s’Dieneval seeress. She offered herself unconditionally, in a statement three times repeated, to do all in her power to defeat the Mistwraith’s incursion. Her appeal was heard and accepted in earnest by the last centaur guardian at Althain Tower.”
Elaira digested that, weak at the knees. The daunting confluence of powers involved made her charge of the Biedar’s flint knife seem a pittance.
“I don’t see how our lines cross,” Prince Arithon once had insisted, adamant in deflection of the Biedar crone’s claim on his destiny.
Under Davien’s sharp gaze, Elaira acknowledged the persistent threads stitched through her beloved’s fate. In him, and in Lysaer, the cross-braided currents of ancient history converged like the sheen on a blade layered under a ruthless forging. Past question, Enithen Tuer would have known whom she guested in the grey twilight of Desh-thiere’s mist. Surely, Asandir had lodged his royal arrivals from Dascen Elur under her roof to present her with Requiar’s living descendants.
The gravid, next question woke shattering heart-ache. “You imply the old crone in Sanpashir would have saved Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn from death by wasting, regardless of Dakar’s or my intervention that gruelling night at Athir?”
“Perhaps,” Davien allowed. “Or she may have reclaimed Requiar’s lineage through Lysaer, or another s’Ahelas relation sequestered beyond the Worldsend Gate on Dascen Elur. The issue was never put to the test. If Sethvir knew the probable range of alternatives, I suggest you are best advised never to ask.”
Elaira gave way, found a chair, and bowed her head to mask tears. “I have to decide where to go from this place.”
The Sorcerer laid his hand on her shoulder, a comfort unsettling beyond his most wicked verbal assault. “No need to choose now. You can’t leave in any case with the Mathorn passes buried under ice. As a balm for the troubled spirit, Arithon found delight in Ciladis’s treatises on healing and natural conjury.”
Late Winter 5925
Islands
A miscreant sailhand in his right mind would suffer a flogging before shirking his duty in Rockbay Harbour. The treacherous waters drowned men in prime health when shipwreck cast them on the rocks. Survivors who escaped the murderous rip and the suck of the tidal eddies faced a desolate shore, ripe for misery and starvation. Both sides of the strait were free wilds, and no place for an unsanctioned trespass. From Vastmark’s broken shingle and forbidding cliffs, the nearest inhabitants lay fifty leagues distant: hardy shepherds who grazed herds in the remote mountain vales with large dogs and tribal independence. Alive on sparse resource, they were disinclined to welcome a destitute stranger.
Off the perilous shoals in the straits, running east, the obstreperous little sailhand signed onto the Wasp’s crew at Spire became the feckless exception. Unwashed, ungroomed, his fox features nestled in matted beard up to the eyeballs, the fellow was an agile spider aloft. His seamanship shamed the mate, an embarrassment that overshadowed, at first, his penchant for rough-house pranks.
No one suspected him when a filched poke of pepper was sewed to the head-sail hanks, and canvas raised in a freshening breeze wafted the spice in a noxious cloud over the oar deck. The rowers lost their stroke, folded at the benches, helplessly sneezing. The coxswain’s established beat went to shambles, while the quarter-deck officers fell over each other, strangled by hacking c
oughs. Croaked shouts prevailed over chaos. The beset galley recovered her way, righted course, and skinned by the shoaled narrows off the north spit of Myrkavia.
The off-watch crew smirked, until the Wasp’s night entry into Forthmark’s reveted anchorage ran them afoul of a patch of lard, smeared on the fore-deck. The hands dispatched to secure the downed head-sail skidded headlong into the rail. One tumbled overboard. His panicked yells, and the froth raised by back-watered oars at the harbour mouth, raised guffaws from the by-standing salts on the wharf. Later, the fights sown by ridicule pummelled the crew given shore leave. The Wasp’s captain paid up for their damages, fuming. Fines levied for breaking the peace brought the vitriol stew of complaint back aboard, along with the men nursing bruises. Arguments devolved to fisticuffs over whose misplaced joke was to blame.
Captain’s orders saw the galley cast off to quash the tension caused by restive tempers. Underway to the rumbling beat of her oars, the Wasp’s sullen atmosphere smouldered into side-eyed accusations. More mistakes soured her passage south. A poorly flaked coil kinked a dock line at Shandor, causing a second botched landing that made the ship’s master the butt of snide humour. None of the Wasp’s company laughed to his face; for hours, a man spoke at his peril. The purser’s return from the excise shed brought two cancelled bills of lading, with a hefty portion of the consigned cargo transferred onto more trustworthy keels.
The galley embarked under a cloud, high on her marks and forced on short ledgers to finish her run down the strait. She made fair speed towards more hospitable waters, her board timber to be exchanged for wool bales at Ithish, and a roster of fresh oarsmen waiting. Her harried company itched to spend their pay on the pleasures found in the famed Innish brothels. Anticipation might have eclipsed the mishaps that plagued their seaward passage, had the hammocks not let go in the night and dumped the off-watch crew onto the forecastle deck. Crashed in heaps, their yells hurled the Wasp into mass pandemonium, while the sneak who had tied the criminal slip-knots remained at large.
