by Janny Wurts
Into a landscape seething with upheaval, bloodied by the carnage inflicted by spring traps and ambush, the Prime Matriarch transplanted her Senior enchantresses from their established residence at Whitehold. The move wrung the hands of the sisterhouse bursar, whose treasury coffers bore the extortionate cost of galley passage to Jaelot, then caravan transport on mule-back over the notches and slot narrows of the Skyshiel pass. A month’s toil brought the frayed entourage to disgruntled settlement in an open encampment in Daon Ramon.
Only Lirenda raised no complaint. A dumb beast in thralled service, and lately reduced to muscling strapped trunks and split wood for the cookfires, she no longer agonized over the crow’s-feet stamped into her lily complexion. She could sink no lower. After hauling ashes from fire pits and emptying chamber-pots, nothing in the wide world could make her degraded lot any worse.
Or so she imagined, until the morning Prime Selidie commanded her presence in the central pavilion. The attendant Seniors were already excused when she entered the private, partitioned enclosure, cloaked in gloom and rancidly tinged by the flame of a single taper. Lirenda performed her obeisance, suffocated by the moth-poison taint of wool hangings barely aired out from inclement travel.
Her tawny eyes as she rose were the stalking tiger’s, thirsty for blood.
The Matriarch was installed in a carved chair across a low table. A muffled hand cuffed in velvet and pearls indicated the only available seat: a divan cushioned with ancient embroidery, the legs chiselled into heraldic swans with spread wings. The birds’ necks were contorted like coupling snakes, shortly veiled by Lirenda’s drab skirt.
Mute, but not patient, she waited, inscrutable.
The usurper wearing Selidie’s flesh eventually must find herself compromised. Secretive plans that spiralled into ever-more-convolute activity suggested her omnipotent grip may have slipped since the shock of Davien’s back-handed rebuff. Whoever looked out of the Matriarch’s eyes, crone or coerced green initiate, the fixated pursuit of Prince Arithon’s person invited contempt. Yet no Senior dared to question the circuitous chess-game in motion at Ettin. Lirenda’s intent focus perceived no cracks under the gloss of imperial grooming.
Cold aquamarine eyes regarded her back. Half-shuttered lids iridescent with powdered mother of pearl revealed no flicker of weakness. Immaculate, fair hair braided through a gold-wire diadem glittered with rubies and amethyst.
On the table, the instruments of repression, unveiled like cut glass on black velvet: three initiates’ personal quartz crystals rested in a surgical row. Lirenda recognized the first as her own, bestowed at the testing that followed her oath. Apprehensive, she marked the second, linked to Elaira. The last, caged in wound copper and thread, belonged to a first level junior initiate. A pair of silk gloves, and another ominous bundle secured by ritual knots lay in readiness, also.
“Properly unveil the shrouded effigy,” the Matriarch opened. “I want it renewed with a fresh infusion.” The prompt of a crippled hand swathed in gauze indicated the third subject’s crystal. “There’s your template.”
Lirenda tugged on the gloves. Palms clammy inside the thin silk, she bared the cloth doll, wound with white ribbons once stripped from the sleeves of the specified novice. The opening of the ritual disclosed the sister marked for manipulation. As much the bound handmaiden to the Prime’s will, Lirenda engaged the copper-wound quartz point and imposed the ciphers that stabilized Vivet Daldari’s etheric imprint.
“You’ll recline for completion of my directive.” Prime Selidie’s intent regard caught the flare of Lirenda’s internal rebellion. “The yoke galls, does it not? Though for you, this particular case is not contrived as a back-handed punishment. The subduction of your identity through Vivet furthers our order’s creed to advance the greater good of humanity.”
Initiates died for the mission, the terms of their service made absolute since the inaugural matriarch had founded their secret society. Pity granted no stay of exception. Lirenda settled herself on the divan, skewered by dread, and unable to protest. The ordeal fore-promised much worse than the deep immersion invoked for screening the order’s new applicants. For Vivet’s fractured existence was a shaped tool, live puppetry fashioned by ruthless design to sweep a royal obstruction off the Prime’s game-board.
Lirenda languished, while her superior loosened gauze ties with her teeth and fumbled her welted hands free. Anxiety choked thought, given the unpleasant ways a personal crystal might be put to use, combined with Elaira’s. The scrape of the raised chair, the lisp of slippered steps on the dais stair, then the predatory sweep of full skirts rounding the table: Lirenda endured, unable to quail, as the Prime’s icy touch traced the master sigil on her forehead. Closure kindled a flash of dry heat. Then implacable forces sucked away the stream of her consciousness…
… the senses returned to her were another’s: raised from the well of oblivion into an alienated frame of awareness, Lirenda emerged into a tumult of sunlit colour and noise. An infant in a rug sling chafed at her shoulder. Overheated, and laced into a country-style bodice and homespun skirt, she sweated amid a buffeting crowd, crammed in between the pegged canvas stalls of a tinkers’ itinerant market. The Prime’s purpose had not subsumed her entirely. Folded into a borrowed identity, Lirenda became the unseen liaison, implanted as a live sounding-board and as a passive observer. She could influence nothing. Only partake as the hapless instrument immersed into Vivet Daldari’s experience.
The subject herself blinked, swept by a surge of inexplicable dizziness. “Forgive me,” Vivet interrupted the spiel of the stick-puppet vendor. “I’m a touch overcome, most likely from the crush and the heat.” She shifted her squirming infant, startled afresh at the sudden firm grip, arrived in support at her elbow.
“Best you rest in the shade, then,” suggested the callow, young cousin who steered her. He threaded her unsteady steps past the clumped wares and stacked baskets, propped bolts of dyed cloth, and strings of glass beads. Beyond the bazaar, a cluster of log benches under an oak gave the settlement’s matrons a restful place to ease their feet. Vivet perched on the last vacant seat. Studied by a solemn boy chewing his fingers and scoured by reproachful glances from the married women, her face flamed. How embarrassing, that her weakness had required solicitude from a male relative.
“Thanks for the kindness, I’ll do.” When her escort kept hovering, she untied her points and loosened her bodice. “Valien’s going to feed, or start fussing, enough reason for me to stay put.”
The youngster fled, while a mother exclaimed and scooped her thumb-sucking daughter out of his path. No smiles acquitted the boy’s self-conscious haste. Neither did the women fold Vivet into their circle. Though her infant was an asset to the community, her irregular household continued to set her apart. Murmured conversation resumed around her, over the clicked spools of an elder’s lace tatting, and the hiss of bleached linen and carded wool being spun on drop spindles.
Vivet sighed. She ruffled the springing, dark curls of the babe fathered on her by a misfortunate woodsman whose oath of debt to Koriathain had claimed his life. She could do nothing else as a lowly novice immersed in a covert assignment, even if the stigma also afflicted her blameless son.
For already the settlement’s toddlers took after their parents. The boldest directed their rough-house play elsewhere, squeals subdued when their ball rolled under her feet. The ostracism would have stung less if not for Arin’s long absences. His seasonal livelihood kept her hearth lonely, even in summer, when the demand for an herbalist’s skills sent him foraging for weeks on end.
“Well, pumpkin, I’m sorry. We’re in this together.” Vivet captured Valien’s batting fists and worked his wriggling energy out of the sling. Sworn to the Order of the Koriathain, she upheld her duty: her fate, and the child’s, bound Arin’s interests under the Prime’s directive.
Vivet hefted her son to her breast, lip caught in her teeth to stifle a wince as he clamped on her nipple. Fortune might shift
her lot. The guarded insularity of Ettinmere offered the best haven to raise a gifted family, given her mission successfully conceived her next-born by Arin. Blood offspring of his would possess wild talent, liability enough to get such a youngster culled outright by the True Sect purges.
For Canon doctrine inflamed the northern kingdoms to war, with unbelievers and clanborn put to the sword by temple decree. Settlement folk hungry for outside news plied the merchants’ drovers with beer, where they idled in boredom alongside the picketed draught teams. Vivet caught their outspoken opinion, the quickened tempo of argument evident through Valien’s guzzling.
“Oh, I’d say for a fact there’s been uncanny practice!” A man’s passionate finger stabbed emphasis between the hulked oxen, switching at flies.
“… that The Hatchet’s scouts fingered a hidden encampment. Mark this! The report listed women and bairns, tucked as tightly as termites in rot under tents in the greenwood. But when the dedicates closed on the site, they found nothing, no sign of anyone there.”
Someone interrupted, gruff with disbelief.
“I tell you that unlucky company died to a man,” the original speaker insisted. “Fell with clean swords in a wave of red slaughter, lured into a baited trap!”
“Claptrap nonsense!” the cynic responded. “Even the Spinner of Darkness can’t conjure the living semblance of women and children.”
The scoffer met a nervous rebuttal. “What limit, given he’s evil incarnate? The dedicates might have seen anything fell, even conjury that animates corpses.”
“Fact’s been witnessed already,” another voice insisted. “The uncanny creature vanished clean off the field at Lithmarin. Melted into thin air. Faithful survivors swear he left no trace for the head-hunters’ trackers.”
The wizened man mending the mule whip spat. “Well, the surgeon who worked with the east-flank troops encountered the Master of Shadow up close. He insists the slinking devil’s no paragon. Just a small, black-haired fellow, unassuming and shy, no more sinister than a mountebank with a knack for impersonation.”
A slight man with dark colouring, though nothing like Arin, Vivet mused to herself. Her designate quarry was not retiring, given his insolent temper shoved burrs under everyone’s skin. She missed him, regardless. Emotion tightened her throat, followed by a fierce wave of longing. The intensity of the attraction appalled her. Dispatched by the sisterhood to waylay his destiny, she had never expected to care, or pine for his erratic attention. His indifference cut her, surprisingly deep. Cheek laid against her suckling child, Vivet stifled her wrenching grief, unaware that her tender response was the puppeteer’s pull of enthrallment …
… but Lirenda was party to all of the strings, trapped as the Matriarch’s passive observer under the aegis of the master sigil. She felt the invasive, rippling chill, when Prime Selidie invoked her personal crystal and delved into the record of her private self. The rage and shame of her downfall rekindled, as the Matriarch’s purpose tapped back into the primal longing once quickened by the Masterbard’s empathy. Arithon’s infallible artistry had illumined her spirit, pierced her heart, and ignited the blazing need for a love unimagined, and never experienced.
Selidie’s ruthless manipulation threaded that wakened cascade through the other quartz point aligned to Elaira, then knotted the invasive thread through the genuine spark of her cherished regard for Prince Arithon. The diabolical fusion welded desperate, unrequited longing and intimate affection into a flame of torment. Last, Selidie strung the brew of potentized motivation through the link that enthralled the Daldari woman at Ettinmere.
Lirenda shuddered in sympathetic reaction, unable to whimper as the final cipher sealed the entrainment. She shared the shocked onslaught as Vivet awakened, wracked by a yearning to demolish reason and ravage the spirit. The Prime branded her with an inconsolable obsession to the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s essence.
For Vivet, the rip tide of spellcrafted desire inflicted a cruelty beyond surcease. Her already compromised peace of mind shattered, until the improbable hour her consort abandoned restraint and possessed her. Crushed by longing and abject despair, she buried her tears against Valien’s dark head. Beyond her, under the adjacent oak, the mules switched flies as if naught were amiss. The merchants’ drovers lounged in the dappled shade, chewing grass stems. Their gossip had drifted, as if no violation had tightened the intrigue that aimed to deflect the world’s destiny.
For Lirenda, the visceral heart-ache let go, dissolved by the rush of dizzy relief as her thralled senses separated from Vivet’s identity. Suppressed awareness resurged, restoring her to the stultified gloom of the canvas pavilion sited in Daon Ramon.
Her traumatized fury refocused in time to catch an insightful glimpse of Prime Selidie’s satisfaction.
The fleeting expression was icily shrewd, proof of a rapt intelligence wielded in cold self-command. Appearances lied: the Matriarch’s manic resolve never stemmed from erratic senility. Likely, she toyed with the ruse to mislead her enemies.
Lirenda’s resharpened interest perhaps prompted the Prime’s rare moment of confidence. “Did you presume my behaviour was irrational?” The low laughter that followed crackled like frost. “Then, for the import of our sisterhood’s mission, pray the Fellowship Sorcerers agree. Let them trip on their overweening contempt and crash into the pitfall of misjudgement.”
Although the day’s conjury seemed an overt bid to breed a child candidate for the Prime succession, Arithon’s perverse nature was disinclined to embrace Vivet’s driven attempts at seduction. Recast as the feint for a radical thrust in another direction, the move foreshadowed a current of intrigue too murky for even the Warden of Althain to fathom.
Late Summer 5924
Deathwatch
The invasion unleashed by the True Sect war host scoured the northwest barrens of Daon Ramon, the hopscotch pattern of their engagements and hit-and-miss spats of skirmish erratic as cricket fights swept by a scourge. Staged into the broad, rolling grasslands veined with seamed gullies and entangled briar, the campaign sought fixed roots, with each hill-top taken under a relentless, chess contest of wits. The Hatchet’s foot companies seethed from their defensive positions by day in marched columns that furrowed dust off the trackless heath. Wave upon wave, the advance paused by night, while stealthy clan raids slipped through picketed sentries to set spring traps and cause surprise mayhem.
The stagnating heat and the flies by late summer should have exhausted the faithful. Yet none of the Light’s officers caved in retreat despite their stalemated frustration. Against ambush, veiled feints, and the pestilent seizures of misdirection sown by nefarious spellcraft, The Hatchet pressed the zealot weight of sheer numbers with his born genius for tactics. While the incessant casualties mounted, more than clan blood-lines suffered. The toll of carnage afflicted the flux. Unsanctioned trespass and traumatic death rippled discord through the lane currents, a lingering after-shock of malaise like a stain to mage-sighted awareness.
Cosach’s charge to defend the free wilds demanded a response before dissonance marred the lyric chord sustaining the mysteries. To that end, Dakar suffered the needled assault of whining mosquitoes, tucked in a gulch downhill from the scar of another garrisoned war camp. The latest and worst of The Hatchet’s redoubts nestled behind palings atop a bald crag that commanded the landscape.
A moonless night’s quiet infused the deep shadow, broken by the scuff of the night sentries’ boots and the rasp of mail against weaponry. Stakes roped with twine marked off their beat, where daybreak would wake seething industry. A row of parked wagons loomed against the stacked lumber imported for out-buildings. Canvas tarps covered another dray, burdened with a camp forge, sand and quicklime in sacks, and the shovels, picks, and trowels stockpiled to carve the wild turf into fortifications. Ghostly under wan starlight, whitewash blazes splashed the boulders chosen to be prised from their beds, then shattered and dressed under the masons’ mallets for permanent mortared embrasures.
On the surface, the scene appeared peaceful. The Mad Prophet wormed through the ink tangle of underbrush to the rim of the gully. Eyelids half-shut, for too long immersed in the altered awareness of mage-sense, he nursed his overstrung faculties. His vigil was altogether uneasy. Disconcertingly close to the lane’s active focus sited at Caeth-al-Caen, and with midnight’s tide crested two hours ago, the heightened surge of the flux taxed his endurance. Even the ebb current threatened to drown him. No surprise, that he wrestled the throes of exposure in the upshifted wake of Davien’s meddling at Kathtairr.
Dakar’s nerves were wont to leap at frissons like star-bursts, while his unstable focus in present time flinched, dazzled by the residual sheets of white fire left by the ancient echo of unicorns passing. He blotted his palms, rattled to the chaotic edge of insanity. Although Cosach’s scouts dared not open their Sight in this place, a master spellbinder ought to be fit to withstand the proximal intensity.
Experience proved otherwise. But caution posed too costly a luxury. More than clan lives were endangered.
Dakar clamped his teeth, determined to stay anchored, while ecstasy rode him in shivering waves, at times fit to thrash him unconscious. Near blinded and deafened, he sounded the flood of exquisite sensation for the subsonic thrum of disharmony. That signal dissonance had to be present, hard by an enemy camp. The pitch of anxiety and rage cast at large by the True Sect invaders should gauge the strength of the nest Cosach’s war band poised to attack. Action must rout the intrusion, before the defacement marred a resonant, grand junction vital to the free wilds.
Yet the only flare of ill temper in range needled Dakar at close quarters.
“Well?” rasped Cosach’s whisper. “Have you finished the headcount?”
The Mad Prophet blinked. “Not yet.” Stressed by the interruption, his ethereal vision shimmered through commonplace sight like a half-world unfurled out of dreams. The chieftain’s gruff presence beside him crackled with impatience, torch-bright against a night landscape buckled into fluorescent haloes and electromagnetic distortion. Obliged to reknit his frayed concentration, Dakar dug back into immersive trance.
