Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  Southward, under stars upon the jet sands of Sanpashir where the eldest in service to Mother Dark’s Chosen tips her seamed face to the sky, her tears hang the balance between sorrow and hope as she measures the living course of the prophecy: ‘Behold the dark hour of the second death! Now Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn rides the song of the sword, with only one way to survive. His fate, and ours, lies with Elaira anient! Grant strength for her coming decision …’

  Hours later, when the Light’s stricken men recover awareness aboard Adruin’s anchored galley, the count turns up several missing wounded, with the crew off the courier penned in the stern cabin, and their swift sloop, secured under Sunwheel pennons, long gone with the out-bound tide; in their midst, Sulfin Evend swears with savage refrain, that in life, he might never cross paths with the Spinner of Darkness again …

  Early Winter 5671

  XV.

  Athir

  Acold, off-shore passage through stormy waters left a man in acute discomfort too much time for reflective thought. When Parrien s’Brydion awakened, mewed up in a berth aboard the jacked messenger sloop, the small vessel rolled hell-bent for the chartless deeps of the Cildein. Creaking timbers and the moan of taut gear told a seaman’s emerging senses the craft bearing Arithon’s delegation slogged, ill-set, against a cruel headwind. The risen gusts that screamed through the stays presaged worse weather to come. Parrien gritted his teeth. His mad-dog pain found no voice, that all he loved was endangered. He could not guard his doomed family, or spare them from the horrors that followed defeat. Alestron’s sad fate lay beyond his reach, while the siege broke the ramparts, behind him.

  Worse than the throb of a headache at sea, and the sting of his tender con tusions, Parrien faced the distrust of his shipboard captors. The moment the enchantress pronounced his health stable, Talvish arrived, armed, and rousted him.

  Chivvied past Glendien’s skewering glare, then prodded above deck in a stranger’s ill-fitting oilskins, Parrien cursed Dakar’s lubberly seamanship as he assessed the sloop’s course and condition. Rolling whitecaps thrashed a molten lead sea, sheeting spray off the plunge of the bowsprit. The keel wallowed, awash. Both main and jib-sheet were pinched, and thrumming in waspish protest. Each crest slammed the careening hull, as the north-eastward tack ploughed towards the frayed scud that foreran a trampling storm front.

  Whipped by the hanks of his unbraided hair, still clogged with mud from the poultice, Parrien blustered, ‘Why hasn’t your piratical prince stirred his arse to attend the ham-fisted trim of these sails?’

  ‘Mind your vile tongue!’ the spellbinder snarled. Forced in soaked misery to man the rank helm, he ran on, ‘His royal appeal in behalf of your life is all that’s stayed Glendien’s hand. I’d rather have left your fate to the thugs grunting oars aboard Adruin’s galley.’ Between imprecations, Dakar belaboured his s’Brydion prisoner with understanding that, Arithon being infirm, somebody else was required to navigate.

  Parrien licked his teeth. More likely, that inconvenient necessity had been what kept the clan widow’s dirk from his ribs. Braced as the salt chased the fur from his mouth, he said carefully, ‘Where under sky am I taking us?’

  Dakar’s staggered gesture encompassed the darkened horizon. ‘Anywhere out-bound.’ Under contrary wind, despite heaving sickness, he had won as much distance from Alliance pursuit as the courier craft could withstand. ‘What course we set later depends upon Arithon, who hasn’t returned to awareness.’

  Which upset was certain to make shipboard life beyond difficult: Parrien understood he was roped by the heels. The Fellowship flunky would scarcely forgive his blood-letting assault on a crown prince. ‘A stupid mistake doesn’t make me suicidal,’ he declared in cornered forbearance. ‘If you turn your back now, I won’t swap the heading. My death, or your prince’s, would just salve the tears of the jackals besetting my family.’

  Dakar’s hackles outmatched the queasy reflex to render his gorge. ‘I should credit the fact that we’re in this together? That didn’t restrain your killing rage last time.’

  Parrien shrugged. He need not apologize when pressed at bay, that s’Brydion reacted for kinsfolk. Since survival demanded, he bent his rapacious attention towards easing the sheets. A cross-staff rummaged out of the stern-locker let him sight the sun’s angle at noon. He reset the glass to log elapsed time and determine the moment of sundown. Since plotting required map and dividers, he asked for Talvish to relieve the helm. The belaboured keel settled immediately under the man’s more-experienced hand. Wet, but less battered, Parrien left Dakar folded against the lee-rail, then braved the on-going hostilities below to establish a running fix.

  With his two wardens topside, the empty stern cabin allowed him free use of the chart nook. His snatched refuge extended, since he could not scribe figures until his numbed fingers got warm.

  Fragmented talk filtered through the companion-way, where the Prince of Rathain still languished in febrile unconsciousness. Glendien remained by his midships berth, where the roll of the sloop stayed the mildest. Elaira meantime braved the noisome task of changing his crusted bandages. ‘No sepsis,’ she commented, thankful, as the lifted dressing exposed the tender pink of a closing wound. ‘The drainage has slackened. I won’t need the iodine. Alithiel’s chord seems to have healed the grim worst. The fever’s less, and his body is mending without any sign of impairment.’

  Yet for the spirit strayed too far afield, swept in thrall by the winter stars’ singing, no remedy Dakar or Elaira had tried could effect a waking recovery. The Masterbard’s gifted awareness stayed lost, strung warp through weft with a harmony past human cognizance. Every effort to summon him through rapport ended in reeling faintness. Against precedent, the enchantress could not touch Arithon’s being. Always, the splendour of the grand chord surged through and unravelled her contact.

  ‘He’s drifted too far,’ she murmured, forsaken and raggedly desolate. While the lantern swung to the sloop’s heeling pitch, she masked tears against her clenched fists. Her wisped chestnut braid draped the curve of her neck, and stress bowed her brave shoulders. Through the keen blast of spray through the hatch, as Dakar clumped below on a staggering weave that fetched him up, green, in the galley, Parrien caught snatches of her untenable anguish.

  ‘Three days … drive him beyond safe limits … can’t measure the scope of his danger! Mercy on us … try some other more-desperate avenue … don’t find some way to recall him!’

  Dakar left off brewing his peppermint-leaf tisane to kneel at her side. ‘Elaira.’ Drawn as he was himself, and as sorrowful, he gathered up her distraught hands. ‘Stand down. Stay strong. Your beloved is spirit wandering. If he rides the winds, that does not mean he’s in fatal danger just yet. The effect of the Five Centuries Fountain should balance his health and grant time to seek wiser means than your order’s forced mastery to waken him.’

  ‘You’ve communed with Sethvir?’ Against Elaira’s nature, bitterness showed as she pushed off the spellbinder’s comfort. ‘I’ve sent to the Warden myself. Called out in appeal through my crystal, repeatedly. Yet I’ve gotten nothing but silence from Althain Tower!’

  Dakar stood with a reluctant sigh, braced his awkward weight, and filled the pot on the gimballed stove. ‘Sethvir is still fielding the leaks on two grimwards. Even on good days, nobody fathoms the ways of a Fellowship Sorcerer.’

  Anxiety blunted her Koriani perception; else Elaira would have noted the Mad Prophet’s veiled lids and suppressed calculation. A nuance apparent to Parrien, caught sidelong from inside the stern cabin; s’Brydion cunning deduced the gist: before losing Rathain’s precious blood-line, the Sorcerers would have a salvage plan. If they dissembled now, their abstruse machinations were surely already in motion.

  Yet hours passed. Night fell to no change, beyond the climbing shrill of the wind, and squalling flurries that led in the storm front. The little sloop reeled, with Talvish strapped to a jack-line on deck, wrestling to tie reefs into the thrashing sail
s. One man could not control the rank helm. Parrien kicked Dakar from moaning prostration and forced his jelly-legged weight to assist. Tireless strategist, the s’Brydion also cornered the Mad Prophet’s reticence.

  ‘You know our next course change,’ he accused straightaway. ‘Don’t prattle to me that you haven’t had your marching orders from Althain’s Warden!’

  ‘We’ll be making for Athir,’ the spellbinder allowed, his discomfort plain through the shared effort to muscle the wheel-spokes. In the roaring dark, his sickly features showed steel: the mulish point past which nobody’s mauling might move him. ‘Once we’ve made our safe distance offshore, we’ll steer north. No tricks, for my confidence. If you hope for a lawful reprieve from your felony, Parrien, you will chart the journey in safety. Best for all concerned if your crime is reduced from a life-threat down to a wounding. Pray that Arithon s’Ffalenn regains waking awareness before we reach our destined landfall.’

  So began the difficult passage upcoast towards the desolate spit on Rathain’s eastern shore. Amid testy hostility, and the murk of kept secrets, Arithon lay stilled in his berth. The unearthly peace that settled his features wrenched the heart for its changeless serenity. Opposite Dakar’s uneasy reserve, Elaira’s fraught worry pervaded the sloop’s crowded cabin. Her harrowed focus ascertained that his early assessment had not hedged the truth: the nebulous limbo that gripped her beloved did not yet threaten survival. Arithon breathed easily. As long as his muscle tone resisted atrophy, she withheld from trying the arcane means that could entangle his fate with the Koriani Order.

  Glendien’s grief, also, found no release. In cruel separation from kinsfolk and clan, her mourning for Kyrialt had no outlet, except to assume her husband’s abandoned post and guard the stricken crown prince. While Elaira slept, and Dakar groaned under flattening nausea, the clanswoman glared daggers at the duke’s brother from her crouch beside Arithon’s berth.

  Yet the ice in Talvish’s silence wore the hardest on Parrien’s trapped state of penury. Watch after watch, through black storm and under the glittering, blue mornings feathered with cirrus, the blond swordsman shouldered each stint at the helm with his light humour cast into eclipse.

  S’Brydion tenacity broke only once, the hag-ridden temptation too strong to resist when a fisherman hailed off the coast from Perdith rafted up for the purpose of barter. Dakar’s odd insistence, that their sloop’s onboard stores must be bolstered with long-term provisioning, stayed their passage an hour to onload sealed casks of salt meat and biscuit. With Talvish’s muscle immersed with the lading, and the women belowdecks hiding Arithon, Parrien’s sneak attempt to stow away on the lugger was thwarted by the spellbinder’s detainment for cause, on the outstanding charge of crown justice.

  ‘Only Arithon’s word holds your fate in abeyance! As Rathain’s prince, he alone can appeal for the grievance of Kyrialt’s death, or call a reprieve for your mad act of slaughter against him.’ While the cheerful fishermen cast off their lines, the sloop fell away, turned offshore again to duck hostile patrols, and Eltair Bay’s flow of Alliance-flagged commerce through Vaststrait. Dakar planted his obstinate bulk at the helm and shouted down his prisoner’s seething rebellion.

  ‘You will make no dire threats!’ Knuckles clenched, brown eyes narrowed, he bristled like an unkempt spaniel flaunting a wolf’s teeth. ‘What had you planned? To browbeat that crew for their fishing craft?’

  The pinned fugitive glared back. Arms crossed, he said nothing. Sore desperation did not reason, or answer to brangling morality.

  ‘Forget your suicidal attempt to rejoin the warfront!’ snapped Dakar. ‘Run like a rogue, Parrien s’Brydion, and you’ll face arcane force under rightful reprisal. By my charge to safeguard the royal lineage, you could lawfully be noosed as a murdering criminal.’

  Even scalded to shame, Parrien’s shrewd instincts gave warning: something else lurked beneath Dakar’s outburst. Hidden pain, stuck like a thorn in the flesh, hazed his nerves beyond volatile. Set on wary guard, Parrien retired, and left Talvish to steer the next leg of their thrashed, winter passage to Athir.

  As night fell again, the next clobbering storm whipped up the Cildein. The sloop reeled and tossed in the shrieking wind, with spars stripped and her helm lashed alee. The savage weather became everyone’s gaoler, as hours of frigid, damp misery kept them huddled belowdecks with the galley stove doused to avert wild fire.

  Parrien endured in hostile retreat, protectively curled in the forward cabin. Nobody else would dispute that rough berth, banged and corkscrewed by each hissing wave-crest. The wet salt on his cheeks was not due to the deck leak, when someone’s invasive touch clasped his shoulder, softly arrived as a moth’s wing.

  His flinching spin and snarled oath met Elaira.

  She held a lit lamp. Her severely neat hair was braided, and her eyes pale as smoke in the dimness. ‘Glendien’s with Arithon, for the nonce,’ she explained, ‘and we are not alone, having someone we love in grave jeopardy.’ Her voice was unsteady, despite her held calm; a ghost’s imprint against the pounding rush of frothed water, and scarcely a plank’s width between the storm’s fury, and drowning.

  ‘Damn you!’ snarled Parrien, before his throat closed with anguish for Tiassa and his four children. ‘Why not hold the hand of your hobbled prince? Or do you seek revenge by jabbing my flanks with censure parading as kindness?’

  Elaira hung the lamp from the ring in the deck-beam. Unhurried, against the sloop’s gyrating roll, she pulled shut the louvred door. Even in anger, one must pity her hands. She had worked herself raw, poulticing wounds and grinding the herbals for astringent remedies. Now, the same dauntless mercy withstood the inimical stare fixed upon her.

  She said gently, ‘Please understand that your effort has not gone for naught, by steering this craft towards safety.’

  His recoil came on a sharply checked breath.

  She cut him off. ‘Your wife is well, Parrien! Alestron’s upper fortress has not yet fallen. I’d show you in full measure, that accepts no one’s word, offered as a lame consolation.’

  Surely, past question the harsh cold made him shudder. Parrien pulled the dank blanket around his bull frame, tucked up his chapped knees, and demanded, ‘Why?’ He could not remove her. Not if he manhandled her for rank insolence and bashed her backwards through the latched companion-way. Deeper than Tiassa’s nerve-stripping rages, this woman: her provocation was more than witch-trained. Over and over, she displayed the fibre to match and ameliorate Torbrand’s fettlesome lineage.

  Parrien fought his tight chest. ‘Should my desperate straits matter?’

  Elaira attacked through his blistering spite. ‘Not for your pride, foolish man, that snarls to hide your heart’s weeping. I have come for your wife, who surely would settle the anguish of mind that torments you from sleep.’

  Massive and war-scarred before her elfin frame, Parrien propped his jaw on his fists and glowered like a denned animal. ‘You don’t have that high-handed hold over me!’

  The enchantress reached under her mantle and presented a clear crystal sphere. ‘Try me?’

  Her invitation awaited no answer. Already, her flicked rune cast the scrying his unbearable need in fact could not resist …

  Night view opened up, of a scene boldly snatched from the midst of the Alliance war camp. There, under lamps in the Sunwheel pavilion, Lord Commander Sulfin Evend stood with Lysaer s’Ilessid, both men clad in the glittering regalia to commemorate the ritual burning and scattered ash of a convicted sorcerer. Which furore now set them in ranked opposition to the officers, who clamoured to close the campaign by unbridled aggression.

  ‘We can take the filthy rat’s warren down!’

  ‘Bury the s’Brydion name and lineage in the rubble of their own battlements!’

  ‘End the scourge that has strangled the trade in East Halla, protecting Atwood’s barbarians!’

  ‘Flush the lair that’s harboured the Spinner of Darkness and furthered the hindrance of Fell
owship sorcery!’

  Above the howl to drive home a swift conquest, then savage the wreckage for spoils, Sulfin Evend slammed down his fist and gave the riot his icy refusal. ‘Alestron’s sea quarter is already ours! And you’ve witnessed the corpse of the Master of Shadow blasted to smoke by invoked Light and the hands of your priests! Impatience at this stage will only waste lives. Our galleys risk sinking each time we stage a new company onto the harbour-side landing. Alestron’s last bastions won’t need to be cracked, since our sappers have broken the cisterns. More than ever before, we sit tight and wait. Hold the defenders hostage atop their own walls, and let thirst and hunger deliver their surrender into our hands.’

  When more outraged yelling disparaged restraint, Lysaer rebuked folly in scalding terms and fierce majesty. ‘Are we hungry for death? Addicted to ruin? Has the horror of war and a sorcerer’s wiles turned us into despoilers of women and children? Or are we the champions of hardworking craftsfolk, rightfully born to pursue decent lives and build honest security? I say now, under peril of my retribution, we stand proud and hold out for an honourable victory. My leave is not given to tear down a fortress like starving wolves set on a carcass!’

  ‘The s’Ilessid pretender has changed,’ murmured Parrien. ‘How? Not through Fionn Areth’s sorry demise! Don’t tell me the burning of a false corpse has blindsided Desh-thiere’s curse.’

  ‘The Mistwraith’s grip has not lifted,’ Elaira affirmed, her grief for the hapless grass-lander’s fate limned by the scene in the crystal. ‘The staged ritual was a sop done to placate the troops. Endorsed by Lysaer, since Sulfin Evend’s sworn witness correlated his curse-driven awareness that his half-brother had quit the arena. Now, Lysaer wrestles the warped urge to pursue on the strength first inspired by Alithiel’s harmony. You have bought the distance to make reprieve possible. The farther away we move Arithon’s influence, the more the geas wanes, and the more freely Lysaer’s innate character can fight to reclaim his abused self-command.’